by Pirateaba
“We should protest. Start a petition.”
Ryoka pounded the table.
“You’re right! Let’s send one to the Author’s Association.”
“Wait, there’s an Author’s Association?”
“…Probably not. But we can post it on change.org!”
“Yeah! Let’s do it!”
“Okay, I have a piece of paper here. Let me start this petition.”
Ryoka pulled out the chapter’s script and began scribbling on the back. Erin got up and hovered over the paper as Ryoka wrote.
“pirateaba is obviously a fake name. But I know what the real author’s name is.”
“Okay. What is it?”
Erin smiled. She pointed to the first line.
“Helicopter DeFranco. Okay, so we’ll start by saying that ‘We the main characters of the story feel that the author, Helicopter DeFranco has repeatedly ignored our right to acceptable working hours, freedom of speech, medical care, a safe working environment, and…’”
“Wait a second.”
Ryoka had to hold up a hand and cut Erin off.
“Are you sure his name is Helicopter DeFranco?”
Erin frowned.
“Pretty sure? And it’s ‘she’, Ryoka. The author is a she. Helicopter can be a girl’s name as well as a guy’s.”
Ryoka stared at Erin. She paused, put down the pen, rubbed at her eyes, and looked at Erin.
“First: the author’s name is not Helicopter DeFranco. I don’t know where you’re getting that from.”
Erin looked down sadly at her hands.
“The comments lied to me.”
Ryoka shook her head.
“Second: the author is male.”
“He is not! I mean—she is not!”
“The author is totally a he, Erin. Only a guy would be this much of a dick to female characters.”
“If we were in a LitRPG web serial written by a guy, we’d both be in a harem. And your breasts would be three times as large.”
Ryoka looked down at her chest and covered it protectively.
“Not every male author is a chauvinistic pig. Some of them can write female characters. Like George R. R. Martin.”
“If we were in The Game of Thrones we’d be dead.”
“True…”
“Anyways, the author is a she.”
“He.”
“She.”
“It?”
“Look, are we going to write the petition or not? Let’s just write ‘pirateaba’ for now and change it later.”
Ryoka hesitated as she stared at the paper.
“But are we sure we want to do this? I mean, seriously?”
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“He could have Gazi come back and stab us repeatedly.”
Erin paused. And then she looked at Ryoka, seriously.
“Ryoka, let me ask you this instead: what do you think the odds are that the author’s going to have that happen anyways?”
Ryoka stared at Erin for a second, and then sat down and began to write.
—-
Later that day, Relc and Kblkch walked towards the inn. They stopped when they saw the signs planted deep in the snow.
Female main characters for proper pay and time off! Striking until we get vacations!
Free our heroines! No stabbing for all!
I want a pay raise!
Relc turned to Klbkch.
“Looks like they’re on strike. Want to go back and wait?”
Klbkch shrugged.
“That appears to be the only sound course of action.”
Relc hesitated. He stared at the inn. He could hear Erin and Ryoka inside, shouting some kind of protest.
“Should we tell them they’re only alive until the real main character shows up?”
Klbkch shook his head.
“I believe that would be unwise.”
The two began walking back towards Liscor, though the snow. Relc started complaining after a few minutes.
“What kind of name is ‘The Wandering Inn’, anyways? The inn doesn’t even move!”
Klbkch agreed. He gestured to his new body with one of his arms.
“I object to my death by the Goblins as well. I feel I should at least have died to twice their number. My reputation is at stake.”
“And I got my ass handed to me by Gazi while Erin gets the final blow. Again.”
“To be fair, Rags got the kill for Skinner.”
“Oh, so I get upstaged by a human girl and a Goblin? I feel much better about that.”
The two walked on in a huff as lightning began pouring from the sky and striking The Wandering Inn. After a second, Relc turned to Klbkch.
“…Do you think we get hazard pay?”
2.08
Where do we go from here? That was probably the name of a song of some kind. That wasn’t too significant; everything was a song title in the end.
But where did she and Erin go from now? After they’d saved Ceria (and Olesm) from the ruins? After they’d lost the others.
Where did they go? What did they do, knowing there were others in the world like them?
For a moment, the sheer enormity of it all struck Ryoka full-on, before she could mitigate the feeling. Where did they start?
The King of Destruction was moving. All the people arriving in this world were probably playing hell with the politics and power struggles of each nation, and besides that, the threat of bringing modern-day technology like firearms into this world was very real. Add that to the possibility that it might be possible for this world to connect back to hers and Erin’s—!
Was she missing anything? Oh yes. On a smaller, local level – on this continent, in short – it seemed like Ryoka and Erin had no shortage of problems. An angry Watch Captain in the city, the Antinium, Lady Magnolia, Teriarch, a roaming horde of the undead, Ceria’s injuries, the Gnolls, and possibly Gazi, although it was anyone’s guess where she’d ended up.
Some of those things weren’t necessarily deadly problems—the business with the Antinium as Erin described it was odd. Ryoka hadn’t read any books on the Free Antinium, so she had no idea what they were doing. She could guess, but—
One problem among many. Where did you start? When the house was burning down, the first step was probably to get out of the fire. But where did you start when the entire world was raining fire from the sky?
Erin was looking at her for an answer. But Ryoka didn’t have any idea.
“We—should probably try to analyze the way the leveling system works. There are a lot of classes. If we understand which ones are valuable, or whether there’s a limit or—or a way to level up faster, that might help.”
Ryoka put one hand on her head as she tried to think out loud.
“We need a map. A better one than this, at least.”
She indicated the rough map on the ground. It was hard to see any meaning in the napkin sitting next to the chess pieces, but now she remembered the names of each of the continents:
Baleros, the mysterious continent of jungles and Gazers.
The Blighted Kingdoms of Rhir, the dying lands locked in eternal conflict.
A kingdom of knights and royalty and damn humans. Terandria.
Chandrar, home to the King of Destruction and a desert larger than the entire United States of America.
And of course, home, or at least the place where she and Erin were stuck. The continent of Drakes and Gnolls and a few humans. Issrysil. That’s what the Drakes called it, but Izril was the only thing Ryoka was willing to pronounce.
They sounded like names straight out of a fantasy game, rather than real life. But then, South America, North America, Asia, Antarctica, Africa, Australia…when you got down to it, it was pretty strange that over half of the continents in her world started with the letter ‘A’.
Ryoka tried to kick her brain on track. But she couldn’t. Her mind would much rather think about why continents were named oddly than focus on re
ality.
Because reality was a bit too hard.
It was embarrassing. How many times had Ryoka wanted more responsibility, less parental controls, more autonomy, and a real challenge in her life? She’d wanted to have something to work for, to live for.
But this was too much. This was crushing despair and incomprehensible madness. Where could they even start?
“Gathering magical artifacts? Learning spells…? Is there a way we could gather allies?”
“Um. Like in Lord of the Rings?”
Ryoka shook her head. Even saying that out loud sounded stupid. She wasn’t Aragorn son of Arathorn, heir of Isildur and rightful King of Gondor with a magic sword of prophecies. And she wasn’t on a quest to save the world or fight an evil tyrant. She was just trying to survive. She didn’t have anything to offer people. She didn’t even have a pair of shoes, just some boots made for a Gnoll.
“Eighty gold pieces.”
Before Ryoka could fully slump down in her chair, Erin spoke. She didn’t look at Ryoka, but stared at the ceiling. Ryoka blinked at her.
“What?”
Erin shrugged.
“That’s how much Pisces says it would cost to get some of my cupboards enchanted. Well—actually, he says that it would be better to replace the wood frames first, but that’s not too expensive.”
“Okay.”
Ryoka stared at Erin without any expression. Where was she going with this?
“I have a few gold coins from killing—well, there were these Shield Spiders a while back and Gazi and it’s an entire thing, okay? But I need to fix my inn, buy food…I’m running low on money.”
Another problem. Wonderful. At least Ryoka had quite a bit of money from the delivery for Teriarch…which she’d never done. A spasm of guilt and anxiety wormed its way into Ryoka’s stomach.
Erin didn’t notice. She was still thinking.
“You could probably use a lot of gold, too, right?”
“For what?”
“Well, what do adventurers have in all the stories and games? Magic swords. Magic armor. Magic…wands. Magic spell books. Wouldn’t that be helpful when you do your running thing?”
“Runners don’t need much to run. And I can defend myself.”
Ryoka pointed that out in defiance of the fact that she’d been nearly useless in the Ruins. Erin shook her head and explained.
“Yeah, but you could defend yourself. I mean, with spells rather than having to kick everything you see. And there’s other things you can buy. Like, uh—”
“A restoration spell.”
Ryoka’s mind jumped ahead of the conversation and Erin blinked at her.
“What?”
“There are no [Priests] or people like that in this world. But there are mages who specialize in healing magic. If I—we—could find one who knows how to cast a restoration or regeneration spell, maybe they could heal Ceria’s hand.”
Erin’s eyes widened.
“You think so? Really? Is that possible?”
“I know someone who thought she could fix my shattered leg. And that person knows a famous healer.”
It was a simple goal. But if that was the starting point—
Erin nodded decisively.
“Well, if you’re going to pay for Ceria’s hand, count me in!”
Ryoka opened her mouth to tell Erin she could handle it, or that Erin should save her money for her inn, and then closed it. She paused, and nodded at Erin.
“I’ll do that.”
“So…how much is that going to cost?”
“A thousand gold? At least a few hundred.”
Erin didn’t say anything, but her eyes bulged a bit. Ryoka tried to reassure her.
“I know how to get money. A lot of it.”
“How much do Runners make on their deliveries?”
“I’m not planning on relying on running to get that much. There’s one—no, two, actually—two ways I know I can earn a lot of money.”
Ryoka thought about her options and didn’t like either one. But she had a goal now. Money. It was a simple goal that didn’t take into account politics, world events, or anything else. It was a clear road, and Ryoka was good at running a straight line.
“Right.”
“Right?”
Erin blinked at Ryoka in mild alarm as the other girl stood up.
“I’m going to start now. If I head back to Celum, I should be able to start working by tomorrow. I’ll come back with whatever I earn in about a week, with more news, an idea of what the spell might cost, and anything else I can think of.”
Erin’s face fell.
“What, you’re leaving? Just like that?”
Ryoka stared at Erin, nonplussed.
“Of course. Time is money.”
“Yeah, but time is also time. Which is a lot more valuable than money. Sometimes.”
Erin mumbled into the table, and then looked up at Ryoka pleadingly.
“You just got here. Well I don’t mean you just arrived, but we haven’t talked that much.”
“We got all the important details down.”
“Yeah, but—”
For a few seconds, the girl with chestnut-brown hair stared at the table as if afraid to speak. The girl with raven hair stared at her, until Erin looked up.
“I could use some advice.”
Ryoka wasn’t a social person. By choice, as much as inclination. And she was a bad friend. She’d never been a good friend, or even a friend to anyone, really. But she heard it in Erin’s voice. A slight catch, a pleading tone. An unspoken request.
Her inner self told her to go, told her it wasn’t important. But a better part of Ryoka she didn’t know she had told her something else. She hesitated, and then she sat down again.
“Of course.”
—-
Being an [Innkeeper] wasn’t something that came naturally to Erin. Or rather, it wasn’t something Erin had ever done. But the first part of that thought was a lie.
She was good at innkeeping. Because being an innkeeper was all about people.
And Erin liked people.
It was odd. She played chess all day, and that wasn’t really a social sport. But you met people playing chess. It was sort of the rule. And she liked talking to people. Because people were different, interesting, and most people were good people.
So Erin had begun learning how to read people. It was still something she was new at, trying to analyze people rather than taking them at face value. But she was starting to get…feelings about people she met.
It was something Erin had only just noticed about Ryoka. In truth, she should probably have clued into it earlier, but in her defense, it had been a very long couple of days.
It was this: Ryoka really wasn’t a social person.
In truth, that wasn’t really a hard conclusion to come to. Whether it was Ryoka’s tendency to hunch inwards when she sat in a crowd, or her silent stares and grunted responses when she didn’t want to talk, she practically exuded a ‘don’t-talk-to-me’ zone.
Plus, she just wasn’t the type to sit around. Ryoka got antsy if she had to sit still, and if she got excited when talking, she tended to get up and pace around. She couldn’t just relax; she had to move.
She was a doer as opposed to a thinker. If Erin had to think of it, she thought of it in terms of chess players. Ryoka was like some of players she’d met who could do 5-second games really well because they were so used to seeing certain pattersn and playing games that they could make the best or close to the best move within moments.
That was at odds with how Erin liked to play it, a bit more calculated and patient. OF course, any good chess player had to mix instinct with calculating the overall impact on the board, but Ryoka had that certainty and ability to jump to logical conclusions that left Erin speechless at times.
Case in point. Ryoka had just explained how ice cream was made, and Erin was excited.
“So that’s why I couldn’t get it to work!”
&
nbsp; She slapped the table and looked around wildly. She had all of—well, most of the ingredients still in her inn. She could make ice cream! Ice! Cream! The ambrosia of children and anyone who enjoyed life!
“I can’t believe you thought you had to churn milk to make icecream.”
Erin mock-glared at Ryoka.
“Well, how was I supposed to know you had to heat it up and stir it up like…custard? Who’d ever think of something as crazy as that?”
“Catherine de Medici. Although she probably learned the recipe from the Italians who got it from Marco Polo. And they might have gotten it from the Chinese.”
Ryoka frowned absently as she thought, and then realized Erin was gaping at her.
“What?”
“Do you…do you have like, a perfect memory or something?”
The Asian girl shifted uncomfortably in her eat.
“Not exactly. I’ve got a trick memory. I remember details and things I think are interesting really well. And I studied quite a bit of history for my AP exams.”
“Whoa. I never took the AP’s. They seemed way too hard, and they weren’t a requirement at my high school. Did you pass your exams?”
Ryoka seemed to hesitate.
“I got a few 5’s.”
That was just another reason to admire her. Erin smiled happily as she imagined eating bowls of the delicious ice cream, even if she could only make vanilla. Well, that was what fruits were for. Flavor.
“You have no idea how helpful that is! I can make ice cream and start selling it in my inn! Or—or make ice cream cones! I’ll be rich!”
So delighted was Erin at the thought of showing Selys and everyone else ice cream that she didn’t realize Ryoka was shaking her head.
“Not a good idea. I don’t think it’ll work.”
“What? Why not?”
“First off: it’s winter.”
Ryoka pointed to one of the shuttered windows that was letting in a distressing amount of cold air through the cracks, despite being closed.
“If you’re going to sell frozen treats, you might as well avoid using sugar because of the cost. Only the aristocracy and rich merchants can afford to buy a lot of confectionaries, so you’d have to raise the cost too high. Also, ice cream is hard to store, especially if you don’t have a fridge.”