Infinite Farmer: A Plants vs Dungeon
Chapter 186: Trial of Home

“It can’t be.” Tulland spun around from the ocean and saw the familiar site of the peak that made up Ouro’s center. It was ringed by buildings he had known since he could start remembering things, every stone of them perfect and in place. Every road bent here and there just so, going to avenues and sights he had traversed since birth. “This is either Ouros, or a very good copy.”

“It’s the second one,” a voice said. “I should know. I’m the same thing.”

Tulland turned around and saw his uncle for just one moment before the tears blinded him. He wasn’t real, exactly. The system message instantly confirmed that. But he was real enough, in some ways, that Tulland couldn’t bring himself to draw a distinction.

Still blinded, Tulland bent down his head and read the second of two messages as quickly as he could.

It was probably the shortest system description he had ever seen. Tulland wiped his eyes and accepted it about the same time his uncle crashed into him, wrapping his fisherman’s arms around him in a hug.

“Stupid boy,” Tulland uncle grunted. Tulland realized, with a shock, that his uncle was crying too. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too.” Tulland hugged him back. He couldn’t remember if they had ever actually embraced in this way before. Usually, neither of them was the type. “You died?”

“Oh, yup.” His uncle disengaged from the hug and scratched his hair as casually as if Tulland had just accused him over overcooking the stew. “Followed you into the dungeon with your tutor. Got a class from it and everything, from that The Infinite fella. Turned out I wasn’t much good at it.”

“You followed me?” Tulland shouted. “Why? You should have stayed safe.”

“Not much to stay safe for, then. Don’t worry, boy. From what The Infinite told me, I’m already having another life somewhere else. Our world will do better. And on top of that, I get to see you one last time. Not a bad deal, as far as I’m concerned.”

There was a stew going in Tulland and his uncle’s home within the next thirty minutes, packed with protein courtesy of an enormous fish his uncle claimed he had caught while waiting for Tulland. As it cooked, Tulland did his best to explain what he had been through to his uncle, who had very little context with which to understand any of it.

“So you were tricked into the dungeon then. I suppose that makes a bit more sense. It always struck me as odd that you’d become interested in that arch so late. And that System isn’t evil?”

“Not more evil than anyone who makes a mistake. We are friends now, more or less. I’m guessing Ouros will get another System, now, if it doesn’t have one already. Should be a shock for the Church.”

“Let them be shocked. The clerics were always good to us, but it was the Church that kept them from being better. I can’t tell you how many times I saw them get in the way of good things.”

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Tulland arched his eyebrows.

“Really? You never said.”

“It wouldn’t have been good for you to know back then. The way you were with authority, and you expected me to tell you that the biggest one was rotten? Ha! I’m an old fisherman, but I’m not stupid.” His uncle looked him up and down again and shook his head. “Stars above. I can hardly recognize you in all that armor. And you’ve grown.”

“An inch or so, I think.”

“Not just height. The way you stand is different. You’re a man, now.” His uncle shook his head. “And I wasn’t even there to see it happen.”

All the doubt Tulland felt about The Infinite saying he thought of himself as a boy evaporated right then. Something about hearing his uncle call him a man and saying he was grown warmed him to his core, like he had been waiting for just that for months. In a way, he supposed he probably had, whether he knew it or not.

“You were there,” Tulland said. “For most of it, anyway. You made it happen.”

“I always wondered if any of what I tried sunk in. You were always running around, trying to figure out ways to leave. It was hard to tell if you even heard most of it.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that.” Tulland smiled. “I didn’t even realize how much you had taught me until it started to matter again and again in the dungeon. You kept me alive in there.” Tulland shook his head. “My tutor too. He followed you in?”

“Yes. Neither of us had much time left, then. You never knew, but I wasn’t well. I had been sick for a long time. I had to convince myself I was strong enough to chase after you. I didn’t know The Infinite would fix me when I got in. He was so old he could have died of it any day. I checked with The Infinite about him in those last moments after that damn boar gored me, and it said he was still going strong. Killing everything in sight.”

“Tutor? How? What was his class?”

“I don’t know. I never asked. I figured he was talking them to death.”

Tulland and his uncle laughed and talked for the rest of the night, eating stew and bread and telling stories. It was a different kind of talk than what had done before. Now that his uncle was convinced Tulland was some kind of hero, he apparently felt off the hook for his moral upbringing. The stories Tulland had never heard his uncle tell when he knew he was listening came out now, with all the practiced development of years of retelling behind them.

“Naked?”

“Naked as the day he was born, in that shed. Laundrywoman had come by, hadn’t seen him, figured he left those out for her. Now it was the middle of the day, his fence wasn’t built, and he was trapped in that shed freezing to death.”

“Why didn’t he call for help?”

“Too embarrassed. If I hadn’t broken my oar, he would have frozen to death out there. I swear to you. It was the way he was.”

“What happened to him?” Tulland asked. “I don’t think I never knew Barnes.”

“You didn’t. He met some girl, a ship captain’s daughter. She lured him away, and we never saw him again.”

“Seems like a lot of people just left like that.”

“You would have too, eventually.” His uncle sat back. “I loved Ouros. Loved the ocean, loved the fish. Never thought about leaving. But most people weren’t that way. For every person who loved it, there were a handful who would have gone almost anywhere else.”

“Why not you?”

“Can you imagine it? When I was on Ouros, there was the island, but I could at least tell you where it ended. If the sea on one side was choppy, I could try the other. I heard that on the continent, you could stand facing the ocean and have thousands of miles at your back.” His Uncle shuddered. “All that land. All those bears.”

“Wait. Our world had bears?”

“Every world has bears!”

They argued about whether or not Tulland’s world had really had ursine creatures for a bit. His uncle finally won handily by pointing out he couldn’t have possibly known about them if they didn’t, which Tulland had no answer for. Of course, he might have just seen them in The Infinite, but by that point he would have had to accept his uncle was lying to keep the conversation going, and his uncle had never, ever lied to him.

“Anyway. The trick is, the vegetables don’t matter. The kind of fish doesn’t matter. Cooking it slow does.” His uncle was just finishing up giving him pointers on what he considered the perfect stew. What they had eaten in this place was as bland as the old stuff on Ouros had been, and Tulland had still never enjoyed anything as much. “You gotta let everything mix. That’s going to take hours by itself. Then… Oh, damn.”

“What?” Tulland looked down into the pot. “Is it scorching?”

“No, it’s just that things are ending.” His uncle waved around the room. “All of this. I hoped we’d have more time.”

“Ah.” Tulland felt a bit of pain in his stomach as he considered losing his uncle again. “I guess nothing good lasts very long.”

“Stupid.” His uncle pulled him into a hug. “You think this won’t last? When are you going to forget about it, boy?”

They stood for a while, not talking. The Infinite at least gave them that much time. His uncle finally broke away from the hug, wiped his eyes, and coughed.

“Now, one last thing. This Necia. You don’t mess that up, you hear?”

Tulland nodded. He didn’t trust himself to talk just then.

“Make sure that good thing lasts. And tell her I love her. It’s true enough. You, too.”

“What?”

“I love you, Tulland. You were better than a son to me.”

The old fisherman just didn’t say things like that. Tulland couldn’t imagine what it had cost him to squeeze out the actual words that represented how he had always acted.

“I…”

Tulland’s voice caught. His uncle patted him on the shoulder as he tried to talk through the hiccups of weeping without breaking down into a wail.

“It’s alright, Tulland. You don’t have to say it. I know.”

The world broke. Tulland found himself laying in a bed of grass of his own invention, weeping uncontrollably as Necia and Amrand sprinted towards him from the town gates.

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