I found the village looking much the same as it had when I left. That wasn’t a surprise. I hadn’t been gone for more than six hours or so. And boring is as boring does. A sleepy old village couldn’t change that fast, could it?

  I said what were becoming my ritual greetings to Boaz and Fisher before stopping. There was a question brewing in the back of my mind I hadn’t thought to ask anyone about before. It had been there since the minute I had first seen the treant, though if you had asked me what I was thinking about at the moment back then, I would have said not getting killed. That was priority numero uno.

  “Hey, Fisher,” I said hesitantly. I wasn’t certain if he’d know the answer to my question or not. “Do you know what moonstruck means? I mean, I know the gist of it, but what specifically causes something to become moonstruck?”

  Fisher cocked his head to the side and thought about that. He thought long and hard, taking at least a minute before answering. “I don’t know much more than the basics myself, to be completely honest. Moonstruck creatures are creatures cursed by the moon with a lowered intelligence or bouts of insanity. I don’t really know what causes it other than the moon itself. I presume you’re asking about the treant?”

  I nodded. “Just asking out of curiosity. I managed to identify it before it attacked me, and it was just called a Moonstruck Treant. I didn’t even get a good look at it either. All I saw was a pair of green eyes and a glowing mouth before turning to run and getting walloped in the spine. That thing is stronger than most explosives.”

  “I’m surprised you survived that first hit at all. Your defensive stat efficacy must be through the roof to have pulled that off at your level difference.” Fisher thumbed his lip. “Hmm… being moonstruck must weaken it. Though, I haven’t noticed a difference every time we encounter it. It’s still as good at pounding on the village walls as it was at pounding them in. It built them, after all.”

  “What do you mean by stat efficacy?” I asked, a little confused.

  Fisher blinked, surprised. Apparently this was something I should have known by now. “You don’t know? Man, you really are new to this. Alright, lesson time. So. By now you know that stats mean different things at the bottom of a tier as opposed to the top, right? Well, each given individual also has their own different stat meanings. To put it simply, each person excels at different things in different ways. The treant out there, for instance, has a higher efficacy in strength and defense, but a lower efficacy in intelligence and health. Not a huge increase or decrease to either.

  “You, on the other hand, have an astronomically high stat efficacy in defense and health, if what I’m picking up from your experience with the treant is accurate. Which means you will have at least one abysmally low stat, possibly two, to balance things out. My guess would be intelligence and agility, though you could have just a really low intelligence and a slightly lower strength and agility.”

  Huh. That sounded practical. None of that fancy managing your remaining mana and budgeting for spells you’ll need to cast in future encounters for me. Plain and simple, like everything should be. Of course, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be picking up the odd spell or two when I had more mana, but they would probably be large damage dealing spells that I could only cast once as a fight ender.

  Nothing draining like flamethrower or something equally absurd. Just empty it all out in one go and wait patiently for it to refill. Rinse and repeat.

  Still, that didn’t help me for the time being. I still had to figure out what was wrong with the treant. If I didn’t do that, I would be stuck on this floor in this village until the day I died or the quest automatically failed and I was given a new one. At least the quest had simplified somewhat when I had gathered all that wood.

  Floor Quest: Figure out what’s wrong with the treant.

  Do note, this is a solo quest. If you do not complete it on you own, you will be given another.

  That one line telling me to figure out what was wrong the treant bugged me. I already knew what was wrong with it. It was moonstruck. That was plain and simple, and fairly obvious to anyone who took the time to parse things through. But apparently it wasn’t enough. So what was it about being moonstruck that I needed to figure out?

  What was moonsickness?

  Duh, it was a sickness given by the moon. But what was the sickness? Was it some sort of debuff, a consequence for a choice, or something else?

  I decided to just ask. That was, perhaps the simplest way of getting the information I wanted, and the least painful. Doing things this way meant I didn’t have to go back out there and get beat up all over again for science. All those twinkly stars and glitter around the word and some such.

  “Moonsickness? Why, it’s a curse, of course. But who would go around cursing the treant in the first place? It’s the only thing between us and the veil. Whoever did it was either very calculating in their elimination of our town, or was committing an elaborate form of suicide.”

  Ding.

  Floor Quest: Figure out how the treant was cursed and why.

  Do note, this is a solo quest. If you do not complete it on your own, you will be given another.

  I nearly smacked myself upside the head. Of course it was a curse. What else could it have been? Moons didn’t just go around handing out random debuffs, nor did it release a poison or disease or anything of the sort. The answer was glaringly obvious in hindsight. But you know what they say—something about the past and vision and something or other. Smart people stuff.

  Okay, don’t blame me. I wasn’t completely caught up on slang. And yes I know that saying’s been around for ages. I’m an old soul in a new body.

  Deal with it.

  “Who do you know that’s capable of cursing something like that treant? They should live in your village, as I assume y’all don’t see the wide world that much.”

  Felix shook his head. “I don’t know anyone like that. Sure there are a few… exotic characters in our community, but I can’t think of anyone who would do such a thing. It’s just too horrible. I mean, to consign the entire town to death…”

  And I understood. Truly, I did.

  Okay, not really. But I was sure trying. I couldn’t think of any specific kind of person that would do this sort of thing on a whim, and my mind kept going to all of those laughable Disney villains with the fancy capes and the can-do attitudes that often ended up being “morally gray” or their evil being “okay” because their parents treated them horribly or they were abandoned from their youth. As if those are ever acceptable excuses to be evil. Stupid, sad excuses for plots.(You can imagine me spitting off to the side here. Really, the new ones were quite abhorrent in this regard. Old Disney was so, so much better.)

  Can you hear me Walt? No? Too busy rolling over in your grave? Thought so.

  It was at this point that Boaz piped up. “There may be one person with the capabilities, and the knowledge. Though, I’m not entirely certain why she would turn to doing such a thing. She took an oath, after all.”

  Felix looked horrified, like he had just swallowed a pill made of frog mucus and the left over remnants of freshly brewed pond scum. “Surely not!” he said, vehemently rejecting the suggestion. “She couldn’t! She wouldn’t! The poor woman couldn’t bring herself to hurt a fly, let alone slaughter the village wholesale.”

  “Who?” I asked. This was becoming more and more cliche by the second.

  Felix shook his head, sadly. “Her name is Dalia. She is, or was, the village healer.”

  I walked up to the house Felix had directed me to and knocked. Ten seconds turned to twenty, turned into thirty, turned into several minutes. There was no answer. So I knocked again.

  This process continued for another three or so knocks before the door finally creaked open and I got my first look at Dalia. She was an older woman, maybe five three at the tallest. Her face was lined with creases that showed a lifetime of worry and care. Her hair was turning white, though it still had a light brown tint to it, as though it was fighting to stay alive. Which was silly. Hair wasn’t alive, it was very much dead.

  Her eyes were starting to have that gloss older people usually got, and her clothes were light and flowing, easy to put on and take off. If she lived on her own, which I was told she did, this was the only way for her to manage her own wardrobe.

  Ritualistic Healer(Lvl 8) - NPC

  A ritualistic healer uses charms and rituals to seal wounds and repair any kind of ailment you can think of. They have cures to diseases, poisons, and curses. They can bring people back from the brink of death with a word and a gesture, and they can replace anything missing from your body, even parts of the brain. Always a good person to know, they can make a fantastic addition to any party or team. Paying them what they are truly worth is often utterly impossible.

  She sized me up and down before motioning for me to come inside, closing the door behind me.

  I took the opportunity to examine the place. It was… interestingly decorated. Various talismans hung off the walls, including a dream-catcher which I found fascinating, and other bits of magical oddities sat around on shelves. There was a case of vials in the corner, meticulously labeled, and a mirroring cabinet of jars full of all number of pastes and powders. A set of paint brushes, knives, and a needle and thread sat in between on top of a chest of drawers. A few of said drawers were hanging open to show a collection of candles and incense sticks to burn.

  The whole house smelled like it was the inside of a large palace made of quarried stone with a natural mortar. The scent belonged to a spice I recognized, but couldn’t quite put my finger on the name of. It had a dark, rich, earthy scent. It was warm with a hint of spice, and a bitter after-smell. On the whole, rather a pleasant scent, to be honest.

  Dalia interrupted my musings by speaking as she guided me to a chair in the center of the room. It was settled across from a matching chair with a quaint little wooden table in between. The table was made of a dark, well stained wood, certainly not native to this part of the floor.

  “So,” she asked, sitting me down and taking the seat across from me, “What can I do for you today?”

  Taking a deep breath, I began. “I came to ask about curses.”

  “Ah, one of my favorites to deal with. Curses are easy. Just a bit of time and concentration and they can be broken with very little effort. At least, the natural ones can be.”

  “Natural ones? What does that mean?” I asked, genuinely confused at this point. I had thought all curses had to be cast by a person. But that was just my inexperience speaking.

  Dalia was more than happy to clarify my ignorance on this topic. “Natural curses are curses that can be found in nature. Received either by fighting the wrong creature or touching a cursed artifact, they can be quite nasty. Not nearly as bad as human cast ones, but a curse is a curse, bad or worse. Do you happen to know what kind of curse it is?”

  “Something about the moon, I think.”

  “That narrows down the search to two different results. The first one is called Tears of the Night, and is quite a nasty curse indeed. It is renewed at the full moon and grows stronger as the moon wanes until the new moon comes. As both a natural and a cast curse, it is perhaps the most insidious of the two. It shows itself in the form of pitch-black tears on the night of the new moon. The only way to cure it is to bottle these tears and save them til the full moon where you need to mix them with water from a crystal fountain and then drink the mixture. This curse is almost always fatal on the first or second cycle.

  “The other one is called moonsickness. It gives the moonstruck debuff every night except the new moon, causing the bearer to loose their sense of self and usually go on a rampage or lunatic raving until morning. They will then feel the overwhelming need to sleep until night comes again. This one is purely a cast curse, so is harder to remove.”

  I tilted my head from side to side, pretending to think for a little bit. “I believe it was Moonsickness. Do you know how to cure it?”

  She nodded. “It’s a bit more of an involved cure than Tears of the Night, but it should be doable, even for someone with no experience like yourself.”

  “And who else in this village would have the ability to cast this curse.” I asked.

  “No one. It requires a fairly complex and exact set of steps. Only I—” she cut herself off there, realizing what I had asked and what it meant. “Very clever.”

  Ding.

  Floor Quest: Kill Dalia and cure the treant of its curse.

  Do note, this is a solo quest. If you do not complete it on your own, you will be given another.