In the earthen part of the Blank White Country of Scape, the rains came gently, and they did not leave the land dry.

  Tiller woke grumbling and cursing Pod and beer. It wasn’t for hangover-related reasons. He’d only had a few pints. No, Tiller cursed because a fine mist was drifting through the air. He’d used the Earth sigil to shape the walls of the house as best he could, trying to narrow them toward a roof. Try as he might, they wouldn’t remain stable beyond a certain point. He’d dragged his hobo bed against one wall for maximum shelter, but nonetheless, he woke shivering and damp to his bones.

  This was the price of his rampant alcoholism.

  “It’s not alcoholism! I had three beers!”

  As they say, denial is the first step to admitting you’re an alcoholic.

  “No it’s not! That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Denying that denial is the second step to admitting you’re an alcoholic.

  Tiller glared upwards, committed to the erroneous and long-dispelled notion that the voice he heard was in the sky. He rose, knowing that sleep would not return to him that day. He staggered through the doorway of his little house, sighing. He was wet, he was cold, the dinosaur leather of his pants was stuck to him. There was only the barest hint of gray to the sky. He was the first one up. Though an early riser, Maeve would not be up for hours.

  Tiller let his shoulders sag. If he wasn’t going to sleep, and breakfast wasn’t ready, he would get to work.

  At least he would have no watering to do.

  He inspected the remaining crops. There were nine potato plants still growing and a hearty crop of eighteen corn plants. They would be ready for harvest in nine more days. The Pipkin’s powers would be wasted on them for now. He did the math, calculating that he could expect almost a full bag of corn and almost half a bag of potatoes. That would amount to the bones of thirty gold in sales, almost matching what he’d already made in Medley.

  He pulled the seed packets from his sack and splayed them out like a hand of cards. He had six each of carrots and onions plus the five packets of ten-day beetroot he’d bought from Glubb. On the other hand, he needed to get them in the ground. But there would be math to do on what they would be worth when harvested and how best to deploy the Pipkin to increase their growth.

  As if summoned by the thought, he heard the distinctive “Yip” and turned his head.

  The Pipkin sat, only a few feet away, watching him. He took a step closer and it took a step back.

  “Hmmm… seems a day without contact has set us back a little, eh fella?”

  “Yip!”

  “Feeding you will probably fix that. But Maeve’s still asleep so that’s gonna be a little while.”

  Dejectedly, “Yip…”

  Tiller went to work. The soil parted easily beneath the blade of his shovel. He’d gardened at home and had always found digging earth during the rain to be poorly advised. The wet soil turned dense and made for a hard-packed and inhospitable growing environment. Here, it didn’t seem to matter. The soil maintained its rich, spongy folding until he had turned what he expected to be enough for the rows of crops. Looking back at his work he cursed.

  “Damn… that’s almost all of it…”

  Indeed, there was very little soil not turned.

  “I guess… if I could cut down those trees, use the Earth sigil to flatten those bits… damn, this isn’t going to work… I’ve got room right now for what? At best, twenty packets of seeds here… That’ll put out twenty coins a day in value, not counting the little Pipkin boost… but at twenty coins a day…”

  He paused, furrowing his brows as he did the math. To make ten million coins would take, divide by two is five million, again by ten is five hundred thousand… shit, that’s five hundred thousand days! What is that? fifteen hundred years??

  It wasn’t. It was thirteen hundred seventy, rounding up. But he was just a simple alcoholic farmer.

  “I’m not a fucking alcoholic! 1370 years… shit, what’s that in my world…”

  Again he started trying to calculate in his head. Though it might have been entertaining to watch this process, it would not be entertaining to read about him painstakingly working out that this would translate to more than twenty-two years in his world.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Thanks. Could have really used that help when I didn’t even have paper to do sums on…”

  Tiller looked down to his boots, his body deflating. “Twenty-two years… uh-uh, no way. I’m not doing that. The kids will have kids of their own. I’m not missing all that. Fuck, I really need that composter.”

  But the composter would cost one thousand gold.

  Tiller seemed to flag for a moment, drooping visibly from the strain of the reality. Even if he did succeed, he realized he could be years in this world before he could get back to his children. For a moment he had the look of a man ready to quit. His face showed the emotion of a man long separated from his family. A man living in existential uncertainty. A man whose only friends were two leprechauns and a weird greenish Pikachu with a root for a tail.

  Then his eyes hardened, he rolled up his sleeves, and he went back to work.

  “ONE PERCENT!” Pod’s rage was unrestrained and unblunted. He was painfully sober.

  Tiller held his hands up, “Pod! Pod! You’re not grasping the scale of what I’m talking about. I need to expand the ground here! Eventually I’m going to need workers. Maybe I can pay some of them with wages, but others might be persuaded by shares too. I can’t cut off too much of a slice. You need to,”

  Pod roared, “I need to get you the fuck off my land is what I need to do!”

  Maeve watched without comment.

  It was afternoon, the rain had quit, and they were gathered outside the leprechaun burrow, cups of tea long forgotten.

  Tiller said, “This farm needs to make thousands of gold every day! More even! If it makes a thousand gold a day then I’ll still be here for twenty-seven years in this world. That’s almost six months in my time. That’s too long. Think about it Pod! One per cent of thousands, tens of gold, every single day!”

  Pod paused for a moment, considering. Then prideful indignation consumed him and he was roaring again, “If you get that far! I’ve never seen, never heard of a farm making that kind of money! It’s all pipe dreams and promises now! What about the real world, lad? Eh? You want us to haul your shit and let you have our land for one per cent of a fucking dream? You’re not even paying us!”

  “I paid you three coins!”

  Maeve’s voice barked in, “He what?”

  Pod shied away suddenly, shooting Tiller a look of betrayed disbelief.

  Maeve scowled. “We’ll talk about that later. Now, Tiller, love, Pod’s got a point. It’s not that I don’t believe you mean it, but there’s a gap between meaning and doing and we can’t feed ourselves on the space in between.”

  Tiller despaired for only a moment. Then the gears in his head seemed to turn and a light bulb clicked behind his eyes. “Okay… what if I had a different idea. You can have one per cent of the enterprise when I leave… Or you can have a coin a day in rent and labor.”

  Pod stilled. His face grew less irate and he nodded slowly. “Now we’re talking.” It was like he could count the pints. Immediate gratification.

  Maeve said, “That’s a coin each?”

  Tiller stilled. A coin each would be twenty coins for each harvest. His maximum harvest with the land he had now was going to be worth two hundred coins, or twenty a day, before he factored in his lucky bonus harvests and the Pipkin’s boosts.

  “Listen, that’s a lot. I need coin for reinvestment.”

  Pod said, “You’ll be taking my wife’s time and my time and you want us to share a gold a day?”

  Tiller pursed his lips. He had the impression that a coin a day between them would represent a monstrous increase in their living standards. He didn’t like to short-change them. It was only the brutal yearning he had to return home that made him feel so mean.

  “What about a coin a day and the one per cent. How’s that sound?”

  Pod stumbled over to his wife and whispered in her ear. She responded and the exchange hissed away for a few moments.

  Pod turned back to him and said, “Coin and a half and the one per cent.”

  Tiller sagged. “One and a quarter.”

  Pod spat in his hand and extended it. “You’re on, lad.”

  Tiller tried to suppress the grimace as he extended his hand to shake.

  “Shit… this is why I needed something to write with…”

  Tiller sat by his farm on the thirteenth day, seedlings peeking through the earth with disturbing uniformity. “The Pipkin is useless to me like this. I’ve got 170 ten-day plants. The Pipkin can do thirty days of boosting in ten days. The best I can do is bring a few plants in really fast, but they’ll hardly be worth dragging to Medley. I should have bought a few potatoes or corn or something, something that’s worth more and takes longer. Then Bean could bring them in and make them ready when the ten days are ready to go. Fuck, that was stupid of me…”

  He sat back, looking at the seedlings, willing them to push faster, to bring him home faster.

  He breathed deeply. It would take time. He needed to adjust to that. Realistically, the money he was earning now wasn’t for paying the shopkeeper. Right now, it seemed, he was working toward the one thousand gold he would need to pay for the composter.

  He looked around at the worked field, down at his dirty hands, across to the trees and long grass. He sighed. The Pipkin, fed and friendly, was curled up and asleep just a few feet from him. He exhaled again. It was peaceful here.

  Little did he know what was about to happen.

  “What’s that? What’s about to happen?”

  Tiller opened his mouth to say something when he heard the whistling of air. He looked toward the sound in time to see the potato plants rustle with sudden motion and then something was rolling across the open ground to come to a stop by his feet.

  His eyes bugged wide in surprise, then a wretch heaved at his chest.

  It was the head of one of the twins.

  Bonk’s voice roared through the potato plants, visibly shaking them.

  “Oy! We’ve gotta have words. And by words, I mean I’m gonna fucking eat you, hoo-man!”

  Tiller scrambled to his feet. Bonk stood only yards away, staring at him with evil beady eyes. In one hand the corpse of one of the twins dangled by its ankle. His other hand grasped the neck of the choking and scrambling surviving twin.

  Bonk growled, “Nobody takes out a contract on me. I’m gonna fucking eat you, fuckin alive, from the feet up.”