Chapter 12 – Cold
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The warm feeling beneath their skin was starting to feel like something of a lie. Although their insides felt warm and the frost hadn’t bitten into their skin, the outside of their skin felt every bit of the overwhelmingly cold. If anything, the warmth under the skin made the cold on the skin itself feel far worse. There was little Lotus could do about it, save maybe going back and making warm clothes, but going back wasn’t an option they had, apparently. The talking polar bear insisted that going back would just make matters worse, somehow, and his tree wife didn’t seem to be able to feel cold. Dawn was also no help, as the cold seemed to have made her dizzy and she needed to lean on Lotus just to walk straight. That at least was another source of warmth for Lotus, as the tiger-bear coats they used seemed to provide very little actual heat for how much they weighed. She imagined her situation in the real world and knew she would have died half way up the hill. Though, if she were in the real, she wouldn't have been strong enough to carry everything she was. On top of her woven plant backpack, that was almost her own size and more than her own weight, she also lugged around a heavy scythe and now another woman. It was almost strange that she could move as freely as she could, even within the context of a game.

As they climbed the tall-hill sized glacier, they found traces of creatures living there. Snow leopard like creatures attacked them on more than one occasion. They were about the height of a table each, and had a sleek-cat shape, with long, curved but jagged, blade like horns protruding backwards out of their skulls, behind the ears. A purple-blue lightning arced between the horns of each beast, and could travel through the creatures’ fur to coat their claws and harden their hide against attacks. Despite the individual strength of the creatures, they employed hit and run tactics, often attacking from behind. Worse was the way they could use their white pelt to blend into the snow. Countering their ambushes required fast reactions or careful spotting. 

When an attack came, Lotus pushed Dawn to the ground and brought her scythe up to defend. The creatures’ attacks either sliced through where Dawn had been, or they were repelled by the weapon’s sturdy snath. In several attacks, while they were pushed back, Lotus brought the heavy blade down on one of the leopards or Dawn would be clear headed enough to lash out with a dagger. When that didn’t cause them to die outright, it was enough to hold in place long enough for Dima to get a clear shot. The loud shots would ring out and the echo moved across the icy mountain as the creatures fell to the ground with smooth metal chunks passing through thin sections of skull, near their ears. With the first leopard dead, the others would normally run, but those that didn't were sliced into several bloody pieces by Oak, who used two large swords as easily as if they weighed as much as kitchen knives.

The oddest part wasn’t Oak’s abundant and inexplicable strength, but that Oak didn’t have hands. Her arms were as cylindrical as her body, and they ended with a flat surface. Somehow, when she went to pick anything up, whatever it was just stuck to the flatness. Furthermore, she could choose what stuck and what didn’t, and even rotate attached objects. It was like she had a pair of invisible hands on the ends of her arm stumps. And not just two hands either, so long as there was space to place it, she could hold as many objects as she could lift. Lotus had noticed that Oak would place both her massive swords on one arm when she wanted to have a free hand.

 

While they walked ever upwards, Lotus had a stray though wander into her mind. How long had it been since she logged out? She was used to playing for extremely long periods of time, as time in virtual reality games often passed slower than in the real world. The exact difference was usually listed in the manual, but Saviours of the Wild was an illegal game, or may as well have been, and hadn't come with one installed. To pass time, she looked through the forum to see if anyone knew.

Surprisingly there were very few results, as if only a few people cared or someone had, for whatever reason, deleted the threads. Normally thread deleting caused a much bigger stir then any original issue, what was often called the Streisand Effect, but no one was complaining about that, so it was more likely that people weren’t noticing it, not caring. Apathy was far from uncommon, so that seemed like the most likely option. Looking through what thread were there, another odd thing quickly became apparent; there was an inconsistency between the people that did post about it. It wasn’t a particularly hard thing to test; you set a timer in the real, log in, count to sixty and log out. The ratio between the time on the clock and the counted out minute was the time dilation factor. If you wanted to be more exact, you’d have to subtract the time you spent logging in and out, but the test was often close enough for a rough answer. More expensive machines, or just custom build ones, often had diagnostic equipment that could measure the exact ratio. Given how simple the test was, that one person said a minute in life was an hour in game and another said it was a full day was a nearly impossible difference in results. Though she was willing to count that up to a mistake in their math considering how little real time would have passed in either case. What made the number more confusing was that there were other people that said there was no time difference, and others that said that almost no time had passed after spending a day inside. Neither of those results were likely, as time not passing outside was actually impossible, and, since she had spent a month in game, her body would have died a long time ago if there were no difference in time. She had set her device to wake her when her bodily needs needed seeing to, so she knew the difference between game and real times was fairly steep.

 

When they reached about two thirds of the way up the glacier, they found a flat section, that was apparently the plateau they were looking for. It was a relatively smooth and flat area that was roughly circular with a twenty meter radius. Towards an area in the shaded of the hill, was a space that seemed to have been frequently used as a camp site. There was the remains of a stone fire pit and a few cut logs around it, that were as close to being seats as anyone could expect in the wilderness. One of the previous travellers that passed through there had apparently left a pile of firewood, with a cover over it to keep the wood dry. Normally, that would mean that they were close by or intended to come back, but the snow over the cover was too thick for that to be the case. It might have been someone's kindness or emergency planning, or it might have been the local custom. Regardless, they were thankful for the convenient fire. With Dawn still too out of it to be useful, and neither Dima nor Oak being even slightly talented at cooking, it was up to Lotus to make the supper.

As it turned out, not only were the Leopards a wealth of craft materials, with an abundance of both electric and ice elemental material, they also tasted very nice when fried with a type of local radish. It wasn’t a complicated dish, just meat cooked with a thin wrapping of radish, but the flavour was still deep, with the radish providing both a bitter and sweet flavour and the meat being almost of zest. Once she had eaten, and had been next to a fire for a while, Dawn seemed to become more alert. In her new found awakened state, she set to work making some thicker coats from the Leopard skins, using traces of elemental blood treated vines as the lacing to give them a self-heating feature.

While Dawn worked, and Lotus started to clean the cooking utensils, Dima and Oak went to check out a nearby frozen lake. From the campfire, a stick-like object could be seen jutting out of the ice. As they went over to investigate, Lotus wondered briefly how much Oak weighed, and if the ice could support her, but dismissed the idea offhand. Despite her appearance and voice, Oak seemed to be quite cunning; Lotus often felt that she had to watch out for her. Knowing that, Lotus was sure that Oak knew her limits, and wouldn’t be walking out if she didn’t think it would hold.

As she thought about it, she heard a thunderous crack, worse than being next to Dima's gun, followed by the sound of a heavy object hitting water. Turing to face the frozen lake, she could see Dima and Oak sink rapidly into the water.

Without a moment to loose, she stopped what she was doing and ran to the water’s edge. Searching through her bag she brought out a small blue-white seed.

 

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