by Pirateaba
Erin looked startled, but then she nodded.
“Oh yeah, sure. This thing has speakers, right Ryoka?”
“That’s not a good—”
Ryoka trailed off and gave up. Ceria had already seen it once anyways. And besides…
“Sure. Yeah. Go ahead.”
Erin pulled the headphones out of the jack and the iPhone immediately began playing. Ryoka heard “Hey There Delilah” playing quietly in the silence.
The four guests in the inn froze. They each reacted differently.
Ceria’s eyes went wide as she heard the strange music she had listen to once before. Memory flashed in her eyes, and her eyes filled with tears and she took a seat. Ceria closed her eyes and remembered.
Olesm stared at the iPhone, mouth open, showing rows of sharp teeth. He listen with innocent wonder and his tail slowly began to wag to the sound of the gentle beat.
Selys blinked a few times, and then she took a seat, listening hard to the lyrics and closing her eyes.
Pisces—he stared out the window at the fading light in the sky without saying a word. He brushed at his eyes as the song ended.
And Erin and Ryoka listened and forgot for a moment they were in this world. Both girls felt pricking at their eyes. Erin wiped hers with her sleeve, and Ryoka just shook her head.
“Is there a way to make it louder? The volume’s maxed out, but…”
Erin trailed off as she clicked through the settings. Ryoka didn’t have a good solution besides buying a pair of speakers, but Pisces reached for the iPhone.
“A simple problem. Allow me.”
He tapped the metallic casing of the iPhone and whispered a spell.
“[Amplify Sound].”
Suddenly, the iPhone was loud enough to fill the entire room. Erin jumped, and then grinned as she stared down at the iPhone.
“Whoa. That’s so much better than speakers.”
Ryoka stared at her phone, suddenly very interested.
“How long does that spell last?”
It might be a terrible idea to play music while running in dangerous spots, but on the open road…Pisces raised one hand upwards and shrugged.
“I may be able to prolong the spell for several days with sufficient renumeration.”
“I can learn that spell in less than a day.”
Ceria frowned at Pisces and he scowled at her, but Erin still focused on the iPhone. She put a hand on her chin, and then slapped her forehead loud enough to make everyone look at her in concern.
Erin was suddenly excited. She halted the current song and held the iPhone out to Pisces.
“How loud can you make this?”
“How loud would you like it to be?”
“Really loud. Super loud! Loud enough to be heard even in the city.”
Pisces nodded, and frowned as he adjusted the spell, whispering words too quiet to hear. Ryoka eyed her friend.
“Erin. What are you doing?”
Erin turned and grinned at Ryoka.
“Getting customers!”
When she hit the play button on the iPhone, the sound that emerged nearly blew out everyone’s eardrums. Erin clapped her hands over her ears, but she was grinning wildly.
“Perfect! Now you all stay here and I’ll go get some business!”
She ran out of the inn. Ryoka followed her, and saw Erin climbing up to the roof. She shouted at Erin, but the other girl didn’t stop. Erin stood on top of the roof, and opened her mouth.
“Hey! It’s music time!”
Ryoka clapped her ears to her head. Erin’s voice was loud! It had to be a Skill—it sounded like Erin was shouting into a megaphone. But then Erin touched the iPhone and Ryoka realized what she was about to do.
The drumbeats that started blasting through the air sounded like air cannons going off. But in a second Ryoka heard the guitar playing chords she knew by heart. Erin took a deep breath, and then she starting singing at the exact same time Kid Rock did.
“It was 1989, my thoughts were short my hair was long—”
Ryoka gaped at the ceiling as Erin began singing, perfectly matching the lyrics to the music. The only difference was that Erin the lyrics from boy to ‘girl’ and man to—a really fast ‘woman’, which Ryoka entirely approved of. Erin sang along with the song, projecting her voice out across the open plains and towards Liscor.
“And we were trying different things; we were smoking funny things—”
The sound pulsed through the inn, so loud that Ryoka could feel bass in her bones. She couldn’t wipe the grin off her face, especially when she heard Erin try to sing along with the female chorus.
“Whooaaaoh? Wooaaaoh!”
Erin belted out the rest of the song until the last note. Ryoka expected her to stop, but Erin just switched to the next song. And then Ryoka heard something that made her blood chill.
No.
Thundering drums. The sounds of jungle wildlife. A cinematic orchestra, straight from the movie trailer Ryoka had ripped the song from.
No. She didn’t. But she did. Erin had the iPhone on shuffle. Ryoka started towards the door, but it was too late.
“Put your faith in what you most believe in. Two worlds, one family!”
Ryoka listen in half-pain, half-amazement as Erin sang along with the song. How the hell did she remember the lyrics? But now Ryoka could practically see Tarzan on the screen in front of her.
As the song ended, Erin shouted down at Ryoka in a slightly-less loud voice.
“Oh hey, you’ve got tons of Disney songs on here!”
Ryoka covered her eyes with one hand. But she couldn’t stop grinning, even so. She remembered the songs right out of her childhood. Erin clicked through the songs, and then Ryoka heard a familiar drumbeat. Erin listened with a grin to the sounds of characters from Mulan falling down, and then her voice echoed off the city walls.
“We’ve got a long way to go.”
God. She even remembered the parts that weren’t part of the song.
“Let’s get down to business. To defeat the Huuuuun!”
It was amazing. Erin wasn’t a great singer, but she sang far better than Ryoka ever could. Ryoka had taken lessons from a professional along with a bevy of other lessons from tutors her parents hired, but she didn’t like singing. But even though Erin’s breathing was out of synch and she sometimes sang an entire octave off, the passion she put in her songs made up for all of it.
Ryoka stood in the kitchen as Erin sang a “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan, and then ad-libbed to the wordless “Circle of Life” song from Lion King. And like the animals from Pride Rock, her words were the herald to a flood.
They came out of the city in ones and twos at first, and then the few became a stream which became a flood of people. Drakes, Gnolls, and humans too, following the sound of music.
They stood around Erin’s inn, listening to her as she belted out her world’s greatest hits filtered by Ryoka’s tastes. But there was the thing—hate the music or love it, Ryoka had a lot of the billboard’s top 100 songs across each passing year, and each one was preserved perfectly on her iPhone.
To the listeners, it was like hearing each classic the very first time. And this was a world that had never heard pop, rock, rap, or half of the musical styles evolved over a hundred years to the art forms they were today.
The audience was spellbound. Or rather, they were absorbed into the music, because the last thing they were doing was sitting still.
The Drakes and Gnolls were dancing! Ryoka saw what looked like classic ballroom dancing mixed with wild break dancing from a familiar Drake guardsman. The Gnolls had their own moves as well, and they moved to the beat in a way Ryoka could only call primal.
“Oh my god. It’s a mosh pit.”
She couldn’t hear the sound of her own voice. Erin had somehow managed to turn up the volume of her song, and she was drowning out even the roar of the crowd below.
One of the people right below the inn was shouting up at Erin. Zevara had [Lou
d Voice] as a Skill as well, or she had a great set of lungs, but the iPhone combined with Erin’s voice was loud enough to drown the angry Drake Captain out.
Ryoka grinned as she heard Erin switch songs. She ducked into the inn and saw Ceria, Selys, and Olesm all scrambling to cook burgers as Erin sang her heart out on top of the inn.
“It’s too late to apologize! Too laaaaaate!”
Zevara tried to climb up the side of the inn, but other people in the crowd dragged her back. Erin countered by launching into “I Gotta Feeling”, and the rest was history.
Ryoka realized people were streaming into the inn as well. She made her way inside, and saw a huge press of bodies, held off at the kitchen by a wide-eyed Olesm. He was trying to keep order, and failing.
Somehow, Ryoka ducked through the crowd and shoved her way into the kitchen. She saw Ceria and Selys desperately trying to make Erin’s hamburgers. She’d left plenty of ground beef and ingredients, but the Drake and half-Elf were trying to make burgers and serve them to the hungry people outside while frying the meat. In Ceria’s case, one-handed.
“Here! Let me!”
Ryoka had to shout in Selys’ ear before the Drake surrounded the spatula. Ryoka began flipping burgers and dumping them onto a plate while Selys began adding buns and ingredients to the burger. She had no skills, but Ryoka knew how to cook.
The bass made the oil in the skillet bounce, but Ryoka started cooking as the beat blasted through the air. She flipped and served as fast as she could, losing herself to the music and the work. A scaled or fair-skinned hand was always there to take whatever Ryoka made.
She took her place serving food as well so Olesm could retreat and rest for a few moments. It wasn’t like taking orders though; people shoved money at her and grabbed food. Ryoka soon found herself covered in a mix of grease and food particles.
But they were selling everything and anything. Hamburgers were just the start; the people in the inn were demanding anything they could drink or consume, and Ryoka and the others struggled to meet the demands.
After they ran out of ground beef, they sent Olesm down to buy more and started cooking whatever Erin had in the kitchen. The crowd didn’t care; bowls of buttery noodles disappeared as fast as extra-crispy fried potato slices.
Olesm appeared thirty minutes later—an age—with welcome fresh supplies. Not only the ground beef; he’d bought everything he could in the market.
He’d also managed to badger Relc and Klbkch into helping Krshia roll up kegs of some kind of ale up to the inn. They nearly got mobbed by the crowd until Olesm set up one of the tables outside with the barrels and as many mugs as he could gather.
That opened the floodgates. Ryoka had thought people were flooding the inn before; now they couldn’t even see the floor. People crowded around, snatching mugs as money found its sticky way into a jar that had been filled with black flies. Klbkch took the flies.
Ryoka took only one moment to take a break. She staggered outside and saw that the inn wans’t the only place doing business. Even as Erin sang on, more enterprising vendors had hauled out wood stands onto the grass and mud. The snow had long melted from the sheer body heat generated by the crowd.
Movement in the air made Ryoka look up. Above Erin as she stood on the inn, glowing blue shapes were flying through the dark night sky. Frost Faeries.
They were hovering in the air, dancing around, flying in complex patterns and laughing as Erin sang. For once, they seemed to be too caught up in the music to play any pranks. But one of them had…a mug? Ryoka saw the faerie empty the liquid and hurl the mug down into the crowd.
It shattered across the back of Relc’s head, but Ryoka didn’t think he or the people around him even noticed. They were caught up in the unfamiliar music, and the feeling in the air was pure excitement.
Erin started singing “All the Single Ladies” and half the crowd went wild. Ryoka had no idea Drakes even used rings, but then she saw a few on tails. And then she saw a few rings disappear and people start slipping off in pairs as the night progressed.
—-
How long did it last? Ryoka didn’t know, only that after a while even the adrelaine and music couldn’t keep her upright. She stumbled around, serving the waning crowd. At one point she saw Zevara shouting at Erin as the girl paused to take a drink and eat some food Ryoka passed up to her.
“People are trying to sleep! Stop singing!”
“No!”
It was as roar from the crowd below. Zevara looked around in disgust, and Erin tossed down the rest of her water. She stood up, and the cheering nearly deafened Ryoka.
“You can’t stop this! Yeah, you can’t stop me! Because—”
“I’ve got that feelin’ in my bones. It goes electric, wavey when I turn it on—”
Ryoka couldn’t help it. She moved her feet to the song. Just a bit.
…She might have danced with a Gnoll, and found herself competing to see who could perform more tricks with Relc. Ryoka knew how to do standing backflips; it turned out Relc could do that and break dance, but no one in the world knew how to moon walk.
For one glorious night Ryoka forgot about everything. She danced, laughed, and let the music sweep her thoughts away. She saw Erin laughing and dancing on the roof, and laughed too. The songs carried Ryoka up on a rush and carried her away until suddenly there was only darkness and silence.
From somewhere on top of the inn, Erin turned off the iPhone and stopped singing. The Drakes and Gnolls stumbled back towards the city, and Ryoka realized that the world was spinning around her.
Olesm and Selys were asleep on a table, trash strewn about them. Pisces, helped Ceria climb the stairs, and then wandering unsteadily out of the inn.
Ryoka looked at the stairs and didn’t even bother trying to ascend. She saw Val wave at her as he walked upstairs, waved back, and collapsed in a chair.
Her eyes closed. Ryoka was asleep before her head even fell back.
She slept, and dreamed of dragons.
—-
[Innkeeper Level 20!]
[Innkeeper Level 21!]
[Skill – Advanced Cooking Obtained!]
[Skill – Advanced Crafting Obtained!]
[Singer Class Obtained!]
[Singer Level 6!]
[Skill – Perfect Recall Obtained!]
[Skill – Control Pitch Obtained!]
Erin heard the words sometime right before she passed out. She woke up – still on top of the inn’s roof just past dawn, mainly because she was slipping off.
She nearly fell getting to the ground anyways, but managed to save herself just in time. Erin stared around the trashed landscape, and wondered if the snow would hide it all. No. She’d probably have to clean it up.
That went double for the inside of Erin’s inn. She took one look at the chaos and covered her eyes. But that wouldn’t help.
Without Toren, none of the dirty dishes and messy tables would miraculously clean themselves overnight. Erin stared around the trashed room and wished with all her heart that her skeleton would come back.
She hated cleaning up messes. Dust was what Erin was good at.
But something caught Erin’s eye as she stared around and tried to find a place to start cleaning. An oddity.
She knew no one had come by after the last patron had staggered out and Ryoka and Ceria had gone to sleep upstairs. But something had moved in the night.
Everything in her inn was the same as it had been when Erin had passed out. Except for one thing.
Erin stared at the chessboard Val had delivered to her, sitting at the far end of her bar. The rows of orderly pieces stared back at her, nice and uniform.
But—she’d never put any pieces on the chess board. And as Erin hesitantly stepped closer, she saw something else.
The pieces were transparent. Each one had a ghostly quality to it. They looked like a medieval set of chess, with vaguely human pieces in all the right places. But wisps rose from the pieces like smoke, and they had a
faintly unearthly quality to their substance.
They looked like magic, and the coolest pieces Erin had ever seen in her life. And they were all perfectly set up in their starting positions on the board.
Except for one piece. A white pawn piece had moved up two squares, occupying one of the most traditional opening spots in the game. Pawn to E4. King’s Pawn Opening. Erin stared at it.
“Whoa.”
2.17
Erin woke up with a huge smile on her face. Today was the first day of the rest of her life, and for once, it was all amazing.
Slightly less amazing was the huge mess in her common room. Erin’s huge smile reduced in diameter, but she maintained a cheery outlook. True, her inn was trashed, but the money.
“The money!”
Gold coins, silver coins, copper coins. She had far more of the copper coins than anything else, but Krshia had given her several gold coins as she’d brought goods up from the city throughout the night. Erin had a huge jar of money, and next to it was an even bigger jar, again filled with money.
And next to that…
Erin had to hug herself, she was so elated. It had worked! Her crazy idea had worked, and she’d earned so much!
She had to give some of it away, of course. She hadn’t paid Selys or Ceria or Olesm for their help, and Ryoka had cooked up all the food! She wondered if the prickly girl would accept being paid. She would, right?
If only Toren was here, life would have been perfect. That made Erin’s smile slip, but just for a second. He would have cleared up this mess overnight and be staring creepily at her in the morning. But without him she’d have to do it.
Well, it was a fair price for a wonderful night. Erin sighed, rolled up her sleeves, and got to work. She could get a head start before she made breakfast. Something involving eggs and bacon, she guessed. It would be too much work to mix pancakes.