-Eddie Cantor

Between food and fighting, it was no wonder the Nekos were exhausted. What surprised John most was Lunaya, who for perhaps the first time chose to leave the campsite and go off on her own. Having an inkling of what she was up to, John deigned not to follow her.

John didn't mind the quiet, it gave him plenty of time to think. According to the warning he got, dungeon levels reset every week, and every time he Reincarnated. That was only seven days, but right now it seemed like an eternity, since he was only level five and that meant he could do less than a level every day. Actually, he couldn't even really grind level five dungeons, and maybe not even four or three. Even Feast wouldn't be enough to keep his health up once he fought enemies near his own level; he'd use up far more resources than he recovered from any one fight. Hell, Moira was a dozen levels ahead of the last dungeon, and while she'd never been in danger, it had been hard for her to fight and keep all of them safe at once without breaking out the heaviest of her magic.

"The EXP I gain seems to scale linearly, but the time and resources I dedicate to each individual dungeon grows exponentially, and the risk is another factor I always have to consider. If I treated it like a straight-up idle game, I could probably come up with an equation for experience per hour, but it changes every time I level and can deal more damage, not to mention everyone else. Plus, if I fail on a boss in this "game", it's a lot bigger deal…"

John eventually decided the best thing he could do was continue to grind, getting a better feel for things as he leveled up and learned more about his abilities. Plus, he needed to make better equipment. His sword was great, but armor would be an improvement, and he could also make things for the others if he had more materials. But unless he was going to supply them with armor made entirely out of rat clippings, he needed to fight something a bit stronger. He hadn't even gotten a single pelt. Since he only had around an hour and a half left, he would put dungeon grinding off for the day. He wanted to be home as quickly as possible so that he could meet his mother on her return, if he hadn't missed it already.

But there was another problem - one that John had thought about before but never seriously considered. The sparse and bare bones nature of his campsite had finally begun to irk John; the incident with Lunaya's punishment had been the final straw. Not to mention that he was tired of taking the nearly mile-long walk to the forest every time he wanted some privacy.

"Seras, I'm going to the forest for a bit; I want to see about making more proper lodgings here. Stay here and watch the Nekos until Lunaya gets back; we'll be going home in less than two hours."

"Alright!"

Seras gave a salute as John turned northward, marching off toward the trees. He'd spent a good amount of time considering his grinding options. Hopefully Lunaya had been given plenty of time to consider hers.

To his relief he actually passed Lunaya on his way to the forest. She looked a bit surprised to see him, blushing as she glared at him and wrapped her tail around her waist protectively. Before John could say anything, the Canid hastened her steps and was off toward the camp.

"Probably for the best," John said to himself with a shrug. "If I stumbled on her in the middle of something… well, it might not be much of a punishment anymore."

Lewd thoughts entertained John's mind as he finished his walk to the forest. Thankfully, since he wasn't desiring privacy, he didn't have to worry about trekking in until the foliage became a cover; any tree would do for what he had in mind.

"Alright, still not totally sure how to do this, but I want to Craft a log!"

John vocalized his desires and focused on the menu that normally came up when he made something, but nothing ever happened. He placed his hands directly on the tree and still got nothing.

"Okay so, what, I have to craft this into something usable first? But then do I have to chop it down and hack it by hand, or…"

"Hi there!"

"That is not the menu I was expecting," John noted, seeing a pop-up with an odd greeting. He crossed it out, only for it to be immediately replaced with another.

"It looks like you're trying to learn the basics of being a functional human being in the wilderness. Would you like help?"
-Get help not dying of exposure
-Die of exposure

Alongside that messaged popped up an image - more of an avatar, really, except that it was animated and… no, it was looking at him! Before John, right next to the display of that message, was a display showing a creature that looked like the actual Clippy merged with a mushroom due to some unmentionably horrific fungal infection. Not only that but he was bouncing in almost the same way and had the same stupid grin-looking twist to his paperclip body.

"I, uh… I'm not gonna die of exposure. I can literally go back to my house in an hour and a half," John said, unable to comment on the sheer absurdity that he was staring at.

"Well, what about your Nekos, huh? What about winter, huh? Oh, but you didn't make it Winter here, because you don't even have the skill or brains to implement a proper cycle of seasons yet!"

"Oh, now, just a moment, I- I-" John stuttered, caught off guard by being more or less verbally assaulted by his own interface.

"Now listen here, because I'm only gonna say this once," the overgrown paperclip interrupted John's stammering with a harsh look and firm words. "You can't Craft anything that isn't an available resource. It's not an available resource unless you harvest it. Develop a skill or just manually hack it apart, but for god's sake, did you really expect to Craft a fully-formed log out of a living tree?"

"Oh, and I suppose just having infinite growing potential and magical abilities I use by shouting their names in my head like a goddamn anime character makes more sense?" John asked, tapping his foot.

"Hey, that's how it works in games - but you sure as shit don't craft Town Halls out of trees in Warcraft, do you?! You gotta bring 'em to the Lumbermill!"

The animated shroom-clip had a point. It was a point he insisted on using in the most offensive way possible, but a point it was. All the same, John was a lot more concerned about this invader of his personal space than his plans for using his new world's natural resources.

"Okay, that's good and all, but first - who the fuck are you? Why are you here? And am I seriously gonna be stuck with you from now on?!"

"I'm Natty! Your benefactor decided you needed a helper for when you can't even figure out the dumbed down magical tools she gifted you, so here I am!"

"You- my benefactor? You mean Gaia? Whoever it was, I don't need help just because I tried something and it didn't work. Seriously, are you gonna sit here and annoy me just because I-"

"It looks like you're trying to repress your own failures and stupidity. Would you like some help?"

"Real fucking clever," John replied with an eyeroll. "Just shut up and let me work for a bit."

John focused on the task at hand and was surprised to find that Natty's window disappeared. Instead of the trees themselves, John walked around and gathered up as many branches as he could find. It wasn't easy, since Seras and Lunaya had collected most of them as firewood, but he didn't need many - a few had fallen naturally in the past couple days, so in just a few minutes, John had an armload that he was able to stash successfully in his inventory. According to his inventory he had eight units of Wood after his brief foraging.

"Okay, now… if I can combine my ores, I should be able to make an axe; I just need-"

Bronze Bar
A bar of bronze. Alloyed by Smelting a Copper Ore and Tin Ore together.
Requirements: 1x Copper Ore, 1x Tin Ore, Smelter Mana Cost: 10

"Smelter? What is that?"

"A smelter is a device or factory in which the smelting of ores takes place. Numbnuts!"

"I'm starting to think you're just here to add swear words and annoyance to otherwise useful information," John growled.

"You wouldn't be wrong," Natty helpfully added, smiling as he bounced around. "Guess there really is a first time for everything!"

"But, let me guess, I can't make a smelter?"

Basic Smelter
A simple but effective smelter used to transform low-level ores into bars of equivalent material.
Requirements: Skills you ain't got to pay the bills

"Oh come on, you seriously edited the requirements to piss me off?"

"Git gud, scrub!"

"I- fuckin'- fuck you!" John screamed at his invisible foe, searching his inventory frantically. He found what he was looking for at the bottom of the things he had yet to dump into his Abyssal Chest and was quite proud to see a Crafting window pop up.

Bronze Axe
7-15 Damage + 1.25x STR
Durability: 100/100
An axe forged with the Bronze Ingots you forgot you even had until now. Seriously, you almost made a Stone Axe because you haven't been keeping track of your own inventory, didn't you?
Requirements: Wood x5, Bronze Ingots x5 Mana Cost: 30

"Seriously? You couldn't even let me craft this without sass?"

"That was actually-"

"I don't care anymore!" John shouted, mashing the button to create the object before he could be any more annoyed with the situation. In his hands an axe appeared, and in his inventory the outlined items disappeared as he was finally rewarded with the fruits of his **** frustration and excessive toil in the face of almighty annoyance. Despite the occasional usefulness of its advice, John would have preferred the silence of the unknown to this intruder on his own personal space.

"Now, let's get to chopping!" John shouted, hefting the axe and taking frantic whacks at the trunk of the tree. A part of John had honestly expected to topple the trunk in a quick frenzy of blows, but although his strength was higher than almost ever before thanks to the cloak around his shoulders, John still took a good dozen swings or so before the air filled with the sound of crackling timber and disturbed air space. With his axe already showing signs of wear and tear, John stepped well off to the side and admired his handiwork as the tree almost leisurely fell to the ground. He was fortunate in that despite his rage-blinded state he had managed to fell it away from the other trees so that it did not catch on anything. It fell harmlessly to the ground, leaving itself wide open for John's follow-up.

"Now I want to Craft-"

"You can only craft what you can work with! Think you can lift an entire felled tree, pipsqueak?"

"If I ever find you in a state I can get my hands on you," John swore, clutching the axe as though Natty himself might appear before him at any moment, "I will tear your bones from your flesh and knit your tissue into an apology note to all who have ever suffered your existence."

After making that vow John went to work on the tree itself. Though his axe was rapidly wearing down, it was still more than sharp enough to make quick work of a large portion of the trunk. Mindful of his own personal abilities and the relative ease with which one could handle large quantities of wood, John did his best to section off the trunk and didn't stop until he'd cut almost six feet of trunk into a dozen roughly equal sections and had successfully added all of them to his inventory.

"Alright, I've got some wood. What else do I need to do to start on making a house?"

"You could just lay them on the ground. Six sections of a moderately sized tree is more than enough to make a house, right? Should just magically form together!"

"If I could make a house out of sarcasm," John noted, "I'd have shelter for the next dozen creatures I Purifiy."

John sighed as he continued to chip away at the trunk before him, hoping that his axe would hold out. According to his inventory it was only around 20% depleted, but he could feel the strain every time he brought it down. Despite that, he was hopeful for the future. If it wasn't for the ever-present and eternally annoying Gaia-Microsoft hybrid that had infested his abilities, John could almost believe he was playing a game of Civilization. He needed to work on his basic tech tree before he could get the things he wanted accomplished, and any failings in that were the result of his own poor planning. Not that he'd admit that to the newfound voice in his head.

"If I focus on base-building and finding a way for everyone to farm materials," John thought as his axe began a rhythmic motion to harvest the valuable resource before him, "I wonder what I can make? What about ores? Magical materials? If I can find a way to generate them, there's no limit to what I can make. If I could just enhance the armor and weaponry of the Order, they'd probably reward me with…"

John's own thoughts engulfed him, more engrossing than the rhythmic noise of his axe colliding with the tree he'd felled. Visions of a John clad in glistening armor and enchanted weaponry filled his mind, as he steadily hacked away at the first of undoubtedly many resources he would turn to his use in this new and untamed world.