Soup was never my favorite meal. I didn’t hate it, but it just didn’t do a lot for me. A good chowder or another thick broth was nice, and a well-made miso soup made my tongue dance, but I never shared the excitement for a hot bowl of chicken noodle, tomato soup and grilled cheese, or even a hearty beef stew that was enjoyed by my friends and family. However, after a few days of eating nothing but trail rations a hot bowl of steak, peas, potatoes, and mushy carrots in a mediocre broth felt like heaven in my mouth. We had made it to the town of Lion’s Head and the White Lion Inn it was named for. As one might expect, in the center of the large cafeteria-like main room’s broadest wall was the mounted head of a gigantic white lion. The fur was yellowing with age, but it stood out in brilliant contrast to the dark wood of the rest of the building. A rented room included tonight’s dinner of bread and soup as well as breakfast in the morning, all for only one gold, lending further evidence to my conclusion that the bartender in Willowbright was an asshole. Each room even had its own private bath, though decidedly less fancy. At the end of the day, I was just glad to clean the sweat and grime of the road, and once again Red had taken my clothes to a launderer. I’d want to buy another change or two, to minimize expense and allow myself to feel clean on longer trips, but to square that circle I’d need a lot more money, as we were now down to only fourteen gold and still had rations and supplies to buy for the next inevitable leg of our journey.
“You’re gonna need a lot more dosh than this to pay someone to teach you magic, chief,” Red sighed as he re-counted our meager savings within the private confines of our room at the inn. “An’ unless you’re better at fightin’ insurgents or protectin’ caravans than you look, that’s gonna involve makin’ money in esper battles.”
“Right,” I exhaled. I hadn’t even had much time to look around town to see what our options were, or even just to explore, but I trusted Red’s familiarity with this world enough not to argue. I looked concernedly over at Wysteria, sleeping comfortably on the chair. “They aren’t fights to the death, are they?”
“Not usually,” he shook his head. “Not so long as the espers know what they’re doin’. I mean, there’s risk in any fight, right? A boxing match ain’t meant to kill nobody, but it happens, and a fight between espers is way more dangerous. We ain’t seen a boxer with fire breath since magic was banned in the fights forty years ago, after all.”
“Boxing sounds like it used to be super interesting.”
“Oh, man, those were the days!” Red replied with a grin. “When I was between gigs, I pulled in a lotta money takin’ bets. Can’t do that with the esper League, of course. Too much scrutiny an’ regulation an’ such.”
“Sounds like a wild time,” I forced a smile and nodded, wanting to encourage my friend to share his fun stories with me (and it was indeed something I’d love to hear more about later), but I had more pressing concerns. “So, say we do a fight and Wysteria gets hurt... do we need extra money stashed back to pay a doctor? Or… some other kind of healer?”
“In an official League fight, no. They got healers on staff for that kinda thing; a benefit of bein’ part of the system, plus it speeds up espers lookin’ good for any ceremonies that might follow. Up until that, well… most chainers do their own magic. Except you ain’t got that.”
“Right… so then I probably need to pay someone to teach me that, too.”
“If you’re makin’ a career of it, yeah.”
“All right…” I took a deep breath and tried to gather my thoughts, only to realize I didn’t really have enough information to make a proper plan of action. “… so, what do I do?”
“Well, it’s sort of a vicious circle. Your best bet would be to do a couple of low-risk League fights to get the capital you need, but to be an accepted part of the League you gotta pay your dues an’ that’s a hundred gold standard, up front.”
“Yeesh!” I grimaced.
“Yeah. Furthermore, the nearest coliseum is at least a week away, and I dunno about you, but I’d like to eat more than hard tack an’ fish flakes on the way there. Nevermind that magic trainin’ ain’t cheap, an’ it usually takes years to learn…”
“I think that last part I can manage. I can’t say for certain, but with the way the Grimoire is laid out and what I know of genre conventions, I think I’ll be able to learn faster than most, at least. I already have a leg up on Parting the Veil, after all, and I learned that with only a little rough instruction from you.”
“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe you had it in the book before we met; a consolation prize for uprootin’ ya from your friends and family back home: one magic spell.”
“Maybe…” I frowned, both in remembering the few people I left behind that I was really starting to miss, and the idea that this journey might be more difficult than I’d hoped.
I’d shoved it to the side for most of my journey so far, and in the first couple of days it was easy enough to just bask in the surreality of it all and ignore the emotional weight of the fact that there were people I’d left behind. But my mind was always more adept at wandering than I was at chasing it, so now and then I’d make a concerted effort to pull myself away from the past and focus on the present. There wasn’t much I could do about it anyhow; it wasn’t like I knew of a way back, and I didn’t even know how I got here in the first place. Magic might be able to help, sure, and while dedicating myself to looking might seem like a prudent course of action, it still felt like a far-off prospect when simple spells that everyone knew and used were already so daunting for me. I just didn’t want to think about it for now. I wanted to enjoy the ride while it lasted. Beside that, who knows how time worked in Barbavia compared to Earth? Maybe it had already been years. Maybe they’d already mourned and moved on. Maybe worse things had happened that I didn’t want to know about. Of course, maybe I hadn’t been magically transported to another world and was just lying comatose in a hospital bed somewhere. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of reasons to desperately focus my determination on ‘getting back’, even though my heart hurt when I thought too long about the people that were no longer a part of my life.
“Sorry if I, uh… stirred up somethin’, there,” Red said softly.
“It’s cool,” I shook my head. “Nothing I can do for it but give myself time. You said we could still make money doing esper fights even if they’re not part of the League?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “You find someone who’s willing to spar, put up a small amount of money, and the winner takes the pot. It usually ain’t much, so you’ll have quite a few fights ahead of ya before you’ve got the kind of gold to get started with somethin’ serious, but Wysteria could use the training, anyhow.”
“This sounds an awful lot like gambling?” I didn’t mean it as a condemnation, I was just surprised it was legal. “Are we gonna attract any unwanted attention for that?”
“Nah, especially not bein’ part of the League. If it were an official match, they frown on that. Doesn’t mean it don’t happen, but they try to control it as much as possible to keep the fights honest. Nobody throwin’ a round for a big payout backstage or somethin’, y’know? Keeps the criminal element out of esper battles… mostly,” he added with a shrug. “But for a private fight between two randos? You’re golden. Nobody cares. Happens all the time.”
“… what if I’m not good at gambling?” I really didn’t know how good I was or wasn’t. I did all right for myself on family poker night, but there were no stakes and we played for fun. Playing slot machines and blackjack in video games was fun enough, but I’d never done it in real life with real money because I had an almost destructive desire to keep playing until I at least broke even if I went on a losing streak, and that was with fake, digital coin. Something told me the stress might tear me in half if it happened with real money.
“Well, that’s what you got me for. I might not be a fighter, but I can read people pretty good an’ I’ve spent a lotta time around this kinda element.” Of course, it was also in his best interests to make sure I had enough money to learn how to set him free, otherwise he’d be stuck with me. Neither of us said that out loud, though, and I was grateful for its omission. It made the pressure seem less obvious. “I’ll see if I can find a few marks while you look around town tomorrow morning. We’ll rendezvous and make a plan, then go from there. Sound good?”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Sounds good,” I agreed.
It was weird that Red used the word ‘rendezvous’, and ‘dosh’ for that matter. It was strange enough that this world had such a similar English equivalent, but also French? It wasn’t a language I had a lot of experience with (I took Spanish in high school), but I recognized things like ‘grimoire’ and ‘oeilvolant’ as having French origins just by the way they were pronounced, with half the letters ignored or smushed together. There were also enough similarities between the romance languages that I could guess at the meanings of certain words, which only led to more questions. ‘Terramor’, for example, seemed like a portmanteau of ‘terre’ and ‘amour’, French words for ‘land’ and ‘love’. ‘Landlove toad’ sure sounds a lot like ‘Loveland frog’, which was a cryptid spawned from a hoax born a few hours South of where I grew up. A grimalkin was from English folklore, if I recalled correctly, and they were indeed black cats associated with the practice of magic. ‘Oeivolant’ I wasn’t as familiar with, something about movement, I think. Was it also a mythological creature of some kind from my world? What does all of that say about Barbavia? It was fairly easy not to become stressed about what had happened, where I really was and what state my head was in. I had no power to change it, so there was no sense in worrying about it. But it was terribly interesting. If this world wasn’t some interpretation of fiction, either established somewhere I hadn’t seen or made from whole cloth by my subconscious, where did French words come from? Is there Spanish? Basque? Mandarin? If it was possible for a word like ‘oeivolant’ to be beyond my understanding and yet likely to carry a real-world meaning, did that mean Barbavia has to be a real place? Or can my brain make up a convincing enough facsimile of a word to trick myself into both believing it to be plausible while also not knowing its meaning?
Those thoughts were eventually gently escorted from my mind in favor of getting clean and going to sleep. Philosophy was fun, but there was never much merit in dwelling on the answers to questions that might actually not have them. Red and I shared a disdain for determinism and its ilk (though I was traditionally less vociferous about it), but even if this world (or Earth) was crafted by the hand of intelligent design, I had no incentive to try and discover who was responsible. Even given my unceremonious transport to the Commonwealth, I was much more interested in seeing the future play out before me than discovering the identity of the manager of spacetime and charging up to them to demand answers to my idle queries.
Existing without ready access to a clock was one hell of an adjustment. For the most part I didn’t miss my phone, especially without social media and instant messages to check, but having to guess at the time based on the position of the sun in the sky felt archaic. If I had any kind of important meeting, I’m sure I’d be late for it. Waking up without an alarm was similarly baffling. The number of days in my life that weren’t governed by the harsh, electronic beep or melodic tone couldn’t be more than two thousand, and that was counting early childhood and school-age summer vacation. Waking up when my body was done sleeping and having no clue when in the day it was felt bizarre, both like I was lost in time and somehow cheating at a fundamental facet of life. It was later than I’d planned when I finally got about town, which might’ve been better for what I was trying to accomplish since the city was bustling with life. It let me take in more of the sights without drawing too much attention or too many questions, with shopkeepers’ focus on paying customers and shady characters more than a chubby lookie-loo in brown robes keeping his hands to himself.
I wasn’t really sure what I expected, technologically speaking. So far indoor plumbing and other small creature comforts were prevalent, whether extant through science or obvious magic. Clocks did, indeed, exist, but were far less omnipresent. If I had to be specific about the subgenre of the Commonwealth, it seemed to err far more on the ‘steampunk’ side of fantasy, albeit with fewer absurdly tall tophats and redundant pairs of goggles. Everything felt sort of relatable, and at the same time intimate. My shopping experiences were more to the key of driving to the nearest superstore and buying a week or two’s worth of groceries, but people here went to the bakery for a single loaf of bread and the butcher for enough meat to serve dinner, a short walk from refilling their personal stock once they ran out. It felt… quaint, like the tiny, isolated town I grew up in. At the same time, it seemed fantastic. Every store had at least a few items beyond my understanding, typically food, potions, and what I assumed were medicines and poultices. There was a lot of stuff I wanted to buy, but risking coin at this stage wasn’t worth my collector’s interest. Of particular draw was the traveling carnival that had set up residence just outside of town. Colorful, striped tents and various barkers had drawn my eye more than once as I traveled, but I knew if I allowed myself a closer look, I’d get sucked in and spend even a little gold, which was more than I had to spare. So, of course, I ran into a cute barker on the other side of town.
“You look like a guy who’s bored as hell,” she bubbled, loosely curled turquoise hair standing out brilliantly against the magenta and white stripes that dominated her outfit. She had a twin-tailed jester’s hat with jingling bells, striped on the left and on the right solid magenta with chunky white stars. Her face was done up in simple black and white makeup, with a large, round magenta nose stuck on top of her actual one.
“I’m managing,” I said dismissively, but politely, trying not to get drawn in.
“Y’know, there’s a sweet carnival on the other side of town,” she said casually, producing a deck of playing cards from seemingly nowhere and flicking the entirety of the deck from one hand to the other across an impressive distance.
With a tip of her thumb, what appeared to be a business card slid out from the middle of the deck, and she leaned forward, holding it out to me. She created impressive cleavage out of a humble chest and modest diamond of exposed skin between the floppy, white, bell-adorned collar and the jumpsuit proper, subtly squeezing her arms inward as she made the offer, one gloved hand on her knee for support. I felt pandered to, and I didn’t like being pandered to, but I did like clowns and didn’t want to make waves without Red around to have my back, so I accepted it. Surprisingly, it wasn’t a card but a small white envelope that contained a pale red ticket reading ‘ADMIT ONE’ in giant letters, ‘SID’S SPECTACULAR TRAVELING CIRCUS’ in smaller font below it. I looked back up at the clown, who was standing again, a simple, patient smile on the lips she’d painted to match her attire.
“I appreciate the free admission, but I only have so much money and I need to find someone to train me in spellcasting on the cheap. So unless that little trick of yours was some kind of sorcery you’re willing to share… ?”
“’Fraid not,” she shrugged, twiddling her fingers, “just good old-fashioned sleight of hand.”
“Ah,” I shrugged, pretending to be more disappointed than I actually was, since that was the answer I expected. “If I make some money before you leave town, I’ll be sure to stop by and spend a little there. I do love a good carnival.”
“Three more days,” she held up an indicative number of fingers, “though it’s been a long time since Sid printed off new tickets. If you manage to find us in the next town, that’ll still get you in for freezie.”
“Oh!” That did genuinely surprise me, though in hindsight I was sure the cover charge was far less than the prices for various food and events. “Well… thanks! I’ll do my best to stop by. Do you perform in anything, or are you just pulling in marks?”
“Whoa!” she held up both hands and looked around to see if anyone else heard. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to us, even with the small amount of traffic on the little side-street where we’d met. “I didn’t know you were in the biz! Ixnay on the kayfabe, dude!”
“Sorry,” I felt myself flush a little. Red had used the term ‘mark’ last night, so perhaps it was in my head more than usual. Obviously among seedier elements it was a word for a gullible person that was easy to con. In years gone by on Earth, carnivals were often a front for criminal organizations, or at the very least a bit of a con themselves; rigged games of chance, embellishing the contents of a show and overcharging for it, holding fixed gambling events in secret tents, etc. etc. I became familiar with the word in the context of professional wrestling, which itself had its origins in the carnival circuit. I’m sure there was a lot of crossover in the other lingo, as well. ‘Kayfabe’, for example, was an expression for the masquerade of artifice that allowed wrestlers (or carnies) to play the act and perform their operations right under the noses of regular people, something like the suspension of disbelief. In professional wrestling, kayfabe was the thing that separated stunt actor Dwayne Johnson from skilled wrestling combatant The Rock; the polite fiction that these larger-than-life personae were actually fighting each other and not just performing a high-impact ballet.
“It’s cool,” she half-shrugged, seemingly content nobody noticed the small crack in ‘our’ façade. Her entire posture had changed on hearing me use carnival slang, and even her voice was less performatively over-the-top. “I don’t suppose you’re looking for work? We could use a proper bally. I am kinda pulling triple-duty, here.”
“Thanks, but I’m trying to make this chainer thing happen,” I nodded with a smile, “if that falls through, I’ll keep you in mind, though.”
“Kay! Well, I should probably go make sure the town guard has their juice. I’ll see ya when I see ya!” she bounced away down an alley, nimbly nipping up onto a rooftop to get a better view before vanishing into the crowd below. She moved with a casual grace that reminded me of the way my roommate traversed the various worlds of the Assassin’s Creed games.
He would’ve adapted to this world much better, I thought to myself. He was the person I knew who was into all the modern isekai and litRPG fiction. He knew the ins and outs, the exploits. He would’ve figured out how to level up, what was causing him to gain more Xp… hell, if Barbavia was a fictional place from a story on Earth, he had probably already read about it, as well as gallons of fanfiction written in its world. He was perhaps the person I missed most of all, which seemed sort of weird since I’d left both my parents behind as well, but he was basically my brother. He was the person I’d go to for guidance and advice, or to share a dumb joke I thought of. I physically shook my head to loose myself from my thoughts. I’d been alone with my mind for a bit too long today, and opted to seek out Red a bit early in hopes of having his wit and enthusiasm distract me from the dismal gloom I’d allowed to overtake me.