The next morning Ryuji woke with a start and almost fell out of bed. There were the remnants of some kind of dream but he couldn’t remember or be bothered to care. As he looked around himself, he was totally at a loss as to where his current location was. With a sudden jolt of realization it all came flooding back to him, he was no longer in Japan but in some foreign world where he was an elf and had been attacked by a werewolf on his first day here and this was the inn he was renting.
As he laid back down in the somewhat comfortable bed he began remembering all of the events of the previous day and the event that started it all. He was hit by a car and died, so this really was his reality now! How strange to find that it’s all real and it’s not like it could be some trauma-induced coma because he could remember traces of a dream. If he could dream that meant he was unconscious and now he was awake so this had to be real unless it was one of those dreams you only think you woke up from, but that seemed less than likely.
After coming to terms with his situation he began thinking about the girl he met the day before and how cute she was. After a couple seconds, he realized that his pants were feeling tight and looked down at the bulge under the sheet. He spent the next couple of minutes making it go down.
After he finished, he put his leather belt and his plain if nice cotton shirt back on but he realized that there was a big bloodstain near the bottom. He then looked at his arm and was astounded to find no trace of the scratches from yesterday. With that done he took himself to the privy at the end of the hall and got himself a little more presentable. The stain wouldn’t come completely out but that was fine since it would be tucked into his pants anyway. Before leaving the room, he secured his three coin pouches to his belt and filled the nonmagical ones with copper from the dresser drawer. He did the calculation and he figured it up quickly, eight days times nine small copper per day of regular-priced stay brought it to seventy-two small copper coins. So he put that in one of the pouches and the other he just filled up about halfway.
On his way out the door, he locked it behind himself and secured the key to his belt with the leather thong on it. He made his way down the stairs thinking how odd it was that the people here seemed to use a base eight counting system. He decided he would ask about that at some point but he had other things to take care of first.
As he got to the bottom of the stairs, he saw that the dining area wasn’t nearly as crowded as the night before and there were a few tables completely empty. He quickly took a seat at a nearby table and began looking for either the owner, Teresa, or Karen the serving girl.
After a few seconds, the older Teresa came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with some bowls on it and stopped in front of the table just down from him. As she was unloading the bowls onto the table in front of her other guests she looked over and acknowledged him. “I see ya, dearie, I’ll be over there in a blink.”
True to her word it didn’t take her long at all to arrive in front of him. “Alright then, this morning we have a choice of foods for breakfast thanks to you! Normally we don’t have fresh bread left for breakfast but since you went and bought so much, I made up a batch of butter and a batch of yogurt. I even managed to get some fresh berries to go in it. So what’ll it be? Or I can just bring ya some of each! Ya know, you didn’t have’ta spend any money outside the inn, that’s not what I meant for ya to do. If you’d just told ‘er we needed more bread she woulda brought the bread and I would’ve paid for it.”
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Ryuji just smiled at her. “I’ll have the buttered bread and berry yogurt then but not too much. I will probably be moving around a lot and I don’t want to lose my breakfast. Also, I want to pay for my room in advance for the next eightday as we discussed.”
As he said that he untied the plain coin pouch from his belt and opened it, upending the contents onto the middle of the table. The sight of someone doing this made Teresa’s eyes go wide for a moment but she regained her composure quickly.
As she began gathering up the coins that had spilled to the edges of the table, she chuckled out a reply. “A bit showy I see. It would’ve been more practical to just use bigger coins but that’s no matter. I’ll get yer food after I get ‘em all tucked away. How many is this?”
“There are seventy-two coins in the pile and thank you for the meal.”
Teresa scratched her head and gave the puzzling elf sitting in the wooden chair a sidelong look. He was more than a bit odd when she thought about it. He had come to her on a recommendation so she gave him a discount, then he spent extra money at old Lizbet’s stand to get the bread they needed, and now he was putting down more money than they had agreed upon for his lodgings. Just what was he up to she wondered. If he were rich he could have stayed in any of the inns in the nobles' district so why was he here?
Maybe he was just trying to look rich to the people around here but then he also didn’t really act like that kind of person either. She decided on one more question just to try getting the info she wanted. “That’s more than we agreed upon. What are you after?”
Ryuji knew that he was making her suspicious but he still felt that a fair price needed to be paid for a fair service. It was a little strange to other cultures but the Japanese people all had a firm belief in fairness and honor instilled into them from an early age. There were always exceptions but overall they were more honor-bound than not. “I know that you were trying to give me a discount but that’s simply no way to run a business. You have to make money to get by so there isn’t really a reason for me not to pay a set price for a decent room. That’s all. If you don’t need the money then give it to Karen instead, I don’t mind either way since the money is yours now.”
Teresa chuckled and scratched above her ear. “Well now, Ya got me there! Well since you’ll be stayin’ a while what’s yer name and should I actually be addressing ya as M’lord?” this last part was in a hushed tone that wasn’t likely to be heard by anyone else in the dining area even in the relatively quiet atmosphere of the morning conversation.
Ryuji Panicked for a second. Nobody up to this point had asked for his name and he could tell that his name would be strange in this world. He was also unsure if he was supposed to already have a name and if he did then he couldn’t very well use his old one from his past life. In the end, he didn’t have a choice but he could at least come up with a clever explanation for it, but what?
After a few seconds of Teresa looking increasingly more uncomfortable he had an idea. “I’m sorry but I can’t answer you truthfully because I just don’t know. I don’t remember my name or much else about my past. Pretty much the only thing I have are the past few days and what I had on me. Why don’t you call me Ryuji, a bird was screaming something like that when I awoke in the forest the other day. It sounded like it was trying to wake me up so I’ll just use that as my name.”
Teresa’s eyes got wider the more Ryuji said, then they narrowed near the end as though she wasn’t sure if she believed him or not. She pondered that for a second then shrugged and went to the kitchen. A few moments later Karen came out of the other door with a tray and walked over to Ryuji’s table and began setting his bowl of yogurt and a plate of buttered bread on it.
She smiled at him with a little bit of a puzzled expression and seemed hesitant before speaking. “Um sir, why did Teresa tell me to ask your name and see what I thought? Is there something wrong?”