ISLE: U.I. (Act I, Part XII)

Marlowe retrieves some long-awaited numbers

1000 words, ~5 minute read
Recommended listening while you read: staring contest by tomxbumpz
Day 4 on the island, morning

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Day four was an early start; I was up at first light. I watched the sun reach across the horizon, a tiny yellow dot with a fiery ghost stretching thin at first first, then expanding upward into the sky above the ocean. I ate, drank, packed my bag and was on my way back to the leather whatever-it-was before the beach had fully brightened.

As I arrived at the upturned driftwood that I’d planted yesterday, I slipped on my sandals and trudged into the woods. I came to the small bald patch in the overgrowth, turned, and trekked a little further, counting my steps as I went.

One.

Two.

...

Forty-nine.

I stopped before taking another step.

“...think it was about fifty...”

I was not directly in front of a tree... I’d gone wrong somewhere. The palm forest was thick here and it was hard to know how far off I was.

Twenty minutes of frantically scanning the treetops later, I found the leather thingamajig. The entire time, it had been just a few steps before where I’d stopped.

“Cheeky bugger...”

I grabbed one of my brand new axes and immediately got to work.

It took nearly three axes to chop down the tree. As I looped my final axe back onto the rucksack, it had only a thin sliver of durability left. The tree needed an extra push before it fell. I helped it along and got clear as it crashed down to the forest floor. For a moment, it threatened to get caught up in the surrounding trees, but I got lucky. It rolled off the branches and fell with a thud.

{Foraging +3xp}

The leather bound package tumbled out and skittered under a yuca plant. I crawled underneath, stretched as far as I could, and pulled it out by a single finger. I was sweaty. My skin slipped against the leather.

I found a spot on the trampled ground and sat down with the thing. I laid it down, untied the strap that bound it, and unrolled the leather. It smelled good, like smoke & cedar, like the inside of a barrel sauna. It was larger than I’d expected, and once unrolled, it took two hands to handle, like holding an old-fashioned newspaper. It was ‘aged’, but it didn’t crumble or tear.

In the very center, near the top, was another disc sewn in, exactly like my rucksack. The white ring of light pulsed softly, sensing my touch.

I focussed on it, and tiny dots moved across the face of the leather like a wave, from left to right. It appeared as though tiny particles of the leather itself were bursting with light and then dimming. Maybe projected by the ring, but this looked more like a chemical reaction in the leather itself. After the wave passed, a collection of symbols assembled themselves evenly across the surface. I ran my finger over one icon and I could feel its contours, a subtle indentation beneath my finger. The glowing thread-like lines were actually etched into the surface temporarily—ink made of light.

I sat back and studied the symbols. There were eight of them. The first I recognized. It was the same icon I’d seen fall out of the sky, upside-down when I’d found my rucksack. I touched it.

The icons seeped away like wet ink dispersing. I caught myself smiling. The movement was so smooth, so gratifying to watch. And then, the same interface the rucksack had projected before, a grid showing my inventory, inked itself onto the leather surface. I could see my water, my Kehra seeds, everything in my pack, even though I’d left it a few yards away.

“That’s handy,” I said, “not exactly sure how or why... but seems handy...”

The familiar interface came with an additional column of information here. It showed stats about my pack. Upgrade Level 1. Durability. Quick references of how long the food & water held within should sustain me. My current maximum weight limit, and by extension, the stamina drain rate of my current load. A few other things I didn’t fully understand.

“Definitely handy.”

I re-focussed my attention on the glowing circle at the top of the interface.

“You're a U.I...”

The circle glowed again and the inventory display dispersed in the same captivating inky fashion. The grid of symbols re-assembled out of tiny dots. I didn’t recognize any of the rest of them. Most, I didn’t yet even understand. I tried to touch the very last icon, which sort of looked like an old-fashioned Rolodex, but it did nothing. The ink pulsed slightly as I pushed my finger against the leather, but nothing changed.

I shifted my focus to the symbol just below the backpack. It looked like a rudimentary bar graph. I put my hand on it briefly. The symbols melted away again, replaced by what I’d been waiting for...

“Ha! Finally!”

A full display of my stats appeared. No more trying to keep track of every little {+1 this} and {+3 that}! The full list of skills filled the leather. Each had a number and a simple line meter, just like my axe’s durability meter, to signify the points I’d accrued in each. There were 5 over-arching categories: Survival, Crafting, Domestic, Knowledge & Morale. Each of these categories held three skills. The full page read as such...

• Survival

  • Foraging

  • Sheltercraft

  • Firecraft

• Crafting

  • Toolmaking

  • Invention/Engineering

  • Refinement

• Domestic

  • Cooking

  • Farming

  • Heritage

• Knowledge

  • Xenobotany

  • Xenoarchaeology

  • Cartography

• Morale

  • Comfort

  • Eudaemonia

  • Community

I looked at that last two categories for a long time. What the hell was Xenoarchaeology? Worse, what was Eudaemonia?! I’d never seen that word in my life. Worse yet, how was I going to level up a Community skill on a deserted island?!

“Figure it out later...”

I snapped out of tinkering with the interface. I was sat cross-legged in the middle of the forest. I could experiment more back at camp. I rolled it up, wandered back to my pack, and realized that the loops on the one side looked perfectly designed to hold the leather roll. It slid through the loops easily, but they held it snug enough to be secure. I threw the pack over my shoulder and bounced up and down a little to make sure it wouldn’t fall out. The backpack held it tight.

“Spicy.”

Before I left, I glanced at the tree I’d chopped down. It had taken three axes to do, and while I was slowly growing more confident that I could craft more, those last few chops of the first two axes had been bittersweet. I’d tried re-gathering their parts to re-craft them, but the stone had lost its sharp edges, the stick had broken and my handwoven twine was frayed and unusable.

It seemed such a shame to put all that work and just leave the tree lying on the ground. Could I put it in my bag and take it back to camp?

Unfortunately, no magic-backpack-that-could-hold-30-rocks was going to allow me to pick up an entire tree. I grunted. I winced. I gave up. There it would lay.

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Author Notes

I’ve been hanging onto this one for a long while now. While I am intentionally trying to keep the ‘LitRPG’-ness of this story to it’s functional minimum, I had to indulge myself and lay out the full skill tree at some point.

It is an unusual skill tree on purpose, and things like “Eudaemonia” will be explained further down the line. This may not be your little cousin’s LitRPG. However, we’re all nerds here (this far into the serial we must’ve weeded out the non-nerds, no?!) and this week’s instalment was explicitly written to satisfy that craving for points and skills and progression. I’m very curious how anyone reading this initial draft of the story feels about this instalment. Are the skills improving or breaking your immersion?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

See you in the comments below.