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Sassa's Questline derailed

On a beatiful patch of fertile soil, with her goats eating the wild herbs of the mountain all around her, there was a little girl. The girl's name was Sassa and she was a needlessly beautiful little thing. In fact, she had the same looks as the third and supposedly youngest daughter of the baron ruling five villages and a copper mine on the mountain.

If this was still a game then people would have called this a radomly generated estate questline, one that usually started with the lost noble child's death. After Sassa's death the player would have taken up the duty of taking revenge and eventually ended up taking over the mountain with the next higher noble's consent.

With freedom of thought and a personality of her own as well as a basic outline of the quest content things...changed. Sassa changed.

Here she was, a level 1 character, 8 years old with nobody to care for her but an old woman who took her in as a baby. By this point said old woman had already been killed and Sassa was standing there, waiting for the player chasing the killer to succeed, find the order to kill her and start asking questions regarding her whereabouts. Then a servant of the baron would come to finish the job just when the player was close enough to see her die. Sassa knew this because she was a quest character, but the questline for the estate would only be triggered after her death. So far only the quest 'catch the old woman's murderer' had become active. Estate quests were always chain quests, but Sassa knew hers only until the point where she died.

Thus there she was, on the little patch of green grass far away from anyone or anything that might save her. The player and the killer were still in the village. The player had to catch the killer first before the Baron's men would come for her.

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She had a small knife, a silver necklace that was proof of her identity as the Baron's daughter, a water container, three copper, an apple and the rags she was wearing. And her goats.

And now she had a head to think things through.

Sassa, level 1, eight years old, got up and started leading her goats to a village she had visited before. Granny's nephew lived in that village. 

She arrived two hours later under the curious gazes of a few villagers. Visitors who were not warriors or mages or something similar were highly unusual. Determined, she led her goats through the village that consisted of only a dozen houses until she arrived at the clay hut where Granny's nephew lived. After knocking she opened the reed door and looked inside. The man she had been looking for, a bow maker and general purpose wood worker, looked up.

"Granny died. They're looking for me...I can't take the goats." Sassa said, to which her Granny's nephew grunted.

"You know how to shoot." He offered her a finished bow, three dozen arrows in a shoulder bag and two silver. Though slightly disappointed, Sassa knew he would not be able to protect her. Twins were seen as bad luck in this part of the mountain range due to some trouble twin sons had caused because they were so similar nobody could tell who the real older brother was. 

She doubted they would bother chasing her once she left this mountain. The Baron only had about 150 peasants under him, after all. And she was the fourth daughter that might have married a craftsman or village head's son if she hadn't been a twin and her sister the Count's daughter's playmate.

So Sassa took the bow, arrows and money and left, heading deeper into the mountain range, away from her father. First of all she would start hunting rabbits and foxes. And later, well, at least she would survive longer than intended.

It was a shame neither the Baron nor Sassa had ever bothered to ask what the people in the Count's territory or the rest of the world thought about twins.