–Chapter 3–

Alco was farming the fields when he noticed an odd feeling. One that always crept up on him when someone was coming to the village. Nobody else had ever felt it, but he was never wrong, even when the traveller was far out of sight, he felt someone enter his lands.

He walked over to Margaret, his wife and told her about it. She nodded and went to get the village chief when Alco felt the feeling disappear, like they were departing.

‘Margi! Ai think ‘ey left! Neffa mind et!’ Her wife turned around, confused for a second, when she calmly walked back to her chair and continued knitting the shirt.

Alco walked back, still a little confused about who would come so far from the next place and turn away when so close to civilization, but the work had to be done, so he continued ploughing the fields. As long as this unknown person didn’t return, there was no worry. Here in the mana-less parts of the lowlands, humans were safer than any other being, say for woles, buns and harrs.

Though he couldn’t help but feel there was something special about this arrival... almost like they were a... second him?

x x x

Felicia put down the items she held in her hands – mainly her pyjamas and sword, and rested them against a tree. Then she went and collected mushrooms for the next few hours. When she saw her phone had been hacked by something that could give numbers to someone’s life, she thought it could be a better idea to just be alone for a while and think.

She found quite a lot of mushrooms, mostly red-capped scaber stalk with some sweet tooth and a few penny buns. These were the Leccinum quercinum or aurantiacum, Hydnum repandum and Boletus edulis respectively in science-talk. There were quite a lot that may have been safe, but her memory wasn’t the best and she’d rather not poison herself in the wilderness.

Put together, she had about... a whole pile of mushrooms. Felicia bound her pyjamas together like the world’s worst basket and put the sheath of her sword across the gaps made using the sleeves of the shirt and the pants. Then she put the mushrooms in the so-called basket and went to the east, where the rivulet should be and she could clean the mushrooms to eat them without dirt or piss on them. Wolf piss.

She reached the rivulet without problem and prepped things to wash the mushrooms. First, Felicia put all of them out of the basket, then she washed her pyjamas and hung them up to dry. In the meantime, she cut all of the stems nicely with... the tip of her sword. It was very clumsy and 100% a bodge as the British called it, but at least it worked and the mushrooms looked better prepared already.

Seeing that the clothes would take a lot longer to dry, she wrung her pyjamas and then put them back, after which she cleaned a bit of the rocks around the rivulet and went to actually wash the mushrooms. She just put them in the water, softly touched and removed the dirt and then put it on the flat, wet rock. She repeated the process until she had all the mushrooms done. First she ate one of the typical brown caps, a penny bun and it tasted pretty good for a raw fungus, though it gave her an odd feeling... Then she tasted the completely brown-reddish mushroom with a bit of a rounder cap and thick stem and it tasted a bit better, maybe, not by much if at all. It just tasted different. Lastly was the uneven capped, kind of yellowish Hydnum repandum, which was... bitter. It wasn’t like it was terrible, but it definitely was the worst of the three.

After she had tested the three, she began to eat the yellow ones, thought being that if she ate the gross ones now, then she would be left with tasty ones later. Though, the taste was inconsistent. Smaller ones were tastier than bigger ones most of the time, but not all the time.

After a while, Felicia felt her phone hum. Having completely forgotten how terrible a situation she actually was in, Felicia expected a message from her mum asking about when she’d return from camping and was greeted by disappointment when she found out it was a notification from whatever took over her phone.

[Unlocked skills

[Unlocked a class

[Unlocked a class

[Unlocked items, see the inventory

It seemed that now that she had filled her stomach with mushrooms and processed most her thoughts about the first screen, that she could look at the rest.

VABi

Sorry for the very late release!