Gamelit 22 (fish chowder) (Patreon)

            The village hadn’t gotten less depressing over night, but seeing it under virtual sunlight filled Amanda with the same desire to be productive that real sunlight did. Ordinarily that would have disconcerted her, but it had been so long since she’d been energetic that she didn’t care how she recaptured the feeling. It was enough to have it.

            “Last night I got a couple of quests done,” Nick was telling her. “I went around the edges of the village and checked the boundaries, and then I did an inventory of what’s left over. It’s not much. The place is completely trashed. Turning this back into a working quest hub again is… not going to be minor.”

            “What about it is going to be hard?” Amanda asked, surveying the town square. “I don’t know what it was like before, and what it needs to have to be working again. From a game perspective.”

            “It needs buildings to look right. And for it to be useful to players, it needs NPCs. This town in particular had some questgivers, a repair guy, and some vendors that bought trash and sold basic goods, like arrows or common quality armor or food.”

            “People buy food in a game?”

            “Oh sure, it helps you restore health after you lose it fighting. And drinks help magic-users like sages and druids top up their mana.” Nick tapped his fingertips, one after another. “So… buildings, quests for low-level players, and at least three NPCs. That’s the baseline. Or it would have been before the wireset. Now…” He rotated in place, looking, then rubbed his head the same way he did in person, except here it made his giant ears flap. “The wireset makes things so immersive that you can’t really half-uh… not put your entire effort into what it’s like to be here. So maybe there’s an opportunity not just to make it like it was before, but make it a destination for the new version of the game. Something dynamic maybe. That could be exciting!”

            “Sounds great,” Amanda said, because she could respond to his enthusiasm without knowing what on earth he meant. “What should I do?”

            He folded his arms. “Maybe you can handle the kids. The surviving NPCs, I mean. I don’t like how that came out… that the legal requirements meant the kids had to be left alive without their parents. They need to go somewhere.”

            “Can I talk to them?” Amanda asked.

            “Yeah….”

            “Then I’ll do that, and you do…” She waved her hand at the town. “Whatever it is you need to do over there.”

            He saluted her and jogged off toward the middle of the square, leaving her to confront the very realistic looking children waiting in the centaur camp. She didn’t blame Nick for his discomfort, because the sight of them was exactly the sort of emotional manipulation she disliked about modern storytelling. But if this was part of what Nick wanted to do… she sighed and approached the first, offering the little girl a cookie from the Pouch of Magic Cookie-making. “My dear, I know you have relatives somewhere who can help you,” she said, hoping it was true. “Do you know their names?”

            Was it her imagination, or was there a pause? And then the child was confiding the names of all her relations, and then the other children were too, and at least one of them said her father wasn’t in town at all, but had gone away to some other place and was supposed to be back soon. Amanda guessed the AI directing these new plotlines had decided that orphaning all these children would have made players—or at least this player—grumpy. “So how do people get in touch in this place?” she asked. “Letters? Magic? Let’s find your families.”

            Amanda had not anticipated doing what amounted to administrative work in a game, but she could hardly call the next hour anything else: she was writing people to ask them to do things, and then arranging for those messages to be delivered by centaur courier. It was surprisingly relaxing to do this in a pastoral forest setting; if she sat with her back to the village, she was facing a lovely meadow and the centaur camp, and there was sun on her shoulders and the music of birds in her ears. All of her real world jobs would have been far more palatable had she been a pony centaur in a meadow who could eat multiple cookies without concern for her waistline. Come to think of it, did centaurs have one waistline, or two?

            By the end of the morning, she’d accounted for all the children, and having wrapped that up, she was unsurprised to be told:

Congratulations! You have learned Scribing (Level 1). You have advanced in Negotiation and Diplomacy!

            No surprises there, really. Calling her bad handwriting ‘scribing’ was really pushing it, though. With a chuckle, Amanda looked around: the centaurs were taking care of the NPC kids, and there was no sign of Nick. No doubt he was off doing something quest-like. She was tempted to search for him, but only briefly; as much fun as it had been to brain a virtual monster to death with a ladle, she didn’t particularly want to die to a random predator in the forest. Hadn’t she told him more than once, if he was lost, not to wander off to look for her? She would do the same.

            The afternoon sunlight had a different quality, more yellow than white, and under it she could almost see the ruins as a purposed demolition instead of the effects of catastrophe. She stopped in front of one large pile of rubble, because in the back, she thought she saw what might have been an oven. Hadn’t Nick said that food was important to players? Amanda put her hands on her hips, frowning.

            The sound of hooves shuffling through the debris distracted her, and there was the son of Kavon the cook. The boy said, “What are you thinking, Champion Mandypony?”

            “I’m thinking that we need to eat,” Amanda said. “So I’d like you to get me three volunteers with strong backs and two runners interested in bringing some ingredients this way.”

            A couple of hours later, she and her centaur work crew had excavated the remains of a significantly sized kitchen and cleaned it up enough that she could fill the giant cauldron and start a soup going. The oven was a bit more of a challenge, but while her volunteers handled that she could use a recovered skillet to do flatbread. Yeast breads rose gratifyingly quickly in a virtual setting. By late afternoon she’d attracted the entire centaur camp, and they’d cleaned up the area around her improvised kitchen. “This was probably the inn,” Kavon said, drawing the probable boundaries based on what remained of the walls: little more than an apron of stones in most places. “Thus, the size of the kitchen. A good choice to unearth first.”

            “Everyone’s got to eat,” Amanda agreed, and handed him the ladle. “Try this. We had plenty of fish from the stream, so I decided to do chowder.”

            “Delicious!”

            “I think it’s pretty good, but it could use something. Seasoning, or clam juice….”

            One of the children tugged at her belt. “Pony lady, please, is there dessert?”

            “Not yet,” Amanda said. “Let’s see what we can whip up. You and your friends had better help, I think.”

            By the time Nick showed up, the centaurs had made a firepit in the center of the old inn and were singing and eating with the orphans. “Wow, that smells good! What is it?”

            “Fish chowder,” Amanda said. “Your father’s not a big fan of it, so I don’t make it at home.”

            Trying a spoon, Nick’s brows rocketed upward. “Maybe you can air-fry him some chicken nuggets while we eat the real food, the way you used to do with me when I was little and picky.”

            Amanda laughed. “Maybe I should…! Here, have a bowl. How did your questing go?”

            “Oh, I can’t wait to show you! In fact, I’ll just walk with this… here, this way. Don’t worry, I wont drop it, I have a ridiculous dex stat in game.”

            Nick brought he to the center of town to a tiny sprout, set in a ditch where the previous tree’s roots had been. An obviously magical sprout, because it was glittering in the low sunlight, and occasional sparkles rose from its elegantly curved limb to hang in the air. When the air bent it, even slightly, it gave off an ethereal chime. “Isn’t this amazing? I got a quest to grow a new, magical tree for the village. It might have useful magic, something that will protect people, or empower them!”

            “It’s beautiful,” Amanda said honestly, admiring the frond. And then, knowing how gardens went: “I hope nothing eats it.”

            Nick’s eyes widened in horror. He set the bowl down. “This can wait. Come on, we got to figure out how to protect it.”

            That’s how they spent the reamining hour before dinner: hunting up something they could use as a fence for the baby tree. Their best choice was a basket donated by one of the centaurs: cutting long strips in it let in the sun and the air without allowing inquisitive deer muzzles passage. Weighing the handles down with fire-scorched bricks kept it in place. By the end of that, Amanda got another notification:

Congratulations! You have demonstrated the prerequisites for the skill Wise Counsel. You now have Wise Counsel (Level 1).

            Amanda chuckled, causing her son to glance at her quizzically. “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just that I only wish getting better at hard things was as easy in real life.”

            “Are you sure?” he asked, grinning. “That’s the opposite of the kind of stuff you usually say. You know ‘nothing worth doing comes easy’ or ‘if it didn’t cost us anything, we wouldn’t appreciate it.’”

            “In this case? I think I’ll still be grateful for the easy win.” She turned in place, having a good look at the village. It was still ninety percent ruins, but the inn space was swept and people were sitting there, eating and making music and laughing, and at their feet the little sapling glowed in its new habitat. “This feels like a good start to me.”

            “To me too.” He made a fist and she obliged him by bumping it. “Let’s go tell Dad all about it.”