Christina says, in Dark Speech, 'Red, after entering the portal, go into the first door you see. That will bring you into town. The third door on your right will have a Guru inside. Listen to its dialogue to receive a ring and then exit the building. Continue to the right until you reach the last door. That'll be the castle with a king inside. Listen to its dialogue to receive 1500 gold. Drop the coins onto the ground and then listen to it again to receive 1500 more gold. Repeat this process until you have a million gold. Don't come back until you have it all.'

Before I could even begin to understand what it was that the girl expected of me, I was pushed backwards by my face. The living room I was inside of vanished, and it was replaced by a large stone wall around twenty feet tall. I found myself in a new place where the ground was an orange-brown color and the sky was a sickly green. At least this place was not quite as blurry as the last one I visited. There was a small doorway to the left of the stone wall. Even though it looked small at first, the door seemed to grow in height as I approached it. It was actually taller than the mine shaft Mrs. Kelly and I had dug earlier. Just as the young Miss Kelly had instructed, I pushed open the door and entered inside of the town. Every part of the town was made of stone. The walls, buildings, and even the floor were entirely covered in stone. It reminded me of a medieval castle. Though, obviously, I had never been inside a real castle before. I just remembered the pictures inside some books.

A shirtless man in a skirt approached me slowly, but he came from the opposite direction from where I was supposed to go. I turned away from him and followed the stone wall to the right. There was a short woman, with black hair and a blue dress, positioned out front of the third door. She talked about how this was a town of elves at the bottom of the World Tree. No matter where I looked though, I could not see any sign of a tree large enough to have an entire town at its base. The woman repeated the same message over and over again, so I walked passed her and entered into the stone building. The interior of this building was rather dark. The four stained-glass windows let very little light inside. Maybe they were fake windows. Mother's church had fake stained-glass windows. I had not realized it at first, but eventually I noticed that the windows could not be seen from the outside, only from inside the church. The fake windows unsettled me for some reason. A gentleman at Mother's church called them “illuminated wall decorations,” though I heard that he left the commune shortly afterward.

This church had a single man inside who wore a white robe and a headdress. Other than his skin tone being a peach color, he looked like a regular human. If regular humans needed to blink constantly. Perhaps he had attempted to send Morse Code to me with his eyelids. Unfortunately, I did not know Morse Code. He stood on top of some golden stones and there were more green stones that lead up to the pulpit. I approached him and greeted him with a friendly wave of my hand. He did not return my greeting, but he did tell me that if I was to see the King, then I should bring a ring with me for identification. A ring seemed like the worst way to identify friends. Rings could be lost or forgotten. Even Father would often forget to wear his ring when he went out for a drive in his Black Beauty. Bad people could steal them and pass themselves off as friends too. The man warned me not to lose the ring before he handed it over to me. So even he knew that it was risky to rely on the ring.

--You have looted a Ring of Elf--

That window popped up again, but quickly disappeared. I waved farewell to the gentleman as he repeated the same message as before. It was nice of him to remind me again, but if I was really so incompetent as to forget his instructions in only a few seconds, then maybe I was the wrong person to entrust the ring to. Once outside, I continued towards the castle to meet with the King. There were two more stone buildings on my right, but what caught my attention was the black-haired man that stared at me. Unlike the last person I spoke with, this man had not blinked at all. Even with a lit cigarette in his mouth that emitted smoke in his face. As I approached nervously, he started to grumble about dwarfs. I would have been a really tall dwarf if I had been one. Luckily, I was able to walk passed him without an attempt by him to speak with me. Perhaps it was because I was nervous or because I was not used to my new height, but I accidentally bumped into a small creature that hid behind a pillar.

a zozura pierces YOU for 7 points of damage.

Two transparent windows popped up in front of me. The one with my new name and the three colored bars and also the one that seemed to be for just about everything else. A quick pat revealed that there was not any damage to my pants, but I needed to be more careful of where I walked. Four of the creatures shuffled around ahead of me. Small shelled beings with spikes. They looked like a type of snail, but just the shell part. I could not see the body that maneuvered the shell. They were not too difficult to avoid as they retraced the same paths over and over again. Two more stone buildings passed on my right as I continued on my journey to the castle. A woman paced back and forth as she griped about water and wells. She ignored me and let me pass by her in peace. Eventually, I arrived at the largest building in the entire town. There really was a stone castle here. The outer wall was about twenty feet tall, but the interior walls were even taller. There were even seven towers that overlooked the area. It was a very impressive sight. A knight in blue armor rushed over and announced that the King had waited for me. I did not want to make a royal wait, so I rushed inside the door.

The front door opened right up to the throne room. That should have been impossible. Even if I did not remember the names of the various parts of a castle, it was still obvious that this was wrong. The throne room was always in a protected place. Behind a moat with a drawbridge, behind walls, and with a bunch of knights and servants in between the King and any threat. Never was the throne room in the first area, behind the front door. Even if this was the backdoor, it still should not have been joined directly to the throne room. In stories, secret escape routes of royals were hidden away in some dark and gloomy area of the castle. Not just a doorway in the throne room. I struggled to comprehend what the architects thought when they designed this. All I could come up with was that it must have been a royal order. There was no other way to make sense out of that obvious design flaw. These same people based their trust on ring bearers, though, so maybe they just trusted others too much.

The entire room was uniform in color, but it was not a color I was able to place. It was not gold, bronze, or copper. It was more of a combination of orange and brown. There was a short and chubby man that sat on the throne, which was a good 7 feet off of the ground. Stories usually depicted Kings as overbearing, but this King seemed to take it to the extreme. The throne he sat on was so large that his feet could not even touch the ground. I approached the dais and knelt down on the floor before the King to show my respect. It was the first time that I met with a royal and appearances mattered. Stories tended to have criers or stewards to announce visitors, but the King just sat there, in an empty throne room, all alone. It was probably a test for me. Knights would probably rush out and subdue me if I showed disrespect towards the King. So I remained there on my knees as I waited to be acknowledged. No matter how long I waited, though, the King continued to ignore me.

Redmaw: i need to gain the attention of the king kneeling does not work

Primrose: What? Where would....OH! Haha. Just get up. Haha. It's not a real king, it's just an NPC. A Non-Player Character. You can just go up and talk to it. It will give you money after you listen to its dialogue.

Redmaw: i need to acquire a million gold

Primrose: A MILLION?!? That's going to take awhile at 1,500g per speech. You can't skip the dialogue either. What do you need that much gold for?

Redmaw: i was told to get it

Primrose: Ah, then send me a tell when you're finished. I'll help you out a bit. Oh, wait. You do know about your inventory, right?

Redmaw: inventory

As soon as the word inventory entered my thoughts, a new screen appeared before me. The largest one yet. The transparent window took up most of my viewing area and the tint of the window actually grew darker the longer I looked at it. The name Redmaw appeared in the upper left corner with a list of words and numbers beneath it. I was not sure what any of it meant. Probably some form of shorthand or abbreviation was used. The middle of the window was almost full of empty boxes. Twenty-four of them were in a rectangle that surrounded a picture of a large paw print with 4 claws. It reminded me of a dog's footprint in the mud. The largest pad had two blue images on it that looked like a tooth and a talon. Three of the boxes held clothing items. A long-sleeved shirt, pants, and gloves. The other twenty-one boxes in the middle were empty. In the upper right corner of the large window there were four horizontal bars with icons of various colors in front of them. All the little circles were followed by the number zero. The lower right part of the window held even more squares, but these squares were all full and looked rather familiar.

The first square held nine Skin of Milk. It looked like an old waterskin bottle that Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone may have used in the past. The next square held eleven Bread Cakes, which looked like miniature muffins. The other ten squares all held lockboxes from the place Mrs. Kelly brought me to. That meant that ten of the twelve squares were filled with lockboxes. They had not vanished into thin air after all. I should have known better. Magic only existed in stories. When I thought about one lockbox in particular, another large window appeared. It had twenty-seven more squares, but they were all empty. I proceeded to check all the lockboxes and found out that every single item that I had attempted to clean up before were all present. Blobs, blocks, tools, weapons, and even a boat were all inside of the ten brown lockboxes.

Redmaw: there is so much stuff inside

Primrose: Yeah, the stats will take awhile to explain. You should probably get started with the NPC though, since that will take awhile. Go up and talk to it. It will give you the gold you're looking for.

The King still stared blankly ahead. He had not noticed my presence at all. I stood up and looked around the throne room. There were no movements at all. Servants and guards did not yell out in alarm, Knights did not rush out to tackle me to the ground, nothing happened at all. Other than the two chandeliers that hung from the ceiling, it was just the two of us there. There were not even any chairs to sit on for those that sought an audience with the King. I quietly walked forward and took a step-up onto the dais. No loud alarm sounded and not a single knight rushed out to punish me. I stepped up to the top of the dais. Just in front of the throne that the King sat upon. When I neared, the King actually stood up and spoke to me.

Elven King says, 'Glad you could come. Disaster has befallen us. The Elf fountain water, our life source, has stopped. The wells are drying up. Many men went out and nobody came back. You are our last hope. I shall give you 1500 Golds. Prepare for your journey with this money. It will be a dangerous journey. Take care of yourself.'

The King blinked quite a lot while he spoke and, for some reason, the sound of a typewriter was heard while he spoke. I did not know why the beings in this place needed to blink so much. It was not very bright inside the throne room. There were not any windows in the throne room and the chandeliers above us were not even lit. The typewriter sounded weird as I read through his words too. When the typewriter was finished making its “chunk chunk” noises, loud dinging sounds occurred in quick succession. The problem was that when all the noises had stopped, I had not received the gold I was supposed to have. The King did not reach toward me or hand me anything. There was nothing on the ground at our feet either. I tried to talk to the King again.

Elven King says, 'There is nothing more I can do to help you. Looking forward to good news.'

More typewriter sounds were heard while he spoke, but there was not a single ding sound afterward. I was not sure where the gold could have gone. If all the items from the first place ended up in the inventory, maybe the gold did as well. I thought of the inventory, and it appeared in front of me again. The window still took up most of my visual range. The jumble of words and numbers on the left side did not seem to change at all and the middle boxes were still mostly empty. In the top right-hand corner of the window though, there was a change. The second bar held the number 1500 inside of it. I had not associated the circle to the left of the number as gold, since it was far too yellow to be considered gold, but I suppose it could have been a gold color. That would mean that the two bars underneath it were probably silver and bronze. The top bar had a shiny metal circle next to the bar with a zero in it, but I was unsure what it could have been. It was too bright of a color to be silver.

Redmaw: i think i found the gold but i do not know what to do next the king said he would not help me further

Primrose: Hmmm, you should probably just try reaching out your hand to take the 1500 gold. The currency shown is platinum, gold, silver, and copper btw. Try to use your hands to grab them?

It seemed silly to me, since windows were not meant to be touched, but the Kelly girl relied on me to get this gold. I would not fail her. My right hand came up and reached out towards the tinted window. I hesitated a little, since fingerprint smudges took time to clean off of windows. Father hated dirty windows. The thought of Father forced me to realize how badly I had messed up today. I had yet to do any of my chores. My hand trembled as it touched the number 1500. I clenched my shaking hand and pulled back. The number 1500 turned into a zero and a gold coin with the number 1500 beneath it appeared in my hand. The face of the gold coin was much more detailed now. There was a path on it that led up a small hill towards three towers. I turned my hand to the side and dropped the coins to the ground as Miss Kelly instructed. Somehow, the gold coins turned into a small brown bag when they fell to the ground. It was probably to keep them collected together and prevent them from spilling all over the place. I have never seen 1500 coins of any type together, let alone gold coins.

Elven King says, 'Glad you could come. Disaster has befallen us. The Elf fountain water, our life source, has stopped. The wells are drying up. Many men went out and nobody came back. You are our last hope. I shall give you 1500 Golds. Prepare for your journey with this money. It will be a dangerous journey. Take care of yourself.'

Like before, the King repeated the same thing, with the same blinking eyes and the same typewriter sounds. The ding sounds occurred again, and a 1500 number appeared in the gold section of the inventory window. I grabbed the number 1500 and it turned into a gold coin in my hand. It also turned into a brown bag when dropped on the floor. I listened to the King again. Received more gold coins from him. Dropped them all on the ground. I repeated the process again and again and again. The King blinked at me and spoke his lines repeatedly. More typewriters sounded and more dinging happened. I grasped and dropped, grasped and dropped, and grasped some more. As I did so, I kept a mental count of the gold I had accumulated on the floor. 1500, 3000, 4500, 6000, 7500, 9000...it finally dawned on me how long it would take to reach a million gold coins. The more time passed, the harder my hands shook, and the more my hands shook, the longer it took to obtain the gold coins. I did not have time for this. Father....he...

Redmaw: i do not know what to do

Primrose: Sure, what part are your struggling with? How can I help you?

Redmaw: this takes too long i have things to do

Primrose: Well, yeah. It'll probably take you around 6 hours to get a million gold. Maybe more. I might have a way to cut that in half, but it would still take 3-4 hours and it's not a guarantee.

Redmaw: thatsss wayy too long ii havechurestodo

Primrose: Calm down please. I'm not sure how to break this to you, but you don't have to do chores anymore. Your life will be completely different from now on. The world has changed and will never be the same again.

Redmaw: but FATHER hehe he wont he

Primrose: Just kick his fucking ass then. Video games are real now. Do you have any idea what that means? You can be as powerful as you want to be. I can help you become the strongest being in the world. You'll never need to be afraid of anyone ever again. Do you want to become strong?

Redmaw: strong? Sstronger smarter tthan FATHER?

Primrose: Fuck your shitty father. He's garbage. To hell with him. You're already stronger than that shitbag anyway.

Redmaw: ffather hek you shouldnt not speak of fatherer in such ways

Primrose: Open up your inventory. It's time you learned what your stats actually mean and how powerful you really are.....