“I don’t know. What are the options?” Cassy asked uncertainly.

  “The book listed a lot of stuff, but for basics – let me grab it, actually.” Danielle went over to her bed to grab the book, and read from a page she’d marked with a ribbon attached to the book’s spine. “OK, we don’t have infra- or ultra- vision colors. Magenta is listed as best for administrative and legal, which sounds boring, but it says ownership controls, so maybe not always. Red attracts healing and medical use stuff, but also sometimes weird hostile enhancements. Orange is best for barriers and resistances and anything stone themed. Yellow is best for mana resistance or Skill resistance – I guess that’s why citrine is popular for kids, Inside? Weird thought. Anyway, greens are good for enhancements that will buff the wearer different ways; the shade can matter.”

  Danielle paused to look at the jewelry in the box again. Each row was one color, all the way across the three panels: magenta, red, orange, an orangey yellow that looked a lot like citrine, a truer primary yellow followed by a bright primary green, a more nature-y olive green, cyan, sky blue, a darker primary blue, a perfect mana-violet that reminded her of the tomatoes and violet-needled pines, and a bolder purple at the bottom.

  “Looks like we don’t have the best color for Skill or Trait buffs either, but that can vary more than some categories anyhow, so you might as well take olive if that’s your goal,” Danielle continued her overview. “For physical buffs – like, say, to speed? Definitely the bright green. Also bright green for wind themed stuff for some reason. Um, let’s see, cyan is good if you want communication or connection-themed stuff. Blue is for invisibility, privacy and camouflage, so not the color for you, Cassy. Purple is best for volume and spatial control, so that’s reserved.”

  “Cool that there’s two whole rows of it, then,” Sadie said. “What would that shocking-weapon thing that whats-his-name got be?”

  “According to this, it’d be infracolor,” Danielle said. “Something called frahni, which is apparently a particular shade of infrared. The primary color groups chart lists two infrared colors and two ultraviolet colors.”

  “Huh. Do you think that’s what all these clear stones on the sending stuff are?” Akari asked.

  “Nah, colorless stones are neutral in terms of what kind of enhancements they can attract, so they probably gave us true colorless quartz for maximum potential. These,” Danielle gestured to the jewelry box, “are lab zircons, the book says they can’t be made true colorless because zirconia isn’t fully transparent across the whole expanded-visual spectrum.”

  “It’s part of why zirconia’s cheap,” Cassy said. “Quartz and lab-sapphire can both be made in the lab as true-colorless or pretty much whatever color they want. Ruby is just red sapphire, you know. I forget the real name of the mineral they are, but they’re harder, too, more durable. Sapphire and quartz are also both denser mana-attractors and that means zircons have to be bigger to support the same tier of enhancement.”

  “So we’ve got a whole lot of crystals, but they’re the lamest possible crystals?” Heather summed up.

  “Think positive – we’ve got a lovely set of practice crystals available, and we’re too low level ourselves to need anything better yet,” Danielle said.

  “I don’t know about need, we’re just too low level to make anything better yet,” Akari said ruefully. “I’ll take an orange ring from the men’s side, anyway. It looks like it’ll catch on stuff less, and it’ll leave the ones Danielle can work with best available for her.” She picked up a ring with an orange stone and diamonds etched into the band.

  “I’ll take red,” Heather said. “Is there one with plus-signs on it? Like the Healer’s cross symbol?”

  “This one?” Akari pointed.

  “I guess it could be, if they were all run together. Close enough, anyway.” Heather took it, and tried it on different fingers. “Kinda big. We might have to try to clip it anyway.”

  “Just string it on your necklace like another pendant,” Cassy suggested. “Are you OK with green, Sadie?”

  “Sure, I’m good with an increased chance of buffing jewelry,” Sadie said.

  “I think I’ll take a cyan ring,” Danielle said, choosing one with wavy-looking etchings. “Hm, you’re right, they’re kinda big. Anyone mind if I steal a chain from one of the necklaces?”

  “Nah, go ahead and take the chain of one of the purple ones you’re gonna use a different way anyhow,” Sadie said.

  “That sounds sensible,” Akari agreed, and Heather nodded.

  Danielle pulled the chain out of one side of a pair of bold purple “weeping broken heart” pendants, and threaded her chosen ring onto it.

  “OK, that’s settled,” she said, putting the new necklace into her pocket. “Now, let’s all get to bed! I don’t know about you girls, but I’m exhausted.”

  Everyone chuckled and started winding down for the night. It was a bit silly, maybe, but the new jewelry made a much more pleasant note to end the night on. Sadie and Akari walked Cassy to her room, just in case the Wolf boy was out looking for Danielle. Danielle put away the three boxes of rings and “sets” in her footlocker, for improved security. Heather washed out everyone else’s mugs, and got ahead of the others on tooth brushing and restroom using. The other three took their turns in the bathroom and at the sink as quickly as possible, and soon the lights were all off except the usual “night light” in the restroom. Akari got up just after the kitchen light was finally turned off, and made Danielle tell her the time so she could wind and set the alarm clock.

  Danielle lay staring into the dark while everyone else fell asleep (she thought, anyway). Visions of dead bodies and bloodthirsty giant cats and boys that called themselves wolves chased each other through her head, and the extra sword behind her footlocker weighed on her mind.

  At least an hour later, Danielle got up and sneaked across the room to where Akari’s sword lay across the top of her footlocker. She borrowed it, and fished the other sword out from behind her footlocker, and sneaked outside in her T-shirt, shorts, and sock-feet. Outside, she activated her Active Camouflage Skill, and crawled awkwardly up the retaining wall and out a few paces into the rain. There, she drew Akari’s sword, then put the other one into the magical cleansing sheath, drew it out, put it back in again for good measure. Then she put Akari’s sword back in its own sheath, and held the other up to the rain to wash the pommel, grip, and guard. Finally, thoroughly chilled but satisfied, she went back inside.

  She went into the bathroom, and wrung out her clothes into the bathtub drain, shivering and muttering to the System about how she needed a drying Skill for times like this. Then she dried the extra sword and the outside of Akari’s sheath with her wash cloth, and flushed the toilet just in case someone had noticed her being up. She wasn’t sure if there was any chance of actually fooling anyone that way – if anything, wouldn’t they have noticed her going out the door or coming back in? She was still carrying two swords, too. Too late to take it back, either way.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  She stepped back out and closed the bathroom door as far as she could without cutting off the light entirely, then sneaked back to the beds. She lay Akari’s sword back where she’d found it, then felt for the new scabbard by her own bed, and sheathed the sword before sliding it behind her footlocker again. Out of sight, out of mind; but at least now it was properly clean. It took Danielle some more time to shiver herself warm again under her light blanket, but this time she fell asleep once she warmed up.

  Morning, as usual, felt like it came far too soon. The alarm rang. Sadie got up and shut it off, and announced, “I’ve got breakfast today.” She turned on the kitchen light, and reached up on top of the cold box, only to bring down a mostly empty paper bag, rattling with wax fragments. “Wait, are we out of pemmican?” she exclaimed.

  “No, of course not,” Akari said from her bed. “We just finished up the open one last night. We can all chip some in if we want to keep doing pemmican for breakfast, or we can switch back to jerky, or we can go hard core and only eat dinner leftovers from now on.”

  “Let’s do jerky today,” Danielle said. “If that’s OK with everyone else. We might want to switch to dinner leftovers in general, but considering how last night’s dinner went I think jerky is called for.”

  “I can work with jerky,” Sadie said. “I want to use some of the hardtack from the tin that went with the pemmican, too. Any objections?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Heather mumbled.

  “Go for it,” Akari said. “I’m calling first shower.”

  “Thanks Sadie,” Danielle said. She stayed in bed, thinking over what she wanted to do for the day.

  Sadie ensured that no one was going to fall asleep again by getting out several discs of hardtack and pounding them vigorously in a frying pan. Heather groaned and covered her ears, but Danielle sighed and looked around near her bed. Sure enough, her journal had fallen off in her distraction the night before. She picked it up, and spent the time while Sadie was cooking writing an entry for each day so far, dating each of them and recording what they did, what food they ate, and any exceptional events like the vine fight and the wildcat incident. Of the fight in 1019, she wrote very little, but she did record her level-up details, including the crystal enhancements on her bag and staff.

  “OK, there,” she said, closing it in satisfaction. “My promise to Lydia and Eva is in progress, now, and I have the date. It may not be a wall calendar, but it’s a calendar.”

  Her System, to her exasperated amusement, promptly popped up a question: “Do you want to add a calendar to your Planner?” Danielle groaned aloud, then said, “Yes, add calendar.” She was prompted to name the calendar (“Level Monitoring”) and choose a format (“monthly”). It only took moments before she was staring at a ghostly calendar page, floating in her System Interface. She looked at the box for Sunday, June 3rd, and it highlighted, tracking her eyes. She tried blinking as she did to select other options in her visual interface, but it seemed to be as selected as it got. “Hm. Add note to selected day?” she tried.

  That worked, and she saw prompts for a Note Title and Note Comment. “Title: Danielle Level-up. Comment: Danielle leveled from base level 1 to 2,” she told it. The comment collapsed to a note in the date-box, showing just the title. Experimentation revealed that she could blink-select that to read the comment. “Exit calendar,” she told her System, and to her surprise, it collapsed to one side and joined a set of squares with labels under them, almost like the icons on the computers at school. One was labeled “Lists,” one was labeled “Calendar,” and one was labeled “Notes.”

  “Interesting,” Danielle said thoughtfully. Then, on impulse, she tried, “Add journal.” To her delight, a new square appeared with the label, “Journals.” Then she was prompted for the title of the journal, and said “Sending Journal.” The title was accepted, and the box for Journals expanded to fill her interface. Danielle picked up her physical journal, and opened it to the entry she’d just written for Decision Day. She held it up behind the ghostly journal in her interface, and told the system, “Copy this written entry to active journal.”

  It took a long moment, and Danielle starting to read the writing over, but her System got the idea and started adding a copy of the writing to her journal in her interface. “Yes, it’s working!” Danielle crowed. The process started to speed up, taking up the written text faster without waiting for her to focus on each word. It kept going when she turned the page, and stopped when it reached a date heading. “Perfect,” she said in satisfaction.

  “You training the System over there, Danielle?” Sadie asked.

  “Save and close,” Danielle told her System journal, continuing the imitation of the computer program it seemed to be vaguely referencing. That took her back to the icons, and she said, “Close Planner.” Her System interface finally closed entirely. “Excellent. Yeah, I’m learning more about Planner,” Danielle told Sadie. “I might have to work on better interface options again, though.”

  Sadie and Heather both groaned. “Not again – the last time you got on that, you kept babbling about it in every spare moment for almost a year!” Heather complained.

  Danielle laughed. “It’s not my fault you don’t appreciate my efforts to access my System quietly. Don’t worry, though, I can’t obsess over this all year. I’ve got bigger things to obsess over.”

  Sadie pulled a bag of jerky out of the Party supplies under the counter, reading the nutrition information on the back, then opened it and started cutting the jerky into smaller pieces. Akari came out of the shower, and Heather immediately took her place. Danielle re-activated Planner and copied the rest of her physical journal into the translucent pages of her mana-Trait journal. Then she put the physical journal away and pulled on her denim overclothes and a clean pair of socks.

  “What are you doing over there?” Akari asked suddenly.

  Danielle looked up to see what she was talking about, and found Akari watching Sadie with a frown. Turning to see, Danielle saw that Sadie had two frying pans over the camp stove, one upside down over the other as a sort of ill-fitting lid. Meanwhile, she was holding something close to the fire below with what looked like a pair of chopsticks.

  “I’m trying to make the hardtack softer by steaming it over the gravy,” Sadie said, “and while I’m waiting, I’m trying to soften up that necklace I want to reshape. It’s less wire-y than I was thinking when I first picked it. It might be more of a cut-out kind of shape, but I still think if I can get it hot enough and squeeze it hard enough, I should be able to make it more like teardrops facing two different ways and less like a broken heart."

  “Huh. Good luck with both of those, I guess,” Danielle said. “It might waste some hardtack if it doesn’t work, but if it does, it’ll be a great way to improve the hardtack when we need to.”

  “Yeah, and I think the sausage-gravy thing will work better with pemmican, but it should be OK with jerky too – not just any jerky will be equally good, but I found a package that I think will work out pretty well,” Sadie said. “If I’m right, and it comes out OK, then it’ll for sure be safe to try with pemmican later when we can’t just binge on tomatoes to make up for cooking gone wrong.”

  “We are going to have kind of a lot of pemmican,” Danielle agreed. “We might have to buy more hardtack to go with it, though. Unless we can figure out how to make it.”

  “Making more pemmican might be easier,” Akari said. “We just have to figure out how to start collecting the extra fat we need. It’s animal fat, though. We know how to get animal food, more or less. I’m not sure where we’d get flour for biscuits, though.”

  “Hm. I guess I’ll see if Food Preservation for Your First Winter has any advice on that,” Danielle said. She reached under her bed, where she’d stashed the books she was working with the day before when dinner time came. Pulling up the stack, she opened the book on food preservation and started scanning the table of contents.

  Cassy knocked on the door before breakfast was even ready. Heather was just coming out of the bathroom after her shower, and promptly activated her Skill and announced, “Not hostile!” before peeking out the door, then opening it fully to let Cassy in.

  “Good morning!” Akari said. “You’re early – did you have breakfast?”

  “Nope. Remember how I traded you my ring for a necklace last night?” Cassy said tensely.

  “Yeah?” Danielle said, her heart sinking just a bit at the tone.

  “My roommates noticed,” Cassy said. “Oh boy, did they notice.”

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2