Obviously.

Let's see just how far you can push your luck with abusing the questgiver system...

"I am," you respond. "And I have a quest for you. Or more of a contract, depending on how you want to see it."

The elf girl looks at you with a raised eyebrow, waiting for you to continue.

"You are a tank. I am a damage-focused fighter. You as a rather low-level hero, and I as... well, an NPC with pretty much none of you heroes' privileges, could work together to move up in the world a little bit."

The girl smirks in a somewhat condescending way, but it doesn't quite work because of her adorable face that makes it very hard to take her seriously. "You're asking me to team up with you?"

"If you have to you can think of it as more of me becoming your follower," you say. "But yes."

"Since when do NPCs have such ambitions?"

"Since watching heroes do all the cool stuff got old."

The girl puts a finger to her chin and looks towards the ceiling in a thoughtful way, and then she gives you her answer.

"Since you can't be more useless than my last teammates, and being a tank is slow and boring sometimes, I guess I could let you tag along with me. At least for a while."

"So you will accept my quest?" you ask.

The girl nods. "Sure, why not."

You hear the tone of another quest added, and open up your menu to see it.

Quest Name: An Unlikely Alliance
Objective: Keep Mikael alive and let him adventure with you.
Reward: Shared XP from Mikael.
Participants: Ilimia

"So your name is Ilimia?" you ask.

"Yeah?" Ilimia answers.

"Sounds like a disease."

"It's elvish."

"'I'm afraid your son has caught Ilimia. He has four more days to live.'"

"Stop it."

"'Five if he drinks lots of water.'"

"I'll stab you."

"'Symptoms include damaged tissue resembling stab wounds.'"

Ilimia pulls out a dagger and gives you a light tap with its tip, enough to hurt you but not enough to do any real damage. But you still flinch violently, because... it did hurt you.

"You hurt me!" you hiss at her.

"Don't be such a pussy, I barely touched you," Ilimia replies with a shrug.

"No, you don't get it... I'm supposed to be invulnerable to player attacks..." You mess around with your menus until you find an answer in your stats menu.

Your status as friendly NPC has been revoked as a result of becoming a hero follower.

Great, just great... Apparently you can't be a friendly NPC and mercenary at the same time... Oh well, hopefully this would go the way you hope anyway. Now you have a hero who is bound by a quest to protect you, with whom you share XP. If she tried to kill you or leave you for dead upon finding out who you really are, she'd suffer a penalty for failing the quest. You practically have a hero ****. Sure, you're also HER **** in a sense, but that doesn't matter as much.

Then you suddenly hear the front door open, and the swordsman from earlier enters the inn. The werewolf hunter.

"Okay, let's leave right now," you tell Ilimia. "We need to find some adventure."

"Just a sec, the hunter just came in," Ilimia replies and gestures to said hunter.

You can't tell her the truth, at least not yet, so you try to discreetly slip away, avoiding the hunter's field of vision (which you honestly can't tell the range of, with that helmet he should realistically only see blackness with a few spots of non-blackness) and attempting to get to the exit before he sees you.