Marathon

Timber wolves are indeed a cross between a tree and a wolf. They look like living bundles of sticks somehow connected together and flexing and interwoven. Like normal wolves, they were very territorial. I probably just fell into their house equivalent. And they hadn't invited me to dinner. Standing and reorienting myself gave the four of them time to surround me. Less favorite. Well, it was time to apply the small amount of skill gained from skeet shooting, playing paintball and being a BB range director. Drawing out the assault rifle, I took aim and waited for them to attack. Which they did. One leaped at me, jaws wide.

I managed to get off a whole 3 shots before the wolf bounced off my shields, the savage strike smashing them to a mere 87% instead of 100%. Okay, so that wasn't really smashing them. It still looked like it would have. If my intestines weren't having existence difficulties I probably would have crapped my suit. So instead the "You're going to DIE so do something" section of my mind did the closest thing which was to release a few bullets. Some of the said bullets soon made extremely bad friends with the aforementioned timber wolf. The thing yelped so I tried to put it out of its misery and run for it before the others lost their confusion from the nice and loud gunshots.

Thank groodness for Dead Space. There was only enough time to smash its head with my metal boot (when I get scared I get serious), which at least stopped the whining, then 3 of them jumped me from behind at once. Probably the first smart thing I had done for a long time was duck and ignore that weird "+18m" gold text that had popped up. All three flew overhead and crashed into the opposite cave wall in a tangled woody mess. So I did the smart thing versus a group of enemies. I pulled the plasma grenade from my pocket and pushed the little button and chucked it at them. It stuck to the middle one, and I realized what I just did. I just chucked a plasma grenade in a small enclosed space while in said small enclosed space.

A very short SPRINT resulted in me not blowing myself to pieces with a plasma grenade for the umpteenth time if you include Halo on the Xbox 360 at my friend's house. Like with the first timber wolf, "+16m", "+13m", and "+21m" appeared and then faded away. That text ticked me off. What, was this supposed to be CoD or something? This suit gave life a very video-game-ish feel but this was going too far. Besides, what was with the 'm'? Are we saying that the wolves were worth millions of points? Even a freaking low-rank helicopter was 650ish. And those were probably a lot more lethal than a mere timber wolf.

Not having much better to do other than try to get away from the now collapsed-in cave with probably 1 mostly intact wooden body and 3 piles of ashes, it was time to figure out what that text meant. Clearly it was some sort of points system or something regardless of how weird the scale was. HELP POINTS popped up a very small box that said "Try SHOW GUI TARDIS". SHOW GUI TARDIS unfortunately did not make a a picture of a certain very useful blue box appear. No timey-wimey for me. SHOW GUI TARDIS nevertheless yielded very interesting results. TARDIS may also stand for "Transdimensional Accessible Radical Dispensing Item Store".

The GUI for this suit function was very simple. Just a search bar, a box with my current points and a few buttons in various places. A little magnifying lens, a graph, a wrench and a question mark. An imaginary question mark formed above my head. If I only have a mental keyboard, how do I click buttons? To whoever is seeing this, because at this point this monologue has gone on far too long to not to be read by anyone, no that question shouldn't have been asked. A mental keyboard can also easily be friends with a mental mouse. How much herp would a herp-derp derp if a herp-derp could derp herp?

Anyhow, with 1731m I should be able to buy something, right? Maybe another plasma grenade? Searching for it resulted in 23b results. Billions, maybe? The 'recommended' one was the type I just used. Thank groodness. And I could buy one for a mere HOLY CRAP 1600m??? Okay then. Well, it's probably worth it. The buy button gleamed at me. It said "click me. click me. click me." like a broken record. Like a broken record. Like a broken rec-moving on. Submitting to temptation, I clicked the button. Another box with a bunch of delivery options popped up. I picked "cardboard box".

Before I could wonder just what would happen there was a strange noise, almost like a blowdart, and a cardboard box appeared in the air. Then it fell to the ground. I picked it up, opened it, clipped the expected grenade on and mentally smiled. I was satisfied with my purchase. Then the significance of what just happened struck. A box just came out of nowhere and delivered a weapon of decent destruction and then dissapeared shortly afterwards. Internet shopping just got taken up to, well, forget about 11. It's now over 9000. OP much?

Anyhow, the help button didn't tell much. What it did tell though was quite valuable. Everything you do affects your points. Any given action has it's base score depending on what you did, with what, how well you did, etc. It also has a score multiplier which comes from the context. Singing a song well in front of a large group of people would have a bigger multiplier than singing said song well to yourself. Simple enough. Then it got not so simple. Apparently everyone and everything has their own score whether or not they participate in or even know the existence of the system. The number system was easy enough. 'k' meant 1000's, 'm' meant 1000000's, 'b' meant billions, and then apparently there were 't', 'q', 'p', 's', 'v', 'o', 'n', and 'd'.

How you could actually get to that many points was past my own comprehension. The significant thing was that the last line said "If the user can't think of what to buy, search 'recommended' to maximize usage of our intuitive purchase feature". The list of recommended items was topped by something that immediately caught my interest. "Portal to your house, in a jar!" was the first item on the list. It cost 3q. 3141592653589793 to be exact. I had a way home! It just cost a metrick fetlockton. A metric fetlocton. Gaah. A LOT.