I wasn’t able to get any sleep that night. My heart was racing, my head was spinning, and I began to feel myself sweating all over my body, all because of the person lying beside me. And the worst part is, I was afraid to convey my own feelings, these feelings I’ve been harboring for at least a lifetime.
Em quickly discovered that there were limits to these powers, which were quite obvious, actually. Most manga I’ve read that had a dungeon core worked with a point system, where you could trade in points for items or expansions.
Well, while it did work similarly to that, it was a bit more complicated. You see, when Em opened a window with the total amount of points accumulated and the cost of each item, it was all in whole numbers. After placing those two trees, the total number of points were reduced to the single digits.
However, when I took a look at it myself, I wanted to see a more exact number. What I got was a large amount of symbols that I couldn’t exactly place, though the tail end seemed to constantly change, which meant that this was an encoded representation of the amount of actual points. Still though, I wouldn’t be able to see the entire number, even in this encoded state, so I decided on the next best thing, to normalize the number in roughly the same way Em had her output, though with a few significant numbers at the end. What I noticed was that while the values were mostly similar, Em’s values were rounded down for the amount of points, and rounded up for the cost. I decided to just use Em’s values at this point, but it did give me a rough idea of what these values represented.
We didn’t have a lot of items on our list of things we could create. Not that the dungeon core limited us. Everything on the list was stuff we wanted to have. Most had to do with food, though there were other things in it that were added for entertainment, like video game systems. We put entertainment in the low priority list, though we did aim to get at least some form of entertainment.
There was no way for us to get back down. The elevator, or at least we assumed it was an elevator, stopped working, and it would remain that way for a very long time. Not that we really had any reason to go down, though.
“So how fast do you think we’ll get enough points for our next purchase?” Em asked.
“Depends on what we want to purchase,” I said. “Wait, let me do something.”
I opened the same panel Em used to look at the list of things we could create, and added a new section where the amount of points per second would be displayed. The number was really low, slightly less than 0.0003 points per second, which meant it would only raise one point per hour.
“Wait, you can do that?” Em asked, as she glanced over at my screen while still having hers open.
“The math is pretty simple,” I said. “I could even add a time estimate to each item in the list.”
“No, what I mean is, you can modify my screen as well?”
“What do you mean? I only changed my own screen.”
“Well, my screen also seems to have these new additions. Normally I would have just copied these over, but it seems that’s not really needed.”
“It seems to be so. However, I did notice that our minds aren’t as in sync as they were in the beginning.”
“I think you’re right.”
Whatever caused us to know exactly what the other was thinking seemed to have stopped. I wondered if us sharing the same panel would also eventually cease, though so far having a synchronized panel did come in handy.
Another sleepless night, this time I had a dream. I wasn’t sure what that dream was about exactly, but it felt familiar. There just seemed to be something missing, though, and I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. Once I realized it, I woke up. I felt myself sweating. I guess it was then that I decided that our first priority was going to be proper sleepwear.
The morning sunlight was shining through the ceiling again. I wondered how this world would be if there was actual sunlight, but for now, this was all we had. It was still nice, though. The nights weren’t as dark, and we would still be able to see when it was day. I considered adding more of these lights around the place, but they required quite a few points.
What didn’t cost any points, or barely any were clothes. We could create several sets of clothes for less than one point. However, because of their low cost, we had to raise the precision of the amount of points, which meant that everything was multiplied by a hundred, though it also meant that the amount of points per second would be raised as well, to slightly less than 0.03 points per second, or about one point every 36 seconds.
“It doesn’t feel right,” Em said. “The numbers just seem too high.”
“That’s how math works,” I said.
“Can’t we go back to how it was before?”
“I mean, we could, but it requires me to create a new system where you have sub-points or something. Wouldn’t that also be confusing?”
“I mean, we’re used to money.”
“Yeah, but I think the whole purpose of how we designed these panels was so that we could use it like we do in an RPG.”
“Still though, what if we have something that costs a lot of points? Isn’t it just better to divide it into smaller numbers?”
“Is it really needed at this point, though? The numbers are still small enough, and we’d get this issue anyway with higher costing things.”
“Which is why we need to do these splits.”
“But we also shouldn’t make it too confusing.”
It was the first time since we’ve arrived in this world that we had a disagreement, and it didn’t really seem that either of us was willing to budge.
“Look,” I said, “let’s just leave it for later, when we actually need to change things.”
Em begrudgingly agreed.
I couldn’t sleep again, at least not comfortably. I knew I was right, yet, something still bothered me. I never really had such a disagreement with my friend before, and on top of that, my feelings… I felt conflicted. Maybe I should have budged a little.
Gui didn’t seem to be bothered though. We’ve been friends for a long time, I almost forgot that he had an eye on me. I wondered if he still did, at that moment I wished he still did. I mean, wouldn’t it have been cruel if I was the one who had feelings and he didn’t?