Today’s Earth date: August 11, 1991

At the end of the month, we’ll go to Teagaisg, get some more training, and then make the trek to the Water Temple.

Apparently the demons get stronger the longer they are in this world. The demons arrived when we did, and they level at a similar pace. If we keep a good travel speed, we should be strong enough to defeat each temple. The demons will be stronger, but so will we.

I asked if we’d have soldiers supporting us. We won’t. Only people from our world can enter the Temple, and since the demons are in there getting stronger, we have to do it by ourselves. I’m feeling pretty strong, but it would be way more comforting to have six Heroes instead of our four.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

***

Dropping the book off at Taobh’s one-room library was a brief affair, barely more complicated than returning books to a public library in his world. With his delivery quest complete, Wayne looked around for lodging, finding that Big Benny’s was a few buildings down from the library.

Taobh wasn't large enough for two taverns. Their respective seating far outnumbered the total buildings in and round town, and the streets were quiet. However, the people here loved their ale it seemed, and visitors made the trip down to get away from the Capital, but still. They couldn’t be making enough to justify their costs.

Or maybe margins were better in this world somehow.

Margins? His sword shot balls of ice, and Wayne was thinking about margins. Was he going to sit down and whip up a burn rate estimate just for fun?

Embarrassing.

Big Benny's had a handful of regulars. Three sat at the bar, and four were in the corner playing a card game. All were men, farmhands most likely, judging by their boots and their leathery tans.

Wayne approached the bar, said who sent him, and asked for Benny.

Benny was the skinniest human Wayne had seen in this world. He reminded Wayne of these little crude but posable stick figure warriors he made out of paperclips and glue as a kid. His teacher found the production operation in his desk–several pools of drying glue–and put an end to that.

“Can't complain about more dead goblins, but I'm not sure I know of anything else that needs killing,” Benny said. “Could probably find some merchants looking for travel escorts.”

“Anything local?”

“Got any other demands? Maybe they give you an assistant and a massage too?” Benny grinned.

Wayne laughed. “Okay, fair. I appreciate your time. I would take a drink and a room if you have them.”

Benny pointed at Wayne and winked. He pulled a mug from over the bar and walked to the taps at the other end of the counter.

“Rattlins and goblins huh?” A pudgy man at the bar said, leaning over. “Ever get tired of it?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Killing goblins seems like a tough way to make a living is all.”

“Oh, this is new for me.”

“What were you doing before?”

“I worked, well, I still work at the Royal Library.”

The pudgy man raised a bushy eyebrow.

“I'm serious. Made scholar last month, actually.”

Holding a sideways glance, the man took a long drink from his mug. He set it down and released a satisfied sigh. “You're saying you're kind of smart then?”

“I wouldn't go that far.”

“My boy wants to study at the Capital, but he struggles with the writing part. I don't know anything about that though, so I can't help him. Think you could?”

Wayne thought. “Like a tutor?”

“Sure. You ever do something like that?”

He had, actually, back in graduate school.

The man stuck out a hand for a shake, “I’ll cover your room tonight and see you tomorrow?”

Wayne agreed.

***

If thinking about profit margins post-Isekai was lame, where did becoming a tutor rate?

The man Wayne met at the tavern owned and operated a large apple orchard crawling with activity. Cabins-for-the-workers-on-the-property large.

The house on the orchard grounds had two stories and was significantly bigger than the farmhouses Wayne had stayed thus far. He sat in a firstfloor study with a fifteen year old boy, who stared at blank paper intensely with a quill in his hand. This was their second lesson, and Wayne’s eyes were heavy with sleep. Last night, the couple in the room next to him at the tavern sounded like a dying horse jumping up and down in mud, and they had stamina.

Like them, Wayne barely slept.

Wayne’s student was named Barry, and he was a little pudgy like his father. A touch awkward and incredibly shy, but he was amiable. He listened when Wayne talked and seemed to put effort into learning–even if he hated every minute of it.

Wayne wasn't having a rollicking good time either, but teaching the five paragraph essay made him oddly nostalgic for Earth. For cinder block walls and lockers slamming. For morning announcements and pizza day at the cafeteria.

That was doubly weird because he didn't have a particular fondness for his high school years.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Wayne, but I hate this.”

“Yeah, it sucks. You're getting it though. I think that's enough for today. You can use the extra time to get your next draft going. We'll dig into it tomorrow.”

Barry nodded. “Will I like the Capital?” he asked after gathering the courage.

“Haven't you been?”

“Never for that long.”

“Which parts worry you?”

Barry stared quietly at his desk for some time. “All of it, I guess.”

Wayne gently pressed Barry to be more specific, promising to share what he knew about any part of living in the Capital.

“It's really big.”

Wayne agreed. “You don't have to learn the whole city, though, just the neighborhood around your school. I can't think of a reason why you'd have to go across the city. Wanting to is fine, lots to see and all, but how much you explore is up to you.”

“Even that's bigger than Taobh.”

“It is, and I don't blame you for being intimidated. You're worried about being late and embarrassing yourself by getting lost?”

“Yes.”

“Know what I do? I leave obnoxiously early, like two hours before I need to, but I really like scoping out the route the day before if I can. If I screw it up and get lost, it doesn't matter because I have a whole day to figure it out.”

Barry thought. “Won't other people think that's weird?”

“I promise you no one will care enough to notice.”

Barry seemed swayed but not entirely convinced. “The Capital is loud.”

“You got me there.” The Capital was loud as hell, but not with traffic or rogue car alarms, so for Wayne, that made adjusting a bit easier. “You’d be surprised how well you can adapt. It might take you a bit, but your brain will learn to tune it out. Kind of like you don't hear the sound of your own breathing.”

Barry thought for a moment and then looked distressed. “Well I can now!”

Wayne laughed.

“How do you make it stop?”

“If you think that's bad, wait until you realize you are breathing automatically.”

“Mr. Wayne!” Barry's eyes darted around the room in panic as he made the conscious decision to breathe in and then out.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Wayne hadn't meant for the joke to become that distressing. “Lots of beautiful people in the Capital if you're interested in romance.”

Barry looked at Wayne seriously. “The last time my dad took me I saw this girl that was so beautiful I thought I was going to die.”

Wayne chuckled and patted Barry on the back. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

On his way down the wagon path that led to the road, he passed Barry's father. He was walking the orchards, giving instructions to one of his farmhands about what to prune. When he saw Wayne, he excused himself and walked down the row to offer a greeting.

“Be honest with me. How's he fairing?”

“He's doing fine. Kid is pretty sharp. He just needed a better process is all.”

The father shook his hand. “I'm very grateful. Now, I don't want to interrupt Barry's lessons, but a pretty young lady was asking for you at Benny's.”

Wayne's first thought was that his armor was done early. Doing odd jobs in Taobh was fine, but he wanted his real adventure to begin. When the armor was complete, he could get back to the Capital and then pick up the path of the Chosen Heroes.

“Before you go chasing skirts, I got one more piece of business for you,” the man said. “The guys I use for security are a man short, and I really don't want to leave good apples sit. Want to get them off to the Capital as soon as they're off the tree if I can.”

Wayne said he had to stay in town for a bit yet.

“Don't need to leave today. Three days from now.”

“Does security walk or ride the wagons?”

“Ride, of course.”

That beat walking. “I'm waiting on a suit of armor. Let me check in on that and get back to you?”

“By all means.”

Wayne thanked his patron and enjoyed a cool valley breeze on his walk back to Benny's.

The old man and his grandson had told him that Benny's was the better of two taverns, and it wasn't all that bad. He wasn't swiping in and out of his room with a plastic card and enjoying a warm continental breakfast, but the food was passable and his mattress was acceptable.

Before Wayne could get up the stairs to his room, Benny called for him from the bar.

“Folks been saying they recognize you,” Benny said. “Well? Is it true? Are you really the Zero Hero?”

Wayne sighed. This hadn't happened for a while, long enough for him to forget how much he hated the nickname and the attention. He said that yes, that was him.

“And you really didn't get any of the Hero blessings?”

“It's happened twice before, apparently.”

“Damn,” Benny said, shaking his head. “That's a hell of thing. Buddy of mine took a bull horn through his pouch, so I have an idea of what you're going through.”

“I'm not sure what you think happened to me, but I can–”

“Wayne, hi!” The farmer's daughter sat at a table, waving. She had a set of leather armor bundled with twine sitting on the chair next to her.

Wayne excused himself from his pouch conversation with Benny.

After a small disagreement about where to do the final fitting–she said his room would be fine, and he said absolutely not–he tried on the armor right there in the tavern, pulling it on over his travel clothes.

At one point in his previous life, he made the regrettable decision to try wearing black leather pants. He wanted to be a rockstar, tough, edgy. Instead, he had worried he cut off the blood flow to his groin and panicked trying to peel the pants off of his body. He didn't have a frame of reference for how armor should fit, so he checked the range of motion as best he could, surprised to find it was quite flexible. Leather greeves were different from rockstar pants, it seemed.

“It feels a little tight across the chest,” Wayne said. “Otherwise, this is impressive. I don’t feel like I did enough to earn something this nice.”

“Keeping us alive feels like a lot to me,” she said.

“How about you give me one piece of the armor for free, and I pay for the rest?”

“My dad would be pretty mad if I did that.”

“I’m going to insist on it,” Wayne said. “If you want, I can speak to him directly.”

She said no, that was okay. She’d accept his generosity.

“Want me to walk you back? It’s getting dark.”

“My aunt lives in town,” she assured him. “I’m staying with her and going back in the morning.”

With the last of her assessments and measurements complete, she estimated she’d need another two days at most. She rebundled the armor and departed, leaving Wayne at a table by himself. He looked around the tavern, seeing a few of what he had come to know as the regulars. He hadn’t met them, but he recognized their faces. The night was young, and he wasn’t quite ready to sleep. He drummed his fingers on the table as he thought about what to do.

“Zero Hero?” Benny said as he approached Wayne’s table with a mug. “Boys wanted to send the celebrity a drink.” He pointed to three men sitting around a table with cards between them. They dressed well for the countryside, but their complexions betrayed that they had worked their way up, working hard as young men to earn what they had now, like an apprentice eventually becoming foreman after decades of labor.

“Wanna play a game of Three Hooves?” a man with a silver mustache called from the table.

Wayne approached and thanked them for the drink. “I’ve never played,” he admitted.

They offered to teach him, and he happily accepted.

The game felt vaguely like euchre from his world. Three Hooves was played with forty cards of four suits. One player was the “banker” and the other three players worked against the banker to win rounds, or “tricks.” Players had to match the suit of the round, playing progressively higher and higher cards. The rules felt fairly convoluted, but then again, he played Magic: The Gathering as a kid. He didn’t have room to judge a world for having a complicated card game.

He felt like he was getting the hang of it, but as his experience with the game improved, his sobriety worsened. Though his new friends took the game seriously, their ultimate goal also seemed to be to get drunk. They got rowdier with each round, but their tone felt more LAN party than frat boy, like goofy faux competitiveness amongst friends.

In the middle of a trick, the other three players stopped play and watched a man and a woman enter the tavern and head upstairs to their room. They dressed in fine garments with gold stitching, brass toggles, and polished shoes. The woman led, pulling her man’s hand along behind her. Half the tavern watched in silence and then looked at Benny when the couple had gone.

“Yeah, that’s them,” he said.

“Them?” Wayne asked.

“Visitors from the Capital,” silver mustache said. “Guards got called to their room last night. The noises were… Can’t find the words, but I think that’s for the best. I don’t think I want to know how you get a body to make a sound like that.”

“Oh, I heard them. My room is next door.”

“Benny!” the man yelled. “Get this poor lad another mug.”

When Benny delivered the ale, he informed Wayne of his no-refund policy for room rentals. But if they kept it up all night again Benny intended to kick them out. He needed sleep too, you know.

“Alright, Zero Hero,” silver mustache said, wrapping an arm around Wayne. “We need answers. We have important questions.”

Wayne had drank to the point that his blinks happened in slow motion, sometimes taking four full seconds to close and open again. He swayed in his seat like a tree in the breeze. “Do your worst.”

The men laughed. “Were you a warrior in your world?”

“Not remotely.”

“Do you have a… you know…” They gestured at his crotch.

“A penis? Yes, I have a penis.”

“We heard Heroes didn’t have anything down there.”

“Okay, but I do.”

The men talked amongst themselves for a moment, whispering back and forth. “Do you talk to the gods?”

“Not even once.”

“Do you go back to your world when you sleep?”

“No.”

“Is it true you didn’t get a Diary?” They were referring to the system, the Diary of the Gods.

“I got it, but it didn’t work.”

The silver mustache raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t?”

“It’s complicated, but I kind of have abilities now. Kind of.”

The men asked him to clarify what he meant by “kind of.”

Wayne explained how the Chosen Heroes fit specific archetypes or categories of abilities, like the Rogue, the Paladin, the Healer, and so forth. None of that was new knowledge to the men at the tavern as it was well documented in histories and folk tales.

“I don’t have anything like that, and my body is just a normal human body.”

“But you have abilities?”

Wayne nodded.

“Show us something?”

“I don’t know…”

“Don’t worry yourself, lad. It’s okay. We can return to the game if you’d rather do that.”

So they did, but the drinks kept flowing. Soon, the game of Three Hooves turned to a simple bluffing game of who had the highest card. Wayne wasn’t very impressed with that drinking game, so he taught them one from his world: Quarters. Or gold pieces, he guessed would be more accurate here, but nevermind the name for now.

The goal of the game was to bounce coins into a glass. They split into pairs, and when one pair got a coin in the glass, the other pair had to drink.

Wayne’s favorite part of drinking games was that he was objectively terrible at all of them.

Soon, the drink claimed much of his fine motor skills. He wasn’t fall-over drunk, but if three people were between him and where he wanted to go, he would find a way to bump into each and every one of them. That kind of drunk.

“Okay, guys,” Wayne said, pointing needlessly to emphasize his words. “We’re friends. I’ll show you some Zero Hero magic.”

Benny yelled across the tavern, “Don’t go trashing my place.”

That meant no casting Missile or using Sword of Water. Wayne looked through his abilities and found one he could use safely indoors.

He activated and deactivated the Light spell, like he was flipping a light switch on and off. The men stared dumbly at the light emanating from Wayne’s forehead like a dull flashlight.

“Is this a healing light? Some kind of blessing?” silver mustache asked.

“Nope. Just light.”

The men looked at each other, unimpressed and disappointed.

“The cool stuff is all dangerous… Wait. Okay. I got one.” Wayne stood, looked around the tavern, and carefully picked a place to stand, looking up at the ceiling as he did.

“What’s this one?”

“My room is right above me,” Wayne said. “I’m going to pop up there and grab something.”

With a big grin, he opened his system menu.

Rise.

As the spell promised, he teleported up a floor. That part went according to plan, but he was very much mistaken about the location of his room.

He did not teleport to his own quarters.

Instead, he appeared in a dark room and was immediately overwhelmed by a musty smell, the bass of flesh slapping against flesh, and what sounded like a lamb holding an endless bleat. He couldn’t see anything, which was a blessing in retrospect. Disoriented, he stepped forward to find his way out and slipped. He never learned what he slipped in or why it had the consistency of pond slime. The important thing was that he realized where he was and what was happening. He was close enough to the happening that a foot bounced off his back over and over.

He panicked.

Rise.

Wayne appeared on the tavern roof, a fact that took him a moment to discern, the darkness of night disorienting him anew. He sprawled flat to keep from falling off or through. Once he finished wishing for a “Descend” ability or a featherfall spell, he accepted he had to get down on his own.