Olivia (Ospirin?) stashed her wooden ID slip back in her pocket once the lizard man returned it to her. “Thank you so much for giving me a ride,” she said. “I’m definitely not from around here.”

“Call me Josiah,” the lizard man said. “And anyways, it would be cruel to leave you there. The roads aren’t safe, especially if you’re unarmed.” He shook his head sadly. “You’re lucky I’m the one who found you instead of something nastier. You would think with all the increased trade in these parts, the Duke would bother sending out a patrol or two along the roads.” He paused to take a long swig out of a waterskin, which he then offered to Ospirin. She accepted eagerly, though she had eaten the pastry, she’d had no way to rehydrate so this could be her first sip of anything for hours. “So tell me all about how you ended up lost.”

Ospirin considered the best way to go about explaining her situation. At this point, she was almost entirely sure that she had somehow switched spots with the original Ospirin, or replaced her. While Josiah seemed nice, he already thought she was a few screws loose so trying to explain crossing over from another world might be too much all at once. If her hunch was right, and this was a fantasy world (complete with trolls, no less!), there was a good explanation which would explain both the lack of memories and understanding of how this world functioned as well as help her write off any continuing weirdnesses or missteps. “I don’t remember anything — about who I am, or where I am, or where I’m going and why. I think I’ve been cursed.”

Josiah said, “Well, a curse would make just about as much sense as anything else. Though a curse of amnesia sounds pretty serious, you would have had to piss off some kind of demon for that.” He hesitated, “You might have trouble on your trail, the kind I wouldn’t want to bring down on unsuspecting folks.”

“No trouble,” Ospirin quickly reassured him. “It’s not like I have some super magical artifact or hidden powers or sword.” She pulled the three coins out of her pocket, along with the napkin. “When I woke up, this is all I had on me, aside from the identity slip.” 

Josiah looked down at her meager possessions and laughed. “Miss Hart, that’s not even enough to buy your next meal.”

“What?” She exclaimed. “Are you telling me that I’m broke? What can three of these coppers buy?” Internally, she cursed the original Ospirin for leaving her useless pennies. This was a bad sign, she was going to need to come up with a way of making some money fast. What kind of job was she even qualified for in a fantasy world? Maybe a tavern wench, she’d worked in restaurants before, so she felt qualified to serve food. If she was in her own body, she’d have a better idea of what kind of labor she could do — her past self was strong enough to carry around heavy trays and had the endurance to stand on her feet for a long shift, but could Ospirin?

“You could buy an apple,” Josiah reasoned. “If you’re into that sort of thing. And if the seller’s nice, you may even have a coin left over.”

“Could you explain more about the money system? Like I understand the basic concept of trading coins for goods but I’ve lost my memory of the exact details,” Ospirin asked. She figured the more information she could learn on the ride to their destination, the better off she would be trying to make her way on her own. 

“Well, what you’ve got there is copper coins, which are worth the least. There are four copper coins to a brass coin. Now brass coins are what you’ll see around here generally, since most people’s daily wages are paid in brass. A meal will cost you about five brass coins at just about any tavern. Then, a hundred brass coins will get you a silver coin. I guess for reference, a small-time farmhand might bring in about twenty-five silver coins a year. Finally, and I doubt you’ll ever have to deal with gold coins but a thousand silver coins are equal to a gold coin. Really the only time ever talks about the price of something in gold is when they’re talking about building castles,” Josiah explained. “That’s the general gist of how coins work here in Vedras but most of the surrounding kingdoms use the same system, only thing that really changes is the face on the front.”

“So we aren’t in Cervant?” Ospirin asked. It would probably be a good thing if she was far from where the original Ospirin was from, less people who knew the original to be suspicious of her so-called curse. 

Josiah nodded, “Cervant is off to the west of Vedras if I remember my geography correctly. I’ve never traveled much outside of Vedras so my knowledge of Cervant is limited.”

“What can you tell me about Vedras, then? Or at least where we’re going?” Ospirin asked. 

“Sure,” Josiah said. “But you should know I skipped most of my history lessons back at school. I can tell you about how things currently stand but if you want to know what king won what war three hundred years ago, you’re better off asking someone else.”

“Whatever you know is more than I know,” Ospirin said. “I’d appreciate literally anything.”

“The easier question is where we’re heading: the village of Treemoore. At least, that’s where I plan on dropping you off. I’m heading back to the family farm, which is outside of the village limits,” Josiah said. “Treemoore’s a good place, almost large enough to be a town. The only real downside is the monsters, people are leaving more and more because of them. Mostly heading into Casut, which just finished building its big fancy walls. Casut is a nice city, it’s where I’m riding out from, but they look down outsiders.”

Ospirin interrupted, “What do you mean, they don’t like outsiders?”

“Let’s just say that the Duke of Casut has a certain criteria that anyone who wants to live on the inside of the walls has to meet. But don’t worry about things like that for now, Treemoore accepts all kinds.”

Still worried about her financial situation, Ospirin asked, “What’s there to do in terms of work? Three coppers aren’t going to last very long and I’d like to at least find somewhere to sleep tonight.”

“I’m not in the market for a job myself so I don’t know exactly what kind of work is available in town, but you’ll find that if you can swing a sword or aim a crossbow, you’ll find all sorts of work hunting monsters and keeping people safe. Though, you don’t have the money to buy yourself a sword either, do you, not like people just leave those laying around. Maybe…” Josiah trailed off. “Look, you seem like a nice girl, so I’ll give you some insider information. Tomorrow, if you head outside of the village in the morning, walk north past where the smithy, keep going down the old path for an hour or so, eventually you’ll come across the ruins of the old manor. The place is as haunted as a vampire’s cellar but there’s money to be made sifting through, maybe even an old sword or two.”

“Josiah, you’ve been wonderfully kind to give me a ride and explain stuff to me, but what kind of advice is ‘oh go to some haunted ruins!’ If there’s monster hunting jobs, maybe the adventurer’s guild would be willing to lend me some equipment, I assume you don’t need any references to work for them?” Her knowledge of how adventurer’s guilds worked came largely from fiction but she was pretty sure if monsters were as big a deal as Josiah was making them out to be, the guild would be happy to accept any helping hands. 

Josiah looked at her strangely, tilting his head to the side like an oversized, scaly cat. “There’s no such thing as an adventurer’s guild, at least not here in Vedras. Is that something that you have in Cervant? Or you probably don’t remember the exact details, huh.”

Ospirin’s mind started racing at a mile a minute, trying to digest this new piece of information. What kind of fantasy world, especially one plagued by monsters, didn’t have its own adventurer’s guild? Who organized the quests and tracked completion? Who certified adventurers or at least made sure they had a sword to take with them? Maybe there was some equivalent that she just didn’t know the word for, maybe adventurers were called mercenaries or it had a catchy name like the Bureau of Questing.

She took a deep breath, she was getting ahead of herself. It didn’t matter whether or not there was an adventurer’s guild because she wasn’t an adventurer. This wasn’t just a video game where she came pre-equipped with a sword and enough know-how to stab things with it. There was no easy menu for her to open and pick a spell to cast from. No, Ospirin needed to take things one step at a time.

“Monster hunting might be a little out of my league right now. I could probably just ask around at the tavern to find some work. It’s not a lot but I would be willing to help out in exchange for someplace to stay and maybe some food,” Ospirin said, trying to be realistic about her career choices at the moment. 

The conversation between them continued as Josiah started to open up a little more about his family. He lived on his family’s farm with his parents, his own wife, as well as his brother and his family. His family, the Clawstones, was known for their beer, which they brewed in large vats and sold by the keg. Josiah’s wife was also a lizard-person but his brother had married a human woman. He’d been in an argument with his mother about his own lack of children two days before so when it came time to drive their orders into Casut, Josiah had volunteered to go, even though it was usually his father who went.

Ospirin enjoyed hearing about the daily lives of these people. Josiah, once he got going, was happy to gossip about the ongoing feud he had over his chickens with his brother and that he was sure that the farmer down the lane from him was cheating because once he’d seen him sneaking back into his own house. It was nice to be reassured that despite the oddity of her new situation and the inhuman appearance of Josiah, people were still people in this world. Even though she was still concerned about basically every aspect of her survival, letting him talk about whatever came to mind helped distract her from the enormity of the tasks she had before her. 

They rode for nearly three hours in total, in Ospirin’s estimation. Without a phone or even watches, it was hard to exactly judge how long they’d been traveling together. Treemoore came into sight about thirty minutes before they actually reached the main square, once they had emerged from the forest. The village proper was settled at the base of what appeared to be the start of the foothills of a mountain range. There were no walls encircling the town, at least not the kind Ospirin thought of when it came to medieval city protections, but a waist high wall of stacked stone demarcated what was considered the village from the farmland around it. The buildings were structures of wood and plaster, similar to what Ospirin might have described in her former life as Tudor style. 

For now, at least, this would be her new home.