“Try what?” said Mike, who’d recovered from his emotional turmoil and was watching with an uncomprehending look. To be fair, so was everyone but Joe.
“This,” I said, and picked up the neatly-skinned hide. It was heavy and I did not want to carry it in my grocery bag. I couldn’t, actually. It wouldn’t come close to fitting. I hope this works.
“Inventory?” I said to no one in particular.
A five-by-five grid appeared in my vision, superimposed over the world. All the squares were empty.
“All right!” I shouted. “It works! Store Bobcat Hide!”
The hide vanished from my hand. A small image of the hide appeared in the top left square of the grid.”
Joe let out a shout, as did Anthony, who’d figured out what was happening. The rest of the group started glaring at us. Mostly me.
“What the Hell just happened?” said Mandy, sounding a bit sharp. “Explain. Now.”
“Mistress, most games have what we call an auto-loot feature and an inventory feature,” Joe immediately replied. “It’d be boring if you had to stand there and pretend to skin animals and search corpses, not to mention really graphic. So you loot them, and you get whatever it is they drop. And you have an inventory so you don’t have to pretend to put stuff in and out of a virtual bag, or worry about how much things weigh. Gamers tend to be pack rats.”
She still looked confused, so he said, “Just try it. Say ‘Inventory,’ like James did.”
“’Inventory,’ she said, and gasped. “What’s this? How does it work?”
“You store stuff in it,” I said. “Then you can take it out when you want it.” I reached down and stored each drop in turn. The fangs, the teeth and the meat stacked, each group of identical items only taking up a single square of the grid. “I’ll share this stuff if we figure out what to do with it,” I said to the group. “Although I think Anthony should get his rug.” There was light laughter.
Meanwhile, Mandy reached into her bag and took out a bottle of water. “’Store Water,’” she said. The bottle stayed in her hand and she frowned.
“It says only System-recognized items can be stored. What’s that mean?”
Joe and I exchanged glances. “Not sure,” he said after a second. “At a guess, it means only things that are looted from enemies can go in there. What else do we have that the System might recognize?”
Glancing around, I remembered the Mental Disruptor. “Samantha, can you store the gun?”
She took it out and said, “Inventory,” her eyes widening as the grid appeared before her. “’Store gun?’” she said in a questioning tone.
The gun vanished.
“Well, that’s handy,” I said, smiling like a kid at Christmas. “We’ll figure it out as we go. Samantha, can you get it back? Try doing it without actually speaking, just think about what you want from your Inventory.”
Frowning, she held out her hand. Her expression tightened with concentration.
The gun reappeared in her hand.
“Nice,” said Anthony. “That’s probably faster than pulling it out of the bag, and you can’t lose it. You should probably just keep it in there.”
Samantha nodded and concentrated again. The gun disappeared once more.
“Okay, things are looking up,” I said. “But we still have a long ways to go. Mandy, you were worried about walking. You doing okay?”
“My Stamina was going down a little at a time,” she said. “Joe told me to watch it. But it never got more than ten points or so down. I can probably walk farther now than before this happened,” she said, sounding pleased.
“If you leveled…?” She nodded. “Then I’d put the point in Constitution. It seems to increase Stamina as well as Hit Points.”
“I did,” she said. “I got more Hit Points and my Stamina went up, but neither of them regenerates any faster.”
“Weird,” said Anthony. “We’ll have to figure out how the numbers work.”
“Later,” I said. “If everybody’s ready, we should get going.”
And so we did.
Chapter 6
Keep On Keepin' On
As we walked, I examined the items in my Inventory.
Adult Bobcat Fang: Crafting material. Appraise for more information.
Adult Bobcat Claw: Crafting material. Appraise for more information.
Bobcat Hide: Crafting material. Appraise for more information.
Bobcat Meat: Cooking ingredient. Appraise for more information.
Mental attempts to appraise the items produced a System Message telling me I didn’t have the Appraisal skill. But even without it, I noticed something inconsistent.
“Joe,” I called out, “Any idea why the teeth and claws say ‘adult’ but the hide and the meat don’t?”
We walked for a little bit while he thought about it. He eventually answered without turning around.
“In some games it makes a difference what level mob component drops come from. It sounds like the System cares about some of them but not others. I guess a piece of meat is a piece of meat, but adult teeth are bigger than baby teeth. Maybe a young bobcat would only have dropped one piece of meat or a smaller hide.”
“Mob component drops?” said Mandy. “What’s that?”
“‘Mob’ means enemy,” I said. “It’s short for ‘mobile,’ don’t ask why. Components are parts to make things. If I took these claws and stuck them in a piece of wood, maybe I could make a crude mace or something. So they’d be components of the mace.”
She thought about this. “If you used a regular stick to do it, would the mace be a System thing you could put in Inventory?”
“Hell if I know,” I said. “Everybody has at least some kind of weapon so I think we should just hang on to these for right now. But if we do end up making something we can try it then.”
“Okay,” she replied, and returned her attention to the road.
We passed another cabin with no cars in the drive and no answer to our call, then came across a small, weatherbeaten house with a rusty old truck and a car on blocks in the driveway.
“Does anybody hear banjos?” asked Anthony. “I think I hear banjos.”
“Not funny, Anthony,” said Mike. “Not everybody around here turns their house into a tourist cabin and goes to live in town.”
“Sorry, sorry,” he said. We’d bunched up as we went up the gravel driveway to the house and could all speak in a normal voice.
“HELLO!” shouted Joe. “Is anybody…”
The front door opened and an arm holding a pistol slipped out. Before any of us could so much as move there was a loud BANG! and we all jumped.
“Get the Hell off my property!” shouted an angry male voice. The pistol had been pointed up, not at us, but it had gotten our attention. That was probably the point.
“Okay, okay,” said Joe in a loud voice. “We’re going, sorry! We just wanted to…”
“I said GO!” the man shouted. He sounded both angry and scared. The pistol waved. Behind it I could barely see a wide-eyed face.