Werewolf Pup (alternate)

You sit on the porch of someone else's house, watching the activity at the market. Villagers yelling at stalls, carrying wares, chopping wood, buying goods, just going about their lives.

You're a young boy appearing to be of age eleven or twelve, covered in filth and dressed in brown, tattered clothes. You're a street urchin, having been homeless ever since the of your parents. You're also a werewolf. And so are everyone at the market you're currently watching.

Werewolves originally only existed in the game as ordinary monsters, spawning exclusively in places where it always seemed to be night to give them an excuse to never appear in their human forms. They were just savage beasts to be slain by heroes, or slay heroes since unlike you they were quite strong, meant for higher level players to which they would still pose a considerable challenge. But that was all they were, randomly encountered wild monsters only found in dark parts of the world.

Then the village of Torgniam was added to the game.

This is where you live. The first part of the world where it's daytime half the time and werewolves can still be encountered. A place created as an experiment to add some depth to werewolves or something.

Torgniam is a peaceful village inhabited with friendly villagers trading simple and mostly uninteresting goods, but they're also unusually generous with haggling, leading to better prices than in most places. Many villagers also had miscellaneous quests to add some personality to them.

But at night, all of these friendly villagers, all of these humble people and smiling faces, turned into werewolves. They would then go hunting around the area for prey, and their main targets were of course heroes, especially the ones present in the village itself.

This was meant as a kind of moral and emotional dilemma for the heroes. The werewolves weren't simply monsters spawned in to kill them, they were humans that they would probably have gotten to know at least a little. Would heroes really want to kill them? Or would they look for other ways? Would they attempt to spare them or look for a cure?

Nope. They would just kill them. Obviously.

One thing the developers had not taken into account was just how heartless heroes tended to be. Many people completely misinterpreted this attempt to add depth to the game, thinking that the idea was that the villagers were actually evil and only showed it at night, and their friendly behavior was just a facade. Basically, they got it completely backwards. Then there were those who only saw nighttime in the village as a fun event where you got to kill weaker-than-average werewolves. There were also the unusually cruel ones that took greater pleasure in killing them knowing that they were innocent villagers. Only the most hardcore roleplayers and overly emotional heroes would leave you and the other villagers alone. And sadly, those weren't exactly the kind of heroes you encountered most frequently.

At first, this had been dreadful. Now it was even worse.

Before, some heroes had justified their slaughter of transformed villagers by pointing out that they respawned at dawn. How had the developers dealt with that? By making the villagers' deaths permanent. If someone died, they wouldn't respawn. Instead a new villager would spawn with a randomized name, appearance, personality, and sometimes a miscellaneous quest. This hadn't helped much, though. The main difference was that previously, every time you were killed you would at least respawn. But now, if you died, that was it. You would be erased from existence and some other child villager would be generated to take your place.

This idea was even worse to you than being killed over and over again. Almost all other monsters at least had the safety of never truly dying no matter how bad things got. You? One slip-up and you were no more. Therefore you had done everything you could to avoid combat. Every time you transformed, you hid or ran as to not get killed by a hero. You had managed pretty well with this, having stayed alive ever since the update was added, and it also helped that you were a child. Some heroes who were perfectly fine killing adult villagers still didn't feel comfortable murdering a little kid, even as a werewolf. Especially when said kid werewolf just ran off and hid making cute noises.

Unfortunately, not everyone had survived as well as you had. Your parents were long dead, and all of your friends had met the same fate.

The developers had actually taken notice to your persistence, making you something of a token character by giving you the unique title of "Orphan Street Urchin" which appeared next to your name "Mikael", and given you a few tailor-made miscellaneous quests. Of course, they hadn't removed your permanent , so you didn't really care.

Your special treatment was however a double-edged sword when it came to how heroes treated you. Some of the more achievement-geared ones wanted to kill you especially just because you were kind of special, but on the other hand some of the more RP-heavy ones would be less inclined to kill you. Why would they want to kill the poor, innocent orphan boy who lost both his parents to prejudiced people who only saw them as bloodthirsty monsters?

Well, this poor, innocent orphan boy felt way more like a bloodthirsty monster than anything else. After being killed so many times, after constantly fearing for your life, after losing your family and friends, you were more bent on taking on the heroes than you imagined many other monsters to be.

The problem is that you are, as mentioned, a child. Which means that as a werewolf, you're also a child. Unlike the adults, you aren't expected to actually manage to kill a hero. You're supposed to rely almost entirely on the compassion thing that so many heroes lack. You don't age either, at least not over time. Your only alternative for growing stronger is to level up, which you can't do because you can't get a single kill.

Still watching the market, you feel the familiar frustration boil within you as you lament all these facts. Then suddenly your view of the market is blocked by a figure. You look up to see a female hero, a tall, muscular barbarian. Her long, dark hair is tied into a single braid and her skin is tanned and covered in warpaint. And of course, she's well off in the chest and ass departments and not as much in the clothing department. All in all, she looks almost exactly like at least three other barbarians that have attempted to kill you. Heroes really aren't that original appearance-wise...

"So, got any quests for me, orphan boy?" she asks.

You sigh. Someone wanting a quest from you is preferable to the whole killing deal, but you gain absolutely nothing from it. Only the hero does, which annoys you. But nevertheless you open your questgiver menu, only to find it empty.

Your quests aren't consistent. On some days you got a different one, and on some days you don't have a single one. This is one of those days, apparently. Just as you're about to tell the barbarian this and hope she moves on without holding too much of a grudge against you for wasting her oh so valuable time, you get an idea... What if you were to make up your own quest? It probably wouldn't actually register as a quest, leaving the barbarian's quest log unchanged, but you had never tried. So why not? The barbarian might get upset if it doesn't work, but during daytime you weren't killable, and this looked like one of those heroes who would be attempting to kill you anyway when night fell.