> Quest: Better than You - 1 (Personal)
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> Kill 3 Rank E Initiates (0/3)
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> Or 2 Rank D Initiates (0/2)
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> Or 1 Rank C+ Initiate (0/1)
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> Reward: System Sponsorship (Rank D)
Bob massaged his forehead. He'd get creases for sure if this kept up. And he was still in his early twenties. He'd turn into a shrivelled old man. The system really was bloodthirsty monster. You hear about the Aztec gods and their unsustainable addiction to warm heart-blood, but the system was on a whole other level.
Bob had no plans on completing that quest. No, what worried Bob was that other quest recipients might not be so high-minded and righteous. And he had the mixed fortune of being an A rank initiate, meaning he would complete the quest for anybody in one clean shot. Bob would have to keep his eyes peeled and his guard up.
> Quest: Sky's the limit (Personal)
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> Count to 1,001 out loudd without misisng a numper (max interval 2 seconds).
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> Optional challenge: count backwards
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> Reward: (hidden)
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> Optional Reward: Jonny the Man - The Kiwi Warriors
"What? What! A copy of Jonny the Man? It still exists. Praise be to the system for it is merciful"
Bob couldn't believe his eyes. If this wasn't divine acknowledgement that that work of fiction was a masterpiece, Bob didn't know what was. He almost started counting backward that moment. But something got him suspicious. "Is this a real quest?"
Bob squinted his eyes and examined the message box. It looked system-esque to Bob. It was the same font and format. But what about all these spelling mistakes? The system quest writer had really let himself go. Too much warm heart-blood on an empty stomach.
And then the content of the quest itself was most mysterious. The system was usually pretty single-minded: kill this, level that, do better. And yet, count to 1001 backwards? Who benefited from completing that? It was just a waste of time. Was this some kind of system bug? Or maybe a personalized prank?
It didn't matter though. The stakes were too high not to play along. These were Jonny the Man stakes. As soon as Bob found some downtime, he'd start counting backwards. Worst case scenario the heavens laughed at him. Best case scenario he'd finally learn the outcome of the epic struggle between Jonny the Man and Kai Vortex. You've got to play to win.
"Finally," Bob groaned as he opened his last message. The system was really spamming him wasn't it? He should launch a complaint. It had taken him over twenty minutes just clear out his inbox. And he had business to attend to. The system has no respect for personal goals.
> Grace Period active:
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> Remaining time: 3:52:49
"Grace period, huh?" Did that mean people weren't allowed to fight each other? One of those enforced ceasefires like you see at the start of some real-time strategy games. Or maybe it meant the system had some further "challenges" in store for its lucky initiates and they'd be unveiled at the end of the grace period?
Of course, thanks to the system's signature terseness, Bob had no way of judging and so no way of making a proper plan. He guessed he could try attacking George. The problem with that plan was that attack might go through. He reckoned he'd have a hard time explaining his intention to the golden retriever. And what if the system didn't stop attacks but penalized them instead. Bob didn't fancy getting penalized.
Why had the system thought it necessary to grant its initiates a 12 hour (calculating with the world quest for reference) grace period? Was he supposed to be preparing something? Should he have fortified a base and recruited allies?
He hadn't. He'd spent most of his time sleeping and complaining. There was still almost four hours left. Plenty of time to make an effort. Or... Or he could do what he'd been wanting to do from the beginning. Good idea, Bob. Yes that sounded like a plan.
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See Bob was otherwise engaged. Bob was a busy man. Hell, Bob was excited. And who wouldn’t be? The universe in its infinite wisdom (or foolishness) had chosen to grant him, Bob Brown, a magical power. Bob was practically a wizard at this point wasn’t he? Bob was a wizard. A master of arcane forces. A disciple of the mystic path. Yes, yes, of course, it was a tragedy that his new magical prowess was limited to manipulation of the least appealing of the elements. But magic was magic. And Bob was dying to test out his new skills and find out just how badass he was.
He rose up on his newly responsive leg and crept out onto the plains, careful to let George continue his sleep. Bob loved George, but George was one needy companion and Bob had work to do.
He found himself a nice patch of muddy grass. It wasn’t hard. Last night’s rainstorm had transmuted large swathes of green prairie into muddy wastes. A fact which suited Bob just fine. For mud, despite their long and complicated history, was Bob’s element.
Now for the moment of truth. Bob planted his feet and focused hard on the mud in front of him. He described the activity to himself as “reaching out with his mind.” An outside (and more objective) observer might have chosen the words: “Bob screwed up his face and stared angrily at the ground.” But then who can say what's true?
It was coming. Something was coming. Power was welling up inside him. He was the master. All bow down before the mud magician. Hm… Bob tilted his head and took on a confused expression. He crossed his arms and examined the mud patch in front of him. Why he’d be damned if the mud had moved an inch.
Furthermore, now that the dramatic currents of the moment had spilled out of him, he decided he hadn’t feel anything at all. No power, magic or mystic insight, just excitement and nervous energy. It was all rather dissatisfying. In his frustration, he leveled a wild kick at a mud clot on the ground. It sailed neatly up and away. See, he’d made it fly hadn’t he?
No, no, no. Bob scratched his head and put on his thinking cap. This was how they do it in the novels isn’t it? Shouldn’t that have worked? You get a new skill and suddenly you know exactly how to use it. Maybe he was forgetting something. He turned to his wealth of anime knowledge (basically a database of real world experience). Aha, he had forgotten something: hand gestures, hand gestures and an attack phrase. Yes that must be it. Good thought, Bob, good thought.
He readied himself again, hands outstretched, brow wrinkled in concentration, lips twisted into an intense frown. He reached out to the mud. The dark, angry depths below the plain. He stirred up its bubbling rage, its black, sweeping ambitions. “Mud explosion!” He shouted, bringing his arms up and forward in a spasmodic gesture of eruption. The mud, curse its name, stayed just where it was, in all its lazy, wet grace.
Now Bob couldn’t resist a sliver of worry creeping into his mind. A long stretch of verbally expressing his frustration to the unresponsive mud patch helped a little, but the nagging suspicion came back afterwards with full and renewed force. This ability of his was going to be a chore. It was going to be work. Mud manipulation was going to be one of those things where you have to spend hours and hours of training before you saw any tangible benefits at all. "Oh my God, this is going to be like learning French all over again isn’t it?"
The horrible memories of that childhood trauma snaked up through Bob’s mind. His poor tongue’s inability to express the needlessly complicated soundscape of the language and the teacher’s ruthlessness in failing to credit his very legitimate disability.
He remembered an oral examination like the trials of hell, as he waded through unknown and unfamiliar words, while the instructor endlessly repeated the same meaningless noises, jeering and taunting him. All told he’d spend years on the damn thing and could barely string together three sentences in a broken, unrecognizable accent.
Bob sat down on his patch of mud. He sighed deeply to himself. "It’d be nice. Wouldn’t it be nice, if some things in life were just easy? Don’t you think? Couldn’t we all get behind that?" Still, Bob, demonstrating a greatness of spirit rare to this world, pulled himself together. Bob was a wizard.
And truth be told, Bob’s interest in the French language had been lacking at best, but this... for the sake of gaining mud magic, what sacrifices would Bob not pay? He was invested heart and soul. That had to count for something. He’d show that French teacher yet. Bob was going to market.
First things first. He’d been ambitious. It was the folly of the youth. Only a great wizard could pull off mud explosion. He needed to start small. Feel the mud, Bob, feel the mud. That was the foundation of all mud-craft. He scooped out a handful of mud, closed his eyes and tried to focus on it.
Bob felt the soft weight of it, the earthy smell, the coolness, he heard the squelching sound it made as he moved his fingers, sensed its resistance to his motion. He sat there for a minute, then two, then five. This was his element, he told himself again and again, his servant, his destiny.
Bob felt strangely focused. In his past life, he’d struggled to sit unoccupied for three minutes all together, but the mud (he was horrified to discover) interested him in some fundamental way. There was water inside it and grains of dirt held in suspension. It occupied a complex and intermediate state. His own body warmth flowed slowly into the mud, making it softer and more pliant. The mud was always changing, always in flux.
A full fifteen minutes came and went. Bob sat there like a Buddhist monk in complementation of some zen riddle, the mud pillared in his left hand like some precious statute. That was the moment Bob imagined he’d felt something, something distinct from his five mundane senses. Imagined being the operative word because the sensation was so faint, so weak compared to his traditional senses, that he could hardly make it out, let out maintain focus on it. But it was there (probably). It was something (probably). Bob was a wizard (probably).