Alice begrudgingly walked outside the hut for a meal. Not knowing where dinner was, Alice just walked towards the direction with the most noise and light. She could see the warm orange of a large flame coupled with happy and excited chatting from the village centre.
As she got closer, she could see goblin children around Kani’s age running about happily and celebrating with their parents and friends around the large bonfire while eating. Not everyone was happy though, there were a few adult goblins who sat sadly by the fire, mostly in pairs. There were around three or four of these groups, and they were crying into each others shoulders while eating their meal. The village chief was walking between the groups and seemed to be comforting the more depressed couples.
Alice walked closer to the fire and when the children saw her, some gave her cautious looks while hiding behind their parents while others snickered and laughed at her. Alice walked to where she assumed the food was but wasn’t sure what to do when she got there.
Her first thought was to seek out Kani to get his help, but she scrapped that idea since she could see Kani sitting with one of the pairs of depressed goblins, probably his parents. Alice was curious about what could have happened, but she could tell that now would be a very bad time to ask, not that she could understand what they were saying either way. Instead she opted to ask Karandi for help before realising that he was also quite busy. With no other paths open Alice thought back to her fiddling with the system and tried something. Her plan was to elevate her [Language Proficiency: Goblin] into an active skill, and as she navigated through the system menus she could only hope that this actually worked how she thought it would, seeing as the system liked acting with a bit too much moderation. To elevate the passive skill she used one stat point, then another 15 stat points to get it up to level five, lowering all of her attributes by three in the process. Hopefully this wasn’t too bad as it was now the same level as her [Language Proficiency: Common].
Alice started walking towards one of the goblin children and tried her best to be polite in her greeting, and as she started speaking she could feel the skill grabbing the ideas and concepts she wanted to express before guiding her to the words she needed. It did seem to be limited to words she already knew though, and with her only having had one conversation since coming here what she had said could only be described as goblin flavored gibberish. The young goblins seemed to get the gist of what she was saying and one of them was elected to help her, but not after taking the time to laugh among themselves.
Her elected helper took her over to the fire and awkwardly communicated that she could eat as much of the assorted fruits, roots and vegetables as she wanted but only a small portion of the meat. Alice did her best to thank them before getting to her meal.
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As she ate, Alice couldn’t help but think about her new active skill. It seemed to activate whenever she thought of speaking in goblin and took a small bit of mana when it activated. The skill also reminded her of the way The Great Dreamer spoke, it shaped the ideas she wanted to convey into words while also folding in any background knowledge she also needed to communicate. It also took any words she heard and helped her remember the context she heard it in and what it was likely to mean, essentially helping her learn the language for herself! All she needed now was to keep talking to people and she would be able to communicate without the skill by end of week.
Before she finished eating she also wanted to see how her new active skill [Eye of Fate] would work. The first thing Alice noticed when she activated the skill was the ludicrous amount of mana she was spending, at the current rate thirty seconds was the longest she could hold it for. As she looked on the world seemed to shiver for a short moment before continuing on. Alice noticed however, that the sounds around her were coming in at a slight delay to what she was seeing, it wasn’t anything much, just a half second or so, but Alice realised just what was happening. She was seeing half a second into the future, not too useful at the moment but still quite interesting to her. She then tried focusing in on one of the goblins only to find that time had stopped. And she had too. Even her eyes were pinned in place, but she also found that she could see a small panel of text in the corner of her vision. It read:
A young goblin child celebrating a joyous occasion with friends and family.
It seemed she could only see surface level information with both her identification skills, simply that the kind of information she could get changed. Alice undid her skill with only ten percent of her mana remaining and finished her meal. She then went to some of the playing children and asked to play with them. It took many back and forth exchanges before they understood what she was asking, but eventually they began playing a game Alice had never heard of before called Nyedi. One person would play the Nyedi, a monster from bedtime stories, and whenever they touched someone they became a tree and would have to stand still where they were. If they stayed trapped for over a minute the Nyedi could tap them again and remove them from the game. The Nyedi’s goal was to either trap or remove everyone else from the game. But at the same time every other player could free two trapped players at the cost of not being able to play anymore. If every player still in the game had been trapped and freed they could then trap the Nyedi in a tree and win. When they started playing Alice was always one of the first people to come out and when she was the Nyedi she thought she was doing well but ended up losing in the end.
Eventually, despite the fun she had, it was time to sleep and it was decided she would sleep in one of the unfinished huts.