Chapter Twenty-Four

I really could have wished for some in-flight peanuts, or maybe something to drink. Or maybe some… I don’t know? Leg room! The benches we sat on had none of it. And as for a place to relieve ourselves? At the far rear of the ship there was a hole.

Yeah. You heard me. It was make it rain or bombs away and damn whoever was down below and looking up at the wrong time. There was at least one thing they did, nobody was allowed to get up until we were outside of the city limits.

I can only assume that at some point a brown bomb struck a rich person in the head, and that led to a change in the laws. I privately resolved right then and there that when I settled down in this world, I would not live in the country outside of a major city.

Packed in as we were, the only time anybody really got any space was when somebody got up to go take care of their body’s needs, and by the way, there wasn’t so much as a curtain. Though to my great relief, everybody was facing away.

These details get left out of fantasy novels for a reason I guess. I mean nobody talks about how Bilbo Baggins didn’t pack any toilet paper and in the movies you didn’t even see them prepare a hole for that around their camp. Oh and as for how this world handled the problem?

Newspapers seemed to be the order of the day. I noticed that this gets used for a great deal. I still hadn’t read one, and I’m not sure why. But when I sat back down from my ‘bombing run’ I looked over at Loysa and asked, “How come newspapers are used for everything?”

“What do you mean?” She looked at me as if I was a bit dense.

Alright, I had to elaborate, “I mean, they were used to wrap my corndogs, they were used to wrap my sweets that you swiped, they’re used for cleanup. It’s just kind of strange.”

“Oh, so you don’t do that where you’re from?” She asked.

I shook my head and shifted a little on my seat. The paper was rough and very low quality. I made a mental note to invent proper toilet paper if I ever made enough money.

“It’s just practical. It’s the cheapest paper there is, and because all the paper doesn’t get sold the day it’s printed, businesses buy up the previous day’s papers to use for their own purposes, since it’s behind by a day, it’s super cheap. A single cred can buy hundreds of old papers. The companies who print them would rather sell the lot and get something for them rather than nothing.”

That made sense. When I was in my old world, I watched a lot of those ‘gone to another world’ shows, to some degree that genre savviness has helped me here. However, I couldn’t help but think that there was a fundamental flaw in those shows.

Whenever the focus was on a newcomer improving things, their entire world referred to the newcomer as a genius and innovator and was awed at everything they did. He could invent toilet paper and they’d be shocked at the idea.

In short, it treated those worlds as staffed fully by morons who couldn’t imagine anything new. In reality, most inventions, I think, are going to turn out to be very banal. ‘Oh, that worked, great, good job.’ You’d have to be truly revolutionary and impressive in order to be recognized as above and beyond other people.

And they also forget that those worlds should be full of people doing things a particular way for a reason, like right now. Newspapers used for everything is very practical, it’s a way of reusing material that would otherwise be immediately turned into garbage and getting at least one more use out of it. It showed practical thinking and realism, at least in a small way.

I can’t help but think that, ‘Maybe I am the right person for this world. A lot of people with the same genre savviness would go overboard, underestimate the locals here, and get their damn fool selves killed in short order. I can just picture one of them trying to intimidate Yorgim Schnee and finding themselves looking at a hole in their chest when that bodyguard of his was unleashed.’

Stolen novel; please report.

Of course I had to make sure not to fall into the same trap. I had knowledge this world didn’t, but the means to execute almost none of it, which meant it was useless until that changed.

I looked up at the sky, and realized I’d forgotten to check to see if there was even a moon for this world. Or maybe more than one? But there was definitely space, stars, there had to be. Didn’t there? Yes, I think when I first mentioned my ambition… Okay, so that means it’s possible. There’s somewhere to go. I still want to build a spaceship and get it to the stars.

But I had to keep that quiet for now.

For now.

But not forever.

‘First you have to deal with the fact that you owe a favor to what is probably this world’s version of a mafia boss.’ I thought, and I actually laughed out loud about that. I got a few funny looks and waved it off.

It was a hell of a day.

The ship swayed a little in the high winds, but this one was able to go much, much higher than the little ferry thing I’d ridden in before to get to my last destination. As such I could see much more of the world at large, though I wasn’t about to get up and go look over the side.

Then it occurred to me.

‘Can I shift form into a bird or something? Maybe fly?’ I got goosebumps from the thought, how far did my powers go?

So many questions.

I decided to pester Loysa again.

“Loysa, how much do you know about kitsune magic skills?” I asked.

“Not much, that’s probably why she is telling us to go to Steelven. My first guess is that whoever we’ll find is going to teach you magic along with whatever help they’ll be with your actual quest.” Loysa took a deep breath after she spoke, and seemed to weigh something in her mind while I looked at her.

“You’re not aware of this, I’m sure, but this is all highly unusual.” Loysa went on, “Most of the time, you’d go to the quest point first, I’d shut up and let you go figure it out. But my Goddess is being even nosier than she usually is about these things. You should have built a team on site back at the guild, or just gone from one guild to the next, that’s how this is usually done. But for reasons I don’t understand and she won’t tell me, we’re going all the way to Steelven and my Goddess has told me in advance what material you’ll need to gather to complete your quest.”

“And that… never happens?” I asked.

“No. Never. To be frank your first quest should have been something far simpler, like gathering herbs outside of town or something.” She shook her head, “I’m going to have words with Sami when I get back. Rare skill or not, this is far more than you should have had to take on.”

“Oh.” I said. I didn’t know how to feel about that, and I was still trying to work out what I should think about my situation or the guild receptionist when the ship started to descend towards a sizable square building nearly identical to the one we’d left behind which was surrounded by what I guessed were taverns, inns, supply shops, and the people who ran them.

It was honestly a relief to see that this world had something in common with mine. In the old world, communities grew up around vital resources first, and travel hubs second. This community, surrounded by a flat plain in all directions, might have had a small farming presence, but it wasn’t hard to see where the money lay. Our ‘dock’ as I had to think of it, wasn’t the only one. There were seven more flat topped buildings nearby, with other airships and gliders coming in or going out, and the bustling clusters of people that gradually came into view in what looked like a town square suggested that the flight schedules were being posted there rather than where the flights were.

It was a subtle bit of cunning I didn’t recognize for what it was until I saw people step away from the cluster to shop or dine before looking. ‘Whatever this world is like, I definitely can’t assume anybody, no matter how uneducated compared to me, is an idiot.’

That, I knew, could go wrong really fast.