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Hans got done with an overtime shift one evening, and had a new gadget to try out. A friend of a friend had sold him an older model VR headset surprisingly cheaply. He'd barely touched that yet but now he had a chance to try it with Nox Vesta.

A different friend was running a server for that game. He had played off and on with ordinary keyboard controls in single-player mode. This time the game booted with glitches in the corners of his vision, bits of the world pixellated. But it did load well enough to show the group server. There were no players online tonight, though. That was disappointing since it meant no group adventuring. Still, a nice thing about this game was that it didn't have hordes of players treating the world like a theme park where nobody's actions mattered. With a hard cap of ten people logged in at once on any server, any of them could make meaningful changes.

Hans logged in and saw the whoosh of a cosmic tunnel, distracting him from the loading delay. Gameplay tips flickered by, several of them glitched and unreadable.

Then he saw a bird's eye view of the server's current status. It held a basic mystic Hearth, defended by a half-ring of rickety fenceposts and some storage boxes. The players so far had focused on exploring, not building. What he liked was the construction. In his own single-player game he hadn't gotten far yet but had set up a shack with a wall and a decent roof. He'd barely played on his friend's server so far.

When he tried logging in with his character, he got denied. That was a quirk of the hardware, something about VR mode needing a different player setup due to game balance. Time to make a new profile then. In his first session he'd been playing a standard human not much different than himself, and a near-copy on this server. But now he had an excuse to try something different. He clicked a randomizer a few times and got something fun: a female raccoon. Her enthusiastic grin appealed to him, unlike the grim scowl some of the models used. This race was one of several variants on the "Waldics", half-civilized forest beastmen allied to the default humans. He fiddled with the appearance details and hit OK. All the skill customization stuff happened in-game, not pre-ordained.

In VR the flip from an interface window to logging in was dizzying. The sliders and buttons fell away and the colors sharpened, twisting around. Hans lost his balance from the illusion, somehow falling sideways in his chair.

He mimed pushing the ground away to stand up. That move probably should've involved a button press, but the game understood his intent. He turned, looking at distant hills and grassland shrouded in perpetual darkness. Beside him was the fire of Vesta set in a minimal rock circle, the beginner level Hearth that protected this one bit of the world from doom. With the server running constantly, its fire gradually ticked down, and now it'd almost gone out.

Hans walked over to the storage chests and waved his hands around, trying to open the boxes. That didn't work and neither did clicking on them. In fact he wasn't sure where the buttons on his hand controllers even were; the design was unfamiliar and he sensed them only as slight weights that prickled along his fingertips and made his palms feel covered in leather. It turned out that what he had to do was mime actually grabbing a box's lid and lifting it like a normal person. He got rewarded with seeing it stacked full of logs, surreally fitting dozens of firewood chunks into a box that looked bigger on the inside.

He took a stack of these out and immediately dropped them. An [Overloaded] notice popped up. That wasn't right. Characters were supposed to be able to lug around dozens of logs, piles of ingots, and full armor. Must've been another VR rule. He figured out the gesture to open an inventory window and saw a hugely reduced limit. How was that game balance? He lifted just two and they appeared right in his hands. A gameplay tip said, [Make bags and packs to carry more.]

He had zero equipment on this character. He rooted through the boxes and found resin blobs, berries, a mushroom, and the skull of a wombat. No spare weapons. He ventured out to the darkness.

Rocks and sticks were easy enough to find, and between the moon and his race's night vision he avoided a wandering wombat and a mudcrab. He soon had his hands full and felt ridiculous looking at a view of his character's arms hauling around a pile of resources. At some point he'd started miming the carrying pose himself and he was getting tired of it.

He hurried back to the Hearth, tossed a stick onto the fire, and discovered the crafting system was completely different. No simple menu where he could click a recipe for something and make it happen. Instead there were suggestions that only created ghostly suggestions of actions. A new [Bark Strips] item led him to mime peeling bits off the wood to make flimsy cordage. The missing recipe for a [Stone Hatchet] then appeared and showed him how to tie a rock to a stick. Lousy durability, per standard rules, but he was now looking at the axe in his own hand and he could waggle it around, almost feeling the unbalanced heft of it. Neat. What he'd expected was a weightless-feeling system that'd let him swing an axe three times a second at nonsense angles to do crazy damage. Some kind of inertia rule was limiting him to more plausible swings.

The VR craft system had freeform options too. He tried striking rocks together and felt them crack, leaving behind chunks, one of them sharp. So now he could dual-wield the hatchet and an improvised knife in a way normal players couldn't.

He had no armor though. His friends had only started this server recently and obviously hadn't gotten far yet, but they'd been scraping together leather bits and other materials for equipment. He had only the rags of a starter character. It was weird to look down and see part of his grey-furred, hefty chest, his clawed hands, his bare fuzzy feet. He could even see a bit of his black nose on the tip of his muzzle. What could he do to take advantage of his special interface?

He went out to the dark again. An owl's hoot blew in his right ear as though making it twitch. He grinned. Alert for danger, he started chopping down a tree. Each swing of the hatchet had a feel of weight and impact, a drain on his green stamina meter matched by the actual exertion of swinging his arms around and imagining resistance. It was taking much longer than normal. When the tree snapped at last -- after dozens of blows -- he cheered, his voice sounding distorted. Then he got distracted because the trunk was falling toward him. He hopped to one side and felt the rumble of its crash beside him. Close enough that he imagined it'd brushed against his tail!

When the thick branches cleared, he got a better view beyond the tree. The camp was near a shoreline. He leaned against another trunk and stared, watching the water sparkle in the moonlight. In the distance a sea monster peeked above the waves for a moment. Somewhere out there beyond many miles of virtual terrain, titanic beasts waited to be fought and killed and made into more powerful tools. In this forested meadow there was hardly a hint of that, only a muddy shore and the resources to build rafts, huts, and the other first equipment for mastering this dark world. The wind shifted and a scent of smoke reached him from the Hearth.

Hans blinked. Smoke? He wasn't imagining it. He pushed the VR headset up and --

Mussed his shaggy grey hair. It flopped back down in his face, longer and a lot paler than his actual blonde, and it tickled his nose. His second effort to pull the helmet off made his hand bang into one of the fuzzy ears high on his head.

"What," he said, hearing his voice automatically pitch-shifted higher to match his character. Something was burning in his apartment building and he needed to get out! He tried to drop the hand controllers but felt only the knife and hatchet, which he could now see at his feet. Brushing one hand against his ear gave him the prickling sensation of sharp little nails. Nor could he find the cable that ought to be draped down from the headset, and though there was a subtle weight on his face it wasn't from screens perched above his nose but from his muzzle. Which was impossible.

So was the fact that when his tail twitched and he grabbed it, he could feel his hand gripping it like part of his spine.

Hans yelped and spun around, trying to see his tail clearly or free himself from whatever had locked him into VR mode. He gestured for the interface but there was no [Log Out] option.

After several minutes of freaking out, Hans found himself sitting on the ground by the campfire, breathing hard. There was no fire alarm in the background, no growing heat, just the enchanted Hearth.

And something growling outside its light.

He got up, wobbling, and his tail instinctively flicked away from the campfire. The shadowy shape was a Clod, a beast made of dirt. It rumbled and feinted but couldn't seem to approach closer than the three-pace radius around the fire. He looked up. No sun warmed this world but the moon waxed and waned, currently a crescent. According to the rules, the monster was the weakest around, but he wasn't eager to test that. He tried to open a chat window and... nothing. He had only parts of the interface, and somehow this glitch or whatever it was had wreaked havoc on his senses.

His friends would surely log in soon and he could get help. He stood there, watching the Clod until it wandered off, then threw another stick onto the Hearth.

He ran through increasingly crazy explanations in his head. Eventually, despite being trapped somehow, he got bored. The moon was phasing back into a crescent already and nobody was likely coming to help him within minutes. Also, it was tiring to stand still so long. He wasn't a character who could park like that with no drawbacks.

Hans lifted his hatchet and knife and took tentative steps out of the firelight. The camp always needed more wood, right? He crept through the quiet dimness to reach the tree he'd chopped down. A few hatchet blows dented it but brought his weapon down to wobbly, fragile status without shattering the tree into convenient logs, as usual. How was that fair?

He tried rolling the log. Laying his hands on the two-foot-wide trunk was like no mere gesture interface. He felt the weight of it, his balance leaning forward as though really trying to roll a tree, and the way his arms didn't feel as strong as they should. Pushing barely moved the log and it rocked back again, forcing him to hop back to spare his bare toes. It must've been this tough because he hadn't eaten any stat-boosting food.

He went back to the camp's wood supply. The fire was good enough for now and they'd stockpiled plenty of the standard logs he'd been hoping to get. How much leeway did he have with them?

He picked up a few. Each was two feet long, inches thick, and didn't weigh as much as he'd expect. For a real object, he thought, trying not to panic about why it felt this close to real. He had no tools, but there was an outline of crude nails wherever he imagined placing them. By tapping two sticks along the outline he linked them, then cleanly separated them. Even at unusual angles. He built a basic shield with a handle, without the leather bits the usual recipe called for. Then a section of wooden floor that snapped together in seconds and anchored itself to the ground by only a wooden pole he didn't have to dig a post for. That was basically the standard gameplay but enhanced to let him attach parts in non-standard ways. Repairing the damaged hatchet only required him to be near the fire to instantly reset the cords and sharpness.

Armed with hatchet and shield, he went back out in another direction. The brightening moon gave him more confidence to see the few monsters in this area and avoid them. He got to a berry patch and found another slight problem. Normally, interacting with the bush would give him a [Handful of Raspberries] item, stackable up to 99 units in his inventory, but picking a berry here gave him literally one. The formal inventory screen showed it as a [Raspberry], which didn't exist in the game's normal code. Its description was blank[A lonely berry]. So had he gotten into something that existed in the code but wasn't implemented?

Hans picked a dozen before his ears flicked toward the sound of another Clod wandering closer. He backed off, berries awkwardly cupped in the same hand holding his shield, and dropped them off. In the storage chest they became a single [Handful of Raspberries]. Puzzling, but it was progress. He made a broad circle of the camp, grabbing loose branches and whacking that fallen log some more. That was going faster than would make realistic sense but still maybe a fifth of what a typical player could accomplish. The question was whether combat would take that much more effort.

So now what? He had the camp, the occasional sight of a deer or mudcrab in the distance, and nobody to ask for help. How long had it been? Maybe an hour. He kept busy for a little longer by placing more floor sections near the firelight's three-pace limit, then a few walls. He had trouble placing a bed, the usual way of establishing a save checkpoint, since for him the formula called for [Straw] and that didn't normally exist. He'd probably have to cut grass. Instead he put more logs on the fire, propped himself up on a branch pile atop his makeshift floor, and shut his eyes. He wasn't sure what was going on. He could feel a fluffy tail wedged under him, uncomfortable until he coiled it around him. Adjusting his extra appendage made him bounce, and then blush. His ragged shirt bulged with what looked from this angle like a sizeable pair of breasts. They'd weighed on him this whole time but he'd successfully ignored the feeling while evading monsters and building floors. Weird, but they weren't his top priority right now. He tried to rest.

#

Stavro woke him. His deep voice reached Hans as though from feet away. "AFK?"

Hans groaned, sore, and rolled over onto his front. Onto dirt. Then he woke up quickly. "Stavro? Something weird happened."

"Hans? I like the new character. Draconis is signing on once he picks up pizza." Stavro was playing as an Atik, a satyr-like race with curly hair, goat hooves and little horns. He'd gotten a leather shirt and a club so far.

Hans said, "Let me show you something." He grabbed logs from storage and connected more of them to make another wooden shield.

"Did you build that without leather? Doesn't look like the standard design. Oh, did we get a new code patch?"

"That would slightly explain things. Do me a favor, okay? Log out and back in."

Stavro seemed to do nothing at all, but then he vanished. A system message popped up in the corner of Hans's vision, saying of course, [Stavro has logged out.]

He came right back, appearing in the same spot in a flash of light. "Yeah?"

Hans reached for his absent headset again and found only hair and ears. "It's not affecting you, anyway."

"What isn't? I notice you added a voice filter by the way. Nice."

Hans wasn't sure how to handle this. "I'm having some weird interface problems ever since I tried that VR rig I bought. The one I told you about. I need you to contact the guy I got it from."

The Atik's face was locked in a neutral expression, though his mouth moved when he used voice chat. "Is your e-mail not working?"

"My whole connection is beyond weird right now." He read out the e-mail address.

"What do you want me to say?"

Hans rubbed his eyes and bumped his fists into his snout. "I don't even know. Did he have any problems with logging out and in again? Put it like that."

"Uh, okay, but you're obviously logged in now, so what's the problem?"

"VR mode is not what I expected." What was he supposed to do, get Stavro thinking he was insane? Maybe the seller would know something. "One other thing. I'm in the Great Oak Apartments..." He named the town. "Call the manager there and ask him to check on apartment 83."

His friend said, "Okay, but what's going on? You playing while traveling? That'd explain the spotty connection."

"Yeah, it would."

"All right. Give me a bit."

Hans sighed in relief. He had human contact and a reality check. While the satyr stood there idly, he went into the darkness to grab more berries that'd replenished already and pick up a few respawning sticks.

His stomach rumbled. He'd eaten before logging in, maybe hours ago. Hard to tell in this endless night. He grabbed a [Handful of Raspberries] with one hand and picked up a few with the other, causing the rest of the sticky clump to break into individuals. While the physics of that interested him, right now he cared more about eating, and berries were a scant meal. The interface helpfully told him he now had [+5 Health, +10 Stamina for 10 minutes] for what little that was worth. In the game you couldn't die of starvation but your base stats without food were terrible. So far he'd seen no hunger penalties, so maybe things worked the same way for him.

Back in the real world he wanted to know what was going on with his actual body.

Stavro spoke but Hans could barely hear. Hans was off defeating that log, which had finally burst into convenient chunks. He carried an armload back to camp, noticing both that trotting along with the weight was easier with the stamina boost, and that it was bumping uncomfortably against his chest.

Hans returned to the firelight and said, "Say what?"

"I said, I sent the e-mail and the apartment manager said he'll be free to check in an hour. Not an emergency, is it?"

"I guess not. So now what? Seems like the rules are different for me. Much slower to cut wood and harvest items but I've got more leeway with the crafting."

"Let's finish the hut you started, then."

They went off together into light forest. Hans kept watch while Stavro chopped with a stone axe, felling a tree with ten blows instead of dozens. "Clod!" Hans called out.

"That's not very nice." Stavro's expression had turned menacing the instant he equipped the axe and the shield Hans had given him. Hans flanked him on the left as the shambling dirt monster drew near. The satyr landed the first blow. His hatchet thudded into the living soil and a faint red damage mark appeared. Hans swung too and felt the impact, once, twice. The beast collapsed into a glittering blob labeled [Dirt] and a random bonus item, a [Rock].

The seemingly angry Stavro went right back to hewing the fallen log. Hans calculated. Those critters normally took two or three hits to kill with beginner weapons, and Hans was pretty sure he'd landed the last two blows. That was good news. Attack power wasn't "nerfed" for him.

When a second Clod harassed them Hans feinted around another tree, then swung in a low arc that shattered its dirty legs. The Clod toppled and from there he finished it off in a second hit before Stavro could even get involved.

"You did a crippling attack?"

"Seems to work for me."

"If you've got special targeting options, you might do well with a ranged hunter build. Thought about what you want to do with this character?"

Hans scratched one of his ears, making it flick. "I've been focusing on the connection problems and survival so far."

"Night vision is usually pretty useless in games where all the caves somehow have torches or glowing crystals. Powerful in this one though; I think most dungeon areas are dark."

"I'm going to need a backpack or something. My inventory is basically what I can realistically carry."

Stavro was effortlessly making entire piles of firewood vanish into the vague space where carried items went. "That's a big drawback. Hope you got more than a freeform craft system and targeting to make up for it."

They killed a third Clod, getting into the rhythm of it, loaded Stavro up with an absurd amount of wood and berries, then stopped by the shoreline to fight a mudcrab. That one seemed to be focused on Stavro, who parried a claw attack with his shield. Then it scuttled sideways and grabbed Hans's right leg in its pincers.

"Ow! Leggo!" He staggered, yanking himself free from the crushing grip. His vision blurred with red for a moment and a life meter dropped from 25 to 20. Stavro landed a solid blow to the shell, Hans flailed and whacked it in the left claw, and his buddy finished it off with a three-hit combo using the programmed left-right-overhand animation for most weapon types. The crab collapsed and vanished in a puff of purple smoke that smelled to Hans like incense. In its wake lay a [Chitin] item and two units of [Crab Meat]. By looking at these Hans saw the usual game commentary:

[Chitin: The shell of insects and other beasts. Material.] [Crab Meat: Best with butter and garlic. Cooking.]

Hans wondered if condiments had any actual existence in this world. For now he kept hunting since Stavro seemed to have no problem carrying half a tree around. When they found a wombat that could provide leather, Hans hurled a rock. The animal looked startled by the move, something that players couldn't normally do, and it charged. Stavro landed a glancing blow but it leaped at Hans, clawing and biting.

[Health: 14/25.] Then it rapidly dropped to 12, then 8. "Get it off me!"

Stavro's axe swung an inch from Hans's face and cracked against the wombat's thick hide. The animal fell from where it'd been clawing at Hans. He had room to strike now. He swung down, missed, and had his hatchet-head snap off. Stavro had the same problem, one of the dangers of excessive logging. Both of them were now facing down an enraged wombat and wielding only junky shields and in Hans's case a stick.

"I've got this," Stavro said, and punched the air above the critter. The blow somehow connected and did a flash of damage. Enemies had invisible cages called "hit boxes" for noticing impacts, and these were often bigger than their actual bodies. Good for a rule system where you could punch but not aim the blow.

Hans's health automatically refreshed by a point, to 9. He threw a rock and connected for minor damage. That distracted it long enough for Stavro to land a punch, then a three-hit barrage and two more strikes that finally made it explode into [Leather] and [Wombat Meat].

Hans pointed to Stavro's hooves. "When a wombat comes along, you should kick it."

"There's no kick button. I think leveling up the Unarmed skill leads to martial arts moves though."

Hans hadn't seen any of the little [Skill gain] notices that normally got dispensed like candy every so often when you cut trees or even jumped. He had only the stamina meter that was quickly refilling, and 10 Health out of 25, and a tunic that'd been slashed to ribbons and was leaving him feeling exposed. It was even dirty as though he'd been battling in a forest. He held tight what remained of it and hurried back to base.

Stavro chuckled as they went back. "I guess it's worse taking armor damage in VR."

"Yeah." Hans sat by the fire, threw another stick in, and opened the craft window. His beginner, trash-tier tunic had the virtue of being easy to repair like other such items. He had to unequip the thing to fix it though. "Turn away for a sec, will you?"

The satyr laughed harder. "You're getting into this." He turned around, adding, "You shouldn't have picked that character if you were going to be shy about it."

"I didn't know how vivid it'd be."

He had no direct [Unequip] button in his version of the interface. Instead he had to wriggle the tunic up over his head and sit there nude but for a small cloth bit he really didn't want to think about right now. With the shredded clothing in hand, he saw a green outline of what the intact version should look like, and touched that with one hand. It puffed with smoke and transformed back to normal. He pulled it back on and felt decent again. The back edge of it brushed against his tail.

"All right. What's next? We could build this place up."

"It's just the starter base. We'll want to move the Hearth after beating the first boss."

Hans hadn't reached any bosses in single-player mode yet. He'd found the summoning altar, though: a hall of ghostly, ashen masks. This world would have a copy of that. Defeating the monster there was the only way to get some widget used in more advanced crafting. Normally he'd be eager for that, but under the circumstances it wasn't his first priority. He said, "Collecting more wood still helps for future building."

So they went out for more log-cutting and exploration. In the process they reached the border of the Dark Forest terrain, where eerie music warned them away. Stavro said, "Stronger monsters here."

"I'm not prepared."

They backed off and kept to the fields and light woods. By the time they'd dragged another few piles of wood back, Draconis was on. A blue-painted man, nearly human but for ears like long blue fins, stood there rifling through the storage boxes. "Hey," he said over voice chat.

Stavro said, "Hans is having connection problems, and trying out VR hardware."

"Oh? How's that?"

"The rules are different," Hans said, and went over what he'd found so far except the most important part.

"Sneak attacks and odd building, huh? That could be useful. Let's get geared up."

The three of them seemed to attract more monsters while together. Most likely there were extras spawning in the background to keep the difficulty reasonable for more players, but they still had an advantage with teamwork and the ability to split up. For a while they felled trees, but then Draconis said, "Could you make wooden armor?"

At the campfire, Hans tried it. With these basic tools he seemed to have only the option to virtually nail standard sticks together when not using an official blueprint, making his attempt at a breastplate look clunky and ridiculous. But the size was good enough that he fashioned a riot shield with a stand, something they could carry and then plop down anywhere for cover in battle. "I bet I'll get more varied options later."

With leather they made Hans a [Small Pack]. For most players it just increased the number for how much they could carry, but in Hans' case it was the first time he could carry anything that wasn't in his hands. Still undersized, but it had some of the space-distorting feature of the usual storage boxes. He fashioned some sharpened rocks that only he seemed able to throw, and honed his aim, then figured out he could use leather bits to make a sling. He only hurt himself twice before figuring out the basic technique, or at least how the physics system chose to interpret what he was doing.

They tested it out on a Clod, letting Hans strike it down with two blows from a distance. Stavro said, "Nice. This could get around some resistances. Find an enemy that you're forced to melee because it's resistant to piercing attacks? Send Hans out with ranged blunt damage."

Aside to Stavro, Hans said, "It's been a while. Could you check on that thing I asked about?"

Draconis said, "What?"

"Some apartment problem. I'll be right back." He stood there idle.

The blue-painted guy did a shrug animation, which would look exactly the same every time he did it. "You've been acting kinda weird. You yelped when you got hit, and you high-tailed it when you got low on health. Sure you're not getting a little too into this?"

The fighting so far had been dangerous, geared for players who expected to die a few times to wombats, cliffs, and falling trees. Hans didn't know if he could pop back to life instantly. "I know. I would love to switch to a more normal hardware setup later, but right now my options are limited."

"Stavro said you were away from home?"

"Yeah."

The satyr started moving again. He said, "Hans, I heard back. The apartment manager looked into your place and everything seemed fine other than the mess."

Hans was perplexed. "Did he see me in there?"

"What do you mean? You're not there, right?"

"Obviously not! I mean I should be, but I don't even know what's going on!"

"What are you talking about?"

Hans shook the satyr by the shoulders. "I'm stuck, damn it! I don't know where I am!"

Draconis said, "Hans, cool it. Whatever argument you're having --"

"It's not an argument. I can't even talk about this without sounding crazy!"

A sigh came over the voice channel, though his friend still had the default bland expression. "I'm gonna head out for a while. I'm not in the mood for weirdness." He vanished.

Stavro said, "Yeah, uh, I need to get back to studying. See you tomorrow." He was gone too, leaving Hans alone in the dark world.

He sputtered. "What was that about?! I say one thing and you ditch me?" That wasn't quite fair, but he still stamped the ground, feeling his bare foot thump on the wooden boards of their hut.

His friends would log back in at some point. They'd see him still on, and wonder what was happening. He wouldn't be stuck here.

For now he figured he should keep safe and try to get more comfortable. Hans paced, then checked on the Hearth. The rules said the players were supposed to upgrade this thing in stages with new materials. For now they were limited to wood and loose rocks. Hans made cautious ventures into the woods with the trick of dropping several lit torches nearby. The beasts seemed to fear these even on the ground, and no fire effect ignited the grass. He felt the heat at his feet and kept careful not to step on the flames.

With the slightly greater confidence this tactic gave him, he chopped another tree and stocked up on wood. Some experiments gave him a spear and a chair, though the furniture didn't give him a specific stat benefit. Wasn't recognized as a [Quality Wooden Chair] or similar standard item. What he had was just a place to park his butt for a while.

#

Hours had passed, probably. Hans had gotten up occasionally to grab randomly reappearing sticks and berries and at one point he dismantled a small tree. It was eerie not being in contact with people. Though he wasn't actually hungry or thirsty, he still wished for a good meal out of boredom. What he had was a box of wombat meat that the game didn't model in enough detail to make spoilage a problem. What about drinks? He was supposed to brew some terrible bottom-tier beer with ingredients the party hadn't found yet, and probably work up to wine or ambrosia.

A quick trip to the nearby shore would get him water and he was pretty sure nothing nasty smaller than a fish lived in it. So he crouched with an improvised bucket, and caught sight of himself. His reflection in the moonlight showed bright, reflective green eyes set in a fuzzy face with a startled expression. He recognized it from the character creation screen of course. But the sight of it moving when he did, each strand of fur and whiskers tickling him when touched, made it hard to forget he wasn't himself. He glanced over each shoulder for monsters, then leaned in for a closer look. He cupped his leather-palmed hands and brought cold water awkwardly to his muzzle to drink. It felt refreshing enough. But he could do more, while he was stuck here.

It took a while. He experimented with fire physics, extended the walls a bit, and maintained the Hearth's fuel. Then he built a box wider than him and filled it with bucketfuls of water that he had to trundle back and forth, grunting under the excessive weight. Then in went a bunch of rocks he'd heated in the Hearth until he feared they'd explode. Which was probably impossible. Gradually the tub heated up. He stripped off his tunic and lay there.

It was the best part of the experience so far. If strange. Between the fur and automatic underclothes he wasn't naked, but he was looking at a fuzzy, curvy body sprawled in hot water and lit from one side by firelight. Nothing evil could reach him. Whatever mad logic had trapped him here, also let him build something more pleasant than his actual creaky shower back home.

His tail was a mess. He ran his claws through the fur, and found himself making a purring sound or whatever raccoons did. Maybe he could get a brush. That thought had him splashing idly with his hands and thinking about new construction methods. With enough time he could build a wooden fort to the limit of whatever the rules tolerated for height and complexity. But it'd only ever be sticks and rocks, without him venturing farther out. Also, it'd never be safe to build wider than the tiny radius the firelight allowed; monsters would break in. He had to get out there, preferably with guards.