Backwoods Dungeon

Chapter Six

Profit

After getting out of the shower and drying off, I opened the other red plus button and found a generic status screen.

Name: Theodore Tande

Class: Druid

Attributes

Strength: 8

Dexterity: 6

Constitution: 5

Wisdom: 6

Intelligence: 8

Charisma: 9

As far as I could tell, the stats were abysmal but pretty fair. I was shocked that Charisma was my highest attribute, but even that made sense to an extent. I was a five at best in the looks department, and my wife was a knockout, so I had to have something going for me. To my delight, I had four points to distribute.

The class screen had said Druids were empowered by Strength and Wisdom. None of the classes had mentioned Constitution though, so I assumed all of them would need that.

Still… if I just dumped all of my points into Charisma would I instantly lose the thirty pounds I’d been trying to get rid of for two years? I didn’t know. None of the attributes had descriptions I could see, and focusing on them didn’t bring up any helpful tooltips.

Stats and Skills. That was the extent of my sudden gamer powers, and not an ounce of help discovering what they did.

I decided I’d better play it safe. One in Strength, one in Wisdom, one in Constitution, and one in Charisma.

Would I actually make more intelligent choices as I improved my wisdom? Would I just know more or be able to learn faster if I increased my intelligence?

No way to know.

Once it was done, it was done. There was no confirmation page, or “Are you sure?” prompt. Once I’d chosen to invest the point, it didn’t look like there was any way to turn back or reconsider.

There was no indication of hit points or mana values of any kind. Frustrating as that meant I had no way to tell if I’d wasted the point in Constitution.

I didn’t feel any stronger, tougher, smarter, or better looking. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel the changes unless I used a bunch of attribute points at once.

What the attributes did was usually the same across most games I’d played, though. Intelligence improved the effectiveness of damage spells, and wisdom did the same for healing. Sometimes, Intelligence governed the sheer amount of mana, while Wisdom would relate to the mana’s regeneration rate.

I did know that was a thing due to the comment about my aura. I wouldn’t be able to always leave the aura on unless I wanted to sacrifice that regeneration for it. I had no idea whether my Wisdom had anything to do with that rate, though.

Dexterity was usually directly related to damage for speed classes like Monk and Rogue. Strength was the same for Paladins and Barbarians.

Constitution hadn’t been mentioned on the class screens, but it usually related to health. In some games, the higher the constitution, the more the overall health would rise each time a level-up happened. In other games it correlated directly to a hit-point number.

Again, I had no way to know.

As for Charisma…? I was a bit vain. I wanted to look good and hadn’t been happy with my body for years.

Once the screen was gone, I started to feel a little dumb about the whole thing. I’d spent hours playing around with menus in my head when I had real pressing concerns that I had to address.

Namely, finding a job.

I spent an hour updating my resume before sinking two more into Indeed, applying for all the “quick apply” jobs that might hire an IT Helpdesk professional. Of course, all of these were happy to inform me that there were hundreds of applicants already; my chances of getting an interview were slim.

Still, the application process took only a few seconds for these jobs, so I hoped I’d get lucky and be the exact fit for one of them.

“Be a Computer Scientist,” they said! “You’ll be able to work anywhere,” they said! They neglected to mention that that was only true if you had ten years of experience in some hokum programming language or esoteric shipping software that no one even knew the name of.

Mongo DB. Who the fuck knows what Mongo DB is!?

A dedicated professional who spends at least some of their free time studying what’s new in computer science. Someone who enjoys that. And dammit, there are people out there who do, and of course, those fuckers are the ones who will get the good jobs.

Hell even Mongo is apparently old by now, as evidenced by the fact that half these jobs want someone with five-plus years of experience in it! Was that even possible? On a whim, I looked it up, and… dammit. Mongo DB was released in 2009?

I sighed. That meant it was already pretty old and I was just hilariously behind the times.

“Maybe I just suck?” I wondered aloud.

This beautiful house and our thirty acres of untamed wilderness were only possible because of a lucky break with the seller and my military service. I got a home loan for practically zero downpayment, and the house had been a steal. The old lady who used to live here just wanted out from under the loan and pretty much sold it at cost.

Even with all those advantages, Rio and I were only keeping afloat due to both of our incomes, and hers was only part-time.

Without mine… how long could we last?

I sighed and opened up my banking app, even though I practically knew the numbers I’d find in each of our accounts by heart.

Yet another sign that whatever was going on with the “Hells” or the “Broken Seals” was not the sign of the apocalypse was that the internet was working just fine. It was still perfectly happy to tell me how broke we were.

We were actually doing quite well despite the savings account dwindling every month. We had a solid nest egg of savings, though I’d give it all back in a heartbeat if it would bring my Grandpa back. Most of it was part of an inheritance from him divided amongst me, my brother, and two of our cousins who weren’t yet old enough to be trusted with sums of money that large.

My brother had long since blown through his, but Rio and I had managed to save most of ours. It was a good thing, too. We were about to need it.

I gave a brief glance at our accounts and was about to flip to something else when something unusual jumped out at me.

Our joint account, where the bulk of our paychecks went, hadn’t changed, and neither had our savings. My personal account had six hundred and eighty dollars in it, though. This morning, it was just under six hundred. So where had the eighty bucks come from?

I wondered if I’d returned something to Amazon and forgotten about it until now, but nothing came to mind. I hadn’t been expecting any refunds.

I dug into the account details and found two identical deposits of forty-four dollars and thirteen cents.

Two deposits. The mystery grew deeper and deeper.

What could have…

My eyes widened.

“Wait…” I said, drilling down into one of the deposits directly. It happened at 3:22. It had probably taken me twenty or thirty minutes to walk back up the mountain, and I’d spent much more time in the shower than I probably needed to, but 3:22 was just about when I would’ve been fighting the goblins.

I’d picked up two coins. Two.

“No way…” I gasped.

I thought more than just two coins had dropped from the goblin’s corpse, but I’d been focused on more important things like not dying at the time. They’d disappeared the second I picked them up, and I’d disregarded them after that. Could the game… the class system, or whatever… Could it be incentivizing me to kill goblins?

It was four. Four coins had dropped from one of those goblins, of which I’d only picked up two. For all I knew, the others were still just lying there. The other goblin had dropped a quiver of arrows, which I’d left out there. I had no bow and no use for arrows.

I’d only killed two of those goblins and severely wounded a third. One out of two had dropped gold coins. Too small a sample size to know how often those goblins dropped the coins, though. If I assumed every other goblin I killed would drop four coins, that would mean… scribble, scribble, math, math, ten goblins would net me our fucking house payment. Twenty-four dead goblins would be worth a monthly paycheck.

… And I had guns.

This was going to be great.