Chapter Thirteen
Departure
Sarehole proved to be everything that Freya dreamed it might. While there were no hobbits in the traditional sense, the varied people were just as fond of food and drink as Tolkien’s halflings. Freya sat before a daunting spread of food and drink. Warm bread, roasted pork, sweet ale, and bitter chocolate. They called the meal Sieran-Las, some people said it meant late dinner, while Green Boots said the meaning was more like before bed supper. This was opposed to the ‘proper supper’ they had been served just a few hours before.
Yet another stack of tray of black meat and red eggs was dropped onto the table in front of Freya. The woman next to her grabbed her fourth plateful of the stuff. She was very obviously a Fable-Walker given that she was wearing a pretty good rendition of Cloud Strife’s outfit from Final Fantasy VII. Deep purple trousers with an armless turtleneck to match, complete with a single pauldron and obnoxiously large sword resting against the table. The small glowing text over her head probably was a pretty good indication too.
Bright Eyes
LVL: 41
HP: 4322/4322
MP: 368/390
Freya leaned over and pointed at the mystery meat. “What is that exactly?”
“Du willst es nicht wissen.”
“Uh.”
The woman shook her head, then spoke in a thick German accent. “Sorry, English.” She held up a large hunk of the meat on a fork. “Is best not to know, great taste.”
Freya decided to chance it on the meat, and in short order she was grabbing a second helping. It was smooth, melted in her mouth, but still had a good chew to it. Yet it didn’t have the overpowering ick factor that overly fatty foods did. The German next to her gave an approving nod.
Freya felt the description window want to appear upon holding up another chunk of meat. She considered the German’s suggestion, then decided to ignore her. What was the sense of using pages on these descriptions if she never took advantage of them?
The window appeared just above her fork.
Alert: Don’t use your windows while you’re eating. It’s rude. I bet you take phone calls and put them on speaker phone at the dinner table too.
Item: Fried Gelatinous Cube
Description: That’s right, you’re eating a carnivorous slime. A carnivorous slime that eats people. That’s like cannibalism once removed. Maybe you should listen to your friendly JRPG loving German next time.
Freya gently put the fork down and tried not to think about how much of that she had just eaten. These descriptions had very quickly gone from ‘kind of snarky’ to ‘douchebag edgelord’. Next time she saw The Gardener she would need to ask why the hell the descriptions sounded like they were written by the psycho AI from Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Freya looked out over the town. This had been a great day. Yet not all that much actually happened. Most of it had been spent enjoying the company of kind people. Zora had told her they would need to leave for Esselem tonight, she needed to report Sulivar’s movements to some friends. While it pained Freya to have to leave, the adventure that awaited her there was enticing in its own way. Really, who didn’t love a magical school?
Thankfully they wouldn’t have to trek all the way to the northern tip of the continent where Esselem resided. Zora had explained a good many literary agents used their pages to develop teleportation powers. Amusingly, they called themselves Travel Agents. Apparently making teleportation work without frying oneself or others was difficult. A group of agents figured out how to do it, and shared the secret with others in their field as a way to provide a consistent source of pages beyond what they gained working with their clients in the Source Realm.
Sarehole was a hub for all people in MythHarbor, but particularly so for Fable-Walkers. The Travel Agents recognized that and set out to provide a desperately needed service for the people here, as well as make themselves ludicrously rich in the process. Outside of only the most popular authors in the realm, people like Robert Jordan or Joe Abercrombie, the Travel Agents were the most powerful by a wide margin. The most successful among them had enough pages to make Terry Pratchett blush.
The sun painted the sky purple and orange, her cue to leave. Freya grabbed a generously sized sweet roll for the road. The German nodded her farewell and turned back to her mildly cannibalistic meat. As the subdued rumble of the feast faded behind her, Freya couldn’t help but feel a fullness the food hadn’t provided. This was purpose. A community of genuinely kind people, she could make a home here while not out adventuring. She would learn all that she could about this world, then she would return with skills to make herself useful. Already she was getting a grasp on the magic. While not out with the townsfolk, she had tinkered with it.
Freya continued to lean into earth-related abilities. With some of her remaining pages she worked out how to make any stone attached to her to form a kind of protective shield around herself. Freya’s grim trophies of the previous night proved to be of remarkable use in that aspect. Given that the toy soldiers were attached to her, and made of stone, it took even less energy to command them. She simply had them float around her with instructions to intercept anything that was going to make contact with her. It took a little doing to get it right, but she worked out something that was acceptable. Out of her two hundred thirty-eight pages, about one hundred ninety of them had been put into her magic. She suspected the other forty-eight would be needed for commercial reasons. As was evident in her having to pay for teleportation to Esselem.
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Zora and Roman waited for her at a stone bridge leading into the forest on the opposite side of the western river. Roman’s wound was completely healed, compliments of a particularly grumpy woman dressed like Mulan. He had attempted to refuse her, but was firmly rebuffed. Zora still had large bags under her eyes but had insisted she didn’t want to sleep, especially now that they only had a single day to explore Sarehole. They crossed the bridge and descended into a surprisingly gloomy looking forest. Given how close it was to the village, Freya assumed it would bring all the same feelings of cheer and comfort. Instead she found herself looking at dying brown trees that somehow had a thick enough canopy to block out any light above. Zora waved a hand over her one of her swords, the blade radiated a dull red light, not unlike the legally distinct lightsaber ripoffs at the toy section on Walmart.
While thankful for the light, the red glow further amplified the eerie air of the forest. Had she been with anyone else, Freya would have assumed these two were luring her into this dark place to murder her. Then perhaps turn her skin into a nice vest. Judging by Roman’s expression and white knuckles upon his sword, he was enjoying himself just as much as she was. Somewhere between five minutes and five hours into their journey, a light appeared ahead. As they drew closer, the source turned out to be a stone archway with two torches mounted on wrought iron posts.
Freya stepped up to the archway, the whole thing had intricate lettering from several dozen different imagined scripts carved into it. Tolkien’s elvish script, The Legend of Zelda’s Hylian, and The Elder Scrolls Daedric script to name a few. Then there were numerous others that she had no idea on. She thought perhaps she could spot Egyptian hieroglyphics, but she wasn’t familiar enough to be sure.
“Do we have any idea what this says?” Freya asked.
Roman mimed putting on glasses. “Nope.”
“The Travel Agent in the village said this would be our cue to turn,” Zora said.
“Of course they did.”
Freya scratched the back of her neck. Just turn at the creepy as shit archway in the middle of the creepy as shit forest. Nothing to be alarmed about, it will be fine. All the carvings? Just for kicks, why bother worrying about it?
Oh well. Freya thought as she stepped over the threshold. Light exploded around her, the trees turned from brown to slate grey, with shining black leaves. In fact, everything was a kind of a bright black and white. Almost like she had stepped into the sketchpad world in the old Take On Me music video. Zora and Roman appeared behind her in the archway which still showed the dying forest if she looked through it. The runes on the archway glowed black on this side.
It was a portal, and they had been transported…somewhere. The strange grey trees formed a semi-circle around a large stone table with the same grey coloring as the trees. Surrounding the table were a group of six people deeply focused on something, that must be how they teleported, some kind of magic runes at the center of the table. Freya followed Zora up to the group. But the six didn’t look up. At first she thought that it was because the table needed their constant attention. That notion was quickly squashed when she saw what was on the table. She went from confused, to annoyed.
The Travel Agents were playing Settlers of Catan.
“Hello,” Freya said, trying to hide her displeasure.
Zora placed a hand on Freya’s arm and squeezed a warning. “Wait.”
Freya deferred to Zora’s more educated judgment. So she crossed her arms and waited. At their side Roman didn’t look irritated, just bored. The group at the table was made up of six people, two men, and three women, and one figure whose gender she couldn’t determine on account of the full green suit of armor they wore. It looked something like Master Chief’s MJOLNIR armor from Halo, more specifically, it looked like the fantasy version of that armor from the Fable 2 DLC on the Xbox 360. As annoyed at waiting as she was, Freya couldn’t help but be impressed. That was one hell of a deep cut.
Finally the woman who’s turn it was grumbled something about never getting sheep, and elected to build another road. At that the group stood up. Most gave her a smile. The one in the MJOLNIR armor stepped forward.
“Welcome, it would be our pleasure to shorten your journey. Where would you like to go?” The voice sounded somewhat effeminate.
“Esselem. All three of us,” Roman said.
One of the men clad in simple plate armor scratched out some numbers on a pad. “Other side of the continent, three people, minus the percentage negotiated with the institute…Comes out to nine pages, three paragraphs.”
Nine pages? This sure as hell wasn’t a sustainable way to travel. Since Freya had heard about the Travel Agents, she was wondering why they bothered traveling by foot from The Mind’s Mirror. Now that made sense. Freya had no way good way to get new pages, even handing over the three for this trip was going to be painful. Regretfully, she started to withdraw those words from within.
Zora held up a hand. “I insisted on going the fast way, I will cover it.”
Freya tried to protest, but was shot down with a hard look. Zora knew what she was going to do, and nobody was going to change her mind. For years Freya had thought herself a confident woman, if not sure of her path in life, then sure of herself as a person. But seeing Zora operate was a whole level past that. With any luck, that would be one of the many things she picked up at Esselem.
Both Freya and Roman thanked Zora, then stepped out of the way of the six agents as they made for the archway. Each one rested a hand on one of the inscriptions. Their glow faded, and the image of the forest disappeared. The portal took on a swirling greyish red tone. The agents then re arranged themselves, selecting different inscriptions. The glow returned, and the portal showed a grand bridge leading to an even grander castle. What she assumed was Esselem was obscured by fog and a light rainfall.
Zora handed over the pages and gave a slight bow before the agents. “Until next time.”
The man who made the calculations returned the bow. “Until next time.”
With that the trio crossed the threshold, traveling hundreds of miles in an instant.
