[SP-F1] <<Earning a Living>> The Warmth of a Forge (Complete!)

[Aetharan 0]

If it was going to be songs both long and funny to make this feel like it wasn't taking an eternity, then he knew exactly what to turn to...  "This song is called Alice's Restaurant.  It's about Alice...  and the restaurant..."  Digging away, happily singing along with his pick ringing into the wall every fourth beat, Aetharan kept on working.  Tedium was easy enough to dispel when one kept his mind on something more interesting than what he was doing.  After all was said and done, was there anything in the world of SAO more boring than hammering away at a wall of stone all day in the search for ore?  He didn't think so.  Keep up with the singing.  No more iron for the first third of the song, at least, but he wasn't worried.  There was a lot more to go.

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(ID# 29159 results: Battle: 2 Craft: 11 Loot: 9 MOB: 9)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

He continued, grinning like the madman he knew in his heart that he was.  "...and they took twenty-seven eight by ten colour photographs, with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one..."  A rambling, wandering song about littering, being arrested, and the draft.  Even his father's generation had been too young for the last of those, in truth, but it was a song that he knew all too well, and one that he hoped would never be forgotten in this world or that other one.  After all, there were some moments when the world needed songs of love, or songs of rage, but it never seemed to remember that there were moments when what the world really needed was to take a good look at itself and laugh at its own ridiculous stupidity.  It also managed to be a decent beat for keeping time with his pick, but that was true of pretty much every song he knew, if he tried hard enough.

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(ID# 29160 results: Battle: 10 Craft: 12 Loot: 14 MOB: 9)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

There was so much more of Alice's Restaurant to go through, though he knew he'd have to pick another song long before he was finished with his digging.  After all, he was less than halfway through his assigned task, but it was going to be worth it.  Pick kept swinging, "...Kid, we only got one question.  Have you ever been arrested?"  Ah, a tale so convoluted and meandering that it was hard to tell what was being sung about, if 'singing' is what you could even call it.  After all, most of it was, in his memory, more a case of talking over a guitar, and he didn't even have one of those.  Just the rhythmic ringing of his pick against the wall, which slowly retreated from him.

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(ID# 29161 results: Battle: 7 Craft: 9 Loot: 10 MOB: 5)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

So many songs to pick from to keep himself cheerful, and singing any of them made him look like even more of a madman than he already was.  He knew it.  He was sure that anybody walking by knew it, and he didn't care.  "Walk in and say 'Shrink, ♫You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant♫', and walk out."  And part of him wondered just how he was going to write that down in his journal, if he decided to record it in text.  It was enough to make him pause for a moment and tilt his head.  "Wait a tick...  I guess...  How?  Hm.  Double-quote, with single-quote nested inside, and the part that switches from spoken-word to sung, I'll wrap in music notes.  Yes, yes."  Then he went back to singing.  Easily distracted by shiny objects and momentary problems with how the **** to write something down when he got home.  Oh well, at least he was still swinging the pick.  That was the important part.  Unfortunately for Aetharan, it seemed that the RNG deities weren't as fond of Alice's Restaurant as he was.  They'd not seen fit to throw him a bone in the entire time it took him to sing it.

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(ID# 29167 results: Battle: 8 Craft: 9 Loot: 2 MOB: 6)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

It was now time to test these vengeful deities of luck that he was dealing with.  Taking a deep breath, having gone four more feet without seeing anything, he started in on Fish Heads again.  It was a short enough song that he could finish it before completing the foot of digging, and it had a strong rhythm to help him keep pace.  That, and it made him-- a thirty-year-old man-- giggle like a middle-school girl.  He didn't know why, just that he found it hilarious.  "In the morning, laughing happy fish heads.  In the evening, floating in the soup..."  Yeah.  He was going to have to do something other than sing to distract himself soon, before he started repeating given trains of thought like a broken record.  Ooh, that led to the question of whether the software on the server would detect and try to correct for an infinite loop in a user!  Best not go there.  Besides, he'd already seen plenty of evidence that no, there wasn't any kind of user error-correction in play.  If there was, surely that place he'd been kept would have seen some kind of system help for him, and all the others like him who just...  snapped at the announcement that first day.

Unfortunately for Aetharan, it seemed that the Fish Heads song wasn't inherently lucky.  Nothing dropped for him out of the twenty-fourth foot of shaft.

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(ID# 29168 results: Battle: 7 Craft: 12 Loot: 10 MOB: 6)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

Aetharan's mood was shifting, anyway.   Sometimes, he wondered if there wasn't something off with his neurotransmitters, and of course, that would lead to whole other interesting lines of questioning.  Early in, he and his ilk hadn't been the only ones immobile.  Not for a couple of hours, or so he'd been told.  The outside world had been allowed to move them to hospitals.  That meant that somewhere in that other world, his body was in a bed, being fed saline and glucose solutions, right?  They were monitoring him.  Somebody was, anyway.  Hell, maybe even his twin came to visit him from time to time or something.  It was clear that she wasn't in this world.  None of his family were.  Had the doctors found what was wrong with his head, while he lay unconscious in this death world?  Was there some chance that his breakthrough, just the day before, had been the result of some medication slipped into his IV?

That thought stopped his pick for quite some time.  It probably would have stopped anybody.  There were so many implications in it, that it took a while to even try to run down the first of those ramifications.  Somebody was helping him, that was clear or he wouldn't still be functioning.  He'd have died three or four days in, game or no.  Endocrine system would have shut down after about 72 hours without water, after all, and he'd be gone.  Disconnected, game over in both worlds.  Hadn't...  what was the guy's name, Kayaba?  Something Japanese, at least.  He'd told those inside what they were stuck with, and he'd implied that the outside world knew the condition of their release as well.  Had a doctor actually noticed an error in his neurotransmitter levels and fixed him?

"Am I...  on antidepressants in the real world now so that I can contribute to beating this death game?  Would they even do that?"

It was several minutes before the pick began to swing again, and when it did, it was with even more determination.  Unfortunately for him, the only success he'd managed in the last half-hour or so was a natural 20 on his Craft (Wild Theory) roll.

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(ID# 29169 results: Battle: 3 Craft: 10 Loot: 13 MOB: 1)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

The music in his head, to which he began to sing along again, suddenly jumped forward some fifty years from the days of Alice's Restaurant.  Gemini Syndrome had come to mind, and he wasn't exactly sure why, but sing he did, even as the pick kept up that furious pace.  "♫I know this place, it smells like innocence lost...  We left the traces of the sins we bought...♫"  Stardust.  The sweetest heavy metal song he'd ever heard that wasn't the obligatory power ballad type.  No, this would have gone so well right alongside some of the angrier songs on his teenage playlists, except for the fact that the lyrics weren't crying out in wrath.  They were exalting somebody.  Holding her up.  Worshiping.  "...♫It's no mistake, you are perfect, you are perfect in my mind♫..."

He wanted to cry.  The emotion in that song, he wanted it again.  It had been so long since She had gone, and there were days even before he'd bought SAO that he regretted the loss, even if he had been the one to file the papers.  And now?  Now he was here.  Swinging at pick in a mine in a virtual world as he sang somebody else's love song to nobody.  Swinging that pick, digging himself deeper, but coming up with nothing but air.

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(ID# 29170 results: Battle: 3 Craft: 6 Loot: 12 MOB: 1)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

Even as he sang that song, and realized that he was stuck in a loop repeating the chorus again and again after that second verse, his head continued to drift.  "♫Look at the wake from the stardust, pouring from your eyes.  It's no mistake, you are perfect.  You are perfect in my mind.♫"  Not just a song, not just the chorus.  A mantra.  Somebody out there was helping him.  It was the only explanation, wasn't it?  Somebody on the other side, in that other world, had seen that Aaron was broken, that he'd fallen into the kind of depression that made him useless to both worlds...  and that somebody had stood by his bed, and rather than just hold his hand or shake their head dismissively, they had given him help.  A drug added to his IV, it simply must be.  That little kick to get his neurons firing the way they should.

He hadn't broken out of his fugue.  Somebody had dragged him out of it.  He hadn't chosen a mission.  He'd been given one.  'Wake up, Aaron', that somebody had said to him.  'Get out of bed and fight.  If not for your life, then for those thousands of others.'  It wasn't his fight.  Aaron was dead.  Aetharan had strangled him before walking out that door, but in this world, you keep what you kill.  Aetharan had inherited Aaron's mission.

In his mind's eye, the stardust poured freely, and the weeping figure's face was the moon.  How selfish had it been to curl up in a ball for all that time when others needed him to fight?  He had a lot of catching up to do.  For every loaf of bread he'd been force-fed, he owed Aincrad's population a dead monster.  Not just some boar, but the clearing of the way.  To do that, he had to finish his task in this cave.  One step at a time.  Get the iron.  Get the forge.  Craft the blade.  Soak it in digital blood until he was strong enough, fast enough to bury it in the final boss's eye.

Maybe then he'd be worthy of companionship.

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(ID# 29173 results: Battle: 7 Craft: 2 Loot: 4 MOB: 5)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

The song wasn't stopping.  He couldn't make himself shut up.  "♫Look at the wake...♫"  Over and over, the full chorus.  A mantra, yes, but survival or madness?  Was there a difference between the two, in this death game?  Pick slammed into stone every measure, again and again as his body and mind fell into a rhythm.  All the while, his imagination filled with gleaming silver hair, a pale white face that didn't belong to anybody he'd ever known, but somebody he'd dreamed of once of twice when he was younger.  It shouldn't really surprise him to be having a religious experience when confronted with sensory deprivation and high stress.  Suddenly, a small break in the monotony if anybody was listening: "♫Praise to the memory living inside of me, host to entirety writing my story.  Lusting and gluttony, so unbecoming.  The stardust is making me blind.  But you won't be left behind!  The memory's here to remind!♫"  Unfortunately, that led right back into repetitions of the chorus.

There wasn't even the little break in the monotony of a drop, as there hadn't been one since long before he'd started singing Stardust over and over again.

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(ID# 29174 results: Battle: 6 Craft: 7 Loot: 4 MOB: 7)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

He'd spent an eternity staring silently at a ceiling, and now he'd spend the next singing the same song.  He didn't even hear himself repeating those lyrics now, even as his hands worked.  It was just there, as much a part of him as his heart-beat, and as easily forgotten now that he'd gotten used to its presence.  Baritone voice rang through the mine, not really bad, but no professional singer either.  He could carry the tune in the bucket provided, at the very least, but he'd never have made it in radio even if he'd had the guts to try in that other world.  It was a good thing he had no intent of becoming a bard in this one, though if he could find a skilled enough singer in Aincrad, he might just have to spend a few Col to hear Stardust performed by somebody with true pipes.

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(ID# 29175 results: Battle: 1 Craft: 7 Loot: 2 MOB: 5)

Aetharan leveled up.  HP now 17/17.

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 3/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

His mind wandered as he continued to sing and work.  This game had started when?  November 6th, 2022.  He'd been thirty for just over a month, and had been meaning to attend a Samhain celebration that weekend with some of the few pagans he knew in his backwater town.  The song he was singing was...  some time in the second half of '13, that much he remembered.  It'd played at his twenty-first birthday party.  One of the few things about that party he could actually remember, when it was all said and done.  That's how the tradition went, though.  Your first legal day of drinking is always one of the heaviest in your life, isn't it?

But no.  Those memories belonged to Aaron, and he was dead.  Aetharan was the one singing a song from a stolen memory, as if it were a prayer to a Goddess envisioned in a pilfered dream.  Still, until he started to forge his life in Aincrad, those stolen memories of another life were all he had.  Aaron was the clay from which Aetharan would be shaped.  Besides, if nothing else it helped to know that the song he was stuck singing was one young enough for anybody who'd legitimately joined this death game to have been born before it was written.  It had that going for it.  Maybe there would be a bard or two who remembered.

His reverie was momentarily shattered by a loot window popping up in his vision.  He'd finally found a fourth piece of iron.  He was that much closer to finishing this miserable quest.

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(ID# 29177 results: Battle: 8 Craft: 11 Loot: 20 MOB: 10)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 4/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

He was now thirty feet into a hole that he'd estimated would go sixty feet deep by the time he was done, and sure enough, he had just reached the halfway point in collecting the materials he was after.  It seemed that he was right on the pace that he'd been predicting, wasn't he?  He supposed that it was better than falling farther behind than that, though.  Pick kept right on swinging once he'd hit the acknowledgement button, and his voice continued to belt out that heavy metal love song.  At least he was starting to vary slightly, no longer just repeating the chorus over and over, but actually singing the verses now.  Still, it was that chorus that brought the most warmth to his heart as he dug.  He wondered, for a moment, whether the man who wrote that song had managed to get with and hold onto its inspiration.

Was the singer with his muse?

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(ID# 29186 results: Battle: 2 Craft: 10 Loot: 10 MOB: 10)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 4/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

The task had to be completed eventually, and he was halfway there.  He had to continue.  Couldn't stop.  He had a job to do, and this was the important first step down that road.  There was no stopping now, only going forward.  He couldn't break Aincrad if he couldn't collect these ten items, now could he?  No.  Mind drifted, and the song continued as his arms swung again and again.  Breath was a rhythm determined by breaks in the lyrics.  Heartbeat was the bass drum in that remembered musical accompaniment, and his pick came down into the stone on the second beat of every measure.  It had to be the evens.  That was pretty much the definition of rock and roll, isn't it?  A beat to work to.

Surprisingly, so soon after his last discovery, he found himself acknowledging the addition of a fifth iron ore.  Maybe this hole wouldn't be so deep as he feared, when all was said and done!  No, that kind of thinking would have him digging twice as far when the Lady abandoned him.  Don't even think her name.

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(ID# 29187 results: Battle: 8 Craft: 3 Loot: 17 MOB: 8)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 5/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

No sense slowing down now, was there?  A few deep breaths, and he was back into the swing of things.  Literally.  He was 32 feet into this mining shaft now, and just maybe that meant a change in how things functioned.  10000.  It was a round number, at the very least, and computers liked round numbers.  The Lady may or may not be with him, but no RNG was ever truly random.  Maybe he'd gotten onto a good seed for a bit.  All the more reason not to waste the chance while it was here!  There was a smile on his lips as he sang and swung, madness mantra filling the air as if it were a drinking song.  Unfortunately, all he got was his 33rd foot of empty space exposed to the torch-light.

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(ID# 29188 results: Battle: 2 Craft: 12 Loot: 2 MOB: 5)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 5/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

His brain skipped a track suddenly, and he stumbled.  When he started to sing again, the song was a very different one, if still somewhat appropriate to the moment.  "♫Reluctantly crouched at the starting line, Engines pumping and thumping in time...♫"  Oh, yes.  Aetharan was going the distance.  Much mellower a tune, but one that still brought a smile to his lips.  Probably far more important, for any GMs with delusions of godhood or any trapped psychological counseling AIs out there, he'd stopped repeating the same song over and over and over again.  That was a problem with omniscience: you couldn't tune out annoying things like earworms.  Still, he kept on digging.

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(ID# 29190 results: Battle: 8 Craft: 12 Loot: 3 MOB: 1)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 5/7, Stone 1/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

Aetharan needed a working tune worth more than one foot of digging, so he racked his mind for a bit trying to settle on one, before deciding that he'd just keep switching songs every five minutes or so as he worked.  He just didn't know all that many really long, or easily-repeatable ones that managed to set a proper pace.  For the moment, though, "♫My child arrived just the other day.  Came into the world in the usual way...♫"  Okay, so he had to watch himself here.  He was in danger of slipping from happy, up-beat songs into truly depressing territory, and that was an emotion that he couldn't afford.  One that terrified him.  If those black waters washed over him again, he didn't know what he would do.  No.  He could sing this song, and even if it was enough to make him cry, it wouldn't stop him.  It was beautiful, and it was one with a strong inherent beat to it.  Not to mention a lesson.

Just as he was getting to the part about the singer's son being just like him, the rock-face dissolved enough to leave behind his second piece of usable stone.  It was a big chunk, but all that weight didn't really matter once it was in his storage, did it?

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(ID# 29192 results: Battle: 10 Craft: 2 Loot: 20 MOB: 10.  And the RNG likes depressing songs?)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 5/7, Stone 2/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

The downward swing was logical, and probably inevitable, given the person who was cycling through the playlist in his own cracked mind.  Cats in the Cradle gave way to Mad World, taken far slower and softer than its original version from the '80s.  Work would continue, however, even as he sang.  Swing once a measure, no matter what.  You could sob if you had to, let the tears flow.  Let it all out.  Nobody was down here but him, after all.  He didn't have to be strong down here in the mines.  Didn't even have to pretend to be.  Just had to keep going.  As long as he didn't stop working, didn't curl up and go into another fugue, he'd be fine...  and he thought that maybe, just maybe, the singing was helping him avoid just that.

Surprise of surprises, a second large chunk of the wall was broken from the wall and into his inventory less than half a song after the first.  He now had the materials to trade for the anvil and forge, with just the hammer lacking.  He'd be done with this soon.

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(ID# 29193 results: Battle: 6 Craft: 5 Loot: 18 MOB: 8.  Yes, the RNG likes depressing songs.)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 5/7, Stone 3/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

A wistful smile struck his face as Mad World gave way to Hurt.  Of course he knew more depressing songs than happy ones.  He'd spent far, far more of his adult life buried in music that matched his dark moods.  "...♫What have I become, my sweetest friend?  Everyone I know goes away in the end♫..."  Oh, that second line of the chorus just spoke volumes to him.  It always had, and always wood.  It was one of the pillars of his being-- the temple he'd built up to loneliness, especially since the divorce.

No.

Aetharan had never been married, and had never knelt at that temple to weep.  He was not Aaron.  That man was dead.  His memories were there to serve as lessons learned, not something to agonize over.  Just.  Keep.  Digging.  It didn't bring him any more ore yet, but it did help calm his mind.  He used the broken chips of stone that rained around him to build a levee in his mind against the flood.

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(ID# 29194 results: Battle: 8 Craft: 8 Loot: 12 MOB: 3)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 5/7, Stone 3/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

Aaron had practiced the Art of Drowning.  He'd seen the black sails in the sunset, spent his December underground, and sang the sorrow until his throat was raw.  It was Aetharan, however, who'd heard a voice, and he who had a fire inside.  It was this moment, as the saddest of the songs drifted through his head and his internal monologue became a flurry of album titles strung into sentences, that he began to swing from the sad songs into wrath.  Oh, this wonderful roller-coaster of emotions that was his own train of thought.  He just knew that one of these days it was going to derail, going around a corner too fast, and his tombstone would read The inside of his skull was labeled Amtrac.  Swing.  "♫Hey, miss murder can I, hey, miss murder can I...♫" Swing. "♫Make beauty stay if I take my life?♫"

Halfway through the song, the notification popped into his vision that he'd found the sixth piece of ore he was looking for.  Just one more, and he could call this fetch quest done.  At least it wasn't twenty bear ***es.

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(ID# 29195 results: Battle: 3 Craft: 6 Loot: 18 MOB: 1)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 6/7, Stone 3/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan

[Aetharan 0]

Continuing his temporary theme of growing rage, he launched into the next song at a pace that left it hard to keep up his swing-a-measure.  "♫Define your meaning of war.  To me it's what we do when we're bored...♫"  It was as if he expected not to mine the last piece of iron ore out of this wall, but to instead beat the wall until it dropped as if he'd killed it.  One of these days, he would break this wall.  Just as he broke the rest of Aincrad.  It would happen, somehow.  This...  castle.  This flying, iron-clad sack of **** would burn, and he'd be the one to set it ablaze.  It would only make sense, right?  It had given birth to Aetharan, hadn't it?  Then again, something in him screamed that he wasn't the only person who would come out of this world looking nothing like the person who'd put on that NERV gear.  Not physically, but something etched into the soul.

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(ID# 29197 results: Battle: 3 Craft: 5 Loot: 13 MOB: 9)

Quest Tracking: Iron Ore 6/7, Stone 3/3

Edited August 28, 2015 by Aetharan