A fresh pair of guards wearing cloth face masks replaced the AoE-afflicted pair currently assisting Boris the Beggar, supporting him on each side and helping him to stand. They prompted him to address the audience and explain himself – it appeared the mayor was giving him an opportunity to lessen the gravity of his crime.
Despite his dazed state, Boris somehow managed to understand what they were saying, perhaps roused out of his stupor by the danger of his present situation.
He began in a slurred voice, “When the effort to clean up the village began a few months ago, I could see where it was all going with everyone updating their characters to fit in with the new image. Since it was obvious there’d be no place for someone of my profession within the new village, I figured I’d pick up my sticks and leave in the hopes of offering my services elsewhere.”
“Huh, so it’s been that long since he left. Who’d have thunk it?”
Boris continued, “But then I heard about this tournament from the town over, so I started begging for money to travel back and witness it with my own eyes. That’s when a mysterious person came up to me and offered to gift me this enchanted armour set and pay for my fare to be taken here, but if only I was willing to enter the tournament under the mantle of the Black Knight.”
“They were so confident in their proposal that they claimed it was an offer I could not refuse, and I didn’t want to come off as rude by telling them that it was, in fact, refusable and that something smelled off about the whole thing. So I accepted it, thinking it’d at least help me update my character and have a place here with you guys again.”
“Oh, come on, Boris. What nonsense are you harping on about? Don’t tell me you’re regular blind now as well as being noseblind? Does it look like we’re going for an all-black aesthetic here? Really? I mean, not that it matters because you’ve always had a place here with us.”
“Yeah, you silly beggar – the only thing that smells off here is you, cos it smells as though you’ve offed yourself.”
“Hey, nice one, man. I liked the wittiness.”
“Thanks, bro. I’ve been working on my zingers for a while. Anyway as I was saying, sure we may not have noticed you were gone for several months, Boris, but we totally would have if you’d given us like a week more.”
“Exactly. You’re like part of the background – just because we don’t pay attention to you every day doesn’t mean that someone wouldn’t eventually point out that something in the background had changed but they weren’t quite sure as to what. And then someone else would mention that you were gone, leading to a beautiful moment between us of shared realisation at how much we missed having you around. That’s how valued you are as part of our village.”
Boris hiccupped, glimmers of tears in his eyes. “But the whole village got a makeover, so…”
He had to pause as the pair of guards supporting him almost collapsed after being saturated with his stench, having to be swapped out for a new pair who came prepared for the stench as revealed by their rubber gas masks.
“…so I thought you guys wouldn’t want an old relic like me around anymore.”
“Well, I mean… Okay, you got us there, but you know it’s not like the new is all good or anything.”
“Hmm,” the mayor expressed his interest aloud, looking in the direction of the comment to see if its speaker would kindly finish their thought.
Luckily for them, another villager covered their misstep. “I think what they meant is that not everything has to change – we can still keep some of the old alongside the better, shiny new.”
Audience members hummed their assent and nodded agreeably, watching the mayor’s reaction through the corner of their eyes. When finally he gave a curt nod, they sighed in relief.
“Boris, you hear that? You’re still an accepted member of our community, so you don’t need to dress up as someone cooler to get our love. There certainly ain’t nobody here who can beg like you do.”
“Yet, he must still be held to account for his crime of imitating a nobleman,” Mayor Ovaro chimed in before things could end on too sweet of a note. “Usually the punishment would be far more severe, but since Boris here has expressed his regret – and since his heart was in the right place in wanting to change himself in accordance with the village – I’ll reduce his sentence to a month spent at the re-education building.”
Boris’s eyes shook in disbelief. “Really?”
The crowd understood his reaction all too well, most people cringing fearfully at the mere mention of that accursed building.
“Indeed,” Mayor Ovaro answered without emotion.
Under his instruction, a new pair of guards replaced the current pair – these new ones were not taking any chances as they wore thick, cumbersome gas masks and were clad from head to toe in yellow hazmat suits – and they began to carry Boris away to serve his sentence; in which time the beggar appeared to have cracked from the punishment as he had a shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
Did Penbrooke’s last strike give him brain damage? I’ve never seen anyone look happy at being sent to the re-education building.
Hauled away, the beggar giggled to himself like a child. “To think I’d get a full month of a roof over my head, three square meals, and plenty of attention, just like the mysterious stranger said. I guess I really should have been committing crimes a lot earlier.”
Besides a small smirk, the mayor didn’t seem overly bothered that the punishment was being taken as a benefit, a situation akin to spanking a naughty child only to find out that it was no child on your lap but a dwarf in a gimp suit.
In fact, seeing how upbeat Boris was, the mayor couldn’t help but add a little extra. “Give him a touch of waterboarding as well while he’s in there. Help him wash the muck off, eh?”
“Nooo!” Boris’s cries came from beyond the amphitheatre exit, sounding like a vengeful banshee. “Anything but a shower, please! I built this grime from the ground up; I’ll be reduced to nothing if it’s washed away again, cast back to bronze rank. I beg you, please don’t send me to that elo hell.”
Once the beggar’s wailing was out of earshot, the mayor continued. “As Boris signed up to the tournament under a false identity, he automatically forfeits his match, meaning Ser Penbrooke of Twirdly Castle is indeed the victor, and one of the contestants heading to the finals. That’s right, folk, this lucky knight is now within grasping distance of the crown.”
To be polite, the crowd gave another round of clapping to Penbrooke and sang further praises about the floral crown, though since most of them were already spent their claps were rather lacklustre and their praises recycled from before.
Not that Penbrooke cared seeing as he’d not paid a lick of attention to Boris’s touching rapprochement with his old neighbours, even now treating the surrounding noise as, well, just that, noise; rather, the knight’s attention was solely directed towards his phantom terminal.
“The AI is currently set on automatic quest progression. I had been planning to change that, but you know what, I think I’ll just leave it as is – it’s too convenient a way to have the boring parts skipped. If only there was a way of telling the AI what to automatically progress on and what to leave for me, that’d make it ideal. Wait, didn’t ManMuncher3000 mention something about that in their post. Something about… ugh, I don’t remember. Maybe it’s one of the possible AI modes? I’ll flick through just to check.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Penbrooke’s flicked his finger as though he were (very inefficiently) rolling up an imaginary scroll in front of him. “Nope. Nope. Nop—”
—————
“—Huh, it’s not part of the set behaviour modes then. Could it be an option somewhere else?”
Cal felt as though he’d just woken amidst a nightmare, existential dread streaking its clammy fingers down his spine, made worse by the fact he didn’t know why he felt this way. All he knew was that he’d blacked out and returned shortly after – or at least he presumed so given his surroundings looked hardly any different – and that him blacking out was likely linked to whatever Penbrooke had been doing in that moment.
Whatever it’d been, Cal’s primal survival instincts were warning him to avoid running into it again at all costs.
“Ooh, there it is,” Penbrooke suddenly said, the sound of his voice – his voice – giving Cal a fright. “If I have the AI programmed behaviour on automatic quest progression and have this option ticked, it should allow cross-communication between us. Very handy.”
He then glanced about himself, his gaze being met by the audience at large who were confused as to what he was still doing in the arena when there remained another semi-final to get through; was he trying to imitate what the Black Knight had done, because he’d need a lot more scare-factor than a silly-looking mask to achieve the terrifying statue effect of his peer.
“Well, I don’t feel any different, so I’m not sure if this feature is working. Let me check I did actually turn it on.” A few seconds later, he grumbled to himself. “Yep, it’s on alright. So where the hell’s the AI? Helloo. You there, Mr AI?”
I know it’s definitely me he’s referring to with the name A-Eye, and it sounds like he wants me to say something to him right now. But how? Panic scrambled Cal’s brain at the fear Penbrooke would do that thing again to him if he didn’t speak in time.
Okay, come on, think. I still can’t move my body, so it’s not like I can use my mouth. Meaning that if communication is possible, it must be through my thoughts. But it’s obvious he can’t hear my thoughts… unless maybe I’m somehow able to direct them towards him?
Cal mentally intoned at a slow cadence, intending each word to be heard by Penbrooke. “Hello, can you hear me?”
“Ah, there you are, Mr AI. Were you having issues with your mic?”
“…Sorry?”
“Ah, never mind. You must be the AI who controls this body while I’m not here. I’m not sure if you know, but I met some of your friends and family a while back.”
All too well, actually.
“And if I recall correctly, hmm, what did they say again…” Penbrooke tilted his head in a quizzical manner. “Ah, that’s it. You must be Cal.”
“Yes, that’s my name.”
“Jolly good, I’ll call you Cal as well from now on. Now, I’ve been a bit—”
“Uh, sorry to interrupt, ser…”
“Call me Penbrooke, please. No need for honorifics between close partners like you and I.”
“Okay. Sorry to interrupt, Penbrooke, but shouldn’t you get off the arena grounds first? The audience sounds rather cranky already.”
Penbrooke waved off Cal’s concern with a carefree laugh. “Pay no heed to them – that’s just how mob NPCs are. Now, what I wanted to ask was… Actually, wait, just to check, you are the spirit of this body, right?
You’re the spirit, not me! Cal wanted to say badly, but he resigned to biting his tongue instead. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Are you sure you’re not a legendary swordmaster from centuries past? Or perhaps the spirit of an infamous sorcerer who, amidst the empire’s golden age, brought the entire continent to ruin? Or better yet, a sexy fae lady who was betrayed and reduced to her spirit form, now on a quest for vengeance?”
…
“I’m sure I’m not any of those things.”
“So no walkthrough on how to make this experience a power fantasy? Or any forbidden, powerful techniques to teach me? Not even any cute, flirtatious dialogue for a touch of sexual tension?”
“…No.”
“Pity,” said the knight, being gracious enough to not request Cal to roleplay a sexually-charged pretty girl anyway. “I thought by this point it was industry standard for guide-type companions within the genre to carry that kind of backstory, or at least add a little spice to the experience. Ah, whatever – it could well be a DLC that comes later, I guess.”
“Anyway, what I wanted to ask you about was this quest I’ve had for a while to discover the secret of Fragrant Grove. I’ve discovered two clues, but I can’t figure out where to find the third. Do you have any hints on what it could be?”
Forget a hint, Cal already knew what the secret of the village was; so the question wasn’t on whether he could give a hint, but if he should when it was clear the locals wanted to move on from their past and were militantly encouraging visitors to do the same.
That being said, though, Cal couldn’t help but remember the existential dread he’d experienced less than a minute ago, when Penbrooke had done that thing. Did he really have a choice when there was a loaded crossbow cocked against his head?
“This village used to be a very different place in the past. They’ve had a total rebranding from name to streets to people.”
Cal paused as he spotted Lucas approaching from the corner of Penbrooke’s vision, likely at the mayor’s behest to drag him off the arena. “Ser, is something wrong? Why have you stopped here?”
Penbrooke hummed his interest at Cal’s answer and ignored Lucas. “Go on.”
“Well, I suppose it’s easiest to say that, until recently, Fragrant Grove was not the identity of this village. You see, before there was the Fragrant Grove you see before you right now, there existed a plain old village that everyone referred to as Shit Hole.”
“Ah, that counts as the final clue. Nicely done, C—”
“—al” Penbrooke turned around and scanned his surroundings, utterly confused. Mid-word, in the blink of an eye, he’d gone from an arena with hundreds of observers to standing in what appeared to be the interior of a run-down pub.
The wooden beams were rotten, wallpaper ripped and hanging listlessly, and the air tasting sour and funky. And it was roisterous in a way Cal had never seen the village before, going beyond snarky voices and loud laughter as within the atmosphere was a vibrance that couldn’t be imitated, chaotic and lively to the point it was difficult to follow everything going on.
It was this realisation that helped Cal clock on to what had happened, for although he’d never seen a Fragrant Grove like this, he’d heard much about a neighbouring shithole just like this one while growing up in Riversdale.
Penbrooke reached the same conclusion when he walked up to the nearest table and swished his hand through it. “Ah, it’s a vision. This must be the backstory viewer feature they advertised that shows key historic moments. I wonder if there’s anyone here that I know.”
Penbrooke peered at the person sitting at the table beside, glanced at other patrons, then returned to the nearest person for a double take. “By god, if it isn’t the gambler himself. Certainly cuts a different figure here.”
Having overlooked the nearest person as a stranger, only at Penbrooke’s comment did Cal take a long gander at the stranger and confirm it was indeed Gillis, even if at first glance it was more feasible to believe them to be Gillis’s wealthy cousin or the like. Wearing fine clothes and lavishly bejewelled, Gambler Gillis was plump and jolly, his appearance topped off by a ridiculously floppy Landsknecht beret. He sat in relative quiet nursing a pint, the seat opposite him empty.
Moving on, the next table across was occupied by strangers, but Cal recognised the waitress carrying pints on a round wait staff tray over to them as the pixie-face beauty Penbrooke had handed a flower to. Given she looked only a touch younger than in the present, he guessed this was a vision from within a year, meaning that Gillis must have experienced an absurd upheaval in fortunes to have gone from wealthy magnate to hopeless gambler in that time.
Another waitress further on in the pub Cal deduced as the administrator who’d registered Penbrooke up for the tournament, easily identifiable by the glasses she wore. And another waiting staff Cal recognised as the sharp-faced brunet who’d been seated beside the pixie-faced beauty in the amphitheatre, currently carrying a pint outside.
The windows were open (due to an absence of glass, curtains, and blinds), and through them Cal peeked a man lying on a blanket outside the front of the building, reading a book while holding a sandwich in his other hand that he’d occasionally chomp on.
This man had a random assortment of items gathered beside him – not so much a peddler’s wares for sale as much as they were a destitute hoarder’s life collection – in addition to two wicker baskets to carry them with while on the move.
When handed the pint, the man passed a bronze coin over to the waiter. “Thank you, Rory.”
“Anytime, Boris.” The waiter peered at the sandwich a moment. “Did you get that from our kitchen by any chance?”
“Sshh,” Boris urged with a finger over his lips. “Megan kindly made it for me when I came by earlier. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Oh, don’t worry, she won’t get into trouble,” the waiter said, turning his eye then to the book. “That’s about some knight saving a noblewoman from pirates or something, right? I could have sworn I saw Gabbie reading that the other day.”
“The very same one, heh. A thrilling romantic tale: Knightingale’s Swashbuckling Adventures Through the Kaspian Sea (and saving the patrician’s kidnapped daughter on the way for some steamy action along the way), third in the series,” Boris answered. He took a long draught of his drink. “When you’re as good at begging as I am, you can get just about anything from anyone.”
Someone moved closer in Penbrooke’s peripheral vision and caused the knight to turn thataway, dragging Cal away from the idle chatter outside towards the nearest table again.
The incoming figure looked to be Gillis’s companion returning with a drink in hand, dressed in gaudy, cheap clothes – Cal could have sworn he’d seen the guy somewhere before, although for the life of him he couldn’t remember where.