4 - Something to do
writing Willow4 - Something to do
My sleep was like a cocoon: despite the meager physical accommodations of my bed, I felt wrapped in layers of warmth, made with tender care. I was in a sparse forest under a light rain. The cottage that meant “home” peeked through the trees, and I hurried there through the noise, not to be interrupted again. A kindness with a forgotten face answered the door, welcoming me inside, and the smells of safety and baked goods washed over me.
The warmth offered me fruits and milk and cookies and all manner of sweets, and as I happily obliged, our conversation danced about nothing in particular, so closely we knew one another that words were hardly necessary. The warmth wrapped her arms around me and sang that I was enough, and I told her that I knew, and for a precious few moments, everything was okay.
…But all too soon, I felt the outer layers of my dream begin to crumble. No! No, please, not yet! I clutched the warmth in my arms, trying to etch the feeling into my heart as I prayed for just a minute more, but the morning light cut relentlessly into the wall of my sanctuary. The memory whispered melancholy and slipped through my fingers, leaving me behind in the corporeal, clenching my pillow in my arms with all my might.
After a time, my emotions began to recede. The pounding in my ears diminished, and my senses came back into focus. I rolled over to see Brask, still sound asleep. The window faced away from the rising sun, so the light filtering through was cold and diffuse. The firefly lantern’s globe was covered by a leather shade attached at the bottom and bound at the top with a string, though I could still see glimmers of amber leaking through the gaps and dancing across the ceiling.
Nature’s call was quiet, but I took the key with me and began to search for someplace to go so that I wouldn’t have to hunt more urgently later. I hope there’s at least something, I don’t want to have to do my business outside again… The inn was on the upper floor of the tavern, with one central hallway and four doors to each side, but upon inspection, all of the doors appeared to be for tenant rooms, with the same kind of lock as ours. As I was about to take the stairs down to search the ground floor, I heard one of the doors open, and Raaf spoke from behind me.
“Oh! Lily, just the person I’m looking for, I was about to try and find you at your room.” I turned to see him peeking out of the door with a nervous grin.
“Hi, uh, Raaf, what do you need?”
“I actually had something important to ask you about, would you mind coming in to talk?” He gestured through the door.
“Sure, just for a minute.” Raaf led me into the room. It was about the same size as our double room, but the right wall had a worn chair in place of a bed, and there was a wooden box in the near right corner.
Raaf’s energy changed once we were in private, betraying the gravity of the conversation. “Lily, are you… You got your freedom recently, right?”
“…Yeah, how did you know?”
“Well, it’s not often you see a free beastfolk who doesn’t speak the Cat’s Tongue and still goes by a Heroic name. Do you mind… telling me how it happened?”
This is risky… But I don’t see any way to get out without arousing suspicion. “It’s probably not very exciting. During the storm a few nights ago, my masters took me out with them to act as a canary.” Raaf’s compassionate expression was colored with mirth, knowing what likely came next. “They put something on their carriage that was supposed to protect it, but I think it attracted the lightning right to us. I barely realized in time to get out of there myself, they didn’t stand a chance.”
“Ha, ha… That must have been scary, but it’s good to hear your captors got what was coming to ’em.”
“I hadn’t seen anyone die so suddenly before, it was terrifying..!” Raaf put a compassionate hand on my shoulder. “After that, I was sleeping rough in the woods until a pack of wolves surrounded my camp. They had me trapped in a tree until later that morning when Brask showed up and saved me.”
“…I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Lily.” I nodded. “Brask is the man you came here with, right? Has he… tried to make you feel like you owe him for saving you, or tried to push you to work for cheap?”
“Oh, not at all. He was a little scary when he learned how my captors were using me, but he was mad on my behalf, not mad at me.”
“That’s… reassuring. When I first met the boss, he gave me a job after I escaped. Cooking is all I’m good at, but… no one else wanted to hire a fox to work the kitchen, so when he offered me a job he acted like I owed him my life. Now, he barely pays me enough to afford my room here, let alone save up to live anywhere else or get another job…” Raaf snapped back into focus. “I wanted to make sure you wouldn’t end up in a situation like mine. If he ever does anything like that… Please don’t fall for it.”
Regrettably, I had to relieve myself in the woods. When I asked him about a toilet, Raaf couldn’t help but laugh. (“Gods, how rich were your captors?”) Afterwards, I returned to the inn and found Brask at the bar. He seemed despondent.
“Hey, how’s it going?”
Brask seemed startled to see me. “Oh! Lily, you’re back.”
“Yeah? Why would I not be?”
Brask stared at his glass for a moment before shaking his head. “…No, it’s nothing. Uh, how are you doing?”
“I’m doing well, all things considered. I thought a little more about my plans, I think finding a way to earn money is a good first step.”
“I had been wondering about that too. Is there anything you’re particularly good at, any careers you’ve always dreamed of?”
In my past life, I was an engineer, but I obviously can’t say that… “I was never really that good at anything, growing up. I… like running, I think, can I make a living doing that?”
Brask hesitated a little. “Er… If you’re all right with tools, you could try adventuring as a rogue?” I was a surprised that he thought I could handle adventuring, but Brask seemed to mistake my expression for offense. “Sorry, I don’t mean to stereotype, it’s just… I don’t know any other decent careers that involve much running.”
“That’s a sort of adventurer, like you, right?” I already had an idea of the answer, but I wanted to maintain the illusion of ignorance that had protected me so far.
“Yes, rogues mainly deal with traps and treasure, but in combat you would be able to stay out of sight or dash in to get the element of surprise.”
I took a moment to think. There would be no shortage of danger, and the idea of dying in some dungeon somewhere was frightening… At the same time, though, I didn’t have much to lose, and I couldn’t help but be excited at the prospect of actually going on the kinds of adventures I had crafted for my friends at our gaming table. Being able to fend for myself would useful, too, if, Gods forbid, Brask were ever to turn on me. “That… doesn’t sound so bad, I think I could try that.”
Brask returned from a brief trip outside the city walls with an assortment of items from his cart. “I thought I still had these, so I went to check! They were Kavek’s, once, but… They were collecting dust even before we separated, so I think it’s all right for you to have them.” He handed me a pack containing a roll of various tools, a pair of lightly armored gloves, and a dagger and sheath, a little worn but still bearing a nasty edge.
“Oh boy…” I thought back to Raaf’s warning. “Are you sure? No strings attached?”
“Of course, they’re all yours! You’ll certainly get more use out of them than he is right now. He left behind some other armor, too, but… Well, it was built for a bird, so even though your sizes are similar I don’t know how well it would fit you. Regardless, if I can help it you won’t be doing any actual fighting for a while, so you’ll be able to afford your own before then.”
Looking over my new tools, I felt joy spread across my face: they were more crudely constructed than I was used to, but I recognized almost every one of them. Lockpicks, screwdrivers, files, a wrench… My clothes were my first possessions here, but having tools I recognized felt like my first bit of tangible agency.
The guildhall was one of the largest buildings in town, down one of the four cardinal paths radiating from the square. The facade seemed to be made of a different lumber than the other buildings in the town, and the craftsmanship was head and shoulders above what I had seen elsewhere.
The inside didn’t have very many people, but the atmosphere still had an oppressive feeling of business. There were two levels - an upper balcony, where I could see a party huddled around a table planning tactics for an upcoming battle, and a ground floor, with a bulletin board spanning the back wall and a harried elf woman in a maroon uniform attending a desk to the left, attempting to manage a queue of several increasingly impatient adventurers. I saw glimpses of an owl person in the same maroon uniform delivering paperwork between the front desk and rows of shelves in the back.
We joined the queue, and though it quickly grew further behind us, eventually we made it to the front.
“Brask. Hireling?”
“Never! My companion here intends to register as an adventurer!”
Without making eye contact, the elf grabbed a form from a stack on her desk and dipped a quill in an inkwell. “Name?”
“Uh, I’m Lily.”
The attendant turned and looked over her glasses at me in a way that was much too old-lady-ish for her youthful appearance. “…Papers?”
Brask spoke up. “No need! Lily is as freeborn as you and me, however strange be her name. I’ll swear to it.”
She glanced between us for a moment. “…No skin off my back.” The attendant scoffed. “No need to test for magic proficiency?”
Brask chimed in again, somewhat hurriedly. “N-none at all!”
We went back and forth with several more questions, and the guild representative’s rudeness grew in proportion with the line behind us. Eventually, though, it was over.
“That’s all. Here’s your proof of membership.” She handed us a sheet of sturdy parchment and nodded toward the back wall. “Quest board’s over there.”
Absentmindedly, I looked at the paper the attendant gave us, and was surprised to see that the letters closely resembled English cursive. Though the words were spelled a little differently than I was used to, it didn’t take long for the inner voice I had learned in my past life to start lining up with what my new ears expected. The document was on official-looking letterhead from the “Millstone Adventurer’s Guild”, followed by a paragraph waxing poetic about the organization’s noble goals. Below that was business: my name, age, and a variety of other fields labelled with unfamiliar acronyms and jargon.
Brask spotted me focusing on the form and his eyes widened in surprise. “You can read! That makes this so much easier!”
Once again, I worried for a moment that I had accidentally given away the game, but Brask somehow managed to rationalize it. “Oh, uh, I only know the basics..?”
“That’s more than enough for now. Come on, you can help pick one out.”
The board was covered with slips of paper describing jobs that the locals had put out requests for. Monster extermination, delivery, construction, resource-gathering… Each quest was marked with a letter from E to A. As we rifled through them, Brask told me about how adventurers were ranked: I started at rank F, which meant I couldn’t take any quests without a higher-ranked party member. Brask was rank C, which meant he could take C-rank quests on his own, or B-rank with a higher-rank companion. Quests also had payments listed, mostly in the currency I learned about before, though some were more exotic: one just said “keep anything that isn’t nailed down”.
Eventually, I found an E-rank quest, with a drawing of a particular wild herb that was to be collected from the forest south of the town and delivered to the local bakery. “Brask, how about this one?”
Brask haltingly read the quest aloud. “One Favor for a full bag of herbs… It’s not much, but that’s to be expected for an E-rank quest. Half-and-half?”
“Sure, five Pittances each.” It was a little awkward to see Brask swell with pride because he thought I was using the arithmetic he taught me when in reality I had almost finished a class on differential equations before I died, but seeing him so happy made me feel a little better about keeping him in the dark.