System Lost: My Own Best Friend

"So..." I muse, turning the candle over in my hands. "I guess we can boil water now?"

"In theory," Violet agrees. "But we need a smaller, non-flowing source to test it on. Like a bowl or something."

"We needed that anyway," I point out. "Maybe we can find a natural rock basin somewhere."

"I'm sorry, I still can't get over this," Vi says. "How?! That's not how the transfer of energy works."

"Candles also don't burn lukewarm or stay lit underwater," I argue. "Nor do lizards shoot lasers from their eyes. We can't take anything for granted."

"I guess not," she says. "But shouldn't the same thing have happened when you were chewing on them the other day?"

I shrug. "Maybe it did, and I just didn't notice. All I did was chew on the wick a little."

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe you should try again? Just be careful—the candle might not be hot, but boiling steam is."

Eh, why not? I place a candle in my mouth, flame first, and roll it around for a bit, trying to get plenty of saliva in there and very pointedly not thinking about what it must look like. A few moments later, I withdraw a gently steaming candle and exhale a mouthful of visible vapor.

"Looks like it works!" I declare.

"How did you not burn your tongue?"

"Dunno," I answer. "Pretty neat, though, right?"

"I hate this. It makes no sense. That's not how physics is supposed to work."

"That's what makes it magic, Vi," I comment sagely.

"Alright," Violet says, skipping from anger and denial straight to acceptance. "Let's try something else. Can you cook meat with it?"

Now it's my turn to be skeptical. "Why would they be able to cook meat but not burn us?"

"I don't know, Allie," she says dramatically. "It's magic."

"Okay, you got me there," I admit.

After returning from our hydration hike—followed by a quick trip to the bathroom that feels a bit sisyphean—I take out one of our last remaining bits of gross, mushy snail meat and grimace. Instead of drying out, it's somehow managed to get even softer and slimier after all this time.

"I still can't believe you ate some of this on purpose," I say.

"It was a little more appetizing when it was fresh," she lies.

I furtively hold the candle's flame to the dead snail flesh and hold my breath as I wait for something to happen. After a moment, the slimy surface starts to bubble and steam, then I hear a gentle sizzle coming from the meat.

I gasp in wonder, then instantly regret it as the smell hits me. I reflexively toss the rotten lump of snail and fall to my knees gagging.

"Ugh, blech, holy moley that is wretched," I say, coughing and sputtering. Once I recover, I stare at the half-cooked lump on the floor and scowl. "Vi, do you know what this means?"

"That these candles make less sense by the second?"

"It means we're friggin' idiots!" I shout. "We've been eating raw lizard meat all week for no good reason!"

"Ah," she deadpans. "Yeah, that is a little distressing."

[Level up!]

Candle Enthusiast is now level 6.

+1 Awareness.

The comforting tingle of a level up does little to assuage my irritation. I never really expected to advance this class so far, and I hadn't even considered trying to master it. I'm a little surprised when a second message appears in my head.

[Level up!]

Survivalist is now level 9.

+1 [Warning: Invalid Reference].

Oh heck yeah! Love me some invalid reference.

"Looks like you got a level for that too," I say.

"I'll probably master it if we can set up a cooking station of some kind."

"Let's try it!"

I head back to the Map room and sit down next to my biggest pile of candles. I spent about half a day just gathering as many of them together as I could, mostly because I was bored. They're not much better as a mattress than they were as pillows, but it's kinda cozy to sleep next to.

I mean, for a stone floor with no furniture.

I grab a few candles and start tinkering. My first idea is to use a pair of candles as "feet," then layer a bunch of them next to each other to make a little table. They roll around a lot, so it's not very stable and keeps falling apart. After a few more attempts, I manage to get them to stay put, though I'm definitely going to need something better in the long run.

"Let's see..."

I stick my tongue out to concentrate, slipping candles underneath my makeshift grill to serve as a "heat" source. I double it up from the other side, overlapping the candle flames beneath the little table.

This gives me a single line of little candle flames licking its way up through the gaps of my candle grill.

"This looks incredibly stupid," Violet comments.

She's not wrong, but I feel compelled to defend my handiwork.

"If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid," I retort.

"You've yet to demonstrate that it works."

I hold up a finger to respond, then lower it and pout. She's got me there. I root through my uncomfortably smelly pockets, trying not to think too hard about the fact that I've been carrying slowly rotting meat on my person at all times. Fishing out a reasonable looking cut of lizard meat, I gingerly lower it onto the precarious little table.

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For the first few seconds, nothing happens, and I'm a little disappointed. But then I hear a faint sizzle coming from the meat, and little wisps of steam start to rise as it cooks.

I whoop with joy at my success. "Yes!" I cry. "We did it! Now we're cooking!"

The smell is...not great. The meat's not exactly fresh, and it's been sitting in my dang pocket all week. But it's not as stomach-churningly rancid as the snail was, at least.

After a few minutes, I pick up the lizard filet and flip it over. Despite visibly cooking, it's still not actually hot. The cooked portions are also...kinda spotty? The places where the candle flame touched the meat have darkened slightly, but the areas around it are still raw.

I guess with real cooking, the heat usually gets distributed through the meat, but magic candle cooking doesn't work that way.

Still, after maybe thirty minutes or so of fussing over it—and only occasionally having to rebuild the grill after accidentally jostling a load-bearing candle—I've managed to obtain one dry, rubbery, sort-of-cooked lizard steak.

Well, maybe less of a steak and more of a vaguely meat-like chunk? It's not dry enough to be jerky, not moist enough to be steak, and smells like something between burnt chicken and floor cleaner.

Not a roaring success, but I'll take it.

"Do you want to try it, or should I?" I ask. All this cooking has made me hungry, despite the unappetizing nature of the food itself.

"It's all yours," Violet says.

With trepidation, I take a small bite of the cooked lizard meat. It...doesn't taste good. But it also doesn't taste bad! It kinda just tastes like nothing. It's got a texture somewhere between well-done steak and beef jerky, but is otherwise bland and uninteresting.

Which is honestly a pretty big upgrade from completely disgusting.

[Level up!]

Survivalist is now level 10.

+1 [Warning: Invalid Reference].

Survivalist has reached its maximum threshold. [Upgrade] or [Fuse] the class to unlock further progression.

"There it goes!" I exclaim.

"Finally," Violet sighs. "Now I can switch to [Defender]."

"Hold on," I say, frowning. "How do we know you won't lose all your progress with [Survivalist] if you remove it now? I'm pretty sure that's what happened when I got rid of [Student]."

"That's easy, try looking at the [Remove] option in your class."

"I don't want to remove it yet!" I protest.

"Don't focus on it with the intent to do it, look at it like you would one of the mechanism's links."

I try doing as she says. Sure enough, the words appear in my head like any other link.

[Remove]

Removes a class from its slot. Progress will be lost unless the class has been mastered by reaching the maximum level threshold within its tier.

"Wait, really?" I ask. "How long have you known about that?"

"Not long," she admits. "I started thinking about it when I realized how difficult it would be to increase any class past the second star-grade. There had to be some way to remove classes without losing their levels. [The Beaten Path] gave me an important reminder—mastery. That turned out to be the key."

"And you just...figured that all out and kept it to yourself?"

"I had nothing better to do while you experimented with candles," Vi says. "I figured I'd let you know next time it came up—which is now, I guess."

I guess I have been fronting a lot lately. Violet leads now and then when we go on our hydration hikes, but it's pretty much just been me in charge for the last three days straight. I'd go out of my mind being stuck in the passenger seat that whole time, so I guess I should be grateful.

"So I guess you're expecting me to take Survivor now?"

"[Survivalist]," Violet corrects me. "And I think that's our best course. It may take a while, but once I master [Defender] I think that they'll make a strong pair. Something focused on keeping us alive."

"Okay, that doesn't sound bad," I hedge. "But if [Survivalist] is already mastered, then I don't need to take it, right? [Candle Enthusiast] gives me awareness anyway, and we can use the Foraging skill through [The Beaten Path]."

"I guess, but you'd get more awareness from the mastered class, and every little bit counts."

"I just want to try mastering [Candle Enthusiast]," I insist. "I know you're not a fan of it, and maybe it does turn out to be a dead end, but I think I've demonstrated that there's something to explore here."

"I suppose," she relents. "Alright, you've convinced me. You can keep the candle class for now."

Not that I really needed her permission, but it's good to be on the same page about it, at least.

[Level up!]

Unified Wanderers is now level 1.

+2 Resilience.

+2 Ego.

Apparently the [World Engine] agrees, because that level up was paired with a much stronger version of the usual pleasant tingling sensation. Also holy frick! Four points for one level?! I mean, I guess I knew that was how it worked, but it's really starting to sink in how much stronger higher grade classes are.

We really missed out with that angel class, didn't we? I almost regret refusing to take it, but it would have locked one of us down entirely and I didn't like the vibes it was giving me.

"Maybe we can even combine Survivor with [Candle Enthusiast]," I suggest.

"You're doing that on purpose now, aren't you?" Vi accuses. "I don't like it. Stacking two awareness classes together would limit us a lot, and we need to be selective about what we merge into our primary class."

"How do you mean?"

"Each new grade is exponentially more powerful, but also exponentially more difficult to achieve," she explains. "Realistically, anything past the third grade is going to be almost impossible to reach. Whatever we merge into [Unified Wanderers] next may well be the last. Since that class's attributes and skills are shared by both of us and it can't be removed, we need to be very deliberate about what we fuse it with."

"Alright, but just because we make another grade two class doesn't mean we have to fuse it."

"No, but it would mean tying up all of our Awareness investment into a single class that's rather narrowly focused on candle-related survival skills."

"Hmm, fair point, I guess," I concede. "Maybe we can just take a look once we get there, in case there are some good options."

"Sure," she agrees. "In the meantime, now that I have access to a fighting class I think we've rested for long enough. It's time to get proactive about searching for a new food source."

Gah. I'm not looking forward to that. As much as it sucks trying to choke down increasingly nasty lizard meat, I feel bad going out of our way to look for trouble. But I can't just rely on getting lucky enough to have edible corpses delivered to our doorstep.

"What's the plan?" I ask. "We haven't run into anything else in a while. I bet we're scaring them off with our smell."

"That is...distressingly plausible, actually."

"Oh, I was just joking about needing a bath."

"It's fine," she says. "The plan is the same. I'm going to leave [Survivalist] on to keep my Awareness as high as possible, then look for signs of life near the stream. Then it's just the opposite of how we found it in the first place. Follow the trails until we find newer ones, then follow those until we catch up."

"Then what?" I ask. "Isn't that just going to lead us to another snail?"

"Probably, but we'll be ready to kill whatever we find," she says. "Since the geckos prey on the snails, we might get lucky."

I have mixed feelings. The laser geckos have mostly left us alone so far, but the snails are much grosser and their shells are hard to deal with. Not to mention the stone spears—if we get hit by one of those, we're done.

The geckos have their laser eyes, but those take forever to charge up, so they probably aren't a concern. However, they're a lot more nimble, which makes them more dangerous in a straight-up fight, even if they are a little easier to kill overall—especially if we can get the drop on a docile one.

Argh! I don't want to choose. Thankfully, I don't have to. This is Violet's project, and I'm going to let her do it her way.

"Alright," I say, closing my eyes and consciously trying to relinquish control. "Lead the way."

It takes a few moments of concentration, but soon I rise to my feet, check my knife, and do the best I can to get our horribly tangled hair out of the way with just a few overworked hair clips.

For once, we're not just trying to survive whatever this nightmare dungeon tries to throw at us. This time, we're pushing forward on our own terms. It's time to hunt.