After about ten minutes of walking, Rose found the stream and began following it downstream. Within a few minutes, she came across a grove of trees growing on both banks of the stream. Sat on a large grey rock overlooking the stream was Gaia. Gaia turned and looked at Rose.

“Congratulations on finishing the first quest. I honestly didn’t expect you to finish so quickly. Your group is the first to gain access to the settlement interface, there are other groups and many more survivors, but your group is the only one who has met all the requirements. Although you did have the knowledge of what you needed, maybe I should give the quest to a few more people, more settlements would help I suppose. Anyway, I brought you here as I know you must have many questions, I am willing to answer them to the best of my ability.”

Rose sat down next to Gaia and thought deeply for a moment, wondering what to ask. She had thought of many questions since the last time they had spoke, but right now she struggled to remember them. The first thing that eventually came to mind was, “What is Essence? How does it work?”

Gaia thought for a moment before responding, “ Essence is the very life blood of this world, of me even. This whole world is me, Essence flows through all of me and all of the world. Humans lost the ability to connect to Essence when I was locked away, the other races died off because their connection to Essence and the Gods was too strong, they could not survive without their presence. The same thing happened to all the monsters, animals and flora that had relied on Essence. Now that Essence again runs through all things, you should begin seeing new plants appear that have special properties due to the Essence they absorb.

Humans can use their connection to do just about anything they imagine, some things will need an affinity for a specific element to work but Essence in its raw form has just as many uses, there are limits of course, your Essence pool will determine whether you has enough power to do what you want. Think of it as mana from one of humanities games, only without specific spells to learn, you have to create them yourself. “

Rose thought she had some experimenting to do when she got home, out loud, she asked, “ So what are Affinities then?”

Gaia responded with, “ An Affinity is a persons connection to an element, they make using Essence to create or use that element much easier. It is possible to have more than one Affinity but only with well matched elements, for example you will have difficulty connecting to water due to your fire Affinity.”

Rose wondered how many questions she would have time to ask and thought about what was the important things to ask. Explanations on her attributes and how to improve them would be useful, she would also like to know how health and Essence pools worked.

Information on skills and abilities would also be useful and she would really like to know more about the One God that Gaia had mentioned last time. Rose turned to Gaia and asked “ Could you explain how attributes work and how to raise them? Also how do the health and Essence pools work?”

Gaia said, “ Attributes are numerical measures of your body and capabilities. The higher your strength, the more you can lift or carry, also how hard you can hit. You can increase it by working out muscles and physically making yourself stronger. Intelligence is how easily you can pick up and understand new knowledge and skills, it is also a measure of how well you make connections between things. You increase you knowledge by both learning new things and understanding things you already know better. Wisdom is how well you use the knowledge and information you have, you can increase it by coming up with new ideas and making informed choices. Constitution is basically how healthy you are, how likely you are to fight off illnesse, it also impacts how long you can be physically active for before becoming exhausted. You increase this by being healthier and doing the same things as for strength. Charisma is how likeable you are and how likely people are to react favourably to you, charisma can be improved by being nicer to people essentially, your physical appearance has nothing to do with your charisma, just because you are good looking doesn’t mean people are going to immediately like you. Lastly luck is exactly that, how lucky you are. Increasing that one is a mystery if I’m honest with you."

Gaia stopped for a moment before answering Rose's next question.

"Your health pool comes from your strength and constitution attributes, it is more a measure of how much non life threatening damage you can take before passing out. You would then need someone to heal you before you die. Your Essence pool on the other hand is influenced by your intelligence and wisdom, it represents how much Essence you are capable of holding at one time. Each person will naturally pull in replacement Essence when needed but you can meditate on pulling in Essense to speed up that recovery time.”

Rose took some time to digest all that information before asking about skills and abilities.

Gaia explained, “ There is a skill for just about everything and almost anyone can learn any skill, they just need to put the effort in. As you level up skills, you will find new knowledge is available to you and that your efficiency with the skill improves. Abilities on the other hand are specifically attacks that you have created using Essence.”

Rose said, “ Ok, I can only think of one more thing to ask and that’s about the Pantheon Quest and the One God, when do I have to worry about that?”

Gaia then said, “Not for some time yet, you need to expand our settlement and get in touch with others, I will give the leaders that have appeared the first Quest to create their settlements, but its your job to connect those settlements and begin rebuilding the human race.

A new Quest will be waiting for you when you wake up, just to give you a goal to work towards in the mean time.

One other thing that you might find useful to know is that it is possible to unlock professions, the higher level profession, the higher level products they produce. At certain levels of professions you will be granted knowledge of how to do more difficult things, for example a builder might work out how to build a new building, or improve an old one.

If you can’t think of anything else to ask I will leave you to sleep, there is much that needs my attention.”

Rose couldn’t think of anything else to ask and soon found herself drifting into a deep sleep