Here is where the story of Nathan’s second life begins: in the most stereotypical place, doing the most stereotypical thing imaginable.
“Buddy,” a voice graveled out, echoing from the wood walls, “you gonna order, or what?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry.” Nathan looked over at the diminutive figure, blinking in confusion. “I don’t suppose you could repeat that? I didn’t catch it.”
The reptilian demi-humanoid hopped down off of the bartop, landing soundlessly on the polished planks of the establishment. “You. Gonna. Order?”
“Ordering, right. Honestly,” he lied smoothly, “I’m too thirsty to make up my mind. Let me wrap myself around some water, and then I’ll order something? I can see you’ve got the drinks up there, it’s just…” He trailed off, shrugging. “Choice paralysis, I guess.”
His fluid words and the two dull gray coins he pulled out of his pocket and slipped into the man’s hand seemed to mollify the bartender. He had initially been taken as an outsider, a stranger and tourist, but after he’d heard a single sentence of whatever language was being spoken he had been instantly fluent in understanding and speaking it, just as he had become instantly fluent in reading and writing it simply from glancing at the board of food and drink prices.
He even understood the coinage of the realm, understood it perfectly along with an intuitive grasp on what the costs were of goods and services and what the social mores were around bargaining and tipping.
The dull gray coin was a single stele, also known as a pauper’s grave or simply a pauper. It was the smallest denomination of coinage in use in the realm, with a lower one once having existed; but inflation made mockery of that coin as it did of pennies, and unlike the United States of America even through the early 21st century, the realm had done away with the commons—a common grave, or a mass grave—as being too worthless to print or expect anyone to accept as currency. The validator enchantments had been run for a decade after as the cities of the Constellation took them in and recycled the mana and materials within them, taking a small loss in the process; and then by the time Nathan entered the realm, they had been discarded.
They would have been worth, as best an approximation can be made from a pseudo-medieval fantasy society’s economy to another world in another universe… more than a dime. And indeed, it would have been ludicrous to retain them, due to their fundamental worthlessness as a unit of currency.
But we digress.
It was a common myth of Nathan’s culture and time of origin that the medieval era of Earth’s Europe did not have clean drinking water. This was, of course, completely false—not only would it have been prohibitively expensive for the peasantry or laborers to drink anything that was not water, the literature of a thousand years discussed the virtues of clean water drawn from a well or gathered from a rainwater cistern. It was only river water which was considered unfit to drink, for sewage was dumped in it. And indeed, Nathan knew many things like this, because he was a reader of a blog called A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which was the work of a historian and an excellent resource for anyone writing in a pre-modern setting whether fantasy or otherwise; and similarly he was a voracious reader of the AskHistorians community on the social media platform known as “reddit”.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The world Nathan had arrived at, however, defied his expectations whether he knew it or not, for the water he was handed in the glass, the clean and pure water… was from a river.
He was unaware of the reasons why the river water was clean and pure, or the reasons why he was not being offered water from a well or cistern. But not knowing these, and being unguarded with regards to them, he simply accepted the water and a small bowl of salted nuts with a nod of appreciation and left the barkeep with a single-stele tip.
“Give ‘em salt,” he murmured to nobody in particular, “and they’ll drink more.”
He rested the fingers of one hand on his staff, taking long sips from the water glass with his other. It was a nice enough piece of wood, solid hardwood which had been rough-cut and smoothed to some extent but not polished. Its grip was solid and it fit his hand well, and he ran his fingers along the intricate carving at the very tip as the memory of working on it surfaced like a story he’d read somewhere, like a story that he’d told or worked on collaboratively.
Because he had, in a way. He was telling it in the moment, the memories of how he’d crafted the staff coalescing around the core of his personality, Saucer’s help, and the as-yet-unnamed intralife benefactor-intern he’d perhaps unfairly chastised.
He almost drew power through it on instinct, but stopped himself in time. Active workings of magic in the town’s limits would be rude, as someone who hadn’t established his bonafides. And he had plans on doing so, yes—there were three bounties which he could handle traced out in glowing runes on the hall-board on the tavern’s wall, and two of them didn’t involve any combat; and those were just the ones he could handle alone. But he hadn’t done any of them yet, and he preferred not to be asked pointed questions about why a traveler, perhaps not an outsider but not a neighbor, was sipping from the leylines.
Especially since he wasn’t a registered Magus, and… hmm.
“Well?”
He glanced down at the barkeep, smiling faintly at the sight of the two-foot-tall saurian with the two-foot tail. “Berry kite and one of those apple pastries from the bakery two doors over. Do you know why that cleaning job is up on the hallie? Any half-stele apprentice should be able to run a purifier.”
The lizardman looked dyspeptic at that, though his ears perked up as Nathan handed over a plot and two stele, taking note of the other plot on the table. He stroked the raised ridges of the smaller, off-white coin—a plot, a lot, or a pace, but never a grave, not outside of the Shinelands—and shook his head. “Ain’t a purifier job,” he murmured quietly. “Lady’s got a horsewasp up her cloaca about sem-auts. Says they’re spirit-touched, that they’re spying on her or that they’re slaves, depends on the day when you ask. Won’t have ‘em in her house, so it’s a full eight’s squat for a full Junior, and she’s paying apprentice rates. Berry kite and a pastry comin’ up, your wizardry!”
Nathan reflected on that warning as he waited, sighing as he toyed with the enchantments he both had carved and had never carved on the end of his staff.
He was fairly confident that it would take him a long time indeed to get used to a wizard’s mode of address in this world.