“How can it still be active? The carrots are clearly gone, and we can’t pick them!”
Maury has a sinking feeling that she knows exactly why the quest is not showing as Unable to be Completed. But, “It’s no problem, we will just head back to the guild hall and turn it back in, then get another.”
“You can’t! Weren’t you listening? You can’t get your next quest until this one is marked completed or the magic decides it is unable to be done. But it doesn’t make sense…”
With a snort, Maury holds the quest slip up in front of him. He gets quiet, and his pupils dart back and forth as he reads the slip once, then again. It is obvious when he figures it out on the third time, through, because his eyes get as large as plates. “No…”
“Yep,” Maury confirms, lightly kicking the old lady’s foot as she shoves the paper in her pocket and crosses her arms over her chest. “It doesn’t say ‘pick the carrots for Old Lady Spencer’, it says ‘gather the carrots for Old Lady Spencer’. So, it doesn’t matter when they are. The quest isn’t done until I gather them all.”
The cursing coming from the little slime is colorful and varied. Maury files away the curse about ferrets and bubbles for a later use. Looking around, she sees a cute little bench made of Elm branches twisted together and sits down in it with a huff. While she stares off into the distance, worrying a thread hanging from the sleeve of her serviceable chestnut colored tunic, she tries to decide what the best way to progress would be.
Clearly, she won’t be backing out of the quest. If it doesn’t get completed, it will stay open indefinitely unless the person who placed it paid for a cancellation option. Looking around at the tidy but obviously ramshackle property, that seems unlikely. And there is no expiry date listed, so she can’t just wait it out.
“Should we do something about her? It seems wrong to just leave her in the dirt…” Neumann hops off of her shoulder, done with his swearing for the moment. He bounces over to the still form. “I can see her chest moving, I think she is still breathing.”
“Shut-up, Newspaper, I’m trying to think.”
He sighs and settles down next to the old lady’s cheek. “Neumann, my name is Neumann. It isn’t that hard. Like New and Man put together.”
“If you don’t shut up, I will turn you into a turnip.”
Nonexistent lips clamp shut.
Minutes pass with no more sound than what is produced by the crickets in the grass. How could such a simple thing go wrong? All she had to do was spend fifteen minutes pulling some carrots from the ground. On such a nice day, there might be a little dirt on the fingernails but a minimum of sweat! Maury groans and drops her head into her hands.
“There is nothing else to do but gather the blasted carrots. I can’t think of any way around it without giving up my ability to quest forever. It can’t be that hard, can it? Probably some hungry person from town. I will just go and hit them on the head and take them back.” With a resolute nod, Maury stands up and stretches her arms high into the air, feeling the tension easing in her back. A moan comes from the lump on the ground, and she looks at it distastefully, then back to the little garden plot.
“You,” she points at the slime emphatically. “Go count how many carrots were stolen.”
“How would I know that?”
“You look for holes in the ground,” she answers with an exaggerated eye roll and goes to help the woman stand up again. She immediately regrets it, of course, when the woman begins to cry, sobs broken by the occasional plaintive “My carrots!”
It takes the rest of the afternoon to calm the woman down, and it is no surprise at all when she admits that she didn’t purchase the cancellation option for her quest. By this point, Maury is over being distraught. Her anger and her despair are always short-lived. Avoiding doing anything that could result in problems is always choice number one, but if that is unavoidable, then she can handle it. Deal with it, move on, and take a nap. That is the formula for a happy life. An additional nap before dealing with whatever is happening is also acceptable.
Accepting the use of Old Lady Spencer’s main room floor to sleep for the night as well as a bowl of thin (carrotless) vegetable soup seems like a better choice than sleeping out on the road and eating leaves. So Maury accepts. It is a good thing, too. As the sun set barely an hour before, the temperature began to plummet. If it wasn’t for the little fire cheerfully burning in the fireplace, she is certain that she would be shivering already.
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It also gives her the opportunity to make use of the supplies she brought with her. After the older lady heads to her tiny bedroom, Maury plops down on the worn floorboards of the cozy main room. She dumps the contents of her bag on the ground between her splayed legs and picks up a bone roughly the size of her thumb nail and her little hide bag containing her carving tools. Muttering the incantation to trigger her enhanced vision, she wiggles around until she is lying on her stomach, her face inches from the porous white surface.
Except for the pop of wood in the fire and the nearly inaudible scritching of magically honed carving picks, the room is quiet. It remains so until Maury sits up, speaking the words to return her eyes back to their normal internal configuration.
“What were you making?” Neumann asks quietly, his voice and manner subdued.
“A tracking item. It will help find all the darn carrots no matter where they are.”
“Oh, that makes sense.” He sidles up to the hearth, having figured out how to move without bouncing at some point while Maury wasn’t paying attention. He watches as she pulls three much larger, heavier bones toward her. “What are you going to make next?”
She sighs and glares at him for a second but continues arranging the new items in front of herself. “We might have to go deeper into the forest than I intended. My weapon summoning isn’t as high as I would like it,” she of course doesn’t mention that both her heavy and light weapon summoning are both at the level normally seen in toddlers,”-and I don’t want to be eaten by anything tomorrow.”
“Wait, you didn’t make any weapons ahead of time? We could have been eaten on the way here!”
“Of course not,” she changes her glare from ‘you are annoying’ to ‘you barely have half of a brain’. “Why would I spend the time making up things we probably wouldn’t have needed? Besides, my main plan is still to throw you at whatever is chasing me so I can get away.”
When no response comes, she arches an eyebrow. Maury pulls a tibia closer and begins to carve an elaborate looping image on it. As soon as she has set it back down in the little section off to the side where the dowsing bone already sits, Neumann speaks up again.
“I’m sorry, humans are so bad in this world. But things are different where I am from.”
Maury doesn’t respond or indicate that his statement matters to her.
“There isn’t the kind of violence in my world that you mentioned!”
A long, deep sigh. “How many other intelligent species are left in your world besides humans?”
“Just humans…”
“So saying that you don’t kill others is because you don’t have others to kill? So humans don’t kill other humans?”
“That’s not…there are-”
“Right, and what about those animals with their heads displayed in that bar I could see? Were those killed just for their meat?”
Neumann wibbled and wobbled, his eyes darting around the room. “But those are just animals!”
“Okay, stupid human. So your world either never had other species besides humans, or they were all killed off some time in the past. And now your world’s humans just kill each other and whatever animals they want to. I’m not seeing how your humans are any different than mine except that they have fewer opportunities to cause problems.”
“But you can’t just kill them when they haven’t done anything to you!” Whatever was allowing the slime to speak without vocal cords seemed to have no problem relaying the distress he was feeling.
Maury rolls her eyes with a mighty sigh. “This conversation bores me. If you are looking for someone to make you feel better about your species, wait until we get back to school and go bug Pixiesnort. If you are hoping, I will apologize to you for figuring out a pain-free way to do my assignment instead of joining the stabby crew down below, save your breath. Or whatever you are using to talk.”
Without giving him a chance to respond, she leans forward and gets back to work.
The first thing Maury thinks when she wakes up is “Did the first person who sheared a sheep look at it and think ‘I’m gonna steal their hair and wear it’ or what?” The second thing is, “It is too early.”
It is the habit of their hostess to wake up as the sun rises to get outside work done before it gets too hot. Even though she no longer does all that much work, it is a hard habit to break. When the front door opens the first time, Maury grumbles and falls back asleep immediately. When it opens again a few minutes later, she peels her eyes open and debates if the quest will be able to be completed if she explodes Old Lady Spencer.
“Good morning, dear! We have eggs this morning, so I will make us some breakfast!”
It is impossible to stay angry at someone who is offering her eggs. Eggs are delicious. Except Merfolk eggs. Well, those might be delicious as well, but it is generally frowned upon to eat the offspring of advanced species.
Maury stretches and gathers up all of the materials still laying across the floor, shoving them in her bag. Everything except her nifty carrot seeker, which she attaches to a thin strip of leather and ties around her neck.
The eggs are, of course, delicious. When the elderly celestim offers up two hardboiled ones to Maury to take for her lunch that day, she does so excitedly, glad to have another meal that wouldn’t involve leveling her gathering skill. At this point, she can’t tell the difference between a poisonous mushroom and one safe to eat. Leveling that particular skill without plenty of studying local flora seems like a sure way to either end up with a slight case of death or crouching in the bushes, releasing watery bowels all day long.
“Actually,” she mutters to herself, “Maybe I should see if I can trade for some kind of brochure or pamphlet with pictures of edible growing things. Can’t hurt.”
“Unless our plants are that different, I could tell you what is safe and what isn’t,” Neumann whispers to her while their host is across the room, putting their plates in the sink. Maury looks at him, contemplating whether or not he can be trusted. If she was in his position, she would probably try to poison him.
That thought leads to her other thoughts. Does that mean she thinks he is right in being upset that she is gathering human souls? Or does it mean she understands being upset about being turned into a slime? Or maybe being dragged from his home is the part she can relate to. The only thing she knows for certain is that she has no interest in feeling sorry for the slime. Human. Whatever he is.
After their fasts have been broken, Maury scoops up the somber little human turned slime and sets out on their grand quest to gather the missing bunch of carrots. It will be fine, she tells herself as she whispers the word to activate her carrot dowser. She watches as it floats up from where it lay against her sternum and twists to turn toward the south. "Just a quick stop at the local hoodlum’s home or some starving guy on the edge of the forest, and we will be dropping these things off by dinner."