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Isekai Terry: Chapter 35 – People Worth Talking To
🕑 Added 2024-07-09 22:45:32 +0000 UTCDusk, Terry soon learned, was an attention whore. Not only did the kitten let the woman pet her but almost immediately abandoned his shoulder to crawl into the woman’s hands. Terry shot the kitten a look.
“Traitor,” he muttered.
“Oh, she’s not a traitor,” cooed the woman while stroking between the kitten’s twin sets of ears. “She’s just a sweet kitten.”
“She?” asked Terry. “I wasn’t sure about that.”
The woman frowned down at the kitten who had sprawled bonelessly in her hand. Then, she shrugged.
“Maybe.”
“She it is,” said Terry. “It’s that kind of trope.”
“What’s a trope?” asked Haresh.
“It’s—” Terry didn’t have the energy to get into it. “It’s nothing important. So, do these two have names?”
A smirk ghosted across Haresh’s face before he resumed a neutral expression.
“I find that they respond to hey you.”
The young woman gave Haresh an unfriendly look. The young man rolled his eyes and stepped forward.
“I’m Jaban. That’s my sister, Ekori.”
“Exactly,” said Haresh, who was clearly having a hard time keeping a straight face. “Who can possibly remember names like that? So long. So complicated.”
“It wasn’t funny the first time,” said Ekori. “It hasn’t grown more amusing since.”
Terry watched this exchange and tried to decide what to make of it. It all seemed genuine enough. Haresh clearly enjoyed teasing the two, Ekori especially. Given how swiftly she’d taken the bait, he wasn’t sure he’d have been able to resist tweaking her nose. Still, something felt off to him. He couldn’t put his finger on right at first. Then, when he did figure it out, it made him both sad and tired. Now that it was clear that there wasn’t going to be a fight, he wasn’t sure what to do. He appreciated that they weren’t dead set on violence. He’d had more than enough of that recently. That didn’t mean he was particularly eager to spend more time with them.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to make an immediate choice about anything because Dusk was soaking up attention. Jaban wasn’t as enthralled by the little creature as his sister, but he did go over to scratch the kitten under the chin in the way that every cat ever seemed to like. Even Haresh wasn’t immune to the gravitational pull of the kitten’s cuteness. He eventually wandered over and let the kitten bat at his fingers. Of course, Dusk wasn’t the only beast that he needed to worry about at the moment. He turned to look at the hulking form of Drumstick. The huge chicken-lizard was eyeing the kitten with such intense wariness that it bordered on the comical. Terry shook his head before he addressed the big beast.
“Were you following me?” he asked.
Drumstick swiveled its head to look at him for a split-second before it looked anywhere but at him. I think that this thing has some serious malfunction. He gave the chicken-lizard a disapproving look. Drumstick might have been pretending not to look at him, but its head hung in shame.
“Hundreds of miles of forest around us,” said Terry gesturing at the trees all around them. “You can live in any of it. You’re huge. Just go make a home somewhere.”
Drumstick made a pitiful squawk-roar at him. Terry wasn’t an expert linguist, but he didn’t need to be to translate that. Please don’t make me. He glanced over his shoulder to find Haresh, Ekori, and Jaban staring at him and Drumstick with slack-jawed expressions.
“What?” he asked.
“You can talk to it?” asked Jaban.
“I feel like talk is a strong word for what I’m doing,” said Terry. “I guess it understands us well enough. Talking back, on the other hand, seems beyond it.”
Then, as if to both prove and disprove his point at the same time, Drumstick let out a series of disgruntled squawk-roars that, again, didn’t need much intuition to interpret. What do you mean I can’t talk back? I’m talking back right now. Stop embarrassing me in front of the new people! Terry was willing to admit to himself that he might have just been imagining that last little bit. Maybe. It was hard to be sure when translating chicken-lizardeze. He did think that they were all overly impressed with the feat. It wasn’t like they couldn’t have done the same thing. He suspected they were overthinking it and just imagined he understood better than they did. After all, they had heard all of the same things that he had just heard. Whatever the case, he was sure that getting Drumstick go live in the forest was going to be a more time-intensive task than he wanted an audience for.
So, he turned to the three other adventurers to bid them farewell. Then, he hesitated. There was a lot about this world that he didn’t know. Things he needed to know. And these three were the first people he’d met that hadn’t immediately been problematic. At a minimum, they could probably tell him things about the Adventurer’s Guild that would at least smooth the way in the future. It would beat having to figure every damned thing out the hard way. They could probably give him a read on the political situation, either in general or specific. He suspected they also had a better map than he did, even if it was only in their heads. They could fill in a lot of gaps for him that would make it much easier to survive.
The problem was that he would have either implicitly or explicitly divulge that he was from another world, and he didn’t know what that would mean. It was possible that he was the first person who had ever been drawn there from another world but that seemed unlikely. If him being brought to this world hadn’t been intentional, why had there been a greeting party for him? No, it felt more like it was something that had happened before. It might even be something common, or at least a known phenomenon. Most importantly, though, he felt like he had a decent chance of escaping them if they turned hostile. It wasn’t a sure thing, and he suspected that Haresh was probably a lot more dangerous than he seemed, but he didn’t get the sense that he’d be facing insurmountable odds.
Sooner or later, he’d have to trust someone. As he thought back, that was also a trope. It was just one that worked for the poor damned bastards who got stuck in these situations. He’d been so focused on the potentially bad tropes, of which there were oh so many, and getting sucked into situations that he wanted no part of, that he hadn’t given much thought to the idea that tropes could work for him as well. He supposed there was no harm in at least seeing where they were headed. If they were going to continue south, they could travel together. That would give him a chance to pick their brains a little and decide if trusting them was worth the risk. If not, he’d just have to continue on as he had for now.
“I’m heading south,” he said, looking at Haresh. “You?”
The man gave him a considering look before he said, “We don’t have a particular destination.”
“That’s sure the truth,” muttered Jaban.
That earned the young man a stern look from Haresh. Jaban seemed unphased by the look because he continued on.
“I’m just saying that it wouldn’t kill us to go to an actual city now and then.”
“There’s no work in cities,” said Haresh in a tone that suggested he’d said the same thing many times before.
“There’s lots of work in cities,” objected Jaban.
“Only if you’re a rank two or a rank one,” said Ekori. “You just want to go to a city because there are more willing girls there.”
“Yeah,” said Jaban with zero shame. “Not all of us have people falling all over themselves to try to win our hearts. I need to stack up as many advantages as I can.”
“Enough,” said Haresh in a long-suffering voice.
Ekori and Jaban fell silent. Terry eyed the young man. He had his doubts that Jaban had much trouble finding willing ladies anywhere he went, but maybe expectations were different in a place where basically everyone could have passed for models back on Terry’s earth. He didn’t have nearly enough experience with non-insane social interactions on this world to judge such things. Haresh seemed to get over his frustration with his charges. He focused on Terry.
“Why do you ask?”
“If you were headed south, we could have traveled together for a while. Safety in numbers.”
Haresh eyed the swords Terry carried again before he looked at Drumstick and snorted.
“I get the impression that you don’t find traveling alone all that dangerous, but it’s been a while since I’ve been south. Is there something there you mean to do? A contract?”
“Nothing like that. I’m more interested in what isn’t there,” said Terry.
“What isn’t there?” asked Ekori.
“War,” said Haresh. “He means the war.”
Terry was a little surprised that he didn’t hear any judgment in the man’s voice. If anything, the man seemed a little sympathetic. It occurred to Terry that he couldn’t be the only person who didn’t find the prospect of war enticing. After all, these three weren’t there and didn’t seem to be headed there. There had been plenty of able-bodied people in the towns he’d passed through. Maybe the war was just a regional problem at the moment. He didn’t know and, honestly, he didn’t care that much. While Ekori took the news without much reaction, Jaban seemed to have stronger feelings about it based on the complicated expression he wore. Regardless, it seemed that Haresh was truly in charge, because he answered for all of them.
“Why not? There’s bound to be something dangerous to kill in the south. Especially since our last two tries didn’t get us anywhere.”
“Oh?” asked Terry mostly because he thought they expected him to.
“Well, there’s your tame cockatrice over there. Before that, there was supposed to be some dangerous plant monster, but someone killed it before we could.”
Terry did his best to keep a mildly interested expression glued to his face. There were probably lots of plant monsters in this world. Plenty to go around. No reason to think he’d killed the one they wanted. No reason at all.
Comments
Jeremy Young
Terry saved them from a dinner party if they had killed the plant monster. Nice of him to do that.
BigFun
it wasn't me dot mp3
bpete
"This is not the plant monster you are looking for!"
