“Got it…Hang on, didn’t you say she only asks you to ‘rid the garden of rats,’ not exterminate them? What if you try to scare them off or something?”
“Check out the big brain on Mahan! You think you’re the only one who’s thought of that? Why the players have tried everything they can think of! They tried merely catching the rats, putting them in cages and taking them to the hag. But it wasn’t that easy: If you catch too few, the hag won’t count the quest complete. And if you catch too many, the Ratherd shows up and it’s back to square one. But let’s say that you hit the sweet spot and catch just the right amount. First of all, you get half the Rep—a penalty for scaring the old lady. She’s terrified of rats it turns out. Secondly, there’s no Ratherd, so no loot—although that’s not a big deal. If you release the rats, even all the way in Kartoss, or if they escape somehow—you’re awarded the ‘Liar’ Achievement and your reputation with the Province drops by 3000. If you slaughter the rats after the quest’s been marked complete—the hag dies that night. That’s the deal and that’s why she’s an old hag. Our only hope right now is that she catches someone unimportant and leaves the square. She’ll get offed tonight then and we’ll have some peace for the new players for a week.”
I looked at the NPC looking for her ‘prey’ with astonishment—she seemed a fairly respectable old lady…I was filled with such a desire to solve this riddle that I asked Fleita to stay in place and approached the grandma. There aren’t any penalizing quests in Barliona! There are only players who fail quests by doing them wrong.
“Greetings, madam!” I said to the old lady, who had an odd sounding name: Agrippina Dormidina. “Do you require some assistance? You wouldn’t happen to have some chore you need done?”
“Why, yes I do, young man!” The old lady perked up. “A neighbor of mine, the Happy Milkman (that’s what people call him—I don’t remember his name) has lost a cow. She tore the rope, the silly heifer, and wandered off into the forest. He’s so distraught, you should see him. He’s not here looking for help because he’s back home waiting for her. Could you, kind stranger, pay a visit to my neighbor and help him with his sorrow?”
Quest available: “The Sorrows of the Happy Milkman.” Description: The Happy Milkman’s cow escaped from her pen and ran off to the forest. Find the lost little cudster and bring her back to her owner. Quest type: Common. Reward: A jug of milk, +40 Reputation with Lestran Province, +200 XP. Penalty for failing/refusing the quest: None.
Why look at that! So it turns out that my Exalted Reputation keeps the granny for offering me the rat-catching quest, so she’s given me some other quest to find a cow! Thanks, but no thanks! I didn’t come here for this! Accepting the quest so as not to upset the grandma, I decided to ask her some more questions:
“Thank you, I will make sure to go visit your neighbor and find out what happened to his cow. I heard that you’ve been having some trouble with rodents—maybe I could help you with that too? I’m a very good rat catcher!”
“Oh but it wouldn’t do for me to ask a nobleman like yourself to bother with such a trifle,” said the old lady bashfully. “If the Governor catches wind that I’ve asked an Earl to dig around my vegetable garden, why, he’ll confiscate my land so that I don’t trouble the aristocracy in the future. Please don’t be cross with me, your highness—I can’t ask you to do such a thing.”
“So it’s all right to ask me to go find a cow, but rat catching is out?”
“A cow is a cow! A cow is a livelihood. Bringing her back is the noblest thing anyone could do. There are others to take care of the rats.”
“What about me? Will you give me the quest?” said Fleita, ignoring my request to hang back.
“Oh god almighty! An undead monster!” The old lady jumped back in fright. “What is the world coming to? A hideous cadaver terrifying honest citizens in the town center!”
Bystanders began to notice us at this point—players, NPCs, and I even noticed the town guard pop up in the near distance—so I began to feel a bit uncomfortable. I will have to have a chat with my student about obeying my orders.
“I’m not hideous!” Fleita pouted, crossing her arms over her chest. “I want to help you kill the rats!”
“Why, you could simply take a walk through the garden and all the rats would drop dead from the sight of ya,” someone yelled from the crowd around us. This was followed by further comments, which at first were relatively harmless but gradually grew meaner as the spectators got a chance to appraise the girl’s costume. Fleita craned her neck left and right trying to get a look at the hecklers, but the old lady drew closer to her and asked with an intrigued voice:
“Did I hear you say that you want to kill some rats?”
“Yes.” When Fleita understood that looking for the hecklers was hopeless, since the whole crowd was heckling, she turned back to the old lady—who grimaced, but didn’t start this time.
“I won’t let you into my house,” the old lady decided. “You might ruin it. As for the rats—since you’re volunteering your service, you are more than welcome. Come by my vegetable patch today around four. I’ll show you where those pests are hiding. Will you come?”
It looked like a quest notification had popped up for Fleita because she spent several minutes staring dully into the distance and then finally nodded with satisfaction.
“I’ll be there!” the girl replied decisively.
“Very good!” the granny grinned. “In that case, I’ll go take a stroll around my vegetable patch. Just don’t come any earlier than four. I won’t be home.”
The crowd began to gradually dissolve, though several individuals couldn’t help but make several more remarks about Fleita’s intellectual capacity for volunteering to destroy her own reputation, so I took the girl by the arm and led her in the direction of the city gates.
“But the old lady said it’s still too early,” the girl tried to resist, but it wasn’t so easy to knock me off my path. The time had come to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s.
“And why have we stopped?” Fleita asked after several minutes, once we had left the city and stopped not far from the entrance to the village where the old lady and the Happy Milkman lived. “There’s that village!”
I got the protective shroud from my inventory—without which Anastaria wouldn’t even sit down to eat—and activated it, hiding us from any prying eyes and ears. Then, I sat down on the ground and gestured to the girl to sit down beside me.
“What is it now?” came the question, but the girl took her seat.
“You know, Fleita, the time has come for us to have a chat.”
“About what?”
“About you, about your training and behavior. Of cabbages and kings.”
“Cabbage? What’s that have to do with it?” the girl asked, surprised.
“Never mind, we’ll drop the cabbages and kings, since you don’t seem to get the joke anyway. But tell me—why the hell would you get involved with the granny?”
“I wanted the quest…”
“Great! And what had I told you to do?”
“To hang back. But what are you, my dad or husband, to order me around, to tell me what to do and what not to do?”
“Didn’t you agree to do as I commanded if I became your teacher?”
“For you to be my teacher, you actually have to teach me. Have you even once tied to instruct me how a Shaman should behave?”
“Do you not have the brains to figure out that your training is already under way at full steam? Do you need a little sign that says ‘training ongoing?’”
“What are you getting all aggro with me for all of a sudden? Big deal—so I got a quest…”
“It’s not about the quest. It’s about your attitude. If you want to keep being my student, you’ll have to follow certain rules.”
“You said yourself that there aren’t any rules for Shamans. That they make the rules as they go! So it looks like you really don’t follow rules, but I have to de
al with one restriction after another!”
“Fleita…” I sighed deeply, calming my nerves. “Let’s try again. I don’t like it when you don’t do what I asked you to do directly. If you feel like continuing in that vein, then let’s part ways. If you were an NPC, I’d understand why you act like you’ve just graduated kindergarten. But you’re a grown up girl, so I’d like to treat you as such.”
“Mahan, I really don’t understand you. At first you’d say that, as a Shaman, I have to follow my feelings in how I act. I started doing that and then you tell me off and scold me like a dad scolds some naughty girl who’s stayed out too late!”
“You’re telling me that your premonition told you that you should approach the old woman and take the quest?” I smirked.
“Well, yeah! Stop laughing at me!”
“Tell me, how old are you anyway?”
“Seventeen, but I’ll be eighteen soon…”
“I’m thirty-two. I’m practically twice as old as you are. And yet you keep poking and messing with me as if I’m someone your age. Did I miss the part where we decided that we’d be equals?”
“But this is a game.” The girl’s eyes filled with such a deep puzzlement at my words that I even began to feel a little awkward. “Everyone acts like this with one another here…So you’re bothered because I don’t talk to you like to my dad?” The last word was marked with such evident irony that I all but started.
“You’ve misunderstood me again…”
“So then explain…please…more accurately what you would like from me…sir!”
I shut my eyes wearily, realizing that our conversation had reached a dead end and that I’d only made things worse. I hadn’t managed to get my position across to the girl, nor managed to understand where she was coming from. What I should do right now is stand up tell her that our meeting had been a mistake and return to Altameda—forever forgetting about the Zombie. But I recalled what Kornik had asked me. An NPC of his level wouldn’t forgive me just like that. It follows that someone’s pulling the strings somewhere and the last thing I should do is abandon the girl’s training. There was nothing left to do but take a hold of my emotions and make another attempt to explain myself:
“Fleita…I really dislike it when you act inappropriately and when you ignore what I tell you to do…”
“There you go! You sound just like my dad now! This is impossible! This sucks…I came to this game in order to get away from all the rules and it turns out that there are more of them here than back in reality! You’re right—if this keeps going on like this, then it is better if we go our separate ways! I thought that you were a true Shaman! But you’re just like everyone else! Feelings, emotions, the way of the Shaman…It’s all talk—all you care about is proper behavior.”
Jumping to her feet, the girl dashed out from under the shroud of silence and ran in the direction of the village.
“You know, brother,” Draco said pensively, looking after the receding girl, “If you ever catch me behaving like that, promise me that you’ll scold me and remind me of this…Why didn’t you put the little brat in her place?”
“Fleita is right though—I am a nobody. She and I aren’t even officially teacher and student. We’re just two Free Citizens, of which one asked another to teach her something. It seems like I’m not meant to be a true teacher, since I utterly have no idea what’s going on in the Zombie’s head…But okay, what’s the point of regretting something that never was. Let’s go see the Milkman—we need to find his cow.”
“You’re not going to help her take care of the rats?”
“No. She made her choice…”
“It’s too bad about the granny. They’ll kill her…”
“She knows how to return from the Gray Lands…She’s a pretty strange NPC, don’t you think? Hardly an ordinary villager, that one… Where’d she come from anyway? Did the Emperor place the seal of return on her?”
Only having said this out loud did I suddenly realize that the granny really was not what she appeared to be at first glance. It wasn’t even the rats—pretty much all the NPCs would fall ill if you failed a quest. Their Hit Points would drop to single digits and they’d temporarily go somewhere. But no one ever died in Barliona—to return again one week later. Even when there’d be a city raid, the NPCs would survive…Something tells me—hello, premonition, my old friend—that I should take a closer look at this old lady.
“Draco, do you mind if I ask you watch over Fleita?”
“But you said that you don’t want to help her.”
“I didn’t say help, I want you to watch over her. And not even her, so much as the rats. Remember Beatwick?”
“Is that where I played with Clouter?”
“The very one. So, if you remember, there weren’t any rats there. At all. And yet here there’s not only rats, but even a Ratherd. We need to figure out where they come from.”
“All right. I’ll do it. Say, you’re at Dragon Rank 11 now. Did you see our father?”
“Yes. We had a chat about the history of Dragons in Barliona. It’s a good thing you asked. I completely forgot about it during that week I spent crafting the clan rings. Anyway, our father told me that…”
Your Totem has gained a level. …
Your Totem has gained a new ability: ‘Whirlwind of Time’—Flight speed increased by 300% for five minutes. Ability cooldown time: 50 minutes.
Your Totem can now carry a player.
The duration your Totem may spend in Barliona has increased to 7 hours per day.
“So that means that I had another brother? That my name is really Shiel and that dad will die in a month?”
“That is correct.”
“So why haven’t we gone to Armard yet?”
“Where?”
“The capital of the Shadow Empire? All Barliona is talking about is how the Free Citizens are marching to its walls and vanquishing all the servants of Shadow in their path…We should be there with them!”
“Draco—I mean, Shiel—what do you want me to do? All my Shamanic powers have taken a two-month-long sabbatical.”
“But you’re still a Dragon! Come on, brother! It’s only now that I’ve reached Level 103 that I’m starting to understand that the most valuable thing in life is family. Friends come and go—students do too…you saw how she ran off…But if our father leaves us, there won’t be anyone to take his place! And…you know what…When you told me my name is Nilirgnis, I asked you to keep calling me Draco. I’d prefer if you did the same now too… Maybe in Vilterax I’m Shiel, but here my name is Draco…”
“You’re right,” I said pensively, shooting Draco a sidelong glance. My Totem had grown—and not merely physically. The Dragon wheeling around me right now was three-four meters from nose tip to tail tip—and was no smaller in spirit. Draco had become…well…perhaps not an adult, but certainly a teenager. It was like he was now 17–18 in human years… “Okay, let’s wrap it up here and go do that Dungeon with Kreel. We’ll help him kill a Dragon of the Blue Flame and go to Armard afterwards.”
“Who is Kreel?”
“A Titan…”
“Another foe?” Draco smirked. “You seem to be collecting enemies—first a Siren, now a Titan. All you’re missing is a Minotaur and a Cyclops and you’ll have the full set.”
“But you know yourself now that the list of our so-called enemies includes several races that we know of only by name. And that Titans as it turns out aren’t the great enemies they were made out to be. If we speak honestly, it was we who were the enemies of the entire world…”
“You are right. Now I know…I still can’t believe it. Okay, let’s head out. I will look after Fleita, while you deal with the Milkman. The sooner we wrap it up here, the sooner we can go save our father…”
The house of the Happy Milkman was really situated beside the granny’s house. Fleita was sitting in front of the gate to the latter, acting like she didn’t know I was there. She even turned away demonstratively wh
en Draco cracked up at her turned-up nose. She really was a girl with a character—and not the sweetest one…I wonder if she’s like this in real life too…
“Greetings, your highness,” a man in a white frock said to me. He was fiddling with a torn rope and bell in his hands and kept looking in the direction of the woods.
“I heard you need help…”
“What? Who? Are you here to see me?” the NPC said puzzled. Then, however, he gathered his thoughts and told me about his tragedy—how his only livelihood had run off to the forest which was brimming with wolves. And how he’ll never get first prize in dairy expositions now and how, in general, all the cows of this world have it in for him.
“Why’d you decide that all of a sudden? It’s not like cows have a professional guild whose leader has decided that you should punished.”
“What else am I supposed to think when these ungrateful beasts slip out of their pens every day and run off into the woods? In the five years that I’ve been in the dairy business, I’ve gone through five hundred cows. All of them run away to the forest first chance they get. Sometimes they’re brought back by kind strangers like you, but the brainless things still only want to get back to the woods, where the wolves eat them sooner or later. These overgrown babies are so fearless and obsessed with dying that the cow vendor is all but camped in front of my house. By the way, you don’t feel like hunting some wolves, do you? I have nothing to give you as a bounty, but I heard that Zane the Tanner likes a good wolf fur. He’d be happy to take a dozen off your hands, and I wouldn’t mind seeing some payback for my little heifers.”
“How can you afford all this?” I asked surprised. “A cow isn’t cheap.”
“Every time I buy a new one, I insure it with the Mayor. They even came to check on me already—to see if I don’t let the cows out on purpose to collect on the insurance. And, can you believe it, the cows just scurried past the investigators into the forest! They caught one and put her back into the pen, and came back the next day to check again. And that mad cow galloped off into the woods again…Oh…How I’m tired of all this! Five years and every day it’s the same old thing. They’ve even started calling me the Happy Milkman as a joke—I’ve never even tried a drop of my cows’ milk. I never manage to milk them in time!”
The Karmadont Chess Set (The Way of the Shaman: Book #5) LitRPG series Page 21