I never thought much about our adventurer journals when I was in Eorzea. Magic world, magic skills, magic book...it all seemed just part of the package. It acted kind of like a book-shaped fitbit, telling me things about my body, keeping track of things I'd learned and places I'd been and the reputation I had with various people. It worked pretty much like when I'd played the game. It was handy.

That it works here on Earth is also handy, and only as surprising as anything else we do working on Earth. Tracks places we go on a map? Sure. Tracks places we find resources to gather? Of course. Shows the numbers that indicate how strong we are? Cool.

But until that pig-hunting quest showed up in Tsu'na's journal, I hadn't really given much thought to where the information came from. The game world is the natural infrastructure for such a thing, with quests written into the very environment. But where's the infrastructure here? Is there a layer of information or scripting somehow in this world that is normally unperceived, but that our journals are tapping into?

Color me skeptical. I think what's actually happening is that we have a much more intimate relationship with our journals than I realized before. I think maybe the journal taps into our minds as well as our bodies, showing us the sum of our knowledge and experience. We go some place, we see what's there, and the journal map updates. We find iron in such-and-such a place, and the journal gathering log updates. We learn such-and-such a recipe, and the journal crafting log updates.

Which means manually writing recipes into the journal in order to learn them is perhaps, at best, a waste of ink. We should be able to learn the recipe by experimentation and practice and have it appear in the book when we get it right since that would reflect our new knowledge. Writing a recipe into the book only works now because it's the ritual we've developed to tell ourselves, "This is a recipe." At least, I hope that's true...if writing the recipe into the book imbues us with knowledge, it sounds a little like memory manipulation using brain surgery.

So the quest appearing in Tsu'na's journal may be reflecting her understanding of things. She understands she now has a quest, so that's what her journal says. The next thing to try is for me to somehow get a quest. Maybe Sam will have a leve for me some time.

As for her quest, we rode our bikes out to Joel Davidson's farm. We checked in at the house. Mr. Davidson was a bit of a stick, maybe late middle age, and not terribly enlightened, since Tsu'na stood in front of him in her Bard clothes, bow slung over her shoulder, and he addressed me. "C'n I help ya?"

Tsu'na answered, "We are here about the pigs."

He looked at her, then back at me. "Oh...you're the folk Sam said would be coming?"

"That is correct," said Tsu'na. "Please tell us where the pigs are."

Davidson gave her a slightly longer glance, then asked me, "Where's your gun?"

"My wife will be doing the hunting."

"Where's her gun?"

"She hunts with a bow."

That got him to at least look Tsu'na up and down. He snorted and started to turn back inside. "Waste of my time..."

"Three ears, yes?" asked Tsu'na. "We were told you wanted to see three ears?"

"Yeah, and no little girl's gonna get 'em with no damn bow."

"No charge if we fail," I said.

He thought about it, then shrugged. "Suit yerself. The pigs are over on the west side. Spotted 'em around the treeline. Don't bother comin' back when you give up." He went back inside and slammed the door.

We studied the door for a moment. "He seems nice," I said.

"Why did he not like me?"

"I'm sure he was expecting some manly man with a big gun. Google 'hunter' and that's what you'll see."

"I have heard of people hunting with bows in this world."

"Some people only hear what they want to hear."

We spent most of the next hour hiking along the edge of a cornfield toward the western tree line. It was a nice day for it, in the 70s. I thought it was a little late in the year to not have harvested the corn, but that's not our business. I was tempted to break out my Botanist gear and harvest some myself, but that wasn't what we were there for.

A group of wild pigs is called a sounder. A sounder can have anywhere from a handful to a few dozen pigs in it. When we first spotted pig activity we shifted to Botanist so we could Sneak in and see what size sounder we were dealing with. I counted eleven; Tsu'na said twelve. Either way I thought it would be manageable.

We backed off to the edge of bow range. Tsu'na switched to Bard and swept over targets.

"See the ones you need?" I asked.

She nodded, settled on one target, drew and loosed. It made a grunt and went down. The other pigs were briefly unsettled, but seemed less so when the body faded.

"Got ears?"

She checked her inventory and nodded. I thought she'd shoot a couple more and be done with it, but instead she lowered her bow and watched the pigs.

"The others don't count?"

"They do. I am waiting for a respawn."

"But...there's plenty other targets, right?"

"Mr. Davidson wants pigs gone, does he not? If my kills respawn, that will not make pigs gone."

"Brilliant as ever, my love. But this is just the qualification quest. When it comes to the actual hunting quest I'm hoping the targets will stay gone. Otherwise we can't finish the quest, right?"

"That makes sense. But what if it does not work?"

"Well...I've been wondering if we need to try Earth weapons, to see if our skills transfer. Maybe shooting a pig with an Earth bow won't cause a respawn. 'Course, that leaves us with a dead pig."

She peered at me. "What does one do with a...dead...pig?"

"Cut it up for the parts we want. A butcher can do it for us..."

"There is a butcher east on 51."

"...But they charge a lot for it, especially the skinning. There's hunters that cut up their own animals...take off the meat, the hide and so on."

Tsu'na was looking increasingly apprehensive. "I do not think I want to deal with a dead pig. And what about the parts we do not want?"

"Well, butcher shops usually have arrangements with factories that take the leftover animal parts and make them into stuff like pet food, fertilizer, glue..."

Her lips pursed. She studied the ground.

"You okay, my love?"

"I am imagining a machine that eats pigs and shits blocks of glue."

"It's probably...a lot like that, actually. Though I think they..."

"Husband."

"Yes, my love?"

"Have you done more research for your airplane?"

So I talked about flaps and ailerons and joysticks and cabling and elevation and drag and a number of other things that had absolutely nothing to do with the industrialized processing of aftermarket animal remains. The pig had respawned before I got to landing gear, so, her theory proven, she was happy to hit her remaining two targets.

When next we knocked, Mr. Davidson opened his door with, "I thought I told you to..." He stopped at the sight of Tsu'na holding up six pig ears in a ziplock bag. He looked at them a moment, then asked her, "Where'd you get those?"

At least he was talking to her now. She answered, "From your pigs."

"Where're the pigs?"

"You did not say you wanted the pigs."

"Yeah, but did you leave them out there?"

"No. The pigs are taken care of."

He nodded slowly. "Well...guess you did the job. Okay. So, gonna do the rest of them?"

I took over for the business end. "We saw a dozen pigs out there. We can clear them out for $550."

"Kind of a lot for just shootin' my pigs, ain't it?"

I shrugged. "The big name pros charge more."

"Maybe I should go with them? Cuz they're pros?"

"Sure, you can do that. They'll come out with a fire team of five in camo, high-powered rifles and night-vision goggles, they've got a management company and sponsors and lawyers and licensing and insurance, and you'll need to get a permit from the state for nighttime firearm use on your property. All told, that'll start somewhere around fifteen hundred."

I gave that a moment to sink in. "Or you can settle your tab with Sam for five fifty and your pigs will go away."

Mr. Davidson wasn't thrilled with this assessment, but he wasn't turning us down flat either. He looked at Tsu'na and back to me. "Lemme get back to you. How do I reach you?"

"You reach Sam. Have a good one."

As we walked away, Tsu'na said, "Fire teams, camo, night-vision goggles...We do not have these things."

"No, but we have targeting and Quick Nock." Quick Nock is a Bard area-of-effect attack that shoots a spray of arrows at a target and other targets surrounding it. "We come in from either side with AOE and drive them together into the middle."

She nodded thoughtfully. "And we must kill them all? Old and young?"

"Otherwise the young will grow up and breed more, and they won't see a reason to leave."

"I wonder if we will gain 'Scourge of Pigs' as a title."

"Guess we'll see."