He was impulsive. It was like he just did whatever came to mind, when it came to mind, yet it almost always worked out for him. I swear, if there's a hidden luck stat, his is either one of the highest I've ever seen or he can calculate everything out in the moments leading up to one of his outrageous decisions. I don't know if it was just coincidence, but I think I only saw him greatly injured once or twice, and even then it was from a fight that should have killed him in moments.
* Quote by alias Trip Hunter, a high-level elven hunter from New Earth. Real name unknown.
----------------------------------------
John's walk turned out to be mostly uneventful, as the Forest Of The Damned goes. He encountered a couple of Demon Gremlins in his shouting, but they were dispatched easily enough since the highest one he saw was level 4. He didn't even get anything particularly good out of it, just bloodied hands and a single level. The level, and the stat points he split between strength and willpower, are pretty good now he was thinking about it, but that's besides the point. The point being, until a half an hour into his walk, not much happened, and he was starting to get quite hoarse.
Half an hour into his walk he got his second non-violent response. The first quickly turned violent, and he wasn’t sure whether to count it, but he counted it anyway. Focusing back to the matter at hand, John started quickly walking towards the response to his shouting. He noted that, this time, the sounds of movement and the sounds of the being’s voice both approached unlike last time. He still wasn’t expecting another person when they met, so he charged a pre-emptive punch, just in case. Rounding a tree, fist first, he ended up punching the ground to avoid punching the very attractive woman who immediately fell back at either the look of him or the small explosion of dirt from his ground pound.
The woman, on second look, was both very attractive and very not human. She was much too tall, her ears too long, and her words much too… non-earthly? Whether that was the best way to put it or not, that’s how John put it in his head.
“Dead gods above, what the hell is wrong with this damned forest?!” The woman, despite speaking English, spoke in a way John had never heard before. Her accent was vaguely English, yet there was an incongruity to it, her lips weren’t speaking the words correctly. Also, he didn’t quite know any person from Earth who would use the phrase “dead gods above”. There were no religions with dead gods that were still referenced, as far as he knew.
Shaking off his thoughts, he realized he had been getting yelled at for the length of his thought process. “-o the hell just comes running out from behind a tree like that? You’re clearly looking for people yet the first other gaol you see you try to put on the ground? Answer me!” John looked at this woman with a blank look. “You’re slow. That’s the only way to explain it.”
“I’m not slow, I was just making sure you’re not one of the abominations around the place.”
“Oh, now he talks! What in the name of the gods are you doing swinging at people you’ve just met? Is that what you consider a conversation starter?” The woman said, clearly agitated and on guard. “Why are your ears rounded as well? I've never seen any gaol with rounded ears, and I've been around.”
John took the rant as a chance to inspect the woman closer. Well, he assumed they were a woman, as they sure acted like you’d imagine an angry woman would.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Arden
Level 1
Ignoring her question about his ears, he decides to get right to the meat and potatoes of the matter. ‘I could go for meat and potatoes. Not gremlin meat though’ “Is your name Arden?”
“No, I am Arden, who would name someone Arden? By the looks of it you’re a duine, despite being a bit small, round-eared, and clearly deranged. Seriously, who throws a punch the first time they meet someone?!”
“Someone who has seen danger around every tree in this forest! Related, how are you still level 1? I haven’t been able to go 15 minutes without encountering a gremlin or demonic bat-looking thing in this forest and you seem to have been able to just avoid it all afternoon?”
“Answer my question first!” The woman stated, defiantly.
John sighed. “Fine. I’m not Arden or duine or whatever, I’m a human. I'm assuming you're a kind of elf or something, since you look very similar to the elves of our myths. I don’t even know what a Duine is. And, on a normal day, I wouldn't take a swing at someone I just met, but today is not a normal day. We’re stuck in some kind of demonic forest filled with abominations, and if you noticed, I diverted my swing the moment I noticed that you weren’t one of the aforementioned abominations.”
“What is a human?”
“Nope, your turn to give answers now.”
“Fine, what was the question?”
He sighed again. The woman was not making this interrogation easy. “Who are you, what is an ‘Arden’, where are you from, and how have you not encountered any of the abominations littering this forest?”
The woman gave him a look, somewhere between scorn and the look you’d give a child who just asked for a million dollars as a birthday present. “My name is Maeve, Arden nobility from the port town Ballymore in the great country Codros. What do you mean ‘what is an arden’, that's just what I am! That's like asking a cow ‘what is a cow’. As for how I've avoided the abominations, that’s easy, I just stayed up in the trees and hid. I only came down because I heard your screaming from the ground. Come to think of it, why are you staying on the ground? Sure, being up in the trees might make you feel like a maide, but it's a small tradeoff for your life, no?”
“I can’t climb these trees, the branches are much too high off the ground. Plus, how do you know there isn’t something worse up there?”
Maeve went pale. “Well, um. I suppose from experience? Not many birds are gonna do much more than try to push you away from their nest, no matter what kind of bird. Though this forest does have quite a number of weird organisms, so it's not that far of a stretch for birds to be weird too. Dead gods, have I been walking through a field of archers painted red?”
“From context, I’d say it's pretty likely that’s accurate. Anyway, as for what a human is, a human is what I am. To steal your metaphor, a cow is a cow, I am a human, and from what I gather, you're an Arden in that same vein. My name is John, by the way. Now that we’ve got the introductions out of the way, I’d like to discuss helping each other out here. I’m sure you got the notification and know this is some kind of tutorial, so let’s get our bearings and maybe work on surviving whatever it's trying to teach us, sound good to you?” John was hoping that he could, at the least, she would agree to travel with him. 2 is better than one when it comes to scaring off solitary animals without a fight, after all.
Maeve, who, in fact, had gotten the notification of this being a tutorial, decided to see what the man had to say. “I'll agree to talk with you here in this area. That doesn't mean I'm going to come with you, however! I’d rather go at it alone than go with you should you turn out to be some deranged freak bent on bloodshed.”
“Trust me, if you’d seen what I’ve seen in this forest, you would absolutely rather be traveling *with* the one bent on bloodshed than be alone against everything else.”