The walk was uneventful, the ground speckled with spots of rain, but the promised downpour never fully materialised.
After roughly five-span of walking they were in the center of the city, An-jel pointing out buildings. She had pointed out three temples so far, each dedicated to different entities that Jump-touch didn't really understand the significance of. Guardians of the past maybe, humans who had done great things but were now gone?
It made sense. You should remember your protectors, often they were the only thing between you and the wilderness.
"-and that's the Chapter House over there, that's where we're going. It's different from the Quarter House, where we're going later, or the Halfway House, otherwise known as the Adventurers Guild. Try not to get them mixed up."
"Why're they called that?"
An-jel shrugged, dodging around a tired-looking donkey pulling a two-wheeled trap, one human driving and a large pile of boxes heaped on the back.
"Tradition, mostly," she said as they reached the building together, "that's what they've always been called, so that's what we call them."
It was a somewhat unassuming construction, at least compared to the overwrought and fancier ones around it. Built of huge grey stones, there were no decorative elements on it at all, not even on the windows. It was a plain, square building with plain square windows and a plain squareish door in the center.
The only thing to note about it was how worn the stones appeared to be, pitted and marked from decades of wind and rain.
"They harvested them from the castle which was originally here," An-jel explained as they passed through the boring square doorway and into a boring stone atrium. "It's the oldest building in the city, although it's mostly the facade which is original. The rest of it was renovated only a few decades back."
Jump-touch had expected the inside to be as grey and worn as the outside, so she wasn't expecting the sight which greeted her as they stepped through the small double doors.
Ahead of her, the floor was paved with a cream stone, polished to a dazzling sheen, and as she looked up, a huge atrium stretched above her, rimmed with walkways and platforms. There were humans everywhere, dressed in blue and green and brown outfits, walking here and there, some of them with stacks of paper in their arms, others chatting in small groups.
The main floor ahead of her was completely bare of everything except a single desk in the centre, where a lone human stood in wait.
Jump-touch kept staring around as An-jel spoke with the desk-human. The room was shaped like half a cartwheel, she realised, with the desk at the centre and corridors radiating away from it, like a hub and spokes, and she wondered just how such a plain, square building had turned into this. Humans really were good at building things.
A short conversation later they were marching together down one of the spokes. There were no signs or markings to show them the way, and as they moved from corridor to corridor, away from the main thoroughfares and into narrower passages, Jump-touch hoped that Anjel knew where they were going.
"Oh come on, we've only taken three turns," Angel laughed at her when she asked, "you haven't spent much time indoors, huh?"
She glared up at the figure, "I've spent lots of time indoors, but not in your insane giant human houses. This place is mad!"
Anjel laughed again. "You should see some of the buildings in the capital. The place where the king works from has over a thousand rooms, and has been in constant construction for over two hundred years now. This place is a sleepy little village in comparison."
A thousand rooms! Jump-touch couldn't even imagine it. Building somewhere so elaborate it took two hundred years to finish? The houses the kobolds lived in could be constructed in a week, and in most cases had been. What did humans do with all the space, that they needed to keep building upwards and outwards?
It would be like if one of the Earth people appeared back in the village and said they'd spent the last decade hollowing out the Mountain into an underground city, where the Kobolds could now live without fear of weather. It would be insanity. Even the big room where they'd come in, you could have fit both her village and the Lower Village in there, with room to spare!
How many kobolds would it take to fill up a thousand human-sized rooms?
More kobolds than there could possibly be in the world, she was sure, even if you counted the Guardians. How could there be that many humans, that they needed even a single building of that size?
She was lost in thought as they drew to a stop, only coming back to herself as Anjel knocked on a boring wooden door, one which looked the same as all the other wooden doors they'd passed.
"Just as I told you on the way over," An-jel eyed the cut and pasted pages still clutched in her hand, "be polite. Sit on the chairs, not the floor, and for Humanity's Sake, don't touch or lick anything you're not-"
A bell rang as the door opened, and with a deep breath, Anjel hustled her through.
****
It looks comfy, was her first impression of the room. Warm, somehow.
It was yet another room filled with wood, but where An-jel's house had used it to make a statement, this one seemed to use it for more practical purposes. It was like being in the hollow of a great tree, she felt, as she stared around, the closed door solid against her back.
All four walls of the room were lined with shelves, although one had a space in the centre for a window, and each shelf was filled to overflowing with books and scrolls, until there was room for no more, and they spilt and slid out onto the floor, coalescing in piles.
In the center was a desk, so large that she wondered for a moment how they fit it through the door. It was also covered in stacks of papers, but these looked newer and more organised than those on the shelves or floor, almost stacked square, in piles far too high to be safe.
Greed will take you out. Something whispered in the corner of her mind, there's too much stuff!
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
She almost missed the man behind the desk, as she swept her eyes around the room, but as he gave a polite cough, the movement drew her to him.
He was almost as short as her, she realised as she approached both the desk, and what she presumed was her own seat, and he was almost as wide as he was tall. Spherical, offered her skill, and although it wasn't quite right she was willing to go with it.
She perched herself on the red velvet chair in front of his desk.
She would have thought him one of the Earth people she had just been considering, except she knew what they looked like. Not the Mud people, those were different, but The People of the Earth, as they called themselves. They were a species of people who looked almost human, except for their small size, and the fact they were always covered head to toe in hair. One of the kobolds in the village said they'd met one once who had told them that to cut their hair would kill them. They'd said they used the hairs to sense in the dark, and that their underground cities were completely without light.
The general consensus between the kobolds had also been that every single one of them was completely and utterly insane, and they were to be avoided at all costs, so she wasn't sure, the hair-thing could just be the ravings of a lunatic.
Either way, this man was completely hairless, his shiny bald head reflecting the weak sun coming in through the glass window behind him, so he couldn't be one of them.
He wrinkled his nose as he looked at her. "Where did they dig you out from?"
Maybe he was one of the Earth-People? If she'd known their language, she could ask, but she had only ever met one, a small furry woman who came to visit the Peak occasionally, the only visitor she'd ever met who would go anywhere near it.
"I, uh," she tried to be affirmative. This is like Alewharf, talking to his leader, you had to speak in short and clear sentences and show you understood the value of their time.
She straightened her back, putting her hands on her knees and looking the human across the desk in the face. He had a flat nose and small eyes, and he was so pale she could see the veins moving under his skin.
"I was told to come here to, uh," it started to break down, "report?"
She hesitated. "Uh, the woman outside the door said I should give you my papers, from the book?"
He squinted at her, before huffing out a breath.
"Okay, hand it over, let's see what mess they've dug up for me today."
She took the pages she'd been clutching in her hand this whole time and pushed them across the wide desk, putting her hands back on her knees afterwards and trying to look attentive, even as her attention started to wane.
She found herself staring over his shoulder as he read over the sheets, frowning at something he'd seen there.
She had trimmed it down as much as she could.
This book belongs to:
[Jump-touch]
[Level: 1]
[Class: Cultural Scholar] [Unique Variant]
2. Stats
Brawn: +0
Dex: +0
Wits: +0
Body: +0
Mind: +0
3. Skills
[Pocket Zone]
4. Achievements [1]
[Leave Home] [White] [Reward: 1 Token]
He pursed his lips, looking down at the sheet, up at her, and then down again.
"You haven't gained any stats since your first time registering?"
"I only registered yesterday. My village didn't… Have a Stone?"
Behind him the rain was starting to fall now, turning the world outside a dull grey.
He blinked, "really? That's highly unusual, but okay, let's pretend that's true. You also trimmed off your age, race, and skill information."
She had to be like Ale-wharf. That meant keeping her back straight and answering with clear, short, sentences. She wasn't ashamed of being a kobold, but An-jel had nattered at her so much on the way there about making sure he didn't see it that she'd given in and torn it off.
She frowned at the thought, then tried to relax her face and bring her gaze back to his face, like Ale-wharf. Humans were relaxed but attentive when talking to their squad leaders. They also made eye contact all the time.
"My age was never on there?" it was decidedly uncomfortable, "I don't know how old I am, but I think I'm fourteen? The Stone couldn't see my uh, home, so it didn't know how old I was either."
All the little red blood vessels and wrinkles around his eyes were starting to weird her out a bit.
He sighed, looking at her for a long time, and she had to resist talking to fill the space. Ale-wharf would sit and allow his leader to think, that was what the book said.
"My skill isn't giving me any warnings about you, at least." He said finally, and she felt a palpable relief as he looked down at the papers in his hands again. "Why did you wait so long to register, you know that can stunt your growth, right?"
She shrugged, looking out at the rain. It was starting to run down the window now. "It never seemed important until now, my village was… Uh, far from here. And I didn't need a job- a class, because everyone else already had one?"
He moved his unblinking gaze back to her, the paper still solid in his hand. Maybe he had a skill to stop it from turning into sparkles?
"Do you mean to harm this city in any way?" he asked finally.
"What? No!" Why would she? "I just want to do my job here for a year, and then go home. My village says I have to stay here a year to learn how hu- cities work. I was hoping you'd have work for me, as an uh, scholar?"
He tilted his head very slightly, like a bewildered dog, and some of the tension seemed to leave his shoulders.
"Your class is strange, if somewhat unremarkable for a Unique," he said the word like he was un-used to it, "I've seen Scholar classes before though, although never as a starter class, and they're always unremarkable. Your main focus should be your Skill. The class is junk, but that skill, that'll carry you forever."
He pushed her papers back towards her, and she took them with sweaty hands.
"That skill, the [Pocket Zone], will get you into any adventuring party. If you can use it to store loot then you'll be spoilt for choice." He sighed, "If you do want to try and pursue your class further, all you can do is keep talking to people, learn what they're about and maybe try writing some books, but it'll be difficult. Unique classes don't upgrade easily, and they're often simply not good. Your only reason to level it is to level your skill. You may be able to pick up a second class at level five, if you get that far."
"Uh," she didn't quite know how to respond to that, "thank you for your advice? I'll uh," she asked her boon for polite talking to a leader language, "I will take your comments into consideration and I appreciate your time."
Mountain, those were some long words.
The clerk lunged forward all of a sudden, laying his small hands on the desk, his eyes glittering in the stormy light. She jerked back at the sudden movement, the red velvet pressing into the back of her head.
"I'll be honest with you, kid," his voice was quieter, the formal tone all but gone, "you look like you just crawled out of a hole in the ground and you speak like the Stone has impressed the language onto you and you haven't quite worked it out yet. I assume that's what the achievement was all about, too. Whatever bandit village you've wriggled your way out of-"
He leant sideways and messed around under his desk for a moment, coming out with a small stack of white wooden coins. He ran his fingers over one of them before handing it to her.
"-when you go back, either tomorrow or in a year, you tell your friends that if they come to town as a group, with you, and with this coin, then they will get one free use of the stone each to pick themselves common classes. They won't be persecuted or arrested."
He rummaged around in the desk again, coming out with a piece of thin, engraved wood. "Keep this safe. If you hand this to the central desk, when you come back here with your…" There was distaste in his tone, "Village, then I'll be directly alerted, and I can walk you all through the process. Don't lose it."
She nodded and a moment later both were safely stored in her Heart. Across the desk, he watched her hands with greedy eyes.
"That's a good skill. Too good. If you decide not to go back home, or if you're running away from a bad situation, you can also use the card at the desk to speak with me at any time, and we'll sort it out."
He leant back, the wind taken out of him as suddenly as it had appeared, a winter squall blowing itself out.
He waved a dismissive hand at her, and she slipped down off the chair, trying not to step on any of the scattered paperwork.
"Did it go ok?" An-jel asked as she exited the room, "they've already taken the fee out of my account, I wish you'd warned me."
Jump-touch shrugged, suddenly as exhausted as the tiny man in the room, the muscles in her back all at once informing her that they existed.
"He was nice." She said as they exited the building, out into the pouring rain. "I think it went alright."