Now that Aster had accepted the prompt, the description of the profession changed slightly

  Novice Naturalist - You have taken your first steps into the wider world of the multiverse’s mysteries. As a Novice Naturalist, your keen eye grants you the ability to identify plants, animals, and environmental patterns with growing accuracy. You gain passive bonuses to tracking, foraging, and recognizing creature behaviors, along with a small chance to uncover rare materials in natural environments. While your knowledge is still limited, ecosystems begin to unfold before you, offering subtle clues and hidden paths. With study and experience, the wilds will become your ally—and your arsenal.

  +2 Vit, +1 Wis, +2 Tough, +2 Free Point

  Starting Skills: Basic Tracking (Common), Naturalist’s Field Guide (Common), Environmental Insight (Uncommon), Treasure Sense (Uncommon)

  After double checking that she was at least temporarily safe, Aster looked at the description for the first skill. She found it… underwhelming.

  *Gained Skill*:[Basic Tracking (Common)] - Footprints, broken branches, scent trails—these signs don’t escape your eye. Passively highlights trails left behind by people or creatures in your area. The more you know about your prey (habits, biology, past sightings), the more accurate and detailed the trail becomes.

  Being able to track things is useful, I guess… Aster thought. By itself it was simply lackluster. Maybe if she found herself in really rough terrain or in a dangerous locale it could tip her off if something was nearby? Eh, they can’t all be winners.

  She moved on to the next one.

  *Gained Skill*:[Naturalist's Field Guide (Common)] - Conjure a personal field journal that automatically records observed data on flora, fauna, and environments. The Field Guide grows in accuracy and depth with repeated encounters. Once thresholds of information are reached, it may reveal hidden traits, patterns, or vulnerabilities.

  Now that was useful! She willed the Field Guide to appear and was beyond pleased when it appeared in her hands as a physical, leather book with an embossed rose on the cover. Intuitively, Aster knew that she could leave the book floating around her, so she did just that. She tested it out, dictating a few ideas and grinning stupidly when they appeared on the page.

  With a flick of her wrist, she turned the page backwards to the index, which she found to be entirely customizable.

  “The perfect note-taking tool,” she muttered. On a whim, Aster made a new entry for the Labyrinthine Rodent, filing it under Tutorial > Monsters > Labyrinth. Much to her surprise, several images of the rodent appeared as if sketched, and with a thought she was able to switch from the sketch views to a three-dimensional model she was able to interact with and take apart.

  “This is my new favorite thing,” she said in awe. Then she moved on and found herself second-guessing that presumption.

  *Gained Skill*:[Environmental Insight (Uncommon)] - You’ve developed an attunement to the rhythms of nature. Passively grants bonuses to Perception and Toughness while in natural environments. With time and focus, you may intuit subtle changes in terrain, weather, or creature behavior. Studying an environment or lifeform may unlock unique insights.

  A bonus to two stats while in natural environments? Toughness seemed to mean exactly what it said on the tin, so she could expect to be able to handle more extreme circumstances and environments. The bonus to Perception was of obvious benefit, especially if it stacked somehow with her next skill.

  *Gained Skill*:[Treasure Sense (Uncommon)] - You gain an intuitive sense for valuable natural resources. Search for edible materials, alchemical reagents, rare crafting ingredients, and hidden natural treasures. Increased sensitivities scale with your Wisdom and knowledge recorded in your Naturalist’s Field Guide. Occasionally reveals specialized resources.

  “Wow,” she muttered. This was gamechanging. A practically-perfect note taking tool, stat boosts while exploring natural environments, and an innate ability to track things. It wasn’t lost on her that the description for that particular skill both included the ability to track people and then later referred to them as her ‘prey’. Hopefully she wouldn’t find that part of the skill necessary, however.

  New skills in hand, and a boost to her morale, Aster retraced her steps to where she’d first seen the rodent, and then continued on her way through the labyrinth.

  --

  Castle let herself be led through the maze of canyons, noting the improvised arrows scratched into the walls at every fork. It made for efficient travel, and also gave her a decent idea as to how much travel this group of people had done.

  Maria spent the whole time learning as much as she could about this professor that had taken leadership of the group of coeds. His name was Asnani, and came from Kuala Lumpur originally. He was a retired MD who enjoyed teaching in his older age much more than working in internal medicine. His countless hours of stories enamored him to his students— or at least the ones who passed his classes. While Dr. Asnani was a generous man, he was not a generous teacher, and was known to be erratic at times regarding both the difficulty of his classes and the severity with which he treated slackers.

  It sucked for Maria, because she knew several men like this Dr. Asnani. Men who were accomplished and intelligent, who hadn’t flown too close to the sun, necessarily, but who had remained airborne too long all the same. She knew them to be unstable, living in a different time, and typically a font of knowledge riddled with impurities from generations prior.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  She hoped it wouldn’t come to any sort of confrontation, but Castle was a realist. She was a nurse, after all. She’d seen plenty of people die. She’d watched age and dementia catch up to the undeserving, and stood by in silent attendance as it happened. Maybe she’d even helped a few along, in their final days.

  Castle grit her teeth as she imagined an outcome where she’d need to do the same to the octogenarian leading these young men and women to their deaths.

  They walked through the canyons quietly, avoiding any signs of life. At one point they saw a large, oddly-shaped bird fly overhead, but if that was all the trouble they’d glimpse Castle would count them lucky.

  And lucky they were, as they came to the camp unharmed.

  It was a large, semi-circular hodgepodge of leanto-style shelters, interrupted by the remains of small campfires. The stream they’d followed ran from the box canyon through the camp and off the edge of the island, a few dozen meters away. A pile of loose shrubbery was sat atop a boulder, drying out in the sun. Another pile nearby held a stack of deconstructed, dried out plants. Larger pieces seemed to be what had been used to build some of the shelters, while the smaller looked like prime campfire wood. A woman sat on a rock in the stream, weaving strands of torn bark and semi-green wood into a circular pattern.

  “You’re all from the same college, right?”

  Matt nodded.

  Castle felt a small smile on her face, There’s an underwater basket weaving joke here somewhere…

  She followed Matt and Derrick a ways into the camp, where the feeling of the camp abruptly changed. People were huddled around the wreckage of what must have been a larger building.

  “Oh no,” Derrick said, then he ran ahead, taking advantage of his increased speed and agility as he leapt over the obstacles between him and the wreckage.

  Castle frowned. “I take it the camp wasn’t like this when you left?”

  Matt shook his head. He looked stunned. “That was our first structure.”

  “Do you see the doctor down there?” Castle asked.

  Another pause, and then Matt shook his head again. “No.”

  He was being strikingly calm about this entire situation. Was it shock?

  Castle looked at him: No excess sweat, hyperventilation, or twitchiness. Eyes aren’t overly dilated…

  She turned back to the scene and started towards the group huddled around the wreckage. Matt was fine, at least for the moment. The people around the wreckage were anything but, however.

  Several sported bleeding wounds, and at least three young adults had broken bones of one kind or another. Castle watched as a young woman with curly black hair reset her own dislocated finger. Tears streamed down her face as she wrestled with the pain before Castle offered her a hand.

  “Thanks,” she said, and Castle noticed that what she had mistaken for splotches of mud was actually pretty severe vitiligo.

  “Not a problem,” she said, looking away before she could draw attention to her staring. She coughed, “What happened here?”

  “You didn’t see it? There was some sort of dinosaur that came out of the sky and—“ The woman stopped as she presumably noticed that Castle was a stranger. She backed away, raising a staff that Maria hadn’t noticed before. “What the hell?” She asked.

  “Whoa,” Castle said, backing away. “I’m just here to help.”

  “Who are you?” The woman said, loud enough to draw attention away from the wreckage.

  Before Castle could respond, Derrick jumped in between the two women. “Hey, Murphy! Chill out. This is Castle,” he pointed back at her. “Matt and I found her. She’s a friend.”

  Murphy turned to look at Matt, who simply shrugged. Jackass.

  Wait. “Murphy?” Castle asked. “As in Murph? The Murph?”

  “What’s going on?” Murph asked Derrick, ignoring Castle entirely.

  The man looked back and forth between the two women before running his hand over his face. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  --

  Murph was a tall woman, easily taller than both Castle and Aster. Her skin was dark. Her strong arms crossed over a modest chest, and her shoulders showed under her white System-given robes.

  Murph, it turned out, was a healer. One of the only healers, actually, which Castle considered a strange occurrence in a camp mostly made up of med students. Then again, she couldn’t judge, seeing as how she was an RN who’d foregone a healer class for her much tankier selection.

  Derrick offered the first introductions. “Castle, this is Murph. Murph, like I said, this is Castle. Matt and I ran into her out in the canyons.”

  They shook hands, Castle taking note of the firmness of her handshake.

  “Welcome,” Murph said. “You’ve kind of caught us at a bad time, what with Dr. Asnani…” she sighed and rubbed a hand over her face.

  “What happened?” Matt asked.

  “Let’s get out of the open, first,” Murph said. “Whatever that thing was, it was too big to maneuver inside the rocks.”

  After they’d moved into the cover of the box canyons, the small group huddled in some shade around a pebbly creek. Murph stood on one side while Castle leaned against the wall on the other. Matt and Derrick sat together on a rock in the middle, Matt looking off at the people in the camp cleaning and caring for each other, while Derrick’s eyes never left Murph.

  “We were discussing next steps,” Murph said. “Forming hunting parties, whether to move into the canyons, how to prepare for the coming weeks, etcetera,” she waved her hand from one point to the next and Derrick nodded along. “It was frustrating. Dr. Asnani was insistent that none of this was real. You could…” She sighed. “You could see the panic in his eyes when he talked about it.”

  Castle’s brows furrowed. “How does someone convince themselves of something like that? How does a scientist refuse to believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes?”

  “Like I said,” Murph let a scowl through on her face, “panic.”

  “The doc was a mentor to all of us, Castle.” Derrick interjected.

  After a deep breath, Castle nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m just frustrated that so many people have been hurt.”

  “Me, too,” Murph said. She shifted her weight and asked, “So what’s your story? Just looking for a camp?”

  “Kind of,” Castle said. She pushed herself off the wall and sat down, motioning for Murph to do the same.

  “I’m good here,” said Murph.

  Matt coughed. “You’re going to want to sit down for this.”

  “Yeah,” Derrick agreed.

  Murph shook her head. “Sorry guys. I’m not trying to be rude, I’ve just got too much pent up energy right now. There’s so much to do and people are looking for someone to take charge of the cleanup and—“

  “Aster is alive,” Castle interrupted. “I came into this tutorial with her, and while I don’t know why you all thought she was already dead, I do know she’s still alive.”

  Murph froze, the air around her seeming to still. “I don’t believe you,” she whispered, not once taking her eyes off of Castle.

  “We didn’t either, Murph,” Derrick said quietly. “But there’s too much that doesn’t add up, and Castle here knows things she otherwise wouldn’t.”

  Matt nodded. “We haven’t seen her ourselves, but we don’t think she’s lying.”

  “I’m not.” Castle returned Murph’s cold stare. “She is alive. We entered the tutorial together. I was her nurse. Well, I was hired to be her nurse, but she wasn’t really receptive of me or medical professionals in general at that point. We came here together and only split up yesterday.”

  They stared at each other a while longer, much and nothing said in those few moments as Murph felt Castle out. And then, without a word, Murph sat, legs trembling. It was minutes later when she looked up, tears and determination in her face, and said, “Tell me everything.”