Ryan had few things from before he'd gotten isekai'd. The clothes on his back were long gone, worn out and replaced by things he'd bought. He'd had his phone, but that had quickly run out of power and had basically become a strange black mirror, and he'd needed to sell it for the glass and aluminum content at one point when he'd needed money. If he'd been a half-way decent OP isekai protagonist, maybe he could have found a mad-scientist type scholar who could take one look at his phone, realized the value of the solid state electronics, battery, capacitors and microchips inside, and started some kind of electronics revolution.
Hell, he could have sold the screen protector to some glassmaker and become partners on the world's first ceramic glass, if he could find a glassmaker willing to talk to him. And knew enough chemistry to realize what was different about his glass. And was honest and wouldn't just steal the glass and have goons kick him out…
If he'd been a quarter-way decent isekai protagonist, he'd have remembered to bring his solar charger with him that day, and he'd probably still have his phone, though most of the time it would be charging, and he'd at least still have a bunch of ebooks, manga, movies, and old porn to entertain himself. He might have even been able to get some sort of business started, since one of the books had been on candymaking that he'd never gotten around to reading.
But no, he sucked, and so nothing of the sort had happened. At least he'd somehow been given the ability to understand and speak the local language, but had spent two years functionally illiterate since that hadn't extended to the writing and numbers. Whatever had happened to him didn't also helpfully make him see all the text in English, which was annoyingly arbitrary in his opinion. Ryan had needed to learn that through immersion, which had been hellish. But he'd learned the numbers, so he could actually keep track how much things were worth and whether he was getting the right change. Beads. Whatever. Whose stupid idea had it been to use magic marbles as the medium of exchange? Couldn't it at least have been cubes, or little cylinders? Marbles resulted in a lot of empty air in his money pouch, and it needed to be a pouch because having marbles in your pockets made weird bulges. Some banks offered something like a credit card system where you stored your money with them and showed places a token, and the bank would pay them later from your account, but Ryan hadn't been born yesterday! He knew all about service fees and percentages and stuff like that!
Still, there were some things he'd managed to keep hold of over the past six now going on seven years on this planet. He kept them wrapped in the remnants of the vest he'd been wearing, more out of nostalgia than practicality, but what else was there? Ryan usually slept with the bundle under his pillow. Not out of any particular sentimentality, but because his pillow was really thin and meant to be used with a sizable rock or block of wood under it to support his head, and he'd never gotten used to either of those.
"Rian? What's this?" Mikon asked.
After six going on seven years, he'd learned to stop wincing when people mangled his name. Really, how could a culture that came up with a tongue twister of a name like 'Lolilyuri' manage to consistently mispronounce his name right after he'd just said it? So Ryan just looked up from where he was tending the fireplace—Riz had offered to do it, but if he couldn't indulge his minor pyromania in his own home, where could he? So she sat on his bed giving him the patient look of someone very loudly not telling you what you were doing was wrong—and towards where Mikon was pulling the bundle, along with his pillow, out from under her admittedly very shapely ass.
"Ah, please be careful with that!" He just barely managed to keep from sounding panicky. It would have been just his luck that telling her to be careful actually made her drop the thing.
Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened, and Mikon handled it with the kind of obvious, ostentatious care that said she was humoring him to make him feel better, which… actually did make him feel better as she carefully set it to the side. "There. What is it?"
Ryan hesitated, wondering what exactly to tell his… well, girlfriend. Kind of his girlfriend? One of the candidates to be his girlfriend? No, not the issue! Normally he'd have told the truth with enough strategically omitted information for it to function as a lie, but doing that to one of the women who was sincerely trying to build a relationship with him seemed… not just wrong. Disrespectful. Still, what else was he supposed to say? "They're mementos," he said, turning away to face the fireplace so she wouldn't see his face. To not get caught in a lie, even one of omission, it was best to reduce the number of micro-expressions that signaled it. "What's left of what I had with me when I left home."
"Oh," Mikon replied, her voice quiet and… sympathetic. It was things like that, her saying those things, that made Ryan wonder about her background. "I'm sorry for moving them, then."
Ryan waved a hand, still looking at the fire and poking it with a stick. He could practically feel Riz's exasperation as he moved around the firewood, probably lessening their duration, but he liked seeing them glow bright orange! "It's fine. It's not tragic or anything—" For him. His family most likely thought he was dead instead of just being blasted through the void beneath existence, only to pop out here like a summoned hero from a cash grab lightnovel. "—it's just… I haven't seen my family in a long time. I've traveled too far, and… well, I'm here. Even if I wanted to, it's not like there's a regular riverboat service I can take to go see them."
"Sure there is," Riz said. "Once a week from here to River's Fork, twice a day."
Ryan chuckled. "Well, my family lives a bit farther away than River's Fork, Riz." All right, his face was feeling a bit too hot now. Time to stop playing with fire and… well, work on his love life. He reached to the side and got a fresh piece of firewood and put it on top of the currently burning coals, then threw in the stick he'd been poking with. It had grown short already, so he'd have to get a new one tomorrow. That done and resisting the urge for more pyromania, Ryan stood, and nervously headed for the bed where his… uh… girlfriends?... sat.
In his humble and unbiased opinion, they were, all of them, way out of his league. Not 'perfect skin jade beauty movie star' out of his league, just 'hot girl with huge tracts of land' out of his league. Just being near them, really looking at them in a way that still made him feel like a creep, was to feel both inadequate and aroused and like he was still fourteen looking up at his brother's really tall, hot gyaru friend. The fact they all had anime-colored hair just added to it, quite frankly.
"What sort of mementos are they?" Riz asked. Unlike Mikon and Umu, who were in skirts, the militia woman and all-but-officially-his-assistant wore trousers, her legs folded in a carelessly casual way as she ran a hand through her short magenta hair (it was far too dark and didn't have enough yellow in it to be pink, so it was definitely magenta!). Her shirt showed off her muscular, small-tracts-of-land build, and she usually moved with the self-assurance of someone who knows they could kick your ass if they needed to, except when Mikon got really skinshippy.
"If it wouldn't be intruding…" Mikon said, sounding more hesitant and solemn than she usually did. She gestured towards the bundle before reaching up to undo the twintails her pink hair had been pulled into and oh God, had she realized he liked the smell of her hair, oh God he wanted to die… Her usual flirty smile was tempered as she looked at him with sympathy.
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"Uh, sure," he said, forcing himself not to think about it. He looked around the bed for a place to sit, and Umu immediately patted the spot next to her, smiling widely at him. A hair shorter than him, she was pretty, blonde, possessed bountiful real estate, and acted like they'd been dating for years, always casually pressing up against him every time she got close. In fact, as soon as he sat down she moved so they were hip to hip, casually leaning against him and very clearly pressing herself against his arm.
He felt so plain and inadequate in the face of all this, he really did.
Ryan sat there between Umu and Riz, glad to get his bare feet off the cold stone floor and wishing they had such a thing as flip-flops here. Maybe he could convince Dormin to make him a pair come summer. For now, he settled for sitting with his legs crossed. In the middle of the bed, providing the only other source of light inside his house, the glowing rock that Lolilyuri had given him lay, still glowing weeks after he had expected her to forget about it. She really did remind him of his sister, surprisingly kind in the most unexpected ways.
Carefully, he unwrapped the bundle. The vest still seemed in good repair if you didn't know about the places in the cloth where abrasion had worn the fibers down to nothing and the holes that his skill at sewing hadn't been able to repair. Maybe he could try repairing it again. Any patches would easily fit into the faded pale khaki…
Inside the bundle was a two-inch wide cylinder of stained wood about a foot long, a distinctively red Swiss-made pocket knife, and a pair of plain butterfly knives, the only thing that had been in his pockets at the time he'd gotten isekai-d. Like his phone, his wallet had been lost at some point, though it had been no big loss, mostly containing receipts and expired insurance cards. There had been no little pictures of his family in there. He'd been born a generation too late for the practice…
The only other thing from home he had that wasn't in the bundle was the braided paracord bracelet wrapped around his wrist, locked in place with a magenta-colored metal buckle, though the compass had gotten lost at some point, its cheap plastic breaking off without him noticing. Ryan had woven it himself, though his brother had helped with the materials, and had given them out as gifts, back when home had started getting nightmarishly dangerous.
Such small things, to be all he had left of another life.
The three looked at the things curiously, though Umu used the opportunity as an excuse to cuddle up against him as he picked up the glowing rock and held it up to properly illuminate his little treasure hoard.
"What are these?" Mikon asked, leaning down to get a better look, one hand raised to keep the light out of her eyes. Ryan moved the rock to one side, and she gave him a grateful smile.
"Well, these three," he said, pointing, "are knives."
"What, really?" Riz said, looking interested.
Ryan nodded, picking up one of the butterfly knives. It had been a long time since he'd handled one, but his thumb flipped up the locking tab as if he'd last done it yesterday. Moving carefully, since Umu was on his arm, he flicked his wrist, and the butterfly knife snapped open, the other half of the handle snapping into his hand. Riz let out an impressed whistle as Umu tried to lean back without letting go of Ryan.
"Nice," Riz said, looking admiringly at the knives. "Where'd you get knives like these? I've never seen anything like these before." She spoke in the tones of someone who'd just seen a really cool thing that she wanted to have herself.
"Oh, there's a little town back home near where I was born where the smiths are locally famous for making these," Ryan said. "My sister got me these to protect myself. I used to have four, but I left the other two when I… left." If he'd been a better boyfriend, he probably should have offered one of them to her. He had two, after all. However, selfishness won. Sighing, he carefully folded the butterfly knife closed, making sure the tab was locked in place. He put the knife down, then got the pocket knife. "This, on the other hand, was a gift from my father," he said. He began to unfold everything, starting with the big knife. Big knife, small knife, scissors, can opener… "He gave it to me when he thought I was old enough to be responsible."
"Binder protect us," Mikon said, staring at all the tools he flipped out. "Your father just gave you something like that? It must have cost a lot of beads…"
"No, I'm not secretly a lord or son of a lord who ran away from home," Ryan said. "I only got within spitting distance of lordship when her Bindership decided to draft me. My father used to be in the militia, and he knew someone who knew someone who did good work. It wasn't cheap, but it was an important gift. He had his own, and he never left home without it." He held up the fully opened pocket knife, showing all the tools on it. The plastic toothpick had gotten lost even before he ended up here, but he still had the tweezers.
"What about this?" Riz asked excitedly, nudging the wooden rod. "Is it another knife?"
Ryan forced himself to chuckle as he went from omission to outright lying. He felt like shit. "Actually, it's just a weighed rod. My brother made it for me when I was younger and was just starting to learn how to use a sword. Hollowed it out, filled it with weights, got someone to fuse the two halves together again." He picked it up and hefted it, carefully avoiding the little switch recessed on one side. That would have been hard to explain, leading to awkward questions. "It was to let me practice swings without having to worry about hitting anything, and get me used to the weight. Now it's… well, it's just a surprisingly heavy club. I know it's silly, but it's the only thing of my brother's I have." He swung it down onto his opposite palm, and there was a meaty sound of impact.
"Sure, that's how you learn how to use a sword," Riz said, looking amused at the idea.
Ryan shrugged. "My brother worried about me. Didn't want me to be at risk of getting hurt, the hypocrite." He smiled sadly in remembrance.
"Do you miss them?" Mikon said quietly.
"Every day," Ryan said, sighing. Carefully, he began to wrap them all up again, setting the bundle to the side so he could put it back under his pillow to add more padding to it later. "Sorry if I ruined the mood. I just… I haven't been home in a long time. I miss them, that's all." At his side, Umu cuddled against him again now that he wasn't handling knives anymore. On his other side, Riz did the same, though she was more awkward about it, as if she wasn't sure what she was doing, and eventually settled on holding his hand.
The three left soon afterward, and the goodbye kiss they each gave was relatively chaste. Ryan supposed after his little recollection, they realized he'd feel a little melancholy. And yes, while usually the nightly making out as each tried to, ah, convince him to choose them as a more permanent partner was… enjoyable… right now he just wanted to lie down, stare at the ceiling, and wonder how everyone was doing back on Earth and where Yellow had ended up, since she didn't seem to be on this planet with him. He'd never found any indicator of it, at least, and he'd listened to rumors for the sort of strangeness she'd cause for years. He still did.
Tomorrow, they'd probably redouble the enthusiasm, and he'd feel really amenable to that… but that was tomorrow.
"Not tonight honey, I'm have a headache of nostalgic longing for home," he muttered as he got ready for bed, moving the bundle back under his pillow. As he did, the wooden rod fell out of the end and Ryan sighed, annoyed at himself for not folding up the end better so that wouldn't happen. He picked it up, turning it over and checking for damage, but aside from a little scuff on the stain on the wood, there didn't seemed to be anything wrong…
Ryan turned around, but the shutters of the house were all closed, and the door was latched. Hesitantly, he held the rod away from him, gripped it tight, and pressed the switch firmly.
The wooden handle jerked in his hand as a three-foot long blade suddenly shot out of the slot on the end, dull magenta and gleaming like cloudy glass in the light from the glowing stone on his bed. Carefully, Ryan flourished the sword, but the blade felt as secure as ever. Out of new habit, he checked the blade for rust and damage, but there were no such imperfections, and the edge was still as sharp as ever. His brother's work still held up, even after all these years without maintenance on the more exotic parts.
Satisfied that it was still in good working order, Ryan pressed the switch again, and the grip jerked once more as the blade retracted back into the slot. He wrapped the sword back with the rest of his mementos, put the bundle back under his pillow and lay down, staring at the ceiling and thinking of where he had come from.
Sleep was a long time coming, and when he dreamed, he dreamed of nightmares, eldritch, chaotic and unknowable…