Chapter 106

They left a lot of miles of dirt road behind them that afternoon. It wasn’t that it was hard to keep a conversation going while they ran, but it was easy to just fall into the rhythm of the movement and not think too hard on anything. At least it was for Luke. He wasn’t sure that Zea’s brain was as susceptible to just living in the moment as his was. Either way, hours passed in relative silence until Luke spotted a town up ahead. He slowed to a stop and said, “Incoming civilization.”

“Thank the Gods,” Zea said. “I want a bed to sleep in tonight, an edible meal somebody else cooked, a bath, and a few hours to work on a project without moving.”

“Wait, what project is this? I don’t know anything about a project.”

“How high is your perception?” Zea asked. “I thought you knew everything that happened around you. You were standing ten feet away while I was gathering materials.”

Luke blinked and tried to think back to anything Zea had picked up lately. When they’d first started traveling, she’d been inclined to scavenge anything she thought was valuable, but after lugging it around for days, she’d switched to a less-is-more attitude. Very few things crossed the threshold of ‘worth it to lug the weight around’ lately.

“The razor prongs?” he asked. She’d grabbed a few shards, but he’d assumed those were to sell.

“Exactly.”

“And, uh, what exactly are you making out of them?” Luke asked. The only thing he could picture was some sort of blade made out of the antler itself, which he was sure would be lethally sharp despite how dull the edge appeared, but they already had ever-sharp knives.

“Oh, you’ll see,” she said with an evil grin. “Let’s just say I’ve had enough of that damn human-sized crossbow.”

She seemed excited about it, which was good enough for Luke. He wasn’t keen on watching the work happen, having already had a front row seat to her magic poking stick. That had never really gotten off the ground, which she’d claimed was fine, since it was just a prototype to test the enchantment and that a wooden stick was far too weak a material to withstand the force the magic would put on it.

Apparently, razor prongs were a different story. “As long as I don’t need to be your test subject, I’m all for it. So we’ll call it an early day here? I’ll see if I can get some better clothes, you get us a room and access to a bath?”

“I don’t think so. You don’t speak the local language, so it’s entirely possible you’ll run into somebody you just can’t communicate with at all. Besides, we need to discuss aliases first,” Zea said.

“Oh, right. Do you think we need them this far out from Valtira? We’re basically in another country at this point.”

“No, probably not, but does it hurt anything?”

“No. What are our names going to be for the next few days then?”

“That is an excellent question. We could go with something in Ostari, but since I don’t speak it very well and you don’t speak it at all, that might draw more attention to us than just being foreigners would.”

“How bad is the language barrier?” Luke said, thinking about the farmers. If even people that far away from major cities were bilingual, he didn’t think he’d have a hard time communicating with most people. In the worst case, he had enough AP left over to pick up a new language at rank 1, but if all they were going to go was pass through, get on a boat, and leave the area, it felt like a waste to him.

Of course, a trip across the ocean on a ship with no engines to power it or satellites to steer it would probably take weeks or even months. Hell, now that he thought of it, he realized that he actually had no clue how far the ship needed to even go. He’d just kind of been mentally picturing a trip across the Atlantic, but he’d never bothered to find out just how wide the ocean was. He didn’t have the first clue how long he’d be stuck in a relatively small space with an unknown number of people who spoke the local language.

Maybe he’d take some time to add another level or two’s worth of AP to his resources, just to make sure he had some flexibility to address new problems as they cropped up. Zea’s AP was still tied up in grinding out the outrageous amount needed to upgrade [Bloodline Purification Ritual], so any situations that called for something outside their current skill set would be on him to provide an answer to.

“There’s enough trade between Sicanti and Valtira that I’m sure we can get by with our current language skills. Nobody is going to mistake us for natives, but they wouldn’t even if we both had rank 3 [Ostari]. You’re not going to find a dwifkin up here. I’ll be the one who stands out.” She paused for a moment and shrugged. “You might find some full-blooded dwarves though, if we get close enough to the mountains.”

Luke blinked at her. “Dwarves? Like… short, beards, live underground, digging a hole?”

“Woooooooow. Is your whole world full of nothing but racist stereotypes?”

“I mean… yeah, kind of. But all our games and stories that have dwarves and elves and halflings and whatever in them came from… from a bunch of guys in the seventies who, now that I think about it, probably were kind of racist and sexist. But these are just stories where I come from. The races depicted in games and books and movies don’t really exist on Earth.”

“Well, somebody knew enough about Aros to consistently pick up a bunch of offensive stereotypes,” Zea said. “Next you’re going to tell me that elves are all a bunch of androgenous, snooty tree fuckers.”

Luke didn’t say anything.

“Gods damn it,” Zea muttered. “Okay, new rule. Whatever you think you know about a species, I want you to just assume that you’re wrong and that you would offend someone of that species if you shared your world’s views on them. In fact, don’t even talk to anyone who’s not a human if I’m not there with you.”

“I’m… sorry?”

“It’s okay, just, that has to mean something, right? A bunch of people who were really high level found some way to look at this world, and then just fetched a bunch of information about other species that they picked up in a scummy tavern or something.”

“Who were really high… what? No, not level seventy. In the 1970s. The decade when they were inventing the kinds of games that featured fantasy stuff.”

Zea snorted. “I think I know enough about your fantasies already.”

“Anyway,” Luke said loudly, “Back on topic. How likely are we to run into dwarves and is there anything I should know?”

“Not likely at all, as long as we’re going directly towards Sicanti. We might run across one or two out traveling, but a dwarven stronghold is not in our travel plans. If we do meet any dwarves, just treat them like regular people and don’t make any assumptions based on your games from back home.”

“Got it. Will do.”

Now Luke was kind of curious about what exactly dwarves on Aros were like. He was about to ask, when Zea interrupted him and said, “Now, about these aliases. I don’t think you should use Aldrick again. Even your real name would be better than that, though that’s not great either. How about… hmm… Nemar?”

“Okay,” Luke agreed easily. He didn’t much care what fake name he used. If it ended up being annoying, he’d just change it again.

“And I will be Pavena,” Zea said.

“Okay,” Luke said again.

“Alright, now that that’s settled, here’s the plan. We get into that town, find ourselves a room, a meal, and a bath. We can ask around if there’s a local tailor who’s worth a damn. If nothing else, you could use a backup outfit or two. I’m sure your clothes won’t last more than a week or two at the rate you go through them.”

“It’s not like I’m trying to get hit,” Luke said. He did, in fact, have multiple skills that worked specifically to keep that from happening. Being outnumbered a hundred to one just kind of made it a moot point. “Maybe we’ll have the time and money to get some real armor soon.”

“It’s starting to feel kind of pointless,” Zea told him. “With where you’re at now, 49 fucking stamina and all that, anything not made of steel isn’t going to do you much good, and anything fast enough to hit you can probably rip through steel anyway. If you want armor that protects you from actual threats, you’re going to need high-end, specialty materials modified by a master alchemist, a master smith to work them into a useful shape, and a master enchanter to take full advantage of those materials.”

“So, lot of time, lot of money, lot of hard-to-find experts?”

“Yeah, basically.”

Well, that sucked. Still, he didn’t see the harm in getting a chain shirt or something. Those wouldn’t break the budget and it wouldn’t hurt to have an extra layer of protection. Even if he could heal up an injury, he preferred not being hurt in the first place.

Plus, that wasn’t accounting for some protection for Zea, who inarguably had the stamina needed to walk around in it all day, though perhaps not the strength to move easily. That wasn’t too hard to fix though.

Either way, he wasn’t going to be surprised if they didn’t find anything in the village ahead of them. Unless there was a lot more hiding away somehow, he counted forty-one houses surrounding a well on the northwest side of the road, and another sixteen houses with fields around them on the southeast side. A meal and a bath probably weren’t out of the question. A master craftsman of any flavor probably was.

“A problem for another day,” Luke mused. “Besides, we don’t even know how much money we’ll have left over by the time we get on the hypothetical ship that’s going to take us to the other side of the world. With our luck, that amaril hide won’t sell for half what it’s worth and we’ll be stuck scrounging again.”

“There is no way we’ll still be short on money after what you looted that bandit camp and what we get for the hide.”

Luke hoped she was right. The fact of it was, he was all too used to having money problems back home, and getting dragged over to Aros hadn’t really changed that too much. The money just looked different and he never really had a clue if he was getting ripped off or not anymore. That was one of the big reasons he left all the haggling to Zea. She at least had a good grasp on what things were worth. A pre-industrial society weighed things differently than what he was used to. Clothes and shoes, especially, he found to be expensive compared to things like food.

Every time he tried to make some sort of sweeping generalization about an industry, he ended up being wrong. It seemed like some skills were just easier to rank up than others, and that had a huge impact on the price of whatever those skills were designed to produce. All in all, it was easier to just trust Zea to handle it.

“Did you ever fence that jewelry we got?”

“Not yet. I wanted to be far, far away from the families of whoever those bandits killed when they took it.”

“I guess we’re far, far away now,” Luke said.

“Yup. Probably still going to hold onto it until we get to Sicanti. There’s no way some dinky little general supplies store out here is going to pay what it’s worth.”

Luke smiled. Like he’d said, Zea knew what things were worth and how to make sure she milked every copper out of them. “Alright, Pavena, let’s head into town and see what we can find.”