The ringing bell was muffled as the shop door closed behind Iris, and she stepped out into the bustling streets of Giantrock City. After a few days of shopping around, she had finally found a skinny little shop crammed between two other buildings, called Dudley's Duds, which offered premium, adventure-grade garments and robes. The higher quality would hopefully mean enough durability to survive her next adventures. To her delight, they also sold hats.
The clothes she had walked in wearing were now stashed in her bottomless bag, and instead she wore her newly acquired attire. The outfit consisted of a robe, hat, and dark brown boots which matched the wide leather belt she had carried over from her previous robe. The fabric of the new robe was a thick, canvas-like material on the outside and a soft, silky material on the inside. The robe came in several colors, but she had chosen the black option with purple accents. Her new wizard hat matched the robes, all black except for the long, purple ribbon that banded the base of the cone and tied into a bow on one side with both ends of the extra-long ribbon hanging over the brim. The cone was sewn and intentionally creased into an arc that tapered to a tip, which held rigid as the hat moved about. Mr. Dudley had assured her that this was standard for brand new wizard hats, and that it would settle into a characteristic floppiness as she broke it in.
She hadn't gotten rid of her previous hat, the one which once belonged to the Weird Farmer back home, but had decided it had finally been through enough. It was less characteristically floppy at this point, and more so struggling to keep any shape at all. It was now put away in her bag as a backup hat, should she ever need it. Along with it were her stained and tattered robes, which she had thoroughly cleaned but ultimately been unable to save. In the end, she decided to hold onto them as a keepsake.
As Iris strolled through the city, she kept her head tilted so the brim of her hat would cast a shadow across her face. It was a hot summer day, and the city seemed to trap heat like a blanket. Soon she felt the sun warming her robe, and groaned. She had already planned to buy more robes than just this one, and made a note to herself to consider lighter colors for the others. She peered to the roof tops, where the occasional wind vane or small flag shook in the breeze that didn't reach the streets. She glanced around, ducked into an alleyway, then blipped to the rooftops.
She sprinted and leapt between the buildings, blipping across the larger gaps and sometimes reaching up to hold her hat in place as her robe fluttered like a flag. Her landings were harsh and thumped against the shingles of the roofs, but she didn't stick around long enough to know if she pissed anyone off. She smiled as she darted across the city with the wind in her face.
She reached the final rooftop, somewhere along the northern edge of the city. Below her was vast open air above the lake, walled off by the massive redwoods that bordered the shores. Also below her, though much closer, were haphazard balconies and forgotten scaffolding that decorated the outer walls of buildings on the city's edge. In the mood for exploring, she stepped off the roof and blipped down to a balcony.
"Hey!" Someone called from the other side of a windowed door.
"Whoops," Iris said, smiling and waving awkwardly at the building's inhabitants before blipping away.
She traveled along the various platforms and balconies until she rounded the city and found herself on the very tip, somewhere below the governmental complex that crowned the city's peak. There were no balconies here, just a solid brickwork foundation that supported the large buildings above, and the network of decrepit scaffolding that lined that foundation. She blipped along a little further until she found a nice, shaded scaffold platform where she would be out of sight and safe from the sun.
Sitting cross-legged, she removed her journal from the bottomless bag and flipped it open to a random page. The journal settled on her character sheet, which she briefly reviewed. Only one thing has changed since she last looked. At the bottom of the description for her Spatial Distortion ability was the description for its Special Use.
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Special Use : Emergency Exit
Cooldown : 30 days (available)
Mana cost : All
Description:
In the event of imminent death, lapse into the void behind reality and reappear an extreme distance away. Activates automatically, location cannot be chosen.
"Available?" she asked aloud.
Had it been that long? Had it *only* been that long? That night she woke up alone in the desert somehow felt like a lifetime ago and a week ago, and not at all like a month ago. She wondered where she would go next if the power activated again, would it take her back home? Or to some other continent she had never seen? Maybe she'd awake in the Glacial Mountains, or the ash lakes of the Barren Wastes, or some place wholly new altogether that she had never even read about. She supposed there was no way to know.
"I guess I have the whole world in front of me now," she spoke to the wind, wishing her mother were there to listen.
She flipped to her mother's entries, which now included her own notes scribbled into the margins with arrows pointing to different lines of the entries.
"Where are you, mom?" she asked the wind.
She hadn't told anyone about seeing her mother yet, and she wasn't sure she would at all. How would she even go about explaining it? She wasn't sure if she'd ever even told any of her friends that her mother was dead. Was she really actually alive? She had looked so young when Iris saw her, and hadn't looked at her the way her mother always had. She looked at her like a stranger. But it was definitely her. It had to be.
Iris watched the sun sparkle off the surface of the gentle waves, and flocks of birds fly in the distance. Fishing boats were coming and going from the docks below, and pillowy clouds drifted across the bright blue sky above. After a few deep breaths to savor the fresh summer air, she flipped the journal to a blank page and pulled a quill and ink from her bag, deciding it was finally time to write an entry of her own.
Dear Whomever,
My name is Iris Orion, daughter of Mary. I don't know who might read this, but whoever you are, I'm glad you're here. I am a Level 9 adventurer, writing to you from Giantrock City. I've only been an adventurer for a month, but I've already seen so much. I've slept under the stars in the Giantrock desert, climbed to the top of the tallest trees I've ever seen, and stood beneath a dragon. I've fought giant rats, snakes and spiders and won. I've fought beasts like hairy men in the mud of a trench, and stood my own against a wizard that rode down lightning from the sky, and survived to write about it now. I don't think that's half bad for my first month, but I'm just getting started.
Iris Orion, 997
She dotted the 'I's in her name with a smile, then remembered something.
P.S. I have a wyvern egg now? More on that later.
She clapped the book shut and shoved it in her bag. She lingered for a moment with the bag stretched open, curiosity slowly overcoming her. She glanced around to make sure she was alone, then picked up the open bag and turned it upside, picturing the wyvern egg as she did so.
Nothing came out. She frowned, and shook the bag. Something small dropped out and clattered onto the wooden scaffold like a rock. She shook it again, and more fragments fell out.
"No, nonono," she started to panic, shaking the bag more aggressively, "please don't say you ate it."
A large fragment dropped out of the bag, clearly a piece of the egg's shell. She was mortified, frozen in place with her jaw hanging open. Then something else fell out, landing in a small heap amongst the eggshells. The creature was the size of a small cat, and looked like a lizard with wings for front legs and fang-like teeth lining its jaws. Iris stared at it in shock as it awkwardly stumbled to its feet, then released the tiniest screech in her direction. An ominous sound, like a distant, distorted roar poured out of the still upturned bag. A purple tentacle reached out the opening, gently wrapped around the baby wyvern, and pulled it back into the void.
"What?" Iris asked, twisting the bag to peer inside of it, "WHAT?"
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THE END
Iris Orion will return in Book 2: Journey to the Shining Blue