I talked with Candy for what felt like hours before she had to log out. I decided that once she was gone I’d go back and try to do this thing on my own before I got other people involved. Still, we exchanged contact info. We’d definitely hang out again! And who knows; maybe next time I’d party up with her?

Anyway, outside was a thing. I was in the city I had seen when I first woke up. Sort of. I was more accurately in the slums, which were underneath the city I saw. The buildings around me were this weird combination of techno-trash and fantasy-standard structures, all built at the base of these huge scifi towers that supported the upper city, which was built on and in what must have been a maze of sky bridges.

Of course, those bridges also blocked out most of the sunlight in the slums. It was stereotypical dystopian, only with a kitchen sink of fantasy elements thrown in for good measure.

Are you okay ROL:E developers? Is this anachronistic setting a call for help?

Whatever. The junkyard I woke up in was directly adjacent to the city, one of several starter areas along with the forest, the quarry and...actually just those three. The forest was big and it apparently had more areas inside of it. It crowded out what would otherwise be a neat four quadrant setup.

I stopped at the edge of the junkyard to wind up my gun, then slowly went in. This part of the yard was lined with rows of solar panels, spread well apart, all built up on metal stilts to put the working bits several meters overhead. Wires ran between them, also overhead, but nothing really reached the ground, which was littered with the same sort of trash as before. There weren’t as many piles here as the place where I woke up, though they were just as tall. They seemed to gather around the poles. I could even mostly see the ground in between them!

I cautiously approached the nearest pile and carefully scanned it for anything that looked useful. To my surprise, a bit of metal stood out to me. It looked almost outlined, or maybe backlit? With a glowing aura around it that just barely stuck out. I gingerly reached out and grabbed it.

> 1x Scrap Motor added to inventory.

Well then. I guess that was my passive at work.

Now that I knew what to look for, I had no trouble finding several more pieces in the pile. I was considering moving onto the next one when I saw…

A Slime.

It was a short distance away, slowly sludging out of an adjacent heap. I pointed my gun and squeezed the trigger.

And the shock didn’t go anywhere near the monster.

Okay. Breathe. Take this calm and remember your tactics.

I walked closer to the slime until I was maybe a meter away. In other words close enough that even my toy gun probably wouldn’t miss, but still just out of reach of the slime. I shot again. A hit! The slime got noticeably smaller, but it was still there, still trying to get me. I fired my last shot then took several steps back while I used the hand crank to recharge my gun. The continued to ooze towards me, but it was so slow that I could easily stay out of its reach.

Too bad this wasn’t IRL. I’d have made muscles from all this damn cranking...then again, probably for the best it’s not.

Two more shots killed the slime. It dissolved into a puddle of green goo.

“I wonder…”

I tried to interact with the puddle before it despawned. It seemed I couldn’t just pick it up. Did monsters have drops in this game? Probably. Maybe I needed to do something special to collect them?

I examined my menus in confusion when something stood out in my inventory. “Containers?”

I opened the sub-menu to see a list of different, well, containers. Pretty obvious in hindsight. It seemed that I had a finite amount of them, but I started with a great big stack of glass flasks. I pulled one out and tried to scoop up some slime.

> 1x Green Slime Concentrate added to inventory

Yes! I had no idea what this was good for!

But I got it! I killed the evil slime and harvested it’s corpse for parts! Look at me, an adventurer!

I closed my inventory while giggling and moved on to the pile the slime had emerged from, looking for more scrap.

Before long I fell into a pattern of looking for scrap with my passive until a Slime came out, then moving onto the next pile. I was building quite the collection of electronic junk! Plus I was learning more about slimes. Not all of them were made equal. The bigger they were, the more HP they had, though none of them yet seemed to be faster than an old man with a cane. They occasionally even had a bit of electric junk in them that I got as a bonus! Mostly though, they dropped a fairly even split of Slime Concentrate and Slime Aqua, which was basically just a more watered down version of the concentrate.

It had been getting dark for a while now. The casualty of having repeatedly lost track of time. Lights built into the solar panels started to switch on with the darkness, so I could still see what I was doing. I could even still tell where the city was; the upper city looked like a theme park, it had so much light shining down from it.

Also, come to think of it, I might have had night vision.

Yep. There it was, right underneath the junk passive. Raccoons can see in the dark. Who knew?

I wasn’t actually feeling tired, so I just continued on.

This turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag.

Slime. Slime everywhere.

Slime flowed out of several piles around me, moving much faster than I’d seen previously, to combine into the largest slime I’d yet seen. A slime that glowed faintly green and which had bits of metal, including a whole lot of rusty brownish-red flakes, all floating around inside of it.

I knew a boss when I saw one. 

I immediately turned around to run away. I wasn’t fighting a boss with starting gear!

Rather, I tried to run away. My path was once again blocked by slimes, regular ones, who were forming a wide ring around me and the boss. These slimes were on the large size. Too big to zap away without at least 1 recharge and too tall and wide to step or leap over.

I turned back around to see the boss oozing towards me. Thankfully much slower than it had materialized, but still alarmingly faster than the regular slimes. It was still slow enough that I could probably have outrun it and even shot it up some while I was doing it...except that I was trapped in a confined space with it.

“How is this fair!?”

This was going to suck.