Chương 2: First Daily

"What the…" Alexandra used her left hand to pinch her cheek. Just to make sure she wasn't dreaming. Feeling only pain at her gesture, she had to come to a conclusion: whatever it was, it was real. Now, she wasn't exactly sure about how she'd ended up here. The mysterious voice claimed that she'd been summoned by the Divinities of Laika? Gods? The sea breeze made Alexandra's dark hair flutter as she stood atop the white cliffs of Baleria.

Her gaze wandered from the sea to the plain that seemed to stretch forever behind her, covered in a multitude of pastel flowers.

"A lot more impressive than in the game," Alexandra whispered, her mouth agape. In any case, Alexandra decided to act as if everything she'd been told was real. It was the safest bet. Worst case scenario, she'd wake up in her chair, hopefully in time to complete her daily.

"Speaking of which…" The voice mentioned that she would be able to continue her streak.

"Status," she spoke out loud, taking care to enunciate each syllable. No response. She frowned. If she was going to be transported to a game world, she better get a system. Wasn't it how it usually worked? Well, fiction was fiction, and she'd just settled on her situation being real. There were bound to be differences.

"So…" Alexandra was alone, standing uncomfortably close to the edge of a cliff. She took a few steps away from the precipice. Falling to her death so soon would be tragic. The plains had no end in sight. No settlement. Nobody.

"What now?" Her attention was pulled to the leather-bound journal that had appeared in her right hand as she was summoned. Unlike the few such books she'd seen back on earth, hidden in old libraries or displayed in museums, this one didn't look ancient. In fact, it seemed brand new. The leather was impeccable, its luster shining under the sun. She opened it on the first page.

Quest Journal Daily Reset: 06: 00 | Streak: 0 Days | 0% All Stats Next Milestone: 10 Days Daily Quests: Gather seven Silver Star Daisies (0/7) Her eyes went wide. A daily quest! Wait… Why was her streak marked as 0? She stared at the number. Ten years. She'd logged in the morning of her mother's funeral, sitting in the car outside the church with her laptop, because she hadn't wanted to break it. She'd logged in with the flu, delirious, from her bathroom floor.

She'd structured her entire sleep schedule around the 06: 00 reset.

"Ahhh. Why? What's the point— She looked up.

"Take me back!". And waited for a few seconds, but the only answer to her prayers was the wind blowing in her ears, and the buzz of pollinators busying themselves in the flower fields. She kicked a rock, sending it crashing into the sea far below with a plop.

"Hello? Anybody home? Send me back!" No answer. So she grabbed a larger rock, and threw it down the cliff, and another. And another. Her voice lost itself over the waves and the wind.

"I'll fucking break everything in your shitty world. Give me my streak back!" Breathe. Alexandra, take a deep breath.

"Okay." She pressed her palms against her thighs until her hands stopped shaking.

"My streak is dead." It stung. But, all things considered, perhaps it was not the worst of her concerns at the moment. Furthermore…

"I guess I'll just have to grind it back up again. Let's see." Gather seven Silver Star Daisies (0/7) Looking at the endless flower fields in front of her, that quest felt doable.

"It's just a matter of figuring out what the hell a Silver Star Daisy is." The sun was still high. She had time. Unless days were shorter here on Laika. She shrugged.

"I'll find out soon enough." Anyway, she had to move. The plain swallowed her whole the moment she stepped off the cliffs' grassy ridge and into the sea of flowers. Up close, what had seemed like a flat carpet of colors revealed itself to be something far more intricate. The blooms grew in loose clusters, each species keeping to its own, as if by some unspoken agreement. Tall stalks of violet bellflowers nodded in the breeze.

Low-growing mats of yellow crowded the spaces between, dotted with the occasional burst of deep crimson. Bees the size of her thumbnail, fat, golden things with faintly luminescent wings, drifted between petals. Smaller insects she had no name for traced erratic paths just above the surface of it all. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! She breathed in. The smell hit her like she'd just walked into a perfume store, something she seldom did.

Sweet, certainly, but not cloying. There was green underneath it, crushed grass, damp earth, the faint mineral tang carried in from the sea. She stood there for a moment longer than she'd intended, just breathing.

"Okay," she murmured to herself.

"Work to do." The journal was open in her hand. Gather seven Silver Star Daisies. It told her nothing else. No sketch, no description, no helpful tooltip to hover over. She supposed that would have been too much to ask. It was just paper and ink. Magical ink, she presumed, but still. She crouched beside the nearest cluster of flowers and studied them. They were pretty enough. Flat yellow petals radiating from a burnt-orange center, growing in pairs along a single stem. She plucked one and watched the journal.

The counter sat unmoved. 0/7.

"Not those." Unless the counter didn't work. But she discarded the idea, as she was screwed if that was the case. She moved on. The violet bellflowers were not a match. The crimson blooms, which grew on thorned stems and smelled faintly of copper, seemed wrong as there was nothing silvery about them. She still confirmed it by picking one. The counter didn't budge. There were pale blue flowers growing in a ring around a patch of bare earth that the insects conspicuously avoided.

She ignored the obvious red flag and picked one. No luck. At least the plant didn't seem harmful to humans. Her knees were damp from crouching by the time she found a low-growing white flower she hadn't noticed before, half-hidden beneath the bellflowers' canopy. Six petals, slightly waxy. She picked one. 0/7. She picked another, just to be certain. 0/7.

"Come on." The plain was not as flat as it had looked from afar. It rolled in long, shallow undulations, each crest revealing a slightly different arrangement of color than the last. She climbed one such rise and paused at the top, shielding her eyes. From here she could see how the clusters shifted and changed.

A band of deep purple giving way to white, white dissolving into yellow again further on, and at the edge of her sight, following the long curve of the land as it bent toward what might be a tree line, a patch that caught the sunlight differently than the rest. She angled toward it. The walk took longer than she expected. The ground between was uneven and dense with growth, and she found herself picking her way carefully rather than striding.

At one point she startled a creature she couldn't identify, a small, tawny rodent, that was gone into the stems before she could do more than flinch.

"Of course there are things living in there." Hopefully, nothing dangerous. Like snakes, for example. She winced. There were definitely snakes. But she was right about the patch. They were immediately distinct. Lower than most of what surrounded them, growing in a dense, rounded cluster no larger than a dinner table.

Each flower had a ring of fine grey petals, narrow and slightly curved, arranged around a center that was not quite yellow and not quite silver, something between the two that seemed to shift depending on how the light fell. The whole patch caught the sun with an almost metallic shimmer, as if someone had scattered flakes of foil across the blooms. She crouched down. They smelled faintly of linen. She reached out and pinched a stem near the base, and tugged gently. Opened the journal.

Gather seven Silver Star Daisies (1/7).

"Yes." The word came out quietly, more breath than sound. She pressed her lips together. It was a small thing. One flower. A counter ticking forward by a single digit. She was aware of how absurd it was to feel this much about it. She picked another. 2/7. Then another. 3/7. By the time she reached 7/7, her chest felt lighter than it had since she'd opened her eyes on that clifftop. The quest line sat complete and still in the journal.

Then, character by character, as if an invisible quill were etching words on the page, a message appeared. Gather seven Silver Star Daisies (7/7) -> Quest Completed: +10 exp, +1 PER, Skill Quest Unlocked: Basic Herbology. Daily Quest Streak: 0 -> 1 She read it twice. Then she laughed, a short, slightly unhinged sound that disappeared into the flowers. One. That's where it started. But before she could examine the rest of her rewards, her senses stuttered.

It felt like standing up too fast, that familiar head-rush where the world dims at its edges and the ground seems to forget which way is down. Her head spun. Her nostrils flared. Her ears rang. When the sensation settled, she was under the impression that she could see further, smell more, hear more, sense more. It wasn't overwhelming. Rather, it was like she could perceive things in more detail. Not a lot more, but a noticeable increase.

"PER +1," she whispered, "it must mean perception. Shit, this is real." A little too real, in fact.

"Let's just pretend this is normal…" Her hand unsteady, she turned the page. On the second page of the journal, she found what she'd been looking for earlier. Her status. Name: Alexandra Ward Class: Heroine of Quests Rank: - Level: 1 (10/50) Strength (STR): 7 Dexterity (DEX): 8 Constitution (CON): 7 Intelligence (INT): 9 Perception (PER): 10 Class Art: [Quest Journal] – A living record bound to its bearer. Generates daily quests tailored to the surrounding environment.

Completing quests yields experience, rewards, and contributes to an ongoing Streak. The longer the Streak, the greater the bounty. Class Perks: - General Skills: - Achievements: - She took a deep breath. It was real. It was fucking real. Yet, her quest rewards mentioned one more thing, so she turned the page once more. There, she found a list of "available skill quests". She surmised that she'd have to complete such quests to actually add the associated skills to her status. Sure enough, Basic Herbology was there.

It would surely be helpful when it came to her dailies. Yet, to her surprise, it wasn't the only entry. Along with her reward came more skills. Skills she recognized. Her stomach dropped slightly. Of all the things she could have carried over… Warlock skills.