The air became colder as the wagon wound its way through the hills towards the distant peaks; Topher shivered, wondering vaguely if they were approaching the planet's polar regions, then whether this planet had a pole, then whether he was currently on a planet at all; giving up, he sighed and bit the bullet. "Tok, since you know I'm an Otherworlder, I guess I can actually ask you this question. What is this world? What can you tell me about it beyond 'You Are Here'?"

The dwarf pondered, giving the reins a flick as he nudged the horse slightly to the left around some debris in the road. "Tough question to answer. It's the world; it is what is. How would you answer that question about your own world?"

Topher sighed. "On my world, that question has a dizzyingly large number of answers. My world is called 'Earth', and it is a large round ball of dirt surrounding a core of molten metal about ten thousand miles in circumference, floating through the airless void of space around a sun millions of miles away which is one of billions and billions of stars in I don't know how many galaxies." He heaved in a breath, stopped, and glanced at Tok, who was staring at him with eyes practically the size of saucers. He sighed again. "Tell me which of those things is shocking you."

"All of 'em," croaked the dwarf woodenly, "but probably top of the list is that you named your world 'Dirt'." He shook his head sadly. "Humans."

"Uh, oh yeah, that too," Topher realized. "We don't have any other races. It's just humans."

"No dwarves? No elves?" Tok seemed to find this almost as amusing as the planet's name. "What about dragons?"

"Nope, just humans. Although sometimes we have very short humans we call 'dwarves', but it's not really the same thing."

"They can't grow beards?" Tok wanted to know.

Topher pondered this. "Some can, I guess, but they're just regular human beards. Not nearly as good as yours." Tok's mouth dropped open; Topher blinked. "What? What did I say?"

The dwarf shook himself. "Nothin'. So, skipping past the part where your world is both boringly named and incredibly racist, what's all that about space and stars? And your world is a ball?"

Topher groaned. "I knew it. This is some kind of flat world, or something. Just tell me it's not being carried around by a turtle."

Tok began to cough, at first hesitantly and then violently; Topher was just about to ask if the dwarf was all right when the coughing transmuted into chuckles, then into laughter, and then into hyperventilating, wheezing giggles. Topher stared, his ears reddening. "Come on. Please tell me it's not that bad."

Eventually, Tok managed to get his mirth under control; between aftershocks of laughter, he informed Topher that the world, which no more had a name than Topher's own universe did, was the sum total of existence in this place; the stars in the sky had been measured by mages with divination spells and found to be made of celestial dew-drops upon a vast web which hung from the great and very solid dome of the sky (though current research had not yet discerned the purpose of the web, nor whether any spider inhabited it). Attempts to tunnel through the sky had not yet been made, but were under consideration, somewhat slowed by the fact that there were only about four mages in the world capable of even attempting the effort and all of them were inundated by other projects competing for their attention. At Topher's bewildered insistence, the dwarf dictated a rough map of the general topology of inhabited land, which Topher did his best to represent in his Ledger; it was depressingly brisk. The land area of the world consisted mostly of one massive supercontinent, surrounded by what was apparently an endless sea; efforts to explore its limits had mostly been hindered by vicious, high-level monsters which became more populous the further one went from land. They were currently on the western part of the continent within the borders of the kingdom of Sheonn (of which Strathmore was the capital); the nation of Thoxen lay to the north, with Pioren split into northern and southern halves on the eastern part of the continent. All three were separated by a large sea from the southern part of the continent (except for a narrow crossing which was supposedly impassably mountainous), which was apparently called "Vorn" and was supposedly some sort of Death Land, with terrifyingly-named sub-areas such as the Lava Mountains and the Swamp of Drowned Men. Beyond Vorn lay the vast, ballooning southern reaches of the Demon King's territory, which Topher just marked with a skull and crossbones since he had no intention of ever going near it anyway. Beyond that, Tok had nothing in particular to relate; the world simply wasn't that complex compared to Topher's.

"So there's no dwarf kingdom, or anything?" Topher pressed. "No elf lands?"

Tok shrugged. "No need for it. We have dwarf cities, sure; the elves have their own places, but they're small. Individual villages, maybe a city or two, but they live in the same kingdoms everybody else does. Why, does your world have separate kingdoms for each group of people?"

"Uhhh..." Topher decided to abandon this line of questioning before it went somewhere uncomfortable. "We're all humans, so all nations are human nations," he hedged, "but that's boring. You're telling me that your sky is a literal dome and your stars are liquid? And also that there might be a giant sky spider?"

Tok chuckled again. "I know this probably sounds insane to you, stretch, but imagine me asking you similar questions about your world in that tone of voice. 'You're seriously telling me your stars are impossibly huge balls of burning gas that exist in an airless void that kills anyone who enters it, but you somehow know what they look like and are made of anyway?'" He smirked. "Between the two of us, which one of us has the more ridiculous cosmology?"

Topher rolled his eyes. "Me, obviously. Let's forget I said anything." He pondered what word in the dwarf's tongue had been translated into "cosmology"; absent a cosmos, it seemed like an odd concept. "Everything about this whole universe is weird to me. The sizes of everything are all wrong; everything's too big for the number of people you have. How many people lived in your hometown?"

"About two hundred," Tok answered calmly, though Topher could tell that the dwarf's eyes became hooded at the thought.

"Right. In my world, the population of my planet alone was something above five billion. We didn't even know if there were other planets out there with life, but the odds made it pretty certain. Large cities on Earth have millions of people in them; even incredibly small towns still have thousands or tens of thousands."

"How tough are your monsters?" asked Tok thoughtfully. "If you had really strong ones, maybe your ancestors tried to make bigger tribes?"

Topher laughed. "We don't have monsters. Or Classes, or Levels, or Statuses. We're just..." he gestured. "Humans. That's it."

Tok gaped. "Fascinating. So your world is completely peaceful?"

Topher winced.

----------------------------------------

They encountered no other danger on the road over the next few days; Topher made excruciatingly slow progress on recalculating all his runic circles and projections, and several times had to completely start over on a sequence after finding out he'd made minor math errors halfway through stacks of dense arithmetic. He wished he had a spreadsheet.

For his part, Tok was mostly silent; he fed and groomed the horse, steered the wagon stoically, slept like a statue, and ate and drank Topher's summoned provisions without complaint. By dint of cautious experimentation, Topher discovered that dwarves could not taste sweetness and had only minimal perception of texture; however, they experienced bitterness and sourness with depth of flavor far beyond what he could even envision, found salt almost as pleasurable as he did sugar, and apparently had gustatory elements to their digestion. He tried to imagine what drinking beer as a dwarf must be like, failed, and gave up; not that it mattered, since Summon Food and Drink couldn't make alcohol anyhow (he assumed it was classified as a sort of potion). Cast with the default runic sequences and visualizations, it could only produce the blandest of bread and water; but Topher, now quite practiced at what a more academically-inclined student of similar technologies from his own world would call "vulnerability analysis and exploitation", could make it produce at least palatable facsimiles of most baked foodstuffs and virtually any variety of tea, coffee, or milk (but not juice or soda, inexplicably). It could not summon meat and had tremendous difficulty with both cheese and vegetables, which made Topher sad every time he contemplated it; vague, disjointed memories of cooking with Hotaka assaulted him whenever he made the attempt, and he soon stopped in favor of trying to make a reproducible cheese danish. Bury the past.

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Eventually, they rounded the last bend in the road and came upon the stretch of the path which led up to the great iron bridge; Topher had been noticing that the land had gotten less and less pastoral the closer they came, and at this point was almost entirely dead grass and withered, leafless trees. He rubbed his hands against his sleeves, feeling chilled despite the enchantments on his robe. Maybe I'll be able to buy some kind of climate control spell in Wanbourne. He also noticed that other travelers on the road had become fewer and fewer, until eventually becoming nonexistent; the great span of the bridge before them was deserted, despite clearly being built to accommodate more than ten times their width abreast and some unfathomable amount of weight. "It's a really big bridge for just us," he marveled to Tok.

"Nobody knows who built it," sniffed the dwarf, "because it was here before Wanbourne was. Current theory is that the dungeon under it used to be some kind of magic city, or somethin'. Still, convenient enough."

As they reached the bridge, the horse paused, apparently reluctant to step onto the iron-shod oaken planks; Topher expected Tok to snap the reins, but instead the little dwarf hopped down and gently stroked the horse's mane, murmuring to it until it seemed calmer. Clambering back up into the wagon's seat, he twitched the reins very lightly, and the horse obediently plodded forward (though much more slowly than its usual pace). As they began to cross, Topher felt a grim sort of unnamable feeling welling up into his bones; something heavy and inexorable, with a clear sense of both foreboding and patience. It grew stronger as they progressed, reaching the peak at roughly the halfway point of the bridge; then, to Topher's surprise, it began to recede and diminish, eventually becoming barely noticeable. He let out a breath he was surprised to discover he'd been holding. "What was that all about?"

Tok shrugged. "Beats me. Only ever bothered me for a little bit, though, so I never worried about it. Goes away entirely after about a day." He continued to direct the horse cautiously and calmly across the great bridge, which was now crossing the titanic gap between two of the larger mountains; Topher looked down, regretted it, and pulled his hood down over his head.

It took nearly an hour for them to cross; immediately, Topher got his first sight at a zombie. It was almost exactly what he had expected: a rotting humanoid corpse, with a faint greenish glow in its eye-sockets and a slow, shambling gait. His stomach twisted with fear, but he quickly saw that Tok hadn't been joking about the speed of the zombies; it moved so slowly that he could have power-walked around it and been in almost no danger whatsoever. "I'm guessing they hit really hard to make up for their lack of maneuverability?" he commented to Tok.

The dwarf grunted. "Take the whole wagon apart with a handful of blows, yeah. You might survive one hit with your fancy magic shields, but I wouldn't bet on it, especially at your Level."

"You ever have to fight one?" Topher asked curiously.

Tok shook his head, the great braids of his beard swaying merrily with the motion. "Not at my Level. I could, I think, just barely take one, but it'd tear me up pretty good for sure; they're tough, like old meat and stone bones, and can take a lot of punishment. Only reason I ever felt like making this trip wasn't suicidal was the fact that I'm a dwarf; if the accursed things ever did manage to bust up my wagon, I could just gather up the most valuable things and hike my way out. Somebody who gets tired..." -- he looked meaningfully at Topher -- "...not so much."

"Well, let's see how tough they are." Topher rolled up his sleeves and started contemplating possibilities for attack; he really wanted to hit one with that ash cone he'd used against the peryton, but figured that could wait. "Let me know when you want me to give it a try."

The dwarf shrugged. "Now's fine. There'll be more later; best to make the first attempt when there's just one."

Topher nodded, squinted, and raised his hands, intoning "Bwin Zom Zefekk Korpu!"; staticky gray pinpoints of light sizzled out of his fingertips and streaked unerringly towards the shambling figure. As he'd expected, the empowered Magic Dart spell (which had been enough to one-shot a goblin he'd had no ability to even scratch with a weapon) sizzled into the creature's chest with no more effect than if he'd lightly shoved it; Topher winced. That was 2 MP! "Can we let it get a little closer?" he asked Tok, shifting over to the edge of the wagon's seat to clear the line of fire. "I want to try a Flame Jet spell, but it's a shorter range."

Tok obligingly pulled back slightly on the reins, which the horse did not care for at all; Topher could tell the beast was (quite understandably) afraid of the zombie, and it rolled its eyes in agitation as the dwarf reined it in. Guess I can't take all day trying stuff out. As soon as the zombie got within about fifteen feet, Topher let loose; he fired off his most powerful spell, declaiming "Ru, Koreq, Korpu!" and jerking his fingers backwards just as the spell completed so that he wouldn't get burned a second time. As before, the searing cone of ash blazed forward, roasting and entangling the zombie; but it still came on (albeit now so slowly that Topher could have stood around quite comfortably for several seconds between each step while evading it), its undead mouth yawning wide in anticipation of living flesh. Topher frowned.

He tried another few spells - a Flame Jet empowered with only Dahf instead of both Dahf and Mij, which seemed to have a bit more direct force behind it, and a twin-empowered Magic Dart using both Dahf and Rxs to produce "Bwin Zom Bomch Ahtvor" (he didn't really understand why Zefekk would be affected by an adjacent rune to be transformed into a totally different basic rune, but his calculations were pretty clear, so he just went with it). That one produced a massive swarm -- nearly twenty -- of the searing missiles, and the zombie was knocked back with sufficient force that it fell down and took almost ten seconds just to get up again. Finally, Topher delivered a one-two punch of an empowered Frost Ray, which seemed not to damage the zombie at all but did appear to make it more brittle, followed by another swarm of Dahf-Rxs-enhanced Magic Darts that shattered the creature into a pile of bones and rags of flesh. Topher huffed and checked his status:

Name:

Christopher Bailey

Level:

9

Class:

Clerk

HP:

24/24

MP:

4/36

SP:

9/9

Strength:

Rank F

Dexterity:

Rank F

Constitution:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Intelligence:

Rank D

Wisdom:

Rank D [+1: Rank D]

Charisma:

Rank F

Skills:

Literacy (Rank D)

Mathematics (Rank C)

Cooking (Rank F)

Customer Service (Rank D)

Data Entry and Filing (Rank B)

Packaging and Shipping (Rank D)

Home Appliance Repair (Rank F)

Pen Spinning (Rank A)

[Cold Resistance (Rank F)]

[Heat Resistance (Rank F)]

Special Skills:

Disrupt Illusion

Conjure Shield (Rank D)

Conjure Light (Rank F)

Improved Status

Summon Ledger

Remove Fatigue (Rank D)

Minor Sorcery (Rank D)

Unique Skill:

Attract Object

"Whoof." He sat down, a little heavily, next to the dwarf. "Took almost every last drop of my MP, but I Leveled; I'm 9, now."

The dwarf smiled a little. "Hope you kept enough MP to make dinner."

----------------------------------------

The remainder of the journey to Wanbourne took about four more days; Topher tried a variety of strategies against the zombies, but usually couldn't improve upon his initial success (and twice failed to kill a zombie at all despite blowing almost his entire MP pool); he suspected they were getting stronger as they approached the city, and the more creative he got with his spell experimentations the more MP he wasted on partial or fizzled castings. On the last day, he managed to kill his fourth zombie using an an empowered Flame Jet, then an Ash Cone (to slow and dampen the flames while still building the heat), then an empowered Frost Ray followed by a Magic Dart Swarm, which shattered the creature satisfyingly and got Topher to Level 10 with only 18 MP spent -- an achievement he was extremely proud of. He also unlocked a new Special Skill for his Clerk Class at Level 10, which he confirmed with grim satisfaction to be almost as useless as he'd expected, being Summon Stylus -- a spellbinding and potent power which allowed him to summon, and dismiss at will... a ballpoint pen.

He could change the color of the ink each time he summoned it, though. So that was something.