Current Quests
None: You should probably get some quests.
Dave immediately felt a little dumb. The secret tunnel was, as tunnels tend to be, very dark and Dave had brought no light. There were magical lamps affixed to the walls just outside. It was so obvious in retrospect you were supposed to take one inside. In resignation Dave lit the fingers of his right hand for a few candles worth of light.
As soon as the door had closed he received notifications about his completed escape quest and did a double take at his quest box. A purple item? Dave opened his text box and skipped the text until the bit that had caught his attention. …and 1 [omen essence] has been added to your inventory. The hyperlink text for the essence was purple. An epic item! It was actually, a really good essence.
“Oh, yeah. Now you give me the super rare cool stuff!” grumbled Dave sarcastically into the darkness.
A new quest hung in the air before him and he accepted it. Local Guide: Find the local guide outside of the monastery and be guided to safety. Well, that was his new friend. The safe person. He figured he could use his HUD navigation to avoid getting turned around in the secret tunnel and find his way to the guide.
From the look he’d gotten before the door closed, the tunnel was a descending staircase of stone carved out of the natural rock of the mountains. So, one hand on the wall for balance, the other alight with small candle flames on the fingers, he descended slowly.
When he got to the bottom of the stairs Dave found himself in a cave with a stream running through it. He put his hand in the stream to feel the flow and walked in the same direction. His HUD was pointing that his quest objective was mostly behind him now and wasn’t much use for navigating a cave. He suspected there was a lot more water in the cave during spring melts but it only flowed gently for now so Dave followed, only tripping a few times along the way to the exit.
Crouching to exit the cave, Dave emerged into the verdant, green forest that surrounded the mountainous chateau-monastery. It truly was a beautiful place to be and he took a moment to take in a great breath of fresh air before beginning a gruelling walk and climb up a steep slope towards his local guide objective.
Dave was feeling a little trepidation about going back towards the place where all the murder-happy cultists were but the quest system seemed designed to be helpful. He figured that the guide must not be an ally of the cult, merely someone who was doing some paid guiding. The cultists probably lied on their forms when filling out why they wanted to come here or something like that.
This suspicion proved true when he crept over a rise, saw a walking trail and saw his HUD indicator pointing down the trail away from the chateau and figured that he’d find a hidden place to wait since the guide, in order to do their job, would be coming this way. He was waiting about ten minutes, if his HUD clock was correct, before he saw a woman with sensible hiking clothes leading a platoon of cultists, in not-sensible cultist garb, at a trot. Dave selected the woman in his HUD and confirmed that she was his guide.
She was a fit woman, Dave guessed in her 20’s, with the auric tint to her skin that suggested a south-east Asian heritage. He noticed that her race was listed as ‘Runic’ on the tool tip and guessed that might be why the skin on her face and hands that he could see appeared to be tattooed with symbols. The only thing incongruous about her was the wide smile that seemed to be the default position her face settled into, even though right now, it seemed a little strained.
“Is fine! We almost arrive, ka!” Dave heard her call to the group through her smile from his distant vantage point. Dave also saw the woman who had fled the chateau and been sent to get the reinforcements. Presumably this platoon were them.
Dave zoomed his minimap all the way out, waited until they turned a corner, he couldn’t hear them anymore and followed along the trail. He almost lost them a couple of times on false trails but quickly got back on track with the help of his minimap navigation.
The trail went on for another five minutes which was relatively relaxing compared to the climb up. Dave, however, was tense and alert with adrenaline. He felt his heart beating in his chest as he snuck up on his quest objective and took to the bushes to remain unseen at the last bend and the chateau gate came in sight.
“Okay, everyone inside, ka? I go now!” said the local guide. She was clearly nervous and practically hopping from foot-to-foot. From what Dave could see, the cultists had arrived, dropped their gear on the ground, grouped up, and gone inside with only two left outside to guard the gate and guide.
“You’re going?” asked a burly woman cultist with a mocking smirk on her face.
“Yes!” said the guide, her smile faltering for the first time as her other guard, a heavy jawed man, came up behind her.
“Can’t let you do that,” said the man, grabbing her shoulders.
“We were told to kill her if she did anything,” said the woman as she drew a heavy cudgel and advanced. The arm holding the cudgel glowed with an essence ability.
The terrified guide ignored the man’s arm around her neck and his hand holding her arm. She reached over her head with her hand, put it right over his face and spoke in what must be her native language. Beetles incorporated around her hand in an enormous swarm and began crawling all over the man’s skin, inside his clothes, across his eyes, in his ears, nose and, as he opened his mouth to yell, they rushed in there too. He spat hard and started shaking his head violently, momentarily clearing himself of loose beetles but they swarmed to cover his head once more.
As the woman with the cudgel stopped in momentary distraction, Dave used the noise the man was making as cover for his own spell.
“Milled for my purpose!” intoned Dave, focusing on a point about a metre over the woman’s head and on the densest bit of paper imaginable. What looked like an enormous, concrete block dropped directly onto the woman’s head, with a wet crunch and the corpse immediately tumbled down under the weight of what looked like a hundred kilograms of high quality paper brick.
Dave threw five metal pens Hugh had given him earlier in the air and flicked his hand towards his target as he ran towards the scuffle. The man was shaking the guide roughly enough to hurt her while he had already used an essence power to cover his hand in flame and was batting away the beetles around his face. The metal nibbed pens flew at the man like birds and stabbed into the flesh of his side. The man shouted in pain and, seeing Dave running at him, shoved the guide away and made a break for the chateau, running past his dead comrade. This proved fatal.
As he ran past the body, the guide he’d been shaking pointed at the corpse and said something in her own tongue that sounded savage and the corpse exploded with such wet force that the man was lifted off his feet and tumbled across the ground for a couple of metres. His clothes were so shredded and covered in gore that it was impossible to tell if the bones sticking out were his or his ex-companions. Even so, Dave ran over and stuck a sword in his neck, just to make sure. It felt… weird. Like popping a thick rubber sack with a knife. Dave shuddered.
“Who are you?” said the guide, springing to her feet with a guarded look and drawing a sickle. Now that Dave could see her up close he could see she had big dark eyes and was quite pretty but her face was frightened and streaked with tears. Her beetle swarm had returned to her and was swarming harmlessly over and around her like a protective coat.
“Hello! I’m Dave. I came to talk to you. I need a guide away from here. Can you help me?” said Dave, covering all the major conversational points efficiently.
“Ugh… yes?” said the guide in a most unsure way.
“Don’t worry. They’re trying to kill me too. A monk of Knowledge from inside gave me this letter to prove my words. What’s your name?” said Dave, stowing his sword, putting the letter on the summoned brick and stepping back politely. She might not appreciate being approached right now.
“Oh!? Um… Samorn. Sam!” said Sam as she took the letter from the brick, unfolded it and started to read with one eye on Dave. Relief started to make its way across her entire person as she read.
“Nice to meet you, Sam,” said Dave. “I think we’re going to be friends. Can you help me tip these bricks and bodies into the gorge and then we run away?”
After some shoving, Sam led Dave back down the trail. He was very grateful that the quest reward for meeting Sam was a good pair of boots; Boots Of Forestry. They made moving in forested terrain take less stamina and made your own tracks difficult to track. He even had a new quest! [The Safety Of Walls] basically he had to reach a town that had walls with Sam.
They moved swiftly at first but slowed down as Sam led Dave off trail and into some forest with heavy underbrush.
“Are you sure we should go off trail? Isn’t that dangerous?” asked Dave.
“No, no. I’ve lived here three years as ranger. Is fine.” she smiled.
They chatted as they walked. Dave told her his story about waking up in a new world and being immediately attacked by cultists. She laughed and he did his best to prove he was an outworlder by way of displaying his outworlder abilities and speaking English, an unknown language on this planet.
“What about you?” asked Dave. “Where’d you get that corpse explosion ability? It was amazing!” He was chuckling until he saw the look on her face. Sam’s smile had fallen and she looked at the ground.
“I have a life essence and a balance essence,” she said in a small voice and stopped talking.
Sensing that he’d said something wrong, Dave changed the subject.
“Actually, where are we going?” asked Dave.
Sam explained their destination, which was an area that was hard to get to but they’d find dry firewood and be able to sleep safely. They got to talking about her life. She grew up in Funan which Dave had to look up on his UI map. He found the map very curious. This planet was like a sibling of Earth. He was currently in what he thought of as eastern France but here it was part of a mediterranean-wide domain called the Byzasian Empire. It covered what Dave knew as most of south-western Europe including both sides of the Mediterranean Sea.
Or, rather, the Mediterranean straight. Notably, the Arabian peninsula didn’t exist in this world so Africa was a truly separate continent which meant that the Byzasian Empire was split by the sea.
Funan appeared to consist of southern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, northern Indonesia and the Philippines all merged together into one land mass except for the Philippines whose southern islands protruded, unmerged, into the ocean.
This was very interesting to Dave and he chatted with Sam about her home country. The way she explained it, Funan was an old country that had historically split apart and come back together as certain rulers become more or less warlike but in the current times, she told him that one of their cities on the cape of Funan called Batam had become a world trade exchange and the local rulers knew that war would drive out trade and so tended to gang up on and push out any other ruler who threatened their incoming wealth with the instability of conflict.
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“So, what brings a Funan woman like you into a ranger job in the middle of north Byzasian Empire?” Asked Dave, with a wry smile. “It’s quite the distance!”
“Ahh, I used to work for nature society but I didn’t like them so I left,” said Sam with a nervous smile. He was coming to understand that while she would almost always smile, she had different smiles.
“Bad boss?” Dave asked.
“Yes!” she grinned.
They bantered lightly for the next hour, making each other laugh as they travelled over some mountainous terrain until they made the area to make camp. It was a hollow that was shielded from the wind but would get morning sun. It would, unfortunately, be very cold at night. They walked, making conversation the whole day. Dave fascinated her with perfectly ordinary things, to his mind, from his reality. She found the concept of non-magical aeroplanes ludicrous and couldn’t stop laughing at the idea of flying metal boats. Eventually, they reached the hollow she’d spoken of. It was exactly as she described and Dave began setting up a tent under her direction. Sam herself set about making a fire in a well-used firepit next to a natural rock wall.
“Won’t the cultists see the smoke?” asked Dave after a while.
“No, too much wind,” laughed Sam while stacking the wood.
“Well, what can I do to help once this tent is up?”
“Can you make a pillow?”
Dave finished setting up the tent and sat down with Spellbook.
“I should give you a better name,” said Dave idly.
In response, Spellbook opened to an index of great professors of magic.
“They’re all professors.” noted Dave.
“Would you like to be a professor?” asked Dave.
“You’re a tome of magic.”
“Professor Tome it is then,” chuckled Dave softly.
displayed Professor Tome.
“Sounds like destiny. Professor, can you show me a book that lists essence stones and their known abilities?” asked Dave, fishing out an unbloodied pen.
Dave studied essence abilities and idly experimented with paper pillows. Over the next hour he found that a large envelope made of cotton paper, stuffed with shredded paper was not quite comfortable unless stuffed to bursting and even then, only marginally so. Sam laughed as she put her head down too quickly and burst the envelope. Dave made a bigger envelope and put the whole thing inside, grinning back at her laughing face.
“Slowly this time!” he chucked while she tried the pillow again.
At dinner time, Dave pulled out a loaf of bread, a block of cheese, cured sausage and a bottle of wine. All looted from the chateau-monastery. Sam, who had been pulling hardtack from her pack, grinned.
“I like outworlders!” she exclaimed.
“Ah! So you believe me now that wine is involved?”
Sam laughed and nodded.
Dinner was good and the fire was warm as they settled down, Dave felt a need to settle the air about something that’d been bothering him.
“Sam, you know you’re saving my life, right? I’d never make it out of these mountains without you,” said Dave.
“It’s fine!” said Sam. “You saved my life too.”
“From one cultist, yes. The other cultist would have got the others after us much sooner if you didn’t violently explode the first and that’s great because they’re specifically trying to kill me,” said Dave and continued to tell Sam about his entire day since he’d arrived in this world and the ruse with Hugh.
“So, right now. You’re the second person I’ve met who isn’t trying to kill me, my quest system, which is supposed to help me survive, is pointing at you and Hugh said that Knowledge herself thinks we’ll be good friends. I don’t know what that letter said but it’s probably good. So, I’m pretty sure you’re the only reason I’m alive and that I’m your friend.”
Sam hadn’t lost her smile but shrank down shyly. Dave continued on.
“Now, please, hear me out before you do or say anything, okay?” said Dave with a calming gesture. “But, Professor Tome can be any publicly available book and I did some reading in Magic Society publications about essence abilities and I looked up balance abilities gained from people with balance and life essences. There’s nothing like a corpse explosion ever recorded.”
Sam looked scared but Dave figured there was no way back and kept talking.
“I don’t know why you’re pretending that one of your essences is balance when it’s clearly not but,” Dave shrugged, “the only reason I care is because I want to know what I should say when I get to town and anybody asks about you when we get out of this mess. So, what do you want me to say to them?”
Sam looked at the fire for a long moment but clearly wasn’t seeing it.
“I am the only person keeping you alive so you have to keep me alive!” Sam demanded.
“Absolutely, I promise,” said Dave, offering his pinky.
Sam burst out some laughter at the childish gesture and shook his pinky finger with hers.
“I have a bad essence,” she said.
“Like sin or blood?” offered Dave, “I figured something like that but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I read about that Church of Purity theory and it sounds like propaganda. Is there actually any data suggesting that personalities are affected by essenc-”
“I have a death essence!” Sam burst out.
Dave froze. Sam also froze. Dave used [Stop And Think], hoping that Sam wouldn’t notice. He double checked everything about the death essence and confirmed that it was on the restricted list and the reason why was because due to ‘the changes and behaviour it inspires in the person who uses it’. He unpaused time.
“Well…” said Dave, still lost for words
“You just used your thinking ability!” accused Sam.
“Uhh, yes! I did and it’s because this subject is important to you and deserves thinking about,” said Dave quickly.
Her eyes did not lose any accusation despite his wonderful save.
“And, I think that an evil person would have joined the cultists today, not tried to get away from them,” said Dave. “Also, you haven’t tried to kill me yet, which is positive, and you didn’t run away and leave me lost in the woods. Also, you smile and laugh a lot which evil people typically don’t do.” Dave was babbling but he felt like it was going somewhere. Press on, he figured.
“So, my guess is that you’re a good person who had a bad idea before I met them. So, I wonder, how did you even end up with it? You’re all smiles as a person so how’d it happen?” asked Dave, hoping that he’d get past her defensiveness.
“I shouldn’t feel happy! I’m evil!” Sam said miserably.
“Well, now you’re just a politician on truth potions,” quipped Dave.
Sam laughed, snorted and covered her mouth looking embarrassed. Dave grinned.
“Look, Sam. I think we can help each other. You’re a woman who doesn’t want people to know her essences. I’m a man in this world who doesn’t want a secret cult to know he exists. Seems like we’re two peas in a pod. Work together?”
Sam nodded and her perpetual grin returned as relief spread across her face.
“Maybe! We can try! The cult is really trying to kill you?”
“Yep! Your situation is weirder. People have studied essences, confirmed that they have no inherent effect on behaviour… except for death essences? Makes no sense!”
“Death is bad!” asserted Sam.
“Isn’t there a god of death?”
“Yes!”
“And that god is bad?”
“No!”
“How does that work?”
“I don’t know!”
They both laughed.
“We still have half a bottle of wine. Let’s empty it and you can tell me about how you got tricked into taking an essence that you shouldn’t,” announced Dave.
Sam rolled her eyes.
“Oh, by gods, it’s because I was the dumbest teenager!” began Sam.
“Who isn’t when they’re a teenager? But even now, I wish I’d taken a death essence rather than kissed Holly Tanover,” grumbled Dave. Sam threw a pebble at him but she laughed.
She told him her backstory. As it all started coming out of her and Dave was able to build a picture. Basically, her family of farmers got pretty screwed over and impoverished by the local ruler and Sam got radicalised by a group calling themselves the ‘Essence for Everyone’ movement. Who believed that the ruling class of the world intentionally monopolised essences to hold power over the people of the world by way of the Adventure Society whose real agenda was not to protect people from monsters, but to keep people away from looting monsters. They believed that essences should be distributed to everyone and worked in secret to get some essences for themselves.
Sam joined the group and travelled with them to their European base when they had already gotten a few essences. Their leader, Alani Laird, had made a fighting force of peasants armed with simple spears and clubs and led them into a low magic zone where they were, one day, lucky enough to find an essence. Their first essence was an Iron essence which Alani took and the iron armour it summoned to her body became their symbol of defiance to the world. The group collected more and more essences over the four years before Sam joined. When she joined, they had five full iron rankers and a dozen users of one or two essences and their only goal was to collect more.
To a young Sam, these people had all the answers. Her family had suffered because, like everywhere else in the world, the ruling class in Funan had essences and her family didn’t. Essences should be for everybody because if everyone had essence powers, they’d be able to fight back against the people who hurt them. Essences were the solution to all of their problems!
Alani believed that the adventure society existed to enforce the rules of the ruling class and so did teenage Sam. The Adventure Society were part of the elite and couldn’t be trusted. Essences were for everybody. And, Alani proved it by taking trap and blood essences to go with her iron essence. A sacrifice confluence essence. A restricted essence. For, what could speak more nobly about their cause than the willingness to sacrifice for freedom from the ruling class and their adventure society?
Sam, believing this with her heart and soul, took life and death essences, representing her connection to the cycle of life and that Sam would be the instrument of death that brought new life to the working people of the world when she got her balance essence, which Alani had promised for later.
But, as it turned out, what Alani really thought was that herself being in charge of the Essence for Everyone movement was actually the most noble thing. As they grew in power people who voiced dissent began going missing, Alani became hard to contact by longtime friends and other Essence For Everyone founders, she was surrounded by flunkies and the people in the movement began to suffer as their efforts shifted from communal support to training strike forces to take from neighbouring rulers. No more lively discussion around campfires and dreams of a free tomorrow. Just Alani and her fight for ‘the people’ but which people they were fighting for, nobody could seem to point to anymore.
So, Sam left. She’d been sent into central Byzasian Empire to kill a noble so that his wife, who was sympathetic to their cause, could finance Alani’s training projects but when Sam’s ship berthed in what Dave thought of as Italy, she just disappeared. Drifting around, never going where a higher ranker might be for fear of being noticed as a death essence user and eventually, working as a ranger in Chamois forest. She had a cabin here which the previous ranger had built. Only they and she knew where it was. That’s where she was going and she invited Dave to stay there too while they avoided cultists which he gratefully accepted.
Dave listened the whole time. Sam had clearly been needing to talk about this with someone and it was like watching weights come off her shoulders as she talked. Eventually, she stopped. Dave was quiet for a while before he responded.
“Hey, that’s pretty awful what happened. You didn’t deserve it,” said Dave awkwardly.
“Thank you for listening.”
“It was a story worth hearing. Heroes, villains, travel. Had the lot. But, when it comes down to it, I think Knowledge was right,” Dave nodded. “Both you and I have a lot of hiding to do and ranking up is the only solution to our problems.”
“Yes, but what can I do now?” asked Sam.
“I don’t know yet but I think continuing not being evil is a good start. For what’s next, that’s a problem for outworlder day two,” said Dave cheekily.
Sam grinned.
“Then I will go to sleep,” she said. “Please have all my problems solved when I wake up!”
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‘Essence is the soul of power. It flows from the being of all people. It is our potential manifest. No longer should it be something granted only to those who hold themselves above us. We, the people, have the right to shape our destiny with the same force that the ruling classes use to maintain their stranglehold on this world.
Essence is for all. It is the birthright of the commoner, the farmer, the craftsman, the soldier, and the future for your children. To deny any being the right to become essence and to awaken that essence is to deny them their very life.’
* Excerpt from pamphlet, ESSENCE FOR EVERYONE: A CALL TO THE PEOPLE. Unknown author. 2678th year of His Majesty Byzas The Great’s reign.