“Fuck, fuck, fuck, what am I even doing here?” Sasha whispered.

Her hands and her back were sweaty and cold as ice. She tried to breathe slowly, but it didn’t help.

“There is nothing to worry about. Just go ahead. You don’t need to be nervous.”

Her head told her differently.

“Damn,” she almost said the first word out loud, “why is it so hard to convince myself?”

The answer came promptly.

“Because what you are doing is absolutely out of the ordinary and you don’t know how to handle it.”

“Just because you haven’t done it before, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

“It’s bad enough. It is so bad I am even talking to myself out loud.”

Sasha ground her teeth and looked ahead. The street was brightly lit. Somebody who didn’t know wouldn’t suspect a star behind the fog of light above them. Cars passed by, people walked the sidewalks. Couples arm in arm, groups laughing - the night was coming alive as it always did on Saturdays. Just for Sasha, it didn’t feel as always. Before she had woken up this morning, she would have felt safe. She would have felt confident in the world around her. Then that confidence had been shaken when she had woken up and her log had popped up.

New Quest Available !!!

The first thing Sasha thought was, “Not now, not on a Saturday.”

The second thing was, “Not here, not in my bed.”

The third thing was, “What the heck is going on?”

People shouldn’t be receiving quests out of nowhere. After all, there were rules for that sort of thing. Sasha was living in a modern society. Quests and experience points were carefully managed and given out by the government, transferred to the local offices of progress who gave them out to the companies who had applied for them. Every child knew the stories of the past. Heroes and villains had buffed themselves up until they had fought and unleashed horrible rampage on the land. Unchecked powers had waxed and waned. Life had been a chaotic turmoil that led nowhere but back to its own beginnings. It had been like that for millenia. And now in just 500 years after the last cataclysm, what hadn’t mankind built? Food in plenty, technological marvels, political stability. Society could thrive and finally move forward.

And today, Sasha had just woken up with a quest randomly appearing out of nowhere. She was tempted to open it. Tempted and nervous and anxious. She opened her laptop and tried to find out what to do. Two times she got her password wrong. She hacked into the keys.

Random quest in log.

→ Workforce.org: Can this be a real quest? Can my boss just send me to get coffee for him? Why can they access experience points for that sort of thing?

Are non-governmental quests legal?

→ Our-experience.gov: All quests are ultimately issued and sanctioned by the government.

“Useless internet!”

Illegal quests.

→ Unionize-now.org: Do not simply act on your company's request. All legitimate quests will appear in your log. You are not contractually obliged to fulfill non-sanctioned requests. If you should choose to do so keep in mind that these activities will not reward any experience points.

Sasha’s eyes kept darting back to the quest window. She left it open while making herself a coffee. She tried to think but couldn’t even get started. She closed the notification, went for a walk. It was a nice day. It was bright and calm. Children played in the park, showing off the new skills they had learned in school last week.

One of them shouted excitedly, “Look, mami, look. I know trees now.”

The boy pointed at the next tree, Sasha could almost hear the drumroll.

“It’s a … “.

A red window popped up between the kid and his mom. Sasha had to laugh. The trees in this park were all species shipped from overseas. Symbols of friendship and unity that could be found in most public areas. There was no point in kids investing all their early points into more exotic botany when there was a whole world of more important things around them. The child looked like it would start to cry, but the mother just smiled and gave it a hug. Sasha looked away. She closed her eyes and faced the sun and tried to surrender her thoughts to the warmth on her face.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She sat for a while until she heard her phone ring.

“Sash, what’s up? Wanna meet at the café next to my place? Kisses, Rocky.”

What a welcome distraction on this day.

Sasha texted back, “Sure, when?”

“Can you do now?”

Usually, she wasn’t that big a fan of Rocky’s spontaneous pushiness. But she still had to keep the quest out of her mind. Talking would do. Cafés were good places. What a different window, a different corner to look out from, could do had often amazed Sasha before. The Last Mug was a bit of a special place, but it did that thing well. Sasha wouldn’t even call it a café. During daytime it could barely conceal the smell of beer and cigarettes of the previous night. And hundreds of nights before that. But it had a small terrace, seats and tables in the sun and some surprisingly flourishing plants. And it all came in a myriad of cracked and washed out colors arranged so carefully they told you that somebody cared about the place as best as they could.

Rocky was sitting in front of a package, beer in hand, chatting with the waiter who smiled at Sasha when she walked up to them.

“Beer before noon?” she asked.

“It’s the specialty of this place.” Rocky leaned back.

“It’s their specialty to be able to sell it despite its taste.”

The waiter laughed and shrugged.

“It’s all in the charisma.”

“Just like the big bosses,” said Rocky, raising a finger in school teacher fashion, “only that everytime I catch myself falling for their persuasion, I could slap them and me both. You’re sweet though.”

“Maybe tell that to your boss next time,” the waiter replied with a wink.

“Oh boy, that sounds like trouble.”

The waiter addressed Sasha, “And what can I get you.”

Sasha ordered a coffee and relaxed onto a chair at the table. Rocky waited just until she had sat down, leaned forward, tapped the package with the flat of his hand and grinned.

“Look what I got!”

Sasha replied with the same enthusiasm, “A box!”

“And on the inside … “

Rocky turned the box over and emptied it on the table. Out fell a bunch of nondescript junk. Cogs, springs, wires, bits of glass and a trickle of microelectronic parts.

“Now watch and see!”

Rocky scooped up the pieces between his hands and slowly lifted them. Below his hands the pieces had arranged themselves, holding themselves together. A link here, a gear there. Some of the pieces seemed to have melted into each other.

“Look at it, look at it!”

While Rocky was excited, Sasha still tried to figure out what she was seeing. Rocky had leveled up his Arts & Crafts again. He was the only person she knew who did that beyond their basic childhood training. Apart from the few famous officially sponsored artists that had made it big or the handful of designers milling around in the companies. Quests for artists were rare and - apart from school work - nonexistent for amateurs. The investment just didn’t pay off. But Rocky enjoyed it, Sasha knew. And now he looked at her and his face already fell.

“You don’t like it?” he asked.

“No, no,” Sasha responded, “I just don’t know what it is.”

“It’s a statue. And it holds. This is a big step! This is something to show, something not everyone can do!”

“A statue of what?” Sasha wanted to ask. Instead she tried to raise the mood again, “It’s cool you leveled up again! What have you been up to in the last weeks?”

“This and that. I had to grind my ass off to get the last exp - literally speaking. I made entry controls at the big sports fair. Sitting around 12 hours a day is boring.”

“I believe that.”

Rocky’s smile disappeared and he leaned towards Sasha.

“Do you think I could sell something like this? Like for real? For exp?”

Sasha had her doubts.

“What? Like for a government or city contract?”

“Maybe, or I could sell it myself?”

“So you want to apply to set up shop?”

“Why not?”

Sasha sighed.

“Quests will be brutal. I bet they give you sales targets in the hundreds, maybe even in the thousands. It’s nice decoration what you got, but that sort of thing is usually mass produced.”

“By workers whose only skill is to produce from blueprints.”

“There’s a lot of blueprints, a lot of nice things.”

“I bet they were all made by like five people. What I could sell is original.”

Sasha couldn’t tell whether Rocky’s business skills would be up to his enthusiam. But he so obviously loved what he was doing. She cringed at the thought of voicing her doubts. Rocky would get by anyways.

“Why not go for it then?” she said.

“Really?” asked Rocky.

“Yes, really,” Sasha said. Then she asked, “You would really like to find your own way to earn your rewards, right?”

Rocky replied after a moment, “It’s not only about the rewards. I actually want to do something that feels rewarding, you know? Doing art gives me that, I think.”

He was special, Sasha knew.

“I hope it goes well for you, keep me updated on what you’re doing.”

“I would always keep you up to date. Minus maybe a week or two, I’m a busy man you know,” he smiled, “Why did you ask that thing about the rewards?”

Sasha’s heart surged a little, as if Rocky would know about the rogue quest that had greeted her this morning.

When she didn’t answer Rocky immediately followed up his question.

“You know, maybe you’re looking for some rewarding things yourself. And maybe tell me about it next time we meet.”

When Sasha came back home she couldn’t remember what they had talked about after that. But as soon as she closed the door behind her, she popped open her log again. .

“Okay, show me what you got,” Sasha said out loud.

She opened the quest’s details.

Bring a bag of strawberries to New Sundale, Park Avenue 87, apartment 8. Tonight 22:30 PM.

Rewards: 10k exp

Sasha squinted at the last number. Ten thousand points for five strawberries. Was this a joke? Last month she had maybe made two thousand, working the whole week. She had grinded through files, statistics and reports. She had reached all her objectives and had gotten only a fraction of what this quest promised. This couldn’t be true. But then, there was only one way to find out. And it was so many points. Sasha looked at her phone. Plenty of time to get some strawberries.