The Adept- Day 5

  Reader watched the hulking wagon rumble away, his jaw slack.

  He looked down at his hand at the free sample. A library card. Well, an admission to the Medley library. A library pass, I guess. Seems pretty lame compared with seeds and weapon belts.

  “Why would you compare my pass to seeds and weapon belts?”

  Don’t sweat it. Different POV chapters.

  Reader just knit his brows and shook his head, sick and exhausted at hearing the constant narration, still shaking with hunger. His body was miraculously healed. The Shopkeeper had indeed traded the letter opener for a pair of little red potions. Reader had been in Scape long enough now not to be shocked as the wounds on his body, especially the dreadful gushing wound in his stomach, knitted up and faded away.

  Grim shuffled alongside him. “Hey, dickface, I don’t know if you recall but I got kind of a thing about being fucking bored and this white nothing is a lot more fucking boring than the island in the sky you just made me leave. Can we get a fucking move on? You’re gonna pass out if we don’t get some food in your face hole pretty soon.”

  Reader turned weakly to look in the direction the shopkeeper had pointed. “I don’t see anything… there’s no town there.”

  Grim said, “Just over the horizon, dickweed. Come on, move it or fucking lose it, don’t ask me if I give a shit, but if I gotta look at this blank fucking nothing.”

  “Okay. Okay. Wait, just a second. Let’s look for the other things I dropped. I don’t have any money.”

  Grim scowled but complied.

  It only took a few moments to find the other two ornaments. It was a white expanse of nothing after all.

  Artifacts tucked into his robe, Reader started to walk. His steps were weak, he felt the effort of every foot having to rise and fall. He could feel the strain in his face, as though his eyes would drift closed, his cheeks felt like they were sagging. Grim shambled along beside him and they walked in silence.

  Reader trudged on, zombie-like. He’d had it in his head that getting off the island was his challenge. Now that he was on the ground, confronting the actual world of Scape, he felt himself shrinking from the impossibility. The Shopkeeper had said ten million coins. He had no sense of the vastness of the request, but the way Grim had snickered gave him the impression he would need to adjust to waiting a long time to see his family.

  From nowhere, Reader said, “Hey, Grim.”

  “Fuck is it? You were on a roll there, scrote-face.”

  “If I can level up my band… and that makes me better at the adept path, does that mean I can store more books?”

  “Sure as shit.”

  “Does that mean… do you upgrade too? Do I get a new, whatever you are? A new Grimfolio?”

  Grim snarled, “That’s my fucking name, dipshit, not what I am. If I see more weak-ass pasty shits like you should I call ’em all fucking Readers? I’m a Tomegeist.”

  “Okay… Will I get a new tomegeist?”

  “Sorry, asshole. You’re stuck with ol’ Grim. Nice to know where your head is at though. Real ambitious that your level of fantastical thinking extends to wondering if you can get rid of me. After what I’ve fucking done for you…”

  Reader sighed, trudging on. “Will it make you nicer?”

  “Ahahahahahaaha!”

  They walked on in silence. The town had been visible from the island and they’d surely covered a substantial lateral distance during the fall. Reader couldn’t move his eyes from the horizon. He was fixed on it, torturing himself, like watching a pot of water coming to the boil, waiting for the bubbles.

  Then it was there. Indistinct at first, then vague shapes, the tops of buildings. They grew with each step.

  Reader said, “That’s… that’s getting big too fast. Something seems off about it.”

  “We can fucking slow down if you’re enjoying digesting yourself so much.”

  Reader shook his head, irritation flashing. “No… It just doesn’t seem right… how big is Scape?”

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  Grim didn’t answer, but shot him a withering look.

  “Oh, right.” Reader reached into his mind and searched for the knowledge. Both of their eyes lit with that faint light and Reader found the knowledge coming to him. “Hmmm… equatorial diameter of Scape is estimated to be 6000 km… that seems small… I can’t remember for sure but I feel like Earth is a lot bigger than that…”

  “The fuck has that got to do with anything?”

  “It changes how the horizon works. If the world is smaller, the curve is more pronounced, it makes the horizon sharper so closer things are more easily hidden… It kind of explains how the town is peeping over the horizon so quickly.”

  Grim laughed, “You’re so fucking funny. Salvation be-eth fucking before thee, and you’re working out the distance to the horizon.”

  Reader opened his mouth, then shut it. “Good point.”

  He found the reserves needed to up his pace.

  Reader was surprised with how easily he accepted the shapes and appearances of the inhabitants of Medley. It was definitely bizarre, and a shock to the system, but he’d been living with a talking book, had seen ambulatory skeletons, clarrocks, xantions and minotaurs already. And he was so, so desperately hungry and he simply could not spare the time or the energy to be dazzled.

  Drawn to the authority figure of a gate watchman, and still feeling slightly silly to be asking questions of what seemed to be an ogre or a big orc or something equally Tolkien-esque and impossible, he was directed to Glubb’s general store to pawn his ornaments.

  He took the discovery that Glubb appeared to be a man-sized anthropomorphic toad in stride. Glubb offered him ten gold coins for the pen, but was unimpressed with the paperweight when it was revealed that the fall had cracked the crystal. Reader pocketed the paperweight and the pen. He had six gold coins in change from his sale of the letter opener after buying the healing potions, leaving him with a total of sixteen coins.

  He had no sense of their worth. Was that a small fortune? Was it the price of a load of bread? He couldn’t organize his thoughts. He was just so damn hungry.

  He moved directly towards the first eatery he could see, a building close to the main gate with a sign over the top that simply read “Dave’s”.

  Grim said, “I don’t fucking know about this, that’s a pretty nice place and we’ve got, how would you fucking say it… finite funds?”

  “I don’t care. I really just don’t care. I can smell food everywhere. If I don’t eat something I’m just going to start crying right here on the street.”

  “Heh heh… gross.”

  They were greeted at the door by an honest-to-god elven waitress, who brought them to a table. Reader had some sensation that he was being looked at oddly. He’d been nervous approaching the town, expecting the animated book at his side to draw attention but nobody seemed to blink twice at that. It was he that seemed to be drawing attention. He presumed his battered form and ragged clothes must make his appearance noteworthy.

  Reader ordered soup. What he wanted was everything, especially meat, but he restrained himself. His body hadn’t had solid food in five days and he was afraid of the effects eating might have. Grim declined food, but helped himself to the table as a place to rest his feet while producing another lit cigarette. The waitress dropped a small bowl of bread rolls in front of them and Reader lurched forward, staring at them.

  “Do you think they’d make me sick?”

  Grim seemed annoyed to be distracted from his smoke rings. “Why the fuck would it do that? You a fucking… what do they call it… one of those people that can’t eat bread?”

  “A celiac?”

  “Shit, that sounds like a racist epithet. I’m not cool with that kind of shit, dickwad. Only thing I’m ethically comfortable with being racist against is whatever the fuck you are.”

  Reader ignored him and reached for a roll. He would just nibble it. He’d taste something. He could let the bread melt in his mouth, it wouldn’t do anything and it was food!

  A few moments later he found himself staring at crumbs and an empty bowl. “Oh… I didn’t mean to do that…”

  Then the soup came. The smells of food in the room had already been murder on his senses, but the appearance of the soup, steaming and wafting earthy smells, undid him. He burned his mouth in his eagerness but he pressed on and made it disappear.

  “That was… the best thing I ever ate in my life… I don’t even think it was the hunger. That was good. Even the bread was amazing. I’m a little dizzy, but I guess that’s okay… maybe a little queasy…”

  “If you puke it up I’ll bet a coin you just eat it right back up.”

  Reader said, “That’s disgusting.”

  Grim wagged his cigarette at him, “No. Watching you devour that poor bowl of soup like a fucking animal, that was fucking disgusting.”

  Reader paid the bill, which was two gold coins, and they left the building. “Grim, I’m kind of worried… That was two coins. I’ve only got fourteen left. What am I going to live on when that gets used up?”

  “Ha! I told you that place looked pricey! The fuck is wrong with you anyway? Working out the fucking horizon or the diameter of the world or whatever the shit on the way here and now you can’t fucking figure out how to make some fucking cash? Okay, I’m gonna break this down for you, real fucking slow. We’ve got a system here, okay?”

  “Yeah… bands, sigils…”

  “Nah, nah nah. Not that. Another system. Open your fucking ear holes and get ready for me to drop some fucking knowledge on your addled puddle of a fucking brain. The system we got here is you can take things, like goods or services, and provide them to fucking people who need said goods and services. Said people will then give you something in return, possible goods or services, but more commonly… fucking gold!”

  “I don’t have any skills…”

  “Oh for the love of my aching asshole, you’re a fucking adept!”

  Reader hesitated. “You’ve… you’ve got an asshole?”

  “Yeah, that’s the takeaway. No I don’t have a fucking asshole! It was a turn of fucking phrase. You can enchant shit, or engineer shit.”

  “I can make things float like… a little bit…”

  “Well then let’s focus on self-fucking-improvement then, yeah?”

  Reader stood, the town moving around him. The sun was low in the sky and the air was cooling. He was so very tired. He didn’t feel like practicing his enchanting here on the street. It seemed strange to be nervous of making a show of himself in front of Bufos, and Orcs, and the rest of the cast of the Witch and the Wardrobe, but there it was.

  He rummaged in his pockets and produced the library pass.

  “How about this?”