Unwog started bandaging himself to slow his HP loss rate.

“Good goin’ lad! How’d ye find us out here?” Antivitz said, huffing. I grabbed a skin of water out of my bag and tossed it to him and Unwog for a drink.

“Dude, I saw that Ogre over where I was like twenty minutes away from you guys. How did it hear you fuckers and what the hell were you doing to make so much noise to attract an Ogre?! Plus, you didn’t even tell me Ogres lived out here, much less anything else!”

“Well, laddie, Mountain Ogres are scavengers and don’t really come down from the mountains too often except to seek out different rocks to eat, or if they’re just feeling antsy and want to eat some actual meat, I suppose. There’s still a lot we don’t know about general creatures of Eir, despite having had civilizations here for many thousands of years. Nobody’s ever really looked into investigating creature habits. But, yeah, Ogres do appear here from time to time.”

“Also,” Unwog interjected, “Thanks for the party invites, I got a lot of experience from that.” I went ahead and pulled up my status screen for myself. That Ogre boosted me to level ten, but I noticed, yet again, my notifications were blinking at the bottom, so I pulled it up. There was a window asking if I wanted to stay a Cleric past level ten, so that meant during this whole trip I had gone from level 1, leaving the city with Antivitz, to level ten and possibly beyond if I decided to stay a Cleric.

Oh! I’m a Cleric! I immediately remembered the fact I had healing spells and went ahead and cast the two spells I had on Unwog and Vitz, restoring their HP to about 10% each. I also went ahead and just inspected Antivitz and Unwog, learning that Antivitz was level 250 and Unwog was 200. Interesting that my magic healed so much, but maybe magic mechanics worked differently in this game. I decided to ask them as they sat on the ground drinking from my waterskins.

My notifications were blinking yet again, so I brought them up. Apparently Weapon Skill was a thing as well, and I had 20/50 of the first rank Two Handed Mace skill, combined from the Ogre fight and the bandit fight earlier I would assume from the window I was looking at. Also my Heal skill could apparently rank up as well. I minimized it down to a small window and cast it on myself being full HP, but the percentage didn’t go up as much as it probably did healing wounded people. I continued to heal them vigorously, taking about half of my mana for both of them. I had a pretty large pool of mana, it seemed. I wasn’t one for crunching numbers or anything like that, so I just took it as is. But I’d have to say, I was pretty geared for a newbie.

After we all rested up, we went ahead and went back to the digsite. Antivitz mentioned on the way that the caravan was probably headed back from the capital and back into the town we came from, so we should camp there for the night for it. We had no trouble getting back to the campsite from there and went to sit and chill until the caravan came by, later that night. We swapped stories of various adventures we had been on, mostly from Unwog and Antivitz, and soon enough, the caravan came by and we hopped on a cart to take us back to Neir, where we came from originally. Antivitz had a load of artifacts along with my Gor’s Armor pieces and my new trinket. I was going to discuss prices with Vitz when we got back to his shop.

While Vitz and Unwog were speaking on the way back, I decided to open up the letter I got from that street urchin a while back, must have been a few days now. I withdrew it from my bag, and cracked the wax seal on the folded piece of paper, and opened it up.

Dearest Zack,

So lovely of you to enter the game to see me! Drop by the headquarters for Tarqu Industries sometime so we can have a chat. I hope you like the gift.

And a name scribbled at the bottom which I could barely make out,

-Adanaya Zurich

I had no idea who this person was, but they apparently knew me.

“Hey, Antivitz?” I asked, slightly interrupting the beginning of another conversation between Unwog and Antivitz about artifacts. “Do you know where the headquarters of Tarqu Industries is?”

“Aye, lad. It’s in the capital of Neir, Ushak. One of the biggest buildings there, in fact. You players actually built it. It’s apparently something called a “skyscraper”. I’d love to go meself, but, duty calls at work.”

“That’s a weird name for a capital in the middle of non-Orc lands,” I mentioned.

“That’s because the capital was founded by a now-famous Orc Merchant, Usha’lak. It’s a grand city now, but apparently it used to be just a few mud huts and various peoples,” Unwog interjected. “It’s grown a lot over the hundreds of years since it was founded, or so I was told as a little Orc. I’ve never actually been to see it.”

“Well I have a letter that would probably get me in the front door there, apparently. From someone named Ananaya Zurich.” Vitz’s eyes widened as I said their first and last name.

“My boy, that’s the person who runs the whole company!”

“I also have an inkling of who it is, but I’m not going to say until I find out for sure.” Antivitz and Unwog went back to discussing artifacts while I looked out the back at the passing scenery. I figured the trip would take a while, so I told Antivitz I’d be back later, and logged out.