《Gamer wars》


 CH001 - A deal with the devil

    Andy turned the key and pushed the rotting wooden door open. His gloomy stale apartment greeted him. Slamming the door behind him he fumbled for the light switch, his fingers dragging across the cold surface of the wall until he found it.


    The small lightbulb in the lounge that had long since lost its cover briefly flickered to life and then just died.


    ¡°Of course¡±, came an exhausted acceptance from Andy.


    He unceremoniously dumped his bag in the foyer and made a beeline for the fridge. Opening the door, his mood soured further discovering it was off. The fridge had been acting up for about two weeks now, occasionally just dying.


    Andy did not have the money to fix or replace it. He did not have money for anything if he was being brutally honest. In fact, he was in crippling debt. His job barely covered the interest on his student debt. His rent was several months overdue, with his landlord very clearly running out of patience and fucks to give.


    Andy grabbed a warm beer from the fridge. His last one. Popping it open he took several hearty gulps as he dragged his feet over to the couch. The beer tasted like ass.


    Using what little moonlight was coming in from the open curtains of the balcony, he was able to find his way over to the lounge and plop down on the couch like a puppet with its strings cut. He sunk deeply into the worn and tattered leather couch and immediately regretted it as several springs poked his butt and legs a bit painfully.


    Yet he did not make an effort to move or relieve the pressure. He simply remained and took another sip from his warm beer. Andy did not feel like moving. He did not feel like anything.


    His mind roamed, he was never able to simply sit still, heck he couldn¡¯t even finish anything he ever started. He felt like a lifetime of failures and loose ends were weighing on him. What was even the point? His OCD and mild ADHD aside, at this very moment he could barely feel any of it. The crushing weight of depression smothering out all except a feeling of anxiety. He could barely even feel the couch springs digging into the flesh of his legs.


    Andy attempted to distract himself from the feelings and the memory of how miserable his work life was with the one thing that kept him going. Escape.


    He reached over and pulled his computer stand over to the couch and over his lap. He had constructed a setup that held his gaming computer and peripherals and based it on wheels. It was an impressive custom job that looked stylish and allowed him to be a ¡®couch gamer¡¯, but not using one of those shitty consoles, but an actual proper gaming PC.


    The PC itself was worth a fortune, paid for with his bonus from the only half decent programming job he¡¯d ever had. Before he got worked out of his previous company due to ¡®office politics¡¯. He would die before selling this PC. It was his pride and his lifeline.


    He used the remote to turn on the TV, pushed the PC¡¯s power button and slid the keyboard and mouse drawer out. The setup even had a rotating platform that suspended a high refresh rate monitor behind it. If he played something that was a little too demanding on response times, than what his TV¡¯s lower response times and refresh rate could put out, then he could simply rotate the platform up and forward, clip it in place and play on the nicer monitor instead.


    All in all, a project of his that he was quite proud of. However that knowledge as always was tainted with the fact that it was not finished. Like everything he did. There were still several additions he had originally planned for that he could just never quite strum up the motivation to do.


    Windows finally loaded up and he went straight to his steam library. He was smelly and mildly hungry, but fuck that, the only thing he cared about right now was distracting himself with a game.


    But which one?


    He knew he should play Path of destiny, as that was his main focus at the moment, but he suddenly felt all the eagerness drain out of him. He was at a point where he needed to do a crap ton of planning for his character¡¯s next major progression in the game. The RPG in question was popular amongst hard core gamers for its ridiculous depth and complexity. Something that he would usually welcome, but right now, he just didn¡¯t feel like he had the strength for it.


    A shame, he would just have to play something else.


    Andy took more sips from his beer as he continued to browse his game library in the dark, only the tv providing a minor amount of light to the room. But the more he browsed the list, the less he felt like playing any of them. The dread of the creeping anxiety once more started to numb him. The depression was once more creeping back.


    Andy leaned back on the couch, once more feeling the life drain out of him. Even gaming was failing him.Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    A hard knock at the door startled him out of the feelings. Andy, who normally despised having visitors or having to deal with people in general, was actually glad for once. If for no other reason than the distraction.


    The banging on the door was harder this time, seemingly impatient. Andy hurried over to the door and peeked through the peephole.


    He immediately regretted it. It was those two!


    He ducked down when one of the men tried to look through the peephole himself.


    ¡°Doesn¡¯t look like he¡¯s home.¡±, the shorter man told his partner, ¡°It¡¯s all dark inside.¡±


    ¡°I guess we come back later then, we still got one more place left to do.¡±, the partner responded.


    Andy could only sigh in relief. The two men in question he had met before, a very unpleasant and painful encounter. They worked for a loan shark he was forced to borrow money from, all legal avenues having been exhausted. It became evident very quickly that said loan shark would resort to underhanded methods of getting his money back. Andy was quite worried about how far those methods would go, as he really had no way of paying them back.


    He could sell his computer and tv, they were honestly the only things of value he owned.


    No.


    He outright rejected the idea, he wasn¡¯t sure he could go on if he lost his PC. And yet survival seemed to dictate it was his only option.


    Once more Andy felt the crushing weight of everything and could not even bring himself to get up from the floor he was resting on. It was all too much. Why should he move? He just wanted to curl up and lay here and do nothing.


    Smoke distracted him from his thoughts.


    Andy jumped up in alarm and rushed over to the lounge. The smoke was coming from his PC! Andy ran over to the PC and saw sparks flying on the inside of his tempered glass PC case. As he knelt down ready to rip out the power cord, the lights on the motherboard and graphics card suddenly dimmed and died out.


    Andy sat there, hand still on the power cable, not yet had a chance to pull it out.


    He knew.


    He knew how his life went, he knew his luck, how shit worked. And he knew in the bottom of his heart without any further investigation of computer parts and damage, that his gaming PC was lost. He sensed it in the bottom of his heart.


    Andy sat there just staring at the case blankly. He couldn¡¯t. He couldn¡¯t feel anything. He didn¡¯t want to feel anything. But tears started swelling in his eyes. The cold drips streaked down his cheeks despite the emptiness inside. Twenty five years of his life and this was all it amounted to. This is what the next fifty held for him, wasn¡¯t it?


    The tears wouldn¡¯t stop flowing. So Andy willed himself to his feet and went over to the other side of the lounge. He turned the balcony door¡¯s key and opened it.


    What was he doing? No, he knew.


    This was crazy. Yes it was. But it''s all just so pointless. He can¡¯t do this anymore.


    Andy froze, before he could take a single step outside.


    A man in a suit stood on his balcony. Despite how many questions he should have about a stranger on his balcony on the 7th floor, none really took precedence save one. Why did he have yellow eyes with slit pupils like some kind of cat or reptile?


    ¡°Good evening, Andy Singer¡±, came a smooth british sounding voice. It had an almost melodic quality to it.


    ¡°Hi¡±, was all he managed. Questions like ¡®who are you¡¯, ¡®what are you¡¯, ¡®how did you get here¡¯, ¡®what do you want¡¯, you know, all the obvious stuff. And Andy failed to verbalise it into anything other than ¡®hi¡¯.


    ¡°May I come in?¡± The stranger asked.


    ¡°Sure¡±, Andy responded as he stepped aside to let the stranger/Alien? In. Andy probably should have slammed the balcony door in his face and ran for his life, nothing good could come of inviting some kind of alien or demon into your apartment. But Andy failed to care. He just couldn¡¯t care anymore.


    Perhaps sensing the state Andy was in, the suit guy got straight to the point. ¡°Mr. Andy, I am here to make you an offer.¡±


    Andy stared at him blankly for a few seconds then nodded at him.


    Suit guy took it as permission to continue. ¡°There is a game being played Mr. Andy. A game that involves a number of participants competing for a prize by means of elimination.¡±


    He paused waiting for Andy to absorb the information.


    ¡°Should you win, the prize in your case would be fifty million.¡±


    Andy suddenly found a little more focus. That¡­ That was a lot of money. He would be set for life and luxuriously at that.


    Perhaps sensing his client¡¯s interest the suit guy carried on with a little more vigor than before. ¡°Many contestants will be competing in multiple elimination rounds until only one remains, the winner. The game the contestants compete in and rules and settings of each game will be randomly assigned.¡±


    ¡°What kind of games?¡±


    ¡°All genres will be included, I cannot say more than that at this time.¡±


    Andy¡¯s gamer instincts were taking over, looking for the holes to exploit, running scenarios in his mind. He assumed that his extremely broad taste in games, overall experience and dedication to gaming in general should put him well above many of the other gamers in ability in general.


    What did he really have to lose here?


    Sure this guy was dodgy as fuck, and this was clearly a deal with the devil type situation that would come back to bite him in the ass hard, but¡­


    What was the alternative? The balcony?


    ¡°I accept.¡±


    The suit guy smiled a broad insidious smile. ¡°Excellent, an immediate response. I knew I had made the right choice with you.¡±


    ¡°I don¡¯t have a gaming PC though¡±, Andy suddenly realised out loud, ¡°At least not as of fifteen minutes ago.¡± Andy turned to the man worriedly.


    ¡°This is of no concern, you will not need it.¡± The man explained.


    ¡°Oh, and one last thing¡±, his smile turned even more predatory, ¡°If you die in any of the games, you die in real life. Makes things more interesting for the fans.¡±


    Andy gave no visible response, except a ¡®you don¡¯t say¡¯ eyebrow raise. He was honestly expecting something like that and was not surprised in the slightest. In fact he had already resigned himself to such a fate both before and after this conversation, so this did not hinder him in the slightest.


    The suit guy was clearly a little disappointed with his lack of response. ¡°Very well, let us begin.¡± And with that he snapped his fingers and the world went dark.

 CH002 - Hellscape

    Andy was left alone inside an impossible black void. Everything had disappeared. The only thing that existed now was him, as he was, as of a few seconds ago in his apartment. The alien suit dude was gone. His apartment was gone. Existence itself seemed to be gone.


    Just him floating in the impossible void. If he had suffered from claustrophobia or agoraphobia, or whichever phobia pertained to this situation, then he would probably be in deep shit right about now. But as it were, he did not, and he wasn¡¯t.


    Well at least he didn¡¯t feel like he was in any immediate trouble, he could still breath after all and the temperature inside this void was¡­ he would have to say perfect.


    Andy looked around and all he could see was more void. He wondered how long he would have to remain here? Perhaps while they gathered all the other contestants? But how long would that take? Weeks? Months?


    Okay, now he was a little concerned. Starvation and / or sanity loss were legitimate factors to consider here you kreepy alien suit guy!


    Luckily before real serious panic could set in, something happened. A bright pulsating light near his position.


    After pulsing a few times, it quickly transformed into a bright rectangular surface that, if he didn¡¯t know any better, resembled a monitor of sorts.


    ¡°Welcome player.¡± A professional yet sexy female voice announced. The voice seemed to have come from the screen. Both audibly and visually. He meant visually, as in the screen seemed to have a pulsating effect of its own as she spoke.


    ¡°All players have been gathered, the first round will begin shortly.¡±


    So all the players had been collected. That meant what, he was the last to be contacted and maybe that¡¯s why they sent him straight here? Nah. It seemed unlikely. Then what? Maybe he was in some sort of time dilation while the rest of the world moved on?


    Honestly he decided to rather just not think about it, there were too many strange options to consider here and it would just tire him out mentally or straight up break his brain.


    ¡°The game will now be selected.¡±


    Now she had his attention. The monitor suddenly started to randomly flick through a series of images several times per second. Each time the image changed it would make an audible click sound, the whole effect coming off as a type of spin the lottery wheel.


    He could guess what was happening here.


    Gradually the flicking slowed down and eventually Andy could actually start making out some of the options flashing across the screen. He at least recognised some of the games and it really was a broad selection of genres. Everything from RPG¡¯s to shooters and even Turn based strategy.


    What worried him a bit though was that he did not recognise most of the titles. These were games he had mostly never heard of. The covers of each game were generally elaborate so they all seemed like quality games, and yet he didn¡¯t know most of them. That should be impossible, his knowledge of gaming was pretty extensive.


    The ¡®lottery¡¯ suddenly started slowing down to a crawl.


    Tick, tick, tick, tick¡­


    Tick, tick¡­.


    Tick.


    The screen seemed to rollover one last time to a game he did recognise. Andy¡¯s breath caught in his throat and panic actually set in for the first time. The cover of the game was ¡®Dark Tide¡¯. It was a faithful souls-like clone. The kind where you expected to die hundreds of times before beating the game. The alien suit guy¡¯s words echoed in Andy¡¯s mind: ¡®die in the game, die for real¡¯.


    Andy felt like he was going to be sick.


    And then¡­ Tick.


    The screen ticked over one last time after what seemed like an unbearable eternity.


    Andy doubled over in relief, trying to catch his breath. He was so flooded with relief, he forgot to look at what game was actually selected.


    As Andy finally braved up enough to glance at the screen, it blinked out before he could see the title.


    Wait!


    Luckily the women announced it anyway. ¡°The game selected is Landers¡±.


    Another game he had never heard of, what was going on here?


    ¡°The difficulty for Landers will be set to Hard.¡±


    Joy.


    ¡°Randomly selecting starter planet¡­¡±Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    So some kind of space game? Still not enough info to puzzle out the genre though.


    ¡°Voreo selected.¡±


    That sounded like the kind of name you gave to something nasty.


    ¡°Randomly selecting modifier...¡±


    ¡°Modifier selected: ¡®Uncertain victory¡¯¡±.


    Andy wondered what that meant, he really hoped she would explain.


    ¡°Primary objective of round one¡­ Withheld by modifier.¡±


    Oh shit. That¡¯s what it means.


    ¡°Secondary object¡­ Survive.¡±


    Fuck so a survival game on some kind of dangerous planet in a genre I don¡¯t know, with a victory condition I don¡¯t know in a game I don¡¯t know. This is bad.


    ¡°Round one - Landers, will begin in 3¡­ 2¡­¡±


    ¡°Wait! What the fuck! Don¡¯t I get any more info than that?!¡± Andy couldn¡¯t help but cry out, as his world went dark once more, including his consciousness this time.


    <hr>


    Andy groggily opened his eyes. It felt like he¡¯d been woken from far too few hours of sleep, to the sound of an annoying alarm. It only took a second for the memories of the past few events to surface and for him to snap up too full alert thought.


    There were flashing lights and sirens going off all around. Not the alarm clock kind, but the ¡®oh shit we¡¯re fucked¡¯ kind. He immediately noticed how smothered he was feeling. Looking out through his visor, he appeared to be in some kind of- space suit. He suddenly had a very bad feeling about the nature of how these ¡®games¡¯ are played out. He would rather be using a mouse and keyboard!


    Andy tried to get up and look around, but quietly felt the restraints. He struggled to look down in his current suit and bindings, but he appeared to be strapped into a seat. Looking around for the source of the sirens, didn¡¯t seem to help either, they were kind of everywhere.


    Andy noticed he appeared to be in some kind of space shuttle, but did not seem to be moving. Looking out through the one and only window he could see, he saw a nearby planet, which he assumed to be Vorea, just going by the ominous dusty cloud cover concealing most of it.


    He might have really appreciated the incredible view of space and the zero gravity and all those wonders, if the entire cabin hadn¡¯t started violently rocking around and if incredibly loud and much more ¡®local¡¯ sirens hadn¡¯t started going off.


    ¡°Warning critical failures aboard the Aldonis. Emergency launch initiated!¡± Another sexy female voice announced, not the same one as before.


    And then Andy¡¯s stomach lurched as the massive g-forces of the pod being jettisoned hit him. He came awfully close to throwing up. What¡¯s worse, is he felt something collide with the pod moments later with a very scary ¡®thunk¡¯ sound and now the pod was also spinning, making him want to throw up even more.


    Trying not to get too dizzy by looking out the window, Andy caught glimpses of an enormous spaceship, presumably the Aldonis. It was truly breathtaking, especially given the fireworks display. The Aldonis was blowing up left, right and center, with debris being flung in all directions.


    Then the shuttle began to rock violently and soon after the view was obscured by dusty clouds and flames. He was entering the atmosphere now. But he was pretty sure the ship wasn¡¯t supposed to be spinning still, that is generally not how this sort of thing is supposed to go. He had a really bad feeling about this.


    The spinning had slowed down significantly by the time he finally broke out of the upper atmosphere, but he caught a glimpse of the surface of the planet approaching rapidly. The spinning finally stopped in full and he could feel the sudden massive shift in G¡¯s as the shuttle began to burn retrograde.


    He doubted this landing was going to go well. And sure enough the prophet of doom struck again. He felt every bone in his body want to snap at the force of the impact. It really, really, hurt and he almost blacked out from the pain.


    Pain in this ¡®game¡¯ was too real. Fuck this shit! This can¡¯t even be called a game anymore!


    There were sparks and smoke everywhere, it seemed like the shuttle with its flickering and dying interior lighting was about to go up in flames any moment. Andy was not going to stick around for that. He immediately started trying to figure out how to release the harness.


    Unfortunately the ride was not over yet. The entire shuttle started tilting over and eventually crashed again. But that was not the worst of it. Andy could feel it start rolling. He was flung around within the constraints of the harness, while he could feel the shuttle violently rolling. He could not see outside the window due to all the dust that was being kicked up, but could only assume that he had incorrectly landed on a hill of some kind and was now paying the price for it.


    With one final crash the shuttle stopped once more, this time at an angle, giving Andy one final set of bruises to remember it by.


    Now he proceeded to work the harness in earnest, eventually finding a lever on the side of the seat that caused the entire thing to open up and deposit him on the ground with a thud. Ow. Again.


    Small fires had started cropping up and the flickering lights were barely hanging on. He needed to get out of here quick. Andy looked around and eventually found a hatch with a big read lever, reading ¡®emergency release¡¯. That would do.


    He pulled it down and the entire hatch door exploded outwards. A rush of air suddenly blew into the shuttle and knocked him on his ass once more. Andy looked out the door after getting back up and witnessed a hellscape.


    Black mountainous terrain as far as the eye could see. Which wasn¡¯t far on account of the dirty brown atmosphere and fog swirling about. Veins of molten rock snaked all over the place, with an actual occasional lava pit.


    ¡°This planet sucks!¡± He couldn¡¯t help but complain out loud.


    He quickly looked around before he left this death trap, but could not find anything useful. There really wasn¡¯t anything here except him, his spacesuit and the burning interior of his space shuttle. Andy decided not to linger.


    He looked out the hatch of the shuttle and was alarmed to see that there was a giant crevice below him, ending in a lava river. The shuttle that seemed to be wedged in the mouth of the crevice suddenly lurched and Andy lost his balance, almost falling out of it.


    Andy quickly got up. The shuttle was wedged in the crevice, but it was barely holding on. Andy did not like doing acrobatics above a fiery pit of death, but staying here was clearly not an option.


    He exited the hatch and scaled over the top of the shuttle. Balancing on the top, carefully made his way over to one of the cliff faces and pulled himself up over the edge. The suit made a scraping sound against the edge of the cliff, which nearly made him shit his pants. He did not know how durable it was after all.


    Andy scrambled up and finally looked around. There was nothing but hellscape in every direction. He was alone out here as best he could tell. What was he supposed to do? Survive? How?


    He looked back to the shuttle when it lurched one more time and finally on the rear side of it, saw another hatch labelled: ¡®Supplies¡¯.


    Oh shit.


    Not a moment before he had the thought, the cliffside finally gave way and the shuttle plummeted to the lava river below.

 CH003 - Heat

    Andy stood there for a moment trying to collect himself.


    He knew he shouldn¡¯t mope, but he really did feel like screaming out loud about how rigged this game was. Only, he knew this was far more than just a game. Life and death were at stake here.


    He did the only thing he could do and examined his suit, given his lack of supplies, materials, tools and anything else. There was some kind of control pad on his left arm and his visor actually did have a hud built into it. It showed several things.


    His health, which was at eighty three percent and showing a plus next to it. Presumably he was healing over time. A fascinating thought, but one for another time.


    It also showed a hunger and thirst bar. Hunger being at ninety eight percent and thirst at ninety five percent. Now that was a problem. If this game followed typical survival practices he would either start to lose health when hunger or thirst depleted, or perhaps just outright die. He had no food or water on him, such things were probably sitting at the bottom of a lava river right about now.


    There was also a battery power bar, apparently the suit will need to be charged eventually. It was currently at ninety nine percent.


    The hud also showed internal suit pressure and temperature, as well as external pressure and temperature. Internal pressure being 50kpa and external being 150kpa. Interesting. The internal temperature was twenty three degrees celcius but the external temperature, in other words the natural atmosphere, was a hundred and fifty degrees. That was a lot, but looking at all the volcanic rock around and lava pools, it was hardly surprising. It was actually more surprising that the temperature wasn¡¯t hotter than it was.


    However it was night at the moment and assuming this place had a day night cycle, there was a very real possibility of the day being much hotter. He would either have to hope he could find shelter before then, or hope like hell it wasn¡¯t too hot for his suit to handle.


    Andy took some time to play with the buttons on his left arm. They apparently operated the display on the hud. All the different menus were to do with his suit. The game went into quite a bit of detail with how you could manipulate your suit, a real space sim type game. It even included several diagrams located in different sections of the menu showing how different aspects of the suit worked.


    One such diagram showed his backpack, which apparently had connectors for two gas tanks, a battery and two different slots for filters. If he was understanding these diagrams correctly, basically he had a full pure oxygen canister that was being pumped into the suit to keep his pressure regulated. As he breathed and exchanged it for carbon dioxide, the suits current one and only CO2 filter sucked it out and put it in the secondary gas canister labelled ¡®waste¡¯. Funny, because depending on how this game worked, CO2 might have its fair share of uses.


    The battery powered all of this along with temperature regulation and the helmets built in light.


    For now it seemed like he would be fine as long as he didn¡¯t do something stupid like rupture his suit or open his helmet. His more immediate concern was going to be food and water. Also, now that he thought about it, somewhere he can open his visor safely to eat and drink it. Shit. He was fairly certain opening his visor to the hundred and fifty degree atmosphere was a death sentence, nevermind what dangerous shit the atmosphere might be made of. Why else would he start off with a space suit.


    This was going to be a problem. It meant he basically needed to find or build a working base or something. The direction this game was going was suggesting that you probably had to build a base with supplies given, otherwise survival did not seem practical. Given his supplies are gone, the only likely option was to try and find a POI or similar or another player or their drop pod. All very bad prospects.


    With nothing left to do and an ever draining hunger, thirst and battery, Andy got up and set off. He decided to head for the nearest terrain peak to get a vantage point. The black volcanic ground was hard and often jagged. Not only that, he had to avoid the magma streaks flowing here and there, he doubted it was a good idea to get his suit anywhere near them.


    But he made good progress in spite of this, ever careful not to have an accident. Nobody wants to ruin their life preserving space suit after all. One of the things he did do, was use the menus to turn off his headlight and try to preserve more battery power. Not that it would matter much, as he was more likely to run out of food or water first.


    He also tried setting the internal temperature setting of his suit higher. According to the documentation provided in the menus, the greater the difference between the inside and outside of the suit¡¯s temperature, the more it required to maintain said temperature. Raising the internal temperature would thus save power, albeit not a lot.


    Once the helmet started getting stuffy from the temperature increase, Andy noticed that his hydration bar was draining at a faster rate, undoubtedly due to the increased temperature. This game takes its shit seriously apparently. Andy was forced to set the internal temperature back to normal. The drain of hydration was currently his biggest problem to begin with.


    Andy carefully made his way up the steep and jagged slope until he reached the summit. He looked around, but all he could see was more of the same landscape. The fog limited his visual range, but being high up still allowed him to see more than before. Just a pity there was nothing to see.


    With no reason to stick around, Andy descended carefully and headed for the next peak.


    This process repeated several times. He was actually starting to get quite concerned. His water level had already passed the thirty fifty percent mark.


    After exiting a large canyon he was actually starting to feel the effects of the dehydration a bit. Well definitely not as much as someone that was supposedly two thirds way towards dying of dehydration, but games are usually funny like that.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    Andy crested the next peak and began to look around. Only this time he caught a glance of the sun rising in the horizon. Now he was starting to get really worried. Carrying on in generally the same direction, it wasn¡¯t long before the sun illuminated the chargrilled hellscape with a vengeance.


    Everything appeared to shimmer in a nasty heat distortion effect, but on the flip side the ground actually sparkled a bit. If only he had the luxury of enjoying the scenery. The hud showed the external temperature was indeed rising as he had feared. The question is, how much can the suit take? He did not want to find out, but he had still not found anything even approaching the concept of shelter, and had little hope that he would. So Andy marched on and hoped for the best.


    The temperature inside his suit started climbing slowly, while the atmospheric temperature continued to climb rapidly. It was starting to get stuffy and hard to breathe. If this kept up he would be baked alive. Andy had already checked the suit''s power, the cooling system appeared to be working at full throttle, it just wasn¡¯t enough.


    It was a good thing he had taken the time in the beginning to learn how the suit and its various systems worked. Because now, instead of boiling to death, he could find and use the flush option. It would vent the suits current atmosphere and replace it with a fresh batch from the O2 tank that was apparently successfully keeping the O2¡¯s temperature at a steady temperature, apparently very well insulated.


    So Andy hit the vent option. Out several ports on the suit he watched the O2 vent in an instant. And then all hell broke loose, there was fire everywhere! The O2 ignited immediately upon contact with the atmosphere. Andy screamed and leapt away from the flames. Checking himself quickly, but he saw no obvious damage. Whatever the suit was made of, it apparently didn¡¯t mind fire all that much.


    He honestly did not want to repeat that again. Aside from the scary fire, it was also a waste of oxygen. But as the temperature continued to rise outside as he trudged along, the suit''s atmosphere also continued to heat up again, even faster this time.


    This process repeated another two times. Fire dancing.


    Shit! This was going to be a huge problem, he can¡¯t keep venting O2 like this, especially at this rate. The external temperature still hadn¡¯t stopped climbing. The visual heat distortion effect along with the sun''s intense glow left the world awash in a scary flowing sea of yellow.


    Andy went back into his hud menu. He needed a way to cool the suit down without sacrificing precious oxygen. He quickly poured over the menus, having to vent dangerous fiery O2 one more time in the process.


    And then he had an idea. Andy set the override for the ¡®waste¡¯ tank, where all his CO2 was being stored, to ¡®manual¡¯. He then set the valve controlling it to constantly pump atmosphere from the suit into the waste tank at a steady rate. The suit would automatically keep filling up with fresh cool O2 to maintain the 50kpa target pressure. This allowed for a steady flow of fresh cool O2 into the suit to help combat the heat. He had to play with the flow rate a bit, but eventually got the suit¡¯s temperature under control.


    He stopped fiddling with the setting once he got the suit¡¯s temperature hovering in the range of thirty five degrees celsius. He would undoubtedly end up paying the price for this in thirst, but at least was no longer venting O2 or at risk of blowing himself up. Also he didn¡¯t want to pump all his O2 into the waste tank too quickly, as he was uncertain how he was going to get it out of there again.


    Andy continued onward, now more determined than ever to find help. Even with the increased O2 flow rate, he was still going to run out of hydration before he ran out of oxygen due to the increase in internal temperature.


    Andy felt frustrated with the odds so heavily stacked against him, and yet all he could do was keep on searching. He wasn¡¯t sure how far away potential POI¡¯s or other players might spawn, so he had determined the best course of action to be, keep heading in a straight line, more or less. In case there was some kind of minimum distance involved to spawn or drop mechanics. This was all of course still a gamble contingent on such things even existing in the first place, but it was still his only hope.


    A few more peaks later and Andy finally ran out of hydration. He was scared shitless when he finally watched the hydration bar tick over to zero. Andy had even stopped walking and silently held his breath.


    He was still alive. The suit did give him a warning about hydration being critical and his health bar showed a minus symbol and went red. So it was a system that drains your health over time. He noted that his hunger was still at sixty percent and his battery at seventy five percent at this point.


    So now all he needed to do was find shelter before he died. Yay. He still didn¡¯t feel like he was dying though, just very thirsty. Guess the game did dampen some effects. Why not pain then?!


    *Sigh*


    Andy continued on once more. He kept going for another couple of peaks, all the while nervously watching his health drain. It was at forty percent now, an alarming prospect. But despite the low health, he did not feel any pain, unlike with physical injuries. He did however feel quite fatigued. It could be from all the exhausting hiking, but he suspected it to be an effect of the low health. Was just a hunch though.


    ¡°Warning, waste tank full!¡±


    The suit suddenly sent him a surprising notification.


    That¡¯s impossible. The waste tank started empty and the O2 tank full and they both have the same capacity according to the hud¡¯s reporting.


    Andy quickly dove into the menu as he noticed the suit¡¯s internal temperature starting to rise again with the continuous O2 flow having been blocked. The O2 tank was still seventy percent full, but the waste tank was reporting one hundred percent full. How was this possible?


    He examined the status a bit further and noticed the temperature inside the waste tank was near the same as the external temperature. Was the waste tank not insulated like the O2 tank? The O2 tank reported having far more Moles of O2 in it than the waste tank.


    Oh shit. That was it. Gas expands when you heat it up. So the same amount of gas takes up more space, hence higher pressure and lower moles. Moles being the measurement of how much gas particles are actually present. The O2 content in the waste tank heated up via the non-insulated waste tank and expanded till the pressure was too much for the valve to keep pumping atmosphere from the suit into it.


    The suit¡¯s internal temperature was climbing rapidly. He would suffocate soon. Andy did the only thing he could, and navigated to the menu to find the option for venting the contents of the waste tank, to make more space.


    He found it. It would be a terrible waste of possibly recoverable O2, but he had no choice.


    Andy suddenly had a flash back to what happened when he vented only a tiny amount of O2 from his suit. Fiery death.


    He panicked, but it was too late, he had already hit the button to vent the full waste tank.


    Fuck me.

 CH004 - Under pressure

    Before Andy even had a chance to regret his actions, he heard and felt the explosion. Andy was forced to the ground by the initial concussive force, But it did not end there. He was suddenly lifted up and corkscrewed inches above the surface of the ground as he was dragged along.


    He suddenly lurched upwards and then spun over once more and was dragged across the hard surface of the planet. Between the panic, the frantic scuffle and array of alarms and warnings going off, it was hard for him to string even two thoughts together.


    He caught a glimpse of fire and a trail of twisting smoke as he was bounced around like a rag doll. The tank! It was acting as a bloody flaming thruster! He slammed into a cliff face, hard, before being dragged along once more and passing a magma stream way too close for comfort!


    Andy remembered the menu had been left on the toggle for the waste tank''s external valve. He twisted his arm over and quickly hit the activate button to toggle the valve closed again.


    His motion suddenly arrested, while he was a meter off the ground and he plummeted back down, hitting the ground with a thud. Gravity on Vorea was only slightly weaker than earth as far as he could tell.


    Andy groaned in pain. Everything hurt. A glance at his health bar showed fourteen percent and still dropping from hydration loss. Fuck.


    The waste tank problem seemed to have been solved for now, but the alarm going off showed a whole new class of problem:


    ¡°Warning suit breach!¡±


    Fuck me!


    Andy panicked and checked himself. Eventually he found a tear in his suit near his right hip and quickly tried to hold it closed, doubting how effective that would be.


    ¡°Warning toxins detected!¡±


    His health ticked down to twelve percent already, way faster than the rate from the loss of hydration. Fuck.


    He quickly opted to vent his suit once more and then cover the breach again.


    ¡°Warning toxins detected!¡±


    Fuck. FUCK!


    It wasn¡¯t enough. Looking at the situation: the venting, holding the breach closed and continuous flow of O2 to the waste tank that he had previously set up and was still active, all that, it wasn¡¯t enough to keep the toxins low enough to prevent health loss.


    Toxins from the atmosphere were still getting into his suit. The temperature wasn¡¯t heavily affected though, so not too much was getting in. He still quickly increased the flow rate to the waste tank to limit any further problems though.


    But he needed to deal with this issue somehow. Normally in movies a breach in your suit meant a loss of pressure and oxygen, but that wasn¡¯t happening here. Instead toxins were bleeding into the suit.


    Andy remembered that the external atmospheric pressure was 150kpa and inside the suit was only 50kpa. That''s why the toxins were flowing into his suit. If he adjusted his suits internal pressure closer to 150kpa, it should help prevent this.


    Another thought occurred to him. If his suit pressure was higher, then O2 would flow out through the breach instead, but every time he had ¡®vented¡¯ O2 into the atmosphere, it had ignited. So why, when the atmosphere was leaking into his O2 filled suit and not igniting? Was the blend of gasses too different that way around? Or was it just a quirky game mechanic?


    ¡°Warning toxins detected!¡±


    His health was down to eleven percent. He needed to act.


    He couldn¡¯t take the chance. He would have to keep the pressure internally lower than the atmosphere, he couldn¡¯t risk O2 flowing out and igniting next to a breach in his suit. Andy raised the setting to 140kpa. That should slow down the toxins entering the suit. He also increased the waste tank¡¯s flow rate to try and further reduce this.


    After a while, the warning was still present for the toxins, but his health drop rate seemed to slow down. He was now sitting at ten percent health. And still holding his side closed as much as he can.


    Fuck. So much effort and he was still probably going to die.


    Andy could barely summon the will to move. This was just total bullshit. Could whichever divine force ruled over existence seriously not give him a fucking break!


    Andy sighed, but aborted it mid way. Was he lost? No. No. He could still remember which way he was going based on the position of the sun that was getting close to setting.


    A sharp light reflection caught Andy¡¯s eye in the distance. What was that?


    Hope barely springed forth from his gut, but he tried to temper it as much as he could as he rushed over in that direction. The universe in general was not known for being on his side after all.


    Upon getting close enough to see what it was, Andy had mixed feelings about it.


    It was another player.


    A dead player.


    The player''s suit was torn to shreds and stained with blood, he also had an assortment of items scattered across the ground near it.


    Andy however did not have the space right now to sort out his emotions about this. He needed to act.


    He unclipped a roll of duct tape off a toolbelt the dead player was wearing. And tried to use it on the tear in his suit. His fingers could not really peel the duct tape open though, while stuck inside his suit. However, when he held the duct tape in hand, his hud showed information about it:


    ¡°Duct tape (100%): Used to repair suit damage. Equip in hand and hold against the target area.¡±This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Andy tried that, held it against the tear and immediately a patch of duct tape covered the tear automatically. The duct tape now read: ¡°Duct tape (66%)¡±. It would seem despite the visceral reality this game confronted him with, it was still in many ways game-like.


    The toxin warning in the suit actually disappeared for the first time soon after and the warning in the hud about ¡®Major suit breach¡¯, changed over to be ¡®Minor suit breach¡¯. Andy decided to keep the suit at its current settings as he didn¡¯t want to risk making the situation any worse, now that it was sort of stable.


    Andy searched the body and found a ¡®water bottle (40%)¡¯ and ¡®energy bar (50%)¡¯. He also took the dead players tool belt to help carry stuff. It had an assortment of clamps and large pockets on it for holding stuff.


    His health was down to eight percent. He needed to drink this water, but given how low his health was, he doubted he would survive opening his helmet long enough to drink it. That was assuming he could even survive such a thing at full health, which he had his doubts about anyway.


    He felt like crying tears of frustration. So fucking close! It¡¯s right there in my fucking hand! He tried to hold it up to his mouth in frustration, despite the fact that the hud clearly stated you had to do that with an open helmet. Of course nothing happened as expected.


    Calm down. Just calm the fuck down. Take a deep breath of toxic fumes.


    After forcing himself to calm down. Andy continued to look around. This guy was out in the middle of nowhere. He had to have come from somewhere, right? Andy spotted what looked like some kind of hand held drill nearby on the ground. It too had apparently been shredded. That was definitely a point of concern for later, not now though.


    Looking around further, Andy spotted it. A vehicle! Sticking out from behind a steep hill. That must be what the player arrived in. Judging by the broken drill he was probably out here mining resources or something.


    Andy rushed over to the vehicle, that on closer inspection was some kind of personal carrier rover thing. It apparently had also seen better days. The vehicle was banged up, had a multitude of scratches on it and had apparently crashed into a cliff face. But not so badly though. It was also entirely missing a wheel. Just what hell went down here exactly?


    Andy rushed over to the vehicle and climbed in the open driver seat door. It looked like it still had power, so he flipped on what looked like the main power switch, and everything lit up. Andy found the controls for the menu and began to navigate it as quickly as he could.


    Seven percent health left.


    He found what he was looking for, it was possible to vent the atmosphere of the vehicle when the doors are all closed and then pump oxygen into it from the vehicle''s personal O2 tank. He would have an environment he could take his helmet off in!


    Andy closed the door and began the depressurisation sequence. He heard the hissing sound of the atmosphere being ejected slowly and watched his hud report the external pressure dropping. As the atmosphere started thinning he could no longer hear the sound of the process, the gas in the air no longer pressurized enough to properly carry sound waves anymore.


    And then at the 23kpa mark, the fucking lights went out.


    Andy sat there in stunned silence for a moment. The atmosphere was holding at a steady 23kpa, but depressurisation had stopped. He fiddled with the controls, but everything was dead. Well almost everything.


    There was a flashing battery symbol. The fucking rover ran on battery power! He had a feeling this was going to be a theme with this game.


    What now though? He was almost certain the remaining 23kpa of toxic atmosphere was enough to kill him even if he added a lot of O2 to the mix. Especially with his now six percent health. And even if it would work, the unpowered rover was not going to be pumping O2 from it¡¯s reserves without power.


    Fuck. Again, so close.


    The rover had three battery slots all of which were located on the inside of the cab. Currently only one slot was occupied, by a very dead battery.


    He could abort the process, go outside and see if the dead player had a battery on him. His suit was likely powered by one, but the chance it would also be dead were way, way high as far as he was concerned. Opening the door now would mean abandoning what little progress he had made in venting. And if the player''s battery was dead, then it would all be over.


    FUCK! He really felt like smashing something in frustration.


    Andy could see the sun was finally setting outside. To think he somehow made it through the scorching heat alive only to end up about to die here like this. Such bullshit.


    Five percent health.


    Fuck! Aaaaaarrrghh!


    He did actually smash the dashboard a few times in frustration.


    Andy let out a resigned sigh as he stared at the blinking battery icon.


    Wait!


    He had a battery. It was in his own backpack, powering his suit!


    This seemed like an insanely risky plan, but it was all he had. Andy navigated the menu with practised ease and activated the battery release. His suit went dark and a battery holder slid open on the right side of his backpack. He leaned over and retrieved it.


    The temperature inside his suit started to rapidly climb. He didn¡¯t have the hud telling him this anymore, since that was now offline, but he could feel it.


    Andy quickly replaced the battery in the rover with his own. He didn¡¯t want to risk accidentally charging the rover''s existing battery while doing this by putting them in together, assuming that was actually possible at any rate. He activated the rover once more. It worked!


    The depressurisation continued. Andy said a silent prayer for it to hurry the fuck up, it was getting realy hot in his suit.


    Once it got below 1kpa, he wondered why the duct tape hadn¡¯t ripped off his suit from the pressure difference yet. He had after all forgotten his suit''s internal pressure at 140kpa. That was a lot compared to a vacuum after all. Guess the game''s version of duct tape is pretty sturdy stuff.


    Finally the cab was in a vacuum state. He did not care to question how it managed to get there so easily, just chalking it up to ¡®game logic¡¯, but he wasn¡¯t going to complain. The temperature in his suit had stopped increasing now, but it was still really uncomfortable.


    Andy activated the valve on the rover¡¯s O2 tank. His health was down to four percent.


    ¡°Error: O2 valve not responding¡±


    No, no, no, no, no, no!


    This wasn¡¯t happening!. He tried it again. It must have been damaged with the rest of the rover.


    Andy quickly pulled up a diagram, the O2 tank was located at the rear of the vehicle. He had no way of reaching it to even take a look.


    Fuck! Again! Fuck!


    Even if he opened his helmet right now, he was certain the vacuum state of the cab would do enough damage to kill him on his measly five percent health.


    Think. Think. He needed cabin pressure.


    Andy snatched his battery back from the rover and put it back in his backpack, powering his suit once more. He then did the thing that so far had caused him nothing but trouble. Only this time it would save his life one final time and without any explosions.


    He opened the external valve of his O2 tank. He braced himself from the force of the ejecting gas, but it soon normalized and he quickly sealed the valve once the external pressure was up to 40kpa. He had done it, the cabin pressure was workable!


    But his O2 tank was really close to empty now.


    Andy nervously toggled the lock on his helmet and opened the visor.


    He had done it. He quickly brought the water bottle up to his mouth and held it there.


    Hydration 98%


    Water bottle (0%)


    Health 4% (+)

 CH005 - Salvage

    Andy felt like crying tears of joy. Ever since he landed on this god forsaken planet the hydration bar had been a guillotine hanging above his head, waiting to snuff his lights out. And now it was sitting at a sweet, sweet ninety eight percent!


    Next up was the energy bar. He hoped the system would consume more than was needed and that he wasn¡¯t about to waste it. But honestly, it took so much to pull this off, that he didn¡¯t know when his next opportunity for ¡®eating¡¯ was going to come along.


    Andy held the energy bar up to his mouth. After a small delay it registered and the energy bar now read: ¡®Energy bar (6%)¡¯. His hunger in turn was now full. So it only used what it needed. Good.


    Andy looked around the interior of the rover. For some reason it was getting really hot in here. The hud showed the temperature being thirty nine degrees celsius. Was it because the rover was off? Did it need power to cool the interior?


    No. It was more likely Andy¡¯s waste tank. It had more O2 in it that had been heated by the sun. It could easily be transferring that heat to the cab¡¯s atmosphere, given the canisters much higher pressure.


    Andy sealed his helmet once more to keep out the cab''s rising heat. He took a moment to consider his next move.


    The rover is clearly not going anywhere and he clearly didn¡¯t have the resources, tools or parts to fix it. Even if he did, he would not have the power to run it. He also couldn¡¯t stay here, he would need more food and water eventually.


    That means he would have to leave, but where would he go?


    Andy felt depressed again. It felt like he was right back at square one.


    The rover had to have come from somewhere. Perhaps it was possible to try and find that location, likely the dead players base.


    No. Likely a POI of some kind. He doubted that a player could acquire a functional rover by the first day of the game already, just using their starter gear. Most games just did not work that way. This meant the dead player likely found the rover somewhere. Which meant a lucky POI find.


    But still he would make it work. He just had to find it.


    First things first though. He needed to exit the rover. But the cabin was filled with O2, a lot of it! He was pretty sure he would be sitting at ground zero for a giant explosion if he opened the door.


    He couldn¡¯t pump the O2 into the rover''s O2 tank on account of the broken valve. He could vent it to the outside, but that would likely result in another fiery disaster given the sheer volume of O2 in the cab.


    What he really wished he could do was get the precious O2 back into his personal O2 tank. But he knew of no way to do that and even if he could, it was already too hot to be very useful.


    He once more removed the battery from his backpack and used it to power the rover, allowing his suit''s temperature to start accumulating again.


    Andy poured over the menus one more time and finally found a setting that would let him set the pump used for venting the rover, to a lower flow rate. This would in theory allow him to vent the O2 at a ¡®safer¡¯ rate. He just hoped it was safe enough and that the rover was as fire retardant as his suit was.


    Andy set the setting and began venting. Immediately he heard the tell tale roar of the fire and felt the entire rover rock violently. As scary as it was however, everything seemed to be holding together.


    It took a while, at the reduced flow rate, but eventually the cab was a vacuum once more.


    Andy reset the flow rate on the pump and set it to pump in the external atmosphere to fill the cab, so that when he opened the door there wouldn¡¯t be a mass depressurisation.


    A short while later he turned it off. The dashboard was reporting that the cab was sitting at a ¡®healthy¡¯ 148kpa of a hundred and fifty degree celsius atmosphere. It was once more night time outside.


    He returned the battery to his suit.


    Before exiting, he decided to take a chance and set his suit¡¯s settings back to their original starting state, hoping that the duct was sufficient to deal with the difference in pressure between 150kpa and 50kpa. He also stopped the manual flow to the waste tank as it would cost him oxygen he currently could not spare given the almost empty state of his O2 tank.


    He nervously held his breath and carefully watched that his health bar did not suddenly start showing a minus sign, due to leaking toxins or some such. If this didn¡¯t work he would be screwed, as any wasting of O2 at this point, would see him running out very quickly and suffocating.


    Andy breathed a sigh of relief. No alarms. Everything seemed to be holding steady. And with the night time outside, it was ¡®cool¡¯ enough that none of those extreme measures were needed.


    Andy opened the rover door and exited the vehicle.


    His situation unfortunately was still no less precarious than when he first arrived on this shithole. He still needed to find shelter.


    But first, he took a look around to see what he could scrounge up. He of course noticed the scorch marks on the sides and top of the rover from the O2 venting, but otherwise the rover seemed to have sustained no additional damage from the event.Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    He first checked the dead player more thoroughly. Andy should have felt something more, rummaging through a dead man¡¯s corpse, right? But he didn¡¯t. Not really. Was it because this felt like a game despite the realness? He sincerely hoped he wasn¡¯t a psychopath. But it could also just be his gamers instincts, pvp and all that. Kill or be killed.


    The dead player¡¯s backpack contained another flat battery. Andy decided to take it anyway, he may be able to recharge it later on or something. The player''s O2 canister had ruptured, with more of those deep claw marks.


    No matter how he looked at it, there was some dangerous shit running around this place and he was probably lucky not to have run into any alien lifeforms so far. Let¡¯s hope his luck continues to hold out.


    The waste tank of the player was still intact, but Andy doubted its usefulness. It either contained pure hot CO2, or it contained vented Hot O2, both of which he didn¡¯t have much use for at this stage, coupled with the fact that he had no reasonable way of transporting the heavy and bulky canister on what was likely to be another long and hurried journey.


    Andy left the player and searched the rover instead. He took the battery of course. In a trunk at the back, he actually found a second energy bar, score! He also found a crowbar. Holding it, he read the info on the hud:


    ¡°Crowbar: used for forcing things open or disassembly of plates and panels. To use, hold in hand and point at target.¡±


    Interesting. His first tool apparently. He noticed the crowbar had the same type of connector on it as ¡®his¡¯ toolbelt. Andy managed to clip it onto his toolbelt, it fit perfectly.


    He took a look at the large oxygen tank attached to the rover. What a waste, the pressure gauge suggested it was still half full. That¡¯s a lot of O2! But aside from the now clearly visible bust up valve, he also had no way of removing it from the rover. He tried the crowbar, but that did nothing. It seemed he needed a different tool for the job. To be fair, even if he could remove it, he would not realistically be able to carry something that heavy around anyway.


    Andy then took a look at the broken mining drill. Picking it up, his hud updated:


    ¡°Tier 1 Mining drill (unsalvageable): Can be used to excavate or to mine ores. To use, activate and point at the target surface.¡±


    Well that makes it pretty clear. Andy guessed the poor guy came out here to mine ores or something. Some creature must have attacked him. Maybe he tried to make an escape and crashed the rover instead. But Andy was no detective, he couldn¡¯t really determine the order of events or anything like that.


    Inspecting the immediate area, Andy could not find anything else.


    It was time to leave. But where to? He noticed some faint tracks in a patch of ground that was covered in some ash, making tracks possible in the first place. It was at a different angle to where the rover crashed, which meant there was a decent chance that the player had come from that direction. One could hope.


    If Andy was wrong about this, then he was probably going to end up right back on death¡¯s door, but he honestly did not have anything better to go on at the moment.


    As Andy set off for the nearest peak in the direction of the tracks, he contemplated his odds of survival here. He probably had more ¡®night¡¯ time to use than when he landed. The day night cycle in theory should be a fifty-fifty split, but the night he started had felt considerably shorter than the day. So it stands to reason he arrived in the middle of the night and now he should have a bit more time to deal with.


    That being said, he had to find shelter before day time rolled around or he was done for. His O2 was running on fumes and he had no more tricks up his sleeve that he could use to deal with the increased heat. If he hasn¡¯t found shelter by the time day rolls around, he¡¯ll be dead in minutes.


    Andy crested the first peak of his new journey and saw¡­ Nothing. Of course it would not be that easy. He once more carefully climbed down the opposite end of the hill, as always carefully watching his step and staying far away from magma streams.


    Fuck. He really hoped he would not run into one of whatever the fuck bullshit alien killed that player. He had no weapons on him save for the crowbar and sincerely doubted it would do any damage to whatever the fuck had ravaged that rover.


    He wondered if a player''s lander¡¯s starter equipment didn¡¯t perhaps contain some basic guns or similar weapons to defend themselves with. But then surely he would have found one on that player. It was more likely this was just a consequence of the so-called ¡®hard¡¯ difficulty.


    Either way he was going to have to simply hope he didn¡¯t run into any aliens, because he doubted there would be much he could do if he did.


    Andy crested another hill, but still nothing. He was really starting to get worried. Not even any signs of tracks. Not that it would be at all practical to spot them though.


    *Sigh*. He descended once more.


    He also couldn¡¯t help but wonder about the victory condition. You know, the unknown one that all the other players probably have a nice head start on thanks to all the shit he¡¯s been through. Well at least the ones that are still alive anyway. You gotta wonder with how dangerous this game seems to be.


    Given the nature of the game so far and what hints he could pick up so far, it was most likely some kind of¡¯ build this ultimate project¡¯ or ¡®structure¡¯ type deal. Or ¡®leave the planet in a rocket ship you built¡¯. Something like that.


    Then again, the intergalactic host or whatever the fuck was running this game, could just as easily spice things up a bit to make it more ¡®entertaining¡¯ as alien suit dude had put it. So it could also be stuff like last man or x number of men standing wins. Either way, he really needed to get ¡®back in this game¡¯.


    Andy lost count of how many more hills he attempted and how far he had travelled. Suffice to say it was a lot and a long time. His hydration had once more run out and just started to eat into his health again. A health bar that had been recovering slowly and now only sat at twenty five percent, not much to play around with.


    It was in this sorry state that he crested the hill and finally spotted what he was looking for. A large ruined structure. It had clearly suffered some kind of accident or explosion, but there seemed to be parts of it still intact.


    Andy was filled with joy and nearly jumped up and down in excitement. Finally a real shot at this bullshit game!


    Looking it over more carefully, he deduced it was likely a POI, not the players base. Probably where he got the rover from in the first place. Andy decided to wait a little bit and scout from his vantage point.


    There was always the possibility of POI¡¯s being a magnet or spawning location for mobs. A lot of games liked to do that sort of thing after all and he could not afford to be jumped by some alien at the moment.


    And then he saw it.


    No. Not an alien. The sun was rising!


    Andy started sprinting down the hill, all caution thrown out, he was about to be cooked alive!

 CH006 - The morning sun

    Andy dashed for the broken-down POI.  He ran as fast as his legs and weighty suit and backpack would allow.  There wasn¡¯t a moment to lose.  If that sun came up, his suit would start heating up and he had no way of cooling it down this time.  He needed to find some kind of usable shelter before that happened.


    Andy reached the broken apart complex.  Most of it was torn apart by what appeared to be some kind of former explosion.  He climbed up an elevated floor that appeared to be made up of large iron plated cubes that reached all the way into the ground.  Or at least what was left of the floor.


    The sun had already reached the complex, the first rays of golden death peaking between warped exposed metal girders and frames.


    Andy looked around to find any part of the base that was still intact enough to hold atmosphere.  He spotted two rooms side by side.  The one on the left was dark like the rest of the base, however, the one on the right actually somehow had power!


    Andy ran up to the sealed door of the room.  It appeared to be some kind of bedroom.  The door on the bedroom, unlike its neighbour, was powered and could be opened via touch panel.  The inside of the room was illuminated by a single light.  It also had an LCD screen mounted on the wall that appeared to be showing the room¡¯s current temperature and pressure.  It read: twenty three degrees celcius and 100kpa.


    There was also a locker present in the room.  It may very well hold food and drink supplies.  That was another problem he had.  His health was still draining from hydration loss.  If he didn¡¯t deal with that at the same time, he would not survive till the next night in the first place.


    He wanted to enter the lit bedroom, he could just open the electronic door and mind out of the way while the 50kpa difference sorted itself out, before entering.  But he would firstly be stuck in the same position he was in right now, in that he could not open his helmet to drink.


    The other thing was the pressure and temperature caught his eye.  He knew from similar space games that 100kpa is an ideal pressure for human breathing, provided of course you had a decent gas makeup.  That, and twenty three degrees was an ideal comfort temperature for most humans.  This strongly suggested a few things.


    First, is that the atmosphere inside that room was perfect for human breathing, probably even a similar makeup to that of earth, it had clearly been set up that way.


    Second, was that the dead player had not raided that room, there could be some supplies inside.  The player would have needed an airlock to enter there without upsetting the atmosphere.  Andy did not believe there was enough of a base left standing here to have all the equipment and setup needed to recover and maintain the atmosphere inside this one room, so it had to have ultimately been left untouched.  Also the damage to the base looked old and unlikely to have occurred after the player left.


    He needed to get in that room and fast.  He would also need to hope that there was some water in there.  No.  He couldn¡¯t rely just on that slim chance.  He had to quickly take a look around for supplies before that even.


    The sun had already risen and the temperature inside his suit had already started climbing.


    The destroyed base was fairly large, so Andy focused his search on the immediate area.  In the meanwhile he thought about his problem.


    It¡¯s such a pity he didn¡¯t have more time to work with.  If he could have just used the neighbouring room to wait out the daylight.  Based on the fact that the lit bedroom was holding a constant temperature so easily, despite the condition of the base, it strongly suggested that external atmospheric heat in this game did not transfer easily through walls or doors.


    This in turn meant that if could have sealed himself in the empty room, with the current atmospheric temperature sitting at two hundred and three degrees celsius, then he could have just waited in the room for the day to pass as the temperature in the room would not have changed as long as the door was closed.  Andy had already checked and he could use the crowbar to force a door closed just as he could open one.


    But with his super low health, there was currently no such option, which was rather frustrating.


    Andy noticed a part of the base with two doors barely standing.  That had likely been the airlock entrance before it blew up or whatever.


    He found an intact wall that had a closed cabinet.  Opening it revealed what appeared to be some construction supplies.  Picking up each in turn, his hud described them:


    ¡°6 x Iron wall frames¡±


    ¡°4 x Iron construction frames¡±


    ¡°8 x Iron sheets¡±


    ¡°2 x Plastic sheets¡±This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    ¡°11 x Glass sheets¡±


    ¡°Welding torch (67%)¡±


    ¡°Electric screwdriver (34%)¡±


    ¡°Water bottle (0%)¡±


    ¡°Water bottle (83%)¡±


    ¡°Water bottle (100%)¡±


    Jackpot!  On so many levels¡­ Jackpot!


    Andy couldn¡¯t really understand why the player had left so much stuff behind, especially supplies like water, but that was a concern for another time.


    He had life saving water supplies.  Now he just had to figure out how to drink it!


    The sun was heating him up too much now, he was out of time, whatever he was going to do, he needed to do it now!  Or this was the end of the road for him.


    Andy tried his best not to panic and to come up with a solution.  He still needed to get in that room and keep the atmosphere intact.  He could try opening and closing the electronic door quickly.  But firstly, the pressure difference would throw him around, which was really dangerous and secondly he wasn¡¯t even sure how fast the door could be opened and closed.  It was almost guaranteed that no matter how quickly he acted, too much of the external atmosphere would get into the bedroom for it to be viable.


    Andy considered the items in the locker.  When he had picked up the wall frames, his hud had overlaid a sort of 3D grid.  Most likely placement options.  He picked one up again and examined the instructions more carefully.


    ¡°6 x Iron wall frames:  To place, hold in one hand, with a powered electric screwdriver in the other hand.  Point frame at target location for confirmation.  Point electric screwdriver at location to execute placement.¡±


    Andy grabbed the screwdriver and frames and tested it out.  He saw the square grid show up on the floor and space above it.  Each wall frame was square and seemed to be the exact same size as the door to the room, well when placed anyway.  In his hand they were actually quite a bit smaller and lighter.  Game logic.


    He adjusted the frame he was holding out until it lined up next to the bedroom door, at a right angle to it.  Then he pointed the screwdriver at the same location.  He saw the outline of the placed frame slowly materialise and once finished it disappeared out of his hand and became an actual fixed wall frame.


    Cool.  But it was just a frame at this point.  Not a complete wall.  He then grabbed ahold of one of the iron sheets:


    ¡°8 x Iron sheets:  To place, hold in one hand, with a fueled, ignited blow torch in the other hand.  Point sheet at target location for confirmation.  Point blowtorch at location to weld in place.¡±


    Andy pointed the sheet at his new wall frame, saw it snap into place, then pointed the blowtorch at it.  But nothing happened.


    Examining the blowtorch, he saw it had an on/off button.  Pointing it away from himself and everything else, he turned it on.  It immediately ignited with a blue white flame coming from the nozzle.  Perfect.


    He tried placing the sheet one more time, this time with success.  Examining it, it now looked indistinguishable from one of the bedroom walls.  Meaning, it was probably airtight.


    Andy quickly set to work.  He clipped both the screwdriver and the blowtorch to his toolbelt, then proceeded to drag two more wall frames and sheets over to the bedroom door.


    The suit¡¯s temperature was already sitting at forty degrees celsius, so he had to work quickly.


    He placed the other two frames around the entrance to the bedroom door, creating a sealed off one size ¡®block¡¯ space in front of it.  He then welded them all up with sheets, effectively sealing the block off from the outside atmospherically.  He was now trapped in a 1x1x1 block space with a two hundred and seventy nine degrees celsius atmosphere, sitting in front of the bedroom door.


    He hoped against all odds that when he opened the door and the atmosphere in the block entered the bedroom that no doubt contained at least twenty percent oxygen, that it didn¡¯t go boom.  But he had hope.  When the atmosphere entered his suit through the tear in small amounts originally, it did not ignite.  Granted the room likely had far, far lower levels of O2 than his suit does, but he still thought it would work.


    The bedroom was also quite spacious.  It was four by three blocks in size, with what looked like a second row of four by three blocks of space above it, partially concealed by some kind of rubberised roof grating panels.  That¡¯s at least twenty four blocks versus his one poisonous block.  It should be enough to handle the temperature difference and disperse enough of the toxins to be manageable, even at the higher 150kpa pressure.


    Andy held his breath and hit the open button on the doors console.  He braced himself as the door opened rather quickly.  He was forced to stumble forward with the rapidly shifting air pressure, but it wasn¡¯t too bad and he quickly regained his balance.


    Andy waited a couple of seconds for the gases to normalize.  The pressure sensor on both his suit and the bedroom wall confirmed the resting room air pressure was at 102kpa, with the temperature sitting at a nasty thirty eight degrees celsius.  But it had worked!


    He quickly unlocked his visor and brought one of the water bottles to his mouth.  He quickly sealed the visor once more and flushed his suit once to get rid of the lingering toxins.  He only lost one percent of health throughout the process, proving that the toxic atmosphere had dispersed enough to only be a minor problem.


    If only he could revel in the moment of victory.


    Unfortunately Andy still had a host of problems.  For one, this little stunt could only be repeated another one or two times.  Both the temperature and toxin levels would build up and cost him likely exponentially increasing amounts of health, assuming at some point it didn¡¯t just outright kill him.


    He was also very close to running out of oxygen and had spoiled the oxygen in this room already with toxins.  Andy doubted he would be able to vent his suit again anyway, there just wasn¡¯t enough oxygen left.


    On top of that, where was he going to get more food and water supplies?


    Truly he had his work cut out for him.  But for now, he could for the first time ever, take a breather and appreciate the early morning sun, through the bedroom¡¯s small window, without it actively trying to kill him.

 CH007 - Sit. Rep.

    Andy sat on the bed for a while, just to catch his breath.  Turns out, it wasn¡¯t all that comfortable.  But after everything he¡¯d been through, this was still heaven.


    Looking around the bedroom, there really wasn¡¯t much in here.  Just the bed, a nightstand, the LCD displays, a metallic box with a red light showing, and the locker.


    Andy decided to start by investigating the locker.  Inside he found another two energy bars and a tablet of some kind.


    He pocketed the energy bars and examined the tablet.  Flicking the on/off switch, he was actually quite surprised that it had power and turned on.


    A splash screen briefly showed the ¡®Landers¡¯ game logo and then went into a menu.  The title in the top left of the tablet displayed: ¡®Landers - PDA¡¯.  A cursory glance through the menus showed that the device held a full game help file, or at least he should say a wiki of sorts.  More to that though, the PDA apparently contained a multitude of ridiculously useful functions.


    It could track the direction to beacons you set up, diagnose power issues and a huge variety of other functions.  There was even an option for-


    Atmospherics!


    The thing that had been the bane of his existence so far!


    Andy turned the atmospherics function on and stared dumbly at the display.  The title read: ¡®Room atmospherics:¡¯


    It not only showed the room pressure and temperature but also the makeup of the atmosphere in it!  It listed moles and percentages of each gas!


    Nevermind how this was scientifically possible.  Game logic!


    Point is, the bedroom registered the following gases:


    Nitrogen: 71%


    Oxygen: 24%


    Hydrogen: 3%


    Toxins: 2%


    Carbon dioxide: 1%


    The one to three ratio of oxygen to nitrogen was most likely the gasses that were originally in this room, since they are the typical gasses used for human breathable air.  Even a low percentage of Carbon dioxide would be pretty toxic to humans, so that likely came from outside, along with the rather vaguely labelled ¡®Toxins¡¯ and the Hydrogen.  It was possible some Nitrogen also came from outside, but given the look of this planet, Andy doubted it.


    So the three, two, one, makeup of H2, CO2 and toxins were likely the makeup of the atmosphere outside.  Obviously not that exact ratio as these numbers are clearly rounded, but at least he now had some idea of what was out there.  He could later confirm it in person.


    The higher Hydrogen rating explains why releasing oxygen was always so damn explosive.


    The temperature also read forty degrees celsius¡­


    Wait- what?


    The temperature in the bedroom was going up? Andy thought the sealed room wouldn¡¯t increase-


    Oh.  Of course.  It was his damn waste tank heating things up again.


    Looks like that one or two more uses of this bedroom he had planned for eating and drinking, was about to get a whole lot less than that.


    Fuck.  Again.


    Examining the atmospherics a bit more, it turned out that you could even hold the PDA close to a tank or pipe and it would even tell you what was inside it, just like the room reading.  That was nuts!


    Andy didn¡¯t have much else to do at this point, so he started flicking through the wiki.  Trying to get a handle on all the different builds and tools and stuff listed.  There was a lot!


    Everything from mining to agriculture, to building rocket ships and automation.  It just went on and on.  He kind of wished he had this game back home.


    The PDA however, while having a listing of a ridiculous array of weapons and other armaments, seemed to have no info on alien lifeforms.  Bummer.


    Eventually he came across a ¡®device¡¯ listing that he recognised.  It was called a ¡®power controller¡¯.  It was the white box he had seen on the wall of the bedroom.   Andy pointed his crowbar at it and soon the box flipped open.  Inside was a battery and some symbols and lights.


    From the looks of it, whatever charged the battery in the power controller had stopped working and now the battery was being used to power this room.  The use of the power controller, according to the wiki, was a couple of things.  First it separated power networks with its electrical input and output sockets.  Second, it allowed for the charging of a single battery, but also the use of that battery to power stuff in turn if needed.The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Andy did not need anything turned on in this room at the moment, so he turned the power controller off with the built in switch, in order to save this particular battery for later.


    The room went dark and Andy could do nothing more until the sun set.  So he continued browsing the PDA for now.


    <hr>


    Even though the temperature had increased to forty five degrees celsius, Andy only lost three percent of his health eating and drinking.  He needed to fill up as much as he could before leaving the room, he wasn¡¯t sure if he was going to get another chance to do so.


    He then slipped into the ¡®cube¡¯ and used the crowbar to manually close the bedroom door behind him.  Unfortunately there was still that twenty four percent of oxygen with him now in ¡®the cube¡¯, but there was nothing he could do about it.  He simply had to hope it would not cause a problem.


    Andy said a silent prayer and used the crowbar to remove a sheet from one of the walls.


    Immediately external atmosphere rushed in to fill the 48kpa difference in the cube, pushing Andy against the closed bedroom door in the process.  But at least there was no fire and death involved.  The twenty percent oxygen ratio must have been low enough to not cause a problem when mixing with the atmosphere¡¯s hydrogen.


    Speaking of, the first thing he did was examine the atmosphere with the PDA:


    ¡°Hydrogen: 50%¡±


    ¡°Toxins: 30%¡±


    ¡°Carbon dioxide: 20%¡±


    Interesting.  And very, very deadly!  He was suddenly glad he had never tried to open his helmet in the middle of that.  That cocktail at a hundred and fifty degrees celsius or higher would most certainly have killed him instantly.


    Andy held the crowbar up to the sheetless wall frame, but nothing happened.  It would seem that deconstructing wall frames required a different tool.  He tried the hand drill, but also no luck.  Fortunately he could squeeze through the wall frame regardless, as is.  Which was a good thing, otherwise high might very well have been stuck there!  Imagine going through all that and then simply dying because you trapped yourself in a fucking wall!


    Andy took the time to explore the POI properly this time around.  He needed to see what he could all scrounge up, what he all had to work with.


    First up was a half destroyed room.  A manufacturing area of some kind.  There were a few large industrial machines here.  The first was an atmospherics manufacturer.  According to the wiki, it was responsible for construction of pipes, filters and other atmospherics related equipment and devices.


    Next up was a machine called a shredder.  It apparently could  shred stuff back into raw ores.  The things you would normally have to go out and mine if you wanted to get any kind of manufacturing going.


    There was also an electric furnace, which could melt those ores into ingots used for production.  It apparently used a lot of power though.


    There was a coal generator here as well, but without any coal or any way to mine coal, it may as well be useless.


    Next to that, was also a ¡®fuel generator¡¯.  It was a portable device that took a fuel canister and used it to generate power.


    The last structure, appeared to also be a type of manufacturer, but it was so badly mangled, that Andy had no idea what it was for.


    There was also another locker.  Andy opened it up and found another energy bar inside, along with a wrench and a wire cutters.


    Consulting the wiki on these two new tools, showed that the wire cutters was needed to lay or collect electrical cables and the wrench was used to lay or collect pipes and stuff related to pipes.


    The locker also contained three metal ingots.


    ¡°Iron ingot 2kg¡±


    ¡°Copper ingot 37kg¡±


    ¡°Gold ingot 15kg¡±


    These would probably come in handy manufacturing one or two things that he needed.  Although the lack of iron might be a severe limiting factor in anything he wanted to make.


    For now he pocketed the energy bar and clipped the new tools onto his toolbelt.


    Scattered on the outside of the base, he found a fair amount of wreckage that resembled solar panels.  This was likely the base''s main source of power prior to whatever happened here.


    There was also a second building that branched off the original airlock.  The passage leading up to it of course was pretty destroyed, but the building itself appeared to be intact.


    Three pipes came out of this building before ending in broken ends where the carnage started, but they did all have sealed valves prior to that, so there existed the possibility of some kind of gas still being in some of them.


    The building appeared to be some kind of greenhouse, going by the mostly glass roof and the dirt tiles used for the floor.  There just wasn¡¯t anything planted in it though.


    A single door granted access to the greenhouse, but Andy did not want to open it, as there might be some useful atmosphere in there for all he knew.  He wondered what kind of atmosphere it had though.


    He then spotted that one of the pipes leading into the greenhouse, was ruptured on the inside.  That meant whatever gasses existed inside the greenhouse, likely was equalized with the pipe.


    Andy whipped out his PDA and pointed it at each of the three pipes.  The first had pure CO2 in it.  The second was empty.  The third, which was the ruptured pipe that now shared atmosphere with the green house, had the following:


    ¡°Oxygen 56%¡±


    ¡°Nitrogen 14%¡±


    ¡°Hydrogen 29%¡±


    ¡°Carbon dioxide 1%¡±


    With the pressure sitting at 220kpa, that actually meant quite a bit of potential oxygen in there.  The temperature however, was sitting at sixty one degrees celsius, making it largely unusable in its current state, even if he constructed a filter to filter out the O2.


    Andy looked through the stuff the Atmospherics constructor could manufacture, on the PDA, to try and come up with some ideas.  The only devices that he could make that could cool the atmosphere down were all costing resources he did not have access to right now, like steel for example.


    His first priority right now was actually oxygen for once instead of water, since his O2 tank was almost empty.  He would run out before the night was over by his guess.  For once it was something other than hydration that was going to kill him.


    And he had multiple potential sources of oxygen around now, but just no way to cool it.  He needed a solution to this problem.

 CH008 - Getting started

    Andy contemplated his situation.  He clearly only had this one night to solve his oxygen problem, or he would run out.  There was a variety of gasses available to him in different rooms, atmosphere and pipes, provided he spent what little resources he had constructing pumps or filters, or whatever else was needed to get at it.  Although they were all too hot to be useful, as is.  A major problem indeed.


    He also didn¡¯t have iron and according to the PDA, most things required it to build.  Another major problem.


    Should he just go trying to find the dead player''s original base or lander?  It should be somewhere nearby in theory.  But that was an extreme gamble.  He couldn¡¯t stay out in the day time, it was too hot and would get him killed at this point.  Which means he had one night only to find something and if he didn¡¯t, he would have squandered the only chance he had to do something about his situation.


    Andy decided to save that high stakes gamble for a little later, only if he was absolutely certain that there was nothing else he could do to salvage the situation here.  He instead focused on the available resources and equipment at hand.


    Okay.  So what about this shredder thing?  Could it get him the iron he needed?


    Andy double checked the entry on the PDA.  It did say it could turn stuff into raw ores.  He would need to power it and test it out.


    First he used the wire cutters tool to gather a few units off loose wire from the electrical cables running along some of the walls.  Next he needed a power source.  He did not want to go into the bedroom right now to try and retrieve the power controller, as he did not want to disturb things in there any further than he already had.


    That left only one option, the portable generator.  He tried dragging it over near the shredder, then using the wire cutters in one hand and some wire in the other, he was able to connect cable from the shredder, to the floor and then to the portable generator.  The game automatically formed a detachable plug on the generator''s end of things.


    So far so good.  Now.


    Andy found an eject button on his welding torch that ejected its ¡®fuel¡¯ canister.  He put the fuel canister in the portable generator instead and clipped it in place.


    Now the moment of truth.  Andy turned the generator on.  It started rumbling to life and soon after, the power button on the shredder lit up.   It worked!


    Andy quickly grabbed his crowbar and went to work ¡®stealing¡¯ a few iron sheets from a couple of intact wall frames from around the base.


    He came back to the shredder and turned it on.  The shredder started turning its grinding teeth of death and made a lot of noise in the process.  Andy held one of the iron sheets out to it and the sheet disappeared from his hand and reappeared in the mouth of the shredder, already busy getting ground down to nothing.


    After a while, the shredder''s LCD display showed that it now had 2kg of iron ore in it.  Andy did not pull on the ¡®ejection¡¯ handle yet, like the PDA had instructed him to do, as he did not want a bunch of loose iron ores floating around.  He had already seen from the ingots that they could stack.  He would abuse that.


    He proceeded to feed the rest of the iron sheets in until he finally ended up with 24kg of iron ore.  Then only did he pull the release lever.  The shredder unceremoniously plopped out a rough ball-shaped chunk of iron ore.


    He turned the shredder and generator off for now.


    First he had to steal some more cables, then he had to lay them from the generator, along the floor, over to where the electric furnace sat.


    After this, he was able to turn the generator back on, followed by the electric furnace.


    Andy inserted the iron ore into the intake of the furnace and hit the button to activate it.  The furnace flared to life and started generating a ridiculous amount of heat.  The atmosphere around the furnace heated up enough that it started flowing outwards and almost made Andy lose his balance.


    Andy quickly backed away while it worked.  A few minutes later the furnace cooled down and made a ting sound like some kind of microwave.  It then automatically ejected the brand new iron ingot.  Andy waited for the metal to cool down a bit before picking it up: ¡°Iron ingot (24kg)¡±.


    Nice!


    He turned the furnace off and once more laid cables over to where the atmospherics constructor was.  He once more turned the generator on as well as the atmospherics constructor itself.


    The constructor also had an LCD display that showed a menu of things you could build, as well as the resource contents of the machine.  Andy proceeded to dump the iron ingot in the machine and then select a single piece of pipe (0,5 kg iron) to construct.  The constructor got to work and after several seconds, ejected a brand new piece of pipe.  Everything seemed to work fine, so Andy went over to the first locker and fetched the copper and gold ingots and also loaded them into the constructor.If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Now the question was what could he build that would save his life.  Obviously most items were still locked out, either due to a lack of more specific resources, or just because they need to be researched or acquired by other unknown means.


    He could now print filters for other types of gasses or even oxygen extraction itself.  So getting at an O2 supply was no longer an issue.  The issue still remained however of cooling the O2 enough for it to be usable.  Also cooling the bedroom so he could use it again for eating and drinking.


    He could not build any device related directly to cooling, they all costed resources he did not have.


    The normal way of cooling stuff was to use something else that was already colder, to absorb the heat, but he had nothing colder anywhere.  Pretty much everything in this place was varying degrees of ¡®hot¡¯ by this point.


    So then what could he do?  How did he solve this?


    Andy wracked his brains.  He searched his rudimentary knowledge of chemistry and all his experience playing any kind of science or engineering oriented sim games.


    And then he had an idea.


    He didn¡¯t quite know if it would work, a large part of it depended on how accurately this game modelled physics and chemistry, but it was worth a shot and probably his only viable option at the moment.


    Andy got to work constructing first:  a ¡®electric pump¡¯ and then a ¡®flow valve¡¯.  Then he made a vent.  Followed by a dozen pipes, the regular kind, not the insulated kind as those ones would cost more and defeated the purpose of what he was trying to do anyway.


    Andy then got to work.  First he checked if he could pace pipes against walls, as well as through them, using the wrench.  This all seemed to work fine.


    Next, he started his experiment.  Using the wrench, he placed down a small loop of pipe on the floor.  Then, on one side of the loop, he placed the pump and on the opposite side of the loop, placed the pressure valve.  He also needed to connect power to the pump with wire.


    Now he placed a vent connected via T-junction to ¡®side A¡¯ of the pipe loop.  As soon as he did, the 150kpa atmosphere pushed into the vent and filled side A of the pipe.


    Now he adjusted the setting of the pump that would transfer gas from side A to side B, to be very fast.  He also closed the valve completely.  Turning on only the pump, side B began to fill up with atmosphere from side A, which in turn just kept sucking up more and more atmosphere through the vent.


    According to the wiki on the PDA, these standard pipes could handle up to 50mpa of pressure.  He wouldn¡¯t need that much and had no intention of pushing things that far regardless.


    Slowly but surely side B¡¯s pressure got higher and higher as more and more atmosphere was forced into it.  Eventually Andy removed the vent, with the pump still turned on.  This had the effect of letting side B suck up all remaining gas and leaving side A in a vacuum state.


    Now he also turned the pump off, trapping the high pressure gas on side B.


    Next up was to set the valve to allow a small amount of pressure through at a time and then wait a little bit for some gas to flow into side A.  Now the tricky part.


    Andy changed the pump¡¯s setting to match the flow rate of the valve and then turned it on.  Only a small amount of time passed between these two events and only a little bit of gas had accumulated in side A..


    This created the effect where side B was constantly very high pressure.  Side A was constantly very low pressure.  And the whole loop would have gas flowing around it permanently.


    Andy quickly whipped out his PDA and turned on the atmospherics function.  He first confirmed that the pressures were all roughly what he expected and then he took a close look at the temperatures.


    It turned out that side B of the loop was always ever so slightly higher in temperature than the atmosphere and side A of the loop was always slightly lower in temperature than the atmosphere.


    The experiment was a success!  This would work!


    Basically, when a gas is allowed to naturally expand into an area  on its own, it expends energy to do so and has to take that energy from somewhere else, hence cooling it¡¯s surroundings.  On the other hand, when a pump pumps the gas into the high pressure area, the pump doing the ¡®work¡¯ puts energy into the gas and causes it to heat up.  So side A would always be colder and side B would always be hotter.


    Gas expansion was a dumbed down version of what refrigerators used for cooling, with those, they actually used the extreme expansion version of evaporating a liquid into a gas.


    Either way, this setup would solve all his ¡®immediate¡¯ problems.  All except one.


    Andy still needed to salvage the ¡®breathable¡¯ atmosphere in the bedroom.  In other words, not toxify it further.


    So he went ahead and built two ¡®active vents¡¯.  They were pricey in that they each cost some gold to make, unlike everything else he had constructed so far.  Active vents were basically vents and bi-directional pumps all rolled in one.  He could turn them on and off and set them to pump atmosphere into a pipe or pump the contents of the pipe into the atmosphere instead.  A very versatile device overall.  Albeit a bit expensive.


    Next, Andy went and ¡®stole¡¯ some of the insulated pipes that were running to nowhere at the back of the wrecked base.  There wasn¡¯t that much, but it was enough.  Regular non-insulated pipes would not work for what he had in mind.


    Now Andy unplugged the portable generator and moved it into the bedroom entrance ¡®block¡¯.  It took soom finessing but he eventually got it through the wall frame and into the ¡®block¡¯.


    Using the hand drill, he was able to mount the two active vents onto one of the solid walls.  He added four units of insulated pipe onto the end of each active vent to serve as gas storage for each vent.  Then he wired both of them up to the generator, all within the single block.  It was admittedly a bit cramped in here now.


    Now it was time for Andy to test out his makeshift airlock.

 CH009 - The cold

    Andy did not have the right machinery to construct a second door to form a real airlock.  Instead, he would be relying on attaching and detaching an iron sheet from the open wall frame to fill the roll of a second door for the time being.


    That being said, the principle by which this airlock would go about working is that there are two separate active vents and pipes.  One active vent and it¡¯s pipe would be dedicated to the external atmosphere and the other active vent and pipe would be dedicated to the room''s atmosphere.


    Andy ¡®borrowed¡¯ the fuel canister from the generator and put it back in his blow torch, sealing the open wall frame with an iron sheet.  He then returned the fuel back to the generator and turned it on.


    With the ¡®airlock¡¯ now sealed, he set the ¡®external¡¯ active vent to suck in gas and turned it on.  After about half a minute, it had sucked up all the available atmosphere in the ¡®airlock¡¯ and held it in it¡¯s private pipe.  The ¡®external¡¯ vents pipe now contained atmospheric gases and the ¡®airlock¡¯ was in a vacuum state.


    Now he opened the bedroom door.  He braced himself for the dangerous flow of pressure from the 102kpa room to the 0kpa ¡®airlock¡¯.  Mass depressurisation like this was always dangerous as it could cause objects and you to fly around at high speed.


    Andy was pressed up against the wall, hard, until the pressure normalized.  Luckily nothing too dangerous flew at him and only some furniture shifted around a bit.


    This was the last time he would have to do that.  Now he could use the airlock normally.


    Exiting involved first closing the ¡®internal¡¯ (bedroom) door.  Then setting the ¡®internal¡¯ active vent to suck up gas and turning it on until the airlock was in a vacuum state.  Then turning that active vent off.


    Next he would set the ¡®external¡¯ active vent to pump out gas and turn it on until it pumped the full contents of its pipe back into the ¡®airlock¡¯.  Then he would turn that active vent off as well and could now open the ¡®external door¡¯.  As in, remove the sheet from the wall frame with his crowbar.


    And that was the process of exiting the bedroom via the ¡®airlock¡¯.  Entering was simply the reverse of that process.  Each  vent and attached pipe was responsible for holding and transferring a different set of atmosphere (the planet''s atmosphere and the room''s atmosphere).


    The reason he didn¡¯t just save some resources and use one set of active vent and pipe, for only the room¡¯s more desirable atmosphere, is because he would be forced to open the vacuumed out airlock to full external atmosphere pressure every time he opened the wall and as stated before, any kind of mass depressurisation was dangerous.


    There were still some minor issues, like if he went into the room while the external atmospheric pressure was 150kpa and the airlocks gas at that pressure got stored in the pipe, if he exited when the external pressure was higher (say during the middle of the day), then pumping that gas back into the block would still only result in an airlock with 150kpa gas pressure, lower than the outside.  You¡¯d still have a risky air flow when opening the airlock.


    Not that Andy planned to go out during the day ever again, but you could never be too careful.


    He had also needed to use insulated pipes for this and not regular pipes, because if he went outside and stored some of the bedrooms atmosphere in the ¡®internal¡¯ pipe, it would, no matter how he shaped it, be exposed to some of the external atmosphere and that would affect the temperature of the ¡®bedroom atmosphere¡¯ stored in the pipe.  An undesirable outcome to say the least.


    Andy then ¡®borrowed¡¯ some more wire and connected the cable from the generator''s new home inside the airlock, over to his existing ¡®manufacturing¡¯ power network.  The generator would have to remain in the airlock for now as he needed his one and only fuel canister to power both the generator and his blowtorch while operating the ¡®airlock¡¯.


    Now that he had a way of maintaining the bedroom''s atmosphere, he needed to go back to solving his original problem... cooling.


    First Andy conducted a quick test.  While the high pressure gas was still inside side B of his cooling loop, he disassembled one of the high pressure pipe segments.  Nothing happened.  Inspecting the remaining pipe segments with the PDA¡¯s atmospherics function, he noticed that the pressure had gone up.


    This meant two things.  First is that any gas in the pipe he is removing, is automatically forced into its neighbouring segments.  Second is that the open ends of the remaining pipe are automatically blocked off by the game.  A convenience feature that was clearly added to allow players to more easily work on their bases and systems.


    Andy put the missing pipe segment back and attached a vent to it to let the excess high pressure gas vent back into the atmosphere.


    Once that was done, using a combination of his wrench and hand drill, he proceeded to disassemble his little cooling experiment.  He then moved all the parts over to the airlock and sealed it behind him.  He repeated the lengthy process of entering the bedroom.


    Once inside, he got to work.


    He attached  just under half the pipe on the inside of the bedroom wall, next to the window.  He put the pump on one end, and bent a pipe through the wall from it.  He would later go outside and hook up something to the other end.  He then put the valve on the other end of the internal pipe and once more bent a pipe from it to the outside.  Lastly, he created a T-junction in the middle of the inside pipe (basically once more side A), and bent it outside.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Now Andy exited the bedroom via the airlock and it¡¯s lengthy exit procedure.


    Once outside, he went around the outside of the base to where the external side of the bedroom window was located.  Here he could see the three pipe points sticking through the wall.  Andy closed the loop between the pump and the valve''s pipe ends.  He also added a vent to the piece of pipe leading to the T-junction.


    With this complete, he was ready.  He went back to the airlock and made his way into the bedroom once more.  Inside, he connected the power cable up to the pump.  He set it to ¡®high¡¯ and turned it on.


    The cooling loop now sucked up atmosphere via the external vent and built it up in the external pipe.  Andy used the PDA to keep an eye on the pressure of the external pipe.  He did this by pointing the PDA at the small bit of the external pipe that was actually sticking out inside the bedroom, in front of the valve and the pump.


    Once the pressure reached 20mpa, he ¡®cut out¡¯ the single segment of pipe leading from the T-junction to the external vent, effectively cutting off the supply of atmosphere.  Once the remaining gas had been sucked up into the external pipe, he repeated the procedure from his earlier experiment.


    Turn off the pump.  Set the valve to match the pump''s flow rate.  Wait a little for some gas to fill the inside pipe.  Turn the pump back on.  And voila!


    Over time, the cooling loop would cool the atmosphere in the bedroom via the ¡®cool¡¯ side of the pipe present, and transfer the heat out via the external side of the pipe with the high pressure.


    Unfortunately, he wasn¡¯t sure how long this process was going to take.  Andy checked with the PDA.  It was a bit alarming that the gas in the ¡®inside¡¯ pipe was initially higher than even the room''s current temperature, but after a short while, it quickly corrected itself.  Soon the gas in the ¡®inside¡¯ pipe became much lower than the room''s temperature.


    Perfect!


    With this, it was only a matter of time.  After a while, it would cool the room¡¯s temperature back down to acceptable breathing levels.


    The biggest problem was that he did not have that long left.  His hud was already giving critical O2 pressure level warnings and he could feel that his suit¡¯s oxygen was starting to thin out.  The game also seemed to darken his vision ever so slightly now, no doubt their representation of him being oxygen deprived.  It would likely get worse as things progressed.  Andy sucked his breath in frustration.  Not this shit again!  He needed more time.  But what could he do?  The only oxygen around him was too hot.  It was unbreathable.  There was no way for him to rapidly cool oxygen down.


    The only thing here that could cool stuff down was his new slow acting coolant system and his suit which did a bit of cooling using battery power.  But it¡¯s not like he could just swap his hundred and fifty odd degree waste tank with his O2 tank.  Even though the waste tank no doubt contained a fair amount of oxygen, his suit wouldn¡¯t be able to cool it fast enough for it not to fry him.


    He could open his helmet and breathe the atmosphere in the room,  but that would put him back in health drain mode due to the still present toxins and he still hadn¡¯t recovered enough health to survive that for an extended period of time.  Likely not long enough anyway.


    He could try and scrap more iron to build a setup to purify the atmosphere in this room, but between the time to harvest sheets, scrap them, construct stuff, setup the rig and run it long enough to purify.  There was no way he had that much time left.  Least not going by the rate the darkening effect was progressing.


    Fuck.  Fuck.  This is such bullshit.  So Close!  As Always!  Ever since he had that bullshit start to the game, it¡¯s just been one unreasonable uphill battle after another.


    Maybe he should just give up and fucking die already.  After all, the game wanted him dead really badly apparently.  Maybe he should just let it kill him already.


    Andy suddenly didn¡¯t feel like doing anything anymore.  He just wanted to throw off this damned space suit and curl up on the bed and die.  He felt the familiar feelings clawing at him, dragging him down.


    He¡¯d been so busy trying to survive all this time, that he hadn¡¯t even had the chance to feel depressed.  That was the funny thing about depression, they say that one of the best ways to stave it off was to simply keep busy, have a routine and such.  And they were right, that did work.  Keeping busy usually meant he didn¡¯t have time to sink into depression.


    Problem was, it worked both ways.  When you finally did get depressed, you didn¡¯t feel like doing anything, you know the thing that would help distract yourself from the depression, literally anything!


    Andy stood there, all life drained out of him.  He watched as the darkness increased.  As the coolant loop continued chugging along, lowering the temperature of the room, bit by bit.  As the temperature in his waste tank started to decrease as well, from spending time in the ¡®cooler¡¯ room.


    Wait!  That was it!


    The revelation was enough to more than sufficiently distract him from any depression.


    Andy dived into his hud menus and found the settings for the waste tank.  He then proceeded to open up the waste tank''s internal suit valve a little bit.  It was normally closed as the filter that absorbs the carbon dioxide and deposits it into the tank was a separate thing.  There was after all no reason to dump potentially lethal CO2 content or mass heat from your waste tank back into your suit.


    However, opening it up only slightly, meant that there would be a small and steady flow of really hot O2, with a sprinkle of CO2, into a suite that was filled with alot more cooled pure O2 than what was being injected from the waste tank.  The result was that the temperature inside the suit would only rise slightly and the suit''s powered cooling system could keep up with it.


    As for the CO2 being injected back into the suit, the CO2 filter simply had to work double as hard to filter it all back into the CO2 tank again.  Sure, part of that CO2 would come back into the suit again, in some kind of vicious cycle, but for now, the filter could keep up.


    Eventually the CO2 build up would start overwhelming the filter and that would become toxic and this would use up both the filter and his suit¡¯s battery faster, but Andy was confident that this would hold out long enough.


    Unfortunately, he was stuck here for now, since he needed to cool the room, but more importantly, stay here so he could cool the waste tank via the room.  Then finally he would have access to a fresh supply of Oxygen without any more crazy hacks.

 CH010 - Unwelcome

    The remainder of the night had passed by and even most of the way into the next daylight hours.  But finally, Andy had success.


    The room''s temperature currently sat at eleven degrees celsius.  A bit on the chilly side, but more than workable for eating and drinking.


    But more importantly, his waste tank had just dropped to forty degrees celsius.  Meaning, he now had access to a decent supply of oxygen.  Well, decent enough, it wouldn¡¯t last forever of course, but it was more than enough to keep him going for a while.


    Andy turned his cooling system off, now it would just be an unnecessary power drain if he left it on.  Speaking of power drain, his suits battery had started to run out sometime this morning, so he had wired the portable generator up to the input of the power controller in the room and used that to charge the battery within it.  He then swapped it out with his suit¡¯s current battery.


    The sun was already busy setting, so Andy went about filling up his hydration and hunger with bottled water and protein bars.  He was now once more running out of water, with only half a bottle left.


    At least he had been making steady health gains with all this careful work.  He now sat at a much more comfortable sixty two percent health.


    Andy needed to get back out there, and get back to work on solving his next problem.


    He briefly considered swapping his O2 and waste tank around, now that he had a waste tank filled with usable O2.  Even if there was a bit of CO2 in there, the filter would quickly mop it up.  But he ultimately decided against this idea, when he realised that the waste tank was not insulated and as soon as he stepped outside, the atmosphere would start heating his O2 supply via the tank itself.


    Instead, he opened the internal valve of the waste tank and set the now empty O2 tank to pump the atmosphere inside the suit and store it.  He basically used his suit as a pipeline to transfer all the gas from the waste tank, to his O2 tank.


    It was a strange feeling having all that gas rushing through his suit and the process took a few minutes, but ultimately succeeded.  His O2 tank was now full with forty degree O2 and a bit of CO2 and his waste tank was mostly empty.


    Andy set all of his suit¡¯s settings back to normal, for the first time in a long time.  It felt like hitting a nice big reset button.  A fresh start, so to speak.


    With the O2 issue out of the way, he proceeded to use his makeshift airlock to exit.  Completing the process by removing the iron sheet from the wall frame, he was about to step out like any other time before, when something caught his eye.


    Every instinct, every fibre of his being told him to freeze.  The two long thin black limbs ending in talons, peeking over the edge of the broken base floor, sent shivers down his spine.  Once he saw the limbs strain to pull up whatever they were attached to, he could wait no longer, panic screamed flight.


    As the tell tale sign of the talon scraping against the metal in the process, could be heard, Andy ducked back against one of the adjacent walls of the airlock and ever so slightly out of view of the monster.


    Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck!


    Whatever that thing was, there was no way in hell he survived it unarmed.  The blowtorch?


    Andy heard the tap tap sound of multiple limbs ending in those metallic talons, traipsing their way across the base floor.  They sound like they were drawing closer.


    Fuck the blowtorch.  No way, no how.  He did not have confidence that it would be enough against whatever the fuck that thing was.


    The tapping drew even closer.  It was going to stumble across him sooner than later.


    Andy did the only thing he could do.  He reached out ever so slightly, hoping the thing would not notice his arm, and slid the gas canister out of the portable generator as quietly as he could.  The sound of metal scraping against metal as he did so, was deafening to him under the circumstances.


    Fully out, the creature had clearly not heard it or he¡¯d probably be dead already.  Andy swallowed hard.


    He put the canister in the blowtorch just as slowly and quietly.


    The tapping was getting very close now.  He also heard the creature make a chittering sound.


    Andy gently picked up the iron sheet and pointed it at the wall.  He braced himself.


    He flipped the blowtorch on and pointed at the wall as fast as possible.


    All hell broke loose.A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    The blowtorch roared to life, its flame making a sound that might as well be broadcasting his position loud and clear.


    The creature that was already too close for comfort immediately sprinted for his position with a rapid and loud succession of talens tapping on over.


    Fuck!  He wasn¡¯t going to be able to weld it fast enough, it was already almost on top of him to begin with.


    Then the shit went down.


    As the creature shoved one of its taloned limbs through an opening in the wall frame, the construction outline of the sheet turned red and the welding process was cancelled.


    The talon missed him by an inch.


    Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuuuuuuck!


    As the creature continued to round the corner in that moment, it sent another long taloned limb searching for him.  This one connected and both tore through his suit and cut his right leg in the process, causing him great deal of pain and a health loss.


    Andy did the only thing he could and turned the blow torch to the limb.


    The ghastly sizzling of flesh could be heard and the monster shrieked in pain, instantly retracting the limb.  Another limb replaced it however and swung at him.  But Andy managed to lean out of the way and blowtorch it as well.


    The creature howled once more and Andy decided to press the attack with the creature nursing both of it¡¯s frontal limbs.  He summoned every inch of courage he could muster and leaned close to the open wall frame.  Catching a glimpse of a portion of the creature''s jet black hairy body, he shoved the blowtorch at its side, causing more burn damage.


    The creature, apparently not expecting to suddenly become the hunted, howled at the man and jumped away in panic.


    Yes, it can fucking jump!


    Andy quickly leaned back and used the reprieve to try and weld the iron sheet again, while the creature hissed at him angrily from a distance.


    Come on!  Come on!  Almost there!  Were the chaotic thoughts bouncing around his skull as panic set in.


    The creature realised something had changed and once more charged straight for him.


    Holy mother of fuck it was fast!


    ¡°Aaaaaarrrggghhhh!¡±  Andy cried out something between fear, desperation, determination and a war cry, as the monster barreled towards him.


    Just before it reached him the iron sheet snapped in place and Andy heard a loud thud noise as the creature crashed into the now solid wall.


    Holy fuck.  Fuck!  What the actual fuck!  Mother fucking fucker!


    Andy was still trying to calm down, trapped in his little airlock, that suddenly felt very, very claustrophobic.  Andy turned the blowtorch off, before he could accidentally burn a hole in himself or something.


    Hole!  Fuck!


    His suit was sounding off an alarm about the breach in his suit and the resulting toxins flowing in.  Andy grabbed the duct tape from one of the compartments on his toolbelt and used it to seal the breach.  After which he flushed his suit once to get rid of the toxins.  He didn¡¯t even have enough room in his emotions right now to care about what would otherwise have been a really scary burst of flames all around him in a tight enclosed space as he did this.


    The warnings went away.  What they were replaced with however, was the sound of the creature clawing at the wall on the other side.  Now that was fucking nerve wracking!  After waiting for quite some time however, the creature gave up on that.  Andy assumed at this point that it couldn¡¯t actually get through the walls.


    He was however treated to the unnerving sound of the creature wandering around.  Tap. Tap. tap-tap-tap.  It was searching for a way to get to him.


    All Andy could do was wait.


    And wait.


    And wait.


    He didn¡¯t know how long he waited, the feeling of being bait trapped in a cage only worsened with time.


    The creature had gone off somewhere eventually, but he doubted that it had left the area.


    Just what the fuck was he going to do.  He couldn¡¯t sit here forever.  His hydration was a ticking time bomb.  Maybe that thing would retreat during the scorching day time?  He had no idea.  If it didn¡¯t, he was fucked.  Actually he was fucked even if it did.  He would have long since consumed his lost bit of water by then.


    Surviving another night and day without a source of water did not seem viable.  He would still need time to come up with a solution for getting more water.  No matter how he looked at it, he couldn''t stay here.


    Fuck, he really wanted to though.  Really, really wanted to.  But he needed to get busy or he would die.


    But then what?  Go out there and carry on building?  Hope that thing didn¡¯t rip his guts out while he was busy.  That was madness and quite impossible to go along with.


    Fuck!  Again! Fuck!


    He had no choice.  He needed to face that thing!


    Andy tried to console himself.  What¡¯s the worst that could happen?  He died?  Andy reminded himself that he was a dead man before this game already, and going into this game as well.  It had never really changed.  And dead men shouldn¡¯t be afraid of dying!


    He took a moment to focus and come up with a plan.


    After some thought, he started off by adjusting the valves in his suit, to funnel one third of his remaining oxygen into his waste tank.  Once that was done, he gave the command to disengage his waste tank.  It partially detached from his backpack and he was able to clip it out completely.


    Warnings immediately showed up about the loss of the waste tank and how it would lead to CO2 toxicity in his suit.  But he didn¡¯t care.  It wouldn¡¯t happen immediately.


    He then navigated the menu over to the option to flush his suit and left it there without actually activating.  Andy put the waste tank down and held up the crowbar, ready to peel back his only defence and go out there and court death itself.

 CH011 - Ashen world

    Andy pointed the crowbar at the frame, ready to try and support it as it came loose, in the hope that it would not make too much noise and alert the creature.


    The creature had gone off somewhere, he had heard it walking away, but he felt like it was still somewhere near the complex at the very least.


    The iron sheet came loose and he successfully helped it to the ground with very little noise.  Andy shifted the sheet to the side and out of the way.


    Now he would take it slow and keep his head on a swivel-


    Arrrgggghhh!


    A long black limbed flicked inside the airlock, the talon on end clawing into Andy¡¯s leg.


    Where the fuck had it come from!  Did it trick him?  Was it also fucking intelligent!?


    The creature had it¡¯s talon hooked into his calf, half on the boot portion of his suit.  There was so much red hot fucking pain!


    Andy cried out in pain and reached for his blowtorch, unclipping it from his belt.


    But the creature had other ideas.  Using it¡¯s hook point, in one swift motion, it rapidly dragged Andy out of the airlock and underneath it.  He lost his grip on the blowtorch as he banged his arm hard on the wall frame.


    Andy took a swipe at the skidding blowtorch, but missed.


    The creature was large.  The bulk of its body was directly above him and it was easily as tall as a bear.  Andy could mostly only see it¡¯s hairy underside from his position on the floor, the bulk of its body was supported by four long limbs ending in talons.  It resembles something like a very large four legged spider.  Just meaner.


    The creature reared up, probably pissed off and intent on bringing its two front talons down on his face.  Andy¡¯s leg was no longer hooked as a result, but he most definitely was not going to be able to get out of the way in time.


    The creature brought its talons down fast and Andy did the only thing he could.


    He hit the activate button.


    Fire burst out from him on all sides, the front-most ports scorching the belly of the beast and it responded by shrieking and twisting to the side, trying to get out of the way of the high temperature H2O combustion.  The creature twisted so hard, it actually fell over and got tangled on it¡¯s own limbs.  But it quickly righted itself and leapt backwards to put some distance between them, the creature clearly having been unnerved.


    Andy was glad now that he had set the hud to be on the flush option, it had already saved his life, and this fight was just getting started.


    With the moment of space, Andy grabbed his crowbar and threw it at the monster.  It quickly sidestepped out of the way, but gave Andy the additional distraction that he needed.


    Andy ran over to the waste tank that was rolling across the floor.  It had been literally bounced out of the airlock when the monster initially dragged Andy out, and now was within practical reach.


    The monster charged Andy, already suspecting he was up to something, as Andy picked up the waste tank, pointed it at the incoming creature and turned the external valve.


    One turn of his hand on the valve screw was enough for oxygen to start shooting out of it in the form of a high pressure fast flowing stream.  The stream in turn igniting with the atmosphere in an incredibly high heat flame, just as it had always done so far.  Normally this very same reaction had caused him an endless amount of trouble and almost killed him at least once.


    Now however, it was a weapon to be wielded!


    The creature never saw it coming and as it drew up upon Andy, shrieking, mandibles chittering, it caught a face full of the high heat jet stream and raged in pain.


    Andy had only turned the valve once, so technically only a very small amount of oxygen was being propelled out of the tank, making it manageable for him to hang on to, instead of flying around dangerously.


    The creature was forced back once more, shaking violently to put out the remaining body hairs that were still on fire.  It shrieked at Andy once more, then charged straight at him again.


    Andy brought his makeshift flamethrower up to intercept, but the monster simply dashed to the side and circled around, still drawing closer.


    Andy adjusted his pace even faster to try and keep up with the monster and keep it at bay.  The two of them performing a fiery dance of death as they rotated around.Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    Andy quickened his pace once more to try and keep up with the monster as they spinned around.  The monster was close enough now that the increase would end up cutting it off with the path of the flame.


    The monster simply ran up and sideways along a wall with its incredible speed, like something out of a matrix movie.


    Andy tried to arc the flame up a bit to catch it.


    And then it leapt.


    The monster catapulted off the wall and narrowed its limbs front and back, like a projectile sailing through the atmosphere with minimal air resistance.  It was a surreal sight, to witness the deadly transformation.


    Andy barely managed to duck out of the way as the monster glided overhead.  It nearly caught him.  Andy fell to one knee in the process, but he quickly adjusted and flipped around, pointing his ¡®flame thrower¡¯ in the direction the monster had jumped.  He had heard the tell tale signs of the monster''s claws scrape against the floor where it landed.


    So he spun around and pointed the flame in that direction.


    But there was nothing there.  Andy was about to spin his head around in a panic, searching for the monster before it could get him.  But instead, in that moment of hesitation, his instincts screamed at him.  He knew.  He had a sense for the way this thing fought, the way it thought.


    Andy dived and rolled to the side, just as the monster came crashing down from overhead, talons digging into the floor from the impact.  If he had been there even a fraction of a second longer, he would have been skewered.


    Andy had dived in the direction of the discarded crowbar, he gripped it and swung.  The monster had already recovered from its landing and had already taken two quick steps towards Andy, who was still prone.  It took another step forward with its left set of legs, raising its front right talon, in preparation to skewer Andy.


    But the crowbar connected and smashed into the outstretched front left limb, with a sickening crunch sound.  The monster wailed and lost its balance in the pain and toppled forward, arresting its motion right above Andy.  Man and monster literally came face to face.


    And then Andy smashed the activate button again.


    Fire erupted all around him and the monster cried out once more and scramble backwards with more burn marks.  Its retreat was frantic and showed none of its former grace or precision.


    He needed to end this.  While it was still rattled.  Andy noticed that the still flaming waste tank was in a certain position, the flaming end facing almost perfectly away from the monster.


    He had a hunch, a crazy idea that was as ludicrous as its chance of success seemed¡­  It just felt right though.  The waste tank had just rolled into reach as he was mentally mulling this over.


    Andy reached for the valve screw on the waste tank as he called out to the alien.


    ¡°Hey!¡±


    The alien froze as it regarded him with its full attention.  As if it was an enraptured audience hanging off his words.


    ¡°Chew on this!¡±


    Andy spun the screw open.


    In an instant, the flame nozzle burst to life with an angry vengeance.  The mostly stationary canister up to this point blasted off like a missile.  One that was pointed straight at the creature and it knew it!  The creature tried to dodge to the side, despite how fast the canister was moving.


    Unfortunately for the creature however, the canister also just so happened to curve in the same direction, resulting in a truly lucky hit for Andy.


    Not so lucky for the monster though.  The canister struck it mostly dead center and it was catapulted into a wall five meters away like a ragdoll.


    Andy dove out the way as the makeshift rocket bounced around and then dove straight for his head.  He caught a glimpse of it going way outside the perimeter of the base and out of sight.


    Andy glanced back at the alien.  It was actually still managing to get back up despite being hit by the equivalent force of a truck.  But it was not shaking that one off quite so easily.  The monster looked dazed and heavily injured.


    He had nothing left, no more tricks.  Just the crowbar.


    Fuck this.  Andy charged the creature.  For the first time truly, he was not the prey.


    Andy ran, crowbar raised, poised to strike, he ran.  A war cry bubbled up in his throat and spilled forth as bore down on the monster that now regarded him seriously.


    As Andy got in range and was about to start the preparatory motion for swinging the crowbar, the monster suddenly leapt to the side.  It stumbled as it landed, no doubt from its multiple injuries, but quickly got back up again.


    What the fuck?


    Andy was basically serving himself up on a silver platter, intentionally going into a melee with this thing and instead of capitalizing, it simply retreated.


    This thing was afraid of him, either that or it finally regarded him as a serious threat, as an equal.


    Andy stood there staring the creature down, it simply stared back.  Neither backing down.


    The monster chittered angrily at him.  But Andy responded in kind with a growl of his own: ¡°Dead men don¡¯t fear death¡±.


    ¡°Bring it, fuck face!¡±


    The monster shrieked at him one final time.  But instead of charging him, it simply turned around and slowly limped away.


    Andy stared dumbfounded, as it limped off into the distance and left the base behind.


    Apparently, he was no longer ¡®prey¡¯.  He was not food.  He was a threat.  He was, simply put, ¡®not worth it¡¯.


    Andy watched as the creature crossed a hill in the distance.  It looked back at him one last time, before disappearing over the horizon.


    He had won.  He had driven it off.  The monster that had already killed at least one other player.


    Alarms were going off like crazy in his HUD.  He had lost his waste tank.  His health was low.  His suit was torn.  And come the morning he would likely die of dehydration.  But he had won.


    For the first time since coming here, he had hope.  Hope that he may just be able to survive the insurmountable odds of this hell hole.  He may just be able to survive on this ashen world.

 CH012 - Water

    Andy really felt like resting, especially after the anti-climatic ending to that fight.


    But everything was either broken, breaking or actively trying to kill him at the moment.


    First things first. Andy retrieved the duct tape from his toolbelt and set about taping the tears in his suit. After this, he put it away and flushed his suit to get rid of the toxins, as well as the CO2 buildup. After all, he no longer had a CO2 tank, it had flown off to god only knows where in the distance.


    The readouts on the HUD registered a stable reading. No toxins warnings, except for the one about the lack of a waste tank.


    Right, next problem.


    CO2 would continue to build up in his suit again. He needed a waste tank. He had already lost a third of his oxygen weaponizing it, and now more than ever did not have the luxury of periodically flushing his suit to dispel the CO2 buildup.


    He needed to make a new waste tank. Luckily he had a functioning atmospherics constructor.


    Andy retrieved his welding torch that was still left behind in the airlock and took out the fuel canister, once more using it to power the generator. It was unfortunately starting to run low, yet another problem for him to add to his never ending list of emergencies.


    But he had several things to sort out that were higher priority, so he flicked the generator on.


    Luckily, Andy still had some iron ingot left over from his last construction project and he was able to use that to ¡®construct¡¯ a new empty canister. If not, then he would have had to spend time ¡®harvesting¡¯ iron sheets, scrapping them and smelting them first, not something he wanted to waste time on at the moment.


    The suit was already complaining about CO2 levels, but that was fine, Andy was already busy installing the new canister to his waste slot and soon the suit¡¯s CO2 filter would do its job and clean things up.


    His CO2 problem taken care of, his health could start to comfortably build up again, from its now rather abysmal thirteen percent. The monster had gotten a few good shots in after all.


    But right now, he needed to go back to dealing with his former most pressing concern. The fact that he won¡¯t make it to the next night, without a source of water.


    Looking at the PDA, the device that you were supposed to use to make water, was called a ¡®hydrogen combustor¡¯. It basically used hydrogen, oxygen and electricity to make water.


    Problem was, it required a fair amount of steel to make and Andy¡¯s overall steel supply was a whopping fat zero. He of course did some research, but as he suspected, he would need to construct a furnace to make steel. The furnace in turn would apparently need more fuel mixture (two parts H2 to one part O2).


    Not only that, the recipe used by the game to make steel involved both iron and coal. Iron he could get from scrapping, but not coal. He would need to go out and mine that, with a mining drill he did not possess. He also couldn¡¯t make a mining drill, as that required a special ¡®equipment constructor¡¯.


    He also didn¡¯t see anything that he could easily scrap in the hopes of getting steel.


    Andy still had the option of going around and searching for the dead player¡¯s base or lander, but the same problem with that still existed. He didn¡¯t have the resources. Oxygen and Water both too low to risk the extended search.


    This game was seriously starting to annoy him.


    Andy was reminded of a quote from that movie: ¡®The Martian¡¯.


    ¡°You just solve one problem at a time. And if you solve enough problems, you get to go home.¡±


    Andy took a deep breath to calm himself. He needed to focus on the problem at hand.


    Water.


    He needed water.


    And had no way of getting the device needed to make it.


    Then what? He needed to make the water himself?


    Andy started flicking through the atmospherics constructors menu once more, looking for inspiration.


    And he found it.


    The pipe burner. It used electricity to create a high heat arc inside a pipe. Basically a burner in a pipe.


    His only concern was whether or not the game¡¯s engine would support the chemical interaction needed to pull this off. How advanced was the game? Then again it did support the complexity of temperature drop from forced gas expansion. So, it was a pretty decent chance. The other positive indicator is the presence of the pipe burner as a construction option. It could also just be for generating lots of heat by igniting certain gas mixtures, but Andy had hope.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    Okay. First things first. Andy went around once more stripping iron sheets and repeating the process of scrapping them, smelting them and then dumping them in the constructor.


    He used this and the existing resources to construct a few things for a test. First up, was the pipe burner, followed by some pipe segments and then a ¡®canister holder¡¯. It was basically something you could plug a canister into, that connected to a pipe.


    After constructing this lot, Andy began setting up his experiment. He connected the canister holder to a pipe segment, followed by the ¡®pipe burner¡¯ pipe segment, followed by one more pipe segment.


    He then transferred the fuel canister from the generator to the canister holder. He would need that nice ratio of two H2 to one O2 that the fuel canister held, for his experiment. He kept the canister sealed for now, until he was ready.


    Next Andy opened the valve on the fuel canister ever so slightly, until the atmospherics on the PDA confirmed that a little bit of the gas mixture flowed into the pipe. Andy quickly closed the valve again and removed the fuel canister. He did not want the whole thing blowing up in his face when he turned it on after all.


    Also, he would need the fuel canister for power. Andy put it back in the generator and turned it on. Next he went and stripped some more copper wires, so that he could wire up the pipe burner, which also needed electricity.


    Andy checked the pipe once more with his PDA. It had a small amount of fuel mixture in it at two to one H2 to O2 ratio.


    He then flipped the switch for the pipe burner, hoping it wouldn¡¯t blow him up. After a short while, he turned it off again and used the PDA to check it. The pipe now read 100% H2O. It had worked! Granted the temperature of the steam was in the four digits, and the pipe was causing a mass of atmosphere to flow outwards from it as it bled all that heat off.


    But it worked! The amount of H2O he got out of this was barely a drop, but he at least had a path forward now.


    He would need to construct something that could work full time to make him, ultimately, a decent amount of water.


    So he needed a large amount of H2 and O2 to make decent quantities of water.


    Well the H2 was in abundance in the atmosphere, but the big problem was O2. If he used the fuel canister, which coincidentally had the exact right gas mixture, he¡¯d use all of it up and get not a whole lot of water out of the deal. Furthermore, he¡¯d have lost his only current power source.


    O2. The one of things he normally struggled with. And now he needed a fuck ton of it.


    Come to think of it though, he did have an abundance of it. The greenhouse!


    Andy went back to stripping iron sheets for iron. He also started stripping more copper wires. Not only would he need more power cabling for the new setup, but he was also running out of copper for construction and would need more.


    Scrapping and smelting all that, he was ready to start constructing.


    First he constructed two pipe filter units. Then he constructed an H2 filter and an O2 filter for each respectively. He also constructed two valves. In addition to this, he constructed a whole lot of pipes.


    He ran a power cable over to where the greenhouse was as he wanted to do this build there, localised to where the oxygen source was.


    Andy connected one of the filters to the ¡®broken¡¯ pipe of the greenhouse. The pipe that could, given enough time, suck up all of the greenhouse¡¯s atmosphere and ultimately gain access to its full O2 load.


    A pipe filter had an input and two outputs. One output for the filtered gas and another for the rest of the (waste) gasses. Andy put an O2 filter in it and took the ¡®excess¡¯ pipe and connected it back to the main broken pipe. This would allow the extraction of the O2, without having to discard the other gasses, something that he did not want to do, since there was Nitrogen in the greenhouse, that was not available in this planet¡¯s atmosphere, and so seemed unwise to waste.


    Next he led the pure oxygen pipe into a valve that he kept closed for now.


    Next up, he placed a vent down nearby and piped it to another pipe filter, this one with a hydrogen filter installed. This one¡¯s waste pipe was also redirected back to the vent, since he did not care for the other gasses at all. The pipe filters did come with a pump of their own installed, so it would be able to pull atmosphere in through the open vent as it needed.


    Next he led the pure hydrogen line to another valve.


    Andy then took both of the ¡®valved¡¯ pipelines and brought them together and connected it to a pipe burner. The result of this was then connected to a canister holder. Andy then proceeded to wire everything up.


    He set the pressure for both valves quite low, since he didn¡¯t want to overtax either the H2 or O2 line beyond what the filter units could handle, thus causing an imbalance. He set the O2 valve to be just slightly above half of the H2 lines flow rate. This would result in a water combustion with a tiny amount of oxygen to spare.


    The reason for this, was the water was going to initially come out as steam and he was reasonably sure that no matter how much he cooled it, it would never condense back into water if there was no gas in the bottle to provide pressure. His understanding was that for a liquid to condense, not only did it need to reach the condensation temperature, but there was also a minimum pressure threshold required. If memory served him correctly


    Andy printed a new empty canister to serve as steam capture. After inserting it, he turned everything on as quickly as he could to keep things in sync. Andy quickly whipped out the PDA to monitor everything.


    The filters were both doing their jobs as expected. Next up was the combustor. The pipe reported constantly fluctuating between none and very little H2 and O2. What it was slowly but surely building up however, was extremely high temperature H2O.


    It was working! It was making water!


    It was also making an absurd amount of heat, that was causing rather strong winds in the area, but it was working!


    Andy actually sat down and just watched for a while taking a moment to rest and drinking in his success.


    Eventually he noticed the sky getting lighter, indicating the sun was going to rise soon. Time to move.


    Andy constructed another canister and swapped it with the one that now had a little water (steam) in it.


    The canister was still several hundred degrees celsius, so Andy waited outside longer, to let it bleed off as much of its temperature into the atmosphere as it could before the sun started peeking over the hills. By that time, it was almost the same temperature as the atmosphere and Andy retreated into the bedroom for the day.


    The canister of water would do the remainder of its cooling in the bedroom, thus not taxing his ¡®cooling system¡¯ too much. Eventually it would be cool enough to condense into water and after that cool further until it was drinkable without injury. Andy drank from his last mostly empty water bottle to delay his hydration until the new water was cool enough.