“It just turned up when I built the house. At least it doesn’t eat my runner beans. Hi, I’m Maddy, nice to see someone rolled a dwarf ranger finally.” A nameplate faded into sight above her head as she spoke: F1 Madeleine Ogresbane. When Claire had read it, it faded out unobtrusively.

“I’m Claire, and I did not expect to see someone with a smallholding here! How did you manage that?”

Maddy squinted at Claire’s nameplate. “Wolfbiter, huh? I was in the beta, and this was part of my severance package. They gave us a choice between keeping some of the test characters’ levels, getting a foundation stone, or a scaling weapon. Figured I wanted to try out the simple life for a while.”

“It was just the ONE wolf!”

“That sounds like a story worth hearing. Lemme show you around, and you can tell me all about it – I see you got the alpha warg already, nice going.”

“Yep, I almost died. Took about seventeen hundred arrows and a pile of teeth.”

“You know you’re not supposed to take him on on your own? The quest should have told you to go back to Helgrim for advice, then he and some friends take a group of newbie rangers to deal with him. Practice in teamwork and so on.”

“Oops! Oh, well, I did it. Got a special prize, too, but it isn’t much use to me.” She pulled out the box and casually waved the crown at Maddy, who blinked.

“I have never seen that before, and I certainly don’t remember any lost dwarf kingdoms in the lore. There’s a guy in Tralldon – wait, they just call it “the Mountain” now, don’t they – take it to show him when you get there. Ormun the Illuminator, over by the jewellery quarter and the guy who blings up armour. Buys and sells minor magic shit.”

“Thank you! The silly sexist piece of tacky ironmongery wants me to find another seventeen billion pieces of the set, then find a dwarf boy to give them all to, but there’s apparently lots of xp in it for me. Are you going there again, or are you retired to the farm for good?”

“For now at least – might start adventuring again once things have settled down and they work out all the startup bugs. Here, lemme show you around! This place is so cool. Most people who took the foundation stones went for castles or wizard’s towers, but I saw the “farmstead” option and had to try it. Monsters can’t come past the boundary line unless someone trains them in - ‘spose that’s the ‘hot pursuit’ rule for you – and stuff I plant grows extra-quick. I got a pile of seeds, and there’s a travelling merchant who shows up every week or so to sell more, and buys my produce.”

Maddy opened the farmhouse door and gestured Claire in with a grand wave. It was almost ridiculously homely in there, with even a rocking chair and a copper kettle over the fire in the hearth, a Dwarf-styled Aga oven, and a complicated mess of copper tubing attached to a large barrel.

“You don’t have a cat! You should have a cat.”

“I know! I’ve submitted a bug report. They issue me with a goat that does nothing but stand on the roof and eat my house, and No Cat. It’s ridiculous. At least I have beer – fancy a pint?”

It was very good beer indeed, and Claire happily helped Maddy refill the barrel afterwards, gathering an armful of barley from the garden and pouring the grains into a copper hopper. Copper hopper… dropper… topper! Hee.

“And then it works by game magic, and half an hour later there’s more beer! So, are you off to the Mountain now?”

“I have no idea! I haven’t turned these quests in to Helgrim yet, so I don’t know what he’ll send me off for next. I’ve done rabbits and wolves, so I figure it’s either goblins next or I have to learn herbalism or blacksmithing or basketweaving or something.”

It turned out that the next set of missions involved herbalism and goblins both.

-5 hp!

“Owwww! That hurt!” Claire complained.

“It’s supposed to, dear,” Zreksin explained, slipping her wooden spoon back into her apron pocket. “That way you have an incentive to do it right next time. Now, stir it one full turn clockwise, and then three-quarters of a turn back the other way, five times.”

“I did, though!”

“No, dearie, you did seven-eights of a turn the second time. If you drank this, it would remove warts and turn you primrose yellow, and nobody wants that, do they, hm?”

The tiny white flowers, it turned out, were maiden’s alwis, and a paste made from them was the main ingredient in a basic healing potion, once stirred into strawberry juice. I suppose it has to be red somehow… do mana potions use gooseberry juice, maybe? Or watermelon?

-5 hp!

“Too slow! Stir it at the same speed you would groom a dire badger, not the way you stir soup!”

-5 hp!

“Too fast! The badger will bite you and you’ll be sorry!”

-5 hp!

“That was just right, but you mustn’t leave the spoon in afterwards. Take it out and lick it!”

+5 hp!

“Ooh, it tastes of strawberries and springtime, that’s lovely!”

“It should be, young dwarf! I spent fifty-seven years perfecting that recipe, and it took forty-two of them to stop it tasting of rotting acorns!”

Claire made a face, and carefully decanted her basic healing potion into a half-dozen tiny vials.

“Here, young potionist. I bestow on you your recipe book.” The goblin-sized notebook was bound in what looked disconcertingly like mushroom skin, and as Claire touched it a notification window bubbled up.

New skill gained: Apprentice potion brewing (active, craft): Create a variety of potions. Consult your recipe book for more details.

You have obtained a Potion Recipe Book! Using this, you may create potions quickly or in larger batches. It contains the following recipes: basic healing potion.

Visit an alchemist to learn more potion recipes.

“And here is a masterpiece of gnomish craft for you: the Potionist’s Companion!”

The Potionist’s Companion was a compact leather hip pouch which unfolded to reveal loops for a dozen vials, two holders for larger jars, a multitude of small pouches for ingredients, a slot for her recipe book, and – of course – a wooden spoon of her very own!

“Oh, it’s perfect! Thank you so much!” Claire was genuinely overjoyed, even if she still felt weirded out by the name “potionist”. She was, after all, the kind of person who would spend a week researching the perfect desk set, and another week arranging and rearranging all her favourite coloured pens and craft knives in it. Her handbag was organised into a dozen compartments, each with exactly the correct thing in it, and her bullet journals were a marvel of calligraphy, washi, and indexing techniques. Her bedroom floor, on the other hand, was… somewhere under there. There was a strictly enforced line dividing clean clothes from dirty ones, but beyond that, chaos and anarchy and darkness reigned supreme. So her fingers were already twitching thinking about how she’d organise her potions and ingredients, and how she’d decorate her recipe book. Mushroom brown was so not her style.

“Are there any other recipes you can teach me? Like a mana potion, or invisibility, or barkskin, or fire breathing, or water breathing, or gaseous form, or – well, anything?” Claire looked hopefully at the elderly goblin woman where she perched on her tall work stool.

“I would be able to teach you a mana potion recipe, IF I had any cider. But my cousin Zkliskin’s orchard has been full of rot wasps since autumn, so there aren’t any apples, and his cider press broke when my other cousin Zserkin tried to use it to press rocks in. The others, well, you’d need to be much more skilled before you can learn any of those.”

Saving the Orchard: Kill rot wasps (0/350), prune apple trees (0/10), repair the cider press. Reward: cider, mana potion recipe, 1000 xp.

“Well, I suppose that’s my cue… wait, pressing rocks?”

“They were really pretty rocks, and Zserkin’s never been the sharpest hammer in the toolbox.”

“I’ll see you later!” Claire waved happily, and logged out.

“Oooofffff!” Claire hobbled painfully in the direction of coffee, sensation slowly returning to her limbs after so long motionless. “Note to self: shorter sessions. Definitely going to do that. No more forgetting. Narrator voice: she was definitely going to forget.”

“Right, coffee shop time, or I’ll go crazy and start talking to myself. Instead of to the imaginary people I’ve been talking to all day.”

Preflight: hair brushed and braided, check. Blended eyeshadow and coffee-glitter lipstick, check. Pretty dress and earrings, check. Bloody uncomfortable balconette bra, check. Tights and heels and rucksack covered in badges, check. The things we go through for coffee we don’t have to make ourself… and fresh air and sunlight and social acceptability…

Walking felt weird for a while. It wasn’t just the heels, though they were quite a change from the stompy dwarf boots – even the length of her limbs felt wrong now, and she felt… stretched and insubstantial. Normally, her six-foot-two frame felt lithe and responsive, but now it was as though she might topple over.

“Hypersize macadamia mochaccino, please. And a slice of parsnip cake.”

“Sure thing! That’ll be £27.70 please. Have a nice day!!”

Corner armchair by the window, jacket slung over the seat opposite, tablet open to the Ever After wiki, Claire set to editing and soaking up some of the sheer not-being-stuck-inside-ness. Oh, froggit, I should have taken a screenshot of the quest details. What was her name, Zerkin, Zexins, something like that… I’ll put Zexin and edit it later. I wonder if everyone learns potionizationing from goblins? Nah, elves probably wave herbs around under the crescent moon or something. And forgewrought probably just grease their joints. Or each others’. That must be something to see.

She’d always been one to read ahead with skills and spells and especially equipment, but nobody had levelled a ranger above 10 yet, so there wasn’t much information there. A couple of close-combat skills (including dual-wielding, inevitably) would turn up when she hit level 5, but other than that it was all trick shots (double shot, piercing arrow, curved shot) and a couple of passives to make her arrows fly faster and hit harder. Based on the source material, pet skills and poisoned arrows would probably show up soonish.

Potions were a bit more fruitful, because someone had apparently been pumping one of the master alchemists for details. Invisibility potions were very high level, and so was gaseous form. Nobody had even heard of a fire breathing potion, but the old staples of barkskin and water breathing were novice level, one step above apprentice.

Annoyingly, whoever uploaded that (@bestboi3876, in fact) hadn’t asked about paints or dyes, which had always been Claire’s favourite craft things. They might not be potions, but she figured there was enough overlap to be worth asking ...Zekskin?… about later, or one of her extended family would know how to make them.

Someone had already uploaded a page on rot wasps, but it wasn’t encouraging. They were about ten times the size of normal wasps, but that’s still a very small target for an arrow, and her explosive arrows needed to hit something to blow up. Three hundred and fifty of them were going to take a long time. Ain’t nobody got time for that. Let’s see what we can do…

Claire looked mournfully at the last drops of her coffee, and with one final optimistic slurp started home. I can get in a few more hours before bed, right?