“Did you really make it to floor one hundred of the dungeon?” asks a sorceress, leaning over his shoulder. Sir Knight, sitting at a table at the adventurers’ guild that he has been dragged to by the usual crowd, turns his head. “What’s it like?”
He looks back toward the table he’s sitting at. “Dark,” replies the giant. People around him laugh.
“I always knew he was some kind of royal knight,” says someone nearby as Sir Knight lifts his tankard, pouring the drink inside into his helmet through the metal slits of the visor — perhaps more as an act of consideration than out of actual thirst. At first, this practice received many odd looks when he first implemented it weeks ago, but the people here have stopped asking questions about such things and now, instead, ask other questions.
“Sir Knight! Sir Knight!” calls a voice, someone tugging on the side of his leg. He turns his head, froth dripping down the metal helmet, as he looks at a fairy with orange hair who is pulling on his armor to get his attention. The small woman — about the size of a normal human man’s forearm — looks up at him. “What’s your face look like?” She asks. “Can we see it? How come we can’t ever see your face?” she asks, her wings buzzing as she hovers in the air.
Sir Knight slowly turns his head back toward the table. “Don’t have one,” replies the man in his growling voice, resulting in a series of laughs coming from around the room from many. They think he’s joking or that he’s being mysterious and distant.
But, really, he just doesn’t have one. The massive suit of armor is just empty inside itself.
— He drinks from the tankard again, the liquid vanishing into the armor's void.
“Did you always know the princess?” asks someone who has come to his table with their own chair, squeezing it in through the mess of other people sitting there. “How did you meet?” he asks.
“Of course he always knew the princess, dummy,” says a sorceress, sitting there with crossed arms as she shakes her head. “Royal guards grow up together with their wards, so they’ll develop a bond to protect.” She shrugs. “They’re like a puppy being raised in a home to become a guard dog to the children.”
“Actually,” says Sir Knight. “I just kind of ran into her on the street,” he explains, which is also the truth.
The people at the table laugh, thinking it’s another joke. Someone slaps his back, laughing, and then hurts their hand in the process, causing the others to laugh at him instead. Music and life fill the adventurers’ guild, which is as lively as it ever is — perhaps even more so than usual, given the recent events. While previously, the guild had been open to everyone, now they are checking at the door for adventuring licenses and only letting people inside who have one. Rumors of the princess living in this area, let alone it being the known hang-out of Sir Knight, have driven business through the roof this past week.
“Sir Knight. Do you have a tip for the dungeon?” asks someone next to him. “We’re stuck on the floor-sixty-boss.”
“The hydra?” asks Sir Knight, looking at the swordsman who asked, whom he recognizes as being one of Chicory’s old group companions, before she split away from them, no longer having any reason to live undercover as an adventuring priestess. They’ve gotten strong, fast, if they’re already on floor sixty. “Use electric magic,” he explains. Sir Knight runs his finger over the small puddle of alcohol on the table. “It’ll regrow its heads if you use physical attacks, and because of all the water in the arena, fire is useless.” He pulls a line out of the wet puddle, connecting it to another splash. “But electrical damage will hurt the entire monster at once because of the water everywhere,” he explains. “Assuming your spell is strong enough.”
People around the room look at each other, many taking note. Such adventuring tidbits are very useful. Information can be bought here at the guild, of course, about different fights and strategies. But something for free is something for free, and even if many of them aren’t on floor sixty of the dungeon yet, all of them hope to be one day at least. “We only have fire magic and my sword,” explains the swordsman. Sir Knight looks around the room, scanning the place, until he sees someone standing at the bar and laughing.
“Fidzel,” calls Sir Knight, his voice carrying across the room and causing several people to duck, thinking he’s standing right behind them. The woman at the bar looks around in confusion, before looking back at him and pointing at herself. “I’m calling in that favor,” he explains, gesturing for her to come over as he looks back at the swordsman next to him. “She owes me one,” says Sir Knight. “Fidzel’s a storm-caster. She can help you out.”
The number of favors he’s owed across the spectrum of people in this room is actually pretty considerable. There are certainly more than can be counted on two hands. Because of all of his time in and around the dungeon, he’s helped all manner of parties who were about to get wiped off the map or who bit off more than they could chew. While he doesn’t really need these favors cashed in for his own benefit that often, he does find them useful as tools to connect one group to another in cases just like this one. This lets him burn up those favors before they expire and become forgotten, and it also earns some prestige for himself — and therefore Acacia by connection.
Sir Knight arranges for the sorceress to join their party for that boss encounter and then answers a few more curious questions before managing to sneak away. This is quite the feat, given his popularity, number of fans, and constant stalkers. But somehow, there always arises a single second in which nobody is looking his way by chance, and by the time someone finishes blinking, by the time a head turns back around to his spot, his chair is empty, and he is gone.
And nobody can really explain how a beast of a giant like himself could have possibly managed to get out of a full room fully unseen, but somehow he always does.
Morning sunlight shines down over the grass of the park, a golden shine bouncing off of the dewy blades of grass as the last of the winter’s dampness has melted away. The smell in the air, the feel of it — everything indicates that the cold season has finally ended and that the goodness of a new spring has come to grace the world. Birds land in the still bare branches of the trees but sing contentedly nonetheless, their voices carrying far and mixing in together with the rumbling and speaking of thousands that come from the city streets.
It promises to be a perfect day, or it would at least, if not for the annoying sound grating her ears and spirit.
“You’ve run out of energy and drank one standardized restoration potion,” starts Junis, reading from Acacia’s academy textbook. “One-hundred-fifty milliliters,” expands the elf, pointing at a drawing of a corked glass vial in the tome. “Assuming your body is at normal temperature and you are in an ambient temperature zone equivalent to being forty-seven dungeon levels underground, how quickly will the potion begin to take effect?”
Acacia, sitting there with folded arms, leaning back against the rest of the bench, allows her finger to tap her lower bicep for as long as she thinks. “Five minutes?” she replies.
Junis looks at the book and then back at her. “…Did you just guess that?”
Acacia stares blankly outward toward the duck pond, not making eye contact with Junis, who has been ordered to help her study for the exam. “You need to take this seriously,” replies the elf. “No. It isn’t ‘five minutes’,” she says. “Maybe if you were down on floor ninety, where the pressure is more intense. That would delay the onset.”
“Huh?” asks Acacia, looking at Junis in annoyance. “But it takes five minutes for a potion to fully make its way through your body.”
The elf tilts her head, looking at Acacia for a moment. “…What?” asks the duck-pond-princess, not liking the blank stare and see-through stares that she’s getting from Junis, who almost feels as if she were trying to look inside her head.
Junis lifts the book with one hand, tapping the question. “Please listen carefully. The question was, ‘when does the potion begin to take effect?” she reads. “Not ‘when has the potion finished been fully absorbed’?” She shakes her head. “These are two entirely different questions. The answer is that the effect begins immediately under these circumstances.”
Acacia shakes her head, looking back away toward the water, her finger tapping her arm again as she looks around the park at the black-armored guards patrolling the pathways. One of them stops, holding his halberd at the ready, as he faces a goose that is rapidly approaching his location. The white-feathered bird flaps its wings, honking loudly, and the guard drops his weapon, running away.
Great. Her bodyguards can’t fight off large waterfowl.
“— Acacia,” calls Junis again, snapping her attention back to the elf.
“Huh? What?” asks Acacia.
Junis looks at her for a moment and then sighs, putting the book back down on her lap as she closes her eyes for a second. “Look. Sir Knight asked me to help you, and so I am,” explains Junis. “If you want to pass this exam, I need you to work with me here,” she explains, looking back at Acacia. “You don’t have to like spending time with me, but at least please pay attention then so we both can go do our own things separate from each other,” says the dark-haired elf. “Sooner, rather than later.”
Gods, she hates Junis.
Acacia sits there, her crossed arms pressing a crease into her body from the pressure she’s putting on herself.
Perhaps she is being unreasonable, perhaps not. But Acacia feels what she feels, and what she feels is deep aggravation when Junis is here next to her, being right and knowing things she doesn’t know. It’s not that she has anything against not knowing everything; she knows that’s impossible. But she does have something against the girl who tormented her for so long, knowing everything she doesn’t.
Acacia watches the goose flap its wings a few more times threateningly before waddling proudly back to the edge of the waters of the pond with a rather silly gait belonging to a bird that is made of nothing but roundness and anger.
The spring wind blows over her again, pulling on some string in Acacia that unravels something as a particular thought that had been cooking inside of herself for a while comes to an end. She lets out a long exhalation, sliding down the bench a little, so that her head is at the top of the rest and her legs scoot out onto the path. Acacia looks up toward the sky. “I’m just not good at book-learning, okay?” she explains, folding her hands over her stomach and staring toward the surprisingly blue sky. “My sister always made fun of my poor performance during lessons when we were young.”
Junis looks at her. After a moment, the elf sits back on the bench as before, with proper posture, and closes the book on her lap, resting her hands on it as if she were in the middle of a lecture and were trying to act like a model student. “Really? She seemed nice,” remarks Junis.
Acacia shakes her head, rolling it over the bench. “Not Manchineel. My other sister,” says Acacia. “She’s a real bookworm. I can’t stand her either.”
“Having siblings sounds complicated,” remarks Junis, as the two of them watch the birds float around the lake — ducks and geese.
“Don’t have any?” asks Acacia, her eyes trailing a mother duck being followed by an onslaught of yellow ducklings, who paddle after her. “I always figured you were a big-family brat,” she remarks.
“No. Just a small-family brat,” says Junis. “It was only ever me.”
Acacia grabs the edge of the bench with her hands and pushes herself to sit back mostly upright, lest someone from the public see the queen-to-be slouching. “Huh? Really?” she asks.
Junis nods. “I’m from the north-west,” she explains. “From the farm country.”
Acacia snorts, stopping herself from laughing at the thought of Junis running around a field, picking turnips. “Is your family still there?” she asks.
The elf nods, pulling a strand of loose hair back behind her ear. “Yeah,” she replies rather plainly. “They were good folk, but simple,” she says. “But I had to run away and go to the big city by myself. I had to leave them up by the fields,” explains Junis. “So that I didn’t end up like them.”
Acacia turns her head to look at her. “And how’s that going for you?” she asks.
“Poorly,” replies Junis sharply, shaking her head. “I’m afraid I’ve failed at becoming both a maid and now a teacher.”
It hurts to do so, given that it’s at her expense, but Acacia does laugh a little at this joke. She rubs her face. “Okay. Next question. Come on.”
Junis studies her for a moment and then opens up the book again. She reads the next practice question. “A mother dragon lays fifteen eggs in a clutch…” starts Junis.
And so the lesson goes. Acacia asserts herself a little more seriously and even gets some of them right.
And nearby, in the pond, ducks and geese swing together — not as birds of a feather, but still nonetheless, flocking together. Sometimes things that are different from each other don’t necessarily need to be separate from one another. There can be a co-existence and maybe while there are some occasional uneases, in the warm light of a night spring that washes away the tension, angsts, and feelings of the old winter, it’s hard to take those things with oneself into a new year.
“You want me to do what?” asks Hase, warily eyeing the Vildt boy. She doesn’t like him. He’s too clean, too sharp. People like this don’t interact with people like her unless they’re trying to hire someone unclean for a job.
“Just carry this over to the table,” he explains, his hands pushing the silver platter over to her. On it are two porcelain cups and a steaming teapot.
She studies the set-up, looking back at him. “Is the poison already inside?” she asks, shaking her head. “I’ll carry it. But I’m not adding the dose myself,” explains the girl. “I don’t need that kind of heat.”
The cat-eared boy stares at her. “Uh… no, we… huh?” he asks, scratching his face in confusion.
Oh. She misread the room. Oops.
“Oh,” says Hase, looking out from behind the counter at the two people sitting at a small table in the restaurant. “Which one of them is the mark?” she asks. “What should I snatch?” asks the rabbit-girl, looking back at the boy Sir Knight had brought her to.
“I… you should take… the… payment?” he asks, confused.
“A shake down?” remarks Hase, crossing her arms and shaking her head. “I’m not muscle. I only do quick and fast jobs. Low threat.”
Mietze rubs the back of his head. “They’re customers…” he explains. “This is their tea that they ordered. Just bring it to them.”
Hase looks at him and then hits her fist into her palm, understanding. “Oooh!” says the street girl, nodding. “I got you,” she remarks in a knowing tone, looking around the area as if checking for something. Quietly, she grabs hold of the silver tray and carries it out of the door toward the table.
“Thank you, young lady,” says the older woman of the pair at the table, sliding a coin toward Hase, who takes it and drops it down into her own tucked-in shirt.
Slinking away, unaware of the odd looks she’s getting from the well-dressed people whispering over their tea to one another, she makes her way back to the kitchen where Mietze is waiting. She stands there with one of her hands on her hips, looking rather proud as she flings back a lock of her freshly washed hair with the other hand. “If you needed a ‘package’ courier, just say so,” explains Hase. “I’m good at discretely bringing things to people,” says the thief.
“…It’s tea…” remarks Mietze plainly, gesturing around himself. “They’re customers. This is a tea house.”
Hase nods, winking. “Riiight. Got ya. ‘Tea’,” she says, hooking her fingers in the air. A second later, she shakes her left leg out to the side like a street dog shaking itself dry. The single coin jangles down, rolling through from her top and down onto the floor. Hase steps on it, stopping it from rolling away, before picking it up and holding it out to him. “Here’s yours,” she says, holding out her other hand for the change that would be her cut of the take for this job. “I’ll take mine.”
Mietze stares at her blankly and at the traveled coin for a moment. Reaching out, he folds her fingers closed over it. “You know what?” asks Mietze, smiling with a smile that could only best be described as ‘professionally kind’. “You keep this one,” he explains. He rummages through a drawer next to them, pulling out a small leather purse. “Consider it a first-time bonus. Next time, though, use this,” he says, giving her the empty little coin purse. “We have a reputation to maintain.”
Of course.
Hase almost wants to roll her eyes at herself, but she has to keep up the appearance that she knows what she’s doing. This place is full of what she can only assume are nobles and the rich. She has to keep to their mannerisms and blend in, or the city guards will pick up on the fact that a street girl like her doesn’t belong here and take her away.
“You’ll figure it out with a little practice,” he says, gesturing for her to follow him. “Come on. I’ll show you the storeroom.”
Hase looks at the boy as he walks off, dressed like some kind of prince in a shirt and trousers without a single hole. Looking at the coin in her hands, she bends it to test its realness, before tucking it away into the inside of her shoe instead of putting it in the little coin purse he just gave her.
What kind of high-level operation has she gotten herself into here? Drugs? International smuggling? This is way higher than any of the petty theft she’s been wrapped up in until now. She always knew that Sir Knight was a shady character, but she had no idea that it went this far. As they walk, she eyes every hallway and room, making a mental map of every window, door, and possible escape route for any imaginable situation.
‘Tea’.
Yeah, right. Sure. As if she’d believe that. Are these guys amateurs or something?
Hase doesn't know what kind of trap Sir Knight is trying to set up here, but she’s going to fleece what she can from this place before its jaws spring shut on her.
