Springfield Forest Barrier

Qhila’s face drained completely of color, and her face twisted into a distressed mess of emotions John couldn’t identify, though he did have some guesses. She only looked like that for a moment, however, before her face turned into a blank, emotionless visage that felt more like a mask than a person.

She turned around without a word, and as she started back towards her nest, John looked at her RS in hopes of finding something that might quell his emerging panic. What he found was not a score deep in the negatives as such, but it was jumping across the full positive and negative spectrum, which was hardly better. In the few seconds before she was out of view, it changed fast enough to make the individual numbers unreadable. All he could make out was it changing between one, two, and three digits, and between having a minus first or not, at seemingly random.

A second or two later, her head emerged again. “Wait there.”

Despite the curt tone, the complete lack of elaboration and her vanishing again, that stilled the panic in John’s mind a bit. He was still afraid of how this would turn out, but at least she hadn’t told him to go away forever or something like that.

The wait was excruciating. John spent it alternating between pacing and staring at the door. All the while, his mind’s eye was fixed upon the memory of Qhila’s expression before she slipped on her ‘mask’ and what little space was left in his consciousness was filled with a chorus of his own voice, second-guessing everything he had done and every decision he had made since meeting her.

He was so consumed by his self-reproach that when she did return, he only realized it when she spoke. “I’m going to the Forest Barrier. I need 4 ingredients from there to make an Elixir of Clarity and some Mnemonic Incense. If you want to make amends, come and help.”

Her tone was as emotionless as the ‘mask’ she still wore, and her RS remained undeterminable. But this was progress. It was something he could do to… well, not fix it, but perhaps make it a bit less fucked. In fact, didn’t he have one of those things she wanted to make?

He minimized the Quest window that had sprung up when Qhila finished talking, having a good guess what it’d tell him to do anyway, and opened his inventory. “Actually, I have an Elixir of Clarity you can have…”

Qhila didn’t stop climbing the ladder as she asked, “And where did you get it?”

“From an achieve… ment. I see the problem, never mind.”

She vanished from the barrier and he hurriedly followed.

New Quest: Something to Think On.
Help Qhila gather the ingredients she needs and return to her nest.
Minerva Owl Feather: 0/1
Thinking Cap: 0/1
Acanthus Lesnik Leaves: 0/2
Nobleweed Flower: 0/1

Reward: 300 EXP, 200 $, Elixir of Clarity and Mnemonic Incense recipes, +5 RP with Qhila (the RP is a prediction, not me influencing anything), EXP for Qhila equal to 150% of what she would have gotten from enemies if she was in your party during the quest.

Bonus 1: Qhila remains at or above 80% HP throughout.
Reward: 100 EXP, 100 $, +2 RP with Qhila (still prediction)

Bonus 2: Gather an Adonite Shard for yourself.
Reward: 100 EXP, a secret Augment Body perk.

Aside from confirming that the ingredients mentioned in the Quest were indeed the ones she needed and that the Forest Barrier had dangerous beasts, Qhila had been quiet throughout the walk. Which was uncomfortable but not exactly unreasonable or surprising. At least she hadn’t reconsidered about John helping.

On the positive side, the Barrier Alley they took from the park to the forest also had an entrance at Ashcroft, so he could now walk to school faster than he could get there by bus. Also, the Quest offered some nice EXP and he was quite curious about the secret Augment Body Perk if that opportunity presented itself. Wondering about that also helped push the mental chorus of second guessing himself in the background.

The Forest Barrier was located inside the mundane Springfield Forest, or at least the point where Qhila wanted to enter was. From what he’d gathered, it was supposed to be a pretty big place, including some areas that had been cleared for various purposes on the mundane side.

When they entered, John’s figurative jaw immediately dropped. He wasn’t sure exactly what he had expected, but whatever it was, the reality was far bigger and more majestic. Trees wider than he was tall rose like verdant columns so tall it felt like they weren’t plants so much as the very structure that held up the sky.

The clearing where he and Qhila had appeared was brightly lit by the afternoon sun, but the dense canopy cast the woods beyond it in a green twilight. Despite the gloom, the titanic roots and the ground they dug into was hidden beneath a carpet of mosses and lichen, sprinkled with the occasional fallen leaf.

Instead of paying attention to all of that, however, Qhila turned around to look at the center of the clearing behind them. In it stood a menhir stone, easily more than two stories tall yet looking like little more than an upright pebble compared to the trees. In blatant defiance of gravity, five plucked flowers were stuck to it in a cross pattern. The bottom and left ones were identical white ones with a bell-like shape, while the remaining three were different and John recognized none of them.

While John tried to figure out what to make of that, Qhila consulted her phone. “We can get what I need without trespassing… probably. It’s just two minor predator warnings.”

She turned to John and gave him an inadvertent stab of guilt when her tone returned from simply focused on the task at hand to carefully neutral. “The flowers indicate which parts of the forest are safe, which are risky and which are currently off limits. Up is North, right is East and so on. The meanings of each flower is on the Abyss Market website, though for some reason not just an up to date map. Probably either a Hunter tradition or the Hedgehog Hermit being difficult…”

There had been something about Hunter Cults in the Librarian article on Springfield, the Springfield Accord and the barrier John and Qhila had just entered. The name had worried John, but the mouse-over snippet of the cults’ own articles had said it was in the archaic, polytheist sense where it was just devotion to a particular god instead of a whole pantheon. Not the modern brainwashing and poisoned kool-aid meaning.

That was probably what she was talking about and something he could ask about later, but that other bit was new and sounded too weird to just pass over. Even with the urgency of getting Qhila the ingredients to resolve the mind control issue. “Hedgehog Hermit?”

Qhila nodded once and started to head into the forest as she responded, “Yes. An old guy who lives in the heart of the barrier and is obsessed with hedgehogs. He’s supposedly harmless, but he has been there for decades, at least, without getting kicked out. No way that’s happened if he isn’t powerful.”

They entered the forest and walked in silence for a while. The moss carpet muted their footfalls to nothing, and the canopy was so far up that the rustling of leaves was barely audible even from strong gusts. Combined with the verdant gloom, the earthy scent and the titanic trees, this place felt like another world or another time, far more so than any other barrier John had been in. Like he had been transported to a primordial forest of mankind’s neolithic past, or to a planet that had never seen people at all.

A snapping branch brought John out of his head. In the blink of an eye, Qhila had a vial in her right hand and her left held out with its palm towards him in a gesture that was universally understandable as ‘stop’. Along with those things, however, she’d turned her head to look at the same place John was, at the source of the sound: the fallen branch John had stepped on.

While the glare John got for that was withering, he still felt relieved. Negative as it was, it felt like a crack in the emotionless wall she had put up. Besides, he could think of something that would make the reproach entirely warranted. Whispering, he asked, “Are we inside the predator warning area?”

Qhila just nodded, waited for a little bit, then started walking again. John mentally kicked himself for having been so distracted by the forest that he hadn’t noticed how she was moving more carefully than in the Barrier Alleys. Now that he did pay attention, it was readily apparent. John switched to his combat gear set, feeling double dumb because he really should have done so when they entered the barrier regardless.

They carefully continued for a while, then Qhila stopped for a moment and seemed to be sniffing the air before changing direction. It took a few minutes’ walking before John, now paying extra attention to his own nose, caught an acrid undertone to the earthy aroma of the forest.

The source of the scent turned out to be a slime trail about half a meter wide. In it, the moss and lichens were stripped away revealing naked dirt through the transparent, yellowish-green goo. Qhila knelt down and sniffed it closely, then scooped some up into two vials with a spoon, stoppered them and packed them away.

“The warning was for a harpoon hedgeslug.” Qhila spoke in a normal volume, suggesting that the need for quiet was no more. John’s relief at that was thoroughly squashed by the carefully neutral tone and expression remaining in full ****. “They don’t actively hunt anything other than carrion. They are, however, opportunistically aggressive and can launch venomous spines up to 10 meters. So keep on the lookout for what looks like a large, spiky shrubbery. And don’t get the slime on your skin.”

John nodded in understanding and Qhila took a few steps back for a running start and leapt across the slime trail. John just stepped across, but his legs were also about twice as long as hers.

“While it’s safe to talk… The Quest gave me the names of the stuff you need, but nothing about how it looks or where to look for it. So if you want me to be able to do more than tag along in case of trouble, I kinda need some directions… It also gave me a side objective about an Adonite shard, whatever that is, but unless we stumble across it, I don’t want to delay what we came for…”

Qhila nodded, was quiet for a moment, then nodded again and spoke, “Minerva owls are grey owls with bronze markings that, somewhat ironically, could have been mundane passing if they were smarter. They can teleport and phase through plant material, but we don’t need the actual owl, a discarded feather is plenty. So look for feathers or a glimmer of bronze at the foot of trees.

“Thinking caps are morel fungi that grow on dead or dying trees. So look for fallen trees, clearings with a tree in the middle or trees where the shadows aren’t as deep around them. The mushrooms themselves are light blue with red spots in the pits of the cap and a white stem, but if we find a viable spot that hasn’t been harvested already, spotting the caps themselves won’t be hard.

“The leaves are going to be, simultaneously, the smallest and biggest challenge. Lesniks are a type of plantkin, cousin to dryads and green men. Acanthus refers to the specific variety and I know where one of those lives. Convincing her to part with two of her leaves this time of year could be very hard though.

“Nobleweed is a flowering herb with white and green flowers. Getting named ‘weed’ despite every part of the thing having medicinal properties shows how prolific they are. Anywhere with enough light will be bloody filthy with them unless it’s been picked clean by others, like the West Menhir clearing. If we haven’t found any by the time we have the rest, I can pick them up at Grave Concoctions.

“Adonite is a crystalline mineral you can find in trace amounts in the soil anywhere in the barrier. If you just wanted some of it, you could stuff some dirt into your inventory and extract the Adonite later. But since you asked for a shard… some plants and animals absorb it along with other stuff, then extrude it as pure crystals.”

Qhila had started pressing on as she spoke, and they walked in silence for a few seconds before she asked, “What’s with the water gun?”

“It’s loaded with concentrated bleach. A bit to the face was highly effective against the pseudodrakes, so I figure it’d be useful if we ran into something violent. And if not, I can switch to alchemist’s fire.”

“No. It will ignite on contact with air and ruin the water gun.”

Despite Qhila’s tone remaining one of closed neutrality and her not looking back, John couldn’t quite help a small smirk appearing, or creeping into his voice. “Not a problem if I do it in my inventory.”

Based on the lower volume and not being emotionless, her ‘response’ was just her muttering to herself.