Andrew looked over the ledge. The cliff was a steep drop down to jagged rocks below; she was no surveyor, but it looked to be about five hundred feet down. Takeoff from the cliff would involve a leeap of faith out over that drop, in hopes that she'd be able to figure out how to use these wings fast enough to avoid being smashed to bits on the rocks. Andrew really didn't have any faith in her flight skills, seeing that she was completely unused to this body, so it looked like walking was the way to go. Before leaving, she grabbed the one other posession she had in this world, a small pouch containing what little was left of her startup funds, which she clutched in her teeth. She would have to find a better way to carry her things.
Fortunately, there was only one really hard part to the descent. The ledge her nest was on had a gap some thirty feet wide before turning into a proper downhill path; obviously, the spot was chosen for its inaccessibility to someone without wings. She crossed it by leaping into the air and gliding. The landing was a little rough, but the worst Andrew got out of it was one somersault and a light bruise on her head. She briefly reconsidered her decision not to fly, but decided she'd rather get some experience out on the plains first before trusting her life to her wings.
The rest of the descent was unremarkable, but the path took so many twists and turns that it was nearly ten o'clock by the time Andrew reached the base of the mountain. She wanted to try to fly, but she was tired and hungry and just really wanted a place to sit down that wasn't dirt or rock. Stopping to catch her breath, she dumped out her money pouch on aa large flat rock, using one foot to manipulate the pieces. There were copper, silver, and gold coins, each a little smaller than the one before, marked with their respective values. Not that the values followed any kind of pattern; the copper pieces were two...whatever the monetary unit was around here, the silver were eleven, and the gold were nineteen. A few minutes of counting and confused re-counting brought her total to thirty-seven somethings. Now I know how the British must feel, she thought.
Of course, the interesting thing was that none of these coins were in the game, at least to judge by the demo. The demo player had been shown picking up undecorated gold coins, each of which counted as one monetary unit, which was indicated with a dollar sign, as per 8-bit tradition. These coins, on the other hand, were marked with a cursive F next to the amount, and a symbol stamped on the reverse that reminded Andrew of those dark rituals the Masons were supposed to do in between lodge meetings and racing go-carts in the Fourth of July parade. Maybe that was the stamp of the issuing bank; did they even have banks here? Who knew? One thing was clear, at any rate: this wasn't just a real-life version of the game world; it was a fully-functional world in its own right, which just bore a very strong resemblance to the world in the game.
Of course, full-featured real world or no, Andrew was still stuck in it, and counting change in the middle of a meadow wasn't going to help her get back home. And besides, she was hungry. Grabbing her money, she pressed on toward the village.