"Survive the next 24 hours."
The words hung in the air, glowing on the floating blue blueprint that was my only companion in this frozen hellscape.
It was a simple, straightforward quest, but it felt like the most impossible task I had ever been given.
I had built a house from the ground up, but I had done it with a hardware store ten minutes down the road and a warm bed to sleep in at night. Here, I had nothing but the clothes on my back, and they were rapidly becoming a liability.
The cold was a physical thing now, a crushing weight that was squeezing the life out of me. My shivering had progressed from a violent tremor to a series of uncontrollable, full-body spasms.
My thoughts were becoming sluggish, my brain thick with a cold, syrupy fog. I knew the signs of hypothermia. I'd seen them in coworkers who'd stayed out on a job too long in the winter. I was well on my way.
"Shelter," I mumbled, my lips numb and clumsy. "Right. Shelter."
I scanned the horizon. It was a 360-degree panorama of absolutely nothing. No trees, no rocks, no hills.
Just flat, white, and deadly. I was a single, insignificant speck in an ocean of snow. The only feature in the entire landscape was me, and I wasn't much to look at.
"Hey, Blueprint!" I yelled, my voice hoarse. "You got any bright ideas? A map? A compass? A coupon for a slightly-less-frozen patch of snow?"
The blueprint flickered, and a new message appeared. [Scanning for nearby points of interest… Scan complete. Results: 1. Snow. 2. More Snow. 3. A patch of snow that is statistically identical to the other snow.]
"Helpful," I grumbled. "Really helpful. You're like the Clippy of the afterlife."
[Thank you for the feedback! We are constantly striving to improve the user experience.]
I was going to die here, trading sarcastic barbs with a sentient piece of architectural software.
It was a fittingly absurd end to a life that had been a long, slow-motion pratfall. My legs felt like lead.
My vision was starting to tunnel. I stumbled, my frozen jeans refusing to bend, and fell to my knees in the snow. The impact barely registered. The cold was so intense it had burned past pain and into a deep, profound numbness.
This was it.
This was how it ended.
Not with a bang, not even with a goose, but with a whimper in the middle of nowhere. I closed my eyes, the last of my energy draining away. I was so tired. So incredibly tired.
My jacket.
The thought came out of nowhere, a sudden, desperate craving. It wasn't just any jacket. It was my Carhartt.
A big, ugly, brown canvas thing, lined with fleece, stained with paint and wood glue and the ghosts of a thousand spilled coffees.
It was my work uniform, my security blanket. It smelled of sawdust and sweat and home. I had left it hanging on a hook by the back door when I'd gone out to hammer that final, fatal nail.
I wanted that jacket more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I wanted to feel its weight on my shoulders, to bury my face in its familiar, worn collar. I wanted to be home.
As if in response to my desperate, dying wish, the blueprint in front of me changed. The architectural drawing dissolved, replaced by a new schematic. It was a cutaway view of my house.
My house.
I could see the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom I'd never slept in. I could see the armchair I'd spent a month restoring, the bookshelf I'd built from reclaimed barn wood. And there, on a hook by the back door, was my jacket.
The blueprint zoomed in on the jacket. A glowing, pulsating box appeared around it, and text scrolled across the screen.
[Item Detected: [Worn Carhartt Work Jacket].
[Durability: 87/100. Special Properties: +5 to Cold Resistance, +10 to Emotional Stability (User Specific). Do you wish to materialize this item?]
I stared, my frozen brain struggling to comprehend. Materialize? I could bring it here? "Yes," I croaked, the word a ragged whisper. "Yes!"
[Materializing item. Please note: a maximum of three (3) items may be materialized simultaneously. A cooldown period will apply before this item can be dematerialized or another item can be summoned. Materialized items will automatically dematerialize if the user moves more than 100 meters from the point of summoning.]
The fine print. There was always fine print. I didn't care. I just wanted my jacket.
A section of the blueprint glowed brightly, then shot a beam of blue light at the snow in front of me.
The light coalesced, swirling and solidifying. For a second, it looked like a 3D wireframe model of the jacket, a ghostly, digital apparition.
Then, the lines filled in, the colors deepened, and with a soft pop, it was there. My jacket. Lying in the snow as if it had just fallen from the sky.
I crawled towards it, my movements clumsy and desperate. I touched it. It was real. The rough canvas, the soft fleece lining. It was cold from the snow, but it was real.
I shrugged off my frozen, useless shirt and pulled on the jacket. It was like pulling on a suit of armor. The fleece lining was a shock of warmth against my skin.
The familiar weight on my shoulders was a comfort, an anchor in this sea of madness.
The +10 to Emotional Stability wasn't a joke. I felt… better. Not good, but better. The shivering subsided slightly. The fog in my brain began to recede.
I fumbled in the pockets. My hands found a crumpled tissue, a stray wood screw, and a half-eaten granola bar.
I almost wept with joy.
I tore open the granola bar with my teeth and devoured it in three bites. It tasted like sawdust and honey and salvation. The small burst of sugar and calories was like a jolt of electricity to my system.