As I started to move towards the exit path to the CRAFTING stations, Sarge stopped me again.

“One more thing, Tom,” he said, “that damage you did using that staff? Don’t count on that when you leave the BEGINNER TUTORIAL and go back to your world; I don’t know what exactly you did, and I don’t really care, but just like the wards are in place to empower protections, they’re also in place to empower you guys’ strikes.”

Seeing my look of confusion, the added, “we want you to grow and develop, but mostly, we want you to survive. I know you’ve been a soldier before, back in your old life, so you ought to know the role that confidence plays in survival. We want you to feel confident so that you can better survive.”

“Then, why are you telling me this, now?” I asked, perplexed, “aren’t you worried that it will undermine my confidence?”

“Well,” he allowed, “there’s lack of confidence, and then there’s overconfidence. It’s a tossup as to which is more dangerous.”

I looked at him for a moment, considering, and then gave him a nod. “Thanks, Sa .. Alonso.” I waved my hand vaguely about to indicate the whole area, “for everything.”

He nodded understanding, and I moved off towards the exit path, the others having already disappeared into the gloom of the forest.

The jungle presses in on every side, the heat is beyond oppressive. I know what a piece of coal feels like, I think, when it’s being made into a diamond. Except no diamonds are being made here, today. I can feel the pricks of insect legs marching up the small of my back as if I hadn’t secured all the openings in my fatigues with duct tape and bandanas. A flash of movement to my right and I bring my snooper scope to bear on a pair of snakes locked in mortal combat. I lower it from my eye and there’s enough starlight creeping through the trees to highlight the bright red head that gives the venomous krait its name. The snake on which it feasts already dead, if only its body had the sense to know, wraps and unwraps ineffectually around its devourer.

Getting my head back in the game, I put the scope back to one eye and return my attention to the group of huts huddled in the center of the primitively fenced clearing. Pivoting one heel on the toe of a boot, I nudge Sparky and I hear the dull double click as he sends static over the radio to signal that we’re in place. There’s no returning nudge; we’ve been huddled here in this humid hell long enough that I know what that means. We all know what that means; we’re on our own, one squad short a Second Luey whose chute didn’t open on the way down facing, best guess, a platoon of 'Cong guarding their makeshift POW camp that they think we don’t know about, loopholed out of the so-called Peace Accords into Cambodia.

A bright bloom as one of the ‘Cong sweeps a flashlight in a desultory manner my way sends a sharp spike of pain into my eye. I pull the scope away and shut that one, and open my other eye, it’s night-vision unhindered. A sharp curse from another of them and the flashlight blinks off. So, there’s at least two of them awake and alert. I know what that means: Worst Case Scenario. If we find we can’t complete the mission, call in a strike and exfiltrate. We’ve all heard the horror stories from returned POWs, we know if it were us down there, we’d all rather be dead than left. I know it. My squad knows it.

I belly crawl back like the krait, and the others press closer, so they can hear my barely voiced decision. “Butter didn’t make it, I don’t know what’s happened to the rest of the platoon, but it’s been long enough that they’d be here if they were going to, so that leaves the seven of us against maybe up to 50 of them. At least two actives.”

“You want I should call it?” Sparky breathes.

“No,” I say, pulling out my combat knife, “I want you to wait here while me and Bledsoe take care of the two actives. I’ll see if I can work my way down under the nearest hut. Bledsoe, you work your way east and come in behind the other one. How long you figure?”

Bledsoe doesn’t even have to think about it, he’s already done the math. “20 minutes. 30 at the outside.”

“Okay, let’s make it 45 minutes, while the rest of you work your way around to the big hut on the far side.” We all uncover the faintly luminescent faces of our watches. “Mark. Pop, you got the makin’s; you know what to do. We’ll meet you there after we take care of the actives. Hopefully, the rest will be holed up for the night and we can shake’n bake’m all at once. Sparks, you wait here and call in a FUBAR, but don’t jump the gun. They got numbers, but we got style.” I grin. “We got this.”

No one has anything to add. Bledsoe’s already gone; nobody moves better in the jungle than he does. I nod at Sparky and meet each one’s eyes, and then I’m slithering off too. On the way, I pass the two snakes. The one’s almost figured out it’s dead, and I wonder if it’s an omen; if I’m dead too, but just ain’t figured it out, yet.

I stumble over nothing on the well-trodden path as the past lets me go. I stop for a moment to let the last foggy fingers clear, and I have a moment of, I don’t know what to call it, reverse déjà vu maybe? Was that really me? I wondered, Was I ever there? How would I even know?

I shake my head at the non-sequitur. Where did that thought come from? Have I become one of those time-waster philosophers in my old age? I let out a plosive breath at the nonsense of that. I could see light up ahead, the memory had taken me almost all the way to the next clearing. Giving my whole body a shake, I started walking again.

When I reached the CRAFTING section, there was nobody there to greet me. I saw the rest of my former group scattered about the four stations, already finding out what we were there to learn. On the far side of the small clearing, I could see the Blue Man tapping a wooden mallet on a nail or something. Maybe an awl. It looked like he was punching holes in a belt. I vaguely recalled doing something similar in scouts when I was a kid. Nearby, the elf girl knelt scraping the hair off of one of the rat skins that she’d stretched across a crudely-bult frame using a draw knife to get down to the leather. Counter-clockwise from there, the kid was scraping the bark off of a log with a similar knife, while one of the gnomes stood farther out at the edge of the clearing swinging an axe at the base of a sapling. The kid saw me looking and gave me a smiling thumbs up before turning back to his stump.

The two elf guys were on my side of the clearing opposite the woodworking station, peeking into a large stew pot which hung over the coals of a fire. A human woman was speaking to them while she sprinkled something—probably some spice or other—into the pot.

Nearest me, just past the mouth of the path, was what had to be a smithy. There was a beehive shaped smelter with smoke billowing out the hole in the top and mixing with the smoke from the forge that butted up to its side. A bed of glowing coals pointed like a finger from the front of that towards an anvil where the other gnome was making a valiant attempt at hammering the reddened end of an iron rod. A Blue Man, just like the one from our group, straightened up from where he’d been correcting the gnome’s hammer blows, and beckoned me over. Not having any real direction, I went.

“Greetings, trainee. This is the SMITHING station. There are also COOKING, TAILORING, and WOODWORKING stations available. If you have a preference, you are free to go directly to that station, but all trainees are welcome to learn enough to get a basic SKILL and its associated ABILITIES at each station.” He said with a smile.

“I don’t really have a preference, though I suppose it would be wise of me to learn COOKING, at a minimum,” I answered. “I think I’ll take you up on the offer and learn something of each.”

He nodded in agreement and to my surprise, handed me a pick, and indicated a small path that led off at a diagonal from the one by which I had entered. “If you follow that path, you’ll come to a mine. The first part of SMITHING is finding the ores. Now, this is a training mine, so don’t expect to find all different kinds of ores in one mine out in the world, but it is possible to find more than one kind, and even some gems, if you’re lucky. Anyway, enter the mine and follow the lanterns that we’ve hung, and near each one you’ll find a different type of ore. SCHEMA will alert you of what kind of ore you’ve found, how much is requried to learn the SKILL, and also when you’ve earned the MINING ABILITY.

To earn the SMITHING skill, you need to first learn the MINING, SMELTING, and FORGING ABILITIES at least to 1%. While you’ll be able to refine and work all of the metals here in training, you’ll have to build up your ABILITY percentages before you can move from tin and copper, say, to bronze and iron. Do you have any questions before you go?”

“I always hated when someone asked that, like in an interview for a type of job you’d never done before. Sure, there were probably a million things I needed to ask about, but I was too ignorant to know.

“No, I guess I’ll just figure it out as I go.” I answered, and he grinned in sympathy.

“Just put the ore you mine into your CRAFTING INVENTORY until you’ve got samples of at least tin, copper, and iron. There’s also some silver, gold, and gems, in there too. There’s no time limit on learning these SKILLS and ABILITIES, so you can take as long or as short a time as you please. The only thing you need to keep in mind is that no matter how much you improve, you won’t be able to raise any of your ABILITIES over 1% in the training areas, so nobody will blame you if you want to make things quick and get out in the real world to start earning real-world SKILLS, ABILIITES, and EXPERIENCE points. Any of the precious metals or gems you find are yours to keep, though, so keep that in mind, as well.”

I nodded my understanding and moved off down the indicated path. On the way, I thought about the information he’d given me. From what SCHEMA had told me before, I guessed that most normal people wanted to get right to work earning EXPERIENCE points and raising their ABILITIES, but I was never one to want normal. I might lose a lot of EXPERIENCE if I took a long time, but I might also get myself a good nest egg that would give me a significant advantage in starting my new life.

I guess I’ll just play it by ear and see how things go. If mining is as difficult as I think it will be, taking a long time trying to find gold or diamonds might end up being worse than just grabbing the basics and moving on.

After I had gone perhaps 50 yards down the slightly curving path, I came to a place where retreating glaciation had left a small, U shaped valley. The forest completely surrounded the valley on top of exposed rocky ledges. Near the center of the valley, I could see the dark, wood-framed opening that had to be the mine. Nobody else was about, and the eerie quiet of the forest made my skin prickle with the feel of being watched.

Shaking off the willies, I quickly crossed the valley and entered the mine. I could see the lanterns the Blue Man had told me about strung like colored glass beads along the straight tunnel that stretched before me. The first lantern, nearest the entrance shone a white light, followed by the blue-green glow of the next in line, then a red one farther in, and a yellow-gold one in the distance just where the shaft took a turn or maybe dropped out of sight.

I moved over to the first lantern and studied the rock face in an effort to see if I could discern what I had always imagined a vein of ore to look like. After a while, I decided that I had no idea how to go about telling ore from rock, but logic said if I just started using the pick anywhere in the area illuminated by the lantern, I would eventually find something. With a shrug, I firmed both hands in what I hoped to be a good grip on the long shaft of the pick and swung the sharp end at the rock.

The tip buried itself a disappointing inch or so into the rock face, but I figured I’d get better at it as I went along and pulled it out effortlessly and swung again.

And again.

And again.

I figure it took me about 10 tries before I finally got a notification that I’d hit something.

CONGRATULATIONS! You have discovered a tin deposit!

It took a few more swings in the same general area, but finally a chunk of ore about the size of my fist dropped to the ground. I bent over and when my hand touched it I got another notification:

Tin ore 1 of 5

Huh. I guess that means I need four more of these before I have enough to learn to SMELT it.

Digging out the next four chunks wasn’t as hard as it probably should have been. At about number 3, I'd finally been able to tell the tin from the surrounding rocks, which sped things up a bit. Still, by the time I put the last one in my CRAFTING INVENTORY, I was worn enough that I needed a break and a good pull at the water bottle from my starting INVENTORY. I wondered how much of my STAMINA it had used, and in the thinking of it, a small bar appeared in the middle of the upper part of my vision. It looked like a long tube about halfway full of green color. As I watched, the color advanced a tiny fraction.

I guess that’s a meter that lets me know how much STAMINA I have, judging by the color. That made me think of my other pools, and with a thought two more bar meters appeared; both were full, a red one that I took for my LIFE pool on the left, and a blue one I took to be my MANA to the right. Playing around with them, I figured out how to make them translucent enough that they didn’t block my sight, but were clear enough to take in at a glance.

By then, the STAMINA bar was completely green, and I felt as energetic as I had before I began, so I stood up, slotted my water bottle back into my INVENTORY, and moved on to the green colored lantern.

The next area was for copper ore, which was about the same difficulty as finding and mining the tin, except that it required ten chunks instead of five. After that, it was on to the red lantern which turned out to be iron (another 10 chunks) which was quite a bit more difficult than copper and tin, and after that, gold (no number appeared for that, I guessed it was because anything else I found was optional.) I took little breaks to let my STAMINA refill as I went, but the whole process became easier as I got a few stat bump notifications[i],[ii],[iii],[iv] and finally by the 10th chunk of iron ore, my MINING ABILITY[v]

When that happened, I looked on down the line to the yellow lamp, and saw that the shaft took a steepish drop to the next lamp which was a silvery blue color, followed by one that looked like its shade was made of a prism, casing out multi-colored lights like a rainbow. These were, in order, gold, silver, and gems, I guessed.

I took stock. I’d gained the MINING ABILITY and mined three basic types of ore. I had all I needed to go back and learn SMITHING, but maybe that yellow lantern shining beckoningly at me had given me a touch of gold fever, and I realized I didn’t want to stop. I looked back towards where I could see daylight shining through the entrance to the mine. For the first time, I really missed not having a watch. I hiked the short distance out and tried to figure the time of day from the position of the sun.

I knew I had taken a good half a day or more on the INFORMATION section of the BEGINNER TUTORIAL, and surely the COMBAT section had taken most of the afternoon. By all rights, it should be evening by now, but near as I could tell, it still looked like mid-afternoon. I wondered how that worked, but in the end, I decided that I didn’t have enough information to figure it out.

I looked across the valley to the path leading back to the CRAFTING section. It was the only way out of the small valley, if you didn’t count climbing the rock walls, and the faint glow of the path made it impossible to get lost.

Besides, I thought, if it gets dark, I can always borrow one of the lanterns.

I decided to indulge my inner greed, at least until it got dark, then I’d rethink things. If I grew hungry, there was plenty of extra wood supports scattered along the shaft for firewood, the lanterns supplied flame, and I still had plenty of rat meat that hadn’t needed the COOKING SKILL to learn when we cooked it the first time.

With that thought, I turned and made my way back into the mine.

[i] CONGRATULATIONS! +1 STRENGTH

[ii] CONGRATULATIONS! +1 STRENGTH

[iii] CONGRATULATIONS! +1 CONSTITUTION

[iv] CONGRATULATIONS! +1 DEXTERITY

[v] CONGRATULATIONS! You have learned the ABILITY MINING