Roxyreads

Okay so, as a preface to any first time readers, this story was started on a whim and wasn't originally planned to be this regular, but seeing as how I've sunk an absolute ton of time into it thusfar, it's really become something more than I intended it to be.

I fully intend at some point to rewrite and condense the first few chapters into something a bit neater and cleaner with a more consistent tone, though I'm more focused on pushing forward for now.

With that in mind, please excuse the first few stumbling steps into the world and reserve judgement for a few chapters.

Original Foreword:

Spoiler

Announcement

Hey there, and thanks for taking a look at my humble first attempt at writing! I've been wanting to do this for a while and while I could give all sorts of disclaimers and point out the flaws in my work, I think I'll leave that to the critics.

All of this is for fun and I'm going to stick with it as long as it keeps being fun.

With that said, some recommended listening while you read is Offenbach's Galop Infernal, in a perfect world it would sync up with the action but this is not a perfect world.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy!

-Roxyreads

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This is the story of a girl named Amber.

She’s legally an adult, but never quite got past calling herself a girl;“Woman” never felt right as an identifier.

She’s about 5’6 with an uneven pale complexion, brown hair and brown eyes, a little bit over the mean as far as weight distribution goes, less athletic than most, more athletic than some. On the whole, average in most areas.

She enjoys cooking, video games, tabletop RPGs, trashy light novels, and dreams of one day owning her own cafe.

Of course, none of this is particularly relevant at the moment, she can hardly remember her own name, in fact the first thought going through her mind at the beginning of our tale is as follows:

‘Fuck! fuck! fuck me, fuck this!’

♦♦♦♦♦

Let us set the scene.

A beautiful forest stretches out as far as the eye can see, trees ancient and venerable reach into the sky and soft light filters through the canopy of branches to light the undergrowth; a light mist rolls over the ground despite it being close to noon, providing an ephemeral dreamlike quality.

Truly it would be picture perfect, the ideal place to take a photo for an ambient ‘sounds of nature’ album. With the tweeting of birds and the distant sound of a babbling brook, It would even be the perfect place to record such an album if not for one thing.

“Fuck! fuck! fuck me, fuck this!” A voice screams out, shredding the silence like tissue paper.

Amber was not having a good time.

She was currently running at full tilt while wearing well fitted but distinctly chafing leather armor with nothing underneath and carrying close to 50 lbs of miscellaneous gear on her back, at least at her current guess.

“You just had to drop me in the middle of a damn forest, didn’t you!” She shouted to the sky with the certainty of a madwoman or a prophet. Huffing and puffing heavily from wasting her breath through condemnation of some unseen force.

She’d been through some nasty situations before, but little can prepare you for being chased through the woods by a group of goblins and narrowly dodging badly fletched arrows.

Yes, goblins. Close to 4 feet tall, forest green with beady red eyes and more pertinent at the moment; armed to the teeth with shoddily made but brutally effective weapons. 

Five of the figures were tracking her through the brush, their knowledge of the terrain evening their odds of catching her despite her longer stride. They were close on her heels that she could smell them, a funky scent composed of sweat and blood among other more unpleasant substances.

“What the hell did I do to you little bastards? I literally just got here!” She shouted back as she vaulted over a log, displaying more athleticism than she had in years.

For a moment she almost gave in to her exhaustion before her motivation once again was laid plain by excitable and somewhat concerning laughter; the sort that is usually only produced by madmen throwing switches in laboratories and toddlers holding fragile objects while running away from authority figures.

No, no this was not a sustainable state of affairs; something needed to be done.

After some introspection and a daring leap over a crevasse leading into unknown depths, Amber came to this conclusion; One that I’m almost certain most of you would agree with.

Thinking, perhaps not as quickly as she’d like to believe, Amber reached into the side pouch of her backpack and scrambled around for something, anything useful. She pulled free a stoppered glass bottle filled with a swirling red fluid that seemed somewhere on the edge of vaporizing even in the sealed environment it was stored; as she would later come to find out, this was [Alchemical Fire]. 

She examined it for a sparse moment and considered her options before throwing it as well as caution to to the wind. She chucked it back blindly in the direction of the cackling and dove behind a boulder jutting from the landscape; crouching down and covering her ears expectantly while hoping beyond hope that she hadn't thrown a health potion at them.

There was an infinitely stretched instant of silence before a swelling plume of fire leapt up and a roar of heat and sound blew past her hiding place. The flames scorching the moss and lichen from the stone's surface as the bottled shattered and the alchemical concoction reacted violently with the air; The stuff was the very definition of bottled fire.

And then... silence.

The birds no longer chirped, having the good sense to evacuate after such a conflagration and the brook’s babbling was below the register of her shell shocked ears.

“Did I get th-”

A cheerful chime interrupted her query and she cursed.

An intangible blue window leapt up into her vision.

Faint flickering particles of light danced in the air for a moment before coalescing into a singular bright point and taking shape, the brightness slowly dimmed and left her prize; a pair of crudely blown glass bottles filled with murky fluid sat resting in the grass at her feet.

Amber examined them for a moment, wrestling back her uneven heaving breaths and willing her heart rate to stabilize.

She picked up the greenish one of them, which was by her own flawed and yet effective logic, most definitely the [Pitiful Stamina Potion]. Without pause she uncorked it, and chugged its contents and nearly spat them out. 

“Oh god that’s horrid! This is just a 5 hour energy shot!” she finally managed after coughing and gagging.

In her frustration, she threw the bottle at another adjacent bolder jutting from the forest floor in a search for catharsis.

She did not find it.

It bounced rather than breaking and she scowled at the bottle as it came to rest.

In the end, it took another two minutes for her to calm down and decide that she wouldn't quite get anywhere having a staring contest with an empty potion vial. The adrenaline rush and bitter taste of the tonic dispersing after a deep swig of leather flavored water from the pouch slung at her side.

She slapped her cheeks to get into a problem solving mindset.

“Alright, at least that’s a disaster out of the way… I can take a minu-”

Amber smelled the smoke before she heard the chime of the menu.

She didn’t have to read it.

She did anyway.

Twice.

She gaped for a moment before the truth of what she was reading sunk in, thoughts swirled in her mind before she settled on a predictable response.

“Oh, fuck you.”