Iam, for the record, a big fan of this rock sled.” Matt couldn’t help but admire his handiwork.

“I’m glad, Matt. It sure cost enough.” Lucy disapproved.

When Matt tilled the field before planting his first round of crops, he discovered that the estate shop’s prices were variable. The more work that Matt put into the field, the more the shop costs dropped. It would prorate the cost based on how much of the job was already done.

So when the latest round of dungeon-clearing didn’t yield enough points for buying two units worth of improved soil, Matt hoped that leveling the land and clearing the rocks from the property would decrease the price of the soil.

The rock sled was slightly misnamed, since it was more of a large, squat, flatbed wagon than anything else. It was built to hold a huge amount of weight, which let Matt load more rocks into the sled and move them off his property faster. The idea was great, except for the difficulty of actually moving the thing. It had cost Matt quite a few credits to purchase the sled and now, he was regretting that decision.

“It’s not so mobile after all, I guess,” Matt grunted as he struggled against the loaded sled.

“What’s that?” Lucy asked.

“The wagon. It’s marked as mobile in the system. I mean, it moves. It’s technically mobile, but I was hoping it would move itself, honestly,” said Matt.

“Oh … you could have just told me that’s why you were buying the sled. You know that’s not what mobile means in the system. Mobile is like … so, okay, your house. It’s not marked as mobile right?” Lucy smiled, but didn’t crack a joke at Matt’s expense.

Matt glanced at the shed. “Yeah. It wasn’t, I think.”

“So that means it’s not meant to be moved. You could still move it by hand if you really wanted to, but the estate won’t move it for you. It will move mobile stuff, mostly so not every choice is absolutely permanent, and you have the option to rearrange the bigger stuff later.”

“So I’ve been dragging this for nothing?” Matt asked, incredulous.

“Well, no. It’s not free. I figured you’d rather drag it than spend the points.” Lucy seemed to be in a good mood today.

She also wasn’t wrong. Matt went to the front of the wagon, ducked under the leather straps, and heaved to get it started. Once he had it moving, he walked a fair ways off the property to an empty space he planned on using as an all-purpose dump site. Unloading the rocks was another job, since he had to lift every rock he had pried from the fields again. The sled was mounted on two wheels and could tip down a bit towards the front to make this easier, but it only helped so much.

He was tempted to just tip the whole wagon over once he got it light enough, but he couldn’t take the risk of breaking the thing. Lucy wasn’t wrong when she said that the sled hadn’t been cheap. Luckily, this was the last load of rocks for now. With both fields cleared, Matt sat down on the rock sled for a break, his stiff joints clicking as he sat.

“Tell me more about this mobile thing. How far can I move things?” Matt asked.

“It’s pretty much unlimited. As near as I can tell in the system documentation, part of the point of mobile equipment was being able to loan it out. If your neighbor needed something, you could send it over there. But it costs more the farther you send things, and also depends on how big the object is.”

“So a bulldozer costs more than a bucket?”

“Kind of. Actually, things like bulldozers would be a bit cheaper. I guess it’s to offset the part where you could just roll it over there yourself if you wanted to. So there’s that, too.”

“This would have been good to know earlier.” Matt couldn’t help the sarcasm creeping into his tone. He felt bad right after the words left his mouth.

Thankfully, Lucy overlooked Matt’s ungrateful tone in her reply. “I’m not sure it’s important for you, honestly. You don’t exactly have neighbors to borrow from.”

That’s where Lucy was wrong, and Matt knew exactly how to make up for his slip up earlier. He stood up and dusted himself off. Vitality hadn’t quite patched up all his sore muscles yet, but he could find time on the road.

“Get your stuff. We are going on a walk,” Matt said.

“I’m a fun illusion, Matt. I don’t have stuff to get.” Lucy walked over and looked up at him, questioningly. “Where are we going?”

“It happens”—Matt grinned—“that I know of another thing marked as mobile. I thought we might go see how hard it’d be to scoop it up.”

“There’s no way you need this many sticks, Matt.”

The mystery is driving her crazy. I love it.

After spending so much time with Lucy, Matt had started to pick up on her habits. Although she would never admit it, Lucy loved mysteries and surprises. She’d poke and prod trying to find a clue and get Matt to give up more details.

Since leaving the estate a while ago, Matt probably should have clued her in on the off chance that a dungeon break occurred. But he stayed quiet for two reasons. First, it was fun to watch her try and think about the weird bundle of sticks in the sled. And second, he felt legitimately bad for her. She had to deal with a pretty horrific planet, she couldn’t touch anything, and she only had Matt to talk to. While he considered himself to be a pretty good dude, he wasn’t exactly the world’s best conversationalist.

Lucy was just a kid in a bad situation trying to make the best of it.

So Matt thought the intrigue might do her some good and cut the boredom. He hoped so. It was the least he could do for her, at least right now.

The sticks that Lucy was talking about were just that—a big pile of normal sticks that Matt had tied to the rock sled before dragging it along on their trip. Besides needing them for the big surprise, Matt also could benefit from some more work in the physical fitness department. Since his first big walk to find Lucy, Matt hadn’t really trained. Sure, he did some dungeons to figure out his hand-to-hand combat and afterward, another trap-focused training run. But his overall fitness felt the same, he still walked and ran at the same pace.

The one time he had really run was from the ape chase. But that wasn’t exactly the healthiest method to train his cardio. Dragging a cart across dozens of miles of wasteland sounded like a much more appealing alternative.

“There’s no way you need this many sticks. They were very, very expensive, Matt.” Lucy was still at it.

“Just wait, I promise you it’s worth it,” Matt replied.

For actually getting the sticks, Matt had to open up his wallet. Making a tree grow faster wasn’t beyond his estate’s powers, but it also wasn’t cheap. As Lucy had pointed out at the time, they could have fully planted one of the new fields for what it cost to grow the tree.

Matt responded with the fact that having big trees was nice, and they didn’t exactly have full schedules keeping them from getting more points and planting the field later. Lucy didn’t have a great counterargument for this, but that didn’t stop her from asking endlessly about the expensive sticks for the entire trip.

After growing out the tree, Matt had cut off as many branches as he could without killing the tree outright and bundled them, leaves and all, into the sled.

Time passed, and eventually, they arrived. Lucy could see their destination gleaming from miles and miles off, beautiful in its boring squareness.

“This is your big surprise, Matt? The bunker?”

It took a while, but Matt won Lucy over. The first thing Matt needed to do was dig. Survivor’s Digging was a brutally stupid skill, yes. But it was his brutally stupid skill, and his whole life was—in some very significant ways—brutally stupid. It didn’t make sense to leave it unleveled.

And the mobile modifier on this building was real. Matt had remembered reading the word when he first discovered the bunker. It had taken him a while to figure out the estate interface enough to find the warehouse bunker without Lucy’s help, but he did.

Was it something they could afford to move today? Absolutely not. But if he was going to be digging anyway, it made sense to dig this sucker out and lower the costs as much as possible. And while he was doing that, he could give Lucy a much-needed project.

“So one hundred percent my design, my ideas? You swear?” Lucy asked with excitement.

“Absolutely. You can use anything we have, besides my knife, my spear, my clothes, and my food. Besides that, it’s all you. And I’ll build every last part of it,” Matt patiently answered.

Lucy tried to hide her excitement, but Matt saw her eyes saunter over through the open door to the storage unit while they talked, clearly already starting on plans. It was a good sign. She was going to enjoy this.

“Matt, I …” Lucy stopped for a moment, apparently chewing on her next words a bit before she spat them out. “Okay, real quick. Serious talk.”

“Is this ‘Matt, you idiot’ serious, or serious serious?”

“The second. Just, let me get this out.” She took a deep breath. “So you know that when we first met, I wasn’t thrilled about you.”

Matt sobered up. He responded with every word calculated, “I got that impression, yes.”

“So, yeah. I don’t … I was even less thrilled about the compulsory service part of things. I don’t think you can know what it feels like to have to obey a command. It tunnels in your mind and makes you do things. It’s not fun.”

“Lucy, I’m …”

“No, listen.” She cut him off. “I get it. You didn’t have much of a choice. You’d be dead by now if you didn’t. But, yeah, not so fun at the time. I seriously was planning on letting you die. Bad advice at the right time, or something like that.”

“Really?” Matt couldn’t help himself.

“Maybe a little. But then the whole thing I can’t talk about without getting zapped came up, and I realized that you weren’t the actual bad guy here. So I forgave you at some point. And then, you know, lots of stuff has happened.” Lucy took in a deep breath and paused.

“Yeah. Okay.” Matt wasn’t sure what to say.

“I just, you know, there’s a lot of weird stuff there. And I’m still honestly a bit mad about the command-me-to-tell-you-things bit of our relationship. But you also gave me a name, and we’ve also been sticking it to the system pretty well. And then there’s this.” Lucy waved her arm in the general direction of the storage shed. “I know of the concept of gifts from Earth history. But, I guess, I never thought that I’d be given one. It’s hard on Gaia, you get it, I get it, but it’s true. So … and I think in terms of gifts you could have given me … Getting to design a murder-labyrinth with a future-tech magic storeroom is pretty high on the list.”

“You like it?”

“I do. And I know it took some thought to figure it out for me. So … thanks.”

And with that, she suddenly disappeared into the bunker.

“Just make sure it doesn’t suck!” Matt called out after her.

“Don’t ruin this, Matt!”

Matt didn’t get a lot of time to just be a person anymore. But today he had been able to make a little girl’s life a little better.

It felt good.