"You gonna try drinking it next?" Cy chuckled. "You're such a newb."

Arashi's smile fell and he pulled his hand out, wiping it on his shorts. "Sorry..."

"It's fine, everyone does it sooner or later." Cy waved him off. "For now, we need a game plan. We have goal...a few of them."

"I'm still level 16," Arashi admitted. "I should go do some more quests."

He stood up and looked around, noticing a lot of the NPCs had quests for him to do.

"Careful, most of these are higher than 16." Cyprian warned. "I'll have to come along and make sure you don't kill yourself."

"Really?" The long-haired boy asked, before he smiled softly. "Thank you."

Cy had to wonder to himself when they implanted a line of code to make eyes sparkle like real ones.

Arashi was gone in a flash, gathering up the quests and chatting politely with the NPCs. He stopped, however, when one NPC went on and on about her daughter who was 'marrying the wrong man!', nodding sympathetically as if she were a real person telling him her woes.

It was at this point that Cyprian had lost his composure and burst into laughter.

After a bit, Arashi seemed to realize that the NPC was repeating her story and cut in to bid her farwell, before moving over to Cy, his face red.

"That went on for like a half-hour, I swear to God." Cyprian laughed as Arashi returned to him.

"Hey!" He whined. "Hahaue taught me to never interrupt a lady when she's ranting about her children!"

[Hahaue; Mother]

"You really are Asian." Cyprian shook his head. "Okay, so whatcha got? Anything good?"

He leaned over to look at the other boy's quest pamphlet.

"Just the normal... collect 15 plants, kill 20 weirdly named monsters, get 30 gem stones from a kind of owl... what an owl has a gemstone for is beyond me."

"If you near the desert region, it makes more sense that the cat-demons have gems." Cyprian offered. "But you're not ready for those."

"Well, it says to get them from owls," Arashi admitted, tilting his head. "Well... it says its their 'hearts, which have been frozen so long that they've turned into gems'... that's quite impossible."

A shadow passed over them and the two looked up to see a giant bird-like creature that appeared to be skeletal with phantom wings glided above the plaza.

"...Yeah, it's impossible." Cy murmured.

"What is that?" Arashi gasped, looking amazed at the sight. "I don't remember reading about that on the forums!"