Excerpt: The Wonderful Adventures of Senja The Great

”I need a quest!” was what she said to Mrs. Nightingale. Her last quest had been a success, she had claimed a knight butterfly as her own, trapped into a large class jar. Well, large at least from her point of view, from someone adult's point of view, it might have been a medium or even a smallish jar, but in any case, big enough for a butterfly to live in for a few short moments. She of course had let the butterfly fly free after getting confirmation for her quest's completion from the quest giver. The butterfly had flown away quickly, seemingly unscathed by the ordeal.
She loved doing quests. She always got to meet interesting people and see interesting places when on quests. The world transformed into something different, a secret, hidden world, hiding behind the mask of the ”real world”, a world much more interesting, challenging and fun. A place most adults seemed to be blissfully unaware of. Often she wondered why they could not see it, the adventures one could have there - or maybe they did see, but they just didn't care for excitement. Currently that was her best guess.
Take the butterfly as an example. Before the quest, it was just another butterfly, beautiful and majestic in it's own right, sure, but with the quest, it transformed into something much greater. The queen of butterflies, the most beautiful, cunning, dangerous of all butterflies. If you look it in the eyes, you turn into flowers!
Such danger, and she had managed to win, she had managed to capture the butterfly with her net. A battle of wits and power. She usually did prevail, she was very hardheaded, an of course if you are the one to set the details of the quest, you can flex them as much as you want. If one butterfly escapes, well obviously it was a decoy and not the real queen.
Here she was again, searching for a new quest. Her last quest had left her hungry, she was aching for new challenges. The butterfly had hardly been a real challenge really, the nearby fields were full of all sort of wonderful insects and every kind of butterfly imaginable. At least she thought so. It was also full of all kinds of beautiful flowers. She liked to pick some and bring home to put into a vase. Her mother seemed to like them well enough. There were all colors of them too. You could create a field of colors with them. “Maybe that could be future quest for me!”, she wondered to herself.
Her parents didn't like it too much when she was on quests. She understood it was not because of the quests themselves, but rather because of all the people she would meet while doing the quests. She didn't understand it though. Her parents kept saying how dangerous some people might be, but in her quests it was never the people who were the source of danger, there were so much danger anyway in everything else. Almost all the people she had met were nice. She didn't see how any person could be dangerous to her, such nice people they all were, almost all anyway. And even the not so nice ones didn't seem dangerous, just not quite as nice as the nice ones. It was a puzzle for her, one more thing to wonder for her.
How for example could Mrs Nightingale be of any danger to her? Well she was pretty big and if she fell and landed on top of her, that could be dangerous, she supposed. But that seemed really unlikely and there were bigger things than Mrs Nightingale out there, for example many trees were taller and trees could fall down too. She had never seen a tree fall down though, but there was a one fallen tree behind Mr and Mrs Woodsters house. It had fell in a recent thunderstorm. She had already planned many quests around the tree.