Figuring Things Out

Deep down, Daffodil knew he was running towards disappointment, but it still felt like a punch to his gut when he reached the entrance to his valley and found it empty. “Asterion!” he called, cupping his hands over his mouth to amplify the sound. There was no response, just a faint echo as his own words bounced against the hills and back at him. There seemed to be a finality in that empty response that proved he was alone. Daffodil fell to his knees.

“I…” Daffodil started, narrating his thoughts to the vacant valley, “I was gonna tell him I love him.” Typical Daffodil luck, he thought bitterly. The day he plans on confessing his love is the same day he’s erased from the memories of every WanderQuest player.

Daffodil wasn’t sure how long he stayed there, but the sun was getting ready to set when he finally pulled himself to his feet. He had cycled through depression and bargaining pretty quickly and was now entering an emotion he knew well: rage. His knees immediately ached in protest which only made Daffodil angrier.

But standing around pissed off wasn’t going to solve anything, so Daffodil started to form a plan. Ymara had said all players had forgotten him, but who knew if that was accurate? Who said he was omniscient? Maybe his blessing had missed a few people, or maybe it only affected the people that were currently logged in to the game. Daffodil wasn’t going to sit around and accept his fate until he was sure everything Ymara said was true.

“Tomorrow I’ll go to Caspia. There’s gotta be information there,” Daffodil said aloud. There was something about telling the valley his plans that made them feel more concrete.

There was still about an hour until the sun would completely set, so Daffodil decided to check his skills. If Ymara had actually messed up with the memory wipe, what if he’d screwed up Daffodil’s stats as well?

Daffodil swiped at the air with his left hand, feeling a little stupid as he did so. A translucent blue window appeared in front of him and, thankfully, looked almost identical to the one he was used to. He scanned his stats and was a little worried now that he saw how underwhelming they were. In the upper right hand corner of the menu, his level showed an unimpressive 10.

Daffodil loved farming. It was his favorite thing to do in WanderQuest, but the problem was it didn’t give you any EXP. After five years of playing, Daffodil had only completed a handful of quests which was why his level was so abysmally low. At the time it hadn’t really mattered, but now he was starting to wish he’d put a few more points into strength and stamina and a little less into things like “Rare Plant Cultivation”.

Daffodil hit the next tab and sighed in relief when he saw all his skills were still there. While some skills needed to be purchased with the points gained from leveling up, most of the ones Daffodil was interested in didn’t need to be. This meant he’d acquired almost a few hundred skills while farming and clearing out his valley. Include the fact that he spent a few hours every single day honing a majority of those skills, and it meant they were almost all completely maxed out. Unfortunately, all the skills he had purchased were also farming related which meant he had no points he could spend on important things. Something like Animal Handling was very useful when he wanted to keep rare animals in his valley because he thought it would be cool, but not so helpful if he ever had to fight monsters in this world—and he had tried to use Animal Handling on one of the more animal-based monsters but it had not worked and he’d lost half of his inventory.

The next tab was his inventory, and Daffodil was pleased to see everything where he’d left it. There were a few weapons he’d started the game with, all his coins, and a lot of farming equipment. His eyes lingered on the bouquet of Starling roses before he tore his gaze away.

Switching to the last tab, Daffodil was confronted with a reflection of himself. Well, it was technically his avatar but this was how he was going to look for the rest of his life. That’s a crazy thought, Daffodil decided as he was once again struck with the insane realization that he would be living inside a video game until he died. He moved a little bit to the left and the picture of him in the menu moved with him. After almost exclusively looking at the back of his character for the past five years, it was a little strange to see his avatar’s face. His hair was a bit longer than he was used to and cut in a wolf cut that framed his face nicely. It was a shade of green so dark it almost looked brown and the strands looked fluffy. Without even realizing what he was doing, Daffodil brought a hand up to his head—watching his reflection in the menu do it like it was a different person—and patted his hair. It was soft and silky to the touch, nothing like his hair in real life which was completely dead after years of bleaching it. His eyes were also green, but they were a much lighter shade and glowed like someone had injected chlorophyll directly into them.

After Daffodil had had his fill of staring at himself, he closed the menu. The sun had completely dipped past the horizon, and there was absolutely no way Daffodil was going to enter the monster infested world in the dark, so he decided to go to sleep and head out early tomorrow morning.

“Oh shirt, I don’t have a bed,” Daffodil mumbled. There had been no reason to build one when he was just playing a video game, but now Daffodil was really wishing he’d added one for the aesthetic.

This fucking sucks, he thought, pleased that he could still curse in his head, as he trudged towards the part of the valley he let grow wild. The tall grass worked as a decently comfortable cushion and, despite all his worries, Daffodil found himself falling asleep within the minute.