After buying oil, arranging his tools and doing all necessary preparations it was already past nine o'clock. His preparations included, to his dismay, the repositioning of every single item scattered on his apartment's floor. In order to not disturb their normal distribution he decided to better store most of the unneeded tools in appropriate boxes or his wardrobe and brought most of the scrap parts to the rubbish dump.
The sunset came much later than last month but after his arrangements it was finally dark outside. As it was the perfect moment for his undertaking he did not waste any more time. A look into his wardrobe revealed that there was only a single jacket suitable for his intend. He didn't have the heart to ruin his costly clothes by stumbling in the middle of the night through the woods, but that did not mean that he would need to look like a homeless shelter escapee.
His old softshell jacket with pockets sewn on the sleeve and tool holder has served him well when he helped a friend of his family with house building to earn some pocket money. For the last two years it was a memento to the times when the carpenters called him a craft dyslexic, but if he would need to decide again between new clothes and a new computer he would for sure repeat this mistake with pleasure.
He put on the jacket, pretending the paint stains were part of the sporty look, took one of the older baseball caps featuring a gear symbol and left his apartment. When he went outside, the USB stick, which he had completely forgotten, caught his eye.
The car, waiting for him to feed it with money, was soon loaded with the time capsules, folding spade, a bucket of waterproof plaster and many other tools, and took him to the motorway service station 'Outlook'.
Surely he would not have met more people would he have gone to the bar district instead. In addition to the usual long-distance commuters, truck drivers and tourists who refuelled their vehicles or took a short rest, every weekend this rest stop became a meeting place for car tuners, internet dating couples and all those who preferred dinner and gas station over the kiosk on the mountain or simply had no interest in winding roads.
Most of them stood at the gas station next to brightly souped-up cars, which in Ping's opinion could not keep up with his water-cooled gaming PC, but were ideally suited to chase away dangerous wild animals with their engine noises and could undeniably win a volume competition against tractors.
The less hip visitors were in the visitor parking area, close to the public toilets, or in the smoking area in front of the diner, while the truck and bus parking area was deserted. The motel was a little off the beaten track and had its own driveway, so that nobody who did not want to spend the night there or trotted out to plunder the vending machine could be found there.
Unfortunately, the motel's parking area had a gate and Ping had to use the public parking area with the other mob.
Finally he took an unsuspicious walkway, behind the toilets, to the motel. His hand truck was loaded with five boxes wrapped in foil and a spade, all of which were fixed with rubber straps. Camouflaged by the darkness, he looked like a craftsman on the night shift in his jacket and baseball cap.
Nonetheless, he expected someone would stop and question him at any moment. If someone here noticed him, dragging a huge ticking box filled with a liquid and car batteries, and called the police instead of the mental asylum, it would be a short trip.
That of course no one was interested in Ping and his boxes, did not change the fact that he had to take a deep breath and calm his pulse when he got behind the motel. Then he hoisted his appendage over the guardrail onto the forest and meadow on the other side.
After this short adventure, he needed three hours to accommodate the four smaller packages. The first one in a shaft under a drain cover, which he was able to remove after a long tug with the spade. It was located a little to the side of the entrance to the gravel pit and sticking his whole arm into it's the muddy guts was not a pleasant experience.
The other three packages were buried with the spade. In a root-ridden forest that was clearly not created for digging with a spade. After stumbling a dozen times, he no longer just felt like a petty criminal who buried something illegal in the forest, but probably also looked like after a bar fight.
He hoped his GPS was accurate enough. The system had warned him that the motel's WiFi access point was too far away to serve as a reference point. With GPS and an improvised step counter based on the gyro sensors of his phone, the system could achieve an accuracy of five meters. This accuracy was the critical limit for two of the capsules, but he already decided that he wouldn't return here to repeat this fun even if the would not work.
After all, he was still doubtful whether or not some wacky mushroom picker, sewer worker or construction worker would find the boxes to be happy about the message in a bottle. Yes, he actually included a handwritten note.
At least he had enough time to chat with the system, which certainly wouldn't improve his situation if strangers had been watching him in the forest. But at least it made the work more bearable.
When he finally brought the last large parcel towards the sewers, he addressed the karma system and it turned out that the system could assign quests that would earn him karma points. The system emphasised that, in spite of it's much too small database, it even had information collected specifically for the purpose of preventing crimes that already happened in the system's time. How exactly they looked or when he could get a quest, however, he did not get out of the system.
After asking another ton of questions, he finally found out that a donation could also lead to karma points. The amount of the points would not only depend on what he would achieve with it, but also on how high his effort or risk would be. At the next opportunity he would try to donate a grocery package to the local aid organization for the homeless. In the supermarket was a designated basket and already packed bags for this purpose. Even if it was only a small boon, his sacrifice would be to live on instant soups for the rest of the month, which was fortunately not too long.
The meadow reminded him once again that his hand truck was not suitable for off-road use. A fact that he had neglected when he bought it and for which he now had to suffer. When he buried the small packages, he left the hand truck somewhere in the dark among the trees and carried the package to its designated position. This led to a little game of hide-and-seek on the way back, even with the navigation of the system, but was still more bearable than the miserable hopping from one hole to the next.
The gravel pit, the motel and the entrance to the sewer formed a triangle if you observed the area on a map. Between the motel and the sewer there was a pond from which it creaked and chirped constantly, as if all the toads and cicadas in the city had agreed to have a party. Farther back was what looked like a hill covered with grass and at it's foot a small ditch plastered with cobblestone. Probably to drain water away when it rains a lot and the pond is flooded.
Up close, the opening was large enough for an adult to pass through with his head bowed. The moon was bright enough that one could see well here. At the same time, Ping hardly had to worry about being seen from the motorway service area because he had the trees the background. The trees of the gravel pit on one side and the edge of the forest of the adjacent mountain on the other.
The tower at the top of the mountain was illuminated from below at night and formed another light source that created a pleasant atmosphere. Hopefully he wouldn't stumble upon a lonely couple.
Then he reached the sewer. Ping had once seen a documentary on television that described that deadly gases can form in sewers. Sewer workers would therefore always have a measuring device and safety equipment with them to detect such gases. Sometimes rubber boats were also needed, in real life swimming in such a broth would definitely have long-term consequences that are neglected in video games and films.
"Can you turn on the flash light?"
Fortunately, he found the niche quickly. The system had shown him one of the previously downloaded maps and offered indoor navigation. With a starting accuracy of 1 meter, the precision would deteriorate substantially every 3 meters if you would not re-adjusted at a reference point such as a fork in the road. Fortunately navigation was not necessary, he hardly had to walk more than 20 meters in total and there was only one fork.