by Ryan Rimmel
No one questions the guy with the ladder.
“I wonder where I could go if I had a quest and a ladder?” I thought to Shart.
“Well, anyplace but here would be my suggestion,” replied the demon.
I had Stealth and Shadow Walking, which improved my sneakiness. Alas, it was no match for her old lady wisdom. That, and I think I made a harsh gagging noise as I neared her back door. Just when I thought I was home free, the kindly woman turned around.
“Mr. Mayor, you’re here!” exclaimed EstherSasha. “Excellent, you can try this!”
I switched to my menus and went to the quest log; with its slowed menu time, it gave me a few minutes to consider my options. I glanced over the list of every quest in the town, but there was nothing I could claim as an emergency requiring my immediate attention. All in all, there was nothing of use to me. Yet, I was still unwilling to bite the bullet and try her recipe. I was fairly certain there was something furry sticking out from under the lid of the pot.
Switching back to real time, where only a couple moments had passed, I decided to go with an old classic. Pointing behind her, I asked, “Is that a monster over there?”
She didn’t bite. “There are no monsters in this town with the barrier up. Here, try a bit of this.”
Stupid magical barrier that keeps the town safe from monsters.
As she got closer, the boiled leaves in thick brown paste both looked and smelled particularly unappealing. Shart wasn’t fond of it, because it made my Mana taste funny. I wasn’t fond of it, because it tasted like someone had stewed shoes and then added some hoof for taste.
My moment of indecisiveness got the better of me, and she shoved the spoon into my mouth. That had to be a skill. Everything was skills. I was surprised that Breathing wasn’t a skill until I held my breath while swimming and found out that it was. I was 5% better at it now.
Unerring Spoon Accuracy, Godlike Master, Here comes the airplane, Bitches.
It tasted worse than it smelled. It smelled horrible. In a cruel twist of fate, EstherSasha was the only one in the village with the Cooking specialty, Massive Meals. She was far more efficient at making large meals than anyone else. However, she was older and had somehow gotten the negative trait, No Sense of Taste.
That was a bad example of compounding. No, Sense of Taste didn’t give a failure to cooking, per se, but it did make all foods have a +/- 50% taste variant. All her food was always too salty or not salty enough. That alone would have been unappetizing, but that wasn’t the only taste. There were also sweet, sour, and bitter; all of them would be off by some amount. The only thing that saved her meals was that Massive Meals deadened the food’s flavor by 50%, at her level. So, it might taste horrible, but it tasted less horrible than one of her small meals would have.
Without it, though, the town would starve. We had some food coming in, just not enough for everyone to eat their fill every day. As it turned out, that was sort of a deal breaker for some people. The only alternative had been to let EstherSasha cook. Her skills allowed her to make large meals efficiently enough. It would be goop, but there would be enough goop for everyone. She actually got a caloric multiplier, making the less than adequate amount of food we had go even further.
“It's tastes very nourishing,” I choked, before excusing myself and quickly fleeing.
“That seems rude. She’s doing her best in this economy,” grinned the demon.
“You’ll be eating Mana from it later,” I replied. That wiped the grin right off his stupid face.
One quick trip to JohnMickle’s house awarded me the quest turn in and those sweet 25 experience points. With that accomplished, I was off on my next journey into the seedy underbelly of Windfall, for more low experience quests. It was just what I had always wanted to do.
Busywork.
Chapter 2: Soup Verses Potions
Several days later, as I blearily opened my eyes at first light, I prayed that there was some sort of skill that would allow me to die painlessly, or just disappear. It was early, so very early, and I was hoping to slip out of town before anyone noticed me. Of course, the second I started moving, the first prompt appeared in my vision.
Blacksmith requires Iron. Will you get him iron? (Yes/No)
Baker requires flour. Will you get her flour? (Yes/No)
A conflict has arisen between Jarra the Healer and EstherSasha about a field. Will you assist them? (Yes/No)
On and on the list went. I was Jim, Mayor of Windfall, but what that meant in this world was something entirely different than on Earth. On Earth, mayor was an elected, or at times, appointed position, for someone with political clout. On Ordinal, the mayor was apparently the town’s quest bitch. Every morning, I got the sloppy seconds of anything anyone else didn’t want to deal with themselves.
Quests grant experience, though, right? Well, a quest for flour grants such a trivial amount of experience that it was way less effective than just running through the forest killing goblins. In fact, my leveling had pretty much stopped, once I started performing these countless little domestic quests that were constantly filling my vision. People couldn’t contact each other, but they could use their menus to contact the mayor. The result was constant bombardment with requests from everyone about every tiny thing.
Not helping things was the fact that the town itself was nearly in ruins. It had been that way when I’d found it. There were certainly a few good homes here and there that could be occupied, but there were scores of people here now. Sufficient housing for everyone simply did not exist.
There were 92 people in Windfall, including yours truly, and all of us needed homes. Fenris got off lucky, because AvaSophia had already claimed a house for her family. I never really did but was not considered homeless for some reason, and Toomen Masterbrooke was a statue. Out of everyone, he was my most rock solid supporter. That left 86 people who needed to be in a ‘home’, according to the town interface. Fortunately, many of them were families that could live together. However, families with small children required nicer than average homes.
To further complicate matters, for a building to be classified as a home, the town menu had to rate that structure as livable. Only a few buildings had met that classification without repairs. Those buildings took care of sheltering 24 people. That had left 64 people homeless. We had begun aggressive repairs on many structures, trying to make them livable. However, there weren’t enough supplies available to do more than a token job.
Still, there were quite a few structures where a token job was all that was needed. By yesterday’s end, we’d finally managed to get everyone into a structure that was considered acceptable to the vile town menu. By then, my message queue and quest logs were filled with inane requests from the townsfolk that had been neglected during building repairs.
Groaning, I got up and slid into my armor. Some of my mayoring, in theory, involved fighting monsters. Unfortunately, most of the monsters were ‘town’ monsters like skeletons, which were not worth very many experience points. They had only been allowed to exist underground, unaffected by the barrier.
See, we had a magical barrier that killed monsters that got into town. However, ‘in town’ meant ONLY what was above ground. A super army of monsters could hypothetically be hiding in someone’s cellar, unable to escape. Yet, if they broke free and set one foot above ground, they would be destroyed. At least, that was the way Shart explained it after a small incident involving an escaping rat/dog hybrid that burst into flames upon being chased out of the cellar of a newly occupied building two weeks ago. That seemed like sort of a safety loose end, but Ordinal was weird. There was nothing to be done for it, except hope that the barrier continued to function.
After I was dressed, I slid on my trusty sword and dagger, grabbed my shield, and walked down the stairs into the leatherworking shop that I called home.
There was a leatherworker named Timothy the Tanner, who worked the place as my ‘partner’. In truth, he’d just wanted the sho
p. I explained that I sort of lived in the back room and he was just going to have to deal with that for now. Also, if he woke me up, I would be upset with him.
“Oh, Mr. Mayor,” called Timothy the Tanner, as I walked past him. “You ready for another rousing day?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I’ve already got plenty to do.”
“Well, if you have a chance today, please, visit the bowmaker’s shop. He keeps finding cabbage everywhere.”
“How strange,” I said.
I stepped out the front door, letting it slam shut behind me. As I glanced through the missing storefront window, I could see Timothy the Tanner already working on some new project. There was, hopefully, a supply of leather coming into town later today; Fenris and SueLeeta were out and about, hunting our way out of starvation and nudity.
When a village quest came into my menu, I earned a tiny amount of Administration experience. When I completed a quest, I also gained a bit of experience in the Administration skill. Still, that didn’t seem to be achieving much. If I could clear my town quest docket daily, I might level up the skill reasonably quickly, for all the good that would do me. It was moot anyway, because I was only completing a few quests a day. Thus, the skill just uselessly sat there, mocking me in its uselessness.
Administration: Unskilled. You understand the notion of delegation. Sucker.
After glaring at the menu for a few brief seconds, I sighed and started walking to where the yelling was loudest. I’d learned that avoiding the problem only made the problem worse; the worse the problem was, the less enjoyable it was for me to deal with.
I hadn’t even had breakfast yet.
As I stomped up the path towards the loudest screaming, I reflected on the true issue. I was in the Noob town, the entry point for all the adventurers into this world… and there were no noobs coming in. Apparently, some cataclysmic event had occurred and the noobs were being spawned elsewhere. A town somewhere on Ordinal would have been chalk full of noobie adventurers, just not this old forgotten one that had been left to decay into ruins. Again, I was basing my very limited knowledge of this topic off what my demon, Shart, had told me.
Thus, I, personally as the mayor of Noobtown, got handed everything. I wasn’t even able to avoid it. Jim the Noob could ignore a quest. Jim the Mayor had all his quests shoved into a dozen blinking icons that remained, no matter how hard he tried to hide them.
Inhale, exhale.
I turned the corner and spotted the tall, blond, and very angry frame of Jarra the Healer, yelling at the slightly frumpier and just as loud grey-haired EstherSasha. God, those names.
Names were weird here, too. Most people had what I would have classified as two first names, just smashed together. I’d learned very quickly not to shorten anyone’s name. SueLeeta had treated me to a 5 minute lecture the day I called her “Sue”, and poor PollyEsther had nearly broken out into tears when I referred to her as “Polly”. However, if you got certain titles, you could drop half of your name. I had no idea what Jarra the Healer’s name had been prior to her becoming a healer. In some cases, you could even scrap the whole thing and come up with a new one. I suspected that was the case with Fenris but had yet to confirm it.
Then, you have me, Jim. When I arrived, I stupidly chose my birth name on Earth to be my name here, in a decidedly fantasy environment. On Earth, Jim was short for James and was a perfectly serviceable name. On Ordinal, Jim was the name you gave a small cute dog. Calling a man “Jim” was about as demeaning as you could get. Because a person’s name actually floats over their head here, even strangers I had never spoken to could see the shame of my name.
I tried not to think about it. After all, what was I going to do about it? Nothing. There was nothing I could do since discovering that I was not one of the lucky ones that qualified for a name change. Since I couldn’t do anything, I decided to watch the argument of our cook and healer unfold.
“We need an herb garden and a drying shed,” stated Jarra the Healer. She was formidable, standing ramrod straight at her full height with her arms folded underneath her breasts. She stared daggers at EstherSasha.
“Only a handful of people find enough danger to even need potions,” EstherSasha snapped back. “I can have a proper kitchen built to whip up spices. That way, everyone in the town benefits, not just a few.”
“With what free lumber are you building this kitchen?” the healer snapped.
Jarra, just Jarra in the privacy of my own mind, harshly glared at the cook. Inhaling deeply, she continued. “No one needs your puny buffs. Your Seasoning skill is anemic anyway! My Alchemy skill is much higher. We can either have burnt food or good potions!”
You have heard of Cooking. You get the impression that it involves food and fire.
You have heard of Seasoning. Maybe using some of those herbs on food wouldn’t be so bad.
EstherSasha looked hurt. “I’ll have you know my cooking used to be the envy of the town!’
“Maybe a century ago,” growled Jarra the Healer. “I could use last night’s stew as the basis of a stink bomb.”
EstherSasha suddenly wheeled on me. She had an expression similar to my wife when I’d badly screwed up. “And I suppose you’d be wanting potions.”
I didn’t even get my mouth open before Jarra the Healer replied for me. “He wants good potions so he and his hunters don’t get killed. The poor mayor is doing the work of three men, and all you plan on offering him is some watery soup.”
EstherSasha retorted, “Hardly! I bet he would always look forward to getting a nice, day-long buff over a handful of potions. A hearty meal every day rather than a few measly potions that may or may not be of any use.”
I contemplated using my Shadow Walk ability but realized that there wasn’t enough shade nearby to pull it off. Instead, I took a step back as the two titans went after each other. I didn’t know what either of them was talking about. I felt that I should figure that out first, before I formed an opinion.
Glancing around, I saw a field that appeared to have very different soil than the rest of the town’s fields. The grass growing here looked odd. It was lusher and less weedy. There also weren’t any trees or saplings like the ones that had sprung up in the other overgrown plots. A small house, certainly not one that would be rated as livable, was at the edge of the field. Next to it was a mostly destroyed building of some variety. Perhaps it was something that had once been used for storage.
I quickly brought up the town map. The plot was an herb garden, which told me that herbs could be grown there. They were useful medicinal plants that one typically had to go wandering through the forest to gather. Having a supply in town would be nice. The attached house was just a house, so no help there. The final structure was labeled as a destroyed structure which was even less useful. It could have been a barn or a brothel, for all the info the map gave.
Flipping out of my menus, I was greeted again to the sounds of shouting. The two opinionated women were still not winding down. Each was screaming about the advantages of potions vs cooking. Potions were crafted from Alchemy, which Jarra had. Cooking used the Seasoning skill. Seasoning used herbs in some fashion to improve the taste of food and give it a multi-hour buff. I liked buffs, but EstherSasha wasn’t that good of a cook or a seasoner. That should have made for an easy choice, but herbs were typically pretty hard to get access to. Here, in this field, they looked to be reasonably common. I surmised from listening to Jarra’s accusations of ulterior motives that the Seasoning skill leveled faster than Alchemy. EstherSasha would level faster than Jarra. Still, it was hard to overlook the added bonus that the food might taste slightly less foul if EstherSasha was cooking at a higher level in any skill.
In the real world, I would have hidden somewhere to avoid talking to either of these angry women. I could have sneaked out back, drank a beer, and waited for the whole thing to blow over. Here, I was earning experience points. Since no one would let me go kill monsters, like I had secretly hoped to slip away
and do today, I needed to make do. Glancing back at this quest, I saw it was worth 50 experience points. At my current level, that was as close to nothing as possible.
Both options actually sounded pretty nice; I could definitely see the merits of each woman’s position. I debated the pros and cons of food vs. medicine, while one of the women screamed ‘You goblin tickling trollop” at the other.
Glancing through my town map again, I saw a second herb garden. I was just about to pat myself on the back and take my victory lap as a problem solving hero when I noticed the condition of that second garden. It, too, was damaged. I could see that repairing it required 7 carts of enchanted mud. A cart equaled a load of 200 pounds. Where would one find 1400 pounds of enchanted mud?
Jarra stomped away from EstherSasha, while the elder woman stood smugly. Already regretting it, I walked over to Jarra. She reminded me of my wife when she was angry. My wife had always been very pretty when she was angry. That was a fact that my wife had not appreciated, because it made taking her seriously quite difficult. Also, I may have, on more than one occasion, angered her just so I could see how very pretty she was.
“So, any decisions made?” I asked innocently. It was a bad question but, unlike in real life, here I was a powerful Warrior, Rogue, and Woodsman. Out of respect, she bit back a harsher response while glaring at me.
“I still think the Alchemy station would be better for our survival, but we are going to have to make the Seasoning Kitchen,” she said, while apparently chewing gravel.
“Why?” I asked. Jarra backing down from a fight was an experience, to be certain. However, it was not one I was certain I liked.
“To build an Alchemy Station, I’d need some glass, sand and such,” she replied.
“None of that is particularly challenging to come by,” I replied, looking over the field while keeping her in the corner of my eye.