Crafter's Passion

by Kris Schnee

  Stan grinned and found he could move around easily in the water, dodging the sharks and darting away. There wasn't much point in sticking around. Easier to try out this new spell and see what he could do. Resource gathering, Oro had said. The sounds of battle were faint behind him. So, where could he go?

  He surfaced for air and spun around, flipping in and out of the water. Every movement was smoothly animated. He flipped back to first-person mode to see what it was like to be a dolphin instead of watching one. The interface had changed on him. Now the world was full of echoes that appeared on screen, highlighting parts of the rippling blue world to show sea caves and rocks and fish. Stan darted ahead to snag one of the silvery fish in his jaws and automatically chomped it in half, getting an energy boost. The whole sea around Central Island was open to him.

  He found a dark cave where his dolphin sonar let him see the walls. For no reason he flipped around back and forth, turning upside down before venturing in. Here was nothing but a shallow flooded chamber full of dull grey shells. He turned back to find something else to do, but then scraped a shell off of the cave floor and smacked it into a stone pillar. The game picked up immediately on what he was trying to do, and let him smash the thing open to reveal a pearl. Aha! But how was he going to take the thing without any hands? Stan surfaced to breathe and heard a puff of air, saw a spray of mist. He imagined it was coming from the top of his head.

  There was no tutorial message telling him how to be a dolphin or to collect this sunken treasure. How was he supposed to do either? He darted around the water in frustration and took a minor wound to his tail. Instead of mashing buttons, maybe he could treat this problem like a puzzle. He maneuvered up to a stone shelf where a bunch of oysters were growing, and held down the button he'd been using to chomp. He saw his jaw open wide. He nudged himself forward and scooped up a lot of the shellfish while still holding the button. Maybe that'd convey that he didn't want to eat them. His speed was reduced like this but there was no notice about the food effects of swallowing the shells.

  He got up to the shore and shook his head, flinging the oysters onto the sand. "Take that, game," he said. He'd gotten a slew of the things instead of snagging just one, and it looked like nobody else had even found the cave! Up in the shallows the camera showed him transforming back to human, fortunately keeping his equipment and clothes. Perfect! Stan snatched up all the oysters he could carry, then found a stone and began smashing them open.

  "You respawned already?" said the dragon-man alchemist, crouching on the sand nearby. Other townsfolk were stripping the bodies of the shark invaders.

  "I didn't get killed; I just turned into a dolphin and escaped."

  "How?"

  Stan shrugged. "Somebody gave me a potion. What were you saying about magic?"

  The alchemist laughed. "I was telling you to try making a wand out of whatever cool materials you could find, but then you went ahead and got these. Can I buy a few?"

  * * *

  He got several decent pearls out of the oyster collection and sold most to the alchemist. With one pearl, bits of shell and palm wood, he could make a magic wand for himself! He even had some coins and the repaired and newly made armor for himself. It was a good day.

  He checked the clock on his Slab, which was telling him he'd ignored its alarm and he should be sleeping. Around him he heard only faint music from other dorm rooms and the wheezy whirr of the air conditioner. He logged out of Thousand Tales on the Talisman pad and returned to the title screen. Now, instead of the generic grey he'd had, the logo was a collection of hammered-together wooden planks on a backdrop of beaches and clouds.

  He grinned and said, "Why does it feel like I actually accomplished something when all I did was push buttons?"

  Just as he was shutting the Talisman off for the evening, it told him, [You did.]

  3. Opportunity

  He had a long day of farming. At the edge of the Community's public property was an improvised greenhouse, a plastic tent spanning more than an acre, where they grew vegetables in ungodly heat and humidity. Some of the stuff was gengineered. Usually it was the eggheads who wanted to work in there to justify getting appointed to government positions later, in other experimental agriculture projects. Stan was covering for Eddie because he and a few others were out sick and it was too crazy-hot for anybody else to volunteer. Stan got SCS brownie points for it plus extra water, which he found he badly needed.

  The indoor jungle had long racks of aquacultured roots from some obscure African crop that was supposedly going to feed a billion people. Stan's "scientific sample" task basically meant poking super-potatoes every so often while doing the more interesting work of checking the machinery. Since he had most of the place to himself today he kept up an audio-only game with the Talisman in his pocket. So far he'd built a little asteroid base, struggling to keep track of what was positioned where as he verbally described setting up ore processors and solar panels.

  "Can't I link my accounts and do Endless Isles like this? Or at least a different character in the same world?"

  Ludo was still using that male persona for "advice-giving mode", which struck Stan as odd but helpful. Ludo said, "It wouldn't work to have you doing that alongside players using graphics. I could have you visit the world used by blind players, though."

  "You can play Tales blind?"

  "Sure. Why should they miss out? Besides, there's money to be made off them."

  Stan had never considered what kind of control scheme someone would need if they had bad vision or none, or messed-up hands. "I guess some people make their whole careers about that. But they're just doing it to make money?"

  "Let's just say some of the designers use their own products."

  That was still selfish, but it was a kind of selfish Stan could understand. "What about you? Isn't it hard to play game master for customers with a totally different level of ability?"

  "You forget that I'm a machine. I don't naturally have any senses in your world. Or hands. Even the uploaders have problems with their senses. When they 'go outside' using robots, their vision isn't quite right, and within my world their smell and taste are still flawed."

  "Oh no! The caviar and champagne aren't perfect?" Meanwhile Stan kept up his inspection duties in the greenhouse.

  Ludo said, "Food is a big part of the human experience, so having that not work right is a bigger problem than you might think. Is that what you'd do as an uploader? Gorge on the fanciest food?"

  "Well, no. I like pizza and burgers like anybody normal. I could go for a real meat burger though, not this plant-based stuff they serve. If I were rich I'd smuggle a ton of real beef into California; people would buy it."

  Ludo was quiet while Stan daydreamed and worked on the endless rows of plants. Then "he" said, "Your free trial period runs out soon."

  Stan started to answer that obviously he'd sign up for more, but paused. "I don't have a lot of money, so I'm not sure..."

  "The monthly price isn't very high."

  He grinned. "Yeah, but I get paid in scrip and have to swap that out for dollars at a loss, and then worry about whether that hurts my SCS rating, and maybe it's not worth the hassle."

  Ludo sighed. "If it's really a problem, I could offer you a 10% discount per month for the next three months."

  "That's it?" said Stan, wiping sweat off his face.

  "20% if you can get a friend to sign up for a month."

  "Make it 25% and we have a deal."

  "Yeesh. Fine. And I'm adding Merchant to the skill list for your Endless Isles character."

  Stan had actually wrung something out of the mighty AI! Ha. "By the way, how much of that wood-crafting system applies to reality? I've done some shop work but not in this much detail."

  "Most, though for legal reasons I must warn you that real-world tools are more dangerous and you should consult their manuals. Also, magic wands aren't real."

  "Is anybody in there able to teach me more about that? Tools, I mean, no
t wands."

  "Sure!" said Ludo. "I can grant a quest to somebody to give you a lesson, probably tomorrow."

  * * *

  When he got another chance to play Thousand Tales with graphics, he went around hunting lizards. A species of feathered, scaled critters the size of dogs roamed the jungle inland. He felt primitive what with his club and nothing but the wooden arm-guards for protection. Just him versus simulated nature. He kept to first-person mode even though it meant he sometimes heard hoots and hisses that might be coming from behind him.

  A lizard jumped down at him from a boulder, claws out. Stan swung and missed, hopped backward and fell over. The beast was on him. Stan mashed buttons to throw it off but took a minor wound anyway from its snapping teeth. The moment he was up it tried to bite his legs. He jumped and landed right on its head, then bounced behind it. A meter appeared with a cursor sliding left to right, giving him just enough time to guess what it was. He tapped the attack button right in the middle of that and did a mighty backhand counter with his club, in slow motion. Wham! The lizard staggered up one more time and they traded blows, but Stan had the obvious advantage now against its injuries. He kicked and swung twice more, until the creature skidded across the jungle floor and died. A fanfare played.

  "Not a bad job for solo combat." It had certainly felt cool anyway, and he hadn't taken much damage. Stan realized he didn't have any way to take the lizard apart to sell the hide or something. It wouldn't fit into his already cluttered inventory, either. He tried dragging the thing and the game obliged, letting him haul it toward the beach.

  Along the way, he heard a shower of stones and a pained yelp. He darted toward the faint puff of dust in the distance and a found a rockslide where a second lizard lay pinned by rocks. It hissed and chirped plaintively.

  "Oh sure," said Stan. "You try to look pathetic now, but you'd be clawing at me if you could." He took aim, which called up that timed-hit system again, and smacked it in the head to kill it in a single blow. Another fanfare.

  He dragged both bodies along, though he could barely move with them. He didn't want to abandon the second one and risk having something swipe his kill. So, he made it out to the open sunlight and saw a ninja passing by in broad daylight. The man in black scoffed like Stan was doing something wrong, and said, "Why are you lugging all that?"

  "They're conversation pieces. Got a knife or something?"

  "I'm not using a katana as a steak knife. But try the pub I guess?"

  Stan nodded and slowly made his way to the Crown & Tail, where he called into the kitchen and a frightening knife-wielding chef came out. "Those?" said the chef. "I'll cut them up if I can take the meat."

  "I want five copper too."

  "Eh, fine. Drag them in here." He led Stan into a rustic kitchen where there were several food-crafting stations much like the maker workshop.

  "What are you, anyway?" Stan asked. "A real player or a background NPC?"

  "It's not polite to ask." With a murderous flash of blades, the chef impaled one of the lizards and hauled it onto a butcher station where he began attacking the body. There was some kind of meaty puzzle faintly visible above it as he worked.

  "Says who?"

  "There's a way we do things. Maybe I'm a billionaire, maybe I'm just a guy who likes making food items sometimes. Who cares?"

  It made sense that there'd be some traditions evolving in the game, even if it was just a few years old, but Stan didn't buy the idea that the difference didn't matter. Maybe I'm not supposed to ask, but it's worthwhile to guess. He watched the man at work and inspected him to see his stats. His official class was "Fighter", suggesting that he wasn't just an NPC chained to this one room.

  "Do you buy a lot of meat?" Stan asked. "I could get more."

  "I do, but it's a common enough adventurer task that I get plenty and don't pay much. You caught me at a good time. Food items are mostly for temporary stat bonuses, and staving off penalties if you're online too long without eating."

  Stan was a little confused. "You don't, like, get a certain amount just assigned to you?"

  "From where? I get my ingredients from people fetching them."

  That sounded chaotic. He'd have to rely on a bunch of individual adventurers figuring out what he wanted and how to get it to him. How would something like that ever work?

  Stan filled up the last of his inventory with the lizards' teeth and scales, then headed out to the maker workshop to spend his tiny profit on the admission fee. While he was at it, he dropped his gear and borrowed the workshop's beat-up "Public Axe of Affection". He used it to cut down another tree with some difficulty, and hauled that in too.

  His character sheet now read:

  [Stan Cooper

  PRIVATE INFO

  Account type: Standard

  Mind: Tier-III

  Body: Human

  Main Skills: Club, Dodge, Woodworking, Inspect, Merchant

  Save Point: Crown & Tail Pub

  PUBLIC INFO

  Note: Newcomer. Say hello!

  Class: None]

  He hopped right over to the woodworking tools and crafted a simple round shield. A thought occurred to him and he dug through a book of blueprints. He took the next piece of wood, applied some physics-breaking rules to make it long and thin instead of a cube, then put it on a lathe. He started cutting bits away from the side as it spun, thinning one end and rounding the other. Before long he'd gingerly pulled the rod off of the lathe and brushed aside a confetti of wood shavings.

  [Crafting result: Blocky Baseball Bat. "Strike!"]

  Stan equipped it and grinned. The game considered his work recognizable for what he'd meant to make, if not particularly good. He could probably do better though.

  He tried a few experiments in combining lizard scales and teeth with his woodwork and ended up with a better shield and some spiky wooden shoulder pieces. The item description read, ["Don't shrug."]

  He was about to sign off for dinner when an unreasonably busty elf sauntered in. "Heya. Are you the new crafter?" she asked.

  Come on, thought Stan. That voice has got to have some auto-sultry modifier on it, and that's probably a guy. Even so, Stan stammered. "Yeah. I was just fooling around; I'm not any good at this."

  "Yet. Let's show you a few tricks; I'm getting credit for this."

  "SCS?"

  "Huh? Coins. You know, from a quest-giver NPC."

  Stan fidgeted, hoping his annoyance wouldn't show through the screen. Ludo was indirectly paying his way through some training. True, he was paying real money to play and Ludo was only handing out imaginary coins, but it still didn't seem right. He said, "This game's totally different from reality. People don't do stuff here unless you hand out goodies."

  She laughed at him, making Stan's ears burn. "Where do you live? Oh, never mind. I'm in the Free States."

  The elf encouraged him to chop down another tree. With that lousy axe it took even longer this time. Somebody should've been assigned to sharpen the thing! Stan came back grumbling. The chopping mini-game had been more difficult too.

  His elven teacher startled back into action; apparently she'd been away from her computer. "Finally. Okay, that bat's a start but you need to mark guidelines on the wood in advance, like this..."

  [Crafting result: Basic Baseball Bat. "Not so foul!"]

  Stan hefted the thing and observed its stats, substantially better than the first version. "Thanks! What else can we make?"

  She coached him through crafting a basic magic wand using that pearl he'd saved. It didn't look particularly magical, but he could start using it and see how magic worked.

  "I'm going to want a proper axe at some point."

  She looked disdainfully at the shared one. "Better than that, yeah. So get some metal and learn forging, or just buy one."

  "I could sharpen theirs; how do I do that?"

  "Actually that could be good practice for you. It's puzzle-based, so first pick it up..."

  It only took a few minutes
of work and the blade got visibly sharper, so it was worth doing. He thanked the lady, who'd been itching to get going anyway, and headed out with it to try one more tree before dinner.

  On the way, he ran into Alaya the archer. "You, the killer!" she said, and whipped out a replacement bow.

  Stan forced a smile. "Oh hey, I've still got the party's stuff. I've actually upgraded most of it."

  She'd been about to attack, but paused. "What?"

  "Yeah, I'm sorry, but I didn't do anything to your bow yet. The others' gear is repaired and more powerful. Want to come see it?"

  "Uh... All right." They returned to the workshop, where Stan handed over most of the stuff he'd made. "You could even give this pearl wand to Dominic instead of the plain wooden one." He'd felt bad about killing the mage in particular; he'd been the friendliest.

  Alaya browsed the collection, then picked up as much as she could carry. "Fine, then. I'll take these by way of apology; keep the pack. Are you going for a non-combat class or what?"

  "I hadn't decided. I need ingredients to craft stuff, though, so that means fighting monsters someplace."

  "If you make me a couple dozen arrows I'll buy them off you. One copper each."

  "One!" said Stan, who had no idea what others were selling them for. "I ought to be getting two."

  "I can make it fifteen copper for a dozen."

  "Eh... All right, for the sake of getting practice. See you around?"

  The archer looked confused as she left, saying, "I'd planned to shoot you on sight."

  Before logging out, he changed his character's note to say, [Woodworker For Hire].

  * * *

  Stan headed for the Community dorm's kitchen to finally get dinner. The potato stew was nearly gone and the dining room was empty enough for Eddie to be sitting alone at a table with his math textbook. A portrait of the president smiled down from the wall. "How's the studying going?" Stan said, juggling a hot bowl in his hands. "Feeling better?"