Victor

  Oh boy did I sleep great! Supper wasn't as bad as I'd feared - in my world expensive places usually gave you more plate than food, but here they knew how to treat your stomach right. First they brought out fresh hot bread with butter; like no bread I'd ever tasted, though it was clearly wheat there was something different about it.

  They also brought me wine which I tried, but I didn't care for it; I've never had a tongue for the stuff. With that wine they also brought cheese - it sort of reminded me of gouda but not quite; that was pretty good actually. The main course was a big slab of what I can only assume is supposed to be prime rib; at least I thought it was, I mean, it was certainly red meat and it tasted vaguely like prime rib, but there was something peculiar about the texture.

  It didn't matter, I was hungry, and making quite a scene the way I was wolfing it down. As to the flavorings, I thought I detected rosemary or something similar; could be locally grown. Ah but the bath, the bath, the bath! That was just what the doctor ordered; you ain't lived until you've had an ice cold beer while soaking in hot water.

  This morning they'd sent breakfast up which consisted of oat porridge, fried eggs, sliced fruit, and a pot full of black tea with sugar cubes and cream besides. I ain't much of a tea guy. If only I had some coffee; I mean, technically I did, but I'd need boiling water to even make myself a cuppa. A

  ll that said, breakfast was pretty good all things considered and now I was doing calisthenics; just wearing a tank top and boxers at the moment. I was just about done with a set of squats when there came a ring at the door.

  "Oh right, this suite has a bell," I thought, and said aloud, "just a moment!"

  I hurriedly put on some pants, the same pair as yesterday. The princess had been kind enough to cleanse them before we'd gotten into my car after we'd moved those bodies. Something about the mana cost being so negligible that the body's natural ability to replenish mana overtaking it almost as soon as you were done casting the spell, she'd said.

  It made me wonder how magic worked, its relationship with the laws of physics. After making myself decent I opened the door, and who should appear before me but Illiana, fourth princess of Anaura, herself. Today she was wearing a black cloak with the hood cast back; wait, was she wearing her green cloak under that thing too? Yeah, she was.

  "Princess? Well good morning, this is a pleasant surprise," I said, "But didn't your old - er - his majesty say something about laying low?"

  She nodded, "and lay low I intend to. Which is why I borrowed one of the Shadar'kethal's cloaks, and brought two of their number with me as guards besides. Until the moment I doffed my hood, I was practically invisible."

  A voice came unseen, "your highness, you didn't so much borrow that cloak as forcibly pulled it off of poor Barrian."

  The princess turned around and pointed towards somewhere unseen, "I commandeered it then! Now stop pouting - wait outside the door and warn me if you see anyone suspicious!"

  "Yes, your highness," two exasperated voices from the shadows answered.

  The princess closed the door behind her, smiling smugly, and hung up the cloak next to my duster on the coat rack. She smiled at me, hands behind her back. All right, I'll bite.

  "What brings you here this morning?"

  "Mostly I just wanted to see you," she admitted, shyly, "but I have a practical reason too! Since my comprehension spell doesn't let you communicate unless the other person is also under its effects, I may not be very good at it myself but I thought that maybe I could be your tutor…" she was pressing her fingers together nervously.

  I raised an eyebrow, then I nodded, "ah, you want to teach me common. Ya know what, I'd appreciate that. A lot."

  Her eyes sparkled, "r-really? Let's get started then!"

  "I agree, but I also wanna have a long talk about magic when we're done with grammar lessons for the day, does that work for you?"

  "Aye!"

  So, for the first time in years, I attended a language lesson. But instead of a professor speaking to a class full of some twenty to thirty pupils and boring them to death, I was getting private lessons one-on-one. Cutest teacher I'd ever had the pleasure of learning from, I thought, but I valued my life too much to say it out loud.

  A composition notebook was going to come in handy here, so I brought one of them out; naturally the princess was amazed at the sight of the thoroughly modern pencil I was using.

  Calm down, princess, it's just a piece of machine cut California cedar filled with a hardened clay-graphite mixture that once ran across a conveyer belt with hundreds of its brothers after being assembled by complicated machinery - okay I guess that in and of itself was kind of impressive to someone used to maybe quillpens and ink bottles.

  We sat at opposite ends of the table in front of the fireplace; it was coffee table sized so we had to sit on the floor while I wrote in my notebook.

  "Let us begin with the letters," the princess began, she wrote each character down one by one in my notebook, one per line, and began to explain each one's name and the sound it made.

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  Oh, I realized that there were at least thirty letters instead of twenty-six. More vowels mainly, covering the long and short versions.

  I went over all the thirty-odd lines and started to make notes, "so this one makes a sound like 'buh'," I would say, wait for her response, and then proceeded to write a big fat B right next to it, "and this one here makes an aw sort of sound," I wrote an A next to it, "but that letter in my language carries at least three sounds, but the long version, is represented by this one here?"

  The princess nodded, so I wrote that old "ae" you sometimes see, and when it came to the "oh" I wrote O, and the "ooh" I put a U with an umlaut like a metal band name. Their version of U was always of the "uh" variety, incidentally. After I had them all written down for the first time, I rearranged them on the page so that the sounds roughly corresponded to the alphabetical order I was used to.

  Once confident that I could start writing them in daily drills until they were burned into my memory, we moved on to simple words beginning with the little ones. I once again confirmed that she could re-cast her comprehension at will, and then asked if she was able to turn it off - which she also confirmed.

  My suggestion was to have her remove the spell, at which point I would speak a word, which she would repeat back to me in common, I would try to write it down phonetically, then she'd come check my work. We did this back and forth for a while. From this sequence of exchanges I gathered that the more syllables a word had the more formal.

  The greeting "bo" was roughly on the level of "howdy", "bozu" was your standard "hello", and "bozulay" was something on the order of "salutations, noble one". Hell I even learned that some words in common had similar sounds, though not completely:

  "So how would I say one whiskey, please?"

  "You would say an üisge, apri."

  Huh, oo-eeh-sgay sort of sounds like whiskey, doesn't it?

  Numbers followed a simple base ten system. They didn't look like the Arabic numerals I was used to but were distinct enough from one another that I couldn't mix them up; okay there were exceptions: zero was still round and one was still a straight line

  Anything above ten used the [tens]-[ones] format; eleven was ten-one, for instance. An, tan, than, fon, fin, san, van, nan, dik, were the numbers one through ten. We had several exchanges like this:

  "Twenty-one," the princess would prompt.

  "Tandik-an," I'd reply.

  "Thirty-seven" In a row?

  "Tandik-san,"

  "No, no, Thandik-san!"

  This part dragged for a bit, so I'll spare you any further details. After a couple of hours my arm got tired so I stretched it out and reached behind me to deepen the stretch.

  "That's enough for today," the princess said, I suppose she sensed my fatigue, "let us speak of other matters. First of all," she pointed at the piles of things surrounding the bed, "just what is all of this clutter?"

  I sheepishly scratched my head, "oh that. Those are the things that were in the trunk of my car when I was summoned here. I was assessing what I had."

  "Ohh," she beamed, I could tell she was fascinated by some of the objects; ah, she was looking directly at the plastic cooler covered in stickers.

  "Well then: please allow me to indulge you with a lesson of my own, your highness," I said, leaping to my feet and bowing.

  I explained to her what little I understood about how the cooler worked, how placing ice inside would keep meat fresh for a limited period of time, and I explained that without a way to re-freeze them the ice packs would eventually be rendered useless.

  Oh I also said what little I knew about plastic and how it was derived from petroleum; surprisingly she knew what petroleum was since some nations used it as lamp oil, and some ancient empire had used it as a weapon. Gah! Princess what are you-

  She had drawn my bowie knife from its sheathe, "a most impressive weapon! It's as long as a short sword but it is clearly knife-shaped."

  "I mostly use it as a tool, but it was a weapon used by a hero of legend in my old world," I said, failing to mention that said hero was likely skewered by bayonets.

  "What are those green boxes for?"

  "Ammunition," I said, plainly, "for this." I opened the top drawer of the nightstand and brought out my Colt; there wasn't a magazine loaded but I opened the action and confirmed the chamber was empty all the same, "and that", I indicated towards the rifle case leaning against the wall.

  The princess gasped, "is that a dwarf thunderbuster? Wait, no, it's far too small."

  Dwarf? Well that confirmed one thing I'd been wondering. I guess if there were elves there must be dwarves, but that might not always be a given. I'd recently purchased an album from a dwarf metal band too actually.

  "Does a thunderbuster use black powder, perchance?"

  She did that thing where she wobbled her head while a finger was on her chin again, and said, "um, I think so. I saw some of these weapons in the market a while back, the kit came with something called a powder horn."

  She turned green, "ugh, I remember. He said the powder was a mixture of charcoal, brimstone, and bat poop! How appalling!"

  Ha! That confirmed the presence of crude gunpowder at least. But that wasn't gonna do me a lick of good if I was gonna restock. Well okay, I might not need that much ammo if I was planning to live a slow life somewhere. Heck I hadn't even decided what to do now that I was in this world. This was going to require a lot of thinkin' and a bit of scotch.

  "Then the answer is well yes, but actually no," I said, quoting an old meme, "it is a firearm, but I reckon it's nothing like what your dwarves make."

  My guess was that these dwarf guns were probably matchlocks or flintlocks; whether they were smooth bore or rifled I couldn't say without seeing one. I actually owned a flintlock rifle, an antique from grandpa's collection; of course I named her Old Betsy Jr.

  I brought out a cartridge to show her, explaining smokeless powder and the parts of the cartridge; the bullet is just the tip, you know. Then I went over the specs of my rifle and explained the effective range, which she marveled at. She explained how elves had superior vision to humans and that even their archers couldn't shoot that far with accuracy.

  I wondered what would happen if I taught her how to use the rifle, could she increase the effective range? But what about her ears, wouldn't that hurt? Well she did have healing magic so maybe it was fine. I heard a loud "uuah!" The princess' mouth had dropped and her eyes were stretched wide open.

  She was rooting around my grocery bag!