Averick was a [Runner]. His job was to bring messages from people to people in the small town of Gunsee and, sometimes, to neighboring cities. Or, in this case, to a little house right outside his town.

The house itself was old. It had been there for decades now, built for a retired adventurer who had died a few years back. Old age. A rarity among them. The man had always joked about being one of the luckiest people alive. He had repeated those same words on his deathbed, surrounded by his old friends and companions of a lifetime of danger. Those that had survived, that is.

The house had been left there, nobody daring to live in it. It didn’t feel right to encroach on that place full of happy, old, memories.

So there it had stood, for nearly five years, the occasional townsfolk going there to dust the place up, keep it in working order. Nobody had asked it, but the people did it anyway because that man had helped them on multiple occasions, and at least keeping that old house clean, ready for someone new to walk through that door and claim it as their own, felt right.

But nobody had dared for oh so long.

That is, until a month ago, when a young woman had appeared in town asking if anyone lived there.

She looked strange. Her clothes were so colourful, covered with this big drawing of a cactus wearing a big, yellow, hat with a large fold, and with a moustache, a desert in the background.

A few kids had asked her if she was from the Tower Academy, and she had looked dumbfounded, asking what that was. And that was when the people understood that something was truly wrong: everyone knew what the Academy was. A grand tower somewhere in the Visant Desert, on the continent of Aknos, where all forms of magic were taught and constantly rediscovered or created. Anyone who hadn’t lived all their lives alone in a cave knew about it, so either this girl was one such, which was pretty unbelievable since she acted too civilised, or there was something more to it.

Still, however strange the girl looked and acted, she was courteous and kind, and eventually managed to convince the people of that little town to let her stay in the old house. They had nothing against it, since its old proprietor himself had clearly told them to give it to anyone who looked in need.

Afterwards, things got stranger still: the girl came back the next day to thank the town mayor for his kindness, and explained her situation better. She said she was suffering from memory loss and that she had forgotten pretty much everything about where she was.

Now, the [Mayor] was a savvy man who found it hard to believe this girl. So, unbeknown to her, he had used a Truth Stone, a little crystal enchanted with a [Detect Truth] spell that was used, as the name itself stated, to see if what the person was saying was true or not. Luckily for the girl, the crystal used to hold the spell was of low quality, which meant that the spell itself wasn’t particularly powerful, leading to it being capable of understanding only the literal meaning of the words. One could also call her lucky because of the way she unintentionally expressed herself, because she said ‘It’s like I don’t know anything about the world.’

Now, the Truth Stone glimmered a light red colour regarding the part about memory loss, showing that was a lie, but it also glimmered green on that last line.

The [Mayor] was, obviously, confused. After all, how could someone know nothing about the world and yet lie about them losing their memories. It didn’t make any sense. Hence why he made a small leap of logic, and thought that, probably, the girl herself was uncertain about the memory loss part of her discourse, making the Truth Stone read it as a lie. It was, after all, a basic tool. He couldn’t afford much more than that.

So, he let the girl stay, on the condition that she find an occupation, since nobody was going to give her food for nothing. At least, not for long.

Then the man put her out of his mind and got back to work, administering the town, making sure everything worked as it should, going to meet the [Farmers] to see if they needed anything in particular and to give them a helpful hand with his Skills, one of which was [Town: Fertile Soil].

He was, all in all, a good man who cared for the people who had chosen him for this job.

He also believed that said people would do something about the mysterious girl, because he had not a single clue about what he could do. He had asked her if she wanted him to call a [Mage] that could maybe find out what had happened to her, but she had asked him not to, saying that his time was too precious to waste on something as insignificant as this.

All of this said, he was quite surprised to hear that the girl had found herself a place to work at the local [Alchemist]’s shop. The job itself was known to be extremely complex, which led most people who practiced it to be extremely picky when they chose apprentices. To hear that the girl had managed to convince the in-middle-age-crisis [Alchemist] Herman to not only take her in as an apprentice, but also compliment her on her abilities, was nothing short of a shock. And when he had come by to see how she was doing and ask how that was possible, she had just shrugged and said “I still remember the things I studied”. Which made no sense, but when he’d said as much Herman had nearly booted him out of his shop.

In the following weeks the girl, who was named Alice (“you say it with a C, not an S” she kept repeating) became quite liked by the town as a whole, if still seen as quite strange. Herman himself always lamented how she kept repeating the things he said in different, stranger, ways, and how she disliked the fact that her Class was [Apprentice Alchemist] instead of [Pharma]-something. He had never heard that word. But she was good, and that’s all that mattered.

Not long after people found out that she’d started a little garden in the back of the adventurer’s house where she grew all sorts of plants that, she said, had some medicinal uses. The people who visited only saw orderly rows of colourful plants and thought it was pretty, but that was it. They weren’t [Herbalists], they knew nothing about medicinal herbs and their uses in crafting drugs to help cure all sorts of ailments, big and small.

They didn’t know that one could use mint to cure stomach aches, as it helped reduce inflammation of the superior tract of the intestines. Or that valerian could be used to help people fall asleep. Or even that liquorice could be used to help someone with low blood pressure.

Nor did they know of how, in the right doses, an extract from Digitalis Purpurea could help people with a weak heart, helping that poor muscle contract and increase the afflux of blood all over the body.

There was so much they didn’t know.

So much knowledge she had.

For Alice was from Earth and, most important of all, she had studied pharmaceutical chemistry in university.

That’s how she’d managed to find work as an apprentice under Herman so fast. Sure, alchemy and chemistry were completely different from one another: the latter worked with the active principles contained in all plants, using all sorts of complex reactions to extract exactly the needed substance that could be used to cure a specific ailment, while the former used specialized ingredients charged with more or less magical effects that, when mixed together, created potions that were the wet dream of any doctor Alice had ever known. She didn’t want to begin to imagine just what some people she knew would give to get their hands even on a single healing potion, even a low quality one.

But she’d soon found out there were limits even to those miraculous concoctions. Simply put, health potions were divided in two categories: Accelerant and Purity Type. The first and most common worked by accelerating a body’s natural regeneration. Simple, right? Wrong! Because, sadly, the potion considers part of the body even things like bacteria and viruses. Which could very well lead to someone drinking a sip of potion and die the next day because of widespread infection. That’s when the second type came in: many times more complex to craft, and subsequently more expensive, Purity type healing potions could not only heal by literally rebuilding parts of one’s body, they also acted as some sort of disinfectant, exterminating all external bacteria and viruses up to a certain point.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

All things considered, Alice liked it here: she had a well-paying job that was more or less what she had studied for, had her little garden filled with medicinal plants of all sorts and, most important of all, she got a chance to live in a world of magic! Like in all those stories and manga she’d read in the sleepless nights caused by her chronic insomnia.

Which, by the way, was becoming a problem, since this world didn’t have her medications.

When Averick arrived at her home that day it had been two days since she’d last managed to get a good night’s sleep. She’d had a total of two and a half hours of shut eye. So, at the moment, she was as irritable as a cat that’d just come out of the rain and seen the owner’s dog eating from his bowl. Again.

In short: a lot.

Her eyes were slightly bloodshot, with heavy purple bags underneath them. The gears in her brain turned slowly as the little hamster inside began seeing the light and hearing the voices of his ancestors. Oh, no, wait, that wasn’t the hamster, that was actually Alice. She was hearing voices. Someone was saying her name.

The gears in her mind began turning a bit faster, and she realized she wasn’t actually hearing things again, no, there was someone knocking on the door to her little house and saying her name. She turned around, her neck creaking like a breaking chair, then got up and mechanically opened the door.

"Hi Averick. I heard you."

"No, you did not. I’ve been calling you for the last five minutes. I was about to break in."

Averick was the closest thing Alice had to a friend. He was a twenty-year-old man, younger than her, with an easy smile and kind eyes.

They had met after Alice’s first week in Gunsee, on a Grasei, which was this world’s way of naming what she presumed was a Sunday. She had been trying some kind of cocktail in a bar. The [Bartender] called it ‘Crow’s Glory’, a drink made in honor of a [King] on another continent. It was this pitch-black liquid that had a taste reminiscent of cognac with a shot of some sweet yellow substance in the center. If you looked at the cocktail from the top it looked a lot like an eye staring right at you and being very judgemental.

Anyways, she’d been nursing her drink, and like you’ve all probably guessed, Averick here decided to hit on her, because that’s what always happens. As you can all probably guess, the tipsy boy failed miserably and, because he couldn’t admit defeat, decided to keep trying, making an idiot of himself and managing, this way, to at least befriend her.

Since then, he’d come to know the girl better. And he understood one very important thing about her: Alice was crazy.

Maybe it was the insomnia, most probably it was just her, but she was not normal. In that, she kept poisonous plants in her backyard, in a separate zone from the ones she was growing to make medicines. Also, she had accidentally set on fire the shed in the back when she’d tried, and failed, to make some rubbing alcohol.

"Time is relative and I’m sleepy, what is it?"

"The things you asked for have arrived. The [Merchant] brought it to Herman this morning. He told me to come call you."

Now, Averick had seen a lot of things in his rather short life. Or, at least, that’s what he liked to say whenever he tried to hit on a girl that caught his fancy. He was a Don Giovanni like that. Anyways, he’d ‘seen a lot of things’, but the borderline creepy smile that appeared on the girl’s face when he told her that, paired with the relief and gratitude in her eyes, was a mix he wouldn’t forget anytime soon.

"Thank you," was all she said, before walking away towards the not-really-but-entirely-too-far town. Her sleepy brain told her she’d have to do something about that. Maybe build a car, or move the house. To which she answered with a shush and a reminder of how she’d burned down the shed in the back just by trying to make alcohol.

In ten minutes she had entered the town and reached a small building on a corner. A big sign on top of the door read ‘Wood’s Solutions’. Personally, she didn’t like the name, but Herman had told her that was also sort of on purpose. It was so bad, he said, that people remembered it just because of that. Sure, afterwards, when they told someone to give the place a try, they said things like 'You can’t get the place wrong, it’s the corner shop with the ugliest name around', but that helped too.

As she walked in front and peered inside, she saw rows upon rows of bottles lining various shelves, all divided in categories. Closest to the door were the classics: healing potions, mana potions and stamina potions. They were the most requested ones after all. Further away, though, one could find stranger things, from invisibility potions to something called a food potion.

She opened the door and walked in with a little pep in her step.

"Heeeermaaaaaaan, where are you? Averick told me you have my things!"

A gruff voice from the back of the shop answered back: "I’m here you dimwit, where else would I be?"

"I don’t know, maybe for once you decided to get that sorry ass of yours outta here, take the stick up your ass out and have some fun outside."

That was the sort of relationship the two had: a constant stream of friendly insults flying around the shop as they worked in relative harmony. The man found her strange because of the way she kept acting, while she found him strange because he was not human.

Indeed, Herman was a beastkin. A bear beastkin, in particular.

They were a race present especially on the continent she found herself on, Eva. Originating from the jungle down south, they were basically humanoid animals. Naturally nobody said that to their faces, not unless they wanted said faces to stay where they were, or keep the form they had. Because describing them that way made them sound like savages, which they weren’t.

Something meowed under her, and Alice looked down at a small black kitten with startingly blue eyes sitting there. Her name was Lilith, and she was one of Herman’s pets, the other being a big ass black wolf dog ironically called Gold. He liked to joke that he called him that way because he had a heart of gold, which was true, since he had been really docile when she’d gone to see him, accompanied by the beastkin.

The bearman walked out of the door to the back, one hand on his hip, the other holding a small bottle of dark blue liquid and a packet of seeds.

"I’ve been working on brewing you a High Grade Sleeping Potion with this Moonleaf since it came here this morning, but if you’re gonna be an ungrateful little bitch I’ll just keep all this to myself."

Silence reigned in the room for a moment as Herman the [Pet Owner]/[Woodland Alchemist] and Alice the [Apprentice Alchemist]/[Gardener] stared at each other.

Then: "Did I say just how shiny and well kept your fur looks today?"

The bearman broke down into laughter, making Alice smile. He was a gruff bastard, but of the good sort.

"Take it, and get yourself a good night’s sleep. If this doesn’t work then go pay a visit to Sammy."

"Isn’t he the [Smith]?"

"Yes. He’ll knock you out with a hammer," he laughed, then turned back towards the back of the shop, closing the door, but not before making sure Lilith hadn’t walked into the back. She hadn’t. She was still staring at Alice. And she kept staring through the glass as she walked out and back home.

----------------------------------------

That night, Alice sat on her bed, holding the bottle of Sleep Potion with nearly religious reverence.

This was a bit of an extreme solution, even Herman had told her as much, but she had already tried brewing something with the valerian she had bought from the beastkin’s supplier, but it had only made her sleepy, which then made her disgruntled when she didn't manage to actually fall asleep.

This was it. Either the potion worked, or the hammer most certainly would, concussions and brain damage be damned!

She popped the cork off the vial and drank it all in one go. The taste was sweet, reminding her slightly of the cookies her mother used to make. Images of chocolate chips and creamy inside with hints of cinnamon filled her mind as she lay down in bed.

…

And didn’t fall asleep.

She stayed there, on the bed, face looking at the wooden ceiling as she slowly counted sheep. After reaching four hundred she began counting wolves, and imagined them entering the pen and devouring those useless animals that couldn’t even help her fall asleep. After reaching four hundred again and having caused a massacre, she decided she needed to get out of her room before she decided that a repeat of the ‘Backyard Fire Incident’ was necessary to the inside of her room.

She calmly raised herself up, feeling more awake than when she’d gone to bed, put on some woolly slippers she’d bought after Herman had paid her first paycheck, and walked out.

And stopped in her tracks, as she was greeted by a sheep pen filled with running and bahing sheep that were being played with by wolves.

All around her, a clearing of bright orange grass surrounded her, searing her eyes and making her brain go haywire as it tried to understand what was happening, the hamster in her brain desperately trying to find an extinguisher somewhere and realizing that those budget cuts to the brain department weren’t such a bright idea.

In all that chaos, a jovial voice spoke: -Ah, a new one appears!-

Alice turned towards the source of the voice, seeing it was a tall fellow wearing a fedora and a fox mask that reminded her a lot of those kitsune masks she saw in manga. Apart from that, he was dressed sharply, as if he were ready for an interview with some big company, wearing a black tuxedo with a white button-up shirt underneath, black trousers and black leather shoes.

-Welcome to the Land of Dreams, newbie.-

[Dreamer Class Obtained!]

[Dreamer Level 1!]

[Skill – Walk the Dream Obtained!]

[Skill – Fall Asleep Obtained!]