Day 3 Ebrill 11th, Dydd Sadwrn (April and Saturday)

  I awoke on what I realized was only my third day on Tamh. It already felt like I had been here a couple of weeks. Yesterday alone had to have taken a week.

  I felt strangely good considering I’d slept in a chair for a second straight night. It was a supremely comfortable chair, but I usually felt a little sore anytime I spent a really long day in the tractor.

  Oh well. There were things to do. First off, I needed to figure out some way to brush my teeth and clean my clothes. I did have a full bag of floss picks, so that was nice. I’d gone to the dentist a few years ago with gum issues, and they told me it was because I had poor flossing habits. I’d gone out and bought several enormous bags of the floss picks and threw them in the various equipment I ran. Since then I’d never had a single issue with my gums or teeth.

  When I smelled my armpits, I was definitely gamey. I wasn’t on our property, but I was close to the river, so I walked down to it and decided to strip and at least rinse my shirt and underwear.

  It was only 45 outside, and the water was probably even colder, so it was a good thing I was all alone aside from some squirrels and birds. I would have hated having to expin the effects of cold water…

  I used some of the fine sand to scrub myself. It seemed like I’d read that it worked to clean oneself. It wasn’t super pleasant, but I guess I smelled better after. I would definitely want to figure out a way to get a warm shower at some point.

  I left my shirt and underwear under the floor vents in the tractor to dry off and just wore my jeans and hoodie. Not my favorite feeling, but I couldn’t run down to Walmart to sort things out.

  I hooked up ?the disc and drove back to the homestead.

  When I arrived, Colin was already standing outside the cabin. He was drawing a line in the dirt with his foot. That kid’s boots were hanging on by a thread. He really needed to break that habit.

  His face lit up when I opened the door and told him to hop in. He was certainly proving easier to convert to my side than his mother. She wasn’t hostile, so I really shouldn’t compin. It had only been a few days now. Fortunately, no matter what pnet I was on, a cool machine impressed kids, including Colin.

  I’d always loved discing at home. When I was twelve, my dad had put me in our John Deere 4440 Powershift tractor and set me free on a newly harvested wheat field with a disc. I could still remember the thrill I had at being given responsibility. My dad always cimed that the John Deere 4440 Powershift was the best tractor ever made.

  That disc had only been twelve feet wide. This one was thirty and had to have wings on both sides that folded up to fit on the road. Size differences, and tractor model aside, I still enjoyed this task. It required very little brainpower.

  It was quite a bit more pleasant to run over the uneven field in this monster tractor with its tracks. They really made for a smooth ride in a field versus conventional tractor tires. Discing required much less power than the plow had, so in an altogether too short a time, we were done discing. Once we were finished discing the three fields, I set the disc behind the house along with the plow, and the two of us drove to grab the corrugator.

  Corrugating was a different matter altogether…

  My first ?and st attempt at corrugating back home was the next spring, when I was fourten. I was so awful at it that one of my brothers was put on corrugating duty from then on.

  Of course, we mostly only corrugated potatoes now, and the machine did that itself thanks to the ridger on the back of the pnter. A majority of our non-potato ground at home now had wheel lines for irrigation. Potatoes were still corrugated to make sure there was proper soil drainage around them. Our new strain of potatoes had been modified to be resistant to blight, but there could still be issues.

  If the corrugator hadn’t been retively cheap, my dad probably wouldn’t have included it in the equipment he bought for me. We had a few fields that weren’t in a good spot to use wheel lines so we still had ditches and siphon tubes to water them. Corrugating certainly didn’t require a tractor with anywhere near this power. Honestly, a lot of the implements my dad had bought were really only here because this was an apology. This tractor was perfect to get fields ready to be pnted, and then to pull rge items like the potato pnter that weighed upwards of 80,000 pounds fully loaded.

  We had some fields that had seven or eight towers to help the wheel lines move. About twenty years prior, wheel lines became really popur at home. They set up a central tower, where the well supplied the water. Then the water would run throughout the lines, held up by towers with motorized wheels that made sure the line moved. Rubber hoses with sprinkler heads at the ends hung down from the metal frame. It made sure everything was watered evenly.

  At least in theory. Almost from the beginning, the wheel lines had used GPS to run. They had separate handheld units early on, now they just ran on apps on a smartphone.

  My dad, always distrustful of technology, had made us check on the towers every day or two. Occasionally we found a wheel line that had gotten stuck in a hole, but said it was still moving. More than one farmer had been in for an unfortunate surprise when they didn’t check on their wheel lines for a while during the hot summer months.

  I showed Colin how to adjust the teeth based on different crops. It was set up for corn, so we corrugated the southern plot first. Colin had never seen a corrugated field. He expined how they made mounds to pnt corn. They arranged them in a grid pattern and would put four to eight seeds in each mound by hand. He’d obviously never grown potatoes before, and wheat was just thrown out by hand.

  While we were working, I saw him stretching a bit in his seat. “You a little sore today?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I didn’t sleep so good st night. I did a lot of tossing and turning,” Colin replied, still trying to stretch his back out by holding the handle above the door to give him leverage.

  I chuckled. “At least you didn’t sleep in this seat, but I do feel oddly good still. I figured my back would hurt.”

  “Oh,” he said. Sitting in the seat right next to me meant he couldn’t look directly at me, but in the mirrors, I could see him giving me side-eye. “You’ve never leveled up very high before you said. You probably forgot that you’re supposed to feel great for a bit after you level. You’re also stronger and should be healthier. Level 10 is the first real boost there I hear. Every level above that adds a little to it.”

  He continued on. “You’re way stronger, and healthier than you were yesterday too. Probably close to 20%. You gain about 10% with level 10, and then 1% every level. At level 10 with Homesteader you won’t get sick much, and you can work longer. I don’t know what the percentage is, but leveling helps with more than just skills. John, how come you don’t know any of this?”

  I chuckled. “I guess I just grew up sheltered, I grew up in a pce where we didn’t talk about the System much.”

  I could see him shaking his head at that.

  “K. Level 20 works like level 10. You’ll also age more slowly at level 10, but not a lot. You’ll mostly just be younger longer, you won’t be a geezer for as long. They say every level over 20 makes a bigger and bigger difference. Or so I hear, of course. Never personally talked about it with anyone who was actually level 20. Almost no one makes it over level 20 sir, least no one not important.”

  “Heck, most people I know don’t even hit 20 unless it’s in Laborer. That makes you much stronger and helps your body not break down so fast. Of course that can be tricky too. You have to work hard enough to level, but not so much that your body breaks down before you get to level 20. People get to level a lot faster out here though. Back home most plots are pretty small.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  I wanted to get some more info about Arturos and Merlotus. I didn’t want to show that I was completely ignorant on the subject, but I’d fallen asleep before reading any more history stuff on them. I figured I could get Colin talking about them pretty easily without giving myself away.

  “So Colin,” I said, my hand on the wheel, staring out my front window so he couldn’t see my facial expressions very well. “How much school did you go to? And how much did they teach you about your history?”

  He looked down again. The subject seemed to bother him a little.

  “Well, I went to school for five years. The System priests make everyone do it. It was something Merlotus made a w when the people first got to Albion.”

  “They feed us while we’re in school so it makes even poorer families send their kids to school. I woulda gone til I was at least fourteen, but we left for the Territory when I was eleven still. Then we took a homestead not too far from here, so it was too far from town. Ma kept teaching me with the almanac though.”

  This was good info for sure. He talked like a kid, but hadn’t sounded like some ignorant back-country yokel or anything. His mom was very proper-sounding, so that probably pyed a role too.

  “Everyone learns about Arturo’s and Merlotus in school. It’s so crazy they’re supposed to come from another world!” His face was animated as he said the words. He got more excited as he kept speaking.

  “The priests say all of the races but humans came from different worlds too somehow. They say the dwarves and gnomes still have records from then. They were always free, not like humans who were sves to the orcs because we weren’t strong enough before the System saved us. Different races were sent to each of the different continents.”

  Perhaps people wouldn't consider burning me at the stake if they knew I came from another world!

  “I didn’t get taught by the priests. Did they say that lots of people came from other worlds?” My heart was pounding now. I used the pretense of messing with my touchscreen computer to hide my nerves.

  “You don’t even know about that? What did your school even teach you?” He shook his head. “Not very many, but the priests say that anybody who comes now must be turned over to them to be taught the ways of the System. It’s been like that ever since some other people came over from a portal a long time ago and tried to overthrow the Empire. That’s how guns were brought here.”

  He looked at me with suspicion, and showing that he was a teenager, not a scheming power broker, said. “You came over by a portal. Ma says it was a high-level ritual by Wizards somewhere in the Empire. But you wouldn’t be from another world would you?”

  I almost ughed at his ham-fisted attempt at asking me such a question. Luckily, the System seemed to help me blend in.

  “If I were from another world, would I still talk like you? We even have simir accents, and we speak the same nguage. People from other parts of this world don’t even always speak the same nguage, right?”

  I hoped that part was true.

  “No, I guess you’re right. The elves and dwarves definitely don’t speak Albion either. And you do look like one of us.”

  Wonderful, just wonderful. So, people did occasionally come from other worlds even now, but they were considered dangerous. I clearly needed to do a much better job of hiding my otherworldly origins.

  The real problem was that it wasn’t so rare that my oddities wouldn’t be red fgs. My tractor was a bzing torch of a red fg that I didn’t know how to deal with. One thing I did know was that as soon as I got done with tractor work, I would need to bring it, and all of my equipment back to the forest and hide it somehow.

  At some point, I needed to figure out if I was actually speaking English, or if there was some System tomfoolery going on. Even if Arturos and Merlotus brought their nguage over, I was pretty sure it was Gaelic or Welsh. I remember another theory was that the historical Arthur had been a leftover Roman aristocrat. Either way, that was a good 1,200 or so years before modern English.