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Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 53 – Miner’s Mark
🕑 Added 2024-07-31 07:28:02 +0000 UTCWith the prospect of Adventurer’s Guild assholes looking for him to join their factions, Terry became even more invested in getting south and finding somewhere to hole up. The grim specter of politics and the ongoing threat of the Church were things he did not want to face until he had a home base to work from. He grilled the other three adventurers about the places they’d been, which they liked best, and why. Well, he grilled Ekori and Haresh. He nodded and thought about other things when Jaban tried to tell him about the places he liked best. Terry had a pretty good sense of the young man’s priorities and where they could be located on a woman’s body. Terry did not share those priorities. He was much more interested in survival than that. He also had no desire to take up residence in a city. The guild would have a much bigger presence in any city, which meant there would be more internal politicking going on. Best to just steer clear.
He wasn’t certain that picking a place to stay was ultimately the best decision but constant wandering struck him as a losing proposition. There was just too much opportunity to bump into the Douche Knight or someone exactly like him, to say nothing of more nobles looking for things from him. He still wasn’t sure what those nobles had been after from him, but he was sure he didn’t want any part of it. Those kinds of rich people didn’t have friends like him. They were too entitled and in love with themselves for that. Anything they might do for him would come with a lot of strings attached. He never wanted to be in a position to owe people like that a favor. When they called that favor due, it wouldn’t be for something benign. He also didn’t think he’d get the option to choose not to accept the mission. He wasn’t Ethan Hunt, after all.
Finding somewhere to stay would provide advantages. If he picked the right place, he could minimize contact with church people. Avoiding the Adventurer’s Guild entirely was probably out of the question, at least in the short term, since money was a requirement for most things in this world. Damn my pesky need to eat. While he could probably maintain a steady supply of meat to eat through hunting monsters, that still did nothing to provide him with fruits and vegetables. There was certainly no sign of information about farming in his head. Of course, there isn’t because that might have actually been helpful in letting me avoid life-and-death violence. Not that his opinion about his own personality had changed enough to believe he’d make a good farmer, but options were nice. In the end, he just asked them to take him to a place that Ekori and Haresh agreed was a relatively pleasant, middling-sized town called Miner’s Mark.
“Why is it called that?” Terry asked, not entirely certain he wanted an answer. “Is there a mine there or something?”
Terry had heard terrible stories about what coal mining towns were like back in the day. Granted, he wasn’t certain which day that had been. He might have been thinking about something he read that dated back to 1859 or 1459. History wasn’t his forte, but he did remember thinking that it was terrible. If this town was like those vaguely historical, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go there regardless of whether the others thought it was a nice place. Then again, he might have been half-remembering something he'd seen in a movie. His memories since arriving in Chinese Period Drama Hell were as sharp as an image off of a 4K TV, which was a mixed blessing at best.
Everything from his old life was grainy and out of focus, like things recorded onto a VHS tape off of a TV in the eighties. He remembered watching some stuff like that as a young boy at some old person’s house. He didn’t think it was a grandparent’s house because he was pretty sure he’d never met any grandparents, but he was sure he’d seen it. Or, maybe that had been in a movie too. He honestly wasn’t sure and memory was a shaky thing in his old world. He’d read about something called the Mandela Effect where huge groups of people remembered things that had never happened, up to and including movies that never existed. Maybe I’m remembering things from a movie that never actually got made, he mused.
Haresh eyed Ekori and said, “I never asked about the town’s name. You?”
“I didn’t either,” she answered with a one-shouldered shrug. “Why?”
“Just thought that there might be an interesting story to it. Or maybe a really boring one,” said Terry.
“It’ll be boring,” complained Jaban.
“Why do you say that?” asked Terry.
“Because I’ve been there. It’s a boring place.”
“You mean that you couldn’t find a woman there stupid enough to fall for what passes as your charms,” teased Ekori.
That set off a round of bickering that Terry mostly tuned out. In fact, he tuned out a lot of things over the next couple of weeks. He wasn’t trying to be rude, but there was only so much familial banter he could stand before it started making him angry. He’d never get the chance to do that kind of bantering with anyone. It required too much history, too much shared experience, and he’d never been that close with his own sister or anyone else for that matter. Being trapped on another world or in another universe pretty much guaranteed that he’d never get that chance. Not unless there was some kind of magical cell phone that could ignore things like vast cosmic distances and didn’t have roaming charges. He shuddered to imagine the bill for that interstellar phone call. It still cost an arm and a leg to make transatlantic calls. Inter-universal calls were probably billed in human souls or firstborn children or some other thing that would make his skin crawl.
Not that the trip was all bad. He did get more free entertainment from watching Jaban and Ekori train. Despite all of the very good advice that Haresh was bestowing, and Jaban’s seeming acceptance of that advice, the young man had the memory of a goldfish. As soon as the fighting started, he was right back to trying to play the hero. Terry stepped in a few times to make sure that Ekori didn’t get hurt thanks to her idiot brother’s showboating. Strangely, he and Haresh both seemed to lose a step when they had to intervene on Jaban’s behalf. That intermittent slowness on their part meant Jaban was sporting bruises most of the way to Miner’s Mark. Terry did still end up killing enough things that head sack would need another washing after a visit to an Adventurer’s Guild Hall.
“There it is,” said Haresh over a shoulder.
Terry had been studying a flower that Ekori said had medicinal properties. He tucked it away for later examination and focused on where Haresh was pointing. Nestled next to a river was a town. It was a bit bigger than he’d imagined it would be, but not by too much. The farms situated outside the town walls made it look deceptively bigger. Still, he didn’t see anything that automatically made him want to leave. It gave off a peaceful vibe. This might be my new home, thought Terry. That thought made him immediately start looking around. If he was going to get jumped by some awful, Lovecraftian monster determined to make a Terry kabob, this was the moment when it would happen.
“What are you looking for?” asked Ekori.
“Cthulhu,” said Terry.
“Is that a plant?” she asked in perfect innocence peering at the nearby forest.
Terry resisted the urge to laugh.
“Probably not,” he said before gesturing down the road. “Come on. Let’s go see if this place lives up to your descriptions.”
Comments
Jason Hardman
No sign of Drumstick?
Marian Ch
Cthulu- Cthulhu.
