At this point, Jackie had realized that starting off as an Adventurer was much less interesting than she initially anticipated. Jackie was running errands for random merchants and tradesmen more than anything else, much to her chagrin. The next quest that she was taking was not much different, as it involved helping an old "alchemist" find herbs in the forest. Visibly sighing a bit, Jackie went on her way to find the magic drug shop to get started on the quest. The old man that gave Jackie the quest was called Khalash Saton and was a merchant who operated a successful magic drug shop in Magnolia Town.

Jackie had not been given the opportunity to meet the man himself, but he had written down very specific instructions on which herbs to find and how to find them on the back of the quest paper. The young adventurer ventured into the East Forest, hoping to get the mission over with quickly. As she reached the edge of the forest, Jackie started looking around for the first herb on the list, a few curly ferns. The entire forest was lush and flush with bright green colours, making it difficult to distinguish the ferns, but years of being trained with a hunting rifle gave Jackie a good eye.

It did not take long before Jackie found her first curly fern. The colour was similar to the other ferns in the forest, but the shape was much different, and stood out from the other ferns like a sore thumb. A quick short hike across the forest netted Jackie a fair number of curled ferns, and that led Jackie to the next item on the list: some blue lichen that can be found in rotting logs around the forest. The problem for Jackie was that rotten logs were very common in the forest, and that only a few of them had blue lichen inside them. Tilting over the logs to check for blue lichen was also a problematic process, as mold and bugs of all sorts were commonplace in and on the rotting logs, as to be expected.

Finding the blue lichen was quite a bit more difficult for Jackie, as the rotting logs had bugs crawling in them. Jackie was raised in the forest and wasn't easily scared by bugs like a lot of the other city girls, but at a certain point, it was too much for even Jackie. After probably her sixth log, she found some blue lichen inside it, with barely any bugs inhabiting the log. At that point, Jackie also made the connection between the number of bugs living in a log, and the likelihood of blue lichen being there. Making this connection made finding blue lichen a bit more easier, although the correlation didn't always exist, but it did make this part of the excursion slightly faster.

After about an hour of wandering the forest, Jackie was finally convinced that she had collected a sufficient amount of blue lichen for the merchant man. After checking the quest poster again, Jackie determined that the last item on the list was a red leafed vine. The merchant had written down that it can be found on the biggest trees in the heart of the forest. Following the merchant's advice, Jackie treked deeper and deeper into the forest, in search of the last herb. After a fair duration of walking around, Jackie spotted some trees that were fairly larger and taller than the other trees in the forest, and she scoped around, looking for a red leafed vine.

Jackie's eagle eye spotted a large red vine with leaves near the base of one of the huge trees, and she got closer, trying to confirm it with the description given to her by the merchant. Once she was confident that it was the right herb, Jackie cut off a sizable portion of it and put it in her pouch, and got ready to head back into the town. Having memorized the location of the shop, finding her way was an easy task for Jackie, and she entered into the shop with ingredients in tow on the same day she took the quest.

Khalash, the shopowner greeted Jackie, and she brought out her bags and pouches of herbs for the merchant. Khalash closely examined the herbs, before cutting them into pieces and tossing them into a boiling cauldron for a bit. Khalash takes a bit of the concoction and puts it in a vial before mixing it more, and handing a bit to Jackie to taste it. A bit uncomfortable, Jackie tasted it, and felt energy coursing through her. After Khalash felt content with the mixture, he quickly grabbed some money from his makeshift till and handed it to Jackie before sending her on her jolly way.



803/800 words