In some ways, it conformed exactly to my expectations. In others I was left astonished.

The buildings were all one story wooden domes, smooth and well made, but with lines suggesting faintly the image of an upturned bird nest. Windows were circular, and opened to let the fresh air in. Despite the falling leaves, it wasn’t cold.

The town was bustling to get chores done before supper. No cattle, but plenty of goats and well… the main source of transportation seemed to be fluffy brown birds the size of a horse. A familiar fantasy creature came to mind, but I didn’t want to assume anything.

Most townsfolk were elven. But I also caught sight of what had to be gnomes, with pleasant, pointed features and white hair. Most of the gnomes wore a shawl or head wrap of some kind. The elves had cloth caps with cutouts for their ears. The couple humans I saw must have missed the headwear memo.

“You’re staring,” Bernie said.

“Yeah, I’ve never seen an elf before!”

“Try not to stare. It makes you look like you’re new.”

“Right.”

Bernie led us to a building with a wooden sign of a brown squirrel with a sword twice the size of his body.

“The Sword-bearing Squirrel,” she said.

“It’s a—”

“A dick joke,” she finished for me.

I nodded. The building was more oblong than the others, and maybe twice as large.

We got to the tavern, and checked our weapons and packs at the door. The man behind the counter gave us a ticket. He was green. And he had tusks protruding from his bottom lip. Was he a troll? An orc?

I made a mental note to ask about it later, and we strode further into the tavern. Dozens of people laughed and joked and threw darts. Drinks overflowed. At first blush, it seemed every bit the fantasy tavern I expected it to be.

The hearth had a strange shape. A second glance revealed it to be a repurposed forge with bellows. Above the forge was a sword that gleamed blue in the firelight.

Elves were everywhere.

“There’s a lot of elves here,” I said, stating the obvious.

Bernadette grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me off to the side.

“Look, you’re a boy,” she accused.

“I mean, I’m 24.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“I’m meeting a contact here who is gonna help us identify our new magic items.”

I tried not to remember where we had got them, and nodded.

“We're gonna get close while we’re here,” she continued, “and if I talk about sex, I don’t want you to get weird about it. I got a good vibe from you at the table, but if you start getting weird, this isn’t going to work. I need you not to be a problem.”

There was silence as she turned away from me, and sighed.

“You hooked up with an elf?” I asked, because that’s the first thing I got from the conversation.

“Literally the second day I was here.”

I skipped over visualizing what that looked like, and barreled ahead with the first question I had.

“Was it nice?”

Curiosity at this world overpowered anything else.

“I mean, look at them. If you were that pretty, would you put in a lot of effort?”

“I’d hope so.”

“That’s nice. It was fine. I would keep my expectations low, if that happens for you.”

A run of thoughts went through my head. First was that the elf woman behind the bar was the most beautiful person I had ever laid eyes on. All elves were pretty. Some were gorgeous. Second, was the unfinished business I had with Sofia. Would she appreciate that I had saved myself for her? She absolutely would not. How long had it taken for Caleb to move on?

Lastly, I thought about what it would look like for Bernadette to pull her shift over her head. I cut that thought right out, as soon as I thought it.

“Caleb’s wife—” I began to ask.

“Is an elf.”

“That tracks.”

“Uhuh. I’m gonna grab my elven contact, and we’ll be back in under an hour.”

A look crossed my face.

“Oh my god, not everything is about sex.”

“But you said—”

She punched me in the arm. I could feel real intention behind it, but she also only had 7 strength.

“I won’t be weird!” I pleaded. “I promise.”

She rolled her eyes, and walked off.

It was just me, surrounded by a dozen of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I was also bone tired.

I could count on one hand how many times I had ever been this tired. Building a stone walkway for my dad in the Texas summer heat was one. This is definitely the other.

Look: you’re gonna have to cut me a little slack if I wax poetic about the beauty of the women around me from time to time. All young single men in their twenties are lovesick fools.

We’d all been through our first breakup. We’ve left home, and our friends have gone off to new opportunities. We’re all horrendously lonely, and we all are prone to seeing any beautiful woman as if they were the last we’d ever meet.

We’re all needy, lonely fools.

Then again, Bernedette wasn’t a boy in his twenties, and she’d shacked up with somebody here on the second day.

Maybe boys weren’t lonely. Maybe we all were.

I sat at the bar. It was shiny and clean. No glass behind it, but rows of bottles and several wooden kegs. The barmaid introduced herself as Darlara. Her hair was a soft pink bun pulled tight, and her eyes sparkled green and gold. A spray of freckles splashed across the skin of her nose.

And I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but her simple clothing was also very well tailored in such a way that I couldn’t help but notice that she was stacked.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“Nice to meet you Darlara,” I said with my most pleasant smile.

She laughed nervously.

“Have not met many elves, have you?” Her voice was accented, kinda husky, and she pronounced every vowel like I’d expect an Italian to.

“How can you guess?” I responded.

“Because you look like your eyes may roll right out of your head.”

I laughed.

“Sorry!”

“It is no problem. Just treat us like any other folk, and you’ll be fine.”

It didn’t occur to me until just then that we were all speaking English. How had English spread to this world? Had it? Or was there some kind of magical translation happening?

I realized that she was expecting me to respond so I said, “I’ll do my best.”

She laughed politely.

“What can I do for you, love?” she asked. “You have coin, I hope?”

I fished for the coins in the pouch, not really a pocket really, that was sown into my pants. I pulled out a couple coppers and a silver.

“What does a silver get me?”

“You are fresh, aren’t you?”

I held a finger in front of my face and said, “Shh, lets not let it get around yeah?”

She gave me a wink and took the coin as I slid it over.

“A silver gets you stew and bread, with whatever you want to drink, and a use of the baths.”

“I think if I don’t get some stew right now, I’ll die.”

“That’s true for all of us, dear.”

In moments I had stew, mostly goat, with onions and mushrooms, plus some kind of muffin thing. The muffin was savory, with goat cheese. The ‘best she had’ to drink she called wine, and it came in a wooden bowl, but after one sip it was probably closer to some kind of brandy from the burn.

Without much thought, I brought out my slate.

I clicked on the group chat ‘Saviors of the World I Guess’ and clicked on the list of people in the group. Each one had a strange 18 digit number next to their character name.

I typed the one I needed into a new text, and sent a quick ‘hey.’

Beznik: hey

6:23pm

I got a message back immediately.

Ailmer: what's up Zach. I’m a little busy

God, he was so rude. I tried to go slow on the wine, but in moments I found myself with an empty cup. I ordered another one.

Beznik: where do you think Sofia is?

Ailmer: text. Caleb.

Ailmer: I got a lot going on here. He would be the only one that knows.

6:29pm

This is why I wasn’t close friends with Mark.

I had three more cups of wine before I thought to stop.

Jumped in the bath next. It was a communal thing, separated by gender, five or six large buckets full of soapy water. The soap had a floral scent. I scrubbed hard to get the dirt off and came out a little red, but happy to feel clean. Getting the chainmail back on was hard at first, but an older elven man got me fixed up quick.

Entering the tavern again, Bernadette greeted me. She’d also bathed, I gathered from the wet hair, and clean fingernails.

“You’ve had the wine,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“You got a dopey smile when you’re drunk.”

I punched her playfully in the arm, and she smiled wide.

“I got our stuff in our room,” she said.

I followed her up the steps into the room. It seemed small, cozy. A large bed, maybe queen sized by our standards, and an end table took up most of it. The quilt on the bed was plush, and made up of squares fitted in the shape of the sign out front. A large chest with some pillows was set under the circular window.

And that was it. Didn’t need much else. And it’s not like they had a TV.

I was surprised to see that when she said ‘our stuff’ she meant all of our stuff. How had she gotten it back?

“I’m a rogue,” she said. “I lifted our stuff when the orc went to take a leak.”

“Alright.”

“Man, your pack was heavy. Here, hold this,” she said, pressing the crossbow to my hands, “then open your character sheet on your slate.”

I took the crossbow, swiped open my slate, and tapped my character sheet.

Everything looked the same but for my inventory. Added, was a +1 light crossbow of piercing. Looked like I could tap it too, so I did.

Its lists of traits all seemed to line up with the standard features of a light crossbow except for something called ‘dishonorable shot’ which did 150% extra damage to armored opponents. Nice.

I handed it back and it disappeared from my inventory.

“The wand and spellbook I sold,” she said. “We aren’t magic types. Also, we’re rich now!”

She tossed a bag of coins to me. It was nearly full. Opening the strings revealed more gold than I had even seen before. It was like, real gold, which I actually wasn’t sure I’d ever seen. Not in purities like this.

“Shit. That’s a lot of gold.”

“Ain’t it,” she said with a twinkle in her eye, and rolling a gold coin across her knuckles.

“How are you—” I started to ask.

“My dad was a—”

“Circus performer, right,” I answered for her.

She gave me a wink. Then handed me a monocle.

“Try this thing on,” she said.

As I worked to figure out how to get the monocle to stay in my eye, she leaned out the window and looked around outside. As soon as I got it settled, I swept my vision across the room. A little pop up of text appeared in my vision over the crossbow notating it as ‘magic crossbow’ but not more. I trained it on Bernadette and it gave a very truncated version of her stats.

‘Shade — lvl 4 Rogue; HP 21’

So, it gave me a name, level, and hit points. The longer I focused on her the more information appeared. It wasn’t her whole statsheet but it also gave me her subclass, her best and worst stat, and the name of one of her abilities.

She turned back to me and smiled.

“Like what you see?”

“It’s useful.”

“Yeah it is,” she said, holding her hand out for the monocle. I returned it, and she slipped it into a pouch on her belt. “It doesn’t give the extra stats for people that aren’t in your party though. That first line of information is all you’ll get for most people. Interestingly, really special folk won’t give you anything but a name, and a number of skull-and-crossbones.”

“Is that a level thing?” I asked. Music from the floor below started wafting up. It was lively.

“I think so,” she shrugged. Then without much warning she grabbed my hand. “Hey! Let’s go dance.”

“I’m not really a—”

“Oh don’t get your panties in a wad, we deserve it.”

Again, like the last time she grabbed my hand, I didn’t fight back. I tottered down the stairs behind her, then she led me to the space they had cleared for dancing.

The band was just a fiddle, an overturned barrel, and a tambourine, but that was enough to fill the room. Those that didn’t dance sang along. It reminded me of celtic folk music, not just from the fiddle, but from the beat too.

Lyrics were pretty, but in a language I didn’t recognize. I could probably sing this pretty easy though, and that was likely the point.

The last time I danced with a girl was at a college party. She was trying to teach me to dance with her. Apparently it was ‘all about the hips.’ Eventually she got frustrated and moved on.

The memory came unbidden. But I didn’t have time to think about it because soon we were on the floor and spinning. I’d watched a handful of YouTube videos about it since then, but I think my partner was just a better teacher this time.

We only danced for a single song, but after I was flush with good feeling. and grinning from ear to ear. She wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me down to whisper in my ear.

“You think you can take it from here?”

I glanced around at the others who weren’t dancing. I put my hands on her sides and moved her away from me.

“Maybe?”

“Good!” she said over the music that started up again. She kissed me on the cheek, reminded me not to be weird, and ran off

She walked right up to a young woman talking with her friends. Bernadette grabbed the girl’s drink and quaffed some. The woman stood, the first blush of anger on her cheeks, but before anything else could happen, Bernie grabbed her hand and led her to the dance floor.

Soon they were dancing.

I spied Dalara resting her hip on the bar, and tapping her foot to the song. With no convincing at all, we danced too. Later, I sang with the band once I picked up the words, and Bernie and I played darts with a couple farm hands.

She destroyed us. That 18 dexterity was no joke.

The night ended with both of us well buzzed, and absolutely wiped.

I would love to tell you there was some drama between Bernie and me over there only being one bed. It's a classic storytelling trope for a reason. But it simply wasn’t an issue. Both of us were exhausted. We slept back to back. She was small. We didn’t touch each other.

I don’t remember waking up before the sun and birdsong.

Dragging myself into wakefulness, I spied that Bernadette was awake already, and fully kitted for travel. She beamed with horrible, morning person energy.

“Alright,” she said, “today we get you to level three!”