I did get odd jobs here and there from time to time, but these opportunities were scarce and no one wanted to hire me as a regular.
Once, I was able to negotiate unloading some boxes for a sack of apples. Another time, I helped paint a fence for some fish.
That was all I could get. I tried my hand at a construction site one day when they needed to unload some bricks, but I lacked the strength to go more than two hours without collapsing and was kicked out. The foreman gave me a sympathetic look but told me that I just wasn’t cut out for the job. “We have a quota to meet kid, and I can’t cut anyone any slack.”
Back on Earth, I was an English major, and it was a widespread joke that people like me who majored in English wouldn’t have any job opportunities when they graduated and would end up unemployed.
A cruel irony, then, that even in this other world where lizardmen and magic existed, there was still no gainful employment for an English major.
One night, it rained so heavily that I couldn’t find shelter elsewhere and was forced to sleep in an inn. Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to sleep on a bed for once, but I had to spend almost half of the money I had at that point even though it was very obviously a low-class inn. I spent the day after scratching myself constantly as the mattresses seemed to have been full of bedbugs.
My funds were slowly but surely evaporating, and there were several days where I couldn’t even find the chance to do even basic menial chores to get something out of the day. It wasn’t like LinkedIn existed in this world, and wandering through the streets asking for work oftentimes yielded nothing.
Because the first question that I was asked was whether I could read and write.
And it wasn’t like it would be easy to learn- the hieroglyphic-like script which was the most prevalent script was so far removed from English I couldn’t see myself mastering it even if I was given five years to do so. And that was assuming someone would be willing to teach me. They didn’t have public school in this world, and if I had the money to hire a tutor I would’ve done something else with the money like open up a cabbage stall. Perhaps I could use some of my knowledge from Earth to invent something useful that didn’t exist yet - but that would require having some money to invest in such a startup.
A week passed. I found myself often, sometimes subconsciously, wandering near the same place where I had come from.
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No luck. No door appeared again. No easy way back home materialized either.
And by then, I had lost all hope of being ‘rescued’ in some way or the other.
However, the next day wasn’t so bad. An old lady had some weeds that needed to be removed, and though the work was a bit dirty and tiring, it was still doable even by someone with my physique, and I was rewarded with some potato stew.
She had actually been kind enough to invite me into her home when I was done with the job. Most people would offer me work, but they wouldn’t let me inside their houses.
At this point, I very much looked the part of a homeless man - no shoes, hadn’t showered in a week, hadn’t combed my hair, dirt all over my face, etc. It was no wonder that people didn’t want me to come inside their houses, now that I thought about it. Aside from that time I had been at that inn, I hadn’t been inside a building before.
It looked like it had been a fine place at one time, but had clearly been neglected as there were signs that some areas hadn’t been cleaned in a few weeks. More likely than not, the old lady who owned the place was getting on in years and had trouble keeping up with the place.
“How was the stew?” she asked.
“Oh, very nice,” I told her. Now that my bowl was empty, I made to get up and leave.
“Sit a while longer, won’t you dear? Hardly anyone comes by here anymore,” she said, tugging on my sleeve. I obliged, given I really had nothing else to do as she went into a brief story of her life. Her husband had passed away five years earlier, and she had no children. Her relatives all lived far away, and so she spent her days taking care of the house as best as she could. “But it never gets easier, you know?”
She then got up to take out an incense stick, which she lit before a statue of an owl with four heads - all of which were pointed in different directions. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d have to say that it was made to imply that it was looking north, south, east, and west all at once.
It was the first time I had seen any kind of religious activity in this world, and I didn’t want to offend her by asking something very basic - still, perhaps she would forgive me as an ignorant foreigner if it really came down to it? And if I didn’t ask, I wouldn’t know.
“Sorry for asking, but who are you praying to?”
She did not immediately answer as she bowed her head before the statue, and I realized that she was still in the middle of her worship, so I kept my trap shut. Regardless of what world you lived in, that much was common sense. Four minutes later, she finished, walked back to her seat, and said, “I was offering my respects to Uluka.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The mount of Serragnin,” she said, with an air of ‘that should be obvious’ to it. Unfortunately, I had no idea what that meant, even if it was obvious to her.
“Who… is Serragnin?” I asked her.
She looked at me as if I had made a terrible joke, and then, on realizing that I was serious, widened her eyes. “Are… are you serious, child? What kind of backwater do you come from? Or is Serragnin known by some other name where you come from?”