A girl lies by the side of the road. She is starving and exhausted after rushing out of the city. After some time a horse drawn wagon is clopping down the same road. It is a shabby looking thing. It has a cloth bonnet covering it and the horse is a bit dirty with frayed hair. Inside, the wagon is a small family. A father is at the driver’s seat. His wife and daughter are in the wagon underneath the bonnet and in the shade. The father is dressed in a plain tunic and trousers, while his wife and daughter are in simple work dresses. The parents seem to be in their mid to late 30s while their daughter is 12-years-old. They all share brown hair. The daughter’s eyes match her father’s blue eyes and the mother has a distinct green color to her eyes. The father is a bit concerned about something and remains vigilant against some unknown threat. As the wagon clops on, the father notices the figure by the side of the road.

  “It seems we’re not the only refugees fleeing the city.” the man says.

  His wife peeks out of the wagon’s bonnet to look for what would cause her husband to make such a comment. Their daughter follows suit and pokes her head out too. They see a girl collapsed by the side of the road.

  “Uh oh!” their daughter said. “Daddy! We should help her!”

  The father gives a heavy sigh and looks to his wife. She also gives a nod and he brings the wagon to a stop. After the wagon comes to a full stop, he realizes that this might have been a mistake with his young daughter in tow. The possibility that this could be a trap of some kind dawns on him. Maybe not even that. He could look the figure over and it could be a corpse. It’s not something that the man wanted his daughter to see. He was cursing his good nature in a city environment. His time in civilization may have made him too soft to notice these kinds of things beyond the city walls. After an uncomfortable amount of time contemplating, he hears a pair of little shoes hit the ground. The man looked on in shock as his daughter had gotten off first and made her way to the collapsed figure.

  “Sally! Wait!” he shouted behind her as he leapt off the driver’s seat of the wagon.

  The girl called Sally rushes over to the figure. It was a girl in shabby armor and black hair. The girl was a fair bit older than her. In the city, Sally would’ve called her a big kid or teenager. She lightly poked at the girl’s cheek. A light groan came from the collapsed girl. At that moment, Sally’s father caught up and pulled her back.

  “Dad! She’s hurt!” Sally exclaims.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The father looks the figure over. The collapsed girl continues to groan. He looks around and when he feels somewhat confident that this isn’t a setup for a bandit raid, he gives a sigh a relief.

  “Can I trust you to keep an eye on her?” he asks his daughter.

  “Yep!” Sally says as she smiles. “Leave it to me!”

  “That’s my girl.” he nods along as he hoists the unconscious girl into their wagon.

  The horse drawn wagon continues on. The girl Sally was giving their new passenger a drink of water. Little did they know, the girl they saved had a magical tome in her pack. And that magic tome screamed in celebration.

  “YES! YES! YES!!!” the tome spoke into the mind of the unconscious girl. “Screw the gods, what have they ever done for me? These folk! These people! Now they’re the real heroes!”

  From what Apherward can see, they’re a simple family of cityfolk. Nothing to do with the cursed royal family or the city guard who were no doubt very mad at the state it left the city. They seem to have a number of sacks and wooden crates loaded onto the wagon. It didn’t know if they were traders of some kind or if they were in some other sort of business. In either case, they were saving the girl, Ren, and not handing it over to the royal family.

  Apherward, the magic tome, has no clue if Ren was actually sleeping. Just now, it learned that it cannot sense Ren’s hunger. Sleeping and exhaustion may pose a similar problem. Apherward tries to breathe a sigh of exhaustion and fails horribly on account of the fact that it’s still a book.

  The first order of business is, what next? Firstly, Apherward needs to think of it’s immediate needs. Well, it’s a book. It doesn’t need to eat or sleep. Being magical also means that it was very resistant to damage. Even King Gervan Allutus Irvan couldn’t burn Apherward with whatever holy fire the wealthy monarch could muster. Unfortunately, the book couldn’t magically apparate arms and legs. Well, it could. It just needed someone else’s magic to do so.

  This brings the topic of the girl Ren to the forefront. Would the book continue puppeteering this girl or do what it normally did and find some desperate sap to strike a deal with. The deal was usually just some amateur mage wanting to do some magic and Apherward gaining their service, life force and potentially their soul. This, unfortunately, was not possible with Ren at the moment. To gain the full benefits of such a transaction required an affirmation and no resistance to the book sucking on their life and soul. It’s confident that it has no resistance, but the affirmation is missing. It also had no idea where it would find the life force and soul in someone else’s being. It wasn’t like searching someone’s kitchen for a salt shaker. The soul and life force could be anywhere in this being.

  Now it must make the decision to try and puppeteer this girl to some unknown future or find some other mook and deal with whatever demands they have. If nothing else, this can be a break from Apherward’s usual formula. It hasn’t tried anything like this and who knows if it’ll get another chance to do so. It still doesn’t understand why this Ren girl isn’t responding. That, unfortunately, might be a question for another time. Apherward hasn’t ever come across a situation like this before and it’s not sure how to even begin testing. Worse yet, it hasn’t even theory crafted that much about the reasons for the issue. As the wagon continues on, the magic tome of supreme intelligence settles on one of the most boneheaded ideas in the world.

  “I suppose, for now, I can make this girl stronger.” Apherward speaks into Ren’s mind. “If I am to puppeteer this girl’s magics, I must make her stronger. I will make her stronger by slaying monsters. Yes! I will make this girl an adventurer!”