Death After Death

When Simon woke up in bed in the cabin as he’d done two dozen times before, it was with relief that bordered on disbelief. He just lay there unmoving for several minutes as he stared at the ceiling. Finally, he worked up the courage to turn his head, which somehow managed to feel climactic. After that, he flexed his hands and wiggled his toes before he finally tried sitting up. He’d feared that after the years or decades, he’d been lying beneath the sand, he would have forgotten how to move, but that wasn’t the case.

The first thing he did was look in the mirror and consider asking it a question to see if he was still capable of speech. That was a silly fear, of course, and he shrugged it off with a forced laugh as he reached for the wine.

“Fuck that,” he muttered as he decided the last thing he wanted to see right now was his character sheet. His experience was probably at like minus a million right now, and honestly, he was better off not knowing. Besides - he was sure his skills had dropped since he hadn’t used them in such a long time, and that would probably hurt more, given how much he’d suffered to improve them.

Instead, after he took a long drink, savoring the lost sensation of taste that had been restored before trying a bit of the food and reveling just as much in that. Intellectually he knew the bread and cheese he had was mediocre at best, but that didn’t stop it from tasting amazing in the moment. “Well, what now?” he asked himself once that was done.

From here, he could see all the gear he usually took on his quests into The Pit, but that was the last thing he wanted to see right now. There was no way he was going down there right now. Honestly, he wasn’t sure he was going to that deep ever again. As far as he was concerned, level twenty was a no-go zone. Level six might be, too, honestly.

He wasn’t sure he had it in him to be a zombie or statue again. Getting stabbed to death or dying of exposure was fine. Normal deaths could be painful or humbling, but the crazy ones where he died and kept living? He was completely over it.

Simon looked around for literally anything he could do besides gearing up for a fight. He opened up the dresser and saw nothing of interest. Still, in the top drawer under a stranger’s small clothes, he finally found something promising: a handful of fishhooks. At first, he didn’t realize what they were because they were made of bone, but eventually, his brain decided that was the only thing they could be used for. He looked around the room for a fishing pole or at least a little string he could tie to the spear.

Fishing would solve nothing, but that was precisely the point. Right now, the last thing Simon wanted to do was solve or fix anything. He just wanted to be for a while and remember what that felt like.

Fishooks in hand, he went outside with nothing but his dagger, waterskin, and a little food. He didn’t recall there being a shed or anything, but he hadn’t exactly looked for one, so anything was possible. A quick look around showed him that there was no shed, but a few tool pegs were built into the back wall of the cabin.