“We’re finally here, huh?” Q faced the spooky looking forest in front of her.
After being attacked by the wolves, no one could sleep so they instead gathered around the fireplace and waited until just before sunrise before heading out. In the end they were able to reach the forest during the afternoon on the third day. Luckily they didn’t encounter any nasty surprises like the wolf pack, but they did have to deal with random enemies jumping out of bushes sometimes. Sometimes a player would have to temporarily log out, but thanks to the Cube of Companionship they were able to continue the journey without much problem.
For the most part travel was boring, so the players came up with different ways to entertain themselves. Q began to use her spells to get experience for them, Brie walked with strange footwork while talking with Q, and Kukis was always leaving the group to gather random herbs she noticed. Sir Albert’s team was discussing the battle with the wolves, and began coming up with different plans to deal with a situation like that in the future.
Eventually they were met with the sight of the Forest of Fog, and what they saw was incredibly strange. Tall dead trees were packed closely together, with their branches twisting around each other, almost as if it was making a natural wall. The stranger thing though, was the fog which covered the forest. The fog was like a rolling wave of water that stopped just outside the edge of the treeline. When Q approached the fog to touch it, it seemed a little solid as there was a bit of resistance to her touch.
“This is interesting…” Q began to mess around with the fog as it vaguely reminded her of cotton candy. Seeing Q play with the fog, Brie and Kukis also came by and tried touching it themselves. While the three girls were playing around in the fog, Sir Albert let out a slight cough.
“*Ahem*. It seems that this is where we shall part ways.” Sir Albert bowed towards the girls.
“Yeah, if you find anything interesting in there you better tell us!” Magnus smiled as he stroked his beard.
“Good luck to all of ye!” Baldur gave them a thumbs up.
“Make sure to be careful you three! I won’t be there to heal you anymore.” Celinus laughed a little before turning around.
“...” Sal’ Karn didn’t say anything and stood still for a moment, before muttering “...be cautious.” He then turned around and left, and the girls also made their farewells.
Now that Sir Albert’s party had left, the girls also began their investigation of the forest. The first thing they did was look for a place they could enter the forest from. Since the trees were so densely packed, they had to walk around the perimeter of the forest in order to find a gap between the trees. After half an hour of walking, they finally managed to find a gap which was just enough to let Q and Brie squeeze through.
“I… don’t think I can fit through there.” Kukis said, eyeing the gap.
“No problem.You two just wait out here and you’ll be on the other side in no time.” Q began to wiggle her way through the gap and disappeared behind the wall of trees. For a moment everything was silent until they heard Q’s shout from the other side. “Okay, logout and log in again!” Brie and Kukis exchanged looks, then logged out of the game. The two of them reappeared in a flash of light inside the forest, and found that Q had put down the Cube of Companionship in order to let them inside.
“Nice going Q.” Kukis grinned.
“That was… an interesting tactic.” Brie commented.
“Meh. It’s a classic exploitation technique. Anyway, this forest is pretty spooky huh?” Q gestured at the scenery surrounding them. The dead trees branches loomed above their heads, and cast a dark shadow despite it still being the middle of the day. The ground also seemed to be dead, as it was dry and cracked, with very little vegetation around. The most disturbing of all though, was the fog. The fog was so thick that the girls were unable to see more than two meters in front of them, and it coiled around their bodies like a snake.
Once Brie and Kukis got a good look at the area (or at least as much as they could with the fog covering their view), they slowly began to feel a sense of dread. “I must admit, for a ‘game’, this feels very… unnerving.” Brie’s ears were constantly twitching as she looked around her.
“Makes me think of Silent Hill…” Kukis rubbed her shoulders as she suddenly felt a chill go down her back.
“Well at least there aren’t any monsters… Not yet, that is.” Q smiled as she seemed unaffected by the creepy aura of the forest.
“D-don’t set up flags like that! And actually, why aren’t you affected by this forest? Isn’t it super scary?”
“Hmm… I don’t really know. Maybe it’s because of my stats or something? My wisdom is fairly high, and having high wisdom makes you more resistant to mental attacks so…” Q shrugged her shoulders.
“That makes sense. Ah, I have just the thing!” Kukis went through her inventory and pulled out two potions. “I was making some potions for temporary stat boosts, and just so happened to make a few that raised wisdom. Here,” she passed over one of the potions to Brie. “Bottoms up!”
Brie looked at the potion suspiciously for a moment, but after a bit of coaxing from Q and Kukis she drank it. “Blech… this potion’s taste is incredibly unpleasant.”
“Haha, sorry. I’m still doing some experiments on changing the taste of potions. Just making them normally seems to make them all come out bitter. But hey, the forest doesn’t feel as creepy anymore does it?”
“It would seem that way.” Brie nodded in affirmation.
“With that out of the way, let’s continue searching shall we?” Q began heading towards the center of the forest, and the other two followed.
Although they were walking forward, it was quite difficult since they couldn’t see much of where they were going. Not to mention that stray roots would constantly mess up their footing, and walking through the fog felt like wading through water. At one point Q decided to try to get rid of the fog, so she used [Gust] in an effort to blow some of the fog away. The results were completely unexpected though, as the fog recoiled and disappeared wherever the spell traveled.
Spurred on by this discovery, Q decided to use [Ember], and a large area around the three was cleared away. “Wow… this is way better.” With the area around the girls cleared, their travels through the forest was made much easier. While walking with her [Ember] out Q noticed that it slowly drained her mana, but it only drained one point every five seconds so she could keep it out for a long time. She also tried to invoke a second one once she could recast [Ember], but the new one just overwrote the old one and wasted some mana.
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The girls continued walking around for five minutes, when suddenly something appeared in front of them. The thing seemed to be a cluster of fog which lazily floated in front of the girls. Just as Q was going to say something, the cluster began to gather more fog around itself until it created a small orb with glowing eyes.
[Fog Wisp] - Level 20
“Ooooh~ That looks kind of cute.” Q stood still as she watched the wisp slowly approach their party.
“Do you think it’ll attack us?” Kukis wondered.
“It does not seem to be hostile…” Brie didn’t sound particularly concerned, but she still drew her sword and prepared for a potential battle.
While the girls talked, the wisp approached Q and floated there, staring at her. “Hey little guy, what are you up to?” Q got rid of her [Ember] and held the wisp in her hands. For a moment the wisp seemed to try to escape, but then closed its eyes and became still.
“Oh man, I think my title finally worked!” Q was jumping up and down excitedly as she caressed the wisp in her hands. Since Brie and Kukis seemed confused, she decided to explain its effects to them. “You see, I have a small chance of getting small mobs to be friendly to me. Since we’ve been fighting large monsters and stuff it’s never activated, but I finally get to cuddle small animals! Not that this thing is an animal though…”
“That sounds wonderful but… perhaps you should let go of it.” Brie said cautiously.
“Hm? Why?”
“It is… flashing.” Brie pointed at the wisp in Q’s arms.
Q looked down and saw that the fog wisp was indeed flashing with a bright light. Despite seeing this, Q had no intentions of letting go of it as she continued to pet it. “Don’t worry so much. It’s friendly to me so there’s no way that it-” *BOOOOM* Q’s sentence was interrupted as the wisp exploded in her arms and sent her flying through the air.
““Q!”” Brie and Kukis rushed over to where Q landed and saw that she had lost a tenth of her health. Q was laying face-up and wore a betrayed and confused expression on her face. “Wispers… why hast thou betrayed me!?” Q cried out as she lamented on the ground.
“You already named it!?” Kukis retorted.
“Q, I am sorry but we have more pressing matters to attend to.” With Brie’s words, the other two players looked up and found that they were surrounded by dozens of Fog Wisps!
“Yeah, this could be bad…” Kukis brought out a sword and faced the wisps.
“...” Q was silent for a moment, but then she slowly picked herself up and cast [Ember]. “No mercy…” she muttered as she also cast [Gust] and fired her combination spell at one of the wisps.
When the spell hit the wisp, it immediately began flashing and within a few seconds it exploded! None of the girls were near it so they weren’t hurt, but some other nearby wisps were hit by the explosion. Those wisps also began flashing and exploded as well, creating a large chain reaction of explosions.
The chain continued until it reached the wisps near the girls, at which point they began to run. Explosions were heard behind them as leapt over roots and ducked under branches in an effort to escape the fog wisps. Finally, the sounds of explosions stopped and the girls looked back to see that all the fog wisps were dead.
“That was pretty intense.” Kukis looked around for any more signs of the fog wisps.
“At the very least, it seems to be over. Those were quite the terrifying enemies.” Brie lowered her sword.
“Not yet it isn’t. More are coming!” Just as Q finished warning the two, more fog wisps appeared from their surroundings!
From here the girls tried to keep their distance from the wisps which worked to an extent, but some wisps would appear right in front of them and immediately began flashing. A few times Brie and Kukis would try to slash or stab at the wisps, but their attacks went right through and only kept the wisps in place for a few seconds before they continued moving again. Q refrained from shooting out her spells, but she did keep up an [Ember] to keep the fog away from them. After a few minutes of this, they were eventually completely surrounded and had nowhere to go.
“Ahh damn. These wisps are really nasty.” Kukis gritted her teeth.
“But they feel really nice…” Q looked at the wisps with a longing expression.
“It seems that this will be my first ‘death’.” Brie frowned.
Just as the girls were about to give up, a powerful gust of wind surrounded them and blew away all of the wisps! While the girls were looking around them in confusion, a cloaked figure appeared from the trees.
“Hehehe. You know, all you really need to deal with these wisps is a wind spell.” A childish giggle came out from the cloaked figure.
“Oh… thanks, um…” Q felt slightly embarrassed as she hadn’t thought about using just her [Gust] spell.
“The name’s Wendy. Apprentice to the great witch Pa- ouch!” Just as the figure was introducing herself, another cloaked person appeared and smacked her on the head.
“What did I say about talking to outsiders?” The second person said with a stern voice.
“Um, um… don’t trust them...?” Wendy said meekly.
“Exactly. For not following my instructions, you’ll be punished later. As for you three…” The cloaked person brought out a large staff hidden within their clothes. “State your business in this forest. Now.” They said menacingly as a powerful glow appeared on the tip of the staff.
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Mysterious people in the forest of fog... Also, Q just can't catch a break can she? The moment she can cuddle something fluffy, boom. It explodes in her face.
Oh well. Uh... I don't have anything special to say so... thanks for reading :)
Fun-fact: You can extend a battery's life (AAA or other such kinds) by putting them in a cold place like a freezer.