Year One, Spring

Day 23:

I am Cayor Little, champion of the world! I am… extremely good at hiding. Muffy. Need I say more?

Oh, and the demon cat? Not such a demon when you throw bread at it. (I meant for a rock. It was going to claw my dog to bits! Never put bread beside you…) So, I chucked a piece of bread, ended up with a purring kitty cat. And a jealous dog, who tried to run the cat off and got a swipe to the nose for his trouble.

I gave him extra jerky for his pain.

Then, and I kid you not, the cat started making up to the dog. Probably because of the jerky. They're both half starved, you can see their ribs and hip bones. Not very much, and the dog especially is getting better, but…

Okay, now I need to name them. (I refuse to make pets of, and name the rats.) The cat's… black. Blacky? No. Ink spot? No chance in hell. I'll think about it.

So, beyond the hiding from Muffy and the episode with the cat and dog, nothing much happened today. Beyond finally giving the dog a bath. He's brown, one ear stands up, one ear flops over, and he likes giving soulful looks in the hopes that you'll feed him.

I have weird pets, you know that?

Day 24:

And the continuing saga of "Cayor Little's Weird Pets" continues! With a new addition to the psycho clan- the horse! Who's probably going to end up with Horse as a name…

Okay, explanation needed. Right. See, (why am I explaining to a freaking BOOK?) there's this guy, Taka-something, lives right down the road. Retired farmer? Dunno. Anyways, he showed up today with a horse. I know nothing about horses. It was brown, like the dog. And big. So Taka-what's his name grins, and tells me he found this horse a while back and was trying to find its owner. No one came forward, and he heard I'd moved into the farm, would I like a horse?

I didn't have a chance to reply with 'no, why the fuck would I, what do I feed it?' when he'd taken the really big animal and stuck it in a shed type building. Good point, though? The demon cat (y'know what, I'll just call it 'Demon', solve the name problem there) attacked Taka's feet. And hands, because the idiot tried to pick it up.

Go Demon.

And the dog showed up, and started barking, the horse made some really loud snorting sound back, Taka ran away, and I ended up with a horse that apparently likes to nibble on people.

Sensibly, I went and started weeding. It'd done a lot of it, I'll probably be able to plant crops this summer. Interspersed with cleaning up the land, I ran around to try and avoid the horse, who wanted to see what my shirt tasted like.

Yes, the horse eventually found out, decided it didn't like cotton, tried out my jeans, tried my hair, and finally decided I had nothing tasty on my person.

I probably should've locked the beast up in the shed, right? Keep it from wandering off? Well, I didn't.

The dog followed me into town for my daily forage for food and sellable stuff. Surprisingly enough, the horse stayed on the farm with Demon. They seemed to be getting along pretty well.

There were no random encounters with the townspeople. Oh no, I meant to talk to each and every one of them! Ruby at the Inn, Rock the gold digger, Nami, Muffy- I avoided her- Griffin… Basically, if I knew them, I talked to them. I asked about the horse Taka-whatever had found, and whether they knew anything about that.

What I got amounted to 'you have a horse now? Congratulations! Don't forget to feed it!'

About as helpful as a fish to the face… Oh yeah. I tried fishing. Eh heh… DAMN those things are slimy!

Day 25:

I have tilled my field (a small part of it) and planted some seeds! The random 'I don't know what it is' tree has started dropping its flowers, and I'm told the fruit, whatever they'll end up being, will be available for harvest by midsummer.

I met another random person today. Gotz (is that how you spell it?) from Mineral Town. Who names these places? Forget-me-Not Valley and Mineral Town. Whatever. Anyways, Gotz (pretty sure that's how you spell it) showed up and started talking to me about building a better chicken coop and enlarging my house and… It sounds like a lot of money. (It is. HOW much gold?) I'll probably end up buying from him, but if it'll cut down on the cost, I'll work for free.

But first I need the money. Zack's been showing up like clockwork at 5 P.M. every night, so at least there's that. (And you can sell the weeds for a single gold each… I must have a pile of three hundred of them.)

I wandered over to the mine today, pretty late. What's his name, Carter, borrowed my hammer. Well, borrowed as in 'yanked off my belt and refused to say a word to me as he ran into the mine'. Yes, I hang my hammer off my belt. And my ax, and… well, just about everything… Not like my backpack can carry all the stuff, it's not big enough. And it'd have to defy the laws of physics or something…

Anyways. I chased after Carter because hey, my hammer! And I find him wailing on one of the walls. Just as I reach him, the wall collapses and the mining lantern gets smashed, so we're left in the dark.

Carter doesn't seem to notice. He's yelling and cheering and I can't see my own hand in front of my face, and… Yeah. Not a happy boy, was I.

Eventually, I convinced Carter to go outside. Who knew grabbing someone by their hair and yanking was so convincing? Once we were outside, Carter explained- there was a tunnel to a deeper part of the mine, he'd lost his hammer, he was real thankful he could borrow mine.

In answer to my silence, which he seemed to take for admiring and happy on his behalf, he told me that I could help dig in the mine and whatever I found I could keep.

Actually, now that I think about it, he might've said that because I was thinking about killing him. Maybe Carter has weird mind reading powers and could feel the homicidal waves of hate rolling off me.

My hammer.

Day 30:

Mining is profitable, if you don't mind the exhaustion.

I have enough money for a better chicken coop. Which is great, since I wouldn't trust a chicken to the one I have now.

Gotz starts tomorrow. God, I'm tired. Sleep. Sleep good…

Year One, Summer

Day 1:

The heat has baked my brain. Kai is a lunatic. Phantom Skye Thief idiot stole something from Romana's mansion, which, honestly, is really stupid. The police are out in force! All… one… of them…

Yeah, I've already decided what I'll do to this Skye idiot if he shows up on my farm again. A use for the giant rats, finally!

I built a chicken coop today. Gotz said normally he'd do it himself, but the offer of help was one he just couldn't ignore. That's… a good thing, right? Right? Anyways, three days of work, and I'll have a chicken coop. For, you know, chickens. They lay eggs and the eggs make me money.

Anyways, yeah, that's what I did today.

Day 2:

Worked on the chicken coop.

Day 3:

Chicken coop done. Gonna die now.

Day 4:

So, looking over the past two entries, it seems like all I did was work on the damn chicken coop. Probably pretty accurate, since I can't remember anything. Besides, you know, hammer, saw, lifting wood and holding it there while Gotz nails it in place…

It's a good building. I think I want to live in it, instead of this tiny little hut. Whatever. I now have no money, it be summer, my crops are beginning to grow. And my animals (save the horse) look less starved (the horse looks… the same. Big. Brown. Whatever.).

So yeah. I tossed those weeds I yanked out of my field into the shipping bin, which I swear is actually a portal to another dimension. No matter how much stuff (see, pile of 300 weeds, I swear) I put in, there's always more room. Always. It's kind of freaky.

And it was raining, so I didn't have to water anything. Demon the cat wanted to spend his (her? I don't know) time inside the house, so in he (default) went. The dog (who is henceforth Dog) wanted to plaster himself to my leg, so we went walking.

For lack of anything better to do, I decided to go foraging near the mine. As I walked, I noticed that the bamboo was gone from the fields. Dang. At least it looked like there were berries on the bushes, so I wouldn't have to trust my cooking too much. You know, I like my stomach lining.

I got assaulted by Cartier again, this time because he wanted to talk to me about the dig. Dog yapped his head off, apparently not liking Cartier in Cayor's personal space. Good Dog… I managed to get free of Cartier's rants by, well… It's stupid…

I fell down a hole.

I pulled away from Cartier's arm, which happened to be across my shoulders. I stumbled over a rock. I fell against a wall. Which then proceeded to crumble beneath my weight and send me flying down this really long tunnel and… You know what, I think at some point I blacked out.

God knows I woke up bleeding from the side of my head.

It was pitch black at the bottom of that hole. I couldn't see anything- not my hand in front of my face, not any distant point of light suggesting where I'd fallen from, nothing. I couldn't even tell if my eyes were open or closed.

I could tell that I hurt, a lot. Besides the bleeding head wound, my jaw felt like someone'd delivered a right hook to it, my ribs ached like… well, like they were broken, and while I didn't think my arms or legs were broken, they hurt. A lot.

I've been in enough fights to know how to get up and walk it off, so to speak. To start off with, you don't. Get up, I mean. What you do is lie on your back, and flex your arms and legs to see if anything makes you want to scream when you move it. If nothing does, you slowly sit up, because if you move too fast you'll pass out and hit your head on the ground. Which is never recommended because, well, lack of consciousness.

I managed to get all the way upright without falling over, blacking out again (how would I be able to tell?) or hurting any worse then I already was. But once I was up, I was confronted with a dilemma. What to do? I mean, I couldn't see anything. If I took a step, I might be going down yet another long drop with even more aches and pains, if not death, at the bottom.

I'm not used to being serious, or being faced with real, life or death situations. Not like this. Back home, I'd get into fights, sure- it's how I ended up with an arrest under my belt and a shrink, for my anger issues. But back home, there was always someone around to bail me out. My parents, for example, or my friend, Keith (who decided to move to Maine on account of the cops wanting his head on a platter, the coward). I'd never been really, truly alone before.

It wasn't fun.

The darkness, the alone-ness, all seemed to conspire against me. It was like the Fates that Be decided Cayor Little was going to have a session of introspection, whether I liked it or not.

I didn't. Not that I had any choice, but believe me, it wasn't fun. At the end, I'd come to the conclusion that I was probably going to stay a farmer, if only because it wasn't all that bad that I could tell so far. That is, if I didn't end up dead.

Well, since I'm writing this now, obviously I'm not dead, but at the time, death was very much a possibility.

But anyways.

So, my introspective period- in which I discovered I didn't mind farming, I had no idea what I was doing with my life and didn't care, and how I wished my parents were proud of me but didn't really care that they probably weren't- finally ended, and I noticed the glow.

Seriously. There was this glow, on the same level as I was. I could only see it if I didn't look directly at it, which made me think at first that I was going nuts. Stay too long in the dark and you start to see things, Cayor…

Only it didn't go away, it didn't change colors, it didn't move. Just stayed there, a pale, pale blue light. And I figured what the hell, why not go take a look?

So I did. I shuffled along very carefully, and managed to find a wall, or a pile of rocks anyways, that I could keep one hand on as I walked. And the closer I got, the brighter the light got.

Until I rounded a corner, or whatever the cave equivalent is, and had to stop dead in my tracks.

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me."

It was a sword. On a pedestal stand. And it was glowing.