Back Topside, Will took Bee to a bar squeezed between two tenements. There was no signage out front, but Will informed her that it was called Momma’s Saloon.

The inside was cramped and had a low ceiling. It was at least relatively clean, and lit with both lanterns and a fireplace for a soft, warm mood. The wholesome smell of good food drifted from a back room, which boded well.

“The Rosy Drake has decent food too, but I’ve got a friend who works here,” Will said. “Take a seat anywhere and I’ll order for us. They only have a daily, so there’s no need to bother with a menu.”

While Will went over to the bar to speak with a woman who was too comely to be called ‘Momma’, Bee found a table that was reasonably secluded so that she wouldn’t get whined at for being careless later. Will soon returned with two tall tankards of foamy beer.

It was very strong, but good. Not too sweet.

“Aren’t you supposed to treat a lady to wine?” Bee asked while she wiped foam from her lip.

“Why, you see a lady anywhere?” Will replied, looking around.

“Har har. Good one, Dad.”

“Would you have preferred wine?”

“No. I just felt like being bratty.”

Fondness shone through his smile as his dark eyes searched her up and down. “I don’t mind that too much, you being my sugar baby and all.”

They nursed their drinks for a bit, and Bee watched patrons come and go. They looked neither pompously rich nor starvingly destitute, which suggested to her that this was something of a middle-class establishment.

“What about electricity?” Bee asked, suddenly thinking of it. “If I got sent to a place like this and I wasn’t dumb as bricks, that’d be one of the first things on my mind once I got out of living in a cave somewhere.”

Will nodded pensively. “Well, people have certainly tried. Artificers mostly, as you might imagine. Electricity doesn’t work the same here as it does on Earth, though. It misbehaves—leaks and surges and dissipates seemingly at random. Figuring out electric power is considered kind of like the Holy Grail among Artificers, but no one’s managed it yet.”

“Huh. That’s annoying.”

Will swallowed another gulp of beer and made a face. “Honestly, it might be for the best. The last thing we need right now is for people to figure out how to kill each other on an industrial scale. It’d take us a month to bomb this place back to the Stone Age.”

“That’s probably true. I guess I’m happy I won’t have to fistfight a tank anytime soon.”

A large man with rosy cheeks and a stained apron came out of the back to bring them two steaming plates of roasted potatoes topped with melted cheese, thinly sliced beef with wine sauce, and stewed carrots.

“Heya, Deathbed,” the man said, wiping sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. His left arm suggested that he was Level 7, and the pot on his Profession symbol had to mean that he was a Cook.

“Joe Crag,” Will replied with a nod. He motioned to Bee. “Crag, this is Fumble Bee. She’s my woman.”

“He’s got a woman now, does he?” Crag said with a hearty chuckle. “My, my, my. And a pretty one, too. And a Laborer. A guy might get jealous.”

“Guess I’m just lucky.”

“Yeah, maybe. You sure you haven’t been out fishing?”

“What does that mean?” Bee asked.

Will sighed. “Uh, some guys who want to find a woman go after freshies specifically so they can take advantage of them. Fresh fishing, we call it. And no, Crag, it’s not that.”

“Actually, he did fish me out of the water only like a week ago, and he said if I didn’t come with him I’d get put into slavery,” Bee said, pumping her eyebrows at Will. “And then he forced me to sleep in his bed, and now he’s got me doing all sorts of sexual favors for him.”

Crag laughed himself even more red-faced at that, nearly upending their food when he slapped the table. “Yeah, that makes a lot more sense!”

The Cook continued ribbing Will, and even pulled out a chair for himself, setting it down in reverse with his chin on the backrest.

Bee tucked into the food, trying some beef and carrots. It was fucking beautiful.

“Woah,” she said. “I think this might knock me up.”

Will nodded. “It’s different having something made by a real Cook, right?”

Mouth still full of food, she asked: “So how do you know this guy anyway?”

Will and Crag looked at each other. Will answered. “We’re kinda like pen pals, I guess? We exchange letters.”

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“You two-timing me?”

“Believe it or not, I don’t find myself particularly attracted to this walrus.”

“How do you even exchange letters? We live in the middle of nowhere. What, does the mailman trek two hours through the woods to deliver your post?”

“Nope. We’ve both got a skill that lets us send messages magically. I’ll show you it at some point.”

“Deathbed here gives me herbs sometimes, and I give him news from the Heap,” Crag explained. “His letters are a little verbose, but who’d struggle through them if not me?”

“When did this turn into Gang up on Will Day? You guys need to take it easy, or I might start crying.”

Crag eventually took the hint to leave and said he would whip up some dessert for ‘the master and his concubine’. Will looked like he was going to have a fit of baby rage if he made fun of him any more, so Bee played it nice and sweet for a while.

The food was both delicious and filling, leaving her pleasantly full as she scraped the last little morsels off her plate. She was no lightweight, either, but the beer got her moderately tipsy.

Then Crag brought out a little lemon pie for them to share, which was also delicious but completely exhausted her sweet tooth.

“All right, where to next?” Will asked once they had said goodbye to Crag and seen themselves out of Momma’s Saloon. “You could use a proper wardrobe, and I know a decent Tailor around here. How about it?”

“Lead the way!” Bee replied.

The boutique they went to was in the more high-end part of town, and they were received by a mousy-looking gentleman with spectacles. He took Bee’s measurements, then started bringing out various items for her consideration. Tunics and blouses, pants and breeches. Will bought her multiple sets of outfits, mostly in her preferred colors of greens, browns, and whites. She was made to wear each item in humiliating succession, and the Tailor used a skill called Stitch that allowed him to fit the clothes directly to the proportions of her body by simply feeling and tugging at the fabric, applying a stitch or two at certain seams.

The boutique also offered footwear, but Will took them to another place for that, a store run by another Tailor that specialized only in shoes. He got her two pairs of boots and two pairs of low fabric shoes suitable for fighting in, as well as a pair of sandals. He arranged for everything, the boots and the clothing, to be delivered to the Rosy Drake.

By the time they were done with clothes shopping, Bee was sweaty from her body being on display and manhandled like a pig carcass. A clock tower rang three bells over the city, giving them two hours until their designated meeting time with Mongrel.

They decided to walk around for a while so that Bee could cool off, and Will led them down towards where the lord of Sheerhome apparently stayed, a great big longhouse on top of a height that overlooked the city. They weren’t allowed to get too close, with an entire complex of buildings around the longhouse that was off-limits to the general public, like a gated town within a town.

“He’s called Lord Brimstone,” Will said. “A Level 22 Cook. He’s known for his combat skills, if not his pleasant demeanor.”

“Why doesn’t he have a silly name like everyone else?” Bee asked. “I thought people got made fun of for that kind of thing.”

“Well, he would get bullied into suicide for a name like ‘Brimstone’ if he wasn’t also capable of and very willing to incinerate anyone who dared to laugh at him. Honestly, we should probably stop talking about it while we’re in the city. We don’t wanna get thrown in a dungeon for sedition or something fun like that.”

She took the warning to heart and let the matter rest.

Lord Brimstone. I can’t believe there’s a guy who would call himself something like that with a straight face.

They skirted the lord’s compound, guards eyeing them suspiciously from their posts, and reached a large, three-story building that looked fairly maintained. Bee assumed it was a high-end brothel or something until Will explained that it was the city library.

“You have to pay a pretty steep fee to get in,” he said, “and you’re not allowed to check books out, but if you pay an additional fee you’re allowed to copy books or have a Scribe copy them for you. It’s a great place. Most of the books back at the house—excluding a few volumes that Richard secured for me—were copied from the library here. It’s one of my favorite places in the city.”

Bee could only marvel at the complexity of it all. There was so much for her to learn about this world. Every time she thought she’d grasped the broad strokes, Will would hit her with some new nugget of strange wisdom that made her go ‘Huh’.

Next to the library was a small, decrepit temple, little more than a hovel compared to the library in whose shadow it languished. Will explained that it was a gathering place for those who believed in the return of the goddess, and that they would be spared from her wrath by repenting to her. The revivalists, they were called, and they were considered a fringe element, sneered at and looked down upon by most.

“I don’t have much of an opinion on them, personally,” Will said, “except for the fact that if Era is actually planning on coming back for blood, I don’t think praying it away will be all that effective.”

Then they did some more window shopping. They found a weaponsmith and Bee entertained herself by swinging some maces and swords around, but Will told her that they would hold off on buying her any weapons until she had trained with her instructor for a while and gotten a feel for her fighting style.

They were just about to head to the Rosy Drake when Bee thought of a Very Important Item for purchase.

“Do they have condoms here?” she asked urgently, taking Will by the wrist. “Because, uh, I don’t really wanna get pregnant. But I also don’t wanna not fuck the shit out of you.”

Will laughed at that, putting his other hand over hers. “Sadly, they have not invented condoms.”

“WHAT? That’s outrageous! How hard can it be?”

“However, getting knocked up is the last thing you need to worry about. Every single human that comes to Nifala is reborn sterile.”

“Oh. What?”

“Yeah, I guess Era didn’t want a bunch of toddlers running around in a place like this. Must also be the reason why no one under eighteen gets sent here. I’m assuming she was planning to reverse it when she had the place nicely set up, with everyone all happy and getting along. But then she died, so I guess that’s not happening. Either way, it's not reversible with demonic contracts or divine vows, so she clearly took it pretty seriously.”

That was certainly convenient. Bee wasn’t sure how she felt about being sterile, though. Something about that put a bad taste in her mouth.

What if I want kids someday? Little Wills running around and biting at my ankles. Or maybe more realistically correcting my grammar and holding lectures on things no one cares about.

We couldn’t even adopt if there aren’t any kids here in the first place.

Not that she was actively thinking about having kids—they’d only just gotten together, and she wasn’t quite that psychotic—but purely looking to the future, the thought of an empty house made her strangely sad.