Leaving the Valley

Daffodil rose with the sun, an action that disgusted him since he wouldn’t be caught dead waking up before noon on a Sunday morning. Although, days didn’t really have meaning now that Daffodil was no longer employed. Every day could be Sunday now.

Deciding it was probably best to get an early start, Daffodil rose to his feet and brushed the long stalks of grass off himself. Then his stomach let out a loud growl.

Daffodil groaned. “I have to eat food?” he complained. When playing WanderQuest, Daffodil almost never needed food unless he wanted to quickly replenish his stamina. Unfortunately, playing a video game and living in one were apparently two different things.

Opening his menu, Daffodil selected a meal from his inventory and started to eat as he walked. There was a concerningly low amount of food in his inventory, so he made a mental note to buy some food in Caspia. He’d also need to work on upgrading his cooking skill or else he was worried he might accidentally light himself on fire.

Daffodil finished his meal as he reached the entrance to his Valley. It was marked by two simple stone pillars that matched the engravings he’d done on the pathways, the pillars standing at the top of the hill that led down into the valley. It was a stunning sight; the sun was just finally breaching the horizon and it bathed the valley in bright red.

Once Daffodil stepped through those pillars, he would be leaving his safe zone. He didn’t often leave his valley—in fact, he could probably count on one hand the amount of times he had left the valley without immediately heading to Caspia—and he had never done so as himself. This was the first time he was physically taking a step outside of safety. Daffodil wanted to shudder at the thought but he held it back. He needed to do this. He needed to find Asterion and make him remember, whatever Ymara said be damned.

Daffodil turned and took one last look at his valley. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen it from this angle, looking down from above and taking in everything at once. It was unrecognizable from when he’d first discovered this place. It seemed pretty fitting, Daffodil decided. He had become unrecognizable too.

. . .

From experience, Daffodil knew it took roughly an hour to get to Caspia if he sprinted or two if he walked. One of WanderQuest’s few downfalls was a lack of fast travel and Daffodil didn’t have a mount he could use to cover more ground, so he decided to stick to walking. Sprinting was great when he just had to hold a key down, but now when he would actually feel the consequences of low stamina, Daffodil wasn’t too inclined to push his body to the limits.

The walk to Caspia wasn’t a hard one. After heading east around the river that bent around his valley, Daffodil could follow a well-worn trail the rest of the way there. A path this beaten also meant most monsters didn’t risk getting too close. Daffodil would love to avoid those horrifying creatures for the rest of his life if possible, especially now that he wasn’t protected by his computer monitor.

The walk itself was easy, albeit incredibly boring. Usually, long journeys were broken up by talking with your traveling companions or, in Daffodil’s case, playing music on your phone. Daffodil had no companions—not anymore, no more than a handful of unimportant NPCs—and was now realizing that living in a fantasy video game world meant he no longer had access to his phone, so he walked in silence. The only things he could hear were the birds chirping and the dragging of his feet.

It didn’t help that the path was eerily empty. His game menu told him it was only about 6:30 in the morning which meant no sane person would be logged on the server—unless they had played all through the night, which Daffodil had been prone to do in college—so he was totally alone on the path.

This uncomfortable silence probably should have clued Daffodil in that something was wrong. It wasn’t until the birds stopped singing that he realized he wasn’t alone.

Out of the corner of his eye, Daffodil spotted it: a creature so terrifying it couldn’t be named, a shambling mass so grotesque it’s very appearance would kill a man on the spot. It was… a slime? Daffodil turned to get a better look and, sure enough, what he’d thought was some hellspawned creation was actually just a tiny blue orb dragging itself across the ground in his general direction. Daffodil laughed once he’d realized how far his mind had jumped to reach that conclusion. A tiny gelatinous blob was certainly one of the more preferable things to go up against. Daffodil could even admit that it was a little cute.

A few more slimes were close behind the first. “Hey, little guy,” Daffodil said as the first one reached his feet. The rest were quick to join their friend. “You’re not so bad, are you?”

Daffodil leaned down to stroke the first one when suddenly it leapt. He stumbled back but the slime wasn’t aiming for him. Instead, it landed on a different one and the two merged. In the blink of an eye, all of the slimes had come together to form one giant creature twice the size of Daffodil. It somehow managed to look far more menacing, with eyes that glared down at him and… were those teeth?! How did gelatin even form something sharp?

Daffodil was planning to turn and run. It was a tried and true technique that had served him well over the years. But instead of fear, Daffodil felt weirdly at ease. It was like the few moments before he’d get into a fight when all he could feel was adrenaline and confidence in his fighting abilities. This was no longer WanderQuest the video game, this was real life. And in real life, Daffodil didn’t back down from a fight.

Without thinking, Daffodil closed the gap between himself and the slime and threw a punch. It was pathetically weak—he was now realizing just how much worse his avatar’s strength stat was compared to real life—but it still landed with enough impact to split the slime into two smaller versions. He kept going until the slime was nothing but muck ground into the dirt and then wiped the gunk off his hands. A bar appeared in the upper right hand corner of his vision, showing how much EXP he had gained from the encounter, and he was pleased to see it had almost leveled him up.

Daffodil smiled. He had never been good at fighting in WanderQuest; the game boasted about offering endless options for combat, which meant using way too many keys on Daffodil’s keyboard to the point where he couldn’t remember how to do anything. He didn’t need to memorize keys now, though. Maybe fighting monsters wasn’t so bad after all.

Daffodil spared one last look at the goo puddle that remained of the slime. Then he started walking.