Zeke suddenly awakens. His eyebrows feel heavy, his back aches due to the stone hard soil he has been laying on. The sun in his eyes and the urge to pee doesn't help him feel comfortable either.
He sits on the ground and wipes his brows twice. Wide open now, his eyes reveal quite a look. An enormous round, white platforms with strange symbols made of shining blue light. An enormous, baroque style citadel, and a sky covered in stars despite there's one, no, two shining suns in it.
He tries to remember where he learned that such an otherworldly sky shouldn't be possible, but he quickly realizes that he doesn't remember anything besides his name. He had acquired skills and knowledge, but he doesn't remember the process of doing so.
A strange looking man in a black but shining armor approaches him.
— So, you must be the new Landlord we summoned, i suppose.
Zeke tries to speak, but instead he simply nods, without wanting to do so.
— Great. I'll need to register you in our system so we can start to work. Put your finger here. — The stranger shows Zeke a tablet-like device wich shows something reminiscent of a fingerprint scanner.
Again without even thinking on moving, his finger automatically moves to the desired location. Feeling scared, Seth tries to speak, but he is unable to.
— The system registered you as Zeke Scott ¿Is that your name? — The Knight asks, Zeke nods. — ¡Great, it worked! By the way, I'm your assigned officer, my name is Victor Valor. Oh, and keep the Looniepedia, it's yours now.
LOONIEPEDIA has been added to Seth's INVENTORY.
Zeke feels werid for a brief moment. ¿Where is the tablet this guy just had, and why he is seeing fleeting words? Again he tries to ask, but nothing comes from his mouth. Instead, he just sees another group of words fleeting in his face.
1- Thanks, but, may i ask you something?
2- So, i will become a landlord, but what does that mean exactly?
3- Sorry, what is a Looniepedia?
Quick to assume that those were his conversation options, he starts to think about what to choose. The first one seems vague, and he has a little bit of a good idea about what being a landlord implies, so he chooses to try and say the third line. Surprisingly, he is totally able to do so.
— Sorry, what is a Looniepedia?
— Looniepedias are one of the main work tools for landlords, it's also used for several other people living here, to an extent. Loonipedias are multi purpose devices designed to allow the easy management of loonies and all related to them.
— Loonies? — Zeke says, surprised that he can actually talk for once.
— Basically, every living thing here that's neither a human nor a plant... nor a fungus... nor a microorganism.
— So... Animals.
— We don't say that word here. You'll see, loonies and... those... are different. But yeah they basically have the same niche. Well, let's get started.
Victor says, then Zeke falls unconscious. Just to wake up somewhere way different. The weird sky from before stills the same. He is sitting down on a grassy floor, with his back on a tree. At his left there's a small pond and a little house, at his right, he can see a shovel and three crates. Then, in front of him, a big bird similar to a toucan, except that its beak has the shape of a trumpet.
— ¡Took, took, new man! — The little bird says, spooking Zeke and making him scream like a little girl in a terror movie.
— Oh, you've met Took. — Victor's voice sounds in Zeke's head.
— Victor!? Where are you!? — Zeke asks angrily.
— Genius at work, rookie, i must attend some paperwork up here. But don't worry i can still pay enough attention to guide you.
— Oh you... — Zeke was about to say some bad words but they were replaced by funny sounds.
— Watch that mouth. Okay? You are lucky that you have my guide to begin with, so you don't have to figure it all by yourself.
Zeke sighs — Fine, teach me the basics.
— First, grab the shovel.
Zeke stands up and grabs the shovel. Took moves away a little by jumping and flying in a funny way.
— Good. Now walk until you are near the edge of your land.
— Edge? — He starts walking.
— You are on a Sky island, get used to it.
— Fine now i realize what you meant. — Zeke speaks a little scared, seeing that his land is basically surrounded by endless nothing.
— Don't worry, if you fall you'll be teleported back up. It still hurts like hell so try not to fall.
— Thanks for the warning. So what about the shovel?
— Think about how you want to fill that void, and lift the shovel.
— Okay? — With doubt in his voice, he still does so. While he thinks. — This guy is mocking me, right?
But the landscape actually changes. Where there was a huge chunk of nothing at all, now it's filled with a green plain.
— What? That's not what i wanted at all! Where's the city i imagined in my head? — Zeke asks, breathing heavily. — And why I'm so tired.
— Oh, sorry. I totally forgot that's a basic shovel without any upgrades. Yeah you are actually restricted to do some basic landscapes only, and it should deplete your energy preety fast.
At the hearing of the word energy, a bar appeared at Zeke's line of sight.
NRG: 5/100 , +1 NRG in 29:51
— Okay, if this is a dream... — Zeke says — I need to stop playing those silly phone games.
— Well, while you recover your energy, let's open those crates.
— Please don't tell me that they have random loot.
— They haven't. Everyone knows random loot spawns in chests. No, there's some basic equipment you need to know how to use there.
Zeke opens the crates, starting with the leftmost one. There's two weird devices, one that seems like a glass round table with an egg shaped base and three metal legs coming from it. This crate also packs a small pouch with a small transparent pocket in one side.
— What are this things? — Zeke asks, totally puzzled.
— The big one is a MediCore, there your loonies can recover their health and energy. Also it heals them if they fall sick or injured.
— That's like the fifth time you mention loonies, are they that important?
— Our entire society revolves around loonies in one way or another.
— How is that even possible, let alone reasonable!? — Zeke starts overreacting.
— Okay, let me tell you what i always tell the rookies when we reach this point, you don't bother me with hard questions, and i don't get you bored with hard answers. Fine? — His tone is obviously intimidating.
— Fine — Zeke is now totally scared to be able to talk Victor back.
— Well. The thing is simple, to heal a loonie you just place its respective card face down in the MediCore. Then the card gets unloaded. When the loonie gets totally healed, it will be instantly loaded back to your Looniepedia. Now, the small one is your BPack, there you can store and retrieve small things.
— So it's a backpack.
— It's a backpack-like dimensional storage, that also lets you load cards to your MediCore remotely and retrieve cards from your Looniepedia, by the way, it's the only way to do so, and associating a new BPack to your ID means a mountain of paperwork for me, so don't you dare losing it.
— Okay, mom. — Zeke answers sarcastically.
— Well, proceed with the next crate.
Zeke does so and opens up the crate, just to find what seemed like a two-story mini fridge rip off from some cyberpunk graphic novel. It's heavy so he actually has to make a ton of effort to lift it.
— Okay Vic, explain me what is this condemned thing.
— That's a Questgiv, people will send requests to the system and offer rewards, often in the form of Jokers, Expansion Packs or CTVs.
— What?
— Ah, I'll tell you later, basically different means of trading. With the Questgiv you can fulfill the requests. Take in consideration that once any Landlord fulfills a request, it gets unloaded from the system, so most Landlords just center themselves in a certain kind of product and simply wait until requests are sent. — So basically i have no chance to use it due to the market being actually full.
— Actually, there's a certain niche on the market that no one wants. I don't reccomend or discourage anyone from taking it, but i warn you it's a high risk business. — Victor says.
— What's that market? — Zeke seems curious now.
— Rare items. You know, things that you cannot simply plant and harvest, or make from harvested products.
— What does harvesting have anything to do with loonies?
— Some loonies are useful for harvesting stuff. Okay, you know what? I'll let you figure the best way to use it on your own. Let's go with the last one.
The last one was as heavy as the Questgiv and twice as tall. It seemed like a Soda dispenser with a virtual screen on it, and in one side of it there was something like seemed like a paper trituration machine.
— And least but not less important, this is the Drink Dispenser.
— What? no weird name?
— All our expert device namers were on holidays that week, so we had to appeal to the alliteration department instead.
— And how loonies are related to that? No, wait, forget it, just tell me... Do you actually have expert device namers? How does that even work!?
— Zeke, what did i say you? No hard questions means...
— No boring answers. Okay, i'll stop. So, what does this thing do?
— You can triturate the cards you don't want on the side, and you can use that to get drinks who has different effects, like granting you some experience, temporarily increased energy regeneration, and my favorite... Strawberry juice. Now, one last thing. It's urgent.
— Urgent? — Zeke asks worried.
— I'll teach you how to tame and manage loonies.
— Finally! But why it's urgent?
— Because as you create more terrain, the greater the odds for wild, often hostile, loonies to appear.
— What? You had to tell me that like... way earlier!