We’re arguing again.
The cultists had simple terms: We leave the forest immediately and inform Cuan that the Underway Forest is off limits. We do that, and no more fighting.
Releasing the hostage wasn’t an option. No matter how we tried to approach it, they shut it down without even looking at one another to discuss our offer.
Wilmond thinks we should take the offer back to Cuan to let them decide. If the undead army we saw went after the city, thousands of people would suffer. Their lives against one hostage… Seemed worth considering to him.
Rathain and I didn’t agree with leaving in the end. What kind of Heroes would give up on rescuing an innocent girl?
-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin
***
The morning after their return to Lord Amethyst’s guest house, Wayne was the last to wake up. By the time he came down the stairs, everyone was gone.
He wanted to do this with Fergus, but oh well.
Goods Storage.
Wayne grabbed Page 39 and sat at the kitchen table. He had two slots open now that he was level 8, but he had only one item to activate with Christmas List. The fear of wasting slots by leveling before he had more Pages of Power returned. If they could locate the ruins from Lord Blackwell’s research, he would almost certainly level up again, and they weren’t near any new pages that he knew of.
He circled Quicken.
He got this passive skill:
Investment Account – A Quicken investment account is similar to a Quicken bank account but with additional features.
“Bank” appeared on his system menu, and he clicked into it, he saw his balance (at zero, currently), and he could choose to withdraw, to deposit, or to look at previous transactions. Quicken was still a lame ass thing to put in a Christmas Catalog, but this looked like it could be useful. He looked forward to figuring it out.
The feeling that something wasn’t right came over him. What was wrong with this scene? What was he missing? He looked around without standing, trying to put his finger on it.
“Ah, it’s quiet.”
This was the first time in almost two weeks that his party wasn’t with him. Fergus wasn’t babbling trivia. Hector wasn’t burping the alphabet. Armond wasn’t telling a war story. Margo wasn’t asking questions about all the cities she hadn’t visited. And Sammy wasn’t popping up to tell the party what was for dinner with the aplomb of a high end maitre d. Wayne even missed Outlawson, but that was easy enough to remedy.
Savoring the slowness of the day, Wayne got ready and went to visit the Governor.
***
“Your friend is not with you?” The Governor asked, entering the study. Wayne stood out of respect and was promptly waved down.
“He’s on ‘shore leave’ so to speak. My team needs a break.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but may we cut to the matter at hand?”
“Right, your son. Apoologies.” Wayne handed the Governer a letter with the Asplugha’s Mayor seal pressed into its wax. “He’s alive. Been through hell and will need a lot of time to recover, but the worst of it is behind him.”
The whole of the Governor’s body seemed to relax, like he had been suspended by strings and news of his son cut him loose. He held his response and read the Mayor’s letter.
“Am I reading this correctly? It says the other lost workers were eaten.”
Wayne said it was. “Fergus, my scholar friend, thinks it’s because the den mother needed noble blood for spells.”
The Governor winced. “Is that why the rats attacked the camp?”
“The rats were there for a long time. We found how they got in, and based on what we saw inside… yeah, the nest was probably there before your son thought about joining a dig.”
“That is an odd comfort. He will hate himself for this no matter what I tell him, but perhaps that will help.”
“Survivor’s guilt?” Wayne asked.
The Governor nodded. “He never wants to bother anyone, and wants to hurt people even less.”
“I’m sorry. That does sound hard.”
“Yes, he will endure,” the Governor said resolutely. “Thank you for this kindness. I would be happy to compensate you for the effort.”
“May I make a request?”
The man said yes.
“I have a research project in the Underway Mountains. As a scholar, I’d love to have access to the sources that aren’t in the public libraries.”
With an eyebrow raised, the Governer responded, “Such as?”
“Honestly? Everything, no matter how banal or inconsequential. That’s the only way to dumb into something I didn’t think to seek out. As for things I can think of: topographical maps, surveys, military reports, monster sightings. If it involves the Underway Mountains, I’d like to see it.”
“Not a small request.”
“I know. It’s not a small project.”
Stolen story; please report.
The Governor’s lips cracked a small smile at that response. “May involve sensitive information as well.”
“I’m a Royal Scholar. My integrity is just as important as my methods. I would not publish anything you shared with me in confidence.”
“That sounds rehearsed.”
Wayne laughed. “It sort of is. Your exact concern comes up in interviews all the time.”
“A Royal Scholar and the Zero Hero. Permission granted for you and your friend under the assumption of discretion and confidence. Speak with my assistant outside, and he’ll coordinate it for you.”
“Thank you, kindly.”
***
Ms. Galleia of the Swiftwood Trading Company was pleased with her letter as well. While she read it, Wayne opened a document with his HUD to take notes as they talked. When she finished, Ms. Galleia said they’d need a few weeks to evaluate the find–not to mention retrieve it–so she couldn’t offer final payment now. She could, however, give him a sizable down payment. Wayne gratefully accepted.
Ms. Galleia knew where he was staying. She promised to send word as soon as she had any. Wayne said that word could be more work if they had it. Galleia didn’t have any right now, but that could change with one letter from Miss Kryss, she said.
With a hefty pouch of gold, his errands were done for the day. Holding the gold in his hand, he accessed the Bank menu on his system and mentally clicked Deposit. The pouch collapsed in on itself in the way that Outlawson did when he was dismissed. Wayne clicked Withdraw, entered a number, and those coins appeared in his hand.
Goods Storage had become their de facto vault, so Fergus and Wayne kept their gold stored in there, lest someone rob them. The Bank menu seemed much easier than having to discretely open a portal to another dimension to pop in and back out every time he spent money.
Pleased, he closed the system and realized he had a rare moment of not having to rush to the next task.
That was concerning. He began this trip with the intention of being more present and doing things for the fun of doing them, with no thoughts of profits or progress. This should not be a rare moment at all. Wayne needed to fix that.
Which he would do after translating the dwarvish he transcribed. He’d have fun doing so, and it just happened to be work.
Ah, fixing that habit would be hard, Wayne realized.
He stopped and forced himself to walk away from the library.
***
Wayne and Fergus often passed their time together with games. This world had a chess-like game with three rows of pieces instead of two. Fergus annihilated Wayne nearly every round, but it was fun trying to learn.
When wine was involved, they moved away from tactics and strategy and just fucked off. One of their favorite distractions: Wayne would think of something weird Earth had that this world did not, and then he’d try to explain it to Fergus. Professional wrestling was surprisingly easy. Articulating what made festivus funny was surprisingly hard. And cryptocurrency was as god awful as he expected it to be.
As he closed in on two hours of how people got rich on bitcoin, Fergus put up a finger. “I have understood exactly none of this.”
And they laughed for five minutes straight. They were a little drunk, but the look of graceful defeat on Fergus’ face left Wayne in hysterics.
Naturally, Wayne had the same reactions as Fergus when he was learning about this world, but Wayne had the advantage of being totally immersed and seeing it with his own eyes.
Reflecting on his friendship with Fergus helped to pass the time in addition to supporting the “stop and smell the roses” philosophy he hoped to adopt, permanently. In that reflection, he thought back to what Laszlo had said about Cuan. The paladin had compared the Cuan beach to Jersey–when his eyes were closed and he wasn’t entirely awake–so Wayne was curious to see it for himself.
Granted, Wayne didn’t visit Jersey until the 00s, so he didn’t have a perfect comparison for Laszlo’s memory of the beach in the late 80s. That was alright, though. The fun of it was more important than the accuracy.
Cuan had two beaches within the walls and several more ran up the coast in either direction. The west beach was closest to the Amethyst estate, so he went to that one out of convenience.
Like many of the oceanfront towns he had visited on earth, a road separated the city from the beach. The closer he was to the ports, the more those oceanfront buildings were businesses and stores, not unlike Seaview Art and Antiquities. As he neared the west wall, those businesses were replaced by opulent houses and condos. Again, like on Earth, a view of the beach was highly coveted and, therefore, pricey.
In the middle of a work day, the white sand beach wasn’t crowded, but it wasn’t deserted either. Several families played with their children or waded into the water to get splashed by waves. He saw many people at the beach alone, kept company by their books. Down the way, a couple walked along hand in hand.
Wayne closed his eyes and listened like Laszlo had. He agreed that happy people at the beach sounded the same in this world, but he didn’t hear a cellphone blasting music, the fart sound of sunscreen leaving its bottle, or the whir of a plane flying by, dragging a banner advertising the best stripclub in town.
He remembered his first college girlfriend inviting him to join her family on vacation. As soon as she heard he had never seen the ocean, she insisted. So he squeezed into a minivan with her, her parents, and her greasy little brother.
They had a bad argument on the boardwalk while they were there. She stepped away to find a bathroom, so he killed time browsing a tourist-trap t-shirt shop. You could have a t-shirt custom printed, right there and now, and a joke with the girl at the register about making dumb t-shirts turned into a conversation.
They talked about nothing but t-shirts in those two or three minutes, but when Wayne turned around, his girlfriend stood there, livid with betrayal. She barely spoke to him for the next two days, which made meals with her family even more awkward.
When they broke up four months later, she cited that girl at the t-shirt shop as one of the reasons. His girlfriend knew that if he hadn’t cheated on her yet, he was about to cheat at any moment. She believed that as fact. Why else would he talk to a Jersey girl with a tongue ring and garter belt tattoos on her thighs?
She became even more enraged when he tried to explain why they were laughing at a Tupac t-shirt on the shop wall, but she wasn’t interested.
Wayne opened his eyes. No garter belt tattoos on this beach.
No bodybuilders or sun-tanners either. And definitely no funnel cake.
God damn did he want some funnel cake. Maybe he could teach Sammy how to make it?
***
Despite his best efforts, Wayne ended up at the library.
He copied down the dwarvish saved in his Documents. He could do all of the translation work within the HUD itself, but then Fergus could neither see it nor contribute. With the text on paper, they could divide and conquer. Wayne did, however, begin transcribing pieces of the library’s book on the dwarvish language. If he had that material in his Documents, he could translate dwarvish in the field more easily.
With the text written down, he started on the side of the cube that had faced the ceiling when they first entered the room. You always read the top of a die first, right?
When he finished, he had small paragraph:
“Skeleton Lord - Exp 8000 - Levels 14 to 16
Summon skeletons, three rounds
Death Rage ability”
Yet another piece of dwarvish that seemed to allude to the system as well as game mechanics. Did the first dwarves and the Chosen Heroes exist at the same time? The current understanding of history was that no, the Chosen Heroes came much later, a byproduct of the gods giving humans the elemental crystals and instructing them to build Temples for each.
That put a gap of a few thousand years between when the first dwarves were believed to have gone extinct and when the system was introduced. Yet, the first dwarves had notes about levels, abilities, and experience points.
Before he left the library for the night, he made a list of questions to answer with Cuan’s private records. The sooner they located the next settlement, the sooner he could explore another dungeon.