Today’s Earth date: August 12, 1991

Happy birthday, mom. Writing this down here so I can prove I didn’t forget.

Did some talking to the scholars, and it sounds like this Hero thing will take about a year, so I might be back in time to celebrate your next birthday.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

***

Barry wasn’t Hemingway by any stretch, but the little bit of coaching he received on prewriting techniques and essay structure delivered a noticeable improvement. Before, he struggled to put any words on paper, trying to compose his argument entirely in his mind before committing quill to ink. As Wayne suspected, the boy was plenty smart but needed help getting started.

“Think we’ll see each other in the Capital?” Barry asked.

Wayne shook his head. “I’m going to be traveling for a while, a long while really. I can try to track you down when I get back, though.”

That was not the answer Barry wanted to hear, but he accepted it all the same. “My dad said I can ride up to the Capital for the delivery.”

“Oh? There you go. That’s plenty of time to ask me anything you want about the city.”

Barry seemed to accept his consolation prize but was still intent on doing anything but revising his essay. He asked if Wayne ever fought bandits on the road. Wayne said he hadn’t.

“But you’ve fought orcs, goblins, and rattlins?”

Wayne said that was correct.

“Never killed a person, though?”

The bluntness of the question caught Wayne off guard. “I’ve not killed anyone, no. I’d rather keep it that way.”

“But you could if you needed to?”

“Where’s this coming from?” Wayne asked.

Barry hesitated and said, “I’ve always got someone watching after me, but someday I won’t, right? What do I do then?”

“You talk to your dad about any of this?”

Barry shook his head.

“I’ve got a friend at the Fighter’s Guild. His name is Rush. Maybe ask your dad about taking some lessons?”

“Think he’d allow that?”

Wayne shrugged. “I don’t know your dad all that well, but I do know lots of people take lessons with Rush for the same reasons you want to. I’m one of them. Seems pretty normal to me.”

“I wish you were going to be there.”

With some deliberation, Wayne decided he could guarantee the next promise if he sealed the deal with a few bottles of wine: “My best friend works at the Library too. His name is Fergus. If you get in a bind, go see him and tell him I sent you. He’ll do what he can to help.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’ll give him a warning. He can be a bit cranky, though, so only bother him if it’s an emergency.”

“Thank you, Mr. Wayne.”

The rest of their final lesson was as exciting as a tutoring session on composition could be, which is to say not very exciting at all. Wayne reserved the last thirty minutes or so for review, going back over the major ideas they covered in their time together. To wrap up, he asked if Barry had any more questions they hadn’t covered. For his part, Wayne was happy to spend another hour with the boy if he needed it.

“What was your world like?” Barry asked.

Wayne had meant questions about school or the Capital, but he hadn't stipulated such. He thought for a moment and answered, “Do you read many story books?”

Barry said sure, a few.

“Have you ever listened to two people talk about a story you haven’t read? They mention names you don’t recognize and allude to events you have no knowledge of. Know what I mean?”

“I think so.”

“Explaining my world is kind of like that,” Wayne said. “So much is different that I’m never really sure where to start… Ah, this one wound Fergus up pretty good. There are over 8 billion people in my world.”

“Billion? What's that?”

“Billion is what comes after million. Imagine you made 100,000 gold a day. You would need 80,000 days to reach 8 billion.”

“What?”

Wayne nodded. “There are about 30,000 people living in the Capital to help put that into perspective.”

“Wow.”

“Even with that many people, though, they’re all still people. Not that much different from the people here, all things considered. Some people are good. Some people are bad. They have jobs, they have goals, they get into fights, they explore, they invent.”

“What are your Chosen Heroes like?”

Wayne laughed. “We don’t have those. No magic or Diary of the Gods either.”

“Would I like it there?”

“That depends. Do you like this world?”

Barry shrugged. “Some parts, I guess.”

“Yeah, it’s the same where I’m from. I’m sure there’s plenty you’d like and plenty you wouldn’t.”

“I don’t think I’d miss this world if I left.”

Wayne admitted he used to think the same way, but leaving Earth behind changed his perspective. “I think I spent so much time wishing things were different that I missed out on a lot of what my world had to offer. I’m trying to not make that same mistake here.”

“Really?”

“Yep, and I regret it. Be careful you don’t fall into the same trap. We can talk more on the ride to the Capital.”

***

“How’s that fit? Still tight in the chest?”

Wayne listened to the dull creaking of his new leather armor. He felt more comfortable in it now with the alterations complete, and the farmer’s daughter was pleased to hear he was satisfied.

“It’ll get less stiff once you work it in. If you keep it clean and oil it regularly, it’ll last a while too.”

He thanked her for the excellent work and gave her a pouch of gold–his best estimate of what he would have paid for the armor in the Capital plus a little extra in case his math was off. “See any more goblins around the farm?”

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She shook her head. “Not a hint. We made some gold from the goblin ears too. My dad said to ask if you wanted it since it’s technically yours.”

“No, that’s okay. Your family has done more than enough to repay me.”

The farmer’s daughter ran a hand through her hair, tucking it behind her ear. She shifted nervously and seemed to brace herself. “Can I ask you something?”

Wayne had a bad feeling, but he said sure.

“Do you think the men at the Capital would want to be with someone like me? Like a knight or a merchant or a noble. Someone respectable and important.”

His niece asked him a similar question when she was fourteen. She had just broken up with her first boyfriend, and he went on a social media spree, saying any mean thing he could think of. She was devastated and embarrassed, and she begged her parents to let her stay home from school. To her, that breakup meant no one would ever be interested in her again.

In his mind, Wayne wondered why he had become the go-to man for young adult advice.

“Your family sells what you grow, right? When you go to the market, do you have an idea of what you want to sell for, or do you let customers decide what they pay?”

“We decide, but people haggle a lot.”

“And there’s nothing wrong with haggling if you walk away happy, but my point is that you know what your harvest is worth. If someone wants to lowball you, you move on to the next customer, someone who actually understands and respects the value of what you have to offer.”

She said she understood.

“Just because someone is successful doesn’t mean they’ll be a good partner,” he cautioned. “That might be worth keeping in mind too.”

“You must have had many lovers in this world and in yours.”

Wayne laughed. Hard. “Absolutely not,” he said.

***

The ride from Taobh back to the Capital went quickly with Barry asking every question he could think of. The road was busier than it was on his way down, making an armed escort feel superfluous, but Wayne could appreciate a business owner wanting a bit more assurance that his product got to market.

Once they were inside the city walls, Wayne thanked Barry and his father for the ride and left them to their business. Though he had done his best not to think about the catalog page, his whole body bounced with anticipation not ten minutes into the wagon ride. He was dying to get home and circle his next two games and unlock new abilities. Hopefully. If unlocks were limited by page, he was out of luck.

Discovering that system progress was addictive did not surprise Wayne. He treasured the hit of dopamine he got when one of his RPG characters leveled up or discovered a new item, but he was unprepared for how it felt to improve himself instead of an avatar. If leveling up a character in a video game was a static shock, then leveling up with the system was like sticking a fork in an outlet.

His apartment was as he left it, a single small room in a building the Royal Library owned. Students typically stayed there during their studies, as did visiting scholars or guests of the Library. The accommodations weren’t grand, but they were nicer than his college dorm room had been.

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and fished his second catalog page from where he hid it between two notebooks.

His hand already starting to shake, he circled Spellcasting 101 and Lightspeed. Where his previous attempt to acquire the games failed, they now succeeded, suggesting that he was right about the system capping how many games he could add with each level. Learning more about how Christmas List worked was exciting, but the min-maxer in him worried that the two games per level rule was fixed, rather than cumulative.

If it was fixed and he didn’t find another catalog page, he could level up multiple times without adding a new game, wasting those upgrade opportunities.

But for now, he had new games to explore. He opened his system.

Spellcasting 101 added a new spell to his menu:

Nee – Create a shrubbery.

“Huh? That’s bullshit.”

Adventure games from the 1990s followed an unspoken law that no story was complete without a Monty Python reference. He was as much of a fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail as any other person, and he liked inside jokes too, but why couldn’t this game allude to the Holy Hand Grenade instead?

The skill he got from Lightspeed, a game about stealth jets from the future, wasn’t thrilling but sounded useful:

Probe – You can launch a probe which explores the system and discovers where resources exist.

As always, he wanted to test his new abilities right there in his apartment, but he had seen with previous abilities that descriptions were not always perfectly accurate. He'd prefer to test outside. Most of the day had passed, however, and he worried that by the time he got through the city gate again, it would be dark.

If testing had to wait for tomorrow, he might as well enjoy the night. He picked up a bottle of wine and went to tell Fergus the delivery was complete.

***

As soon as Fergus said, “Thank you,” Wayne felt a phantom vibration.

“What is it?” Fergus asked, seeing Wayne’s demeanor change.

“I think the system rewarded me for doing that delivery,” Wayne said as he opened his system. “Wow, yeah, that must be it. I have a new skill.”

“What’d you get?”

Wayne read the name and description to Fergus: “Station Improvement, Goods Storage – Goods warehouses store manufactured goods.”

The new skill was from Railroad Tycoon. Fergus asked what it did.

“I have no idea.”

“So try it.”

“You’re supposed to be the wise one,” Wayne said, laughing. “We could blow ourselves up for all I know.”

“My curiosity is stronger than my good sense,” Fergus said. “Come on. Let’s have it. Entertain an old man and try your new abilities. If not this new one, then another.”

Nee.

A bush the size of a recliner sprouted from Fergus’ wood floor and rapidly grew to its full size.

“Ah, so the description was quite literal,” Fergus said. “What uhh… what would you use that spell for?”

“Other than growing bushes?”

“Correct.”

Wayne shrugged. He had no immediate ideas.

“Well, go on and dispel it.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“I don’t have a spell or ability that lets me do that. I could try casting again, see if it cancels out the first bush.”

Nee.

A second bush sprouted in Fergus’ apartment.

“I told you we shouldn’t have done this indoors,” Wayne said.

Fergus puffed his cheeks and exhaled slowly. “This will be an interesting conversation to have with my landlord,” he said. “Let’s use the alley for the other two.”

The alley between Fergus’ apartment building and the one next door was wide enough for two people to walk side by side, but not wide enough for a wagon. This particular neighborhood was fairly well-to-do, so the alley was relatively clean. Other than a few barrels and a few stray burlap sacks, it was empty.

Probe.

Wayne’s map in his HUD blinked rapidly. After a few seconds, it stopped, covering the map with blobs of blue and yellow.

“What’d it do?” Fergus asked.

“Not sure yet…”

The blobs were so dense and numerous that most of the map was unusable. He zoomed in as far as he could and asked Fergus to walk to the end of the alley. The scholar did as he was asked with minimal grumbling.

With the map zoomed in, he could see a blue dot moving in the direction Fergus walked.

“I think this lets me see people on my map,” Wayne said. The two-dimensional map appeared to treat every resident of the apartment building as a blue dot but compressed them flat. Six floors of homes made for a sizable blue blob.

The ability referenced finding “resources” in its description, but he couldn’t immediately find what real-world items were associated with the yellow dots.

“That sounds handy if danger is about,” Fergus observed. Wayne agreed.

He activated his final new ability.

Goods Storage.

A layer of reality rolled upward like it were a garage door, revealing an empty stone room.

“Well, I’ll be…” Fergus said, walking around the portal. Though he could see into the stone room from the front, the room disappeared entirely when he attempted to walk “behind” it. “This is like the bottomless backpack, but much larger.”

The bottomless backpack was essentially a bag of holding, a container that allowed its user to store an impossible quantity, weight, and size of items. Only Chosen Heroes could use them. From the outside, the backpack looked like any other backpack, disguising the interdimensional storage within. Most RPGs operated with a similar principle, preferring to make inventories capable of holding an unlimited variety of items, but no more than 99 of each.

The storage unit looked like it was somewhere around 10 feet by 20 feet. Neither Wayne nor Fergus were willing to walk inside of it.

“When your best friend got stranded here from another world, I guess it makes you a bit suspicious about portals and such,” Fergus said, not even daring to poke his head over the threshold.

“Sounds like we have some experiments to run,” Wayne said.

“Tell you what,” Fergus began, “I’ll write up what we should test if you clean up the bushes in my kitchen.”