25 – Ghostbell

Alexandra stared at the field of white flowers before her. Few things looked more like a white flower than another white flower. Finding a Ghostbell here wouldn’t be simple, if there even was one in the meadow.

Just because there were a lot of white flowers didn’t mean the cursed bearing one she needed was among them.

Nevertheless, Alexandra was never the type to shy away from effort. She rolled up her sleeves and got to work categorizing the flowers.

If her memory served her right, Lara had explained that Ghostbells grew in clusters, so she eliminated all the lonely plants. But this was already more complicated than she expected. What was a cluster? A group of flowers. But where did it start? Did two flowers growing side by side count as a cluster? Three? What if they were close together, but with a visible gap?

Let’s be practical.

Since she was no herbalist, Alexandra decided to follow her gut. If it felt like a cluster, it was a cluster.

Next, the flower was supposed to be low to the ground. Once again, it could mean a lot of things. She discarded the tallest stems without hesitation, but among the remaining plants, there was a range to their height that made it impossible to be certain.

When she was done, she’d spotted six patches of flowers that fit her criteria. Two of them she suspected were of the same species, as they looked very similar, if not exactly the same.

“Okay…” She rubbed her nose, and sneezed. Her gloves were covered in pollen. “Which one of you is a Ghostbell?”

The flowers didn’t answer.

She scratched the back of her head. She could just pick all the flowers and return to Lanterned with them, but Lara had instructed her to collect the sap from the Ghostbell stems. It risked running dry by the time she reached home.

She tapped her belt, checking that she hadn’t forgotten her gourd. It wasn’t empty. She drank the leftover water.

“Now, what do I do?”

Returning home to ask Lara and running back here felt like a waste of time. The flowers were there, right under her nose. Surely one of them was a Ghostbell.

She kneeled, bringing her eyes closer to her main suspect. It was a small flower, packed into a cluster of seven heads shaped like bells that hung from the stems.

Bells.

It was her best guess, but it wasn’t a certainty. There were so many flowers in the plains, and many of them were bell-shaped.

She took a deep breath through the nose, letting the scent fill her nostrils. It smelled soft and floral. Like a flower.

There was one way to find out, though she didn’t like the sound of it either. Well, she didn’t like the idea of someone else — Lara, in particular — finding out about it.

She could do a taste test.

Okay, sure, it was going to give her the curse of fragility. But it was almost nothing. Lara said so herself. Maybe not in such certain terms, but close enough. Furthermore, she was doing all this to stack three curses onto herself, it made total sense to sample them individually first.

This way, she could ascertain that her plan was safe.

“Completely reasonable.”

If only she had unlocked Basic Herbology.

But it wasn’t the time to get cold feet. Alexandra snapped one of the bell-shaped flowers at the stem, and brought it to her mouth.

“Cheers.”

She sucked a drop of sap from the broken stem. It was bitter. Less medicinal than the Aetherveil. Sweeter, too. The taste of chlorophyll was stronger.

Flipping her journal, she landed on her status page. Nothing out of place. She didn’t know if curses were going to show up there.

“I don’t feel more fragile,” she said. “Maybe it takes time to activate.”

Then again, would she feel anything?

Probably, right?

A debuff in constitution should be noticeable.

She grimaced. The aftertaste was burning her tongue. She shouldn’t have finished her water so quickly.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“I guess this one’s a dud.”

Alexandra stood up, and moved to the next candidate. This one wasn’t bell shaped, but it was certainly low to the ground. In fact, it was so low that the stems were buried underground. Did they still count as stems, or should she call them roots? She didn’t know.

In any case, it didn’t change how she would act. With a swift twist of her wrist, she plucked a flower. Then, she snapped the exposed stem in half and drank a few drops of sap.

Earthy, probably because of the dirt she hadn’t bothered washing. The sap was pungent, the taste—much stronger than the previous flower—reminded her of fish, and not the fresh kind. It filled her mouth, her throat, and went up to her nostrils. She shed a tear.

“Fuck.” She gagged.

Still no change in her status. This time, she did feel different. However, she wasn’t sure if it was the curse activating, or the horrible taste of the sap leaving its mark on her.

Hoping she wasn’t doing that for nothing, she moved on to the third flower and repeated the same process, then the fourth.

Both tasted horrible, but she still didn’t think she was cursed.

One way to find out how a curse would interact with her status would be to self-cast Inflict Weakness. Naturally, Alexandra had thought of that solution. However, she wasn’t keen on suffering the effect of that curse for nothing.

In essence, it wouldn’t change her course of action. She still needed to sample the sap of the suspected Ghostbells. The only difference was that she would bear the brunt of two curses instead of one.