Those first couple of days settled into a routine soon enough. John and I dragged rocks over from the cliff face to block off the cave. We used a slurry of mud and grass according to a recipe for primitive mortar I found on wikipedia to build it. Allison and Hunter went out scouting in the mornings, and managed to drag back a fair amount of seasoned firewood. Steve took charge of the food situation. He jerked a metric shit ton of bear meat, took over the chocoberry cane I brought, and rationed out a big bag of rice they’d brought along. Debbie and Jeri cleaned that foul cave, and focused on building a door for when the wall was finished. After two days of working sunup to sundown we finally got the notification that we created a Crude Keep. It didn’t come with an automatic level up like the rustic tenament we’d built before, but it racked up improvement points at 1 every 12 hours. We had limited experience with what the improvement points could be spent for, but two a day sounded like a good thing compared to our past buildings back in the village.

Putting in a safe home base took care of our communal effort though, and on the third day everyone was left to their own devices. They even had a meeting about it which I thought was excessive. In the end Debbie gave us all a day off, and tomorrow everyone would start splitting the day. Work till midday toward something for the company, then till dark doing your own thing. I was the exception in that I only worked for them on an as negotiated basis, but they had the use of my boat when I wasn’t actively using it. I got a couple dirty looks when folks realized I wasn’t going to be in the trenches but I figured that was their fault for agreeing to the less favorable terms. After the meeting Allison took off in her kayak to go explore, which seemed a little risky to go on her own but hey, she was an adult. Jeri and Hunter wandered off into the woods together, and I made a mental bet that they’d be building their own separate camp soon for the privacy it afforded. I trailed after John and Steve when it looked like they’d brought fishing gear.

“What are you planning on using as bait?’

John patted the pocket of his overalls, “Bear jerky, it ain’t like we don’t got plenty.”

Steve shook his head. “We need to dig up some worms. A functioning ecosystem requires detritivores, there will be worms or worm analogs in the soil. To go fishing you need to have worms.”

John shrugged and held up his hands in a surrender gesture. “Fine, we’ll apparently hunt for worms first. Steve here used to fish with his grandpa. You ever do much fishing, Jack?”

“Not really. I don’t have the patience and I’m not a huge fan of the taste. I’m actually along to talk business.”

“Debbie runs the business, Jack. Steve and I are just peons.”

“Peons can have a side-hustle, John. What’d you guys do back in the real world?”

“I’m a CPA and have my J.D. but I mostly just manage the family financial accounts and generate income through microtrades.”

I looked at Steve out of the corner of my eye. It sounded like he was some kind of day trader or stock broker which didn’t really fit my mental picture of him. Then John spoke up and I was comforted that stereotypes still held a degree of truth.

“I’m a farm manager, got a degree in agri-business. How bout you?”

“Sappers lead the way. I’m a combat engineer, or I was. I’d just demobbed and was going to go back to school. You interested in farming here?”

“Well, land is free for the taking, but without combines, tractors, hell even fertilizer you ain’t talking about farming. You’re talking about gardening at this tech level. I checked prices and it’s gonna be iffy getting the gear for even a truck garden.”

“Yeah, but the more capital you started with the easier it would be right? I’ll be honest with you, I bought seeds and that’s it. I don’t know enough to even know what else I would need to run a farm, but you do. I’ll kick in the seeds, help clearing the land, and some start up capital when we get back to the XP store. You supply the rest of the XP, the labor, and the knowledge. We split the produce.”

“Wow, you give me seeds and I give you half my crops after investing hours of manual labor and specialized skills? There ain’t been a sharecropper in my family in a couple of generations and I ain’t going back to it now. 5% of the crop for the first two harvests.”

“Cause farming in a place where you don’t know the weather patterns or soil chemistry is such a sure thing I’m not risking a damn thing by ponying up the credits. How bout 30% ongoing?”

“I’ll go 30 the first two, or 10 ongoing, contingent on you dumping in enough XP points I can get the equipment I need to make it viable, and I decide what’s viable. We can’t buy the stuff to succeed or there’s a drastic crop failure, you’re out your initial investment but I ain’t carrying any debt.”

“Sounds fair enough to me, shake on it?”

We shook hands while Steve dug for worms ignoring us. I wondered if John would bring Steve in on the deal but decided that was up to him, as I didn’t really have any need to cut a deal with a stock broker. I set out to go talk to the others, my early success inspiring me to expand my options on this rest day. I was in a good mood and whistling by the time I made it back up to the keep. Debbie looked up at me and smirked.

“You seem awfully cheerful, Jack. I was expecting that look on Hunter’s face when he came back, but wasn’t expecting that spring in your step.”

“You could put a smile on my face anytime you want, Debbie. For now I was in a good mood because I just bought into a farm with John. I’m looking forward to something to eat with vegetables in it, as strange as that is for me to say. What have you been up to?”

“Budding tycoon, huh, Jack? I’ve been working on this, and I think I’ve almost got it.” She showed me a slip-knot she’d tied in a line made of handwoven bark strips. With the crudity of the materials she was working with I was impressed at how well it worked.

“What’s it for?”

“Animal traps. Hunting is pretty labor intensive, going around and just clearing out traps would give us more bang for our buck.”

She had a valid point, but seemed disappointed when I told her deadfalls and figure four traps would be easier to make with the resources we had available. I flopped down next to where she was setting and carved a mouse size figure four from some kindling while she watched. She’d picked up a big ass bowie knife with a tiny handle at the XP store, and for the next while we both carved full size versions and talked shit to one another about our respective carving skills. Debbie had a pretty aggressive sense of humor, but it matched up pretty well with mine, and before I knew it a couple of hours had passed. Hunter and Jeri came back to camp carrying the carcass of some kind of pig.

According to Hunter it was aggressive as hell, but it looked a lot like a regular boar only with slightly bigger tusks and a row of spines on its back. When Jeri started talking about chunking it out into jerky like the bear I immediately spoke up for a smokehouse. I had visions of bacon and ham dancing in my head, and Hunter was fairly easy to convince. Jeri and Debbie took a little more eloquence, but Hunter and I got them on board. The smokehouse wasn’t the best I’d ever built, but it was efficient.

I dug a small but deep pit with a ditch leading up to it so we could feed the fire in the pit. The ladies lashed together a wooden rack to hold multiple layers of meat up above the hole and filled it with cuts from the boar. While Hunter and I ran up walls around the whole thing and threw branches over the top. It wouldn’t be water tight, and there was no way that it’d trap all the smoke that came up from the pit. The whole lack of a door was a giant pain in the ass, and we all agreed to take the time and build a real smokehouse later. Everyone was disappointed the structure didn’t trigger a prompt from the game, but we figured it was probably because it didn’t meet the required threshold to be considered a building. .Between what was left of the bear and the pig they’d just brought back, we needed something now though.

John and Steve came back with a stringer of fish at about the same time we lit the fire in our new smokehouse. John took over butchering out the hog, apparently we’d made a huge mistake by not scalding it first, although how he expected us to accomplish that with what we had available I have zero clue. Steve did something with the fish and rice in his stewpot, putting together some kind of Vietnamese concoction that left me eating bear jerky for today. Allison hadn’t come back yet, and I went out to do a little scouting of my own.

I made a half-hearted attempt to track Allison, but I lost her on the loose scree at the base of the wall. She was the one who’d gone out on her own, and if it had been a man I probably would have turned around and given up on it then. I was a little too old school for that so I kept on in the same general heading she’d taken, hoping I’d get close enough I could hear her call out if she’d broken a leg or something. I came across a tuft of green fur snagged on some brush, and a little further I saw wolf scat. I took the time to cinch my bag around out of the way and limber up with the axe in my hand.

I’m no expert, but it looked like they had passed through at some point today, and I had a feeling they would have picked up Allison’s scent and been able to track her even if I couldn’t. I cocked the axe up in the ready position and proceeded on like that instead of carrying it with the head balanced on my shoulder like I had been. Every fraction of a second mattered if I caught up to them before I expected to. I was trying to move stealthily, so it was a bit of a surprise when I heard Allison’s voice call out to me.

“Hey, Jack, you’re here. Awesome, I could use a hand here.”

She seemed awfully calm for a damsel in distress and I relaxed as I walked forward into a clearing. There were a half dozen wolves lying dead in the clearing and Allison was struggling to haul one up into the air by a length of 550 cord wrapped around it’s hind legs. I gave a low whistle while I walked over and heaved on the line so she could tie it off.

“So looks like you went to town on a wolf pack all by yourself, I’m impressed.”

“I wouldn’t have tried it alone if I’d had a choice, but thankfully they’re stupid. They ran me up a tree and then just milled around underneath it. Not a smart choice once I put my machete away and got my bow out.”

She started field dressing the wolf while she talked, and I’m pretty sure she was better at it than I was, or at least faster. She had one of those plastic game zipper hooked knives in neon pink trim and I grinned when I saw it.

“I take it you spent a lot of time hunting back in the real world?”

“I worked at Outdoor Adventure every summer all through college. I’ve guided more backpacking trips than you could possibly imagine. Not expecting that from a girl?”

I looked at her jeans and t-shirt, focusing on her relatively flat chest.

“Holy shit, you’re a girl? I could have sworn you were just a dude with a man bun.”

She stopped what she was doing to give me the finger before she went back to peeling the hide off the wolf. I stopped her when it looked like she was going to butcher out the whole thing.

“We’re smoking the rest of the bear, and Hunter and Jeri brought back a couple hundred pounds of hog. No way we’ll get to the rest of this meat before it spoils.”

She made a sound that was somewhere between a growl and a sigh and stepped back from the corpse.

“I really do hate to waste all this. It just seems wrong.”

“Since the other option was you becoming puppy chow I imagine you’ll get over it. Since we’re gonna be short on vitamins, I suggest you take the livers, and if you’re gonna tan the hides we’ll need brains too.”

“Super, you can have one of ‘em if you help.”

“Sounds like a deal.”

I went around cracking wolf skulls because my axe was better suited to it while she untied the first wolf and retrieved her line. When it was just a matter of skinning them out we processed the rest of the animals on the ground. The brains got tossed into a pile on one of the skins, and the livers another. We paper rock scissored on who had to carry the brain sack because it was a lot gooier, and when I lost we headed back towards camp. When we made it to the keep, Allison told her story while she started cleaning her hides and I headed down to the lake to get cleaned up. At that point the light had started to fade and we drew lots for watch duty before everyone settled in to their own devices. I spent my time researching early settlements on Wikipedia and drifted off to sleep while still planning for the next day.

Those first couple of days settled into a routine soon enough. John and I dragged rocks over from the cliff face to block off the cave. We used a slurry of mud and grass according to a recipe for primitive mortar I found on wikipedia to build it. Allison and Hunter went out scouting in the mornings, and managed to drag back a fair amount of seasoned firewood. Steve took charge of the food situation. He jerked a metric shit ton of bear meat, took over the chocoberry cane I brought, and rationed out a big bag of rice they’d brought along. Debbie and Jeri cleaned that foul cave, and focused on building a door for when the wall was finished. After two days of working sunup to sundown we finally got the notification that we created a Crude Keep. It didn’t come with an automatic level up like the rustic tenament we’d built before, but it racked up improvement points at 1 every 12 hours. We had limited experience with what the improvement points could be spent for, but two a day sounded like a good thing compared to our past buildings back in the village.

Putting in a safe home base took care of our communal effort though, and on the third day everyone was left to their own devices. They even had a meeting about it which I thought was excessive. In the end Debbie gave us all a day off, and tomorrow everyone would start splitting the day. Work till midday toward something for the company, then till dark doing your own thing. I was the exception in that I only worked for them on an as negotiated basis, but they had the use of my boat when I wasn’t actively using it. I got a couple dirty looks when folks realized I wasn’t going to be in the trenches but I figured that was their fault for agreeing to the less favorable terms. After the meeting Allison took off in her kayak to go explore, which seemed a little risky to go on her own but hey, she was an adult. Jeri and Hunter wandered off into the woods together, and I made a mental bet that they’d be building their own separate camp soon for the privacy it afforded. I trailed after John and Steve when it looked like they’d brought fishing gear.

“What are you planning on using as bait?’

John patted the pocket of his overalls, “Bear jerky, it ain’t like we don’t got plenty.”

Steve shook his head. “We need to dig up some worms. A functioning ecosystem requires detritivores, there will be worms or worm analogs in the soil. To go fishing you need to have worms.”

John shrugged and held up his hands in a surrender gesture. “Fine, we’ll apparently hunt for worms first. Steve here used to fish with his grandpa. You ever do much fishing, Jack?”

“Not really. I don’t have the patience and I’m not a huge fan of the taste. I’m actually along to talk business.”

“Debbie runs the business, Jack. Steve and I are just peons.”

“Peons can have a side-hustle, John. What’d you guys do back in the real world?”

“I’m a CPA and have my J.D. but I mostly just manage the family financial accounts and generate income through microtrades.”

I looked at Steve out of the corner of my eye. It sounded like he was some kind of day trader or stock broker which didn’t really fit my mental picture of him. Then John spoke up and I was comforted that stereotypes still held a degree of truth.

“I’m a farm manager, got a degree in agri-business. How bout you?”

“Sappers lead the way. I’m a combat engineer, or I was. I’d just demobbed and was going to go back to school. You interested in farming here?”

“Well, land is free for the taking, but without combines, tractors, hell even fertilizer you ain’t talking about farming. You’re talking about gardening at this tech level. I checked prices and it’s gonna be iffy getting the gear for even a truck garden.”

“Yeah, but the more capital you started with the easier it would be right? I’ll be honest with you, I bought seeds and that’s it. I don’t know enough to even know what else I would need to run a farm, but you do. I’ll kick in the seeds, help clearing the land, and some start up capital when we get back to the XP store. You supply the rest of the XP, the labor, and the knowledge. We split the produce.”

“Wow, you give me seeds and I give you half my crops after investing hours of manual labor and specialized skills? There ain’t been a sharecropper in my family in a couple of generations and I ain’t going back to it now. 5% of the crop for the first two harvests.”

“Cause farming in a place where you don’t know the weather patterns or soil chemistry is such a sure thing I’m not risking a damn thing by ponying up the credits. How bout 30% ongoing?”

“I’ll go 30 the first two, or 10 ongoing, contingent on you dumping in enough XP points I can get the equipment I need to make it viable, and I decide what’s viable. We can’t buy the stuff to succeed or there’s a drastic crop failure, you’re out your initial investment but I ain’t carrying any debt.”

“Sounds fair enough to me, shake on it?”

We shook hands while Steve dug for worms ignoring us. I wondered if John would bring Steve in on the deal but decided that was up to him, as I didn’t really have any need to cut a deal with a stock broker. I set out to go talk to the others, my early success inspiring me to expand my options on this rest day. I was in a good mood and whistling by the time I made it back up to the keep. Debbie looked up at me and smirked.

“You seem awfully cheerful, Jack. I was expecting that look on Hunter’s face when he came back, but wasn’t expecting that spring in your step.”

“You could put a smile on my face anytime you want, Debbie. For now I was in a good mood because I just bought into a farm with John. I’m looking forward to something to eat with vegetables in it, as strange as that is for me to say. What have you been up to?”

“Budding tycoon, huh, Jack? I’ve been working on this, and I think I’ve almost got it.” She showed me a slip-knot she’d tied in a line made of handwoven bark strips. With the crudity of the materials she was working with I was impressed at how well it worked.

“What’s it for?”

“Animal traps. Hunting is pretty labor intensive, going around and just clearing out traps would give us more bang for our buck.”

She had a valid point, but seemed disappointed when I told her deadfalls and figure four traps would be easier to make with the resources we had available. I flopped down next to where she was setting and carved a mouse size figure four from some kindling while she watched. She’d picked up a big ass bowie knife with a tiny handle at the XP store, and for the next while we both carved full size versions and talked shit to one another about our respective carving skills. Debbie had a pretty aggressive sense of humor, but it matched up pretty well with mine, and before I knew it a couple of hours had passed. Hunter and Jeri came back to camp carrying the carcass of some kind of pig.

According to Hunter it was aggressive as hell, but it looked a lot like a regular boar only with slightly bigger tusks and a row of spines on its back. When Jeri started talking about chunking it out into jerky like the bear I immediately spoke up for a smokehouse. I had visions of bacon and ham dancing in my head, and Hunter was fairly easy to convince. Jeri and Debbie took a little more eloquence, but Hunter and I got them on board. The smokehouse wasn’t the best I’d ever built, but it was efficient.

I dug a small but deep pit with a ditch leading up to it so we could feed the fire in the pit. The ladies lashed together a wooden rack to hold multiple layers of meat up above the hole and filled it with cuts from the boar. While Hunter and I ran up walls around the whole thing and threw branches over the top. It wouldn’t be water tight, and there was no way that it’d trap all the smoke that came up from the pit. The whole lack of a door was a giant pain in the ass, and we all agreed to take the time and build a real smokehouse later. Everyone was disappointed the structure didn’t trigger a prompt from the game, but we figured it was probably because it didn’t meet the required threshold to be considered a building. .Between what was left of the bear and the pig they’d just brought back, we needed something now though.

John and Steve came back with a stringer of fish at about the same time we lit the fire in our new smokehouse. John took over butchering out the hog, apparently we’d made a huge mistake by not scalding it first, although how he expected us to accomplish that with what we had available I have zero clue. Steve did something with the fish and rice in his stewpot, putting together some kind of Vietnamese concoction that left me eating bear jerky for today. Allison hadn’t come back yet, and I went out to do a little scouting of my own.

I made a half-hearted attempt to track Allison, but I lost her on the loose scree at the base of the wall. She was the one who’d gone out on her own, and if it had been a man I probably would have turned around and given up on it then. I was a little too old school for that so I kept on in the same general heading she’d taken, hoping I’d get close enough I could hear her call out if she’d broken a leg or something. I came across a tuft of green fur snagged on some brush, and a little further I saw wolf scat. I took the time to cinch my bag around out of the way and limber up with the axe in my hand.

I’m no expert, but it looked like they had passed through at some point today, and I had a feeling they would have picked up Allison’s scent and been able to track her even if I couldn’t. I cocked the axe up in the ready position and proceeded on like that instead of carrying it with the head balanced on my shoulder like I had been. Every fraction of a second mattered if I caught up to them before I expected to. I was trying to move stealthily, so it was a bit of a surprise when I heard Allison’s voice call out to me.

“Hey, Jack, you’re here. Awesome, I could use a hand here.”

She seemed awfully calm for a damsel in distress and I relaxed as I walked forward into a clearing. There were a half dozen wolves lying dead in the clearing and Allison was struggling to haul one up into the air by a length of 550 cord wrapped around it’s hind legs. I gave a low whistle while I walked over and heaved on the line so she could tie it off.

“So looks like you went to town on a wolf pack all by yourself, I’m impressed.”

“I wouldn’t have tried it alone if I’d had a choice, but thankfully they’re stupid. They ran me up a tree and then just milled around underneath it. Not a smart choice once I put my machete away and got my bow out.”

She started field dressing the wolf while she talked, and I’m pretty sure she was better at it than I was, or at least faster. She had one of those plastic game zipper hooked knives in neon pink trim and I grinned when I saw it.

“I take it you spent a lot of time hunting back in the real world?”

“I worked at Outdoor Adventure every summer all through college. I’ve guided more backpacking trips than you could possibly imagine. Not expecting that from a girl?”

I looked at her jeans and t-shirt, focusing on her relatively flat chest.

“Holy shit, you’re a girl? I could have sworn you were just a dude with a man bun.”

She stopped what she was doing to give me the finger before she went back to peeling the hide off the wolf. I stopped her when it looked like she was going to butcher out the whole thing.

“We’re smoking the rest of the bear, and Hunter and Jeri brought back a couple hundred pounds of hog. No way we’ll get to the rest of this meat before it spoils.”

She made a sound that was somewhere between a growl and a sigh and stepped back from the corpse.

“I really do hate to waste all this. It just seems wrong.”

“Since the other option was you becoming puppy chow I imagine you’ll get over it. Since we’re gonna be short on vitamins, I suggest you take the livers, and if you’re gonna tan the hides we’ll need brains too.”

“Super, you can have one of ‘em if you help.”

“Sounds like a deal.”

I went around cracking wolf skulls because my axe was better suited to it while she untied the first wolf and retrieved her line. When it was just a matter of skinning them out we processed the rest of the animals on the ground. The brains got tossed into a pile on one of the skins, and the livers another. We paper rock scissored on who had to carry the brain sack because it was a lot gooier, and when I lost we headed back towards camp. When we made it to the keep, Allison told her story while she started cleaning her hides and I headed down to the lake to get cleaned up. At that point the light had started to fade and we drew lots for watch duty before everyone settled in to their own devices. I spent my time researching early settlements on Wikipedia and drifted off to sleep while still planning for the next day.