Jyn sighed before jogging over to Page. Kalender followed suit, but compared to the drilled and trained Knight, he’d been left panting by the time he’d caught up.

“Idiot, what are you doing?” Jyn said.

The slime was faster than expected. It was this basketball-sized thing that set upon pouncing on Page whenever she missed, and she was missing all the time. Where she slammed her quarterstaff down, the slime hopped out of the way, and then did an inhuman L-break, shooting up to punt Page in the tummy.

She stumbled back, skin tingling from the weak neurotoxins secreted by the slime’s outer membrane.

“Ahm all goof!” she said.

Jyn sighed. The neurotoxins already built up this much.

Kalender dispatched the slime with his finger guns, and Jyn set about telling Page off about straying too far from the group, with a “Why can’t you be like Kalender?” Her ‘elder sister unwillingly pushed into a breadwinner role’-ness was leaking through.

Midway through Jyn’s sermon, Page’s attention span fizzled out, and her eyes fell upon Lilia.

“Hey! Awen’t you thath Hero flom a while—”

Jyn put her into a choke hold from behind, covering her mouth. “Her name is Lilia,” Jyn said.

Page met eyes with Kalender. He showed her a knowing look. “It’s 100% Lilia.”

A thunderbolt of understanding sparked between them. Good thing Page could be privy to secrets. [+1 Excitement]

Once Jyn let go of her, to no one’s surprise, she zoomed right into Lilia’s face. “Herro! My name’s Page! Let’s bee phrends!”

Lilia looked around, looking for the answer to a question she couldn’t quite phrase. Everyone’s eyes said “We don’t want to deal with it,” however, leaving her to her fate. She gulped.

“I-I’m Lilia.” Why is this girl so upbeat? “Nice to meet y—”

“Wiwia! Wet’s get inside town! I’ww shwow ya around—”

Two hands landed on Page’s shoulders, one of Kalender’s, and the other of Jyn’s.

“You don’t even know this place.” “This is our first day here.” “We can’t find you if you get lost, you know?” “See how Kalender understands? Be like that.” “J-Jyn, it’s not good to compare…”

Before the two could get into an argument about effective parenting strategies, Minimine tugged on Kalender’s hem. He looked down.

“Hm?”

“Meet with Priest first.”

“Oh, right. Do you know where he is?”

Minimine pointed towards Harmony. Kalender followed her finger, completely failing to recognize that her aim was within half a spherical degree of tolerance. Given a sniper rifle, she would have hit her mark.

“I-I’ll just trust you,” he said. Minimine smirked. Gets ’em every time.

Kalender turned to the others. “So it looks like me and … Mimi—” Lilia caught his eye. The girl was, somehow, both listless and confused. It might weird her out to be in the company of a man that she couldn’t trust, so maybe … “Mimi and I are gonna talk to this Priest person first. The rest of you should go around, find a place for us all to stay.”

“Yessh, expworation—” [+1 Excitement]

“Will you be okay, Kalender?” Jyn asked.

“You do realize that there’s someone here who literally won’t let me die, right?”

Jyn snorted. “No offense meant, god—”

“Mimi.”

“M-Mimi.”

They started off towards town, split into two groups as Kalender held Mimi’s fragile hand. It would have been strange for a caretaker—his cover story—not to hold a child’s hand.

Predictably, Page had gone about examining even the caterpillars on the side of the path. Once there was a good amount of distance between the two groups, Kalender asked, “So, why are you keeping your identity secret from Lilia?”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“I want to see.”

“Wanna see?”

“How long before she notices.”

Kalender snorted. It’s a little bit mean towards Lilia, but ultimately, it wouldn’t really change much whether she found out or not … okay, he started to feel bad. It’s probably a good idea to get her up to speed on things, soon.

***

Harmony’s walls were red bricks, but as they got closer, the bricks started to look more and more like blocks, and closer still, one would have to wonder how on Gaia they’d stacked up that kind of tonnage to reach up to six stories high. Slave labor? Aliens? That wasn’t even to mention how the gatehouse they walked up to loomed over them, murder holes looking down at them like an incomprehensible creature’s eyes.

“Purpose?” the guard asked. Instead of wicker and wood, she wore a brigandine and a proper steel helmet. It wasn’t anything knightly, but your typical back alley bandit wouldn’t be able to injure her easily.

She Appraised each of the members, her eyes finally landing on Minimine. Her eyes went wide.

Kalender used his Inquisition card. “Keep quiet about it, okay?”

She stiffly nodded and gave the deepest bow she’d ever done in her life, welcoming them to Harmony.

The first place past the gate was a marketplace, teeming with life. Unlike Clarinets, where peddlers and farmers set themselves up in random streets, this place had an actual method to the madness. A pair of guards could be seen doing the rounds. Not just produce, but various wares like cutlery and pots were on display.

The first thing that anyone but Minimine noticed, however, were the pointy ears.

Maybe one out of ten or twenty—it was hard to do statistics on moving targets—had dagger-pointed ears. They were the vendors and the customers, haggling with each other and the non-elves, too. Really, none of the locals seemed to even care about the other’s ear length.

Minimine tugged at Kalender’s hem and pointed straight ahead. Kalender turned to the other three. “Looks like we’ll be splitting up here. Let’s just meet up here again?”

Everyone agreed, and they went their ways.

Kalender and Minimine left the marketplace, hands still connected. They followed the main road, and past the marketplace were residential low-rises intermingled with crafts and artisan shops. Several chimneys of piercingly-black smoke rose from somewhere off a ways from the main road.

“There,” Minimine pointed. It looked like the town’s plaza. There was a crowd. Kalender sighed. That ain’t good.

The main road formed one edge of the plaza, which was big enough that even with the hundreds of people crowding up whatever big event was happening, they, thankfully, didn’t block the main road. Whatever event it was, the castle in the background, opposite the side of the main road, was watching it. Bored guards made bets on its ramparts.

Swords clashed. Things exploded. What the heck’s going on? The crowd was admiring whatever it was, with ‘Ooh’-s and ‘Ahh’-s every couple of seconds.

Kalender approached an enterprising peddler who had set up shop in the plaza with his trusty cart.

“Hey there, what’s going on here?” he asked.

“Eh? Some Priest fightin’ with some Priestess.” The peddler familiarly tapped one of his customer’s arms. “Heyzat’s Priest n’ Priestess to wut, again?”

“Hah? Harem n’ Love, I think. Money’s on Love. You bettin’?”

Kalender pulled Minimine away before she could be infected by such terrible influences.

Try as they might, they couldn’t find a good vantage point. Minimine pulled at his hem again and raised her arms. Ah, right, she could totally just piggyback on me and see what’s going on.

He picked her up—and what he didn’t expect was whatever magic Minimine used to transmit what she was seeing straight into his brain. He didn’t have the leeway, however, to be surprised by that, at least not as much as he did to be surprised by this.

“That’s him,” Minimine telepathically told him. If you took an incredibly handsome harem protagonist and shaved his head, that’s who this was. He was fighting in a nondescript brown shirt and trousers, but his blue cape shimmered with gold trimmings, as he spun and slashed with two arming swords. He received a blow against one sword, but instead of his body bending and tumbling off to eternity, he remained firm and unfazed, legs never having forgotten the direction of the ground. His feet skidded along the dirt for a dozen meters before he stopped at a low stance, kicking off again, right back into the fray.

The Priestess of Love, meanwhile, was in a “priestess, but make it skimpy” outfit. It was the type that seemed like there were only sashes that crossed her chest, and the sides of her legs were exposed on either side of a curtain to the front and back that stubbornly refused to flutter too far—a perk of magic, no doubt. Most prominent, to Kalender, were her dagger ears.

She attacked the Last Priest of the Harem God with a spear aimed at his neck—a killing blow that he swatted aside with one sword, before following up with the other. She remained too far for him to reach, however, and she only had to hop back a step to evade. She pulled her spear back in, and she stabbed, stabbed, stabbed at the air, making shockwaves that cracked the very wind that the Priest needed to breathe.

They parted for a moment, reassessing their opponent.

***

“W-what the heck is this!” Page marveled at the curvaceous yellow thing, her voice now freed from the funny neurotoxins. The shopkeeper laughed and peeled it for her.

“Have you never seen a banana?” Jyn asked. “I know we are far from banana producers, but it shouldn’t be so expensive that you have never seen them.”

“I’ve always thought they were weird, okay?!”

Lilia chuckled—she couldn’t make heads and tails of her situation. She was in Harmony, now, having been drawn in by how mystical it looked from afar. Now that she was actually in Harmony, it was just … normal. Things looked a lot different from afar and up close.

Jyn had bought her a banana to try out, as well. The Knight was being kind to her, at least. She’d wanted to ask why, but … what, then?

She was different from the others. She’d woken up on a hard, stone table, in the middle of a temple, in the middle of nowhere. She knew only her name, and her Occupation, Tourist. Nothing of her memories suggested how she had grown up, who her parents were, or if she had any kind of family.

She bit into the banana. She spat out the peel. She’d forgotten to peel it. Damn it. She did it properly, this time. It was sweet.

She couldn’t trust these people too fast … then wasn’t it okay to feel a little bit scared for now?

She watched Page start peeling the banana from the middle.

She felt fear.