It was an essential tool, really.
Once I finished with the design, I grabbed the shovel and started to dig.
Digging was hardly the most efficient of the tasks I had set forth but I believed it would be extremely conducive to my work in the long run. By creating a dugout cabin that sat 4' below the surface I not only made it easier to get the logs of the roof up by myself without a hoist or crane, but it also served to insulate the cabin from the weather.
The low hanging roofline would also be aesthetically pleasing once I tossed some dirt on top and had grass growing. Yeah, I was convinced it would look pretty awesome in the end.
Something I could be proud of.
Well, there is a saying that sentiment only goes so far and I had just about reached that point as I yelled out to the world, "Want To Buy laborers, Please Send Tell!" …of course that was directed at no one in particular, seeing as I was the only person in what people affectionally termed the northern wastelands.
Oh well.
A funny thing about digging is how monotonous it is… digging ditches or shoveling dirt or concrete is a rough job despite the little thought it requires. It's physically demanding and just plain laborious. A man of my size can burn 600-700 calories in an hour digging or shoveling, where if I was to go swimming for the same duration I would probably burn 300-400.
Yeah, this was intensive work and the game system made it nearly identical to the real world.
I didn't sign up to do virtual manual labor.
It really wasn't funny.
Completely zoned out as I had learned to do years ago while working such jobs in real life, I found myself working through the night and into the next day. Nearly eight hours of digging later, I was almost done.
In truth, I would have never been able to move almost 3,600 cubic feet of dirt in a day or even a few days if it wasn't for my stupid level of strength and endurance in-game. I was a bit stronger and recovered incredibly quickly, meaning a short break by the fire while munching on rabbit jerky or enjoying some fire-roasted salmon plucked from the river and I was good to go without any lingering soreness.
But, it was still monotonous.
In an effort to maximize my time, I made my way through the clearing and to the closest trees in the vicinity. The tall pines, firs, and spruces were perfect for the log cabin and didn't have too many branches to clean.
The only real issue would be moving them all, thankfully the forest started but thirty feet away from my dugout. I grabbed the woodcutting axe and started hacking away, intending to fell at least 48 trees before my endurance gave out. With woodchips and splinters flying off into the distance, the first tree was felled in about two minutes.
Since they weren't too thick it went by fairly quickly.
The chirping of the birds had been disturbed as that first tree fell but as time went by they returned; some no longer with a home but that was only a temporary disruption. Squirrels were jumping between the tree tops as well in an attempt to relocate, but they seemed to be playing as they watched me work.
Perhaps this was the first time these squirrels had seen a person, and their curiosity got the better of them. As I made it to the tenth tree my axe had started to dull a bit, so I took a small break to sharpen it with a whetstone and then continued on.
Halfway through I had gotten used to the swinging and chopping, and was actually receiving proficiency points in lumberjacking. Needless to say I was felling trees in about a minute now and was able to finish the forty eight in about two hours.
I still had plenty of stamina left so I decided to start dragging all of the trees closer to the dig site. The dragging of the logs actually burned my stamina pretty quickly, despite my high Strength and Endurance attribute, dragging or carrying around 200-400 pound trees wasn't easy when they were over 30' in length. So I switched to rolling them in the end.
I had to keep things rolling, after all.
In a furious rush to finish as soon as possible, I started the process to debark the trees with a draw knife and was surprised to find that the game had auto-corrected the logs so they were smoother than I had actually cut them.
If I had to even them all out individually it would have taken far too long. I spent nearly four hours stripping all of the trees and gained even more proficiency in wood working.
Having finished all of the prep work that was necessary to start assembling the log cabin I fell back on my ass and stared at what I had accomplished.
I had been working with small breaks for the past sixteen or so hours… it was time to call it a day. Logging out of the game I quickly found myself starving and dehydrated, though it wasn't like it had taken me by surprise. The game had a warning system in place that was flashing in the corner of my screen for a while but I had been ignoring it.
Once I set my mind to something and decide to finish, I tend to go until the work is done. Even though the work was physically demanding, since the game's concept of fatigue was reset after a short rest or nap, I was able to continue on with my work until my virtual body had developed a severe fatigue penalty.
Basically, in the short term you could ignore fatigue… but sixteen hours straight and you would be penalized heavily. I figure it was the developer's way to prevent kids from playing for a few days straight and killing themselves in the process.
I didn't mind it.
Chapter 8: Alpha n' Beta Meeting
(Saturday, January 9th Real Day)
"Ahhhh!"
Yawn.
I overslept once again based off the amount of sunlight peeking through the blinds, but it didn't really matter as I didn't have anything really planned.
"Oh Shit," I yelled under my breath, barely making a sound but vocalized in urgency nonetheless.
I was running late.
I had the AnB gamer's meeting today and it started in thirty minutes.
I quickly jumped in the shower with a toothbrush and rinsed for as long as it took to brush my teeth, jumping back out with twenty-six minutes until the meeting started.
Clothing was simple, blackish jeans and a dark gray V-neck T-shirt along with my black Citizen Eco-tech watch on my left wrist.
I ran down the stairs as fast as a hobbled person could and threw on my black pair of Vans, grabbed the keys to my fastest and smallest two-seater and pulled out of the drive-way.
I was down to twenty-two minutes but I was on the road, unfortunately I also had over thirty miles to drive. It was 10:38 on the clock as I turned up the music and let the bass massage my back through the chair.
The light flashed green and in 4.6 seconds I pulled onto the freeway from a standstill doing sixty miles per hour and found myself tucked into my seat, with my lower back being sucked in from the sudden force of the overly-large turbo kicking in. Turning the corner of the on-ramp I found myself with open road, there was hardly a car on the freeway.
I hit 7,200 RPMs on the tachometer and shifted into third and pushed it. As the speedometer climbed from 60 to 70 to 80-MPH in a matter of seconds I again was approaching redline and shifted into fourth. The speedo continued to climb as I hit a hundred miles per hour in roughly eleven seconds from zero. As I hit 110-MPH I was forced to shift into fifth gear, at this point I was running out of gears.
The aggressive differential ratio of 4.3:1 increased my acceleration but limited my top end, I was basically capped out. As the tachometer reached the 7,300 RPM redline I was doing 143-MPH on the freeway, it wasn't that fast but it was certainly fast enough for a car I built from the ground up. I wanted to go faster but my other cars were larger and harder to park in the tight spaces of the city, those could easily do 200-MPH thanks to friendly gearing.