While I don’t at all miss being stuck in a bed, I’ve certainly gained an appreciation for hospital beds as compared to bare ground for sleeping. Ouch. When we got up, I spent even longer stretching than Midnight did.

Being all groggy, I kind of didn’t think about the Interface message that showed up on waking up till it had already faded. Considering that my level now shows as 2, I’m guessing it was something like “Level up.” 

Other happy differences in my Attributes screen included arrow-up icons next to Intelligence, Wisdom, Sensory, Reaction, and Charm. With a little trial and error I figured out that I could increase one by holding my hand like touching the up-arrow for a while. Guessing it might be 3 per level like the game, I tried one each to Intelligence, Reaction, and Charm and – sure enough – the up-arrows disappeared after 3 were allocated. Didn’t really feel any change. But maybe it’s subtle? Intelligence obviously. I mean, spells. So yeah. I’m hoping that with a bit better Reaction I can actually hit things before they hit me. And while Charm in the game mostly just affected prices for things, maybe here it’ll help with pets? Also Health and Mana went up to 10,010 each. And Mana filled up. Since it seemed I was only regaining about 1 an hour by the time I was last awake, picking up around 200 in the last few hours strikes me as a pretty big deal. I don’t know whether that was the sleep or the level up.

While I was busy messing with my Interface, it seems Midnight slipped off and brought back a short-horned deer without me noticing till she’d almost brought it to my feet. Assuming increasing attributes in the Interface actually does something, maybe I should pick Sensory next time? 

I really don’t know how to deal with a whole deer and nothing in the Interface seems to be changing that. After finding a knife in my inventory, I winged it as best I could trying to carve out meat for cooking. Then I gestured for Midnight to go ahead with the rest and she enthusiastically did. Since it takes a lot less time to roast a venison fillet than a whole large bird, we got back underway while it was still morning. 

Needing fires for cooking several times a day got me pondering the cost. With the 30 Mana typical of a level 2 in the game, I’d be able to cast it just enough to start breakfast, lunch, and dinner fires and maybe have one casting left over. If it takes about an hour to recover 1 Mana, then I could easily use it far faster than it recovers. Unless … does a fill-up come with sleep? Or only with leveling up? Even with a Mana pool of 10,010, it might not be all that hard to run out if I’m not careful.

Between mulling that over and still marveling over walking again – let alone walking next to a big cat through a forest using an in-my-head compass and map – the sun was more or less right overhead and the trees had thinned out so I could see the wooden outer palisade wall of Enatus before I’d even realized I was getting that close.

Will they freak out about a pet stalker? Seems likely.

“Midnight, stay in the woods while I’m in town.”

I’m not sure whether she somehow understood what I said or got the drift from my gestures, but she casually stalked off into the woods either way. Will she stick around? I feel like she will. But I don’t really know. This pet thing is so different even if this other world seems familiar from the game.

There’s no gate facing where I came out of the forest, so I head towards the road and then turn into town. And there it is: Enatus. It looks pretty much like it did in the game. Except I think some of the buildings I can see through the gate are different heights maybe. 

Assuming most things are the same, Enatus is a fairly large village for the Jovar region’s mostly forest and rural lands. It’s large enough to support an array of shops, an inn, and a couple temples. But it’s small enough that it doesn’t have the full set of temples. There’s a small keep on a hill in the rough center of the town. And there’s an earthen rampart behind the outer wooden palisade wall and wooden towers at intervals around the wall. Except for the keep’s stone outer walls and the temple of Vulcane that hosts a blacksmithing forge, pretty much everything else is built from wood.

Outside, a donkey pulled cart piled high with root vegetables waits at the gate as I walk up. And a town guard talks to the guy leading the donkey. He’s dressed in a dirty, plain tunic. So put that together with the vegetables and he’s probably a farmer. Just as I got in line behind the farmer, they got done talking and the cart moved on through the gate.

Right then I see a priestess who looks to be around 30 or so approaching the gate. She reminds me of … oh, she looks a bit like Zoie Palmer’s character Lauren in Lost Girl, except in Three Moons priestly attire. She says something I don’t hear to the guard and waves out the gate. Then she catches my eye and says, “Are you Maeve?” Perhaps it’s a common name around Enatus; but when I look behind me there’s nobody there, so she must have been asking me. Could she have heard from Mr. Jansen?

“Yes, my name is Maeve.”

She and the guard both look more than a little confused. Trying to play that back in my head, I realized she asked in the Selkiri language and I replied in English. So I try in Selkiri.

“Yes, my name is Maeve.”

Even though I could speak it better than most players of the game before, I’m a little surprised it comes out so smoothly. Even stranger, I’m feeling like I know Selkiri names for some of the vegetables in that farmer’s cart up ahead … ones that weren’t in the game or even in the books based on it. Maybe it’s an effect from the Incarnation? Must be.

The priestess says, “Greetings. I am called Una. Would you please walk with me?”

I say, “Of course.” The guard nods at me, so I guess this gives me an easy way in without having to detail where I’m coming from. I’ve been debating whether it’s better to say I’m from Enatus or from the woods, especially since I didn’t expect anybody in Enatus to recognize me let alone anticipate my arrival, so not having to answer that just yet is a bit of a relief.

Una leads me through the streets of Enatus, which are strangely both new to me and familiar at the same time. I’ve seen these sights in pixels but never in person before. And all sorts of little details are different, from more varied baked goods at the street vendor cart inside the gate to that the vendor isn’t the same person as the one who always sold the bread there in the game. Aside from pack animals like the donkeys, a lot more house cats than I expected lounge on rocks or play in alleys. And some of the houses have chicken coops. But there aren’t any dogs let alone big cats, so bringing Midnight surely would have caused a stir.

After walking for several minutes, we arrived exactly where I guessed we’d be going: the small outbuilding beside the keep which houses the shrines for those gods without dedicated temples in the village. See, not only is Una wearing a traveling cloak, her cloak is embroidered with the symbol of Tornung, the God of Rulership. Unless the game has it wrong, the only temples in Enatus would be for Vulcane the God of Smithing and Mining and Vyapar the God of Commerce, both of which we passed along the way. Full fledged temples to Tornung are usually only found in larger cities.

I’m guessing Una’s not very chatty, as neither of us has said anything since the gate. I wait for her to say a prayer at Tornung’s shrine before breaking the silence.

Maeve: “Did you hear about me from Lars?”

She looks even more confused than when I was speaking English.

Una: “What’s a ‘lars’?”

Maeve: “Um. Mr. Jahnsen?”

Una: “Are you speaking in otherworld language again?”

Maeve: “No. It’s a name. Lars Jahnsen.”

Una: “Oh. I see. I’ve never heard a name like that before. About a month ago, I received an oracle from Tornung with a vision of you standing at the gate of Enatus as you were today. It was somewhat fuzzy, like an image made of many dots, as I’m told by the elders that visions often are. So even though I was told when it would be, I was not certain that I was looking at the right person just from seeing you be where you were going to be.”

Many a gamer or other fan of fantasy has imagined what it would be like to be “the prophesied one” some holy figure had foreseen. Let me tell ya’, to actually hear someone say something even vaguely like that in all seriousness … it’s just not how I imagined. It’s not so much “my time has come” as “wow, this is weird.” Or maybe, “Seriously, you mean me?” And that’s despite that I’m clearly either hallucinating in incredible detail or actually transported to another world where there’s actual magic.

Maeve: “Wait a … oh, is there no word for a unit of time that goes about this long?”

I make start and stop gestures with my hand to try to convey the jist of a second. Una looks like she’s contemplating the question before answering.

Una: “Maybe. I’ve heard that musicians, smiths, and mages each have craft terms for specialized timing. But the smallest measures of time I know are the 26 hours of the day. Larger cities usually have magical devices installed to signal the hours of the day. But in villages such as this, the main marking of the time deals with the passage of the sun or of constellations at night. Does your world commonly deal in smaller marks of time?”

Maeve: “OK. Uh. Yes, we have a word ‘second’ which means that much time. Oh, you mentioned my world. So you know about my world? And you say it like it’s nothing unusual. Are people from other worlds common here?”

Una: “In recent years, we have heard rumors of people from other worlds. Before that … we have legends. Old poems in our temple relics describe journeys Tornung made to other worlds, sometimes along with one or another of the other gods. They would see strange sights such as a purple sky at noon on a cloudless day or a world with just one single moon. Sometimes they would leave monuments, especially in the poems that include Vulcane. But the idea that there were people in these places? It is not in any of the tales. The first I was certain people from other worlds really exist was when Tornung imparted that you would come here.”

A “world with just one single moon”? I guess that would be a strange sight if you’ve only ever known life in a world with three moons.

Maeve: “But … a month. That can’t be. I’ve only been here one day. Unless I was on ice for a while between.”

Una: “I’m not sure I understand. It sounds like … are you confused by my oracle coming before you arrived?”

Maeve: “Um. Yes.”

Una: “Do the gods not convey what will come to pass in the future on your world?”

Maeve: “Not … hmm … well, not according to most people. Some claim to get prophecies of the future. But almost nobody believes them.”

Una: “It must be a strange world indeed. Then how do the gods guide you through major crises or avert catastrophes?”

Maeve: “They don’t.”

Una’s eyes go wide with shock. She looks horrified, like she can hardly imagine.

Maeve: “Or at least, most people don’t believe they do. Sometimes people claim God told them something. But nobody gets anything solid enough to really be sure. And a lot of them turn out to clearly be entirely wrong.”

Una: …

Maeve: “Oh, uh. Where does one … where are the toilets here?”