“Oh, I’m already at Rank Two,” Rob replied. “Only thing is that I don’t know much Rank Two grimoires, but I wanted to refine my Rank One repertoire, you see.”
“Right, right,” I said. So he would likely only be interested in Sonnet 95 then.
As for the rest of my coworkers, I really only exchanged a few words with them. None of them were cold or overtly mean or anything along those lines, but there was still an air of awkwardness whenever I talked to them. I think some of them hadn’t had a real conversation with a human before that lasted longer than a minute.
Take, for example, Rose, which once again, wasn’t her real name - it wasn’t even close to how she pronounced her name, but I decided to call her that because of her pink scales that really made her stand out, as I hadn’t seen many lizardmen with that color of scales.
I think she was younger than the others, as she was only Rank One like me, and also her mannerisms seemed to indicate that she was as awkward talking to me as I was with her. She asked me a few of the standard questions, where I came from, etc. but what made her stand out at first was that she seemed to be genuinely interested in those things.
The conversation with her ended up turning towards my family, and ultimately Cheddar. While I had been in a bit of a good mood up till then because my efforts at reaching out to my coworkers seemed to be going well, but the more I spoke about Cheddar the more I ended up missing him. It ended up with me not wanting to talk about him any more and just trailing off into silence.
“Ah, I see,” she said. “So Cheddar was your pet?”
“Yes, the best dog a man could ask for,” I said.
“What’s a dog?” she asked.
I chuckled lightly, and it wasn’t until she asked me what was so funny that I realized that she wasn’t joking. There was no way that she could be serious!
But then again, it occurred to me that there might be some sort of language barrier even with the strange magic in the air that translated words for people. “A dog is a four-legged animal, you know, with-” I then stopped mid-sentence as I realized something.
I had been on the streets of Arconia for some time, wandering around the place for over a week, but I never remembered seeing a single stray dog or even someone walking one. I doubted Animal Control was as effective in this place as it was back home, and there should have been strays walking all around the place.
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Unless they didn’t exist at all.
“So, they’re like wolves, but tame,” I told her. She didn’t seem to have heard of anything like that, though she had heard of wolves and how dangerous they were - and it struck me that humanity might have never domesticated dogs from wolves in this world.
“Wait, where are you going?” Rose asked.
I was nearly halfway to the door, determined to go find a pack of wolves and breed a line of dogs from them, but then I remembered what my current position was and I stopped mid-step. As it was, I already had a dog and didn’t want to replace him, but if I couldn’t get back home, the least I could do was create dogs in this world. “Uh, sorry, lost my train of thought there for a moment.”
“You and Cheddar were quite close, it seems,” Rose said.
“Yeah,” I said. I told her some stories about Cheddar and I - how he had been a gift for my fourteenth birthday as a small puppy, how he liked to accompany me whenever I went cycling outside, how he absolutely hated the sound of the vacuum cleaner…
…how he was the best dog in the world, just like all dogs were.
I wiped away some of the tears forming at the corner of my eyes. I couldn’t break down, not where I worked, I told myself. Rose was still listening eagerly, though I was sure she hadn’t understood half of what I had said. “Ah, sorry, I just got a bit emotional is all remembering him.”
“No, no, I understand,” she said. “I have a pet too, an axolotl.” I had seen many people with axolotls as pets, so they seemed to be quite popular.
She told me about her pet then, about the kind of food he liked, the exact temperature of water that was best for him, and the tiny scarf she had gotten him last month.
“He sounds wonderful,” I told her.
“Thank you,” Rose said.
After that we had to return to work, however, that turned out to not be the end of that conversation.
The next day, after work, while we were tidying up, Rose approached me excitedly. I saw her tail moving frantically behind her - I had figured out by now that lizardmen’s tails tended to do that much like with dogs, though they also did so when angry, or excited, or experiencing any kind of strong emotion, so it wasn’t as useful a tell with them.
“Hey, how are things?” I asked her.
“Great, and thanks to you, I managed to do this,” she said, holding up a piece of paper. I couldn’t recognize the letters, of course, but it had the faint green glow of a finished grimoire. “Listening to you inspired me to try to make my own grimoire, and it worked!” She had a lot of excitement in her voice, which I couldn’t really understand. I did that a lot of the time - last night I had managed to make a grimoire for [Create Flame] after all.
“So, is this the first grimoire you’ve made?” I asked her.
“Yes, and it was successful!” she said. I didn’t want to express anything negative and put a damper on her mood. “And, just as thanks, I wanted you to have a copy!”