"Are you really playing Worlds of Glory," Heidi asked as they walked out of the restaurant.
"Yes, to my ever existing horror," Cora grumped.
"If you don't like it, you can stop playing," Heidi said with a laugh.
"That would be giving up, and Cora doesn't get up," Lorenz said, peering around for the valet. "You drove, right, Heidi? Can you give me a lift to my house?"
Nate appeared behind him, slinging an arm over Lorenz's shoulders. He started smiling jovially.
"I can give you a lift, Lorenz. So, are you interested in playing? I can get you capsule with very generous repayment options," he began before Heidi grabbed his arm and tossed it off.
"No, you are not roping him into some weird slave contract because he's free," Heidi said, protectively twining her arm around Lorenz's.
"You already got me playing. Now you want my friends," Cora asked.
"I don't even know where you are," Nate complained.
"I'm farming. It's interesting," Cora said.
"Not if it's farming," Nate shot back, recoiling. "There are so many more interesting things to do, and you're farming? You?" He took a step back and gave her an obvious scan up and down.
"I can farm! It's just growing things." Cora narrowed her eyes at him. Beside her, Heidi nodded vehemently.
"She may have a black thumb in real life, but I'm sure that in the game, she can grow just about anything," Heidi chirped.
"You're not really helping, Heidi," Lorenz muttered in her ear. He looked up and brightened. "Isn't that your car?"
Heidi turned to see a valet pulling up with a massive Land Rover. The gleaming car was in a deep, true shade of black with delicately detailed vines in a variety of darker grey curling over its surface. Heidi beamed as she pulled a ten dollar bill out of her tiny pocketbook and pressed it into the valet's hands.
"Thank you so much for taking such good care of my baby," she purred.
"Fine, it was fine, yes," the valet stammered as he stumbled to the side. He blushed as Heidi's smile widened as she approached her car. "Just ask for me whenever you come back."
"I most certainly will," Heidi assured him as she swung herself into her car. "Lorenz? You coming?"
Lorenz flashed Cora an apologetic smile and hurried to hop into the car.
"Cowards, they're both cowards," Cora snarled.
"They just didn't want to lie to you, cuz," Nate said, laughing. "Come on. Let me take you home while I tell you just why you would suck at being a farmer."
*****
Cora snarled to herself as she stalked towards the field. According to the timer she'd set before leaving home for lunch, her corn should be ready to harvest.
Then she abruptly stopped. From the dim recesses of her memory, she recalled that you needed things to put crops into when you harvested them. People probably wouldn't want to eat something that had just been tossed in a pile on the ground. She sighed as she rubbed her forehead.
"I brought you a basket and a gunny sack," Blue said from behind her. There was thick amusement in the big cat's voice.
"A gunny sack?" Cora asked, turning around.
Beside the leopard sat a wide basket, just big enough to comfortably carry propped under one arm. A plain cloth bag sat in it, woven of rough, dirty cloth. There was a drawstring at the top. Cora had a feeling that the bag might be like the farm tools, unusual and more than likely much more expensive than she wanted to admit.
"You put the corn in the basket. Then you stick it in the gunny sack when you're finished." Blue yawned. "The sack holds more than the basket, but I don't know how much more."
Cora picked up the basket and walked towards the field of towering green stalks. She paused at the sight. Her brief research hadn't said that the stalks would be taller than her. They were dark green and leafy, topped with a decorative spray of yellow and brown tassels. She cautiously paced forward and peered at the tassels. They turned out to be thin sprays of grass, reminding her of nothing more than the fronds of the weeds she used to strip as a kid during summer breaks. She and Heidi would put the grains into small piles and pretend they were packages to be delivered.
Sighing, she reached for the first plump ear. At least it was only two ears per plant to pick. There were just so many ears to harvest.
Blue kept her company as she picked, lounging in the shade of a giant oak that grew in the middle of what she informed Cora had once been a rather decent restaurant's outdoor seating. Blue also offered a litany of not-very-helpful advice as Cora harvested the corn.
It was only the fact that she was netting half an experience point for every ear that kept her going. She was pleasantly surprised when she leveled up after harvesting half of the corn. Then she had to stop. The basket only held twenty five ears at a time, and the gunny sack held twice that amount.
"What do I do with the corn next?" She asked Blue who was half-snoozing in the warm afternoon shade.
"You can offer it to the herd at the southern edge of town." Blue opened one eye and looked at the half-harvested field. "They'll probably take your first two or three harvests. After that, we'll think of something."
Cora wanted to say something, but looking at her experience bar, she thought better of it. With another two harvests, she'd be level three or four hopefully.
"What am I going to do with the ones I've picked so far? Would they want dirty corn?" Cora asked, frowning at the gunny sack.
"There are more sacks in the storage shed by the mayor's office," Blue said.
"I've got an office? Why didn't you tell me?" Cora set the full sack down. It didn't really look full and wasn't heavy which was a blessing.
"You didn't ask. I'm sure your little directional tools will help you find it." Blue flicked her tail disinterestedly. "The only thing that is interesting about you is that you're a weird two-legger. That is quickly wearing off."
"Says you," Cora muttered under her breath as she stalked back to the plaza.
She hadn't missed the interest Blue had shown as she'd picked all those ears of corn. Blue found everything she did interesting. Thinking on it, it was probably because the cat was lonely. From what the leopard had let slip, she was bound to guard the town for a few years because of some youthful indiscretion. Cora had no clue what could result in someone being sent to guard an empty ruin, but she also wasn't going to ask.
Her minimap, when she finally figured out how to get it to work, showed a glowing square next to the plaza. Cora looked away from it to her actual view and located where the square would be. It was a slightly less dilapidated building than the rest of the plaza's occupants. It even had a rudimentary roof.
She trudged to it, pausing at the mess of stones that had once been stairs. The entrance yawned a few feet above them, accessible by a few piles of stone. While Blue wouldn't have any problems getting in and out, it was going to take a bit of work for her.
Cora sighed and started testing the stones. A few minutes later, she had shifted enough to make a makeshift path to the doorway that slid uneasily under her feet when she climbed it to the doorway. She gingerly jumped into room beyond while dismissing the notification that 'Masonry (Initiating)' had appeared on her skills list.
The room turned out to be a hallway that was collapsed a few feet from the entrance. There was a doorway just before the collapse that led into a small room. It held a stone desk and a wooden chair that seemed fast on its way to collapse. The walls were bare except for a window to the side that overlooked the field of half-harvested corn and a blank, glowing screen. She approached it, curious.
As she reached out a hand to touch it, her status screen pulsed in the corner of her eye and the screen she saw before when she met Blue popped out and snapped into place. The glowing square morphed slightly, turning from blank to a rich, glowing green and gold.
"Welcome to Wilderven, Mayor Cora! Population 1/800. Please use tabs to manage the town and grow it into the thriving capital that the Wildlands deserves!"
Cora's eyes widened as she read the words.
"I'm the mayor? But isn't my class Leader of the WIldlands?" She clutched the sides of her head and blew out a hard breath.
"Mayor's current status: Leader of the Wildlands (025/1/10). Work hard, dear Mayor!"
Cora frowned at the screen, biting back the torrent of words that wanted to pour out. Obviously the frame was one of those voice-intuitive things she'd long since banished out of her condo.
She touched it, trying to free the originally free floating screen from the frame to no avail. Cora stared at it for a long moment before scanning the room. Other than the desk and chair, there was no other furniture, or someone had made off with it since the last mayor.
She peered out of the window, locating Blue who was still sleeping. She'd moved from under the tree to rest in its branches, her blue hide visible amongst the green leaves. Cora grinned; Blue wasn't the best company but she was really pretty to look at.
Cora gave a final look at the frame, promising herself to come back after she sowed her next crop. There had to be a way to get it off the wall.
Checking the stones blocking the rest of the hall, she finally gave up on them. She'd come back when she got another level and more time to shift them away. Most of them were broken masonry bricks, fallen from another, higher level. That argued that there might be stairs further down the hallway, not quite ruined as they were inside a building and not exposed to the elements like the stairs outside the building.
She slowly made her way back down the stair-path she'd made to the ground and frowned at the building. If the mayor's office was in it, that argued that it was a City Hall of some sort, especially since it was made of better bricks than the rest of the buildings around it and sat at what would be the opposite of the entrance.
Cora walked to the side of the building, finding a rickety shack standing there, its door missing. She huffed a sigh and shook her head. If it had had a door, Blue wouldn't have been able to easily get in. That argued that whoever had assigned her this guard duty hadn't wanted her to work too hard.
She'd yet to see anything that could threaten a lamb, let alone a full grown leopard. From the mention of a herd, she thought that perhaps there was a barrier that kept everything out and Blue in. It would also explain the lack of small rodents and birds. By all accounts, something should have eaten the corn seeds before she ever came along to plant them.
She walked into the shack. Then she paused at the ripple that occurred, spreading out from her. The shimmer of air passed over the interior of the shack, repairing the gaps between the boards and leaving them pristine and smelling faintly of sawdust. That made her frown. The olfactory update was supposed to be scheduled for further into the next year, not now.
Cora made a mental note to check the forums for the update notes. Perhaps the developers had moved it up. They were changing things all the time from what she could tell from her research. The forums were full of interesting datum for the patient researcher.
The shelves were now ornately carved slabs of wood, not the rickety things she'd glimpsed as she stepped in. The floor was freshly swept stone slabs that echoed most of the plaza. Sitting on one of the shelves was a stack of neatly folded gunny sacks. Set underneath that shelf were four baskets like the one she'd been using. She turned to the other side to see another bag of corn seeds as well as a couple of bags of other seeds, labeled 'red clover' and 'sorghum.'
"Isn't that horse feed? I don't even have any horses to feed with it," she sighed. She picked up the bag of red clover seeds as well as a couple more gunny sacks. "I do remember that you have to rotate crops or you kill the soil." She harrumphed. "See? I remember all those farming games from my youth."
She walked back out of the shed, discovering that it now had a door with a rough rope handle. Cora used her hip to nudge it close, smiling in relief. She didn't really want to know what Blue's reaction to not being able to enter the shed would be. For all she knew, Blue would react like her mother not being invited to her worst enemy's birthday party; while her mother had no interest in going, she needed the ability to say that she'd been invited and declined to go.
Her mother made no sense to her most of the time.
She headed back to the field.