“That’s them. Kid, you did it. That’s the damn bags.”
The man reached out and grabbed three of them at once, waving them in front of Nick''s face. “I can almost smell the stink.”
It took an hour to find them, even with all the store robots working together to excavate the tons of out-of-date goods in the storage hole. But now they had found it, and the man was as giddy as a schoolboy.
“Come on, kid. I’m making us dinner. Grab some beers and things from inside the store and I’ll gather the rest of the ingredients off the shelf.”
“I can’t afford… Oh. You own them.”
“I could loot the whole store if I wanted. Just grab all the stuff you want with dinner and I’ll get cooking.”
When Nick had gathered all the beer, wine, and travel-sized liquor he could carry and made it outside, there was a ship. He could have sworn there wasn’t one there before. Even as distracted as he could sometimes be he would have noticed the enormous, two-story tall fighter ship sitting in front of the store, sleek and deadly as an assassin’s dagger flashing out of the dark.
“That is very cool.”
“It is, isn’t it?” The man looked at his ship with appreciation. “I forget that sometimes. Me and her sort of grew up together. It’s easy to forget how lucky I am to have her. Now, come on in. Make yourself comfortable and pop some of those drinks open. I’ll make us a feast.”
Nick followed him into the ship, which was just as impressive inside as it was outside. There were screens everywhere, displaying information he had no idea how to interpret. The furniture was stripped down and functional, but clearly top-notch. There wasn’t an inch of the whole thing that wasn’t clean, polished, and perfect.
“Have a seat over there. I’ll pop open these bags.”
The man ripped open packages at once, then recoiled from them.
“Whew, that’s ripe. We never could figure out if it was a sausage meal, like a whole meal with sausage in it, or some kind of ground up sausage they classified as a meal. Or if it was really food. Lots of mysteries there.”
“That’s a really horrible smell.” Nick felt a pang of sympathy for the man. “I guess they’ve gone off. I’m sorry, sir. I did my best.”
“Naw, kid. That’s how this stuff always smells. Something about the preservative we use. Rumor was that they were army rations for a destroyed planet . The company got them at a discount and tried to move them as a civilian product. I never knew anyone dumb enough to actually eat it, except us.”
“Couldn’t you afford better?”
“Now? Of course. I have more than I can spend, now. Back then? This stuff kept us alive. That was good enough. Now my buddy Tallow, he was the one who figured out how to make this edible. The first trick to it is, you can’t be gentle when you slop it out. It needs to have the chance to fart off some of that sulphur, so you kinda have to sling it into the pan.”
He did just that, catapulting the mystery food into a big pot with a polished grace that had to be the product of a mountain of stats, levels, and skills. The food plopped into a hideous pile at the bottom of the pot, looking like some kind of dark-dimension chili set to wreak havoc on a gentler realm.
“That’s edible?”
Nick realized after-the-fact that the question might be construed as rude. He decided that given that he had already said it, he might double down.
“It won’t kill me?”
“It’s not edible yet. Now that we have it out of the bag, we have to heat it up. Hotter than you’d think. If it’s not boiling, it won’t burn off the stuff that you don’t want in your body. Got it? Good.”
The man turned up the heat on the stove as high as it would go, and left it cooking while he took his fifth long, hard draw off one of the liquor bottles Nick had brought.
“Now, guess at the real trick. This is space food, see. Nobody on a respectable planet would buy it, let alone eat it once they saw what it was. It’s probably got all the parts food should have, but they are jumbled. What do you do?”
“Don''t eat it?”
“No. Because if you don’t eat it, you starve. You need protein. What you need to do is cook off as much of the fake as you can, then combine it with something real.”
Nick had seen what fake food cost, way out here, economically packaged and preserved to last decades. He couldn’t even imagine what something real cost.
“I see that look, but you’re wrong. There’s a couple kinds of real food that don’t cost anything. Beans, grain. Dried and thrown into bags. See that?” The man pointed at a burlap sack on the ground. “Paid five credits for that on some nothing agricultural world. Bioengineered to hold enough calories to feed you for six months. I’ve got twenty of them below decks. Lentils, beans, rice, grains, all mixed. As real as anything gets, anymore.”
He threw a few cups of the grain in the pot with the meat and a bit of water, then covered it.
“There. I’m going to let that cook up. You sit here and enjoy yourself while I go check on some things. We’ll eat when I get back.”
Waiting alone wasn’t hard. Even if all he had done that day was sit inside this spaceship taking in the sights, it still would have been the most interesting thing to happen to him in months. Before too long, the man came back. Popping open another beer, he served two servings of the food.
“There. Let it cool for a minute. You don’t want that hot grease hitting your stomach too fast. Causes problems.” The man sat across from Nick and threw his feet up. “So what’s your story, kid? What kind of scam did you fall for to get way out here?”
“Who said I got scammed?”
“Because the only other way people get into your kind of job is by getting into a bad, deep kind of debt. And you don’t look the type.”
“Right. Well, I did get scammed. A job ad that promised the world. This turned out to be the world it was talking about.”
“Damn.” The man swigged his beer and stirred his food, still not digging in. “You didn’t know any better?”
This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.
“No, I did. But I didn’t have much choice. I’m an off-universe refugee, you see.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
That was probably the only truly interesting thing about Nick from this man’s point of view. Most people in the universe came from entire worlds that had been yanked into it as a whole after going through trials and tribulations meant to ready them for life in the great, infinite everything. People who had come to the universe that way got to take advantage of the process. They were a cut above the pack, in terms of potential.
A few people, Including Nick, came in another way. Instead of riding their planet as it shot out of the protective womb of their old universe, people like Nick just fell out by themselves. Nick had been walking across his yard to throw away a bag of trash when it happened. At the beginning of one step, he was home. At the end of it, he was somewhere he didn’t recognize surrounded by things he didn’t understand.
“I guess you would have to take some kind of job, even with a fancy class. What did you get, anyway?”
“Your appraisal skill doesn’t tell you?”
Almost everyone got some kind of appraisal skill eventually. Even if this man’s appraisal skill was trash, he had enough levels that there was no chance Nick could block it.
“I never appraised you. Seemed rude, once we got to talking. What did you get?”
“Swordsman.”
“Which one? I’ve seen sword dancers do good work.”
“No. Not a swordsman class. Just swordsman. The actual swordsman class.”
“Oh. I didn’t even know it got that basic. Is it as bad as it sounds?”
“I checked the guidebook on it the day after I arrived. The only entry on the class said ‘Uses a sword. If you have this class, the universe probably finds you boring.’ I haven’t seen anything to contradict that since.”
“No use dwelling on it now. Food can take your mind off it for a little.” The man dipped into his, ladling a spoonful of radioactive-looking food into his mouth. He sighed with satisfaction. “That’s it. That’s just how it was, back then.”
Nick took a bite himself. It was about as bad as he expected it to be. On Earth, he would have spit it out. Since then, he had managed to get a lot of practice hours in eating the cheap slop the store generated for its captive workers. This wasn’t better than that, but it was different enough that Nick was just barely motivated to eat it.
“Don’t make that face. It’s an acquired taste.”
“Not to argue, but there’s not going to be much chance to acquire it now that the main ingredient is out of production. I will remember what you taught me about grains. Should be useful if I ever get out of here.”
“What’s the plan for that?” The man kept shoveling the food into his mouth, clearly enjoying himself as he downed all the cheap calories and expensive, convenience store liquor his body could handle. “You could get an emergency evac.”
“I could. But there’s not much use in it if I don’t have anywhere better to be, and nobody is going to hire a level four swordsman for anything. It’s not a strong enough class to go it alone in the dungeons unless they are truly bottom-tier, and no team is going to waste their time developing something as generic as Swordsman.”
“What about your class evolution?”
The man finished off his bowl and popped open another couple bottles of booze, handing one to Nick.
“Real close.” Nick took a swig of the booze. It was strong. Between that drink and what he had consumed before, he was beginning to feel the alcohol take effect. “Thirty points. As soon as the dungeon recharges tomorrow, I’ll have it.”
“What’s the most likely evolution?”
“Swordsman II. If I get that, it’s all over. I’ll be locked into vanilla swordsman forever.” Nick took a bigger bite of his food than he had before, finding the alcohol made it a bit better. Not good, but better. “The other direction is Magic Swordsman. It’s better, and if I get lucky again after that I might get into something really worth having.”
“Sounds like long odds.”
“It’s the odds I have.”
Nick would have liked to have a different bet to make. Even if he got lucky, he was just moving from bad to mediocre.
“Sometimes you just have to roll the dice. It’s why I came out here. Not a good gamble, but better than laying down and dying.”
“I’ll drink to that.” The man took another swig from his bottle. “Finish your food, and then help me get rid of some of this booze. I’m never going to drink this much alone.”
<hr>
A few hours later, the man and Nick had put down enough liquor to pay his salary for a year and the man’s temporary ownership of the store was almost up.
“You have to go back to work after this? Are you going to be alright? You had a few.”
“I’ll be fine. Just a few more hours. Nobody ever talks to me anyway. Only you.”
Nick stepped down the hatch ramp from the ship, hoping the asteroid surface would feel steadier under his feet. It didn’t.
“This whole time? Just me? That’s dark, kid.” There wasn’t any judgement in the man’s tone. He was stating a fact. “Listen. I’ll tell you something I learned from Anna.”
“Anna? From your crew?”
“Anna. My ship. The Anvil.” The man patted a landing strut affectionately. “What I know from her is, sometimes pushing through at full power gets you through where all the odds say you shouldn’t make it.”
“Sure.” Nick held his tongue on the subject of just how far the odds could be stretched in favor of a vanilla, no-frills swordsman. “Thanks, by the way. For talking to me. It meant something.”
The man clapped his hand on Nick''s shoulder and nodded.
“No problem. You better get in there, son. I’ll take a quick once over of my domain one last time, before it becomes someone else’s domain, again.”
Nick was back behind the counter and clocked back into his post when the dome suddenly went transparent again, opening the store to outside traffic as the old man’s ship finally rocketed away.
<hr>
The next hours of work took forever. Hardly anyone came in, and Nick slowly sobered up as the people who did stop ignored him in the usual way he was accustomed to.
When the shift was finally over, Nick picked his sword up from behind the store’s air conditioning unit and got halfway to the dungeon before reconsidering. There was a good chance it hadn’t fully recharged yet. Hitting the anemic monster generator when it wasn’t good and ready for action sometimes meant only one or two enemies popped out before it quit again, and Nick wasn’t willing to roll the dice on waiting another full shift before he knew.
Leaning his sword on his shoulder, he walked to his sleeping shed, kicked off his shoes, and face planted into his bed. Talking to a real, live person after so long had taken it out of him. With visions of a marginally better future dancing in his head, Nick made a futile, doomed attempt to study up on his potential new classes before sleep and boredom pulled him in.
That night, he dreamt of preserved meat glop and open, starry skies.
The next morning, he didn’t even take the time to put on his shoes before rushing across the rough surface of the asteroid to the small, ramped entrance into the dungeon. It was as depressing as always, a fact that barely registered in Nick''s brain. With any luck, this would be the last time he saw it.
The dungeon always took a few minutes to realize he was there. Nick stretched out while he waited. It wouldn’t do to get injured this close to the end of things after avoiding anything worse than a scratch for months. He could not let anything go wrong. He would not. Once he had his level, he still had enough time to go update his job-seeker’s profile on the network before he went to work, and then things would start to change. He just had to not ruin anything in the meantime.
Fully stretched, Nick rested his sword on his shoulder. He had once thought swords were cool, but that was before he ever held one for longer than a few seconds. A day with the bladed weapon after he got his class was enough to convince him he hated the tennis-elbow inducing, awkward lengths of metal. The mere presence of the thing made his impatience worse as he waited.
And waited. And waited.
Something was wrong. The delay had just shifted from being particularly slow to a sure indication of trouble when the system made it that much more official.
<table style="border-collapse: collapse" border="1">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="width: 98.7425%">Dungeon Non-Functional</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>