1 The Failing Farm

5 years on, and things does not look good for the 'Happy Tree Farm'.

A young man with short black hair and normal glasses with black rim sat in front of a desk with worried looks.

Alten looked at the two stacks of paper on his desk. The stack on the left consist of bank loans in arrears, with warning letter and foreclosure notices. "Dear Happy Tree Farm, you are 3 months in arrears, please pay promptly" was the title for most of the letter. The stack on the right looks more sinister as they are from loan sharks demanding payment with title like "Alten Lee, pay up now or die!" written in red. Alten wondered if it was written in blood.

"Probably red ink. Haiz." sighed Alten as he took out his eyeglasses and start wiping it in despair while thinking about the past.

Alten had always loved farming. He spent hundreds of hours playing Farmville on Facebook. He spent thousands hours more playing the old PS One farming game called Harvest Moon. Even now, he is playing the MMO game called World of Farmcraft. Since childhood, he had always visited his grandfather's farm during holidays and helped out.

However, farming in game is different from farming in real world as he regretfully found out. For example, in game all you need to do to farm is select seed to plant, then click on the soil, and wait a few minutes, and then you can harvest the crops. In real life however, you need to do a balancing act of adding fertilizer and watering frequently every day, and even then the crops may fail due to insect infestation.

5 years ago, his grandfather had suddenly called him back to visit him in his farm in the countryside. Alten loved the farm life and always visited the farm every chance he got back then. He took a couple of days leave from work, and left for his grandfather's farm. When he arrived at the farm during the weekend morning, his grandfather passed him the deed to the farm and said "do as you wish".

"Grandpa, what's this?"

"I'm retiring, this old bone is too old to continue working on this farm here. Since you're my only relative, I'll just pass it to you. You can do whatever you want with it. Work it, rent it out, sell it.... I'll be going on a cruise ship for old people, heh heh".

Alten looked over the deed and sat in thought for a long time. His grandfather kept busy packing and had conversation with Alten from time to time. A whole day and night passed, and Alten hardly slept a wink. In the morning, Alten went to the kitchen to eat breakfast and saw his grandfather looking dandy with a packed suitcase at his side.

"Well, I guess this is goodbye. I hope you'll do the right choice."

"En! I'll takeover this farm grandpa, and make you proud!"

"Good lad, good lad, heh heh"

A horn toot sounded from outside, and his grandfather picked up his suitcase walked towards the door.

"Well, that's my my Uber, good luck with the farm kid."

With a wistful look his grandfather walked out and stopped at the car. He gave the farm a last long look, before turning and driving off to the port. Alten waved for a bit, and then when the car is out of sight he took out his phone and called his boss.

"Boss, I'm quitting, I'll be giving my 3 months notice letter as soon as I get back to office..."

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5 years ago, Alten used to work as a programmer at a large bank. The pay was decent, and the work hours was tolerable. However, he always felt uneasy inside, for though he is a decent programmer, his passion lay elsewhere, specifically farming.

"If given a chance to follow my passion, I really should take it", thought Alten.

5 years later, Alten's life is a total mess. 'Happy Tree Farm' used to be a real productive farm when his grandfather were still working it. Everything was working and shiny brand new. Nowadays, the farm has a lot of broken tools and in need of serious repairs. There were so many things that he didn't know about real world farming, he really regretted the decision he made 5 years ago.

Initially he took out a large loan to buy and repair the tools, machinery, and seeds. The seeds germinated sporadically, and the machine kept breaking down. He was already in the red by the time the second year came around. This is the time when he made another big mistake. Running low on funds, he decided to take out loans from the loan sharks at exorbitant interest rate. Things did not improve though, and expenses kept increasing with every bad weather or machine breakdown.

"Argh! Not again!"

The 'Amazone ED 3000 C' planter that he bought second hand had become stuck. He stopped his tractor, got down and went to the back to look at the planter hitched to the back of his tractor. He scratched his jaw and thought for a while.

"Ah, screw it! I'll get Dan to come over and look at it later, sigh". Dan is the local farm mechanic Alten made friend with since childhood.

He unhitched the planter and drove the tractor back to house. He went into the kitchen and got a can of beer, and decided to unwind the stress by playing World of Farmcraft. He turned on his computer, but even though the CPU light up and started having sound, the monitor is still black. He suddenly got up and tried to reach the monitor cord, but his hand accidentally spill the beer all over the CPU.

"AAAIIIEEEEEE!" Alten screamed as a purple electricity suddenly envelops Alten and his computer, which exploded in a exploding puff of smoke...

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Alten wake up with a splitting headache.

"Urgh... what happened? Why am I outside?"

As he looked around he saw that he seems to be outside of the farmhouse and he suffered no injury.

"Wait, why are there mountain ranges to the north? And where did this pine forest to the east come from?! And... is that the sun? Triple sun?!!! And why is that group of birds flying overhead looks like they could each be bigger than a 737 jumbo jet?!!!!!"

Shocked and wonder filled the confused mind of Alten. He did a double and triple take for a few minutes. Suddenly, Alten hears a slight cough and somebody trying to clear his throat. Alten turned and look at the sound and was shocked; standing at the entrance to the farmhouse was an old looking green person with long ears and mean face.

A goblin! The old looking creature definitely looked like a goblin, Alten surmised from his experience playing fantasy RPG game.

The creature spoke.

"Err, hello human. I'm Thak. I'm a goblin."

Holy shit! It really IS a goblin!

I don't wanna get eaten!