Adventures in Lunightia Singleplayer

Faith came to in a forest. Dappled sunlight played across her closed eyelids, and the far-off sound of birdsong eventually roused her from her slumber. She wanted to go back to sleep, really, but the itchy blades of grass digging into her back made it terribly difficult to-- wait.

Blades of grass? Dappled sunlight? Birdsong?

She had jumped worlds again, hadn’t she. It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t a question in the same way that saying that lightning had struck your oxidizing copper in the storm again, hadn’t it, wasn’t a question, like how the sun rose in the east and set in the west every day in every world that she’d ever been in.

Of course she’d jumped worlds. Why would she ever think otherwise? It was as much a fact of life as green grass and blue skies. Faith jumped worlds, and she never came back. If she was lucky, there wouldn’t be any other Players in this one.

She’d had to learn the hard way that other Players were more often than not too much trouble to bother with. They’d blow up her builds and if they didn’t then she’d vanish without getting half a chance to say goodbye and never see them again, anyways. It was harsh, but it was life.

From the sound of birds, though, she had a hunch that this world had been free of Players before she’d come along. It wasn’t humid enough to be a jungle, and these birds didn’t sound much like parrots.

Perhaps she ought to open her eyes and see for herself. That’d be a much more reliable way of gathering information than lying on the ground listening to the wind blow and mourning the loss of yet another life she’d made for herself. She’d had a good friend for once, a companion other than the phoenix avian she’d been encountering since her earliest memories and the swarm of ghostly amphibians who had taken to following her around.

Speaking of wayward amphibian ghosts, wasn’t that lot due to show up at some point? She hadn’t heard a peep out of them yet, and she’d been laying here a solid fifteen minutes already. They were late.

As if on cue, her companions began to trickle in through the gaps in the world. They were led, as always, by the spindly white one and the mischievous tri-colored one who reminded her of the phoenix. Chat, as she’d named the group of them after a particular habit of theirs, immediately began to live up to their name, chattering away in the back of her mind. At least some things never changed.

They were telling her to get up and get moving before nightfall, as they always did when she Jumped. “Sheesh, you lot, can’t a dragon appreciate the scenery before I have to leg it, for once?” She grouched, but there wasn’t any real heat to it. She knew they just wanted to keep her alive, since her death would just be an annoyance to everyone involved.

So she grumbled and whined about it, but eventually she hauled her sorry self up off the ground and ambled over to the chest that’d been sitting a few blocks away from her to see what goodies the universe had decided to grant her this time. It wasn’t much- a few tools, a bit of food, a couple of logs to get her started- but at least she also got to take the chest and the torches. Those were the actually useful things.

Bonus chest successfully pillaged, she turned towards the sound of running water and started walking. A dip in the river to clear her head would do her good. Chat, being made up of ghostly aquatic creatures, agreed wholeheartedly. It couldn’t be too far away if she could hear it from here, surely.

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Pushing her way through the last line of dense grasses and shrubbery, Faith looked up at the sound of Chat going wild with glee and gasped at the glittering river running just in front of her. She could see fish and squids frolicking in the deeper waters, and didn’t hesitate a moment before diving in headfirst, with Chat swiftly following her.

The cold water was a shock after wandering around the forest chopping trees and following the sound of it, but neither Faith nor Chat minded that. Chat, Faith suspected, probably couldn’t feel the cold, but it refreshed her after the work she’d put in to find it. She could practically feel the grime and grit washing away from her scales after wandering around in that forest for so long.

Time flies when you’re having fun, though. She swam with the current and snapped up a salmon or two and played with some of the bolder members of Chat. But before she knew it, the moon was rising in the sky and she could hear the ominous growling and gurgling of zombies who had wandered into the river to chase her.

“Whoops!” She said, spinning around to face the source of the noise, “Seems like we lost track of time, eh, Chat?”

Chat, as usual, did not synchronize themselves into an understandable voice, instead all shouting over each other in a mental cacophony to attempt to warn her of a threat she was already facing.

“Yeah, that’s about what I thought,” she muttered as she backed up another few feet with a swish of her tail. “Don’t have any weapons, but hey, that’s what claws are for!”

With that, she flipped herself over so she was right-side up instead of floating along on her back, and lunged forward against the current to give a hearty swipe at whatever part of the drowned zombie she could reach. Her claws connected with its forearm, tearing through the drenched fabric of its overcoat and delivering enough force to cause its attempt to grab her to go right over her head as she dove under the water to get closer.

The zombie didn’t seem to know what to do with the fact that its prey had just come closer to it on purpose, and with that momentary confusion, Faith grabbed the unbuttoned sides of its coat and headbutted it hard enough to take out its remaining health. It disintegrated between her claws until she was just holding a few scraps of rotting flesh where a whole zombie had been a moment before. She sighed.

“Well, that was annoying. Got anywhere you think would be a good place to sleep, Chat?” She asked, turning to the floating axolotls who always seemed to have more advice to give her, if only she’d bother to listen.

They looked at each other. A few of them shrugged. “Right,” she sighed, “new world. Nobody’s gone scouting yet. Let’s just follow the river. At least we can’t get lost that way.”

And so follow the river they did.