Still staring at the screen, she starts surveying her surroundings to see if there are any living and breathing organisms around her, “One can never be too careful”.

After looking around meticulously, while only using the 2 side pieces of her vision, she confirmed that there were no threats in the immediate surroundings. She sat down and focused on the screen that was still in the middle of her vision.

The message: “Would you like to start assistance functions” still being displayed on it.

“screen….. wait can I call it screen to ask it something ?”

And the screen replied: “Yes, Screen is perfectly fine”

“Well then, Screen, is it possible to explain to me what these assistance Functions are?”

Basic functions that will be unlocked are:

* Data storage

* Data transfer

* Probing

* Elemental vision

Ayana was dumbfoundedly looking at the Screen, “if it has a data storage function, does that mean I don’t need to read the books anymore to know what is in them?”

“that is a sure thing, just tell me what you want to know about data that you had me copy and I will transfer it to you”.

“Well that makes the choice easy, let’s activate those assistance functions immediately.”

“this is going to hurt a little” was shown on the screen before an immense headache started…….

Ayana kept her consciousness but that was all that could be said about the situation she found herself in. halfway drained of her spirit and her body aching all over, not even able to stand up right after the Screen stopped activating.

“You could have warned me about that” she sounded agitated but grasped her head, after she finished mumbling all those words, because it still hurt like mad.

“Sorry for that, but if I told you it would hurt, you would have waited till you were back from the inspection rounds and I seemed like you needed help right away.” Was displayed on the Screen.

Ayana tried looking at the Screen to read the message, but her headache was still too strong to properly read the message. “Screen can you tell me what is on the Screen? I can’t read it because of the headache you gave me”

“Sure, I can tell you what is on displayed on the Screen, I have a direct line with you conscious after activating the assistance functions after all.” a sweet mildly robotic like female voice answered in her mind.

The voice continued to tell Ayana what was displayed on the Screen….

“well duh, of course I would have waited, hack I would even have prepared myself for it at the least, but now I had no foreknowledge, no nothing and it hurt like hell.”

She reacted a tad too quick and too loud, because her head started spinning and hurting again after raging against the voice of the Screen.

Ayana took a short rest too regroup herself and stood up onto her feet on the trail albeit with caution not to fall over due to balancing issues.

“Screen, could you activated the elemental vision for me please, let’s see what it does”

“command received, commencing features……” followed by a bundle of warnings and blaring sounds.

In less than 5 seconds her vision started blurring, after that it started changing colours, bright ones poured in her vision while the dark ones where getting pushed out. After the change the plants where overlaid with a bright green moving blob, whereas the ground was a dark orange or brownish tinted blob, the other colours where there as well but far less obvious like the grass and the plants.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Although her vision now was still way too blurred to even know if there was a bush of a plant standing next to her on the side of the road, let alone find the water grass she was supposed to find deep in the sprites territory.

Deep wrinkles started showing on her forehead and she got a little annoyed, “how is this an assistance function, while it only makes my vision worse?” this way it is even worse than before.

“it is supposed to show you what has radiation energy and what has not, but this zone is in range of the deviant tower, so everything is infused with radiation energy.”

Would be nice if there was less of it…. So Ayana spoke with her mind to the screen again. “screen can you dial it down?”

“yes, that is possible, how much would you like to dial it down?”

“Can you make it so that normal plants and creatures show no radiation colour, and scale it for the things that do based on the amount of radiation that I am giving off? “

“Will do that right away…” and her vision became less blurry till the point where there was no more blobs, just the normal surroundings, but in the distance there were some blue figures outlined as part of the new vision.

Those are probably the sprites in their base camp. She could also make out a couple of single silhouettes moving through short seas of greenish blue energy, ‘those must be the guards in the gardens’.

At least I still have to walk before I get close to the first garden.

After traversing the path for some time Ayana reached the first garden, although it was still some distance from the path, she did not need to travel more on the path,

only outside of the path she would be fair game for the sprites, so she stayed on the path and started formulating a plan.

Let’s see where the sprites are at the moment, one is 3 gardens away and the other is even further, let’s see how many gardens are under the watch of the nearest guard and she took a seat on the path, with her already dirty robe on the floor and her on top of it while still wearing it, she started observing the sprites behaviour.

The sprites kept moving slowly from one field on to the next, and after some time had passed they stopped moving forward, turned around and started moving backwards to the first field.

Ayana had kept track off the time it took the sprite to get from the third garden to the seventh, 30 minutes, that should be enough if your silent enough.

‘I’ll have to be as quiet as I can be, wait till the sprite is on it’s way to the fourth garden, at that time it should be the safest to start cutting the grass on the backside of the gardens, that way the guard will not notice it as soon as it returns.

And so the biding of her time began, she had to wait for the sprite to finish it’s round, luckily there was no time restriction on when she had to be back from the inspection.

When the sprite finally left the third garden again she started moving, on to the first garden, with the makeshift knife in hand, to the first stalk behind the fence.

As soon as the first one was done she started with the second one, and so on, until the screen told her that her 20 minutes were up.

20 minutes was the time limit she had set for herself when she was still waiting for the guard, 5 for the trip to the garden and 5 for the return trip before the guard would turn around.

Hurriedly she returned to the trail on which she should be, and she started biding her time again hoping the guard wouldn’t be on high alert.

And so she did 2 more runs, one to the other corner of the backside of the first garden and one to the closeted backside corner of the second garden. She had to do 3 runs because she only could get 15 by the end of run 2.

As she was still celebrating while already on the trail, she could hear the screams of the guard that finally took notice of the missing water grass. She turned around to look at the gardens and there appeared more and more blueish silhouettes at the first and second garden.

“Luckily I am already done with the water grass, or this would get a hell of a lot more difficult to do.” And with that thought she went on with the trail to the end of the water sprite territory. And with that also the end of the inspection round for this time.

Finally passing the last set of bushes that marked the end of the sprite territory, that’s when the back entrance to the tower came in to view and with that also the other path’s ending, from which Garrick appeared not long after she passed the bushes.

If one looked very secure at him, one would notice that he was walking with some kind of slight limb. “probably from the swamp alligators”

But he only nodded to Ayana as they met up where the paths joined together.

As expected from a fellow apprentice, they would only talk about things they had accomplished if they had the power to defend themselves, otherwise they would just keep silent and go on with their daily routines.

The last part of the trail was traversed in silence by both of them, neither was in the mood to talk, nor would they have to. As soon as they got close to the door, they opened and the apprentice that handed out the talismans was waiting on the other side of them.

Both Garrick and Ayana handed in the materials that were required to pass the quest and both went their separate ways. Ayana headed up stairs to look at what she got as extra’s this time, and that was quite a lot.

She takes out the murlock corpse and the spear that she hastily put in her pouch and starts examining them, but before she can even start with the close up looking at the murlock, the front door of her room bursts open and Vayentha barges inside, she slams the door shut, but before she starts rambling she looks in the room and her mouth falls wide open.