The Internet

Chapter 5
All the drawings, all the pages the stories that covered every wall of the cabin. One evening Corey noticed an old tablet among the things Nifty had scavenged from town.
"You know that thing does more than just light up, right?" Nifty looked at him. "I figured that out." "How much have you figure out?" Nifty stared at the screen for a moment.
"Enough." It was not enough.
Corey eventually showed him how humans had connected nearly everything to something called the internet.
Nifty was suspicious of it immediately.
One day they sat down and Corey showed him some pictures thats when he discovered art.
Not just graffiti on a wall this time. Millions of drawings, paintings, strange characters, photographs, animations, and entire communities of people making things simply because they wanted those things to exist.
For hours, Nifty barely spoke. Corey then showed him digital drawing tools next.
That took longer. Nifty hated the stylus at first.
He said the screen felt wrong. He complained that undoing a mistake was too easy.
Then, several nights later, Corey arrived to find Nifty hunched over the tablet with three finished drawings and no intention of admitting he liked it. The internet opened had another door after that.
Social media. Artists.
Where he learned about
Collectors. Crypto.
Tokens. And eventually, NFTs.
The last one stopped Nifty completely. "Humans collect pictures they can already see?" Nifty said"That is a very simplified way of saying it." "But they can see the picture." "Yes." "And then they buy it." "They collect ownership of it." Corey spoke.
Nifty stared at Corey, he had be familiar with the customs of goods exchange as well. He knew humans paid for things with money, and he would need money to continue to survive, he couldn't always rely on Corey.
"Humans are weird." "You have mentioned that." The more Corey explained, however, the quieter Nifty became. His drawings had always been for him.
They were a way to keep home from disappearing. But the idea that someone else might care about them changed something.
Maybe the faces on his walls did not have to remain hidden in an old cabin forever. Maybe he could share pieces of home without sharing the secret of what he really was.
And he could earn money to continue drawing, and remembering his world.
That part that really mattered. "They cannot see me," Nifty said.
"Then they do not." Said Corey "They cannot know where I live." Said Nifty "They will not." Replied Corey. "And they cannot know any of this is real." Corey thought about that. "Then Nifty is a character." Nifty frowned.
"I am Nifty." He said
"I know that but they do not have to." Replied corey. That earned a grin from nifty.