The dark interior of The Tavern was filled with whispers, some quiet, others barely concealed. Karsten noticed that none of the whispers sounded particularly worried for the unconscious man hidden away in the corner.
The target of their judgment however, Henry, was not aware of this - unconscious as he was.
Karsten hurried to the out cold Henry and covered his savior’s brother in his blue cloak.
‘I guess I’ll have to get him to an Inn...’ Karsten glanced over his shoulder and peered at the patrons of the tavern. ‘It doesn’t seem like anyone here is going to take responsibility, after all.’
Sighing, Karsten patted Henry on the shoulder and lifted him off the ground. The man was heavy, but Karsten had become slightly buffer after receiving his class and a strength stat of 13.
Ignoring the whispers, Karsten shuffled over to the bar and asked where the closest Inn was.
~~~
Selania Betereske had started working at The Gildering Dex last week, and had already finished her training.
A part of her training process as a receptionist in an Inn that was close to a popular tavern was to know how to handle drunks. This part of her training was short, as the only thing she was told about how to deal with them was ‘Don’t. Don’t ‘deal’ with them. Throw them out the door. We honestly can’t be bothered anymore, those fuckers probably won’t even remember being thrown to the street the day after anyway, so don’t worry.’
She had even received a list of people who were banned permanently from staying. There were about two pages of names, some of the entries from long ago, who - no matter what - were not allowed to set foot into the establishment. Some even had hand drawn pictures of their faces next to their name, drawn by the owner herself. There were also notes scribbled in pure rage by the owner next to the drawings, ranging from slurs to comments about how to best ‘handle’ them for the most permanent effect.
Only one of the names had been crossed out with red lines, the name underneath almost completely unintelligible. The only legible part of the name were the three last letters: ‘-ian’.
This entry was something of a legend amongst the receptionists. This mysterious person was simply dubbed the ‘Red Guy’. Some thought it was the owner crossing off who she’d achieved sweet retribution on, and others hypothesized that maybe the Red Guy was dead, and so crossed off. That didn’t really match up though, as there were a couple people whose name was still on the list that were known to be dead. It seemed that even in death, their wandering spirit itself was prohibited from setting foot into the establishment...
Selania had always found such mysteries exhilarating, so in the long hours of her shift, she would fill her time in between guests with thoughts and theories of her own. Her personal hypothesis was that the Red Guy had performed a grand, heroic and saintly act and the ban had been removed. She thought it was a shame how she would never find out.
*Cling!*
Pulling her out of her thoughts, the copper bell on the door rang, announcing the arrival of guests with its clear ringing.
Like clockwork, she rang back.
“Welcome, honored guests! What might I help you with this…”
Looking at the guests that had entered, her fresh-out-of-training mind stumbled.
She looked at the obviously piss drunk unconscious man and recognized him as one of the relatively new entries of the ban list, Henry Kerdan. What made her mind stumble, however, was that there were two Henrys. One Henry was out cold and haphazardly covered by a cloak, and the other Henry was seemingly pissed, pulling the original Henry along with a deep frown on his face.
A few seconds later, the source of ‘Henry nr. 2’s unhappiness entered Selanias nostrils.
‘Ew… Ballux… Also, clones? My training didn’t cover anything like this… what do I do? ’
She snapped back to attention when Henry nr. 2 slumped Henry nr. 1 up against the wall next to the entrance and turned to her. She gave him an awkward smile, and tried to repeat her welcome, but choked on her words as the man started walking towards her.
“I’m super sorry about the smell, (though it wasn't my fault). Me and my dearest cousin Henry here need somewhere to stay for the night. Oh, and if you have a room with a bathtub, I’ll take that. I’ll pay double. I don’t care how much it costs, I’ll pay double, gratefully. Please, I don’t think I can take the smell of puke anymore…’
‘Double… huh, the only room with a bath is the deluxe suite on the top floor… That’s a lot of money… I think the owner would forgive me… The owner would probably forgive me, right?’
“Uh, H-how long would you like to stay?” She stammered out, already somehow feeling the owner's fury like a dense fog licking at her back.
“One night, please. How much?”
“Huh? Oh, right. Uh, well, the original price of the top suite, the one with a bath on the top floor, is 10 silver a night. So double that would be one gold 5 silver.”
“...”
~~~
Karsten blanched at the price, but in the end, he reached his hand into his pocket and discreetly opened his storage space, pulling out a handful of coins. After quickly counting the coins in his hand, he handed over his one gold coin and five silver coins to the receptionist.
“Thank you! Might I have your name, sir? I need to register it for the archives.”
“Of course. I’m Karsten Kerdan.”
"Karsten, huh?"
“Hm?”
“Oh, u-uh, nothing. If you would follow me! Right this way, Mr. Kerdan!”
Karstens brows furrowed slightly, but he put it off his mind and retrieved Henry.
~~~
Legs shaking from exhaustion, Karsten dragged Henry the last few steps to the room door and stumbled through after the receptionist opened it.
All compassion left behind on the stairs he climbed to get here, he threw Henry on the floor and fell to his knees panting.
“Th-thank you… miss… I’ll… I’ll… oh god… let me just…close the…”
The receptionist smiled thinly and closed the door for him.
“...Jesus…”
What the receptionist had failed to mention was that the building had no elevator, and that the ‘top floor’ was six floors up. In hindsight, Karsten felt stupid for not thinking of this possibility sooner.
‘This is a medieval fantasy world, obviously there isn’t going to be a bloody elevator’.
Either way, this meant that Karsten had to carry Henry on his back like a pack mule up 6 flights of stairs after already having carried him all the way to the Inn in the first place. Not to mention the stench. Or the fact that there was now puke smeared all over his new fancy coat. Or the fact that he was now back to being broke. Or the fact that he would have to bathe the guy and put him to bed like a maidservant.
There was a disdainful frown plastered on Karstens face as he peeled his coat off of Henry and placed it in a pile on the floor by the door.
He readied the bath and positively dumped Henry into it, reluctantly keeping the unconscious man’s head above the water so he wouldn’t drown.
After all was taken care of, Karsten dragged Henry to one of the two double beds in the suite and laid him in it, covering him with the blanket and making sure that his breathing wasn’t hindered by laying him on his side. If Henry died in his sleep after all this, Karsten would kill him.
Karsten added all their clothes to the pile on the floor and cast Prestidigitation to instantly clean them. Blue light welled from where his heart was, streamed through what felt like veins in his arm and out of his hands and fingertips. The blue glow enveloped the clothes and sank into them, before ebbing and flowing here and there in the pile. It almost looked like a blue slime was bathing in the clothes.
It only lasted an instant though, as a second after the spell was cast, the light flickered out of existence, leaving behind it a pile of clean clothes. He picked up his blue coat and looked at the spots where there used to be puke, but there was not even any discoloration left. He lifted it to his nose and inhaled a breath, jubilating when he smelled nothing.
Karsten clasped his hands together and looked up at the white ceiling. “Thank you, Ballux.”
It was the most heartfelt prayer he had ever said.
After folding the clothes, Karsten readied the bath for a second time and washed all of the sweat and puke off his body.
After everything was taken care of, he trudged to his bed and fell onto it, covering his whole body, head included, with the blanket.
“Huuuuuuuuuu……..” A soul-deep sigh escaped him, and he fell asleep.
~~~
The next morning, Karsten woke up feeling much better than the day before.
“I really have to thank the stamina recovery system…”
Taking in a deep breath, he noticed the smell of food in the air. Looking over, Karsten saw that a breakfast table with a copious amount of food had been prepared for the two of them while they slept.
He glanced over at Henry and saw that he was still asleep. Karsten decided to go ahead and help himself to the breakfast, and it wasn’t until he was halfway done that he heard a grunt coming from Henry’s bed.
Exceedingly slowly, Henry raised himself up in the bed, clearly still a bit groggy and probably a bit tipsy from the day before.
“Morning, sleeping beauty, how were your dreams tonight? My dreams were hellish, let me tell you! I had this idea to share some food from the stalls in the market district and come drink with you to celebrate a job well done with the quest, but when I arrived at the tavern you’d already blacked out from drinking too much! So then I, being the good samaritan that I am, obviously had to come to the rescue.”
Henry blinked his eyes a few times to get used to the light, then groggily got dressed.
“So I carried you to this Inn, bathed you, put you to bed and cleaned your clothes for you!”
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Henry trudged over and took a seat at the table, placing a pile of food on his plate and starting to munch it down.
“Now, I know what you must be thinking: ‘Isn’t he just the nicest human being?’, but no, I was simply doing what any saintly Bard would do. I’m sure any other Bard such as myself would have done something equally selfless, heroic and also extremely expensive for you.”
Henry looked up from his plate and at Karsten. “Nobody asked you to help me.”
“Your sister did.” Karsten said, all humor leaving his voice.
“Before we met, I could tell that Medoly was worried for you. At first, I didn’t really understand exactly why, but when I saw you, I thought ‘No wonder’.”
“Even then, I thought, ‘Well, at least they’ve talked it out now.’ I thought that maybe the two of you had come to some agreement when your sister practically beat you up in that back alley, but then you are somehow in a worse state the next time I see you. There was a time when you were in the bath that you stopped breathing, you know.”
Henry’s eyes darkened as he looked down at his plate again.
“Look, I know I haven’t known either of you for long, but I know Medoly is a good person. When I came staggering out of the woods a few days ago and she first thought that I was you coming home, I could tell how worried she’d been for you when, after confusing me for you, she called your name and started sprinting towards me as if you'd come back from the grave. Bad people don’t really act like that.”
“What's my sister got to do with this, anyway?” Henry said apathetically as he continued to eat his food.
“Good people don't deserve being treated like shit, Henry."
Henry paused.
"And you getting piss drunk to the point of very nearly dying the very same day that she found you is as disrespectful as kicking her baby, in my eyes, anyway.”
Henry’s brows furrowed. “Wait, ‘baby’?" What the fuck did you do with my sis-”
“Figure of speech! Jesus, I have to learn this world's common phrases… Anyway, as I was saying, it would be as disrespectful as throwing a rotten sweet-cirn root at her deceased hamster.”
Henry’s brows furrowed even more. “My sister doesn't have a-”
“Okay, look…” Karsten sighed. “Do you understand what I mean? It'd be a dick move.”
Henry looked down at his plate. “Well… everyone has their own problems. I have mine and you have yours. That’s normal. What’s not normal is to meddle.”
Karsten let out an exasperated sigh. Then he grew contemplative and sat in silence while Henry ate for a few minutes to formulate his words. Eventually, he spoke.
“I’ve heard enough snippets here and there from Medoly to get a general picture of your situation. Your dad expects you to be at the forefront in his plan to ‘get back into the nobility’, or something. He basically expects you to be this idealized, superhuman version of himself, and from what I can see…” Karsten thought back to the ordeal he’d gone through the day before, and his mood worsened a bit. “...those expectations have put quite a lot of pressure on you. You’ve been through a lot.”
Henry scoffed. “You don’t know the first fucking thing about my situation-”
“And I don’t claim to!” Karsten snapped. “All I’m saying is that you are not the only one that has problems, and to stop looking at me as if I’m the source of yours. You have no right to treat me like that. You remember that gold coin you so graciously let me have yesterday? I had to use that and five silver to get us this room. I had to fucking bathe you because you were unconscious and covered in puke. Actually, I was also covered in puke, because I had to fucking carry you to the Inn and up six Ballux-be-damned flights of stairs. The smell of puke is still stuck in my nose, I’ll have you know. I had to perform CPR one time just to keep you alive. I’m not saying that to toot my own horn or anything, but because I want you to know what you would have put your sister through yesterday if it weren't for someone's intervention. You would have killed her brother, and odds are, she wouldn’t even know about it. You’d’ve been thrown in an alley by the barkeep and died away from any crowds. No-one would have found you for at least a few days, and your sister would be blazing with fury, but most of all, she’d’ve been worried sick. She’d look for you incessantly just to find some skeleton because you were eaten by fucking rats or something. You would have died yesterday.”
Henry’s eyes shifted to the floor and his mouth quivered. His brows furrowed as he tried to remember what had happened the day before. Karsten felt it was getting harder and harder to empathize with the man as his own anger kept growing. He had said some variation of this to his own sister many times in the past, and he felt indignation at how she hadn’t even looked his way when he pleaded with her.
Henry opened his mouth to speak, but Karsten cut in.
“Why do you do this to yourself?”
It was the question he’d always wanted to ask whenever he’d pick her up from the hospital from getting her blood pumped after drinking too much.
Henry bit his lips and sank his face into his hands, his shoulders lowering. He looked smaller than he ever had before.
Karsten watched this and felt remorse. While he meant everything he’d said, he felt that maybe giving such a speech to a person that was practically a stranger might’ve been going too far.
“I…”
Karsten didn’t interject this time. He let Henry take his time thinking of what to say. It seemed like this had been weighing on his shoulders for a long time, so Karsten simply sat there in silence with him for a few minutes.
“I don’t want.. I don’t want to live like this.” Henry finally said.
“I never wanted to live like my dad’s fucking puppet. The ass has been pushing me in this or that direction for my entire Ballux-damned life. Whenever I went out to try and do something on my own I was always reigned in like a workhorse”
“What do you want to do, then?” Karsten asked.
Henry looked up from his hands and glanced at Karsten.
“Ever since I was a kid, I only really wanted to play around, to be honest. Rules and customs and stuff like that never really felt right to me. I can’t even begin to imagine myself as a noble.”
“Me neither.” Karsten admitted with a chuckle.
Henry glared at him flatly and Karsten put both hands into the air. “I’m sorry. Please continue.”
Henry sighed. “I think traveling might be fun, I guess. Dungeon delving is something I always wanted to try my hand at as well.”
“So you want to be an Adventurer?”
Henry shrugged. “Yeah.”
“I can see that. I think it’d suit you well.”
Henry frowned a bit at Karstens genuinity.
“What? Am I not allowed to be honest here? Is this not a safe space where we share our feelings truthfully?” Karsten retorted in mock-offense.
“Sure, sure.” Henry waved him off, but his face turned serious as he observed Karstens face - specifically, the scars on his temples. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, you know… What’re those scars from?”
Karsten was first confused, not knowing what ‘scars’ Henry was referring to. He hadn’t had them for long, after all, so he’d completely forgotten about them.
Henry gestured to his temples and Karsten had a figurative lightbulb light up above his head.
“Oh, right, these. Forgot I had those…”
Henry’s brows furrowed even further.
Karsten thought about how he’d gotten those scars. Falling from the roof of his house and being… teleported here, with lack of better word. The story of how he’d gotten here was a crazy one, and telling Henry of all people might not be the best idea…
“I don’t really know…”
Henry deadpanned. “It’s okay, Karsten, this is a safe space where we can share our feelings. Truthfully. You are safe here.”
It was Karstens turn to glare now, but he ended up caving. “You know what? Fine.” He took a few breaths and tried to formulate what he was about to say so he wouldn’t sound insane, but promptly gave up and just laid it out bare.
“I come from another world. I fell from the roof of my house back home on Earth, was impaled through the head, temple to temple, by a steel rod and landed in the huge forest outside your house. I wandered there for what felt like forever before I met your sister, Medoly. She saved me and arranged for me to get my Adventurer’s License, then led me to you so that you could help me get started as an Adventurer. The rest is history.”
Henry’s brows became more and more furrowed as Karsten spoke.
“You’re fucking serious.”
Karsten chuckled. “Yes, I’m 'fucking serious'. I’ve already told Medoly. She said she believes me, though I think she thinks I’m off in the head.”
Henry's mind went deep into thought for a few seconds. “From our interactions, I don’t think you seem ‘off in the head’ at all. You seem normal. Eccentric, yeah, but normal.”
“Thank you. I am a very normal person.”
Henry sighed. “Normal people don’t say… nevermind. So, let’s just say I believe you. How did you survive getting impaled through the head by a steel pole? And how did you fall from your house on.. ‘Earth’ was it?” Karsten nodded. “How the hell did you fall from the top of your house on Earth and land in some forest in Lengleia?”
“Lengleia… That’s what this world is called?” Henry nodded. “I see… well, to answer your question, I have absolutely no idea. You’d know better than me, having lived in a magical world your whole life and all.”
Henry looked dumbfounded. “Wait, Earth doesn’t have magic? …Is that even possible?”
Karsten deadpanned.
“Like, none at all?”
“No, Henry, no magic at all. It was a huge shock coming here, let me tell you.”
“Really… Hm… Well, you’re way calmer than I imagine a so-called ‘normal’ person in your shoes would be.
Karsten shrugged. “Yeah, well, you know what they say. ‘Don’t stress over what you cannot control’ and all that.”
“Yeah, sure, but you literally fell into another world… Nobody would be sane after that.” Henry hesitated for a few seconds before asking. “You alright?”
Karsten’s lips became a fine line as he looked up at the ceiling, genuinely checking in with himself and observing his own state of mind.
“Yeah. I don’t know. Probably not.”
He looked around the room for a bit before shifting his gaze back to Henry. “But I’m not freaking out at the moment, so I think doing pretty well.”
“I guess that’s about the best you can ask for. Don’t you want to go back, though?”
“Well, yeah, obviously. But I don’t know how to even start approaching that question. I have no real concept of what happened to me. It obviously has something to do with magic, but it’s not like I can cast a spell like that to go home. I don’t even know if I’m the right class for that. The best option I’ve thought of is to find powerful, high-level people and ask them.”
Henry snorted. “Good fucking luck with that. Even if one of them knew of a method or spell like that, that secret would’ve been kept as a generational secret, if shared at all. And if you tell them what happened to you and they, for whatever reason, believe you, then they’d be more likely to, very easily, kidnap you and, extremely easily, cut you open in their labs."
“How about we ask someone that doesn’t have a lab, then?”
“Karsten, all high level people have labs. Do they not have that where you come from? Oh, right. Well, either way, all powerful people have labs.”
Karsten massaged his forehead. “This is such a weird world.”
“Tell me about it.” Henry shook his head and pinched his glabella in frustration. “So, what do you plan on doing now?”
Karsten thought about it for a while.
“I don’t know. Get stronger, I guess? Figure out how to get home on my own somehow?”
Henry nodded. “Adventuring, then. You already have your license, so it would be easy enough to do jobs here and there in the city.”
Karsten cocked his head at his choice of words. “Only in the city?”
“Yeah. Because of that shiny golden star you have there…” Henry pointed at the star pinned to Karstens collar. “... it would be impossible for you to do adventuring work outside the city without a Guardian. And it would probably be next to impossible to find a Guardian because who the fuck would want to be one? There are next to no benefits, and extreme backlash if something goes wrong. It’s a 24 hour job that you don’t make any profit from, as far as I know.”
Karsten’s face went blank, but then lit up. “Cousin, I have a proposition for you-”
“No.” Henry looked at Karsten with raised eyebrows. “Also, don’t call me cousin, it creeps me out.”
“Brother-”
“Absolutely not.”
“Comrade?”
“...”
“Oh, come on, Henry, you even said you wanted to be an adventurer too. Don’t you also need someone to party with?”
“Not technically. For Dungeons, sure, but for regular jobs, no. And either way, I can find someone on my own just fine.”
“I’m not trying to be rude, but are you really sure about that?”
“...”
“From what I saw at the tavern yesterday, I wouldn’t guess you’re overly popular.”
“...Other cities are different.”
“Mhm.”
“...Sigh.”
“...And Medoly would probably kill you if she found out you let me emigrate with a total stranger.”
Henry’s face fell, and he visibly shuddered.
“And-”
“For fucks sake…” Henry rubbed his eyes with his hands. “...fine.” He said with an extreme amount of reluctance.
Karsten grinned like a classical anti-hero and slapped his new friend on the back. “Great! Let’s go find Medoly and tell her about the fine new arrangements, then gather some additional supplies. After that, we’ll pick a direction and set off on our epic adventure!”
Henry groaned. “The Guild better fucking pay me for this.”