The day started off much like every other day so far, I woke up to the smell of Mom’s cooking, eggs with a little meat and some salt if the smell is anything to judge by. I made a noise to get my father’s attention, he got up from his chair, changed me and then brought me into the kitchen. I sat down in his lap and we waited for breakfast. I can only imagine it’s getting on toward fall at this point since I have been alive for around six months, and the days have slowly been getting cooler. I lost track of the exact number of days because frankly it doesn’t matter at this point, one day is just like the next, pretty boring.
On the bright side I got my first surprise in a long while this morning, Dad didn’t hand me over to mom this morning as breakfast was being served; instead he cut up small portions of egg and started trying to feed them to me. I eagerly took my first bite and got a taste of heaven. After a diet of milk for six months, anything is a welcome change. At one point I had even tried tasting my feet just for some variety. I ate as much as I could, which amounted to 6 whole chunks of scrambled eggs, then mom snatched me away and it was back to breast milk. Looks like today is the day they start to ween me off of my liquid diet, Hurray!! Soon enough it will be all solids for this growing boy.
That however wasn’t the only change in routine as instead of being placed on the bed like normal, Mom put me on some kind of leather contraption. I was confused until she strapped something on herself and then connected us together. Is today the day? It looks like it is since both Mom and Dad start to walk outside with me attached. My first glimpse of the outdoors beyond a couple brief glances when the door was opened and frankly I am a little underwhelmed. I mean I know I couldn’t expect much living in a little shack and all, but still I expected something more than what looks like a bunch of post-harvest fields. All I can see are chopped down wheat stalks bordering a forest, there is a small dirt road bordering the fields and the forest and a cart filled with products from our farm.
As I suspected Dad is a farmer, so it looks like I will have to get a blacksmith to make things for me instead of making them myself. Right next to the house there appeared to be a vegetable garden and what looked like a chicken coop. I tried to get a better look at this world’s version of chicken and I have to say, this world sucks.
Our chickens are half the size of my dad, three and a half foot tall vicious looking monsters. Fuck that noise, no way am I ever going to collect eggs from those things. Not only are they huge but they have talons, think Jurassic park velociraptors and you can kind of get the picture. I have a whole new sense of respect for my parents. But I’d really like to know why everything in this world look like it wants to eat me?
Mom walked us over toward a cart filled with grain. It looked a little weird though, kind of like a rickshaw. Where the heck are the horses supposed to go? No, Fuck, we are too poor to own horses which means… yup, there goes Dad grabbing the front and pushing the cart. Great I can see my future now, collecting eggs from velocichickens and then helping Dad deliver produce to the nearest village.
It looks like I need to figure out a way to earn money before Mom and Dad start teaching me the family business cause I am a city boy and farming looks like way too much work. Mom and Dad took turns pushing the cart and the miles just rolled by. I took the time to become familiar with my surroundings because frankly what else was I going to do.
The road was dirt and it had deep grooves in it that our cart was only making deeper. The forest looked old as in very little underbrush lots of big tall trees. What kind you ask? Deciduous I would assume due to the large leaves, beyond that I have no idea, after all we are not on earth and my one botany class taken 5 years ago didn’t cover alien flora. I asked my parents about them and the response I got was Araaaua, so that may mean tree, forest, or the particular type of tree. I’ll let you know when I figure it out… stupid language barrier.
After around 8 hours and a brief stop for lunch we finally arrived at a town. Bright side, at least it wasn’t some dinky little village, so when I get older I should have a decent place to make some money. As far as first impressions go, things could be worse, there was a large wooden palisade surrounding the town and two guards standing at the gate. I couldn’t see over the wall, but it stretched out quite a bit, at least half a mile. The two guards seemed to be well equipped both were wearing a set of leather armor, I’d say they were standard issue, but the body types of the two guards precluded that possibility. One of the guards was a wolf like my father. Though he didn’t have Dad’s mighty thews he was still a really big guy. Maybe half a head shorter than Dad, he wore a sword on his belt and had a round shield on his arm. His fur however was black with hints of brown and he stood at attention as soon as he saw Dad approaching.
The other guard couldn’t have been more different, he was short, like this world’s chickens short. He stood maybe 4 feet tall and he had an axe strapped to his back. While most of his armor was leather, he had on a silvery metal set of gauntlets to break up the theme. As far as his build goes, some people might describe him as thick or big boned, but that would imply that he looked somewhat athletic, to me he just looked fat. He also had a beard that covered most of his face and if I had to call him anything I would say he was a dwarf. The only thing that ruined the image of this classic fantasy character was the set of giant rams horns coming out of his forehead and the rather goatlike face he was sporting. I don’t think I can totally cross dwarfs off the possible species I will meet, but it looks like I am on some kind of beast person world.
As we got closer Dad and the wolf guard started singing a duet, or having a conversation, who can tell? Then we got waved through and I saw the first use of stone outside of Mom’s kitchen. They had cobblestone streets and some of the nicer buildings also seemed to be made of bricks. I was also pleasantly surprised by the smell of the town, it didn't reek of shit. Instead I was overwhelmed with scents, from coal to bread, it was too much for me to separate out. Having a super nose is tough, I could separate everything out, but most of my scent memory is from a human nose which is somewhat inadequate. My new sniffer could pick up so many nuances within a scent that frankly all the old scent profiles were fairly useless. Bright side though it looks like wolf people keep their towns cleaner than humans did in the dark ages.
Once I got my nose under control I started to focus on the sounds of the town and there were a lot of them. I could hear the sound of a hammer ringing off an anvil, mixed with hundreds of conversations in different languages. Apparently Wolf speech was not the dominant tongue as I was able to pick out far too few of our unique howling speech. Great, looks like I will have to learn more than one language. I wonder if they have Rosetta Stone? Probably not, computers seem to be at least a few centuries away if the architecture is anything to judge by.
While some of the buildings were made from brick, others were some kind of wattle and daub, and still others were made from sticks like my place. Apparently no one has ever made a 2 by 4, either that or logging was a dangerous occupation.
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Dad continued to push the cart along the street until we arrived at a large building. This one was made of bricks, and gave off a Babylonian sort of feeling. I think they’re mud baked bricks and not stone. Regardless, it was one of the biggest buildings I had seen in town, it looked almost like a warehouse. Dad shouted something in a language I am sure was not our standard wolf speak and one of those little goat dwarfs came out of the building.
They started conversing in a language that had a lot more consonants than I was used to. The goat dwarf was dressed in fairly rich attire, he had on a bright blue tunic made out of some soft looking fabric and pants that billowed out instead of hugging his legs. He made several expansive gestures and looked like quite the flamboyant character. Throughout the conversation, which was fairly one sided, since Dad was fairly quiet, seeming only to answer the Goat dwarf’s questions. I was once again reminded that Dad is a quiet man, not given to mincing or wasting words.
Dad went to the cart and pulled out a sample of the grain we had brought, I’d call it wheat, but frankly I’m not really sure what wheat looks like... also it was blue which I'm pretty sure is not the color of wheat. The fancy little man examined our product and then produced 2 pieces of silver from a pouch on his belt. Dad frowned and began walking back to the cart, he grabbed the pull bar and started pushing the cart away.
The little man let dad get about five feet away before he yelled something. Dad stopped the cart said something and the little guy gave him 4 silver looking coins. Dad frowned and after a couple of seconds the Goat Dwarf added around 20 copper pieces to the bunch. Dad nodded, and gave the money to Mom, he shook hands with the Goat dwarf who then yelled something into the building. A couple of burly looking Goat dwarfs came out with sacks and started unloading our cart.
We left the workers to their task and headed back out into the town. After a bit of wandering we arrived at what looked like a market square. Along the way I saw way too many types of people, there was a Pantherman almost as big as dad with semi human facial features. He smelled musky with a hint of spiciness that I couldn’t really place and he wore pants and a vest with a sword belted to his waist. He had a few scars on his body that told me he had used that sword for more than just intimidation and he made me want to hide. Of course it is pretty hard to hide when you are strapped to your mom’s chest so I dealt with my anxiety by focusing elsewhere.
There were a lot of Goat dwarfs, they outnumbered every other race by at least 5 to 1, so I think you could safely say this was their city. They were all fairly uniform in height, I saw maybe 4 inches of difference between the tallest of their species and the shortest. But what they lacked in height difference they more than made up for in the variety of colors they displayed. One was completely black, yet he walked hand in hand with a female? Who had red fur. Looks like color doesn’t really matter to these people, so that was a positive.
There was also a pack of wolfmen that walked by. They all wore leather armor like the guards at the front gate, so I imagine this was a patrol of guards insuring the safety of the town. Leading the patrol was a Goat dwarf who was also wearing leather armor, though he had a metal helmet which made him stand out. They passed us by without acknowledging our presence which seemed to bother my father a little bit as I saw the hackles of his neck rise up a bit as they passed us by.
As we continued on our way we saw this big breasted cow lady? Not sure, I think I saw horns on the top of her head, but honestly I was kind of entranced by her most prominent features. Her twin peaks were difficult to ignore as they were not made to human proportions. There was also some kind of rat man. He was taller than the goat dwarfs, but still shorter than your average human male. Maybe 5 feet tall, with a thick hairless tail and prominent rat like features in his face. He had a somewhat feral look to him, and wore only a simple loincloth, belt and spear. I think he might be a barbarian, but it is kind of hard to tell, there doesn’t seem to be very much of a taboo about nudity.
Most people seemed to be wearing some kind of leather pants, with a vest, that was also made of leather. I didn’t really see anyone wearing any cloth, so I am guessing there are not a lot of cotton or hemp farms around. I’d have to remember that for when I get older since there could be some money to be made with cotton or whatever the equivalent was here.
When we arrived at the market square there were a lot of vendors hawking their wares in what sounded like the second language my father had been using with the goat dwarf that bought our grain. Mom and Dad browsed the stalls, which allowed me to check out the produce.
The vegetables look fairly normal, I mean sure the carrot looking thing is blue, and the fruit shaped like an orange? Is actually violet, but hey the shapes all seem normal. There was a red lettuce and some kind of purple star shaped fruit. I did my best to remember what everything looked like in case I ever found it growing in the wild.
As we browsed the stalls my parents seemed to get really excited when they ran into a spice merchant. They talked in what I am assuming is the common language I’d been hearing my Dad speak. I don’t think it was the Goat dwarfs racial tongue since the merchant was some kind of lizard man and I kept hearing all of the consonants I had begun to associate with that language. At the conclusion of their conversation my mom handed the merchant fifteen pieces of copper and in return they received a giant bag of salt. To give you an idea of how big, I am a six month old baby and the bag had to be at least 3 times my size. Who needs that much salt?
After getting the salt Mom and Dad browsed through a couple more stalls, they bought some fruits from a couple of vendors before finally deciding to leave. We made our way back toward the merchant that bought our grain and upon arriving found our cart waiting for us completely empty. Dad threw the salt and fruit in the cart and we made our way out of the city.
Upon exiting the town’s gate Dad seemed to wish the black wolf farewell and the wolf seemed to either salute Dad, or praise god, not really sure which. He lifted his chin in the air, exposing his throat and spread both hands to the side. Dad just nodded at him and we left the town without any fuss.
I was kind of disappointed, my first outing into civilization and nothing exciting happened, we sold some grain, bought some salt and then left. No magic, no excitement just a boring day doing some grocery shopping.
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AN: Next chapter will be out tomorrow and our mini hero will get his first glimpse of magic. Barring writer's block I should be able to keep releasing a chapter a day. I have been working on two versions of the next chapter, so let me know in the comments if you guys would rather have a lot of description for a fight scene with some gore or less description that simply captures the essence of the brutality without going in to great detail.