Chapter 7

In has been a week since we registered at the Adventurer’s guild.  Truthfully not that much has happened, but let me list the few things that have.  First we found a great spot just outside the eastern gate that is perfect for both me and Robin to absorb and practice our elements.  I can not speak for Robin, but I myself have gotten quite a bit better at controlling the earth.  I can now make a ball of earth and throw it at about forty miles per hour, while not extremely fast the speed is only improving with time.  Along with that my earth walls only take about five seconds to make and reach about three feet high, I can make one seven feet tall but it takes about twenty seconds and that is way too long for use in a fight.  I also have some other things I was practicing, but I will save those for later.  My body has improved slightly as I feel more sturdy now.  The second thing is that we got Robin two new outfits, one sky blue sundress, and the other is a light blue robe that cuts off around the knees and shoulders.  It is made out of some heavier material for a bit more protection, as it is what Robin will be wearing when we do quests.  The sundress is more of casual wear.  I also got myself some simple leather armor that can be work over my athletic shirt.  The third event is more about how Robin is starting to change.  Throughout the whole week I have been trying to get Robin to start speaking more and interacting with others.  She still shows very little emotion, and is shy around strangers, but there is improvement.  Jane the owner of the clothes shop has been extremely helpful in this as whenever we go there she makes Robin speak more and more, and now her and Robin have actually become something like friends.  I have been also teaching Robin how to read and write, though giving it some thought now I don’t know why the language of this city is english, but it helps me a lot.  Robin is really smart and she is learning the language astoundingly fast, give it another month and she won’t need to be taught anymore.  Don’t get me wrong though she still doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and the fact that she was raised in a village and probably given zero education means that she needs to be taught what a lot of things are.  One example is the shower, the combination of Robin having almost no decency and not knowing how to use a shower meant that I had lead her step by step through the whole thing, otherwise she would just come out of the bathroom completely naked asking for my help.  All in all a quiet, but active week.  Our current money is nine platinum, six gold, seven silver, and five bronze coins so we are nowhere near running out yet, which is nice also.

But today ends our quiet lifestyle, because today we will be taking our first quest from the guild.  While we still have a week until the time limit is up I figure we shouldn’t put the quest off till the last minute.  Our day starts in the early morning with a good breakfast in the diner.  We have also gotten pretty close with the two sisters, Maria and saria, but i have only briefly met the third one.  After breakfast we join the morning flow of adventurer to the guild.  “Robin what kind of quest do you think we should take?”  I am not sure what kind of quest they will have for E rankers, I only glanced at the board last time we were there.  “I think a combat quest against lower level monsters would be the best.”  “Sounds good, we can put our training to the test.”  Once we arrived at the guild we headed straight for the board and started looking at the quests.  There were a couple for helping construction, some for guard duty, and then there were the ones that required you to go into the forest.  I see one for Uni-Rabbits, another for gathering a certain type of plant, and a certain quest that caught my eye.  “Kill the group of around ten goblins that have gathered on the edge of the forest next to the mountain side.”  This seems like it should be pretty good.  “Hey Robin how about this one?”  “Ten might be a bit too much.  I have never fought goblins before, but they could easily overwhelm us.”  She is right if we fought against ten enemies they would definitely just overrun us.  Shame that seemed like a good one, the reward was even pretty high at two gold coins.  

“Hello are you guys thinking of taking the goblin quest?”  A girly voice from behind me asks.  I turn around to see a cute short girl with blonde hair wearing a completely white robe.  “Ah sorry no we don’t have enough people for it, so it's all yours.”  “Really that's perfect, me and my brother we thinking the same thing, do you want to team up and do the quest together?”  The girl is really energetic as she points to a short boy with the same blonde hair a bit behind her.  “What do you think Robin do you want to team up?  I think it's worth a shot and it won’t hurt to have some others on our first quest for safety.”  Robin turns and looks at both the girl and the boy that are waiting for our answer.  “Sure.”  Her shyness is coming out again, but it seems like she agrees on the team up.  “Ok sounds like we are ok for teaming up, it's nice to meet you my name is John and this is Robin.”  “Hello.”  “Hello, my name is Emily, and my little brother’s name is Cef.”  “I am only younger than you by like five minutes.  Hello as my sister said my name is Cef.  It is nice to meet you John and Robin.”  The boy, Cef appeared next to his sister without me even noticing.  Cef has a slightly annoyed face because of his sister’s comment, but changes to a more normal one once he started greeting us.  “Hello Cef, it is nice to meet you also.” “Hello.”  “Well now that it's decided that we are going to group up how do we do this?  Sorry in advance me and Robin only registered last week and this is our first quest.”  Hopefully this doesn’t make them back off.  “No problem, we are also pretty new, we have only done a couple rabbit huntings and herb gatherings so far.”  Emily quickly throws out my fear, but it's good to know they have at least some experience being in the forest.  “For the quest all we have to do is when we take it up to the counter have it written down that both our teams our on the quest, and that the money will be split evenly, if that sounds good.”  Seems like Emily already thought through this a bit.  “Ya that sounds fine.”  We head towards the shortest line available.  

The guild really staffs a lot of the counters, they must not want to make their members wait too long, since frustrated adventurers are probably a pain to deal with. It takes only a minute for us to reach the counter.  “Hello what can I do for you?”  This time it's a female dog person behind the counter.  Emily quickly steps up the counter with the quest in hand.  “Hello we would like to take this quest.  There will be two teams doing the quest, the holyfire twins and the..”  Emily takes a look over her shoulder at me  “Witch and Mountain.”   I almost forgot our team name actually.  “Witch and Mountain, those two teams.  We would also like to have the reward money split evenly upon completion.”  Emily quickly repeats our name to the lady and adds the aforementioned money split.  “Ok I have it written down, and here is a map with the location where the goblins were seen.  Be careful though as there may be more than the ten that are mentioned in the quest.”  Emily takes the map and start looking at it.  “Thank you, ok guys lets go!”  With that we set off following Emily’s directions.

Taking a look at the map myself I realize two things, one I should have gotten a map before this, and two that I got really lucky when I came to this world because the forest is huge and I was only about twenty or so miles from the edge of the forest when I got dropped here.  I could have easily been more like fifty which could have taken several days just to find anything besides forest, and by then I probably would have died of starvation.  Anyways from what the map is showing the edge of the forest is pretty much a straight line that you will run into if you leave out of the east side gate.  There are a couple mountain ranges, but there are only two that we care about.  One is the mountain range that I believe the Dragon clan lives on which is a bit south of the city and runs parallel with the forest edge.  The second one is one where we should find the goblins, it runs perpendicular to the forest edge and is a bit north of the city.  

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“Hey John, what are you and Robins elements and fighting styles, I am mostly a healer with some light attacks thrown in, while my brother does most of the attacking with his fire fighting style.”  Hm an attacker and healer not a bad combo for twins.  “I have earth element, and I guess I would be more of a tank, truthfully we have only fought Uni-Rabbits before, so I don’t have much experience.  Robin is well a, is a..” I look over at Robin to see if she is ok with me telling others she is a witch, I mean no one has responded badly to it yet, but I am sure it's still a bit of a trauma for her.  “I am a witch, but my affinity is towards Ice.”  Robin comes to my rescue, and it seems like she isn’t all that worried about others knowing she is a witch.  “Ah so that's why your team name was Witch and Mountain, though I feel like mountain is a bit of a stretch.”  Emily chimes in about my terrible naming sense.  “Haha ya it was, but I feel like with every passing day I am slowly reaching that goal.”  “Don’t worry our name isn’t much better.”  Seems like they did what I did and just combined their elements to create a name.  “If you have any tips on how we should fight I am all ears, I have only practiced a couple of things for tanking.”  Hopefully Emily and Cef know some stuff about how we should fight, and maybe even some ways I can use my element.  “Well I know earth element people are usually good at taking hits, but most of them use their element to gain a footing advantage.  From what I have seen they will use the earth so they can’t be pushed back or to trip up their opponent.”  “Thanks Cef, I will try to incorporate that into my fighting.”  “Unfortunately neither of us have seen an ice user before, but for water they are the most all around users, damage, strategy, and support.”  Seems like Emily is trying to help Robin.  It was really good that we teamed up with them.  Even just these bits of knowledge will help us later on.  

“Hey John where did you get that kind of backpack?”  Ah I brought my camping bag because it had room to carry our lunch, some extra clothes, and anything we need to bring back.  “Well this is from my home world, I am a traveller.”  Both Cef and Emily stop, “”You're a traveller!””  they both jump towards me shouting.  “Calm down ya I just recently came here.”  “This is so cool, I never thought I would see the day I get to meet a traveller, nevertheless do a quest with one.”  Emily is currently jumping up and down in front of me, while Cef is behind her nodding his head.  “I understand we are kind of rare, but it's nothing to be that excited about.”  I don’t understand why they are giving this kind of reaction, everyone else just seemed a bit interested.  “You don’t understand some of the most famous adventurers are travellers, me and my brother have been read stories about them since we were children.”  Emily got really intense as she was explaining why they seemed so excited.  “Could I ask you a couple of questions?”  Cef moves his sister to the side to get closer to me.  “Ya no problem, but let's keep walking, we still have a quest to do.”  With that the twins calm down a bit, and we start heading towards our destination again.

“So your element is earth, do you notice anything different compared to other earth users?”  Cef started asking right away.  “Unfortunately I haven’t actually had the chance to see anyone else use their element besides Robin.  She uses mostly light, fire, and ice.”  I can see Cef’s excitement dim a bit because of my answer.  “But Robin once told me that my ability to absorb elemental power was a lot faster than her’s.”  While I am not some superman, I still don’t want to crush his dreams.  “Really?  How many tries did it take you?”  “It only took me one, but it was only a small bit from a dirt ball I made.”  “What one try!  It took me twenty to finally absorb any fire elemental power.”  Emily and Cef are getting a bit too close for comfort, and I know Robin said it took her ten tries for earth, but I kind of thought that she was on the higher end because of all the other elements she can use, I guess not.  I look over at Robin who is giving a slight head nod toward Cef, I guess she agrees that it should have taken me longer.  “John if you don’t mind me asking how long have you been in our world?”  Emily is the one asking this time.  “It's been about eleven days since I got here.”  “And have you started to notice any change in your body?  Especially once you started to absorb?”  KInd of a weird question, I mean besides my body getting a tiny bit tougher not much.  “I guess that I don’t need to use the restroom anymore, and that my body has gotten a bit tougher.”  “I see, I see, yep you are going to be someone some day, could I get your autograph?”  

Wait what?  “Um Emily I truly think you are overstating things, I might be slightly better at absorbing than other, but I am nothing amazing.”  “John, you are strange when it comes to your element.”  Robin you too, do I have no ally?  “Strange would be an understatement, me and my brother both took twenty tries to absorb our element, and we were considered special.  Do you know how long each try is?”  Wait twenty is special than what is Robin, I mean she has every element and it only took her ten tries.  “No not really.”  “A month, you usually have to rest a month after each try, it took us both a little over a year and a half to reach what you did in one try.  Now do you understand how ridiculous you are?”  “Ok I will say that is different, but what does that have to do with my body changing?”  “You said you can feel your body changing already right?”  “Ya”  “Well that means you have already absorbed enough elemental power for it to start affecting your body,  this usually takes half a year after you finally start absorbing and you once again did it in only, probably seven days after you started.  Unfair, unfair I say.”  I think Emily is starting to break because she started to ramble towards the end of her explanation.  “What I think my sister is trying to say is that usually it takes around two years for someone to get to the level you are at, and you have done it in eleven days, and we don’t even know about your control.  That might also be at a high level already.”  I guess that makes sense, if someone told me they learned an entire language in eleven days I would think they were a super genius, I mean it should take years to really learn a language.  Though,  “I think that my level of control on the earth is not much better than usual, I mean I am only able to do a small fraction of what Robin can do with her ice.”  As soon as i say that Cef moves over towards Robin, “Miss Robin if you don’t mind me asking how many years have you been practicing your element?”  “Three years.”  “Thank you, three years she has been practicing and you are already able to do even a small portion of what she can do you say, you need to realize that you are not normal.”  

I think my feelings are starting to be hurt a bit, they are making valid arguments, but I mean I really am just a normal guy.  “Why don’t we put this past us, ok, I agree that I am different, but truly I believe i am just a normal guy.  Anyways we are not far from where we need to be for the quest.”  As I said that both Cef and Emily sigh, and I think I also heard one from Robin.  I show Emily the map so that she can see where we are and how far we have to go.  We can already see the treeline, so now all we need to do is travel a bit farther north and we should reach our location.  “Ok guys only a bit further and then we should be around the location, John once we reach the forest I want you up front, next I want Robin, then me, and lastly Cef.  I believe that this way we can have our front line guys protecting us from the front and the back.  Everyone agree?”  I was surprised by Emily taking the lead, but she has more experience and already has a plan for our formation.  “Sounds good to me.”  Cef agreed first.  “Same” “Same”  both me and Robin agreed right after.  “Everyone don’t let your guards down in the forest, you never know what might happen.”  Cef reminds of all of the dangers in the forest, and it was a good thing because last time we only met Uni-Rabbits so I might have been too lax last time.  Well now I am pumped for this quest.