Things once ignored.

John didn't get the chance to answer Eddie, or ask her how she added her name and number to his phone, before she followed it up with another message. He tried to start typing, but the moment his fingers touched the text box on his screen to try and send her a reply, his phone went off again and he had to read the new one.

<WHERE DID YOU SEE IT????!?> she asked, but that was quickly followed up with even more messages.

<What did it look like?
Should I call it a she??
What was her name???
Did she try to kill you?!?!?
Was it smart?
I mean, she*!
Could she talk?!?
How old was she?!
Were there other Orcs there with her?!>

On top of all of that, her messages always seemed to end with almost a dozen different smiley faces or hearts whenever she mentioned the word 'Orc.' Eventually, John figured that the conversation would only progress if he decided to pick some of the questions to answer and then went forward from there. He didn't want to tell her where he went to meet Urga, partly because he didn't exactly know the answer to that, but he did try to answer a few of them like that anyways.

<Her name is Urga. She's a part of a whole tribe of Orcs I ran across in... a barrier of mine. She did try to kill me initially, but I beat her in a one-on-one combat along with some undead and stopped that from happening. When I won, the tribe accepted me as a part of their society... kind of, and gave me some things for it. Yeah, she can talk, but it's mostly in another language and I don't know about her age. She just seems older than me.> His thumbs hurt by the time he finished typing and sent the message, but thankfully there weren't many other new texts for him to catch up on from Eddie.

She sent him a couple more questions that he didn't see any point in answering and one message that was just an illegible series of emoticons before she finally finished reading the new one he had sent to her. Her reply wasn't succeeded with a litany of new messages the second time. He found no spam or other questions. It was just the one. Surprisingly, he found it really easy to answer.

<...Why are you alright with fighting undead and Orcs in a barrier but not alright with fighting outside of a barrier to do the right thing?> The tone of the conversation slowed and, despite the fact that he couldn't actually hear her speaking, felt like it had become extraordinarily serious once he saw that message. That was fine. It was a heavy topic to talk about.

Only it took him longer than expected to write out a reply... he was interrupted before he could finish it.

<It's a lot easier to kill something that is already dead when I have a bunch of barbarians at my back. I don't even know if I can bring any of them out of the barrier to help if I had to fight something here. I do know that I can bring other people into the barrier though so you all can think of my refusing to fight and kill LIVING, BREATHING PEOPLE as cowardly as much you all like, but it's not something that I want to do. I-> That was as far as he got.

"You should answer her." A deep and familiar voice with a heavy accent called out to John as he stared down at his phone. His head shot up when he heard it, and spun around to the direction it came from... but he didn't stop to stare at Michel's dead body for very long. The giant blond man remained in his line of sight only long enough for John to see his illusion smile and to peer through it with a cast of Observe before he quickly hopped away from the spot where he was standing. The pop-up came back with no information, so he hit send.

"Otrov..." he growled, and then watched from the corner of his eyes as Michel wavered like a mirage and faded from sight. When no one answered him, he tried using her real name again. "Alanah," he said and then heard the illusionist giggle.

"I'm starting to like it when you call out my name," she chuckled, and then like Michel, her image slowly wavered in front of him. She was wearing the what seemed like the same clothes that John had seen her in the last time they had met, with only minor differences to her outfit. She still had on a white blouse, dark slacks, and high suspenders... but now her blouse had bright pink stripes going vertically down the length of the shirt. She appeared like she was stepping out of thin air only a few feet away from him and narrowed her eyes for a moment, but John started casting Observe right away. He still didn't trust her as far as he could throw her, despite the fact that his abilities told him that she was standing exactly where she showed him that she was. "Interesting..." she mumbled and bit her lower lip. Her teeth raked over the thin, soft rim of her mouth, tugging on the smooth, pink, glistening layer of lipstick she had applied for a moment before John watched as the lip thickened before his very eyes. It took him longer than he would have liked to admit to realize that she was using an illusion to make her mouth look more alluring, but he eventually caught on. "... so I take it that you can't always see through my illusions?" she said, and John's jaw tightened.

"How did the ability you used the other day track me then?" she asked, but John didn't answer. He stood in silence until Otrov reached up and brushed a hand through her curly, jet-black locks, and sighed. "Oh, relax. I'm not here to kill you. You really can answer that friend of yours." Even with her offering him the freedom to talk to someone else, John didn't take his eyes off her. He spammed Observe again, lifted up his phone to enable the speech-to-text function on it, and then sent Eddie another message.

"Otrov is here." he stated into the phone and then hit send. The roguish brunette merely smiled at John.

"You really shouldn't trust that 'talking into your phone thing to type.' That program has a tendency to make mistakes," she said and giggled again. John didn't laugh.

"What do you want?" he asked, and Otrov's face fell.

"The same thing that I wanted from you before... for you to go and 'deal' with Daniel." As soon as she finished talking, John scoffed at her. She didn't get the message. How blunt was he going to have to be abou-

"Hey..." Otrov turned to look at the road as a single car drove by... and instinctively, John turned to follow her gaze. He peered through the window of the vehicle as it passed, and blinked as he recognized the silhouettes of two different heads in the front seats. One had a head full of hair that was black, long, and wavy, and the other had a dark mane that reached down to her neck with blonde highlights in it. "Isn't that your mom? Who is she with?"

John's heart skipped a beat as Otrov actually turned away from him. His Observe told him that she hadn't moved from the spot she had been in since the start of the conversation, but now he felt more worried than he had been when she was trying to stick a knife in his gut.

"You should introduce me..." she chuckled again, and a cool breeze danced across John's skin. She played with a spot around one of her suspenders, like she was thumbing the edge of an invisible knife, and John's jaw tightened. "They seem nice," she said, and John told her to stop.

"Sorry, what was that?" she asked and finally turned to look back at John. Her hand didn't move from the spot on her dark suspenders. Her voice may have been playful, but for once... her eyes remained hardened and focused on the young Gamer. For once... he knew he wasn't looking at an illusion in place of her face.

"Fine," he grunted. "I'll do it. I'll kill Daniel Salvador."