Chương 27: Third Age of the Whatever

The day went. The wagon. The road. Lefant pulling. Lefant. LEFANT. The merchants walking beside their wagons, just like they'd been doing since Mossgrove. The merchants had snapped back to default within three hours of yesterday morning. Mike was dead. The woman in red was hours behind them on the road back. The job was Silvermarch. NPCs were good at jobs. NPCs did not have to process. Maddy was a little jealous, honestly. Around midday she crawled up to the front and asked the Lefant merchant a question.

He was walking next to Lefant with his hand on Lefant's flank, his desert coat dusted with road, and he turned when she called.

"My lady."

"Hey. Are there. Like, uh, a lot of travelers?"

"My lady?"

"Travelers. Like us. Are we common? Or weird? What's the…deal." He smiled.

"Travelers are not so uncommon, my lady. Valoria is wide. Many people pass through. I have seen travelers from many lands, with many strange tools and clothings. You are not the weirdest I have met."

"…how weird am I?"

"Middling."

"MIDDLING?"

"My lady, I mean no offense. Your spear is unusual. Your trinkets are unusual. But I once met a man who wore the skin of a very large fox over his whole body, with the head still attached and the eyes replaced with painted glass. He insisted he was the fox."

"…"

"He was not the fox."

"…dude."

"He charged the inns extra for a bowl of water on the floor."

"Fucking hell."

"He was a kind man. He spoke gently. But he was not the fox."

"That's a…yeah. I know these… people."

"Ah."

"That's a furry. He's from where we're from. Oh my god."

"A furry?"

"Don't worry about it."

"Ah. You traveler are most interesting, after all. Asking questions then remaining mysterious. I guess it is what travelers do."

"Whatever dude. Fuck you." He smiled wider. The smile said he had been called fuck you by enough travelers to file it under affectionate.

"Brad," he said.

"What?"

"Brad. He was a traveler. He used a tongue that reminds me of yours, unlike the fox man. He runs a kitchen now, in a city called Coralis. His smoked meat is very famous, I was told. I tell every traveler I meet about Brad."

"…Brad?"

"Brad."

"There's an isekai'd Earth dude in this world named Brad who runs a fucking BBQ?"

"I do not know where Brad might come from, or what isekai'd might mean, but yes, Brad runs a kitchen."

"…okay dude." She crawled back into the wagon. Fuck him. And fuck Brad. Wait. And fuck the fox dude. Fuck him twice actually. She looked at Lefant. Lefant stopped to his left and ate grass for a minute. The wagon stopped moving.

"Look Ben. Lefant just ate some grass."

"Ok."

"Apparently there are a lot of us. Earth people. Or other-land people. There's a chef named Brad."

"…Brad?"

"Brad. Does BBQ." This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Is everyone who spawns in this world fucking American."

"Probably. The system is racist."

"You're right."

"Yeah." She hopped of the wagon and grabbed a handful of grass. Pink. Smelled like grass with the saturation cranked a half-step down, like the system rendered everything.

"Lefant. You want grass." Lefant turned his big head halfway. His wrong-side eye looked at her. His trunk swung and extended.

"He wants grass." She held the grass out the front. Lefant's trunk reached, took the grass with a delicate curl at the tip, brought the grass to his mouth, chewed it, kept walking.

"…Ben."

"Yeah."

"Lefant is the best part of this world."

"Yeah."

"I would do anything for him."

"Yeah."

"If the system tried to kill Lefant I'd Hyper Beam the shit out of the system."

"…can you even Hyper Beam the system."

"I'd find a way."

They arrived in Silvermarch early on the third day. Or what counted as the third day, if you were being generous, because the system had agreed it was three days but they'd only done two nights, which was mathematically two days, but the system was the system, and the system did not care about math. The wagon came over a small hill and Silvermarch was there. Down in a valley. Bigger than Mossgrove.

Smaller than she'd expected—medieval cities in games were always smaller than you wanted because the system could only render so much building before it started repeating textures, but it was nice. A wall around it, low and grey, with a gate and two bored guards. Red and orange tile roofs the system had cribbed from Mediterranean reference photos. A river. A central tower that could have been a guild tower or a wizard tower or an HOA tower.

Market stalls along the main street even from this distance, splotches of color, awnings, movement. It was… pretty. And it smelled good. She'd braced for medieval city smell. Open sewer, horse shit, unwashed bodies, the smell she'd read about in a fantasy book once where the writer had been extremely proud of his sentences about the smell. She'd built up the bracing all morning. The city smelled like her deodorant. It smelled like lavender. Faintly. With an undernote of bread.

"DUDE," she said.

"What."

"It smells like lavender. Why does it smell like lavender."

"…huh."

"The whole city smells like the deodorant I bought."

"Maybe John runs the deodorant supply chain."

"…that would actually explain a lot."

"John is the deodorant king."

"John…lavender-mafia."

"Yeah." The wagon rolled down to the gate. The guards waved the caravan through, bored, like a wave was something they'd done a hundred times for this same caravan. The Lefant merchant tipped his hat to one of them. The caravan strung out along a cobblestone road that ran into the center of the city, the market got closer, people got visible, people were doing people things. There were a lot of them. She had not been around a lot of people in three days. Mossgrove was like, twelve villagers and a weird chicken.

The caravan was ten people and Lefant. She stopped counting at fifty as they passed through the gate. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand. She did not know what the system's render budget was for a city. Some looked at the wagon. Most didn't. She looked at them. Every face that passed close enough to see clearly. She was looking for the things she had clocked with Gerald: the hand pausing at the jam, the eye crinkle, the bread-buttering technique. She was looking for person and not NPC. She saw a lot of NPCs. Walking too…

algorithmy. Carrying baskets full of things the system hadn't bothered rendering, probably. She didn't bother watching either. But she also saw a woman buying bread from a baker and arguing with the baker about the price. The argument had heat in it. Real annoyance. About half a copper. A kid running after another kid with a stick. Just running. Zigzagging because zigzagging was funner than running straight.

An old man sitting on a stoop with a cat in his lap, scratching the cat behind the ear without looking at the cat, reading something on a piece of parchment. His lips moving slightly. The cat's tail flicking. The cat. The cat was a cat. She watched the cat for a long second as the wagon passed. Eyes mostly closed. Cat squint. The tail flicked when the man's scratching hit a good spot. The cat was the most cat-like cat she had seen in a while. She did not say anything to Ben about the cat.

She filed the cat next to the third egg and John and the bread. The file was getting big. They got dropped in front of the Adventurers' Guild. Three-story building. Wooden sign hanging over the door. The sign had a stylized sword on it and the sword crossed a stylized shield and there was a stylized banner that said, in a very legible font that absolutely should not have been a real medieval font: SILVERMARCH ADVENTURERS' GUILD EST. YEAR 423 OF THE THIRD AGE ALL RACES WELCOME! She stared at the sign.

"Well," she said.

"Very…original."

"Obviously," Ben said.

"All races welcome. This is the racist system trying to tell us he's not that racist."

"Stupid bullshit."

"Year 423 of the Third Age. Fuck does the Third Age even mean."

"What even happened in the first two."

"Don't get me started." She slid down off the wagon. Her Air Force Ones hit cobblestone. The cobblestone was a real cobblestone, uneven, irregular, with grass coming up between some of the stones in tiny rebellious tufts. She'd been in the wagon long enough that her legs had forgotten how to leg. She had to do the small stagger that travelers in books always did, which was annoying because the books had been right about the stagger. Ben slid down. He staggered too.

The Lefant merchant was untying the wagon harness and Maddy walked over and put her hand on Lefant's trunk, and Lefant's trunk wrapped briefly around her wrist, and she said thanks Lefant, and Lefant made a small dragonfly-buzz noise that she chose to interpret as you're welcome, and the merchant tipped his hat at her again and led Lefant off toward what was presumably a Lefant stable. She stood with Ben in front of the door. The door opened.

A man came out and the man was wearing a long blue robe with gold trim and the long blue robe had embroidery on the sleeves that the system had clearly considered a triumph, and the man had a long white beard groomed in a way that suggested several minutes of attention per day, and the man's eyes were a very alert blue, and the man was holding a wooden staff in his hand for no fucking reason because the man was not walking anywhere, the staff was a prop the man held while he stood, and the man saw them and his face lit up.

"Ah! Travelers!" She wanted to die.

"You arrive at a most auspicious hour! I am Master Valdren, Guildmaster of the Silvermarch Adventurers' Guild. Welcome, welcome. I trust your journey was—""Mike died," Maddy said. Master Valdren's face did a thing.

"…I am sorry to hear that, traveler. Mike?"" Long story. Where are the best silk shops."

"…the silk shops?"

"Yes."

"Travelers, I—I believe we have much to discuss before—""Right. I don't give a fucking shit about your weird AI omen. Where are the best silk shops."

"…travelers, the silk district is to the southeast, but—""Cool. Thanks. For silk purposes."

"…silk purposes?"

"Fuck you Dumbledore." A woman stepped out behind Master Valdren. The woman was—fuck—obviously. She was an elf.