Death After Death PLUS 208-210

Ch. 208 - Limited Results

Simon spent hours slaughtering the green vermin that night. At first, they hunted him in packs of three and four, but after he eliminated several of those, the tables turned. He was hunting them. For a time, that was the rhythm. Ambush a group of goblins, slaughter them until there was only one left, then drain the last member dry and use its ragged screeching to call for more. 

That worked for a while, but eventually, they grew wary and defensive. Assembling around their lair, causing larger confrontations. Even the shaman that he owed so much to eventually came out to play, which usually didn’t happen until the second or third night. The thing managed to cast greater fire twice, but Simon took its head off before it could do it in a way that threatened him. 

Where does a goblin learn magic? He wondered for at least the tenth time. They seemed to have a language, but Simon couldn’t understand it, which meant he was probably reading too much into it. 

His best answer was that demons were planting that evil little seed into the various warrens he’d seen that had it, but he supposed they might have some evil little god. Still, how could they have enough language for spells but not enough language that he could understand their other grunts and cries? 

He had no idea, and tonight, he really didn’t care. He just killed them and harvested as much of their energy as possible, and he could feel the results. He didn’t feel much stronger, but the fact that he was able to keep fighting for hours without pausing to catch his breath certainly said something was happening. He even descended into their warren for the first time, though he refreshed his dark vision before he did so. 

It was one of the few places he hadn’t been in his little starting zone, but he wasn’t impressed. Simon had hoped for some overlooked secret, but instead, he found cramped tunnels and shit-smeared walls. He spent a while down there. It was hard to say exactly how long or how many goblins he killed in those claustrophobic spaces. There was just enough order and artistry to the ugly graffiti that he wanted to keep going. There was some intelligence in there worth understanding. 

Sadly, before he found anything worth pushing on for, he reached the limits of his light amplification magic. Without getting a torch or casting another spell, eventually, the faint starlight from the crevice that was the place’s entrance faded to pure darkness, and he turned back toward the surface. 

Still, he hadn’t expected to find the holy grail buried under his feet, and he’d made good progress during the night. “It would have been cool if I’d discovered the spider city, though,” he told himself as he climbed back to the surface. 

It was there he found out it was daytime, or at least it would be soon. He was forced to turn his eyes away from what should have been the thin blue line of false dawn because, under the effects of his night vision spell, it was bright enough to make his eyes water. 

It was only after he’d given his eyes time to clear that he realized that meant that he’d been fighting almost continuously all night. That was a real surprise. “Well, I guess this thing works pretty good!” he said, looking at his blood spattered sword. 

Simon walked through the forest toward the stream, and then, after looking around to see if there was anything around to ambush him, he started stripping to the waist so he could see if there were any results. What he saw next made him throw the sword away in the stream bed. It was better to let it rust than keep using that cursed thing, he decided instantly. 

Simon had lost some weight and gotten some visible muscle, too, but it was a terrible skinny-fat combination that lent more than a hint of goblin to his physique. He didn’t actually think he’d become part goblin, of course. Instead, what had happened was that the spell effects were quite literally siphoning a bit of the strength from each of the creatures he’d killed and giving it to him, but goblins weren’t exactly Mr. Universe. 

The things were ugly and disproportional. Not only were their limbs too long, but they skipped every leg day and relied on sinewy upper body strength. Simon tried to imagine how he would look if he had the same proportions as a goblin, and it was a horror show. 

“You know what? I’ll just get a new sword at the death knight level after I smash all their skulls with a mace,” he said as he walked away from his failed experiment. The silver lining was that he’d lost enough weight for his armor to fit him better, but it was going to take some time and some serious exercise for the unnatural gains of his pecs and biceps to smooth out into something that resembled natural. 

He ruminated on that until he got back home. Then, after he closed all the shutters to keep out the rising sun, he studied himself in his mirror a second time. The results weren’t quite as bad as he’d feared. His chest definitely didn’t look quite right, but he didn’t look like a horrible mutant either, now that the shock had worn off. 

While this wasn’t precisely the reason he was nervous about using the words of flesh shaping and strengthening to enhance his own body for the long term, he was pretty close too it. It felt like he was dabbling with things only just barely within his understanding or control. Simon could only imagine what malproportioned features and strange cancers he’d give himself if he tried to meddle too directly with his crude tools. 

After studying himself with a critical eye, he decided to adjust things only a little bit. He could reevaluate after that. “Aufvarum Hyakk Celdura,” he said, using the words of lesser flesh shaping to even out the worst of it as he tried to force the excess fat from his body. He was a little more aggressive than the last time he’d tried this but unwilling to lose any internal organs due to what was essentially magical liposuction, he settled for merely being slightly overweight. 

“I guess the lesson here is that if I'm going to dip into a wellspring of anything, I should make sure the water is clean,” he mused as he disrobed and prepared for bed. His plan probably would have worked fine if he’d been fighting and killing other men, but slaughtering his way through strangers to become ever more muscular seemed like a remarkably poor use of magic, and he shook his head at the idea.

No, harvesting strength rather than life force doesn't seem as addictive, but it’s no less wrong, he decided as he laid down for bed. There was only one problem; he wasn’t tired at all. He still felt alert despite everything he’d done, but becoming a night owl in a fantasy world was inadvisable. It was just one more reason for people to think he was a weirdo when he arrived at civilization in a few levels. 

Simon had a hard time going to sleep. In fact, after laying there for hours, he was almost desperate enough to see if the weakness aspect of Gelthic could be used to induce sleep, but he decided against it. Instead, he simply waited, and eventually, his rampage hit him like a ton of bricks. As soon as whatever energy had been keeping him awake finally faded, he was out like a light, and he stayed that way for half a day. 

In the morning, he looked himself over, noting that he looked a little thinner and had fewer features he would call goblinish about his upper body. It was almost enough to make him go back for his sword, but he decided to leave it. Instead, he had his apple for breakfast to keep the hunger at bay and started packing for his trip. 

“It’s not like I have far to go,” he told himself as he belted on his leather armor and set out his mace, shield, and a few other things. “Down into the crypt, kill a few skeletons, scrounge a little silver, then walk through some ruins and dodge a wyvern. After that, I can get something hot at the inn in Esmiran, then after I save the lovebirds, I can go see a man about a dragon.”

Simon realized that if he wanted to build up his endurance before he tried to jog up the mountain, he should probably spend some more time in one of those levels, but he’d have to see what felt right. Staying in the wyvern level might tempt him to wait around for decades to see his son again.

Simon blasted through the skeletons with almost no effort this trip. Thanks to the boost his goblin harvest gave him, he was only a little winded, too. He actually spent more time studying the swords that were available than he did fighting the undead or harvesting the precious metal he needed with a few minor words of metal. 

Half that time, he spent deciding which sword he was going to use for a while before settling on a nicely weighted hand and a half broadsword with a bronze hilt and only a little rust on the blade. He chose it both because it fit his fighting style and because he was pretty sure he could clean it up without magic, unlike most of the rest. It just needed a little polish and a lot of sharpening. 

The rest of his time was spent studying the death knight’s sword. The frost blade, as he’d long since thought of it, was made with entirely different patterns than the blades that the unspoken forged, and even though he had the schematics drawn up in his notes, he still took some time to look at the whole thing again. 

It seemed drastically inefficient compared to the other designs he’d had so much experience with recently. Not only was it powered by the wielder, but the magic that was required to protect the person holding it was in the gauntlet. “Why wouldn’t you just put the protective circuit in the cross guard to keep the handle at a safe temperature?”

Sadly, the answer was almost certainly that whoever had made it hadn’t thought of it. That was one of the consequences of magic being so forbidden in this part of the world. Everyone had to reinvent the wheel, and most of them didn't choose the optimal method.

Simon left it where it lay, picked up the key instead, and moved to the exit. However, when he opened the gate, he was surprised to see a level other than what he’d expected. He’d thought he was going to the Wyvern level, but instead, the sleepy little village that would soon be host to a dozen white cloaks lay before him. 

Simon blinked in surprise, trying to digest the implications of that one little change, but that didn’t stop him from stepping through and shutting the door behind him. The last thing he needed was for someone to notice that the bakery’s door was leading to a dank tomb. That would not be good for him. 

Ch. 209 - Ripples

I didn’t solve that level, he told himself as he walked numbly to the inn. All I did was pick up a lousy scroll. The wyvern lived, the messenger died, and it still didn’t get delivered.

He had no idea what to make of that, but as soon as he walked into the inn, he could see it was a dramatically different place than it had been the last time he’d been there. On his last few visits, the place had been half empty until sunset, and even then, it had only been filled with a smattering of traders and locals. This time, the place was nearly full, and the benches were mostly packed with soldiers or at least mercenaries. They looked a little ragged, to say for sure, and with the hard looks he received, he leaned toward the latter.

For a moment, he thought he might have to fight these strangers; then, he saw a look of recognition flit across a few faces, and the conversations he’d interrupted resumed. 

“Ah, there he is,” the innkeeper said, acting like he knew him. “What kept ya, Simon? You said you’d be back yesterday!”

He doesn’t think he knows me, Simon corrected himself. He does know me. Or at least, my doppelganger… It was a chilling realization. He’d thought about the strange evil Simon since that day, three lifetimes ago, but the man had never turned up again until now, and somehow, he didn’t think that was a coincidence. 

“Well, you know how it is out there,” Simon answered, hoping that made any sort of sense. 

“I do, I do,” the man nodded. “Ugly time to be traveling, but if you have to, then you have to.” As he spoke, he slid a key out from under the counter and handed it to him. “Still, kept your room all locked up for you, just like you asked.”

“Thanks…” Simon said, not quite sure what was going on. He’d planned on getting a meal and leaving, but digging into this was too big of an opportunity to miss, and he headed upstairs in search of his room with a few words about how he’d be back down for something to eat in a little while.

Half of him felt like he’d just gotten away with the heist of the century, but the other half was certain he was walking into a strange, elaborate trap. So, when he reached the door with the number on it that matched the key, he paused and waited, examining the door frame, the lock, and any other details that were apparent before he went further. 

For a moment, he was reminded of the delicate gilding that had hidden inside the Librium Malifica. The idea that hell could open up around him from something as simple as gilded text decoration made him move with the utmost care, but after more than a minute of examination, he saw no reason not to insert the key and turn it. 

Inside, he found nothing more than an ordinary room. It was empty, save for the bed, a small desk, and a packed backpack sitting against the wall. He still took nothing at face value, and he continued his slow examination, one object at a time. He didn’t even fully step through the door until he’d looked at the door jamb on the far side of the wall. 

Something stinks here, he told himself. He just couldn’t figure out what it was. It was simply too strange. The last time he’d met the man, he'd appeared at a pivotal moment and then vanished again, but this time, Simon just happened to have come to the place where he was staying? He didn’t buy it. 

“If he is me, then he knows I’ve been here before. He knows where the portals are, too,” Simon told himself. “Hell, he probably knows where more of them are than I do, depending on how far in the future he’s from.”

None of that made him feel any better as he methodically tore apart the room. After he examined the furniture, he took apart the backpack very carefully, examining what had been left behind. None of it appeared to be anything special. There was a sack of foreign gold and silver coins, a few changes of warm clothes that would have been a little snug for him right now, a bedroll, a tent with some stakes, and a couple of weapons that would definitely have been the sort of thing that he’d wield. One of the daggers even had runes of lesser transfer magically embossed into it in the way he’d done so recently in the same style that he’d used on his skull-marked blade. 

Simon was tempted to take that but could imagine a second layer of runes somewhere beneath the surface that would do something horrible if it was activated, so he left it alone. “I can’t trust anything here,” he reminded himself as he checked the stitching of the pants for hidden pockets and the backpack for hidden compartments. 

Still, there was nothing. It looked, for all intents and purposes, as if some version of him left his things at the inn to run an errand and never came back. Simon didn’t buy that for a minute. “For starters, I would have hid my money better,” he said, looking down at the handful of coins. It was a fortune, no matter what the denominations were. “This much gold represents years of…”

Simon stopped and did a double-take as he looked at one of the coins. It bore an uncanny resemblance to him. No, it was him, too, or at least it was his doppelgänger. 

“Son of a bitch,” Simon cursed. The coins definitely weren’t Ionian, and they weren’t from Brin. They also didn’t look like the one he’s seized from the Murani blood money. 

“Has this already happened then, and I wasn’t a part of it?” Simon wondered aloud as he tried to make out the inscription. “Or is this asshole bringing back artifacts from the future to change the past?”

Simon was irritated by that for a moment, but once he made out what the coin said, he practically yelled out, “Oh, come on!” in frustration. The coin didn’t just look like him. It was him. The inscription read Simon the Merciless, and though there wasn’t a date, it was worth 50 drachma. He had no idea how much that was, but he knew that it was half a crown by weight and that the merchants of the area would likely chisel him and give him only 70 or 80% of that.

Right now, Simon didn’t care about exchange rates, though. He cared about what in the fuck this asshole had done to be given the moniker ‘the Merciless.’

“There has to be more,”  Simon said to himself. “This motherfucker is taunting me.”

Simon tore the room apart a second time but didn’t find anything until he checked on the beam that ran along part of the ceiling. It looked like it was doing nothing but holding up the ceiling, but given that Simon was sure he would have hidden his gold up there if he was going out for a bit, he used the chair to climb up. It was there he found one of his old sketchbooks. At least, it was something that looked an awful lot like one of his old sketchbooks from his days in Ionia before he’d finally gotten to see his son. 

With trembling hands, Simon opened it, wondering if it could really be the case. When he saw that it was filled with places he’d never been or seen, he breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t his book. The doppelgänger hadn’t been stealing from his own life at least. Simon knew it was paranoid, but sometimes he couldn’t help but wonder if this asshole was wandering around, undoing all the good works that he was doing in real-time. 

Still, it very much looked like one that he’d owned once, though, and worse, it was definitely his style. Some version of him had drawn every one of these pictures. The style was nearly identical, save for the fact that it looked a little more smudged on some of the softer mediums. He would have been more careful than that. 

If the thing was a forgery, though, it was a good one. It was filled with places he’d never been. They seemed to be in the mountains, and there was a castle and… 

As he took it all in, he stopped as he finally found someone familiar. On one page near the middle of the book was Freya, pale and perfect. She didn’t look so different from when he’d last left her. The very fact that his evil twin might have gotten his hands on her enraged him. However, for a moment, not even that rage could interfere with that moment of perfect longing. It was heartbreaking, in its way, and it was several seconds before he could turn the page or even look away from those piercing eyes.  

When Simon finally managed to shake off that feeling of nostalgic sadness and turned the page, he was rewarded with nothing. The book was simply blank. He started to turn the pages faster and faster, but there was nothing there, not until he reached the very end where he found a long note addressed to him. 

‘My dear, dear Simon,’ Simon read aloud in a whisper. ‘By now, you know who I am, or at least you think you do. Perhaps you will change your mind after the trials ahead. I hope you enjoyed your time in Ionia so recently. I thought both of the fireworks shows that you put on were masterly done.’

Simon paused for a moment, thinking about the words before he decided that both fireworks shows meant the Volcano fight with the lava titan and the final battle for the palace where he’d perished. That asshole was watching me then too? He wondered before continuing. 

‘This would be the part where I’m supposed to offer you some advice about the nature of the Pit or taunt you with some great secret, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. I am exactly what you see and have gone no deeper into this horrid place than you have. All I can offer you, instead, is regret. 

One of your next trials is so terrible that I would spare you from it if such things were possible. I really would. Sadly, some things like the Basilisk have to happen, and other things, like saving Freya, you will never quite manage to accomplish. Don’t worry, when all of that is done, We’ll meet once more in the north. Perhaps I will tell you a bit of what Helades has left out.

Sincerely, 

You Know Who.’

When Simon was done, he almost ripped the book in half in pure outrage. He was sure that was meant to be the reaction, of course. The man was taunting him, but he knew that he was lying. He was certain he’d saved Freya on more than one occasion. 

In fact, he told himself, she was only alive when I last saw her, thanks to my magic. Nothing else could have possibly saved her. 

That feeling of pride was enough to allow Simon to regain his composure, and after a few deep breaths, he was fine again. “He’s just lying to upset me or to make me do something stupid,” Simon repeated to himself. 

Once he decided that, he decided to go downstairs and get some dinner. Acting rashly was the last thing he needed to do, and he’d think much better on a full stomach. 

The roast that he was served was better than he remembered, though trying to pretend he knew people he’d never met before was a bit awkward. Still, Simon started down there in the common room for hours, drinking and dicing. The two love birds he was waiting for never showed up, but the Unspoken did, briefly. 

This time, the number was smaller than he remembered before, and after a few checks, they quickly left again. This confused Simon further, and even as he turned his doppelganger’s words over in his mind, he tried to figure out what might have happened.  

Simon waited for two days for Aaric and the young whisperer he was infatuated with to arrive, but they never did, leaving him wondering what in the hell was going on with this level. Simon was conflicted then. Should he stay on the path he’d planned and leap down the well, or should he take some extra time to get in shape first? 

What does my doppelgänger expect me to do? He wondered, planning to do exactly the opposite. 

Ch. 210 - Perfect Timing

Depending on what was going on, the right answer was either to linger for a long time until Simon was in excellent shape or if it was to immediately proceed to the next level. He chose neither and instead lingered only a couple more days, spying on the white cloaks as they came and went in the hopes that he could read the tea leaves to figure out what had happened to Aaric. 

When he finally jumped down the well in the dark of night a few evenings later, though, all he’d really done was get rid of some of the other Simon’s junk before he took the backpack with him. The gold and silver, especially, he dumped. Except for a couple silvers, in case he had the chance to use them in the next level, and one of the gold coins bearing his image, he left the hand-sized sack just inside the bakery’s oven where the woman that ran the place would find it when she woke up. 

Simon had no idea if she was a good person or if those coins would help or hurt the arc of history. He knew that the other him had anticipated he would be here at this moment, so he was trying to be a bit more unpredictable from now on. 

The ride down the well and out of the cave was just as wild as it had been before, but at least this time, he was a little ready for it, and he stood and dusted himself off on the trail without too much effort. 

Simon was just getting his bearings and mentally preparing himself to start jogging uphill, which sounded like about the most awful thing in the world when he noticed there was a large caravan of people coming up the road behind him. 

Most of the wagons were still behind the curve of the mountain, and he could only see the lead riders, but Simon immediately recognized them as the dragon slayer’s caravan. That confused him quite a bit. 

“Shouldn’t they be in the valley already?” he asked himself. In the past, they’d beaten him by hours or days, but now he was ahead of them? It didn’t make sense. 

“But really, what does this run,” he said with a shrug as he sat down on a rock and waited for them to catch up. 

Truthfully, Simon had no idea what was going on, but it was giving him a lot of time to think. These were either changes he’d induced with his last run or something that had been inflicted on him by the version of himself that had left him the journal. He really couldn’t say which, and right now, he didn’t care. He just scrambled to figure out what he was going to tell the dragon slayers. 

It turned out that he needn’t have worried. He decided to post as a mercenary and twice tried to tell his story, but each time he was rejected. The lead riders couldn’t have cared less once they decided he wasn’t a bandit, and the caravan master just laughed and said, “We need men with strong backs a plenty for butchery and gathering treasure if you're inclined to that sort of work, but dragon slaying? Well, you just stand back and leave that to Sir Anias unless you’re in a mood to be used as bait.”

That line got plenty of laughs from the surrounding men, and Simon feigned some embarrassment, but really, he didn’t care. He just shook the man’s hand, climbed on board the wagon, and endured the ribbing that the other men gave the new guy as he learned what he could. 

Though the timing was a day or two off what he was used to, nothing else seemed to have changed. The men still planned on getting up to Weldon and spending a day or perhaps two resting and scouting before they finally moved on to the dragon's peak itself. That seemed a bit fast to Simon. If he was planning on taking out a dragon, he’d want to spend days on reconnaissance alone, but no one seemed concerned when he raised that point.

“Sir Anias? Nah!” one big man blustered. “He’ll just walk in there with his big magic sword and cut the big scaly bastard in half.”

Another man insisted, “No, he uses a giant bow and shoots a magic arrow straight into its heart!”

The fact that none of them could agree told Simon only one thing: none of these men knew how the dragon slayer did it. According to those who did most of the talking, this was either the third or the fourth dragon that the man was going after, but even that they couldn’t decide on. 

Still, from those flimsy foundations, he was able to build a fairly solid thesis. If no one knew the truth about the knight, then that was because no one had seen him make a kill. Truthfully, if he hadn’t seen the body himself, he would have never believed that the man had killed anything. Since he had, though, that theory was right out. 

Which meant there had to be a trick to it. There were excellent reasons why a hunter might not want an audience, of course. They could be distracting. Their scent or sounds might alert the prey that it was in danger. In this case, though, Simon doubted that it was any of that. He’d seen the knight in person. He’d been a strong, bold-looking man covered in blood, but Simon doubted that anyone of any strength could kill a dragon the size of a small whale with steel weapons, no matter what he used. 

By the time they reached the village, and the giant caravan had descended on the place like a swarm of locusts, Simon had settled on the idea that the man had a rune blade and perhaps even runic armor to shelter him. While those weren't entirely disputed when he saw the man later, at the inn while Simon was unloading some crates, it was replaced by a new one. 

Unspoken. Simon wouldn’t have bet his life on it, but he was almost certain that the clasp the man wore to hold his cloak closed was an amulet of protection against fire. It was a small detail, and he only glimpsed it for a moment, but it was enough for Simon to decide that it was probably him. 

Rather than make their amulets simple, hidden things, they made them into holy symbols of sorts, and though there were dozens of patterns for that, and some were more subtle in their symbolism than others, Simon had seen them all and helped to make most of them.

As strange as he found that detail, it made their only other encounter make a bit more sense to him. The last time Simon had met the man, he'd looked at him strangely. Simon had still been pretty deep in his karmic hole at that point, and if he remembered correctly, he’d still been floating somewhere below negative half a million experience points. So, the aura that cloaked him was almost certainly still black enough to warrant a closer look. 

That was only fair since now he was examining the other man more intently. Simon still wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen on this level. He was pretty sure that he was supposed to save this village or the dragon, or maybe both, but now that he knew who he was facing, he wanted to oppose them on principle. 

Simon cursed himself for not taking the time to look up dragons in the Black Library of the White Cloaks when he was there. He’d obsessed over magic and history, with only a little demonology and necromancy thrown in on occasion, before he’d been taken down to the forges. 

Wasted opportunity, he sighed inwardly, But not so wasted that I think I’ll go for another life without a tongue just for another chance to read through it. 

Truthfully, now that Simon knew where it was, there was nothing to prevent him from going and sacking the broken tower on his own. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could probably do it if he wanted to. Right now, he didn’t need to know more about dragons, though. He needed to know more about Sir Anias.

That night, as both the tavern and its courtyard overflowed with drunks and stories, he was surprised at how little he found out. Everyone had a story, and in that story, every dragon was named something different, but none of them had the ring of truth, and the only thing that came from the knight’s mouth were platitudes. 

Still, as the night wore on, Simon found a number of other clues that led him to believe that a few of the other lesser authorities in this circus might be White Cloaks as well. Or they might just be normal guys, and I’m just getting paranoid, he reminded himself. 

Simon had plenty of shadows to jump at these days. There was the doppelgänger and the White Cloaks, true, but there was also the Murian, lingering doubts about Helades, demons, and plenty of other strangeness from past levels to choose from. That wasn’t even the whole list. There were also warlocks and vampires and whatever else.

He could worry about everything so much that it paralyzed him, but that wouldn’t help any more than letting his paranoia run out of control and deciding that everything was a White Cloak plot that needed to be unraveled.

Still, as Sir Anias slipped out the side door with one of the other men that Simon was suspicious of, he whispered a word of lesser cure to flush most of the drunkenness from his system and staggered after them. 

They left the inn and the grounds, but not so far away that it would be easy to follow them. So, instead, Simon staggered to the back of the stables that wasn’t so far away from them and took a piss, which they ignored. 

He couldn’t hear what they were saying from that distance, but he could see their body language, and they were clearly in cahoots. Even as he tried to contemplate a spell that might let him eavesdrop, though, the conversation was already over, and the knight was walking to the front of the stables to ready his horse. Presumably, that was so that he could be in position for what came next.  

“Definitely a trick to it,” Simon said to himself as he watched the man mount up and ride into the dark toward the mountain. 

Simon didn’t know exactly how it worked yet, but at this point, he was pretty sure that it involved either springing a trap on the thing or using the town as bait to prepare a trap in the dragon’s absence. Simon couldn’t be sure, but the longer he thought about it, the more he leaned toward the latter, which made him angrier and angrier.

He waited for a few minutes for the commotion to die down and the hoofbeats to retreat into the distance. Then he saddled the nicest horse left and rode up the mountain after the man. Simon had no idea if this was the right way to solve the level, but even if he had to do it again, he would learn a lot from watching whatever it was that was going to happen next.