Chapter 10
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New body, old habits.
I have not picked up my axe from Austin.
Or spoken to Lazul.
Or learned how to fish.
These past few days, I’ve not done much of anything, really.
I spent the rest of my first week here wrestling with my brain and fighting an anxiety that stuck in my lungs like glue.
When Sunday rolled around, I forced myself to get up, clean up, and head to town, because the Sunday after the first day of Spring—or the day the player enters the game—is when Mimet the traveling merchant shows up with her cart of goodies, a random loot table of excellent wares, and an inventory upgrade.
I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to see what was available and account for discrepancies in the pricing I’m familiar with so I could budget going forward.
I got nowhere close to her cart.
In the game, when Mimet comes to Gem Ridge, the townies stand motionless on the street for a few hours, then go about their day.
With the realism mod, everyone except Samson trucked their wares out to Mimet’s cart, bartered for goods, bought, sold, placed orders, chatted, laughed, thoroughly embraced the social event with unparalleled vigor.
I froze on the outskirts of the chaos, terrified that someone might spot me.
So, promptly, I abandoned my delusions of grandeur and went back to bed.
The harrowing experience was a cruel reminder that I am not confident in realistic settings. I am a barely functional person relying solely on the mentality that I’m playing a game. Without predictable cutscenes, I’m lost if I have to deal with more than two people at a time.
To be fair to the people of Gem Ridge, I have to treat them like real people with depth and feelings and more ideas than a few hundred lines of scripted text can convey.
To survive, I can’t do that.
To even broach a possibility of being with Samson, I need to break the mold of the script I’ve learned.
But how am I supposed to be that brave? I feel like I could swallow my own tongue at any moment when I picture making a fool of myself in front of someone who can hate me. In front of someone who isn’t programmed to continue liking me more so long as I just keep being…a pest.
I wasn’t built for people.
I was built for trekking through forage lands with a bad axe, gathering anything I can find, and shoving my quarry into the hoard of chests I’m accumulating. I can live like a recluse. I can be with Samson in spirit, each of us despising human interaction safely within our own homes.
This is fine.
I’ve made my farmhouse somewhat cozy with its five random chests, a table, and a chair.
I eat my sad, uncooked, foraged meals in that chair.
Why, just yesterday, I found the pear trees that bear fruit in early spring, so I sat myself down and crunched through three too-ripe ones for dinner. It was great. Who needs ambitions and dreams?
Honestly, the worst part—outside the crippling self-doubt and loathing—is the Samson withdrawals.
Staring at his picture in my journal and tracing the slew of question marks below his name is the only comfort I get each day before the sun sets fully and I have to go to bed because I feel too guilty to use the light Aurelia left me with now that I’m a useless member of society.
It’s only a matter of time before Lazul evicts me.
The dread of wondering how long I have before such a thing happens is my sole companion. Alongside other dreads, of course. Like what I’ll do if I make it to winter without warm clothes or any idea how to start a fire.
Right clicking the furnace in game to make it woosh to life is such a luxury.
I miss the simple pleasures.
The simple breakdowns.
I couldn’t care less about how I wound up here. I never once asked why I existed in the other world. I just did. And it sucked. Because I existed in Florida.
Stupid Florida.
Stupid astigmatism.
I bet it’s the reason I’m trapped in bed this morning instead of out foraging under the false assumption that if I can just get enough sunlight, I’ll be okay again.
Staring up at the blurry rafters, I blame everything on the incorrect shape of my eyeballs.
Logic demands it has never once been reasonable to cry about how Samson will never love me, even though now social anxiety paired with general stupidity are the only things holding me back.
Not, like, the fact he was a video game character before, thus making any romantic approach thoroughly impossible and stuff.
One of these hours, I will drag myself upright and water my garden before tramping off into forageable territory where no one else goes.
I’ll berate myself on every opportunity I’m losing while taking comfort from not missing out on Spring forageables.
I need enough to last through the rest of the seasons.
Assuming the stuff won’t rot in my chest collection.
Truly, who knows what the realism mod will thrust on me next. Best-by dates? What a joke.
Reality has been nothing but a raging disappointment from the moment I was born.
Anyway…what are the logistics behind a four-season year with only twenty-eight days in each? How fast is this world spinning around the sun? What do star charts look like?
Maybe Slate could tell me.
You know.
If I ever speak to anybody ever again.
I press my palms to my face and, once more, curse the absence of a shipping bin. If I could just tuck my goods in there to make money, maybe I could sneak requests for things into other people’s mail boxes. Really flip the script on them with a:
Wanted
Fish and Chips
Note: leave at door, knock, money enclosed.
Thanks.
- Citrus
Sadly, expecting the prim and proper lord of Gem Ridge to lug things out of a box on my property in the dead of the night every day is absolutely insane.
I blame one hundred percent of my distress on having retained my astigmatism.
Why did I give my sweet little character super cute glasses?
What is wrong with my brain? You know, apart from the obvious, which is that clearly Dr. Doofenshmirtz made it and installed a self-destruct button, that I keep pressing.
While I’m humming the Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated theme, a solid knock on my door sends my heart careening into my throat.
I only gulp it back down when a gruff, “I know you’re in there,” follows.
Samson.
Samson.
Here? Now? Why?
Pitter patters consume me, and I recall that I am a mess, and my house is a mess, and I don’t even know how to properly bathe, much less wash my clothes or sheets.
I exist in squalor. I’m a pathetic peasant who can’t take care of herself, and he’s a mature adult who takes care of not only himself but also a bunch of animals.
“I’m coming in.”
Shoving my glasses on my face, I launch to my feet just in time for Samson to open my door, see me and my slew of chests, and balk.
My throat tightens. “I…hello.”
“…hi.”
I wet my lips. “I…am a hoarder.”
“I can see that.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“Why are you apologizing?”
“I…” Tears choke me. “I don’t know.”
He swipes a hand down his mouth as his gaze skims my slew of item receptacles again. “What do you do when you get a new chest? Just drop it wherever?”
In my defense, they are heavy, and I have to dump them out of my backpack, which is very stupid, awkward, not-exactly-game design. I’d write the dev, but, well, the last thing I need to do is peeve off God. I sniffle. “Maybe?”
“Are they even organized?” He pins me with a deafeningly serious expression. “At all?”
I bite my lip. “No…”
He blows out a breath.
Cowering, I whisper, “Why are you here?”
“Hadn’t seen you for days.” He angles himself in the middle of the two chests nearest the door, looking between them. “Got worried.”
Worried? About me?
It’s tempting to hope that means something, but I’m almost positive the only emotion this man has felt toward me has been disconcerting concern mixed with distrust. He was worried that I’d skipped out, like he threatened me not to do. That’s all.
He cuts his fingers through his dark hair. “Why are all five of your chests set up like a sloppy triangle? None of them are even centered with each other. How did you do this? Why did you do this?”
Because.
Because I am a failure, Samson.
That’s why.
My lip juts.
His eye twitches. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Please…please don’t cry.”
“I’m a failure,” I croak.
“No. No, you aren’t. You’re just…”
I collapse against my pillow. “I don’t need your kind words.”
Heavy footfalls ease toward me, and the next thing I know, Samson’s crouching at my bedside, bracing his tattooed arms atop his knees. “Good. I can’t think of a kind way to ask whether or not you’re having a nervous breakdown.”
Several consecutive hollow laughs escape me. “Don’t be ridiculous. This is just my astigmatism.”
“Mm,” he rumbles. “I see.”
“Good for you. I can’t.”
He exhales a humored puff. “Okay, Orange Juice. Talk to me.”
My thoughts stagger. Surely my Samson didn’t just call me by a nickname. Sniffly, I peek out at him. “What did you just say?”
“Talk to me.”
I swallow. “Before that.”
A brow arches. “Orange Juice? Why? Didn’t like it?”
“Isn’t it…a bit weird for you to call someone by a nickname?”
He lifts his beautiful shoulders. “Is it? I don’t think so. I call Lazul an idiot all the time.”
That…is very much not the same thing.
Taking in air, I say, “I’m sorry I’ve worried you.
I’m overwhelmed, which is nothing new, and it’s not like I had a support system before I came here.
I just…” Had a work schedule and bills that forced me to get up and pretend I was okay.
Day-in, day-out. Pretending. Panicking in the bathroom.
Wishing my freezer privileges hadn’t been cruelly ripped from my sad little Floridian hands.
“There are so many steps. So much to do. Nothing is linear. Everything is more complicated than I know how to deal with. I can’t anticipate every detail, but what I can expect is too much already, just on its own.
Lazul is letting me live here so I can help with disaster relief, but I can’t even help myself.
My mind is spinning, and I’m spiraling, and I can’t breathe, and—”
“Shh,” Samson murmurs, dragging a lock of my hair away from my cheek.
It tries to stick, and that’s how I know I’m…
crying. “Lazul has no right putting this kind of pressure on you. All the problems he wants you to fix aren’t yours to deal with.
They’re ours. You have done more than enough good in a single week to earn your keep here for months.
You don’t have to tackle everything you see around us that’s broken.
If you do nothing other than tend this farm and provide Kao with fresh produce, that is more than enough. ”
A tear traces down my cheek. “What happened to being wary of me? How come you’re suddenly so kind to a stranger when you barely tolerate being around the people you threatened me to protect?”
He swipes the rough pad of his thumb beneath my eye, catching the moisture.
“Who knows? Maybe you’re easy to tolerate.
Maybe they’ve never brought me chocolates.
” He plants an elbow on my bed and settles his chin in his palm.
“It’s hard to distrust someone who makes herself ill with worry over a sorry group of strangers.
Last I checked, the people I grew up around wouldn’t bother having panic attacks alone in their pitiful shacks.
Hurting like this, Citrus, doesn’t do you any good unless you’re faking and you make it public. You haven’t.”
Guilt riots in my chest all the same. “It sounds like I bought your favor with sweets.”
“Yup.” He rises. “My care is fickle and one hundred percent dependent on sugar. Hence, the wellness check on my dealer.” Peering at the disgraceful single-room farmhouse, he grunts.
“Would it be overstepping if I helped you organize your sorry excuse of a storage system? I just find it personally offensive is all.”
Everything in me deflates. “S-sorry.”
“Nothing to apologize for. It’s a relief to know you’re human and not naturally good at everything.” He juts his thumb at a chest. “May I?”
I gnaw on my lip and nod, so he lowers himself to the lid and begins rifling through the contents.
A swear hisses out of him. “Void bags suspend time, Citrus, but you can’t just keep perishables in wooden boxes.
You have to dry your herbs and jar your fruit.
You’re lucky this mess hasn’t gone bad yet. ”
I shrink. “Right. Yeah…that makes…sense.”
Sighing, he closes the lid and hefts the entire chest onto one big beautiful shoulder, then grunts, “Come on.”
Come on?
Come on where?
I can’t be expected to follow the big beautiful man who just threw a hundred pounds of assorted goods onto his shoulder, can I?
There’s a billion minus three pears in there.
Unlike in the game, where you shake a tree and two-to-five fruits fall, the pear tree on the northwest forage side of the map was loaded nearly to broken branches.
To reach it, I had to cut my way through debris and mud, past an overfull swamp that—in game—is one of the major fishing lakes.
Little and large things all around scream that this isn’t a game.
But all of it leaves me crushed beneath the pressure of the game’s main plotline objective.
The player is supposed to fix the Ridge after the storm.
That means I’m responsible for fixing all the damage I can’t stop seeing.
Problem is, I have no idea how to. How does anyone even begin to clean a lake full of tree limbs, mud, and mush?
The rules are all different when I look close enough to see them.
And, despite my astigmatism, they’re not even blurry.
They’re crisp, and sharp, so I close my eyes and pretend they can’t cut, but that doesn’t stop me from feeling their looming presence.
I’m scared.
Of everything.
But I can’t bear the idea of losing the opportunity to have a home where, maybe, I can live a little less afraid.
While I’m frozen in my spiraling thoughts, Samson cocks a look back at me. “You coming, Orange Juice? Or do I gotta throw you over my other shoulder?”
Pleasant as that sounds, I would not survive, so I scramble to my feet and follow him from my pitiful shack to his comfortable abode.