Ryuji wakes up and goes about his morning routine every day. He has his bread of one type or another with Karen each morning and usually eats a more fulfilling breakfast a bit later with his master, Dorn. He learns at an incredible pace. It’s not a matter of him having some unnatural ability, it’s just his upbringing and the ideas he has learned in Japan before coming to this world making themselves useful.
Ryuji figures out that the days are actually a bit shorter than earth’s days and that’s one reason he’s having so much trouble finding time to do everything. He tells Dorn he needs to start leaving a little earlier each day so that he can do sword training with the cat beastfolk family and at first Dorn is against it. He says that a wizard has no business on the front lines with a sword but relents when Ryuji explains to him that he also needs to teach them to read and write. Dorn is still a bit apprehensive but when he sees Ryuji interacting with the cat-girls he relents. He reminds himself how advanced his pupil is anyway and realizes that there isn’t any need to push him to keep a tight schedule of training because he picks it all up so quickly, much quicker than a normal student would.
Ryuji spends most of his time teaching the cats to read and actually has very little time to do much practice. He reads the book on sword training and finds that most of it is mindless repetition of swings and thrusts. He does practice a little with the cat family, especially the younger ones. The cat-men very quickly begin to master the techniques in the book and their swordsmanship improves far too rapidly for Ryuji to keep up with. The heavy swords and better diet leave them with corded muscles and looking very intimidating, much to the appreciation of their wives.
The women and children all train with their weapons as well and in only a few days’ time, the rest of the people working in the general store start seeing them as their protectors. The cat-men don’t mind and take to patrolling the whole block with their spears and swords. They take turns while the other help direct the work crews in the remodeling of the storefront.
The storefront makes steady progress with the old and rotten portions having to be torn down and removed first. The cats become a little apprehensive when Ryuji tells them that he wants to upgrade the building to a three-story one. They are worried that he’s going to make them the center of attention for a huge store of some kind. He lays their worries to rest and tells them that he’s going to make the entire second and third story into a set of apartments for them and the other workers. Since this was his decision, he pays the work crew the extra amount to do the larger project without complaint and the cats wonder what kind of workforce needs two stories of apartments.
The renovations to the other buildings of the general store plaza take a bit longer to arrange since most of the workers in town are working on his other projects already. Varon gets worried about his inability to snag many workers but Ryuji tells him not to sweat it because he knows a few crews that are about to be free. In a very short span of time, the Bakery becomes fully restored and as the work crews become free, Ryuji hires them directly with Aleen’s blessing.
He got the fervent approval of the brother of the woman selling perfume in the plaza and they look at the building he purchased for the manufactory and are stunned speechless for a while as Ryuji goes on and on about the ways he wants to set up a production line. The idea isn’t unknown in their world but the idea that it could be so compact and efficient was amazing to the pair. They timidly ask and are granted immediate permission to move into the building after some minor renovation and repairs are finished.
Ryuji also made another arrangement with Lizbet and her two daughters. He began buying all the rest of their bread at the end of each day and having them deliver the bread to the orphanages and the slums. He had an idea to get a soup kitchen started but the bread was more readily available for the time. The good will garnered from this and the fact that he had the cats go and help with distribution several times meant that as soon as the bakery was ready to open, the women already had people lined out to take over sales from their stands and had licenses for new stands in plazas that didn’t have them.
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With all the regular bread available elsewhere the bakery needed a reason to keep clientele coming back to them. Ryuji had a huge number of ideas for new (to the people of the town) types of bread products. The lightly salted bagel chips became wildly popular and the store sold out of them each day well before lunch. Ryuji was happy that his businesses were doing well.
Not everyone was happy that he was doing so well. There were a couple of groups that were looking for the chance to have a chat with him and convince him that he should either hand over all his assets or at the very least cut them in for the lion’s share of the profits. There was a problem with their plans. He began at this time to spend a bit of time working with the town watch to get the swimming lesson program up and running.
He first made sure that all of the guards knew how to swim as well as they were claiming. It seems that some were only interested in the extra coin and were thinking that they could take the payment and then tell the peasant brats to scram or worse to throw them into the river and tell them to just swim. These fellows found that they were going to have to provide the lessons and that there would often be a noble watching over their shoulder and were less than happy about it.
Not everything was going great for Ryuji though. There was a problem that he was beginning to realize was growing more urgent each day. His craving for meat was growing rapidly. He had another episode of changing into a wolf beastfolk and had to buy a round dozen skewers to sate his hunger enough to transform back. It had gotten so bad that the cat beastfolk caught him eating the skewers at one point. The parents were silent about it but once again the children had no filter.
The kids confronted him about it on the way back to the leatherworks. They were just curious because they had heard all their lives that sun-elves didn’t eat meat. While the adults were apologetic about the children being nosy they too seemed entirely too interested. He came up with a plausible lie rather quickly. He asked if the other elves had the same reputation and found that the rarely-seen wood elves did but the dark elves didn’t. he reasoned that it had to be that he had mixed blood and said that it had been bothering him a little too. When he asked them to keep it a secret, they all readily agreed.
That only solved one small part of the problem. Ryuji knew what the problem was without anyone needing to spell it out for him. He was becoming more of a werewolf and he was losing control. He was so worried about it that he even began to try to distance himself from Karen. He was worried that he might transform and harm her or at the least that she would realize and turn him in.
He had to turn down a couple dates. He really wanted to go on them but he was worried about the way the last one had gone and maybe having a repeat. Ryuji was afraid that if he let their relationship advance that she would try to spend more time with him, and she would have too. Karen began to make more advances toward him. she was hoping that she would be able to take their relationship to the next level but was worried that maybe he didn’t like her as much anymore. Ryuji could tell that his refusals were affecting her and he had to come up with a reasonable response sooner rather than later.
One morning when Karen began clinging to him and he was acting distant she decided that it was time. If he wanted to end things, she wasn’t going to get in his way. She knew that she had gotten a bit too attached to the elf lord and he was in truth beyond her station. She asked him if he wanted to go on a date and when he hedged around the subject, she asked him why he was avoiding her.
Ryuji was being put on the spot and he needed an excuse quick. He adored Karen and very much did not want to lose her but he didn’t want to put her at risk either. He was really hoping that if he could keep her at a safe distance, he would be able to figure this out and then get closer to her. That was the plan anyway but now she was pushing the issue and he found he couldn’t blame her. He needed to say something but what?