You must be this old to enter the Dungeon

3] And when you got that feeling, it’s... arboreal healing

I had built up an appetite cleaning up the front yard and was thinking about frying up two slices of bacon for a sandwich, along with a lot of raw veggies, and some slices of cheese, when I found myself taking a long suspicious look at the half dead apple tree sitting between my front walk and the curb.

It felt… off in a brand new way.

The thing had already been sickly looking when I had moved into the old house due to my uncle pouring salt on the dirt around it in an attempt to kill it before he got around to trying to cut it down because the roots had begun to damage the driveway.

He never had gotten around to taking it down, not before he got sick and it was too late. The years that followed him salting that earth had only served to make the tree suffer as it slowly died.

I had thought about chopping it down myself before it fell on someone, or worse, my car. Then I could have turned it into firewood, but my son had begged me to leave it alone since he had been fond of climbing on it as a kid.

Back then, I still loved him.

Besides, the branches of the stunted old thing had sat low enough to the ground that I could reach most of them with a step ladder and pluck a lot of the flowers off of it every spring to make sure what fruit it did grow had most of the sweetness the tree had left to give concentrated in them.

It used to be that I even got to a few of them before the neighborhood kids did.

They didn’t have ladders.

Now the nearly tasteless fruit fell to the ground and rotted. It had become too much work for me to pluck the flowers off over the years, and there weren't any neighborhood kids left to steal my fruit.

There wasn’t really a neighborhood anymore.

Laying my hand on the part of the trunk without any bark on it, I got another gray square.

[ Apply healing to Honeycrisp apple tree]

[ Yes / No ]

“Well, sure. Go ahead. I guess.” I never knew it was a specific type of apple tree.

For a moment, I felt weak as something flowed down my arm, through the palm of my hand, and then out into the tree. I nearly fell over as my knees began to give out and I had to clutch at one of the lower branches with my other hand to stay on my feet.

Then I felt a warmth coming from all around me to replace whatever the damn tree was taking from me. And it was coming in faster than it was going out.

Taking a deep breath, I let it happen. More out of the curiousness of feeling the warmth flowing through me overwhelming the normal constant pain I had in nearly every joint.

Then the flow stopped at my hand.

[ Honeycrisp Apple tree had absorbed the most Healing it can take to its Matrix ]

“Huh.”

The tree didn’t look any different, but the sense of wrongness I had felt from it was gone.

And I felt like I was starving.

Hobbling back inside the house, I grabbed an apple, one from the store, from the clear glass bowl on the counter. A Fuji, my favorite even though every kind of apple tastes about the same now, but I can still remember its flowery sweet taste when I bit into one.

The apple was enough to tide me over long enough to keep me from eating the bacon raw out of hunger as I cooked the two slices up with a dash of garlic powder and pepper on them and toasted the reduced carbs, low salt bread that had half the nutritional value as the store brand, at three times the cost.

Still, you needed something to keep all the ingredients together. The bacon, brown mustard, fake mayo, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion, spinach, and the two slices of extra sharp cheese cut off the block mostly stayed between the bread.

Why bother with a sandwich if it doesn't take two hands to hold it together while you eat it?

And the plate was still clean enough after I wiped up the few drops of mustard and tomato juice with my finger to use again for dinner that night.

I did up a pitcher of hot water with four tea bags and six packets of artificial sweetener thrown into it.

Then after stirring the bags around for a bit and giving them a few minutes to steep, some of it got poured it into a glass mug with ice to give me something to sip on. Then I made my way to my office with one hand on the wall, and my drink in the other.

Now Fox had stories up on their website covering all the insanity I had been dealing with this morning.

Guess I wasn’t insane after all.

At least not about this.

They blamed the Democrats for not having an immediate response to every person on the planet seeing gray boxes with a message from someone on them. Unfair, but expected. The Blame Game fills up airtime, and, as normal, it wasn’t like they had any good ideas of their own to offer.

Just sound bites.

I like Fox. Whenever I feel bitter and hateful about something, I compare my worst feelings about things to what they have to say about them and I know I have to rethink any of my opinions that matched up with theirs too much.

Although over the years, I find myself thinking things over, and agreeing with them more and more.

Is it just from getting old, or has the world changed to the point that now they are the reasonable ones?

Watching the various reports, it turned out that everyone under seventy five had gotten a different message from us older folk.

Someone somehow had gotten clued in that the age that people get a Harvester Class will drop one year, every year. So in one year, everyone who was now seventy three would get a class at the age of seventy four.

And people being born right now would get one… When they’re thirty eight? I bring up the calculator on my computer. Thirty seven point five. Close enough.

My worthless shit of a son will be… fifty eight when he gets one, and my granddaughter will be forty three when her turn comes around.

Good, there should be enough people with classes by the time Bea is that old she won’t have to deal with any of this.

Speaking of which, she had messaged me on Facebook. Wishing me a happy birthday and asking if her gift for me from Amazon had arrived yet.

I checked and I did have a package at the pickup station at my grocery store, but I hadn’t been planning on going there until next week. But I could go early.

They would only hold the delivery in the automated locker for three days.

-Not yet kiddo. It is too late for me to go pick it up today, but I will pick it up tomorrow when I pick up my groceries. Love you Grandchild -

I got a – Love you Grandpa – back a few minutes later, along with a little heart symbol and what might have been an eggplant since they had some special meaning to her since she had talked me into growing some back when she and her mom had lived with me. There were also a few other symbols I didn’t know mixed in as well.

Bea had been five the last time I saw her before her mother got a job out west, but Patricia had made an effort to keep her daughter in contact with me. Probably more for the money she had hit me up for over the years than out of any great affection for me on her part.

To be fair, she hadn’t asked for anything for a couple of years now, and she still helped the kid keep in contact with me. Even if she was just trying to keep Beatrice in my will, I still appreciated the effort.

Besides, a long distance relationship with a kid was enough for me. They carry diseases.

I spend the rest of the afternoon, and evening, following the news between playing games, hitting some forums, and watching some videos.

Someone got some footage of some Entities getting killed down in Arkansas.

The creatures looked like cats covered with scales, and they had attacked some schoolkids waiting to load up on a school bus. The bus driver beat one of them, the scaly cats, not the kids, to death with a baseball bat she kept on her bus.

It was on Fox, so she got praised for her efforts to save some kid’s lives rather than criticized for being armed around kids.

So the “Entities” could be killed by anyone. Guess they didn’t need me after all then.

“Good.”

I would gladly take what should be enough years to die of something age related, probably my bacon loving heart, before the remaining cancerous growths could get me.

That was something that had been a long time coming anyways, I was getting a better deal from the squares than the 'Surprise, you’ll be dead in a year’ cancer I would have gotten otherwise.

A few hours later they showed footage of some cops, anywhere from late middle aged to kids, all trying to get into a hole in the ground some floating stone cubes had flown out of before they started dive bombing at people’s heads.

None of the cops could enter, and they talked about gray squares with blue lettering that told them they couldn’t because they didn’t have a class.

I leaned back in my chair and winced. Both at the pain in my back from sitting so long and the implications for my future. “Damn it.”