"At your service." Bow.

"Sir, I would appreciate your guidance on a few topics. All can wait until your truck is loaded and underway. Namely: my 'crafting' ability, available materials, mind-affecting Class Powers, and my development in general."

What did John say? Her current theory is that this is a low-tech variance zone that doesn't make furs. It's very isolated; that's why they all speak with an accent. The only furs here are those who snuck in, which is why Men do landscaping, and why those Men were - surprised by her manners toward them? And surprised by her presence. Did John say that she got here by accident? So Dave pities her because... it's forbidden to leave this variance zone?

(If this place actually exists, maybe she can flee here later!)

"Nice to meet you," says Dave, nodding at her. "There's one heck of a lot to discuss, yeah. I have a couple of boys who figured out Crafting, anything you can add would be great- We're gonna need it to last in this mad world. Gotta move fast. First day's critical."

He glances around, a sudden command in his voice. "C'mon, get to it! You wanna get ambushed by something standing around with your thumbs in your mouth? Load the danged truck!"

The guys jump and get to work. Dave turns back to them. "One sec, Sam, John. Just gotta explain- This isn't my truck. I got lucky enough that the guy dropping off lumber at the yard still has a working vehicle - something about being Soulbound. So I've hired him for the next few hours, we just have to work quick, right? Okay, why don't we all help load shit - Good initiative on the meat - and we can chat when we're rolling."

She can load things! She keeps an ear out for the fox, especially if there's a chance for a private conversation.

So she's not the only one with Crafting, as she wondered (special powers are a fun trope), but she's still mildly unusual. Why is that? She's smart, but not that smart - her father pushed harder when making her younger siblings. She's about as smart as an average Man, smarter than an average fur... Oh, she's as smart as an average Man, normally, but might be above average here, where they don't do any tweaks? (Of course, they're not supposed to do any tweaks outside, either, but as long as you keep them subtle, and don't try to gain an advantage over other families' children, the law is lax.)

She's neither math-smart or people-smart, but she has a good imagination and sense of motion. She can visualize a hemoglobin in three dimensions and fold each polypeptide from its sequence, although in general her intuitive protein folding is often wrong. She can dance the progressive centipede, backwards. Maybe crafting is a similar sort of activity?

System Inquiry Detected

Remaining Tutorial Duration: 9 days, 22 hours, 53 minutes

Crafting requires a minimum Spirit of 10 or a Crafting Class.

Loading goes pretty quickly! These guys seem used to taking orders from the boss, who mostly fusses over the details of arranging things and making sure everything gets strapped down. The inside of the truck has seats set up along the side. They have a lot of mundane stuff and a special bin for the piles of monster loot- All the skins, furs, feathers, spider silk, and meat bundles get tossed in there and watched over by the bossman. She can help with the cargo straps, that doesn't take as much raw strength. The boss mentions that one of the boys' wives is a nurse, maybe she can get that "Where's the Doctor?" gone.

The fox quits her lookout after a while of no monsters showing up, and sits on the side of the truck watching for a bit, feet hanging down and flexing and fidgeting.

And then she scrambles down the little ladder adroitly and goes and has an animated talk with the driver, up front, tail and ears constantly moving back and forth in irritation.

What's Spirit? She had assumed it was telepathic strength, but Mana doesn't seem psychically active...

Wife meaning a female Man, since they don't have a lot of furs? How is that even supposed to work?

Ah, there's the fox! Pretty tail. (C'Esther doesn't have a tail, but she's seen plenty of furs who do. It's more common on those intended for show, or for outdoor labor where the improved balance is worth it getting in the way sometimes. She wishes she had one to dance with.)

Either the driver is another fur, or the fox is about to get herself in trouble - or the driver likes feistiness, some do, it's even a stereotype with foxes... She walks closer, on a line to pass them and check out a piece of trash at the edge of the asphalt. Is the driver angry?

More anxious than angry? Glancing around every few seconds.

She catches a couple snatches of conversation. "...Not until... ...right way to... ...ecks-pe... ...keep you safe!... ...kill someone..."

And then he points out C'Esther, and the fox slumps in defeat. Then starts walking towards her.

Oh no. Poor fox.

There's nothing she can say here that won't sound like a typical cat's hidden-claw game. She can't even drop her fur-letter, not in front of the Man.

She bows, as deeply as she can without it coming off mockingly. "C'Esther, at your service."

She bows again, to the Man. "Sir."

Actually there is one thing she can say, although saying it makes it horribly real. "I'm with John and Sam."

"Are you sure-" She turns and asks.

"Ask again and the answer changes from 'later' to 'no'."

Sigh. "Yessir." The truck driver rolls up his window and looks over at something else.

She turns back and smiles. Or tries to, at least. The droopy ears kind of ruin it. "Hello. I'm Wynn. What a day, huh? John and Sam are a couple of those landscaping guys, I guess?"

The fox didn't say her fur-letter, which is probably meant to be friendly and avoid escalating their rivalry, but now C'Esther can't introduce herself again, can she, so the asymmetry is just going to sit there.

"Yeah, him and... him. A - Soldier and a Mason." Oops that might be sensitive information.

"I'm new here, what's it like? Hey, how about we take a look at that thing." It's probably trash but it might not be and this gives them something to do together and makes her earlier approach make sense. "If I may, what's your favorite Class Power?"

"-You think it might be some sort of mimic?"

She glares suspiciously at the patch of trash. She takes a marble out of her pocket and tosses it. It hits the empty beer carton with a plink.

"Hmmmmmmm. I only picked one so far, Steady Stance. Saving my points for later, until I know what's needed. Or an emergency comes up."

"I was hoping it might be something useful! - I guess monsters are useful, once you kill them.

I used all my points pretty quickly; I was alone when this started. My favorite is Dancing Claw! If I dance I can fight faster, as long as I'm only using my claws, which is fine since I don't use weapons anyway.

I hope Dave gives me a crafting project once we start moving. If it's hard enough I might get to level two today!

Where were you before here?"

"Ooh, that sounds nice. Also kind of scary, I'll take range any day. Monsters are gonna be the new reality. Improvise, adapt, overcome. I didn't get claws - well, only on my feet, but I don't know Judo or anything. Or Krav Maga, I think is the one with the kicks? Hell, I should learn to dance some time, mobility's prooobably a good thing to have in the apocalypse. If I don't get exclusively into crafting instead. Mats gotta come from somewhere."

She frowns and her ears twitch as she looks down and considers her bare feet. "Crafting gives Experience? Sweet. I got just five percent from spotting and calling out targets earlier. I'm from downtown New York, I was seeing Uncle Nick over there for the weekend when all this went down. Lucky I'm not all alone, probably." She gestures back to the truck. "Hope Mom's okay. How about you? Local?"

(She is sort of just constantly fidgeting the whole time, as on-edge as Nick was.)

"Those are... art forms? Like dance, but not categorized as dancing? I was just improvising; I haven't made a study of combat. I've - never taught dance, and I'm not sure how relevant my knowledge is, but I can show you some drills!

Have you made any progress on figuring out how crafting works? Or gotten better with practice in a way you can describe?"

She doesn't recognize the region, but of course she wouldn't. "No, I'm from the city." So does F'Wen come in and out of the variance zone? No, she must live in here, and her Mom too... but if they don't make furs here... her Mom is probably not a professional, just the companion of Nick's brother, who felt like taking in a runaway. And right, her Mom might be a Man, they do that here.

Asking if she's okay would be unkind when she's not okay and C'Esther is one of the reasons why, buuut maybe she can give F'Wen a chance to vent about anything else on her mind? "A big spider almost got me. I would have died if I'd been alone" oops that sounded like a threat "it put things into perspective, I really want to try to do the right thing and make sure everyone is safe." fixed it? "Like, if I die, and realistically I'm not making any plans past, uh" how long depends a lot on what's going on here, but in the quickest scenario, where the telepath is going to release her before anyone notices her absence, "tomorrow, I don't want to regret anything, you know?"

Wince. "Oof. Spiders? Web trap? Oof. Yeah, never split the party." She frowns and looks over to the landscaping crew. "...Glad you're okay. I dunno, I kind of want to make it through all this more than going out the right way. Shrug." She actually says 'shrug' out loud, in addition to shrugging.

"Anyway. Martial arts! Ancient wisdom for how to move and kick and punch and throw to fight! That'd be handy right now, but a lot more people think they know martial arts than actually do know it. Most of what I've been trying is feeling out what the Body stat does, as much as I can. It's a pretty all-round improvement. Strength, flexibility, endurance, durability, everything. I'm gonna try to do stats to it. Like, my Body was five before I got my Class, and it's seven now, and I could do twenty-five sit-ups all at once before and now I can manage forty. More than a forty percent increase. Similar improvement in push-ups, but my 40-yard-dash is consistent with about a forty five percent increase in speed. A combination of increased strength and increased endurance? And HP- I quizzed System for a while to find a phrasing that worked, and apparently you can technically survive going to zero HP, it's sort of like a shield that prevents harm from getting through to your body, but one that gets progressively weaker as it gets low. 'Reaching zero HP is not advised'."

She pulls a notebook from the hoodie's front pocket, and waves it tail wagging.

"I would like to add a crafting section to my research. Knowledge is power, yeah?"

"Yeah, ancient wisdom stops working if you don't exercise it.

Ohhh, the system didn't answer when I asked it what Spirit was, I guess it doesn't tell you what the stats mean. I was worried I had asked wrong! I know it's used for crafting, though.

Did your max hit points go up when you got your class? I didn't think to check that, or my Mana points, but when I level I'll tell you what happens.

Hm, how to quantify crafting... Doing a standard task isn't good enough; how do you tell system improvements apart from ordinary practice? Ooh, what if you had a set of standard tasks, and several crafters of different amounts of Spirit, and you assigned each task to them once? Ideally without them doing any other crafting in between or beforehand, so their amount of general practice didn't vary too much.

Is the amount of Mana you can draw out and manipulate different from your Mana points? What's the speed you can draw it out? Speed it replenishes? I kind of want to make some Essence now, even though I don't know what cat Essence is even useful for, or if it's an efficient use of Mana - ohh, if I made a bunch of Essence and then you used it to craft, you could make something more powerful than you could do alone... At least, quickly; I presume that, if you spend a long duration crafting, the amount of Mana you can draw is unbounded? Ah, that comes back to the question of how much you can manipulate at once, and if that limit applies to Essence or only Mana.

Have you tried to measure what Mind does?"

She tries rotating a hemoglobin.

"Oh awesome, I'm smarter!"

And either that's one dropping powerful metacognitive distortion, or her father is trying a new intelligence-boosting drug on her. Sigh.

She writes things down!

"Yeah, I tried to do a baseline for Mind but I'm not sure how informative it is. Did some reflex tests, tried to time doing a puzzle. It definitely made my reflexes a bit better, hard to tell how much. There's a simple test you can do with a piece of paper. And I tried working with a bunch of stuff, and Crafting just doesn't work without some piece of System stuff involved somewhere. Like, you can try to Craft a shirt, but if you don't have System-made pig leather to combine it with, it just wastes mana. 'Does Spirit help with doing this' or 'What stats do I need to do that' seem to give a little bit more info. I bet most of the informative help is going to disappear when the 'tutorial' ends. HP is ten times Body, mana is ten times Spirit. Mana comes back at Spirit per ten minutes before bonuses, and Health comes back at twice Body per hour before bonuses. Nick's truck has a big mana battery too, but we can't tap it or feed it more, so it only might be the same thing. We can make Essence? System, what's Essence? ...Hmm."

Does the box for Essence say anything she doesn't already know from the Crafting and Pack Rat Essence boxes? Also, what's the definition of a Critter?

"I'm not sure what counts as making it 'willingly'..."

System Inquiry Detected

Remaining Tutorial Duration: 9 days, 22 hours, 44 minutes

Essence is a representation of the potential of a creature. It is a powerful material for Crafting. Essence can only be produced willingly.

System Inquiry Detected

Remaining Tutorial Duration: 9 days, 22 hours, 44 minutes

Critters are spawned creatures that are intelligent enough to work together and have their own goals and agendas. Unlike Monsters, they are not necessarily hostile unless provoked.

"If Essence is so strong, it has to have a comparatively huge cost. Something permanent, not just mana that comes back. Maybe it costs Experience?"

Huh, is C'Esther a critter? She just appeared... No, the system said 'you are not supposed to be here' at the beginning.

That answers her question of whether monsters are animals who got classes: no.

"Costing experience makes sense... I wonder what the Pack Rats use their harvest for; it must be really important if they'll trade Essence for it. Or the system just created them with a pointless desire.

Do you think Dave's workyard has Pack Rats? If not, maybe we can get some to come with us. They've been here twice so far, they'll probably be back and I think they're smart enough to understand the question." And if Dave says to grab them without asking, that'll be information.

"My gut's saying they're going to make weapons and armor and stuff out of it. Maybe evolve to tinker rats? And hell if I know. I'd try to talk to one but going off alone is not safe right now."

"I would like to ask Dave how much longer it will take to load the truck and get permission to try to talk to them if they come back. Definitely not going off to look for them alone! Thoughts, objections?"

She cautiously stalks to the beer packaging and picks up F'Wen's marble.

"I mean, lemme ask Nick too. He gets fussy about the truck. This could go either way, really hard."

Dave and Nick confer and both reluctantly agree to say hi to the Pack Rats, since the Essence seems handy. Truck is almost loaded though, so make it quick. Sam and John escort her over to the place they were last sighted, as Wynn returns to her lookout on top of the truck.

There's a big hole in the ground in the half abandoned construction site! 

"Meow meow meow?" Anyone home?

She didn't have time to gather props... She takes off one shoe and puts it on the ground, and puts F'Wen's marble next to it.