The Gate Traveler

In the morning, after breakfast, I opened the Archive to figure out this awakening business.

THE ARCHIVE WAS A MESS!

When I first learned about Gates, everything was new and exciting, so I read everything I could find. If something was irrelevant, I skipped it. Now, searching for specific information was a nightmare. There was no table of contents, no index, no search function, and definitely no help function.

The first page of the Archive had two options:

When you clicked "World Information," you got all the entries, one after the other, with the newest one on top. This was perfect for World Information. Who wants to read an account about a place from 100 years ago?

The General Information section was the same: entry after entry, with the newest on top. The only semblance of organization was a small green circle at the top left, and when you zoomed in on it, you saw "Tips & Tricks." During my initial reading in the Archive, I noticed it by chance. When you scrolled down the main page, the circle moved up and disappeared from view. The situation was the same inside the "Tips & Tricks" section: entry after entry, with the newest on top, except for one.

The entries were a jumbled mess. They covered every subject under the sun with no rhyme or reason. It also appeared that Travelers get bored sometimes, and when that happens, they spend time in the Archive.

Some strange entries contained a string of two to seven words that made no sense, followed by text that appeared to be personal messages. One entry read:

I blinked at the message a couple of times. What the hell is a helfermiton?

I scrolled down. No explanation. Just another cryptic breadcrumb in the chaos buffet that was the Archive.

There were ramblings about life and existence, along with gripes about people and events. Some Travelers treated the Archive like a social media feed, commenting on each other's posts. Like I said, it was a colossal mess.

I tried to create folders to distribute the content according to relevance so I could find it in the future, and a red message flashed before my eyes:

The red blinking light didn't announce it. The text flashed before my eyes in red, stayed for thirty seconds, and disappeared.

I shook my head. Weird.

I suspected the person who posted the tip about ability points created the "Tips & Tricks" sub-section. That specific tip remained at the top after I saw it, even after three more entries were added.

The rest was just an information dump.

One Traveler posted a well-thought-out list of recommended items to take with you. More Travelers added their suggestions. Other Travelers argued about the need for this or that item and made suggestions for different items. And one bored Traveler posted a long comment—two pages long!—about why it's best to go traveling "like a baby just born, without the burdens of the material world."

Some Traveler posted to stock up on water before entering a desert; five Travelers commented on his entry with "no shit, Sherlock" in various variations. The best were "Congratulations, Dust Prophet. What's next? Fire is hot?" and "[obviousness_level=EXTREME] Notification: Statement exceeds redundancy threshold." Another Traveler commented that it's better to buy the Condense Water spell and condense water from the humidity in the air. Two Travelers called him stupid and said the desert had no humidity to condense.

One post claimed the only way to tame a void beast was by singing to it. The first comment underneath said that void beasts were deaf. The second comment called both previous authors "hopeless morons who should be devoured by void beasts and shat out as something more useful. A fertilizer."

A different Traveler wrote you should wear good shoes in low to medium mana worlds. Many Travelers laughed at him for going barefoot in high mana worlds. He got upset and answered all of them, with a lot of cursing, that what he meant was that lower mana worlds don't have teleportation, so you have to walk a lot. All the previous commenters wrote that he should have said so, and one threatened to wash his mouth with "Parsium" to clean up his language.

Somebody posted that he got the Willpower Trait and suggested there might be other unknown Traits. A lot of Travelers asked how he got it, but he never answered. Someone else claimed they received the Luck Trait after getting the Treasure Hunter sub-class. Over fifty Travelers called him a liar. They had the class, but not the Trait. Another person said they got the Luck Trait through the Path Finder sub-class. Thirty-seven called that one a liar, too.

I added my two cents and wrote that I got it with the Merchant profession. One day, if I was bored, I figured I'd check how many called me a liar.

The next "gem" threw me off completely. I stared at it and shook my head in bewilderment.

The support continued for three full pages. Yeah ... I had no words, out loud or in my mind.

Five pages later, another disconnected gem read: "So there I was. Naked. Screaming. Covered in glowing ointment and bees." This time, the commenters unanimously agreed the poster was an idiot.

One excitable Traveler announced that the world Ziondla had "Non-Arcing Biometric-Senonites," with five exclamation marks. He got a lot of grief. One comment was so over-the-top, it took me a few minutes to decipher:

"Thou art a total chop-logic m'ron. If 't be true any of us kneweth what 'non-arcing biometric-senonites' w're, haply we wouldst hast been excit'd with thee, but since thee didn't both'r to clarifyeth, thee simply stuff'd the archive with m're hilding garbage." (You're a total dunce moron. If any of us knew what "Non-Arcing Biometric-Senonites" are, maybe we would have been excited with you, but since you didn't bother to clarify, you stuffed the archive with more useless garbage.)

I picked up a few interesting bits between the lines: optional spells, teleportation, buying and selling across different worlds... but sadly, none of it was what I was looking for.

Finally, after two days, I found something. It was an article named "My Thoughts on the Difference Between Awakened Beasts and Monsters." It was a LOOOONG article by a pretentious, long-winded, and pompous writer who was clearly in love with himself. I was sure he had opened a thesaurus for every word, looked at the options, and picked the longest one. He also wrote in long, involved sentences that, after three to five lines, conveyed some tiny piece of information or a fragment of a thought. The article was also five Archive pages long. But since it was the first thing I found about awakened animals, I slowly slogged through it with a dictionary and deciphered it. Bottom line, he had four conclusions:

Awakened beasts and monsters are more intelligent and stronger than unawakened ones.

Awakened monsters are bad because they retain their aggression toward everybody and everything.

Awakened beasts are usually not much better because they remember past slights from before awakening and sometimes want payback.

Awakened beasts who were friendly before awakening are usually good awakened beasts.

That was mostly it. That was the total content of the five-page article, with some additional thoughts included.

At least I learned some things in the Archive, and knew Stretch would be more intelligent and stronger. I didn't think he would turn on me as revenge for "past slights." Looking back, he was always smart, but his reactions became more on point after he started eating mana-rich meat.

To understand the mage's excitement, I cooked some bison hamburgers for myself. After each hamburger, my mana jumped by 120 points. Hmm, maybe I could understand the excitement.

I had an idea for an experiment: Stretch was less enthusiastic about the goat meat, probably because of the low mana levels. So I took out the cooler with the goat meat, eased the lid open just a crack, slipped my hand inside, and channeled mana into it. Nothing at first, just the smell of goat meat. Then—pop! Something wet slapped the inside of the cooler. I yanked my hand back. The meat had turned into minced meat.

I knew it!

I wasn't really looting; I was exploding. That's why the pelt kept flying away, and I got minced meat or chunks. The only thing that kept the chunks from being minced meat was my intention. I needed to create an entirely different loot spell, and I had an idea.

When I was healing the people in the caravan, the first thing I did was diagnose them. Why did I never diagnose the animal during the looting attempt? I should have checked what was happening and adjusted accordingly.

However, before trying the new version of looting, I still needed to visit a town and speak with a butcher, a tanner, or a hunter. I needed knowledge about the process to do it right.

My promise to Stretch stands: my next attempt will be epic!