Chapter 2: 1. Rumors

Alice had been thinking. Thinking about the  status window she had recently awakened to. Status, she thought whilst turning her thoughts inwards.

Name: Alice
Level: 1
Race: Human(Age:10)

Titles:

Vitality: 2
Endurance: 1
Speed: 3
Strength: 2
Wisdom: 5

Passive skills:

Active Skills:[Basic Identification: Lvl 1]

Yesterday Alice had been greeted by a notification saying she had leveled up. At first she was confused as to why she had heard(?), no, sensed this new information, but after contemplating the matter for a full day she resolved to simply ask her parents about it when they came back from work. Alice's father was a hunter, he was  responsible for feeding the village and protecting it from any wild beasts who came too close. Alice's mother was a former adventurer, she had once had the grand ambition of gaining the strength to work for the country's  royalty and as such was much stronger than her husband but was forced to give up on her dream due to an injury. Maybe one day Alice could be an adventurer just like her mother. But before that day came she would have to be able to get from her small village at the edge of the country to a more central city, of course this would mean hunting her own food for the journey and defending herself from beasts and monsters. Maybe she could get her parents to train her when they got back.

"Alice!", a childish shout cutting through her daydreams, "Alice, where are you."

Probably Josh, she thought before answering the call, "Coming!"

What could he want this time? she wondered as she out of her fairly small yard and walked towards him. When the slightly chubby boy two years her junior entered view she waved and sped up a bit, before realizing that there was a wriggling feeling at the back of her mind, trying to worm its way out to the front. While not as intrusive as the level up notification it was still a novel experience. Once she had recognized the odd feeling, new information was projected into her mind.

Name: Joshua
Race: Human(Age:8)

Was this that Identification thing? If this was it, it was incredibly useless; All it told her was information she had already known. Josh must have noticed her sinking deeper into thought because he immediately broke her out of it by grabbing her arm and dragging her out of her yard to a clearing off to the side of the village.

"Let's play! Uncle said I should stop 'harassing' him and come play with you."

Alice looked irritated as the clearly bored and over energetic child begged to play, "Okay how about we play hide and seek, you can hide first." 

"No!", he paused before continuing again, "You're bad at hid and seek, last time I was hiding until dinner time."

Dammit, I thought I could get away from him for at least an hour, "Okay, how about tag then.""

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"Sure! I'm it."

"Wait. Tag with two people gets boring too quickly, why don't you try to find a few more people to come play with us."

"Okay."

Alice waited until he was out of earshot before letting out a sigh of relief, she had finally gotten away from him. I need to start thinking of new ways to distract him. In the short week he had been here, he had learnt most of her tricks, including but not limited to: Hide and seek without a seeker,  a drawing contest but she spent most of it looking for her pencil, and many more variations on this theme, until recently she had to give him the fabled "Side quest", known only by her mother. Before Josh and his family, who were friends with Alice's mother Alyssa, moved into the village, Alice occasionally asked her mother to play adventurer with her. But with her mother getting "too old to be chasing children all day", she was instead given quests by her mother. These quests were things like rounding up all twenty of their chickens to prove she could handle playing with a former B ranked adventurer. This was the fabled side quest. Before she could complete the main quest of facing her mother she had many side quests to accomplish. Occasionally though on some of Alyssa's better days she would play a short game of tag with Alice. These games were incredibly short as no matter how hard she tried to hold herself back there was simply no way a child could match an above average adventurer. And there was no way she could play with her dad since he was always busy working.

 Eventually the sun set and her mother came back from a nearby town east of the village, and her father from the woods with a carriage full of wolves, boars and other animals from the forest surrounding the village. As they were eating dinner in their house, Adam, Alice's father started a conversation.

"I think I went a bit overboard with hunting today, maybe you could sell it during your next visit to town?"

"A bit? I'd be surprised if there's anything left to hunt tomorrow." she said while letting out a soft laugh. "I could take some of it with me, but we should save some of it for winter, you can't be too prepared. I Also  heard some unnerving rumors going around that The Blood Reapers are becoming more active in this area."

"That damn cult full of psychos? The last thing anyone needs here is more of them. Here we are just trying to live our lives and they just have to sacrifice entire cities of people to make a number go up." he said, his hatred of them clearer than day.

"A number? Is it the same ones In my status?", Alice asked while stepping into the conversation.

"Oh, you can now see your status? Maybe our games of tag won't be so short now." 

"They're short because you're a grown up." she pouted playfully. "How can you even be so fast when you're injured."

"I'm quick but not much else. For me to fight strong monsters I need to be able to use magic, which I can't use anymore."

"It's still unfair!"

"Either way, congratulations on your first level! It means you're growing." The hunter exclaimed, "Maybe your old man can start training you to be a hunter one of these days."

"But before you get too exited just remember, your stats just show your abilities, not affect them. People getting too caried away with their level  is how The Reapers happened. Just something for you to keep in mind.", her father quickly cautioned her before she was sent to bed, ending her day.

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