As Ryuji walked along the cross street that would take him to the inn of his destination, he began to notice that there were a lot of the smaller buildings with wooden rooves. There were a lot of different colors of dyed and painted wood being used in a variety of different ways also. Some were signs and some were columns, others were purely ornamental but the largest supply of these colorful decorations was in the form of window shutters. All the different buildings had different styles and colors of shutters. It seemed that aside from signage this was the way to differentiate one building from the next.
After turning onto the third street off of the cross-street Ryuji looked up and down the street and sure enough, he spotted it immediately. The sign was fairly large and was the depiction of a tree with hands and legs laying on its side with a pillow under its bushy head. True to the old woman’s word the sign was a vivid bright green that combined with its size made it stand out.
Ryuji walked over to it and up the two steps to enter the front doors directly under the sign. The two slope-topped doors were the same vibrant green as the sign but looked as if they hadn’t been painted as recently. The doors were set on simple lift-off hinges made of what looked to be well-oiled iron. There were several sets of equally faded but still vibrant, green shutters on the front of the building, mostly on the second story. The walls of the establishment were the ever-present fused grey stone, as were the steps. The steps looked as though they had been laid with a flat side up before being somehow melted together.
Ryuji pulled on the door handle and noted that the hinges were made with a slope to bring the door back to a closed position on its own. He stepped through the door into a fairly well-lit dining hall. As he looked around, he saw that the place had eight rough but sturdy wooden tables with six chairs each and what looked like a simple oil-burning lamp in the center of each. Right now there was enough light streaming in through the three open slope-topped windows to keep the place bright but he figured that they would need to light the lamps in an hour or two.
As he was looking about the fairly tidy dining hall, a medium-height slightly-thick woman came over to a nearby table where a group of five people was eating and drinking. She had a tray laden with simple wooden tankards of some foamy liquid that Ryuji could only assume was a type of beer. As she passed him, she looked at him with a smile and spoke to him. “Be with you in just a moment sir.”
After unloading the tray onto the table she bent forward to collect the small pile of copper and one silver coin near the center of the table. The man sitting to the left of her reached his hand up and grabbed a handful of her skirted rump to a general chorus of sighs and groans from the men and one woman around the rest of the table. The accosted woman didn’t miss a beat and slammed the tray down on the top of the man’s balding head before admonishing him. “None of that you old lech, and if I catch you doing that to my serving girls, you’ll get worse!” as the man rubbed the swelling spot on his scalp, she calmly collected the empty eatery from the table before turning back to Ryuji and he couldn’t be sure but he didn’t think the smile had ever faltered on her slightly plump face.
The woman whom he now figured could only be Teresa, the proprietor, walked over carrying the tray and smiled at him. “So, what can I do for you lad? A room, a meal, both? Well come on, follow me over there out of the doorway.”
After saying that she walked over to a bar counter with a keg sitting on top of one end. As she rounded the counter, she stepped through the archway into the adjoining room that smelled of food being prepared and set the tray down on something out of sight before turning back to face Ryuji. “So, what will it be?”
Ryuji smiled at her in return. “I would like to know the price of a night’s stay and a meal. The old woman *he coughed into his balled fist* ahem, young maiden selling bread in the plaza told me that I should come here and speak to Teresa. Would that be you then?” He smiled his best impish smile.
Her mood brightened just slightly as she replied. “Ah, so old Lizbet sent you! Well then, I guess I’ll give ye a little bit of a discount. Room’s six small copper a night and I can’t go no cheaper on that but I’ll take a copper off the meal and that’ll bring it to an even large copper or eight small copper if you prefer.”
She went on in a chipper mood perhaps imagining what silly description this ridiculous elf might give other people about her. “Be sure that you get your room early on before the stragglers in the evening cause it’ll fill up fast in about a candle-span or so. This is the cheapest place in town to stay for the night but that don’t mean I skimp on my service so don’t you be thinking that! If you pay for the room by the eightday I can knock a few coppers off. Maybe I’ll only charge seven full copper for the eightday. Oh, and tell Lizbet thanks when you see her! And come to think of it we need to order more bread too.” The last she said in a quiet voice as if she were talking to herself.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Ryuji then reached into his coin pouch and fished for the three coins that were in there, the ones left over after he got his bread and the one that was in there when he put them in it. Then he fished out the other five copper pieces one at a time. When he had the whole stack, he presented them to the innkeeper. “I’ll happily take you up on that deal. I’d like to be shown to my room but I plan on going back out for a bit. What time is the evening meal served?”
She took his coins and stuck them in an open pocket of her apron before looking back at him. “The evening meal is already being served but I’ll probably run out of the prepared soup in about half a candle-span so be sure you get back before then. If you miss out on the prepared meal or if you want something that isn’t part of that meal it’ll cost ya extra.”
With her warning out of the way she turned and yelled into the back of the dining hall where a set of stairs ran up to the second floor. “Karen, Come down here for a minute, would you? I need you to do something.”
A moment later a really cute girl poked her head around the corner at the top of the stairs. She had shoulder-length shaggy blonde hair and as she bounced down the stairs something else was bouncing too. She responded as she ran down the stairs. “Coming, I’ll be right down. Yes Ma’am, what can I do for you?”
As she came to a stop only a couple meters from Ryuji, he got his first good look at her and was able to confirm that she was human, or that she at least looked to be. Her face was slim and oval-shaped with Pure Black eyes that contrasted vividly with her pale skin and golden-blonde hair. When he looked at her eyes, he noticed that she was looking him up and down at the same time. When she noticed his gaze, she blushed lightly and averted her gaze back to the innkeeper.
Not that Ryuji could tell but the innkeeper had noticed the looks that each was giving the other and grinning slightly she spoke to the girl. “I need you to take this gentleman up to room six if it’s ready yet and get him his key on the way. Don’t be too long, I still need you down here for the evening rush but help him first if he needs it.”
The young girl, Karen, nodded and walked briskly behind the far end of the counter and then walked back around to where Ryuji was waiting and handed him an old-style iron key. The owner walked off chuckling to herself while they were headed upstairs. The staircase on the inside, as well as all of the inner walls, were all made of wood. Even though it was all very worn the entire place seemed fairly clean.
At the top of the stairs, there was a hallway leading off to the right with two branching hallways on its right. Karen took the first of the two hallways and stopped in front of the third door on the left. The doors had symbols painted on them but Ryuji wasn’t sure what they meant. Judging from the context he guessed that this symbol should mean six.
Karen looked at him with her bold dark eyes set in her pretty face and opened the door for him with a smile. “This will be your room, sir. The privy is at the end of the hall and there will be a bucket of boiled water, pails, and towels sat there in the morning to freshen up with. I’ll wait here for a moment in case you need anything. The evening meal is usually a stew or soup with bread and is being served already and the morning meal is usually bread, cheese, fruit if we have it, and some kind of eggs. We start serving that as soon as it gets light out.”
Ryuji smiled and bowed slightly, which seemed to surprise the girl, before turning and walking into the room. It wasn’t a big room, certainly not as big as his room in japan had been but that was comparing modern sensibilities to olden ones. This room was big enough for him to reside in and it had everything he really needed in a room. It had a small dresser with two drawers, a small table with an oil lamp, and a wood-framed bed. The mention of a privy worried him far more but he supposed that there wouldn’t be running water and flushing toilets in a historic setting like this.
He sat on the bed and noticed that it wasn’t packed with hay like he was expecting from this setting. It was fairly comfortable just a bit more firm than he was used to. A lot of people in Japan preferred to sleep on futons on the floor but his room had a dedicated bed with a semi-soft mattress. Everything in his home in Japan had been old and passed down but it wasn’t in bad shape or anything.
Ryuji stood up and fished a coin out of his pouch before exiting his room. “Thank you, the room is just fine. I appreciate you taking the time to show it to me and waiting on me like this.”
As he said that he held out the copper coin to her. She shook her head and seemed in disbelief for a second. “That’s quite alright, you don’t have to give me anything, it’s my job. I get paid by the owner to help the guests so you really don’t have to pay me anything.”
Ryuji flipped the coin into the air and turned around while it was still in the air to lock his door. Since he didn’t hear the coin hit the floor, he knew that she had caught it and continued. “I didn’t figure that I had to but I’m giving it to you anyway.” With his room locked he turned and walked out. When he thought about it on his way down the stairs, he realized that he probably wouldn’t have done anything like that back in his own country for several reasons, not the least of which being because it was kind of rude to tip service persons in Japan but also because he had never had extra money that he could just throw around. Since it seemed to happen more out of habit than actual intent, he chalked it up to his charisma bonus hard at work.