I woke to the sound of muttering. “All he had on him was a couple of lockpicks? Psh.”

  I lifted my head and blinked into the bright light. Huh. So it wasn’t all a dream.

  “What are you going on about?” I asked Dave. He sat next to me, his beak jerking this way and that, probably because he was scanning through my menus.

  He leaned to one side to look at me. “I’m checking the stuff you picked up from the Hunters you killed. They didn’t have much, but I don’t know what I expected. It was pretty early in the game.”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes, then flicked open my inventory and sorted them by Recent, then scanned through the list. It was easy enough to figure out where the dead Hunters were in my timeline.

  Between the shadow guy with the antlers and the slime creature, I had acquired a handful of lockpicks, torches, regular bullets, a few more Rusty weapons and armor pieces, and plenty of rat meat and “Gorgos Scrapings,” which were what the starting enemy dropped. There was also one Scarred Stone Staff, which had come from them, too, but was slightly better quality than the Rusty stuff.

  “Where are they even getting rat meat?” I asked no one in particular. “There aren’t rats in Seven Keys until the Treecurve.”

  “They always start the game with rats. It’s tradition,” Dave said. “Oh, look at this! Those Apprentic Breaker’s Gloves you got for dismantling your very valuable gun which you now would have several bullets for is almost useful. They give you +10 to Dismantling when you are wearing them while Dismantling things. Seeing as how Dismantle as a skill only goes up to 10 before you have to upgrade it, that seems useful.”

  I nodded blearily. “It will be like having the skill maxed out to the next level, without me having to actually Dismantle a bunch of stuff to train the skill up. Nice.”

  In the hoard from the two dead Hunters, there were also two sets of dragon hatchling skin, one dragon hatchling eyeball, and a Mother’s Tears Grimoire. It was for a water-element spell, so I couldn’t use it yet, but I’d hold onto it. These must have come off the dragon hatchlings’ bodies in everyone’s starting caverns. As I’d suspected, each Hunter had been given one hatchling to kill, instead of making us all fight over the same one.

  The Hunters had a few treasures in there, though. The Rock Tumble Grimoire would teach me a good spell, if I ended up choosing an Aspect that could use it. The Ratbite Grimoire was less useful. There were two more Basic Health Vials and my first Basic Mana Vial, which was currently useless to me. Pretty soon here, I would want more of those, though.

  And I had gold. A lot of it. Between all the Riftguard questlines and the Hunters, I had over 22,000 gold. In the real Seven Keys, that was nothing to scoff at, at least not this early in the game.

  “Will the Conduit’s version of the game have the same shops?” I said. “Or an auction house?”

  “You can buy and sell from NPCs, but it’s usually crap. That said, they will buy things from you. There will be an auction-something-or-other on the next level, but it doesn’t go to other Hunters. It opens up to the audience. They pay for gold credits to use to buy digital copies of your items, either to help you or to be fanboys.”

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  I sighed and leaned over my knees. “So you’re saying the only way to find decent items is to get them from mobs?”

  “Pretty much. But why would Hunters sell unwanted gear to other Hunters? It could only make their enemies stronger. And sometimes there will be, like, a kind of special merchant with better offerings.”

  “Hey, this Shadow Helm looks nice,” I said. It was Yellow grade. “I’m guessing it’s what gave the shadow guy those antlers.”

  It required 25 Intelligence to use, and I couldn’t equip a helm anyway, but I could sell it. Possibly for pennies. Hmm.

  “You know what?” I said, standing. “I don’t think I’m going to sell anything. I think I’m going to give it all to the hippies.”

  Dave groaned. Even though he was on the floor at my feet, the sound seemed to be coming from next to my right ear.

  “Uuuughghghg. Fine. If you have to.”

  “Tell you what,” I said, crouching again. I patted him on his fez. “I’ll take all the coolest stuff, the things I can’t use and that the Tendua don’t really need, and I’ll dismantle them with those fancy gloves on. Then we can use the parts to craft better items, once we find a crafting table and feel safe enough to use it.”

  Dave recoiled from my pats, making me stifle a grin. It was nice to piss him off for once.

  “Don’t do that. You’ll break the propeller,” he said. “Fine. If you dismantle the rare stuff that should have good bits, I won’t say shit about sharing the crummy stuff.”

  I chuckled and rose again, switching to my equipment screen. As I’d expected, the Infernal Riftguard armor pieces were the same as they were in the game. Each one added 2% Strength for each armor piece worn in the set. I had three, so each piece gave me plus 6% Strength, at a total of 18%. It would have been a lot better if I could equip them into the NerveGear’s slots—the set maxed out at 72% added Strength, and I owned all the pieces, since sets didn’t come with Trinkets—but having three pieces was still the best option I currently had.

  I switched to the Reputation screen, which showed I had 24 out of 25 Reputation with all Infernal Riftguard. That meant that they would be useful to me anywhere I went, but they were the weakest of all factions, so it would only be useful occasionally. I was one point away from having them worship me as a god, and I’d only been in the game a half a day, so I figured I was doing alright.

  The Reputation screen also listed out the two titles I’d gained: COMES BEARING GIFTS and HERO OF THE GATES. In the game, titles were just flavor text, a way to flex that you had beaten particularly hard quests or a way to show off your personality. I had been using the one IS BORING AT PARTIES before.

  I should have several more than those two by now, just from beating the hatchling, so that meant the Conduit had nixed a bunch of titles from their version. In addition, the titles were expandable. I tapped through, and discovered that they gave me bonuses—if they could be called bonuses.

  “Hmm. COMES BEARING GIFTS displays the first 9 slots of my inventory to anyone who looks at me. And HERO OF THE GATES gives me +1 Reputation with anyone guarding any kind of door or entry point.”

  The first was outright suicidal, and the second next-to-useless, but hey. I’d take that over no title at all. I equipped it.

  “Okay. You’ve gone through all your items and drops and equipment and all that junk,” Dave said. “Now let’s hurry up and level up, so we can get out of here. You slept for an hour, which was plenty of time for that rooster bitch to set a trap for us.”

  “Maybe we’ll bore her to death by staying in,” I said. “I only slept an hour?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I feel pretty good. Is that the qubins, too?”

  “Nah. Just the thrill of the Hunt. Now get on with it.”

  I was almost relieved to hear the Conduit couldn’t control my energy levels. Or maybe it wasn’t that they couldn’t help, but that they chose not to—for now.

  I didn’t like the power they had over me. Someday, I would do something about it.

  But I had to be above level 9 to manage that, so I tapped the glowing level-up icon in my HUD.

  It was time for the real decisions. Armor and weapons could be unequipped. Stats couldn’t.

  Everything—the whole future of my strategy—would ride on what I chose next.