Cádo’s POV: Day 8

We were poor, in debt, and I think that wizard had missed a spot in my spine, because it hurt everytime I tried to sit down. All in all, it could be worse. In fact it had been, several days earlier.

Kenny and Bernard- Shango and Solitaire as I’d spent several hours practising- were both looking worse for wear, but at least they’d eaten recently. I only got that luxury when they took me to the church for our charity meal. It was there that we discussed what had happened, and what we’d do next.

I’d known, dimly, that something was wrong with me, even delirious and suffering from a fever it had been obvious. The moment I’d woken up with a fresh brain I’d figured out I was unconscious before, I was moved during it, etc. That and the memory of fighting a bear with rocks meant that it wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened.

Solitaire and Shango’s story, though, was new to me. I hadn’t even been there for it of course. I had to keep myself from crying when they shared it.

We were friends, best friends even. We’d been there for each other during some of the worst of our old world, but clearly the worst of earth was a different test altogether than what this new land had thrown at us so far. Hearing what they’d done, hearing how they’d killed…It was the steel my spine needed.

“So, we’re hobos now.” Bernard- Solitaire- concluded. I nodded, grunted, continued eating my stale bread and soup. He and Shango stared at me.

“You…Seem to be taking this fairly well.” Shango noted, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should’ve been more expressive. I shrugged.

“I just had my rib cage turned into a jigsaw puzzle by a bear, then assembled by a wizard. And I think a piece is still lodged in my asshole. Give me some time and I’ll see if I can muster a nice, big scream of horror for you. For now…I don’t know, man, work in the morning isn’t even the second worst piece of news I’ve had this week.”

That earned a considering look from Shango, and a grin from Solitaire, who slapped me on the shoulder.

“Right you are!” The scouser laughed. “That’s just the kind of spirit that’ll keep us from starving to death!” He seemed oddly pleased. Not just about me, either. As if he were growing happier, rather than more fearful, as our situation worsened.

Shango didn’t join his laughter, frown lines deepened to trenches across his face.

“That’s not a small ask, though.” He noted. “How do we even do that? We almost got killed by some random wildlife.”

I cut in, then, sensing that my friends were about to start another of their classic bickering sessions.

“You guys do have a spear, yeah?”

They eyed me, nodded, and I smiled.

“Well then we’ll be fine, I can kill a bear with a spear.”

Now, being truthful, I actually wasn’t sure I could at all. But I figured we needed confidence right now, and from what I’d been told Solitaire and Shango had just watched me almost out-wrestle them both at once while unconscious. True to my guess, they seemed a bit lifted up by the knowledge.

“Alright.” Solitaire continued. “Let’s see if we can’t find some work.”

Redacle had been a gaming setting before a novel one, made for tabletop RPGs we’d used to play together, and as an inheritance of that beginning it was absurdly, ridiculously filled with things that needed killing. Most towns had a missive board, and Jhigral was no exception, and most missive boards were packed with potential work. Bandits, like the ones my friends had run into, but also magical creatures.

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Goblins multiplying in the shadows and stealing crops, magical contaminants driving animals mad- which, thinking about it, might have been what caused that bear attack- and however many other potential sources of danger. Or, if you were in need of it, sources of money.

One needed only to look and read.

We couldn’t read. Fuck.

It took us a few moments of staring to find that much out, but there was no denying it. Whatever force translated every word we heard, it wasn’t doing it for the written passages. In this world we were illiterate. Most adventurers hired a clerk to follow them around and resolve that issue, but we couldn’t afford to hire shit. Nobody would give the weird, foreign giants the time of day, and we had no money to provide any real incentive for them to change their minds.

And we were getting hungrier by the hour, which meant a delay wasn’t on the table. Swallowing our annoyance, we all set off to go into the issue blind.

Well, not quite just yet, Solitaire and Shango insisted on taking a stop at a weird little shop- a dentist’s from what I could tell. They spent a while inside, and when they came out they had a few coins to their name. Six silver and twenty-one coppers, enough for another spear. Or a bow and some arrows.

It was a no-brainer, we picked the ranged weapon. Apparently that had been the one thing the others hadn’t looted from the bandits, having accidentally broken it in the fighting.

With me no longer dying horribly from bear combat, we were able to take our time in scanning out the land as we left. Jhigral seemed to be a northern town, surrounded in snow as far as the eye could see- apparently we’d arrived just in time for winter.

The majority of its neighbouring landscape was woodland, but it was also a coastal town quite close to the ocean on the interior of a great bay. Cave systems were known to run through the ground beneath it, but that was no surprise. Cave systems ran underground everywhere in Redacle. Tabletop game setting, remember? Can’t go dungeon crawling without crawlable dungeons. Particularly not dark ones, that magnetically attract suitably horrible creatures to dwell within.

Now here was our dilemma: Roleplaying games had a particular logic to them. You kill something big, you get an expensive, valuable reward. Cool. But we weren’t sure how much of this version of Redacle had been “randomly generated” around us. Our world-building was fairly in-depth, but it was more than likely that any given creature we encountered was something none of us had coined. Solitaire and Shango had already filled me in about their theory regarding that fact. If true, it meant we’d be dealing with unknowns, and they might not necessarily give us much reward.

Even if they did, they might be as tough as that bear, or as tough as ten of that bear. There were creatures in our original worldbuilding capable of smashing houses to splinters and throwing men hard enough for them to burst on impact, durable enough to have entire squads of modern soldiers unloading into them and barely even notice. We had no guarantee that any given fight we picked would end in our favour.

So it was a tough decision, picking where to head next, and we made it slowly and agonisingly. We’d asked around for the more dangerous spots to avoid, of course, and while we were already thinking we figured we’d keep on asking. Around twenty minutes of this led to us getting the information that, finally, settled us into a particular course. For better or for worse.

Trolls were horrible, evil bastard things. They were about eight feet tall on the lower end, but hunched enough to appear closer to six, and muscled like a chimpanzee on bull testosterone. Their fingers ended in talons, not nails, and they were omnivorous in the same way bears were. Except unlike bears, their favourite food was fucking bear. If we’d encountered a troll on our second night, I had no doubt that we’d all be dead men, and probably without doing much to even bother it first.

And they were a semi-common sight in the region, with one in particular causing trouble for some local traders by attacking the road to Wolney.

We could’ve ignored it. Being honest we even should have ignored it, but we didn’t ignore it, because we were still two full gold in debt, and troll bone marrow sold to apothecaries for about double its weight in silver. Which made the matter just tempting enough that we were actually considering fighting the thing.

It was the worst kind of decision, our hands pressed into a fight we were sorely outclassed and underprepared for, with no choice at all due to the currents of circumstance. And we might’ve suffered a disaster for it if Shango hadn’t thought to bring up his Menu again.

“We’ve levelled up!” He yelled, practically screamed really. It made me jump and almost had Solitaire put a knife through him as we stared at our friend, then his words clicked and we were drilling him for details.