Book 2 - Chapter 8: Afterword

This is, at best, a basic guide. Sooner or later, you are going to go to places I haven’t been, see things I haven’t seen, and have life and death fights with them. It’s just how it is. Even if I really had seen everything, and I haven’t, the world is constantly changing. The Apocalypse System is constantly spinning up new beasts, new spaces, and new troubles. No encyclopedia could possibly document it all.

If I described a squirrel that breathed fire, I knew it might be out of date by the time you read it. That squirrel might breathe ice by the time you get to it, or might be made of razor blades.

The best-case scenario I imagined for this book was that it would help prepare you for the kind of things you were going to see, and to set the tone for the kind of world you were going to have to live in.

It didn’t matter that the world was changing. As long as you knew that kind of stuff was possible, that was enough to give you a better chance at surviving. But that also meant that by the time you had read most of this book, it wouldn’t be all that useless anymore. You’d be in the same situation I’m in. You’d know how things worked, more or less, and you’d be watching for the tricky little changes with everyone else.

The day is going to come when you’re going to find that this book isn’t worth the space it takes up in your pack anymore, when my advice is a counterproductive distraction from the up-to-date information you are getting with your own eyes. If that happens, it’s OK. You don’t owe me anything. I won’t be there to see it, anyway.

The main point for me is that if you got that far, it means you beat the odds and managed to fight your way to some semblance of strength and safety. That’s all I ever wanted.

The guide, Afterword, page 1

—

Sean sighed and put down the guide. It was a complex book, and so was his reaction to it. Was it helpful? Absolutely, especially in the early days. Just as the book said, it had given him an absolutely vital grasp of what kinds of things to expect from the new world that would have otherwise probably gotten him killed.

Beyond that, though, it was a mixed bag. It was out of date, for one. He had basically never encountered an enemy the book listed besides the rats. It made no mention of outdoor proving grounds, and had no idea there was a lethal field boss near the town. Sean had more than once gotten in trouble, expecting dragon-squirrel level threats and finding much more.

Worse, it was designed under an assumption that Sean would play it safe, follow the slower, safer path, and work his way up cautiously to a medium level of overall strength. When he was still doing that, the book was very helpful. It had taught him how to safely grind rats as well as any giant mysterious tome could. But once he stopped doing that and moved on to more dangerous stretch goals, he had to start mentally editing the advice to fit.

Once he was fighting gigantic, over-leveled threats at a breakneck, almost suicidal pace, he had to start ignoring the vast majority of the book’s advice.

Which made him guilty, in a weird way. Whoever had written the thing had meant to keep him safe. That had been important to them. They hadn’t asked for anything, and they hadn’t lied about anything, at least as far as Sean could tell. It looked like whoever it was had just spent dozens or even hundreds of hours creating and updating a book meant entirely to keep him alive.

Now he was throwing it away, and it made him guilty, even if he didn’t know the person who wrote it for him. And, recently, his long-standing unspoken suspicion that he did, in fact, know who wrote it for him was beginning to seem much more likely.

—

“Any luck with the glue?” Brett asked, as Sean walked into the common room holding an armful of things.

Sean had picked up several conventional glues at the market before he left the real world for the Apocalypse System’s competition space. Some were better than others, and he and Brett had mixed five variations of the apple’s glue as experiments. One was just straight glue-apple mash mixed with water and left in a bottle overnight, while three of them had various types of glue mixed in.

The last one was combined apple mash combined with leftover cooking oil they had found in a bottle in the trash, under the theory that changing its consistency might have effects that adding other glue to the mix didn’t.

It was with the glue and apple mixtures that Sean had his first failures. He knew they had been coming, but it shocked him just the same to find not every single investment of materials he made would bear fruit, so to speak.

Botched Apple Potion

Made with a non-edible sticky Tell Apple and glue, this useless mixture is a slightly sticky, useless mess. You can’t or at least shouldn’t eat it, and nothing interesting happens when you splash it on things. It’s a botched attempt, basically. Try again.

Note that you will automatically botch future attempts at alchemy if you attempt to use these as an ingredient.

“A few. All the glue mixtures didn’t pan out. The system says I can’t use them in other potions, either.”

“That’s normal. If I mess up a piece of leather badly enough, the system excludes it from future class shenanigans. As far as I know, it’s that way for all classes.”

“I wonder if I could use your failures myself? Given how weird my class is about non-conventional materials.”

Brett shrugged. “An experiment for a different day, I guess. What about the two that we didn’t mix with glue?”

The first of the two experiments proved to be successful in an interesting way. Sean didn’t know quite how to use it yet, maybe, but it had potential.

Sticky Apple Mash

This isn’t a glue, exactly. You can’t use it to join two objects together permanently, and it loses all sticky potency after about five minutes no matter what you use it for.

Don’t despair, though. The Sticky Apple Mash does have two characteristics that render it a non-failure. The first is that the mash is, well, very sticky. Very small, relatively weak things that come into contact with the mash might find themselves unable to escape at all until the potency of the potion wears off.

The second is a little more complex. This potion represents the first active, intent-based use of your adhesives mastery you’ve been able to discover. At any time during the effective period of the mash, you can will a particular application of it to solidify. Over the course of the next few seconds, the mash will turn into a solid, amber-colored block that adheres strongly to anything it was touching as it solidifies.

“Well, that’s weird. Not much use on the Tells, at least.”

“No, the Tells aren’t fast enough for me to need to slow them down. But I can think of some situations where it might be nice to have.” Sean wasn’t lying. He had once fought a very fast rabbit that catapulted itself off trees. If he had this back then, there would have been a good possibility to trivialize the fight entirely. “But that’s not the only thing. I got an achievement off that.”

Adhesive Alchemist

You’ve used glues, enhanced glues, and even created new types of glues that interact with both your skills. From now on, adhesives that you make or modify gain a small bonus to their effectiveness that scales with your SAV.

In addition, anything you do to modify a glue, tape, or other adhesive you’ve made works a little better in time-constrained field or combat situations.

Brett whistled. “A straight bonus to how well your glue works when your entire class runs off glue to some extent? Damn.”

“I know. And this control aspect of Adhesives Mastery is interesting. I want to try it out with the next project, actually.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

Apple Snot

Not every adhesive is meant to dry. You’ve noticed this with the underside of most tape. It’s sticky, yeah. But it doesn’t exactly turn into a solid thing. It just stays sticky forever. Apple snot is like that. It’s as sticky as it is, but it doesn’t dry or harden over time.

As for applications for an always-on stick-um, that’s up to you. You could make a novelty floor mat that sticks to people’s shoes, I guess. Besides that, it’s up to you!

The name of the product was apt. In the bottle, the snot slid around like a big hunk of mucus, looking like a half-melted snail and almost as appealing.

“I’ll show you once I’m done. Did you happen to bring any leather with you? It doesn’t have to be particularly good. I’m looking for brute durability more than anything else.”

“Hm.” Brett dug into his big pack, digging around through various tools and supplies. “Some of this I want to keep for other projects. But... Yeah, there it is. Remember the sloth leather you brought in? I made a roll of it. I was selling sloth-leather belts for a while. They weren’t any good as combat equipment, but you couldn’t break them. Good stuff in that way.”

“That should be fine? This is more of an experiment. I’d hate to waste good stuff on it.”

Brett tossed the big roll over to Sean. It thumped as he caught it.

“It feels weird not charging you for this. I’ve never worked for free, really.”

Sean considered this. Brett was a go-to-work kind of guy, and so far, their relationship had been very much like two guys working on a project together. But really, it was Brett helping Sean out, something that was already paying dividends for him. Brett himself wasn’t getting that much out of it.

“Is that okay?”

Brett shrugged. “I made my decisions when I came here, Sean. Sometimes you make a decision, and that makes all the decisions after that for you. I’m in, whether I like it or not.”

Sean nodded. His own situation wasn’t that different from that. There was no way out but through.

“So we are good?”

“Close, anyway. I wouldn’t mind some entertainment for my off hours, if you can swing it.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

—

Cutting the leather into the shape Sean had in mind was not that hard, except for the sheer ridiculousness of it. He had made enough hand-turkeys in school over the years to have at least a bit of practice with doing such a thing. Cutting the same shape consistently with little variance while using weird, non-standard mad scientist shears was a bit harder. Luckily, there was enough cardboard in their trash haul to make a pattern, and he made do.

With a little bit of glue, some rudimentary rope twisting, the worst stitching he had ever seen and a ton of guidance from Brett, it only took him a few hours to complete the project. But for once, he didn’t have to guess that much as to whether or not it would be a success. He had done the work himself. He had made the glue himself, and had harvested the hides for the leather himself.

And, most of all, this was exactly the kind of dumb bullshit the system loved.