No doubt, my parents would have been shocked if they could have known that I’d meet a guy in the wilderness and then – having known each other a few hours – we’d both sleep the night around the remnants of our campfire with no other people around for miles. Then again, maybe they would have been even more shocked that we’d have a big cat for a chaperone who I’m guessing carefully kept herself between Simon and me all the time I was asleep.

Simon: “Good morning. Oh, I meant to mention last night. You know you can use the Interface without speaking?”

Maeve: “Say what now?”

Simon: “It took me a while to discover. But you can activate it by purposefully thinking the key word in your native language. It takes practice; so if you tried and thought it wouldn’t work, that’s because it takes work to get the knack. I’ve tried in Selkiri and English. At least so far, I’ve only been able to make it work in my native French.”

Maeve: “Cool. I’ll work on that.”

While I got the fire going and practiced silent Interface, Simon went around checking the traps he’d set the morning before. His catch made a good breakfast for all. And he showed me some edible mushrooms, so now they’re not all mystery ‘shrooms.

One of the traps caught a cute little squirrel. It was still alive, just fainted when Simon brought it back. And I think it had sprained its leg or something, probably trying to get out of the trap. Accidentally befriended the lil’ guy when it woke up while I was going “awww” over it and cooing over how cute it was and questioning how we were going to eat such a sweet little thing. I really wasn’t consciously trying. It’s just … how could I not talk to a cute animal, ya’ know? So I named him “George”. And healed him up.

I know it’s a bit ironic since I’ve hunted and eaten rabbits. And recently at that. But whatever. It’s my line and I’ll draw it where I like. Although squirrels may have to be off the menu now. Don’t want to make George sad.

Maeve: “Military service … so have you tried making firearms?”

Simon: “There are two reasons that’s a ‘no’. First, making firearms that will both reliably hit and reliably not blow up takes advanced machinery that I don’t know how to build. Might be possible with magic. Might not. Second, gunpowder. I know how to shoot a gun. I know how to maintain a gun. But making gunpowder was beyond my pay grade. And I’m not entirely sure this is the same universe. We might be just across the galaxy. Or we might be somewhere else entirely. What if the physics for gunpowder doesn’t work here?”

Maeve: “Good point.”

Hmm.

Maeve: “Simon, would you like to … er … form a party?”

He looked a bit startled. But he told me why before I could ask. Meanwhile, I saw an Interface message saying, “Group formed.”

Simon: “That was a surprise. It’s actually not the first time I’ve been asked such a question, but the Interface didn’t bring up an option dialog before this. I didn’t even know that kind of option dialog was a thing in our Interface.”

From what he described, I guess it’s probably similar to the sort of prompt often seen in games. But I haven’t seen anything like that myself so far.

Out of curiosity, I tried saying “party” in English. Nothing happened though. Then I tried “group”. That brought up a list of my pets and Simon including levels and Health bars.

Maeve: “Cool!”

Simon: “What’s up?”

Maeve: “I think forming the party just required asking with intent. Not a word of it was in my native language after all. But “Group” brings up a list of party members and their current status.”

Simon: “I’m trying it myself. But either I haven’t found the right keyword or it isn’t working for me. Or maybe it only works for the party leader. Ooh, or maybe only for a healer. I don’t have any healing spells.”

Maeve: “I guess that could be. I wonder how it works. We certainly didn’t cast a magic spell.”

Simon: “Maybe some sort of spiritual … thing? I don’t know if there’s a way to know. That might be a question for priests. Or for gods. There was certainly nothing about this in my catechism.”

I giggled at that and Simon grinned.

Maeve: “Is that Catholic?”

Simon: “Yeah. I still am even now. I’m figuring maybe the gods here are special angels.”

Maeve: “Hmm. I was never all that religious back on ‘Earth’ so … well, it’s not like I know either way.”

Simon: “So what next?”

Maeve: “Let’s visit the capitol. Maybe see if we find the other ‘Earthers’ you met before. And then figure it out from there.”

We decided to travel by way of Dunmar. For one thing, it’s kind of on the way. There’s also that maybe we can get some sort of transport from there. The walk there itself took 6 days, which gave us enough time for Simon to teach me his Insect Ward spell. Little bugs weren’t a thing in the Three Moons game, so I hadn’t really thought about them. That changed once I figured out George had brought fleas into the picture, suddenly an insect ward was a necessity. And it works even better than Earth flea treatments. In return, after I’d successfully cast Insect Ward on every living being in our little troop, I started trying to teach him Cure Wounds. Emphasis on “trying”. He soon decided it was too complex for his skill with spoken runes. So we switched to the more simple Compass spell and he picked that up just fine.

Midway through, we found a small herd of giant deer. They’re a lot like the basic white-tail. Except they’re 15 feet tall. My “cute or delicious?” gage was leaning towards delicious even before considering the “feed me Seymour” vibes I was getting from Midnight. And Simon was already pulling out his bow before I’d decided anyway. So of course we had to hunt them. We tried for two but only actually hit one. Even though Simon has a lot more experience with harvesting from hunting, it still took us a whole day working together to butcher, clean, stow part, and cook the rest. It was definitely delicious. And we got leftovers to last days even with Midnight’s large appetite. The butchering and cooking smells drew some wolves probably hoping for an easy meal, but the sight alone of Midnight seemed to be enough to make them back off.

George rides on my shoulder most of the time. Having a squirrel along means having to spend time looking for nuts and more berries. Since I like those too, no real complaints there. But I’m making a mental note to look for some kind of squirrel chow in Dunmar. Also, George would look extra cute with a miniature backpack. So I’ve got to see if it would be possible to commission something like that.

Dunmar looks every bit the stereotypical fantasy RPG small city, just like it did in the game. All those haters who said it was too cliche to exist can go suck it. Because there it is … in all its stereotypical fantasy glory. Except the people are dirtier on average than shown in most games or fantasy art. Including us. Other than Midnight, who keeps herself immaculately groomed. But for now she’s staying out of the town in the nearest forest. So it’s just us dirty people. Oh yeah, people and squirrel. Sorry George. I wonder if I can tame a moose someday so I can have “moose and squirrel”. Anyway … versus Enatus, Dunmar’s got taller buildings on average – most are two or three stories – and more variety. Poorer dwellings, sheds, and chicken coops are all built out of just wood like Enatus. But there’s also a lot that have stucco walls. And the nicer sections, the more established shops, and the temples are built from stone. 

The outer wall is also built from stone. It’s a hodgepodge mix of seamless stone stretches and cobblestone patches. Simon says he saw some work on it last year when they were expanding one district. First they have mages cast spells to create rough stretches of stone wall. Then they join those together with a section built from the combination of stones gathered in fields and rubble from old walls they want to move. From what folks told him, it costs a lot to hire somebody who can do precision stone shaping with magic, so they cut costs by just having walls cast roughly where they’re wanted and filling in the gaps. 

Aside from my sightseeing, our big goal in town was shopping, especially for transportation. It’s a long way to Selkir City. Since goblins and ogres don’t carry much, especially not precious metals, I’m a bit short on cash. I found out from Simon that the authorities in every duchy seat city will pay a bounty on most monster kills if you bring them the ears. If both sides do that, it might explain the ogre’s bag of ears. It’s a seriously gross practice. But a hero’s got to buy supplies to keep fighting, so … well, maybe I’ll learn to deal with it. Or maybe if Simon sticks with me I’ll get him to do all the ear stuff.

Then we asked around for what merchants might be buying giant beetle parts, deer skins, and some of the other things we’d gathered. When we found someone interested in giant beetle parts and I pulled a whole giant beetle shell out of my Inventory, the guy actually fainted. Like fell over fainted. Simon caught him. Maybe I got kind of distracted watching Simon catch him. Anyway, I just kind of stood around while Simon held the buyer up till he came to. Apparently he’s never seen one of these whole. Usually they get fragments or at best large pieces that somebody managed to tear off. The merchant said that since they’re found in the woods where it is hard to pull a cart, nobody has ever brought one in like this before. And that’s despite there being a bunch of uses for the really durable shells. So I got several gold coins for it.

After that, I may have gotten carried away and started singing the lyrics “I want it, I got it” on the way to one of the food merchants. I swear I could hear Simon’s eyes rolling. But I already knew from shopping with just 1 silver in Enatus that a single gold coin would go pretty far when it comes to common supplies.

I literally cleaned out the whole stock of a cart that was selling nuts and dried fruits and put bags and bags of it into inventory. The vendor seemed so happy about the sales that I don’t think she even noticed me stuffing bags into Inventory where they’d disappear from view in front of me. And that’s despite that she barely had enough silvers to give me change for the gold coin even after buying her entire stand’s worth of food.

Horses were the next order of business, along with feed and supplies. And lessons. Like, in the game we just get a horse and press a key and ride like it’s nothing. In the actual world, not so easy. Even after I tamed Lucy … yeah I named mine Lucy … I still needed lessons to know how to do a lot of things like looking after her. And being able to tell her where I wanted her to go the mundane way probably won’t hurt either. And Simon needed all that too. It took a while, but by the time we’d finished the basic lessons the next day, I managed to talk Simon into naming his Desi. I’m sure Desi won’t care that she’s got a guy’s name. She’s probably the only Desi in this world.

I also found some arm and shoulder guards to keep Felix and George from racking up wear and tear on my armor. Sadly, we couldn’t find any pre-dyed in purple or even black, so I went with plain brown.

Simon also introduced me to some of his friends in town at the bar in the Temple of Vyapar. Most of them were still working in the city guard. One of them was a dwarf. He was stocky and burly like I’d expected of a dwarf. And not very talkative. But he seemed genuinely interested in Simon’s stories about his monster hunting. The rest were humans with quite a variety of features … though all could plausibly have been from European backgrounds if they’d been from Earth. None were particularly pale though. It looks like the base skin tone of Selkir is a bit more brownish than in Europe. But considering I’ve not been here long, I’m not quite certain how much of that is by birth and how much is from time outdoors. What I can say is that Simon’s armor-tan lines are deeper tan versus less deep tan. Not that I’d have been paying attention to that. Nope. Nope, not at all. Yeah, I’m not really fooling myself. Hoo boy! Where’d I set my ale?