Mellara isn't used to not knowing things. She's read all the books in her clan (which was only a couple dozen or so, but it's more than anyone
else did), she's interviewed Uncle on his adventuring days in great detail, she's watched every beast in her home forest that she could find (and only got found once!), and she knows the habits of, um, impressive things, she's sure, like dragons. But none of that's helping now.
Not three hours ago, she was writing a simplified illusion spell into her spellbook and whistling a cheerful improvised tune. Now, here she is in an
entirely unfamiliar forest, hiding in the branches of a young oak and trying to hold her breath so the goblins marching underneath her won't hear her, and she's
alone, and all the knowledge in her brain does nothing for the fact she only prepared one casting of color spray this morning. In fact, that knowledge doesn't even tell her if the goblins marching by are weak enough that color spray would even take hold on them…
This whole everything, besides making Mellara feel vulnerable and afraid and stupid, also makes her wish she'd studied more about monsters she might actually meet instead of more about rocks and leaves and dragons. It also makes her wish she'd practiced holding her breath, because it already feels like it's been hours since the goblins arrived and she's starting to get lightheaded which is a very bad thing up in a tree and they still aren't close enough that she's sure her spell will catch them all, but she's running out of time.
She risks taking a small breath, quietly as she can, and hopes the goblins aren't as alert as they look, because if she doesn't breathe, she's gonna pass out and fall out of a tree right onto their spears, and
oh Gods above I'm too young to die I'm only five and forty winters and she's panicking. Mellara tries to force her heartbeat to calm down and peeks around her branch on the oak tree again, to see if they're close enough yet, and
oh no.
One of the goblins, the one with the bone helmet thing on its head, is looking
right at her.
Please, good gods, let them be close enough.
As quick as she can, and hopefully before the goblins can react, Mellara pulls a pinch of carefully-colored dirt from the pouch tied at her waist, spreads it in an upside-down rainbow across the air in front of her, points her right hand's first two fingers at the goblin's face, and says the last line of her best (and only, really) combat illusion in a rush of strange syllables. The homemade rainbow powder flashes and bursts into vivid flame, and then the illusory spellfire twists and surges forwards, and Mellara closes her eyes to avoid falling prey to her own spell just as the pattern of rainbow light starts to shift again…
She hears three quiet
thumps on the forest floor. Then she remembers she can start breathing again.
"Thank you," she whispers to the sky (and the gods up there, and she feels a bit bad for not remembering their names now) as she climbs shakily down the tree towards the ensorcelled goblins.
They're just… lying there, on the ground. Their eyes are open and blank, and the skull-hat one dropped his spear. They look almost peaceful, like old men fast asleep…
Mellara swallows hard and draws her eating knife from behind her spell-pouch. "Just think of it like hunting," she tells herself quietly as she walks over to the three sleeping goblins. "Like hunting. One stab and it's done."
By the time she's over the first one, the skull-hat one she thinks is the leader, and she's kneeling down to put her knife on his throat, she's shaking again.
"Like hunting," she chants as she starts to press down on the knife. "Like hunting." The knife pushes through the goblin's skin and blood pools around the edge. "Like h-hunting…"
There's two more left, lying just a few feet away, once she finishes digging the too-short blade into the first one's spine. Maybe if she closes her eyes when she kills them, it won't feel like she's killing people.
Ten seconds later, she learns closing her eyes doesn't help.
She almost can't bring herself to push through the skin of the last one's throat.
It's only after she finishes climbing back up the tree, almost slipping off what feels like a million times, feeling the tear-tracks starting to dry on her face, that she realizes she left bloody handprints all the way up. She doesn't have it in her to do more than send a mote of her innate magic to wash it away and hope it's good enough before she curls up in her cloak.
She's shaking again. She doesn't have her pack, she's in the middle of an unfamiliar forest, apparently she doesn't have it in her to kill monsters with two arms and two legs, and she's sure to face more before she gets home.
And she hasn't even been wherever she is for half a day…
-----
Aer (
yes, that's really my name, no numbers or anything, I just got into the game early) trudges deeper into the forest, pushing branches aside with her four arms and wishing she hadn't put off that Incanter dip in favor of another level of Doppelganger. Yes, the extra tail swipe is useful for damage output, and she got a few extra HP out of it, but one level of Incanter would've let her shape Airstep Sandals and start
flying at level eleven, basically permanently, and that fly speed would've kept her from having to
trudge through this goddamn forest for so long. The only monsters here are goblins, anyway, so it's not like she'd be missing out on much XP if she just skipped it all.
A branch she missed smacks her in the face, her helmet's durability ticks down by a quarter percent, and she mutters something about goddamn shitty devs making their game too realistic. Then a Spot skill icon lights up in the corner of her vision and something lights up yellow on the ground behind the next tree.
"Huh," she says as she steps past it, into a much clearer area with a wider-shorter tree-thing instead of the narrow-tall trees that are everywhere else. "I wonder what it found—"
And then she sees what the Spot skill highlighted, and she freezes. If it could, if it was real, she's sure her face would be white as a sheet now, because lying in front of her is a standard goblin patrol, made up of a level 6 leader, a level 3 warrior, and a level 1 scout, with their throats grotesquely split open like someone hacked at them with a steak knife and lying in pools of drying blood. It's something she'd expect to find in a horror game, not an 'appropriate for all ages but we hold no responsibility for online interactions' game like YGGDRASIL, and it's also a good example of why she doesn't play horror games, because just looking at this- this
mess makes her wanna throw up. Then Spot blinks again, and she slowly, fearfully looks up at the short-wide tree, images of people hanging from meathooks and stuff that she's seen in some of those games she doesn't play spinning through her mind at high speed…
…and she sees a little green-brown lump of cloth-covered something sitting on a branch something like three meters up. At first, she thinks it's a bag or something, probably with some journal or other quest-starting item in it to go along with the horror show on the forest floor, but then she sees the little arms sticking out of it and holding onto the branch, and she realizes it's probably an NPC, which is still probably a quest-giver, and that's not really better, since she doesn't wanna go on a quest about goblins-lying-in-pools-of-blood things, but it wouldn't hurt to at least pick up the quest so she can ignore it forever, she supposes.
"Hello?" she calls up to the NPC on the tree.
The little hands shift, but it doesn't do anything else.
Aer frowns. This is weird: NPCs usually activate whenever you say
anything while you're looking at them. "I can see you there," she tries, in case it didn't catch it the first time. "I have, like, Spot rank 18, nothing level-appropriate's gonna hide from me."
"
go away," a voice whispers shakily from the little NPC thing. "
please…"
"What," Aer says blandly, crossing her arms in front of her chest, "do I have to climb the tree and physically get you down from it like a stuck cat? Because I
can." Then she blinks. "…Oh my god, I just sassed an NPC.
Why did I sass an NPC?"
A little head sticks out of the little bundle of cloth on the tree (
ooooh, it's a cloak, isn't it?), with weird greenish-grey skin, dark brown eyes, tear-tracks along its cheeks, and an utterly miserable expression on its face, and Aer suddenly feels really bad for the NPC. And then the NPC's eyes flick around, like it's looking at something, and before Aer has the chance to do more than be impressed at the detail the devs put into this one character's actions, those detailed eyes go really wide and the NPC falls out of the tree with a scream.
"Wh—" Aer leaps forwards on reflex, the magic on her anklets triggering and blinking her right under the falling NPC, and she catches it in her arms like a pillow. "Holy shit, what was that?" she breathes. "Why the hell did you
jump out of a tree?"
"I didn't jump, I
fell!" the little NPC in her arms shouts back, sounding offended. "And
excuse me for being surprised when the person that finds me being utterly pathetic ends up being a totemist with the Arms of the Girallon bound to her totem!" And then that NPC blinks, looks down at Aer's arms, and her expression goes back to being utterly miserable, and Aer starts feeling confused on top of the everything else this increasingly nonsensical interaction has caused. "Oh Good Gods I just sassed a woman who could kill me with three hands tied behind her back please be merciful Miss Totemist!"
Aer frowns down at the little grey-skinned girl she thinks might be actively passing that Turing Test thing she heard about once cowering in her arms. "…I'm not gonna hurt you," Aer says in the calmest tone she can manage.
The grey girl keeps looking at her with wide, scared eyes, still shivering.
"Um, I really won't," Aer says to the not-NPC. "Would it help if I put you down?"
The girl nods.
"Okay." Aer carefully grabs the girl by the shoulders, keeping her claws out of the way, and lowers her onto the ground.
Wow, she's short. "I'm Aer, by the way. Who are you?"
"My favorite names are Mellara Uricarn Salazin Porcution Sparkmaker Climby Loopmottin Nackle Ellywick Marinet Booper Borken," the girl says with the cadence of someone reciting something they'd practiced a whole lot, and Aer looks down at her feeling very confused. Mellara-Unicorn-whatever-whatever looks back up at Aer with the same confusion on her face that Aer feels. "You really only have one name?"
"Yeah, well technically I have another name, but this avatar's—" And then it occurs to Aer that if this too-many-names girl is really an NPC that gained sentience somehow she won't know that players aren't their characters, and she cuts herself off, but from Mellara-whatever's expression, it's already too late. "…Can we just pretend I didn't say that whole, um avatar thing?" Aer asks hopefully.
"…Oh Gods I sassed a goddess," the girl whispers, her eyes so wide that Aer almost thinks they're gonna pop out of her head. "I am an idiot and this is the worst day
ever."
Aer stares at the little girl for a couple seconds, and then she starts laughing. "You—wh—heh—a
goddess? You think I'm a goddehehehehehes! That's the funniest thing I've heard in weeks!"
Mellara blushes and covers her face with her hands.
"No, seriously!" Aer says. "I mean, I work at one of the better megacorps, and I don't go hungry or anything, but I have precisely
zero power in the real world, and you thought I was a goddess!"
And then Mellara makes a little
eep noise and takes a step back. "
Real world?" she whispers. "But—then this is an illusion?
All of this is an illusion?"
"…Um. Maybe?" Aer grimaces and looks awkwardly to the side. "Look, I didn't mean to cause an existential crisis, um, uh, fuck, look, the way I deal with the meaninglessness of life is by playing video games and oh no that doesn't help."
"No, this can't just be an illusion," Mellara says frantically, "no mortal could make a phantasm this complete and expansive, especially not with a person that reacts intelligently like this, unless maybe it's a shadow illusion, those can create minds, but those goblins
were not surreal creations, those wouldn't b-b-bleed everywhere and seem like
people, maybe it's an enchantment, and all of this is just a dream made to seem real, but there's no way to… tell…"
Aer sighs sadly. "That's really heavy, Mellara," she says. "I mean, you're
right, there's no way to tell if reality is real or if it's all in your head, but I think it's best to not worry about it, y'know? Since we can't do anything about it and all."
"But… you just implied the 'real world' was somewhere that wasn't here…"
"Hookay, lemme explain," Aer starts. "From my perspective—" And then Aer's eyes catch on the three dead goblins that she's pretty sure Mellara killed from what the little girl said, and it's her turn to shudder. "On second thought, let's discuss this somewhere that's less… bloody."
"Oh." Mellara looks at the goblins too, and her expression falls back to the particular shade of miserable it had when Aer first saw her. "Yes.
Please."
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Posting this here cause I wanna do more work on it and maybe having it here will help with that. Also, as you may guess, I have no idea for a title for this. I don't remember exactly why I thought of this story in the first place, but I have an idea that the YGGDRASIL devs accidentally created a fucking plane with all the minds hooked into their game and that that's why shit happens.
I've marked this 'Overlord [kinda]' because this is nominally set in YGGDRASIL (before the accidental serial isekai that came with its closing), and the outside world is cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk -topia of some not u- description, but I don't expect many (possibly any) canon characters to, like, matter, at the least for a long time, and also I'll be basically making up how YGGDRASIL's mechanics work based on D&D 3.5 with adjustments.
Lemme know what you think, if you've got any titles, all that stuff.
E: It seems I misplaced Mellara's spell list at some point, so I'll need to recreate that. Shouldn't be too
hard.
