Strawberry's Descent

It was Nettle, of all people, who finally made her check.

"You haven't opened your character sheet in months," she said, watching Arista idly sketch a rough, speculative cross-section, the kind of unauthorized daydreaming her notebook always seemed to accumulate whether a project actually existed yet or not, notebook balanced on one knee. "I mean actually opened it. Stats, allocation, all of it."

"I've been busy." Arista didn't look up. "There's a whole railway."

"There's always a whole something. That's not an excuse, that's just Tuesday for you at this point." Nettle nudged her with a foot until she finally, reluctantly, pulled up the panel.

[Blacksmithing: Lv. 73]

Arista blinked at the number for a long moment, genuinely startled despite having watched the XP notifications tick by constantly for months. "...Seventy-three? I was thirty-six when we broke ground."

"You've been passively leveling off rail spikes for half a year. What did you expect."

"I don't know, I just: didn't really check." She scrolled further down, toward the stat allocation panel she genuinely couldn't remember the last time she'd opened, and stopped cold.

[Unallocated Stat Points: 504]

"...Oh."

"How much," Nettle asked, already leaning over to look.

"Five hundred and four." Arista stared at it, doing rough math against every level-up notification she'd half-registered and immediately ignored in favor of whatever crisis Petrov's latest list had produced that day. "I genuinely never spent a single one. Not once. Not since the tutorial."

"You've been playing Ultimate mode, permadeath, zero combat class, for six months, hoarding over five hundred stat points you could have put into literally anything, and it never once occurred to you to spend them."

"I was busy building things. Stat allocation felt like a separate menu for a separate kind of player." Arista scrolled again, half-expecting nothing further, and instead found a small, unfamiliar notification tucked at the very bottom of the panel, timestamped weeks ago, apparently sitting unread this entire time.

[Milestone Reached: 500 Unallocated Stat Points][Title Unlocked: Hoarder]

Nettle read it over her shoulder and immediately, audibly, lost it.

"...Hoarder."

"That's not fair." Arista stared at the title with genuine, wounded offense. "That's not hoarding. Hoarding implies I'm keeping something intentionally. I just forgot the menu existed."

"The system does not care about your intentions, Strawberry. The system saw five hundred unspent points sitting untouched for months and decided the correct response was mockery."

"I build continental infrastructure and this is the thanks I get." Arista flipped through the rest of the panel, morbidly curious now what else she'd apparently ignored into oblivion. "Okay, in my defense, most of my actual survivability's come from just... not getting hit. I dodge problems instead of tanking them. Stats never felt urgent."

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"You are on Ultimate mode," Nettle said, very slowly, the same weary emphasis Bram had once used on her weeks earlier. "Permadeath. Five hundred stat points sitting completely unused, on the one difficulty setting where dying actually matters."

Arista opened her mouth to argue, found she didn't actually have a rebuttal, and closed it again.

"...Okay, that's fair. That's very fair, actually." She stared at the allocation screen, genuinely uncertain for the first time in months, the same specific uncertainty she usually only felt facing an entirely new engineering problem rather than her own character build. "I don't even know what to put them into. I've never had to think about this."

Nettle crossed her arms, watching her scroll helplessly through Vitality, Strength, Dexterity, Wisdom categories she'd apparently never once engaged with beyond the tutorial's forced allocation.

"...You built a continental rail network," she said slowly, "and you're more intimidated by a stat menu than you were by folding adamantium."

"The adamantium made sense! I understood the adamantium!" Arista gestured helplessly at the screen. "This is just numbers with no forge attached to them."

"Hoarder," Nettle said again, with visible relish, clearly not planning to let this go anytime soon.

"I regret showing you this menu exists."

Arista hovered over the allocation screen for another long moment, the number sitting there patiently, unmoved by her indecision.

Five hundred and four. Objectively, she knew, a ridiculous number to have sitting untouched. She also knew, with equal certainty, that she'd survived perfectly well without ever spending a single one of them.

"...Hm."

Nettle's eyes narrowed immediately, the specific, wary focus of someone who had learned to recognize danger in a single syllable. "...No."

"What?"

"I know that look."

"I don't have a look."

"You absolutely have a look. It's the same look you had right before deciding to build a tunnel to Hell because, and I quote, 'the map probably continues.'"

"...That worked."

"It absolutely should not have."

Arista glanced back at the small title notification still sitting at the bottom of her panel.

[Title Unlocked: Hoarder]

"...Hypothetically," she said, slowly.

"No."

"Hypothetically—"

"Strawberry."

"—if the game gives you a title at five hundred..." Nettle pinched the bridge of her nose, already seeing exactly where this was going, and Arista finished the thought anyway, unable to help herself. "...what do you think happens at a thousand?"

Silence stretched between them.

"...You're considering it."

"I'm just curious."

"You're considering it."

"I mean, achievements usually come in tiers."

"No."

"What if there's another title?"

"No."

"What if it's called Dragon's Hoard?"

"No."

"The Untouched?"

"No."

"Investment Portfolio?"

"No!"

Arista was already doing the mental math anyway, half-listening, the actual numbers already assembling themselves in her head the way they always did whenever a genuinely bad idea started looking suspiciously feasible. "...The rail network isn't even finished yet. I'll keep passively earning XP for months regardless of what I decide today."

Nettle stared at her, utterly disbelieving. "You have enough points sitting there right now to survive getting hit by an actual dragon."

"Mhm."

"You have enough to go from ´physically weaker then the average toddler´ to genuinely, actually strong."

"Mhm."

"You could probably become one of the strongest players on this entire server, on Ultimate mode, today, this afternoon, with zero further effort."

"Mhm."

"And your plan," Nettle said, slower now, each word deliberate, "is to sit on all of it a little longer, just to see if the developers wrote a funnier title for the next tier."

Arista looked, for a moment, genuinely conflicted about it. "...It would answer an important scientific question."

"What scientific question?"

"How committed the developers actually are to the bit."

Nettle closed her eyes, drawing in a long, steadying breath, and turned toward the one person she suspected might actually back her up on this.

"...Bram."

Bram looked up from the bolt he'd been tightening on the prototype locomotive, unhurried, entirely unbothered by being pulled into whatever this was. "What?"

"She's trying to become the first player to discover the one-thousand-point hoarding achievement. On purpose. Instead of spending five hundred perfectly good stat points that could keep her alive."

Bram considered this for exactly as long as it took to set down his wrench.

"...Honestly?"

Nettle blinked. "...You're encouraging this?"

"No."

"...?"

"I'm saying I'd also like to know."

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