Gamelit 39 (seed to sap)

            So that was good. In fact, he liked the way his parents were treating him lately… like he wasn’t a kid anymore. What had changed? If he asked them, would they say something like ‘you started acting more like a grown-up?’ Probably. Nick got upstairs, stopped at the entrance to his room, shook his head. Was it really that simple? And if he asked them, they would certainly say, ‘Nothing’s that simple,’ because they’d said similar things so many times before that he could hear them in his head. In unison. Like a chorus. He could probably make a song out of it. He could, and could imagine it going viral as a joke meme song. Things parents said.

            He dropped into his chair, picked up the wireset, and logged in. The moment he zoned in, the clangor of practice swords and construction hammers interrupted the peace of Donner’s Beck, and he winced, ears sealing back. He couldn’t fault the activity: the villagers were training, some centaurs were digging the ditch for the eventual moat, and not only did the inn have walls but the stone that had been littered all over the village was now in orderly piles, awaiting deployment. But from a lore standpoint this was exactly the kind of stuff that disturbed nature-aligned creatures.

            His mom jogged up. “Hail, Thoroldaena!”

            What the heck? He started laughing. “Seriously, you can call me by name.”

            “I just did!” She beamed at him. “You’re right on time, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

            “Oh?”

            “The tree.” She started walking that way and he followed her… to the center of town, which had a tiny paved section. “I found out we could make a plaza with a stone floor, which would be great for a lot of reasons. But before we do that, we have to plan for how big the tree’s going to get. So… how big was it before?”

            Nick crouched in front of the sapling, which looked taller now that he’d fed it the sap. He checked the quest; Seed to Sap was still open, and the progress meter was ‘begun’, which was a weird status but that was how the beta was going. “It was a normal tree before. This one’s magical. I get the feeling it’ll get as big as we want it to be, for dramatic purposes.”

            She glanced at him. “So how big do you want it to be?”

            He grinned. “Too easy, Mom. You’re involved, remember? Now your opinion matters too.”

            She straightened, wearing that look he’d seen all his life when she was thinking. “Huh. Well… it can’t very well be Giant Magical Tree size, like the ones that have houses on top, because there’s not enough room. Though that would be pretty cool. Although….”

            “Although?” he prompted.

            “There was a park we used to go to when you were little,” she said, digging into her pouch and coming out with a cookie. She handed it to him. “It had mangrove trees. They put down roots further away, extending down from the branches. Like stalactites. Stalagmites? I forget which is which.”

            “I remember those!” The cookie was a jam-filled vanilla sandwich cookie, and the jam was apricot. “So you’re thinking the tree, instead of having a giant trunk and a tall canopy, would drop little treelets of itself elsewhere? And eventually the whole village is shaded by it, but it’s a single tree?” He chewed, imagining it. Was there anything else in the game like it? He couldn’t think of one. “That’s… actually really cool.”

            “And it should be obviously magical,” his mom continued. “It should sing, or its leaves can be used to make potions, or something. Oh wait, then people will poach the tree. It should be able to defend itself. Or things should live in it that will defend it?”

            “It needs a tree spirit,” Nick said. “A dryad. The dryad can take care of that kind of thing. It’ll attract defenses and make the magical parts happen.”

Quest update! Seed to Sap: find a way to attract a dryad to inhabit the shell of your sapling and weave the fate of the forest world and the world of mortals more closely together.

            “Oooh!” Mom exclaimed.

            “Nice,” Nick agreed, and glanced up as a flitter drew his eyes. Galatea flapped down to settle on his shoulder and he petted her. “I think… I think I’ll use the boon for this. It feels right. Making the tree too big to cut down this time, and getting a dryad for it… those are things the forest lord would approve of.”

            “And we’d still have a boon left over,” his mom said. “I like it.”

            Nick touched his chest where the glowing boon remained lodged. Under his palm, the skin tingled. “The sooner the better.”

            “I think so too.”

            He nodded and leaned over to pull the arrow Killz had left behind from the soil. With it in one hand, and with the other set over the magic on his chest, he concentrated on a hazy picture of a mangrove tree… but more whimsical and ethereal than the one from the park. Something that created beautiful arches and colored shadows, rather than shades of darkness, with boughs full of exotic birds and critters like winglings. He thought of the white bark of Tolkien’s Lothlorien, and its golden leaves, of crystalline berries and music that flowed through rustling branches.

            “I call upon the Lord of the Forest,” he sang. “To grant the boon I ask on behalf of Donner’s Beck. Grow this tree into a home worthy of a dryad, to live among the people of the village and entwine her life with theirs. A mighty tree, resistant to disease and attack; a beautiful tree, dense with song and wonder; a kindly tree, heavy with fruit and healing; a welcoming tree, to the creatures and spirits of the forest and the people who live beneath its boughs and among its roots.”

            The golden light coalesced under his palm and shimmered out from around it, swirling to the sapling and raising a glowing outline from the ground. It grew and grew, throwing out branches and roots like an airier mangrove, and then stabilized as a hazy promise.

Quest Update! Seed to Sap: You have used your forest boon to call for a dryad to grow and inhabit the tree of Donner’s Beck. You are now: waiting.

            He wanted to say ‘that’s it?’ but before he could, his mother said, “This is perfect. We should go put more offerings on the stone so we can attract the right kind of dryad.”

            “Offerings on the… oh wait, you did something with that rock you pried out of the headwater??”

            “You should come look!”

            So he did, aware of Galatea riding along with him with her head pressed against his jaw. Was she okay? Did having the KeepinTouch make her feel better about Jonah, or worse because now she could tell for herself that he was unavailable? If he asked, she’d probably say she didn’t have feelings to feel about it. He would have to talk to her about it later.

            “I love it,” he said, on seeing the shrine. “This is a great idea, Mom. Look, it’s even a named place.”

            “It is? Oh, it is! ‘The Shrine of Forest Amity.’ That’s great. What do you think we should leave there?”

            “Cookies,” Nick said. “Definitely.”

            In the end, they left more than cookies. They brought back a doll from the village children, and a hairbrush from the centaurs, and picked flowers and set cookies and milk as if trying to attract Santa and it was so funny and so ridiculous that Nick spent the entire time grinning. Especially when his mom set down some rabbit teeth. “Really?”

            “We want her to be able to defend herself!”

            “With rabbit teeth, though?”

            His mom brandished her arm and pointed at a bandage. “Rabbits are mean here! The forest should be proud. Even the prey animals are fierce.”

            “Fair,” Nick said. And after a moment, set the arrow on the altar too. “So she knows there’s danger. And that we’re dedicated to protecting her and the village from it.”

            “Good idea,” his mom said. “We wouldn’t want her to say we didn’t warn her.” She put her hands on her… hips? What did you call that part of a horse? “So now we just wait?”

            “So now,” Nick said, “We go back to work on everything else.”

            “Good point, there’s plenty of ‘everything else’ to do. Do you know anything about making brick?”

            “No? Because…?”

            “Because if we pave the plaza we need to make the buildings out of something, and wood seems like it’s asking for trouble….”

            “Let’s go find out,” Nick said.

            Was spending the day learning from an NPC how to make brick boring? Maybe to a lot of people, but probably not to the kind of viewers who liked Dad’s lectures. It made Nick wish his father was playing too. Was that weird? It was exactly the kind of thing that his friend group decried Rattie and his homeschooled friends for being into, gaming with family. They did board games, he remembered. Wasn’t it cooler to do online games though? Or was that worse somehow? But he loved talking through the logistics of rebuilding Donner’s Beck, and when Carl logged on, he was into it too. At least, briefly, and then he wanted to ride heroically to the next town over to find a specialist in brickmaking. The game even spawned a quest for it. He and Mom played until dinner and then logged off, and over kung pao chicken he and his father talked about the basics of medieval villages and then they had to record a discussion about it and… this was his life now. It would bother him if he hadn’t also spent a lot of time today in the real world with his friends.

            Except that made him think of Shellie and his decision about that. He glanced at his phone, which was no doubt full of group chat messages, and decided he didn’t want to get into it, or even think about it. Better to record something for Jonah’s KeepinTouch. He thought that would be hard, but when he turned on the mic and started going, it just… flowed out. What the game meant to him, how he and his friends had been playing for years, what was going on with the beta. If he stopped before getting into his ambivalence about playing with family, that was reasonable… he’d already rambled for an hour. He saved it and attached it to the queue for the device, and was pleased to see Blythe and Fish had already made one. Blythe’s was titled ‘hi_mr_jonah’, which made him smile… Fish’s was ‘wkeupdude’, which was… also funny, to be honest. He had good friends.

            Tempting to play again, but instead he went into his closet and brought out the dusty guitar he’d hidden away with his desire not to have his love for music turned into some big deal by everyone. Mandolin didn’t map exactly to guitar, but he spent the rest of the night figuring out how.

***

“…hey man, so Nick—that’s the guy responsible for you having to listen to us blather—asked me to record something for you about how Omen Galaxica is so awesome that you need to wake up and check it, because what was the point of doing all that work if you couldn’t enjoy it? And honestly it’ll probably go off the rails without you because you were obviously the one with all the good ideas….”

“Hi, Mr. Jonah… my name’s Blythe and I’ve been playing Omen Galaxica since launch. And I’ll tell you a secret… everyone always wants me to play the healer, and I sort of prefer being a tinker. I like healing and I’m good at it, but the tinker class is so cool. I read that it was your idea to turn crafting into a class, and I know that a lot of people hate it because it’s too finicky, but I love it. But my friends never want to heal, and I wanted to be helpful. I don’t mind, really. But I wish I could play my tinker more often.”

“So about the game balance with the assassin class. It’s totally borked. Someone’s not paying attention because we got the short end of the stick in raids. Not that my friends raid, because there are only five of us. But I’d like to rent myself out to the big raiding groups and no one needs an assassin.”