I keep working on my taming skill until it is completely dark out since I have no desire to come back and dance around the second day. I finally achieve the required ten percent towards the skill and start to walk back to the barracks. When I finally arrive and look at the clock, it is already eleven thirty. I start wandering around the building looking to see if anyone is still awake and working to help me get a place to sleep, but it seems that no one is on duty right now. I walk around some more until I notice a door open with a light on so I move forward to that room. I glance inside and find that it a small bedroom that contains a single bed, a wooden nightstand, a chest of drawers, and a small desk that a woman was sitting at. Since I do not seem to be having any luck with finding a place to sleep, so I knock on her open door.

“Hello, my name is Alain” I call out, and she quickly turns around and faces me with an annoyed expression, “I am sorry to bother you, but Daniel told me to come here to find a place to sleep tonight. I guess I took too long and no one is around to help me find an empty room. Would you happen to know of one?”

She replies to me “You were supposed to return hours ago, we close at 7, not 11. You had better have a good explanation for why you took so long. Otherwise, you will sleep outside.”

As far as I can remember I was never scared of women but this particular one *shudder* she looks like she could snap me like a twig and her expression makes it look like she is seriously contemplating it. “ I was training ma’am” I quickly reply, “I had no desire to go back tomorrow and dance around those chickens some more so I finished gaining the 10% I was required before returning. I thought that there would always be someone working and did not consider that the barracks were only open certain hours.”

When I said that she actually snickered at me before turning back to her computer and typing a few seconds. She then starts outright laughing and calls me over. There I am on video no less acting like a chicken. “Daniel got you good” she replies still laughing while I am really getting angry at her for laughing at my embarrassment. “If you had researched the birds beforehand, or asked someone what they liked then you would not have done that at all. If you know how to deal with making a beast like you, then you can manually attempt taming them without the stupid scratching. This almost makes up for you being so late!” She continues still laughing with tears coming down her face.

“Why didn’t he tell me that?” I ask her.

“I don’t know, but it sure is funny,” she says, then when she looks at me and sees how upset I have become, she tries to regain control. “Seriously, if you decide you want a certain beast, find someone who has one and asks about what they like and doesn't like, or read a book on the animals. It’s not like they can tell you what they need or don’t need after you tame them. You need to learn about them before so that you can take care of them once you tame one.”

“That makes sense, but man that was embarrassing, what did I do to Daniel to get him to do that to me?” I ask.

“You would have to ask him tomorrow when you complete your quest.” She replies, “Either way I am sure you are tired after your day so let me show you to one of the open rooms. By the way, my name is Kimberly.” She tells me.

I follow her down the hall to another door which she opens, then hands me the key. “I don’t know how long you will be here training, but this room will be yours for the duration. Once you are given an assignment and move on then return this key to the desk at the front, or the box if it’s late again.”, she tells me.

“Thank you Kimberly” I reply.

As she moves off back down the hallway, I close the door and take a look around. This room is very similar to the one that she has except nothing is on the bed, no chest of drawers and no computer on the desk. I think to myself I guess I need to get one of those. I hear a knock at the door and open it to find Kimberly back with a backpack and a stack of items.

“I almost forgot, here are some more clothes and other necessary items for you. I am sorry for laughing at you but, you have to admit that was pretty funny.” She says handing me the items, then she turns to leave again calling a good night over her shoulder.

I place the items on the bed and find inside the backpack a few shirts, pants, smallclothes, and things like deodorant and soaps. There is also blankets and sheets for the bed. I go ahead and make the bed now and decide to take a shower before laying down to sleep. As I walk into the bathroom, I am passing a mirror and notice myself and realize that until this moment I had no idea what I looked like. I take a few minutes to examine the stranger staring back at me. He has light brown hair that reaches his shoulders and hazel eyes, a thin straight nose and rounded chin. I will guess that I am around 6 feet tall if the doors are 8 feet. My body looks athletic, not super built but with a decent muscle tone. Overall I think I look fairly good, then I get hit with an image of a human that looks older with a small gut and dark brown hair. Otherwise, he seems fairly similar to me in some respects, but I do not know who it is at all. I figure it must be someone from my past, but since it’s not important at the moment, I decide to go ahead and shower and head to bed.

The next morning I wake up to a knock and see that according to the clock on the nightstand it's 6:00 and I groan. I get up and answer the door to find Kimberly there. “I realized I forgot to tell you eating times last night so I figured I better wake you up in time to eat.” She says.

“Thank you” I reply then thinking about walking in that room alone I decide since she was friendly now to ask “would you mind if I joined you for breakfast, I do not want to eat alone.”

She smiles at me, and I notice she looks much more attractive after a shower, sleep, and with a smile. “That would be fine, I am heading down now just join me when you get there, and I will save you a spot.”

“Thanks again” I reply and head back into the room to dress in the new clothes. About 10 minutes later I head out of the room and realize I am not sure of the way to the dining room, but luckily breakfast is a rather noisy affair, so I follow the noise and the scent of food back to its source. I grab a plate and load it up with some fried meat of some kind and eggs, as well as some toast. I then grab some coffee and look around to find Kimberly. She is sitting at a table with Daniel and two others, and I almost decided to eat alone because of it. I decided against that because I will have to go see him after breakfast anyway, plus I want to know why he did that crap with the skill to me. I walk over to the table and Kimberly waves, and Daniel says “Hello Alain. I’m not sure how you got Kim on your side, but she told me off for not telling you about the other way to use taming. I’m sorry, but I just didn’t have time yesterday to walk you through all the cockatrices likes and dislikes. At least if I had told you before I sent you out there like that might have been embarrassing, but at least you would have known why.” Then he turns to Kimberly and adds “That good enough?”

Kimberly replies back “I suppose so, anyway Alain these other two are weapons trainers like me, we head up this facility together to train everyone and keep them all in shape. Honestly, though it doesn’t look like you will be staying here that long as we deal with mostly martial matters either hand to hand with Jonathan, daggers with Samantha, or swords with me, bows train elsewhere and with different methods.”

Samantha speaks up “I want to train with him some this afternoon after he completes whatever you require of him Dan before you send him off. Daggers and ranged weapons work off of the same statistics, and since you did not test him for daggers, he could be just a suited to that as ranged weapons. At least give him the shot to see if he would prefer that before he gets sent away.”

Daniel thinks for a minute and says “Go ahead and take him after breakfast and run him through what you can. I have instructions from the elder that have to be fulfilled so I can’t delay sending him out tonight, but if you start now, you can teach him the basics at least.” He then turns to me and says “Alain go with Samantha and learn all you can from her, but tonight you have a flight to your trainer at one of the beginner planets. Unfortunately this particular planet we do not control, it belongs to Immortalis I will give you more information later, but for now, we need to finish eating and get started. In the meantime” he appears to concentrate a second “here is your reward for completing my assignment.”

Another box appeared before me saying

Assignment complete- “Dances with chickens”

Reward 100 EXP and one set of beginners equipment

Then a chime sounded in my mind, and I received a notification that I had gained a level. Not too shabby one whole level plus some equipment too. Then I thought about the 7 hours I spent mimicking birds and decide that maybe it was crappy rewards for the time spent.

Daniel continued “After you finish with Samantha stop by my office and we will get your new set of gear sorted out, plus I will get you a book about the beasts you can find on the first planet you go to that you can read on the way.”

I nod my understanding and the chat some while I focus on eating and answering any questions they had for me. I decided to wait on investing the points from leveling until after I had gone through dagger training, as I might like it better than using a ranged weapon. Once we all finish eating Samantha directs me to follow her, and we go inside the barracks. We head up to the second level and into a room that has some training dummies set up in various areas, some with armor some without. Samantha takes me over to a wall that has some bandoliers on it and hands me one as well as a wooden dagger and starts teaching me, “What I am going to teach you will help you in either path you choose to take. The first thing you need to know is your weapons work best in certain scenarios. If you are fighting a person in armor, you need to not only know the weak points of the armor but also which places to hit to inflict the most damage. You want to make sure that your target is down as quickly as possible, and if possible before he even knows you are there. Eyes, brain, heart, lungs, and kidneys. If you can hit these, you can do significant damage, if not kill your opponent in a single strike. You can also cut throats too, but that requires significant levels of stealth to do so. If you fail and the target closes with you with a sword to your dagger or bow, you will be at a disadvantage and have to try to break off or hope you are better than he is.”

She then started me through various strikes on the dummies until lunch time, then after lunch, she started me on throwing weapons. By the time she was done with me, I was ready to go back to dancing for the cockatrices, I had never been so tired before in my life. She finally released me from her torture chamber around 3 in the afternoon, and I went and got a nice shower and fresh clothes I went to find Daniel in his office. When I reached his door, he beckoned me in, and I sat down in front of him. Once I was seated, he gave me a book titled Fauna of the Isildor Wilds.

He then said to me “Isildor is the planet you are going to, and on it you will find Ranger Saila, he is a member of Immortalis, which is part of the reason you are going to an Immortalis planet to start with. Our faction does not have a trainer that has both beast taming and ranged skill plus he owed us a favor, just keep in mind one day you might become a trainer for us. You will be leaving in about 5 hours on the next shuttle to the station, then will take a flight to a hub which then will connect you to Isildor. It will take you about a week to get there, so that should be ample time to familiarize yourself with the animals listed in this book. Please do not start a war with Immortalis while you are there. You may also want to hold off investing the points you gained until you speak to Saila as I am sure he would have better advice for you. Now if you will follow me, we will get you outfitted so that you are ready to show those Immortalis people what a real adventurer looks like.”

He then led me from the room and back towards the main entry, from there he went to a larger set of double doors and unlocked them ushering me inside the room. He then walked over to a wall and started pulling out pieces of gear along it and handing to me. None of it was special, but upon examining it, I got the popup

Leather Breastplate

Common

AC

6

Durability

100%

There was a helmet 4ac, breastplate 6ac, leggings 5ac, two bracers 2ac, and boots 3ac to make up this set. It would give me a total of 22 ac when fully equipped. He also gave me

Ashwood Bow

Common

Damage

7-10

Durability

100%

Fey Iron Dagger

Common

Damage

2-6

Durability

100%

and a quiver of 24 arrows.

Once I had all of this he handed me one last item and said “This item is considered a loan because of the cost associated with making one. It is called a dimensional storage ring and inside this one is camping gear, rope, a torch, and enough food to live in the wild for one week. You own everything inside, and thus you will be responsible for making sure it contains everything that you need, and it can hold about forty more items before it is full. To store stuff inside it think store and the item and it should disappear. To pull it back out think, retrieve or equip the name of the item. Think inventory and you will see a list of everything inside the ring. You have to pay us back for this ring, it will eventually belong to you once it is paid off, but that will take about a year of questing to do. Until it is paid off, you will be taxed 5% of your earnings.”

That sounded a bit steep to me, but then again being able to carry forty plus items in a ring was godlike to me as well. Plus it could equip items directly. I stored all the armor and weapons Daniel gave me then as quickly as I could I used the equip function to put on all the gear. It took me about a minute to get it all on this way, and Daniel smiled at me. “Over time as you get used to it, you can equip everything in about 5 seconds with that ring, possibly even faster, so it’s a nice perk.” He told me, then continued “either way you are equipped and ready to go, so let’s go back to my office and get you the rest of your paperwork for your flights. I would advise you to get a personal communication device as soon as you can afford to, as it cuts out all this paperwork and allows you to bypass a lot of the red tape.”

I thanked him for the advice and told him I appreciated the help everyone had given me, and he responded that we all had to work together towards our goal, so it was not a big deal.

I exited his office soon after that, and it was nearly dinner time, so I decided to have a last dinner with Kimberly and the sadist Samantha before leaving if they were in the cafeteria. I found them once I had my plate and told them I was going to Isildor and they asked me why there and not a Vortex planet. I explained what Daniel had told me about the trainer and they said that they understood and wished me luck on my journey. I thanked them, and we finished our meal together. Once we were done, I went back to my room and decided to look at the book that Daniel had given me since I still had an hour before I had to leave to make my shuttle. I examined the storage ring, and its popup informed me

Dimensional Storage Ring

Rare

Holds 50 items

Currently, contains 13 items

Durability

N/A

I though retrieve the book and it correctly pulled out the book, and I wondered what would have happened if I had two books in there. A test for another day I suppose and started reading it. Once my time had expired, I left the building after returning my key to Kimberly and went back to the main building where I had woken up since it also housed the shuttle terminals and hangars for private craft. I gave my paperwork to the person at the gate and entered the shuttle to await departure. The pilot of the craft eventually came across the speaker and said for everyone to strap in that we would be leaving 5 minutes while I had been lost in thought. When the five minutes were up, we were pressed in the seats, but overall it was a very comfortable lift off. No shaking, no anything I would have associated with going from the ground into space. I watched from the window as the ground pulled away and felt disconnected again as if I was adrift heading off on an adventure of sorts. I had trepidations, but I was also excited to see what the future would bring.

The space station was on site, and we would be there soon, it was shaped like a large mushroom with the stalk having multiple protrusions on which some ships were connected, we moved towards an empty spot and connected. I unbuckled the harness and headed out of the shuttle and into the space station and found it was fairly quiet inside. There were not many people around and surprisingly I had not seen anything that I would call an alien yet. Everyone I saw was either human, elf, dwarf, or some other humanoid that was so similar I could not tell the difference. In a way, I was disappointed, but then again this was a home world. Most of the people would be on the planets or in hubs, so maybe the next leg of my trip would be more exciting. I wandered for a little bit until I found my way to the gate for the next part of my journey I still had around 5 hours before my next departure, so I decided to get comfortable and take a nap.

Spoiler: Spoiler

Personal Information

Name

Age

Class

Level

Faction

Alain

18

N/A

2

N/A

Health

EXP to next level

Mana

35

200

28

Statistics

Strength

Stamina

Dexterity

Intelligence

Wisdom

4

5

10

4

4

Magic Affinity

Nature

Cold

Fire

Water

Light and Dark

8%

5%

1%

4%

3%

Skills

Beast Taming

10%

Stat points remaining

5

Skill points remaining

1