Chapter 2: Chapter 2

For every Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking in the world, there were probably hundreds of people who could have achieved similar heights of knowledge if they had the right questions and resources. Albert Einstein had spent many of his early years struggling to even get by before he had finally had the time and insight to begin making scientific discoveries, catapulting his position from a dropout struggling to get by in life to a world-renowned physicist that practically discovered half of the foundation of modern physics.

This was because he found the thing every researcher and scientist desperately needed in order to truly make discoveries: he had found a question. Alice, upon seeing a freaking magical box quantifying her attributes, had her own question. What the heck is this unscientific thing, and how could something this absurd possibly exist?

Today, the girl who, over the course of her rather short life, had always wondered if she would ever find a question and had finally found one…

Was lost in the woods, hungry, and a bit dehydrated. Her singularly unimpressive athletic abilities were finally coming back to haunt her.

While she would have loved to explore whatever the System was and what was going on, what she needed now were more basic things - food, water, and a basic idea of where she was. She had a certain hope that if magic existed in this world, there might be a solution that was… well… magical, but she figured that was probably just wishful thinking.

As she moved, she paid careful attention to her surroundings, looking for a single trace of anything useful. All of these trees meant that there had to be some form of water here, or at least there had been in the recent past, right? Even if all the trees were creepy and dead, if they had been dead for too long, surely they would have withered away, right?

But there was nothing here. In the three hours she had been walking, she hadn’t seen a single living thing besides herself, nor any hints of one. The forest was completely, eerily, unnervingly dead and silent. This made Alice more and more nervous as she walked - now that she was paying close attention to where she was going and her surroundings, every snap when she crushed a branch, every squeal of surprise when she misjudged where something was in the dim moonlight and walked into it, and every clumsy step she took seemed louder.

Something must have happened in this forest, and Alice didn’t know anywhere near enough about the outdoors to figure it out. The only thing she had determined for sure so far was that there were an awful lot of dead trees in the area, and finding routes over/around fallen trees was a huge pain in the butt. Finally, Alice realized that she was probably an idiot for trying to find her way around this creepy forest in the middle of the night, and began trying to look for a place to lay down for the night.

She hadn’t seen much in the way of cover so far, and she was getting cold. After another few minutes of walking, however, she finally found something that looked vaguely promising - a huge tree trunk had fallen into a bunch of other trunks, and for whatever reason, the inside of the tree trunk seemed rotten and, more importantly, partially hollow inside. The remaining space in the tree could probably fit ten of her inside pretty easily, and the shelter looked like it would probably do an okay job of keeping the wind away. Almost gasping with relief at the thought of laying down and sleeping for a while, Alice stumbled towards the hollow tree trunk - and nearly died for her carelessness.

An animal that looked like a raccoon leapt out at her. Its body was covered in horrific, bleeding pustules, and one of its legs had fallen off. Fresh blood was slowly dripping out of the wound, and it was hard to tell what color its fur had originally been. However, Alice was certain that whatever was wrong with this thing, she wanted nothing to do with it.

Alice was now wide-awake, and immediately began sprinting away at full speed, desperately trying to outrun whatever animal this thing was. Its claws still looked sharp, and Alice was pretty sure this thing had some sort of disease. Who knew whether it could infect humans too?

After sprinting for a few minutes, Alice realized the animal had stopped chasing her, and fell to the ground, gasping and panting for breath. She tried her best to remain alert, looking around for any other animals, but the unnerving silence of the dead forest had returned: nothing around her moved or made a single sound, not even the rustling of leaves. There was nothing to differentiate one direction from another, and no way to see save for the moonlight.

Her head started pounding, and Alice started to quickly realize something - despite the fact that her sweat hadn’t cooled down yet, she was starting to feel freezing cold. She frowned, and her vision started to blur as waves of blackness started eating away at the edge of her sight. She touched her forehead with a growing sense of fear and suspicion, and confirmed that it was blazing hot.

Oh crap. She had hypothesized earlier that another planet would have totally different diseases that her immune system had absolutely no defenses against, and hoped that the RPG system might somehow protect her from that, because she had no way of taking precautions against diseases right now. But less than a few hours after she got to this world, she already had a fever. Wasn’t this way too fast? Was she really going to die like this? Without figuring out anything at all about how she had gotten to this world or what the System was, or even seeing magic after her status screen claimed it existed?

But her eyes felt so heavy, and she was desperately trying to stay awake so that she could at least drag herself somewhere where she might have a lower chance of getting eaten while she was unconscious, but she just couldn’t stay awake. Faintly, as she felt dizzier and sleepier, she faintly saw the words

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Willpower +1, Endurance+1

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