I was born at a very young age. In fact, it has been said that I was the youngest person ever born! As I grew older, I also grew bigger, eventually reaching my current stature.
One day, I was walking through the forest, thinking about how awesome it would be to be a hero, when I saw a large cat up ahead. It was flickering between a tiger, a jaguar, a leopard, a lion, a cheetah, and a snow leopard. I was entranced. It said to me, “Which form do you like best? I’m trying to choose an outfit for a party.”
“I like the jaguar best.” I mumbled after falling over in shock.
“Awesome.” It said.
I followed it for awhile. Either it didn’t notice me, or it pretended not to. After several minutes, it turned around and said: “Do you want something?”
“I want to be a hero.” He told me that I didn’t want to be a hero. I disagreed.
We argued back and forth for awhile, until finally he said “Fine. Build me a temple out of golden bricks, kill that monster over there, and fill out this quest completion form.”
The jaguar floated into the sky and I killed the monster. I tried to complete the form, but all it told me was to kill about 100 more monsters. So I did, and as I was doing so, I kept getting blasted with healing energy. While I was in town, this same influence sometimes stole thousands of coins from my pouch and turned them into golden bricks. That’s when I realized that while I had to build this temple, and find most of the materials, I was going to get a little help.
An epic quest finally came for me. I had heard older heroes bragging about their epic deeds. Now I could join them. I found out after doing it that epic quests are just regular quests that take longer and sound cool instead of cheesy.
After seven months of furious questing, I finally found the last golden brick and placed it at the top of the temple. As soon as I did, golden light engulfed the entire thing, and the Jaguar appeared in the center of the temple.
He turned to me and said: “Just to let you know, there might be a little rain coming…”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You should build an ark. Just in case.”
“But I want to retire. I’m sick of everyone trying to kill me.”
“Save up 30 million gold coins and you can retire in luxury. Or you can retire now, live in poverty for the rest of your life, and not be resurrected ever again.” To me at least, the choice was obvious.
I started building the ark immediately, it quickly became apparent that gopher logs are harder to find than golden bricks, but I don’t have to work for some of them. Sometimes a log will teleport into my temple or into my loot bag. Otherwise, a pile of logs appears next to me after an epic quest. Dungeons are scary, but at least there are other heroes just as terrified as I am to help find the treasury.
Saving is easy, it’s just that since there is so much that needs to be saved, it takes awhile. Also, I like beer… I try to do both every time I go to town, but sometimes when I’ve had an absurd amount of alcohol, I forget to deposit my extra coins. When that happens I think I can hear the sound of barely contained rage coming from the heavens.
Behemoth keeps leveling up. I think he’s trying to get to level 30 before I get to level 60, so now we’re racing. Will something bad happen to me if he wins? Apparently not, but I saw a strange symbol fly from his right nostril up to the heavens.
Terrible news. Behemoth is dead. He died bravely, but it doesn’t make it any easier. I finished my ark soon after he passed and found that it was a good place to keep pets. He wouldn’t have died if I’d finished the ark sooner. I could have put him there and played with him in my downtime. He wouldn’t have had to go adventuring with me anymore. I’ve adopted three more pets since he died. I take better care of them now, and let them retire to my ark after a time spent adventuring with me.
After I finished my ark, the Jaguar appeared to me again and said “Congratulations on this momentous achievement. You have done well.”
“Thank you very much. Do you like the way the ark looks next to the temple?”
“Oh very much so. Gold and brown go surprisingly well together.” The Jaguar said with a smile.
“So can I retire now?” I asked.
“Have you saved up enough money?”
“Not yet.” I admitted.
“Then allow me to make a confession.”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
“The ark is just the first step in this new phase of your adventuring career. The next step is to fill it up with creatures.” The Jaguar looked at me apologetically.
“Why do we need creatures to live in the ark?” I asked.
“Just in case something happens and the creatures need a boat to survive.”
“Okay. Makes sense. You mean like if it were to flood?”
“Yeah!” It said excitedly.
“So how do I get these creatures?”
“Go fishing mostly. Some of those things you caught and released before were actually things that could have gone in the ark. You can also go sailing in the ark and rescue these creatures from cool sea monsters!”
“I’m confused again. You want me to go fishing for these creatures just in case it floods even though they already live in the water?” I asked.
“You know. That’s a really good point that I hadn’t thought of before now. Okay, so after you catch all of these creatures, you’re going to collect pieces of boss monsters and then put ’em together to make your own pet boss monster, but you need to catch these creatures and put them in your ark to make sure uhhhh…” The Jaguar tried to explain, but not very well.
“This isn’t helping.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me either. Look, all I know is that after you finished your temple, I got sucked into this really dingy conference room and some people told me that I had to give you these tasks in a very specific order because ‘this is how the game is played’ or something like that and that if I let you skip around that there would be ‘consequenses’. I was just as confused as you are now.”
“Uhhh… I really don’t know how to react to that.”
“Yeah. These guys were really serious about it too. They said something about how my ‘account would be deleted’ if I didn’t get you to do these things.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Apparently we both just die.”
“Oh well you can just resurrect me again.”
“Not if I’m dead too.”
“Huh. So… I’d better get get going.”
“Yeah, that’d be great. By the way, at some point you’re going to have to write a book!”
“About what?”
“Okay byeeee!” And with those final words, the Jaguar ascended back into the heavens, leaving me to wonder if the whole thing had been just a drunken hallucination.
I decided to start collecting these creatures and putting them in my ark just in case it was all real. Nothing out of the ordinary has happened since then, but I’ve noticed that I haven’t been sent to as many dungeons.