Chapter Fourteen

I suppose I could go over the same details again. Crowded city, mobs of people of all races, but the only really important thing to note here is the guild itself.

The Adventurer’s Guild was laid out almost identically to the one in Johatsu. The tables were similar, the weapon racks on the wall were in the same place, even the lighting was the same. Though rather than a petite little hardass gnome woman, I found myself confronted by a burly human male who loomed over me like a mountain. The chair on which he sat was creaking with every movement he made, his fingers were so thick that I could barely see the body of the quill he was writing with when we approached. His face and bald tan head were a mass of scars from who knew how many different scuffles and scraps in the past.

His arms were thick as tree trunks and his shirt was barely able to contain his body. His coat was open, obviously there was little hope of buttoning it, but it was otherwise very fine, and the only indication that he was old enough to be a Full Gear ranked adventurer was the fact that his slim beard around his jaw was totally white, and there were the beginnings of wrinkles on his face.

‘He’s aging well.’ I thought while the young wolfboy approached with his hands wringing.

“Ah, ‘scuze me, Mr. Jika, I’ma here about an ‘mergency quest, one what got a name on it already, from Mr. Schnee, you got it, yeah?”

The receptionist grunted, set down his quill and pulled a piece of paper from the side of his desk. “Ten thousand creds is a helluva reward but if there’s lives on the line… ah hell, it’s Schnee, if there’s expensive equipment and profit on the line…” He shook his head and held out his slate.

“Step forward.” He said and I held out my slate and he went through certification, laying my slate beneath his own and transferring the quest to me.

“She ah, she did the thing, the job, she did it already, so, you can mark it complete and issue the payment to her now.” Rollo answered and looked over his shoulder at me. I nodded.

I’d done it, he knew I’d done it, but I suppose being still young, he was even more anxious than I was about doing something wrong.

“Right then.” The receptionist grunted again and placed his palm over the slate to certify completion, then did the same to mine.

“Payment will be transferred and automatically divided between you and the rest of your party.” He sounded frankly bored, but then he stopped. “Wait, you’re toothless and you’re getting this?”

“It was an…” I scratched the back of my head and looked away, “unusual situation. I just happened to be there and solved a problem…”

“I see.” He grunted, his eyes narrowed as he looked at me, and I got the feeling I was being examined for any hint of criminal intent, like he was a cop studying a potential suspect.

“It’s true!” Rollo chimed in, though the big receptionist seemed not to have noticed him as he looked me up and down. My ears, eyes, and tails drooped.

“Fine.” He said finally, “Congratulations. Guild fee is ten percent off the top, split between the guild of completion and your home guild of registration. nine thousand credit reward to split among the party.”

I can’t describe just how proud I felt. I know, I know, I did do good when I got to this world. But that was different. This was an actual job!” I raised my eyes and beamed with pride, my tails wagged audibly, slapping together as they moved around, I could hardly believe I’d done it. This felt especially good after taking the giant loss to that grifter. That was probably the dumbest I’d felt in my whole life, so finding myself getting something good out of all this afterward was a big and badly needed boost.

“Thank you!” I said with glee, rising up on my tiptoes and bouncing up and down, the severe expression on the receptionist’s face melted a little.

“First quests are like nothing else.” He said with a knowing little smile. “Hold on to that feeling while you can. There’ll be other quests, challenges, and a lot more, but nothing is ever going to be like the first time.” He said it like it was sage wisdom, and it probably was, no, certainly was, now that I think about it.

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So I did what he said. I held on to that feeling, that sense of triumph, sure it was an emergency quest that shouldn’t even have existed, but the truth was that I felt more validated by that single moment than by anything I’d ever done. I wasn’t the chosen one or anything else, but I chose to go somewhere. I chose to do something. I chose what to do with my life. I chose to be an adventurer. I chose to speak up when I saw what I did. I faced off with a… totally legitimate business person with absolutely no ties to any nefarious or unethical enterprises or activities whatsoever… if you take my meaning, and came away richer for it, maybe even saving a bunch of lives.

I did all that.

I did all that, and I was proud of it.

That went undiminished when I reached the hotel.

To say it was bizarre to my eyes would be to have a gift for understatement. The building was nine floors high, compared to the others, which were no more than four, it was a giant.

“Where is the entrance?” I asked when I stared at it, there were stairs leading up, but it didn’t go to a door at all. It went to a window with an elf woman in a suit behind it. She wore a tophat and a black coat with gold ruffles like something out of many centuries in the past blended with something only two centuries in the past. She was seated prim, proper, and unmoving except for her wiggling ears that seemed to wave at me in greeting.

I waved back with a shaky smile, and Rollo shook his head at me. “No doors, you use those.” He pointed to the front facing view. There were glass cased elevators outside, one beside each of the big glass windows looking in. I scratched my head and watched people come and go in and out of them as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

The cars were affixed to vertical rails with glowing ores on top encased in a small green cage, one I had to figure was some metal strong enough to deter theft. Each time the elevators went up or down, the ore glowed, and when they were still, the glow faded. I couldn’t resist.

I held out my hand and used my Insightful Inventor skill to study the contraptions. There were no pulleys, but as I studied the flow of mana, I began to see that the flow stopped at two points, up, and down’. ‘Gravity and antigravity, the rails keep them in place and the flow is circular, keeping it efficient, the gear at the top of the rail stops it in place, while the gears secured to the rail below keep it from going down too fast.…’

It was actually fairly brilliant, and probably expensive. I sort of suspected that less expensive hotels operated similarly to the mechs, using smaller magitite ores to create steam for movement, but this, being pure magic, was a way of showing off wealth.

Rollo had been standing at the top of the stairs and speaking with the elf at the window while I’d lost myself in my own world, and when I realized the pair was just waiting on me, I turned a little red in the face and jogged up the smooth stone steps as fast as I could without looking silly and approached. She held out her slate.

“Touch the surface and say ‘Nine A’ that will be your room.” She gave me a pretty smile and wiggled her ears. “Welcome to the Hotel Credati, the finest inn for the finest people in all of Kaminaru, nay, the whole world of Manami!” She gave me a sweet smile and winked up at me. “If you desire anything, anything at all, whether it be a meal or company, just press your palm to the wall panel and speak into the hole beside it, someone will come up right away to take your request.”

“Um. Thank you.” I said, I was a little baffled by the way she said all that, though the former part sounded like a slogan. Maybe something like ‘Totally not a criminal front’ would have been more subtle. I did keep my sigh at bay and did as she said, thus registering myself with the hotel.

Rollo led me to an elevator with a marked letter… the writing here seemed to be individual combinations of letters, rather than pictograms and word based characters. But whatever letter it was, it was my world’s version of the letter ‘B’. I put my palm to the wall, the door opened up, and Rollo said, “Ninth floor.”

The ride was surprisingly smooth, the magic it seemed, was more on the individual gears than on the elevator itself, and as such while it wasn’t as fast as it might have been, it wasn’t uncomfortable.

I looked out over the broad city, with its many disjointed buildings, a mix of green gardens and steam or smoke from industry, the many fliers still coming in from outside in every variety. It was so unlike everything familiar to me.

The door opened and Rollo tugged at my sleeve with his thumb and forefinger, leading me into my room for the night.

I looked around the room, a bronze bathtub sat at the far wall by a window that would let me look down on it all, a giant bed, bigger than any I’d ever used at home sat with thick blankets with such fine stitching that even my sharp kitsune eyes could barely tell the threads were there and that it wasn’t one solid piece. Rich rugs dotted a polished wooden floor that I could see my face in, and a basket of exotic and familiar fruits sat waiting for me on a dining table long enough to belong to a manor… to name just a few things that caught my eye. Gas lamps gave off a dim glow that cast beautiful dancing shadows over fine marble statues of unfamiliar deities, and silk towels and robes of gold hung on the wall.

It was all mine for now.

In time I knew that the novelty would wear off, everything would go from extraordinary to extra ordinary, and the life of adventure I dreamt of would just be ‘life’.

But looking at all of it right at that moment, I thought, ‘I would be okay getting used to this.’