8 Zavyyn discovers more interface windows

This boat ride is boring. Moso has to pay attention to the scenery so he told me at the beginning he would start any conversations we needed to have. Did I annoy him by being a chatterbox? I can't tell. But we have a couple hours on the boat to get to the village. Every oOccasionally we pass another swamp dwelling set up on a particularly large hill or knoll rising out of the swamp. A few times we see other boats, but we all zip past without talking or slowing. This boat is going very fast. Where do they get these motors? Maybe this world is not as fantasy as I thought?

With nothing else to do, I begin messing with the settings windows again. There are all sorts of annoying tricks I have to deal with, like text being partially invisible, distorted, and all sorts of other stupid things. But I finally make my way into a menu for toggling UI elements. Elements, huh I guess that's one way to describe each separate window. Wait. Map? I toggle that on and see a map screen scrolling rapidly as we navigate through the swamp. Well, this is handy. I scroll out a little further until I see the village it seems like we are heading towards. Going back to the elements window, I also find a quest log window, which told me my current objective is traveling to a river, an auction window, which let me know I had no items for sale and that there were no buyers or sellers online, and a pet window.

Pet window? I open it up and am aghast at the numbers of pets I have. There are dozens of cat breeds, dog breeds, small wild animals, small magical animals, small insects, clockwork animals, tiny dragons, is that a human child? Why do I have a child as a pet? That child is a squire? Is this slavery? This window is a terrible thing. This faerie dragon looks especially cute, though, with iridescent butterfly wings, and a sassy smirk. Oh, and what about the baby skunk, it looks like it came from a children's cartoon. Yuck, zombie variants? These pets seem highly dubious in more ways than one. As I am about to close the window, my eye catches a pet name.

Brain Drake: This familiar raises its master's cognitive speed.

Wait, so they can have effects too? I will have to look through here for useful ones. This brain drake looks incredibly nasty, though. How would a monster made out of internal organs work, anyway? That ability looks interesting, in an over-powered sort of way, but I don't think I could let anybody see that thing. Maybe I can set up an illusion or something relating to invisibility? Or maybe I can find a magic item to assist my ugly drake in being presentable?

I feel so ignorant, like my mental world is nothing but a sea of questions. I need to find answers; I hope they can help with amnesiac wizards who are the wrong race. Is that something people really study? What department would that be? Even the places I think of to answer questions raises more questions. I feel like I am 99% depression and 1% sass when I consider all the things I don't know. Not being able to talk to Moso while he is paying attention to where we are going makes my anxieties pile up and I have nowhere to let them out.

I should probably stop thinking about those depressing things and go back to exploring these UI elements. Let's go back to my crafting window. It says I have multiple crafting stations available... I guess I can combine things directly through this UI. There's a ton of different crafting skills, each with recipe lists and subcategories for recipes. There's too much. At a quick glance, I have thousands upon thousands of things I can make. Some of them seem to be of dubious utility as well. Clockwork rope? A drake speculum? Eggplant golems? Solar-powered flashlights?

This one looks neat, though - a chainblade! I can imagine a sword swinging around like a whip, or maybe it's also clockwork and can fight just by the wielder holding it. I have no idea how to fight with something like that, but my imagination is going crazy. I should check out what it is like anyway, just to see what its stats are like. Wait a minute, this item window shows an icon for it, and this chainblade is just a chainsaw. If this world has outboard motors for boats, it probably has chainsaws already. Are all these weird recipes junk? I think it will take me a while to find anything useful.

"How much longer till we get there?" I have to speak up a little for Moso to hear me over the boat cutting through the water. The motor is quiet, though.

"About an hour or so. You hungry or anything?" Moso speaks to me without taking his eyes off the water. This is what responsible driving looks like, kids!

"No, I'm good, thanks."

I settle back in with my recipe window and spend a very boring hour going through all the garbage I can make.