Chương 33: Glacrow's Goodes

The first store we come to has weapons on display outside and a sign that identifies it as Glacrow's Goodes. We go inside to find a short green skinned man with pointy ears and a wide smile on his face.

"Welcome, welcome!" he says.

"I see more outworlders have come to try Glacrow's wares. Look around, or come and tell Glacrow exactly what it is you need, and he will provide it for you, all for a good price. Glacrow's prices are the best around, and further discounted for the outworlders even still. Come, come!" I go up to the counter that the small man is standing behind. He smells of forests and leather. It's a pleasant smell, and I instantly like him, despite the way he greedily rubs his hands together.

"Do you buy as well as sell?" I ask him.

"Indeed!" he says.

"Glacrow is a full service merchant. He buys, he sells, and he trades! What do you have to trade with Glacrow? More goods from the outworld?" I start pulling things out of my spatial bag. I pull out the shadow wolf furs, the lynxith furs, the claws, and the fangs. I pull out my old backpack and the two bags I was using to carry food and water. All of the things that I don't need anymore, I put on the counter. It makes quite a hefty pile.

Glacrow nods as each thing is placed on the counter, mumbling to himself about what he sees and affirming how much of each item is placed in front of him. When I finally finish, he looks me up and down and smiles.

"And let Glacrow guess what you are wanting. Arrows! Arrows and a cloak. You must have a cloak! And camping gear. You'll need camping gear." He begins rummaging beneath the counter. He moves off to the side and starts a pile right next to mine, adding a quiver of thirty arrows to a folded leather cloak, a bedroll, a set of flint and steel, and a water skin.

"You need torches?" He looks me up and down and shakes his head.

"You don't need torches," he says.

"But a whetstone! Yes, you need a whetstone. And an extra water skin, so you can go longer between sources of water. This is important, yes." He continues to pile more and more camping supplies on his pile. A tanning knife. A pot for cooking in. Some skewers for the fire. Feathers for fletching. Arrow heads.

"How do you know what I need so well, Glacrow?" I ask him.

"You're a hunter, no doubt about that," Glacrow says.

"Some day, more than a hunter. But you need tools for hunting, for surviving in the wilderness. Glacrow knows what you need. Standard items. Glacrow has sold dozens of them. Lucky you are that he has any left! You need fishing line too. And hooks and weights and bobs. Catch some fish when you come across water. Hunt to feed yourself and others as well!" He thinks I'm still a hunter class. That was one of the first classes I qualified for, and I never even took it.

I went to rogue instead, only going back to the hunting line to get to pathfinder and then Tracker. And I'm aiming for ranger. I'm pretty close to ranger now, I think. Mostly, I need survival as a skill, which these tools are going to help me with. I hold up a hand to stop him as he adds a needle and thread to the growing pile.

"How much is this all going to cost me, Glacrow?" He stops and looks at the pile of items I put on his counter.

"Cost?" he asks.

"No cost. Trade. All that Glacrow has put on the table is in trade for what you have put on the table. A fair trade, yes? Even and fair, all that you have for all that Glacrow has." I look at the two piles. They aren't quite the same size, but I'm happy to not have to dip into my money just yet.

"Deal," I say. Glacrow claps his hands and begins pulling things off the table, from my pile of furs and fangs and claws and bags and pants from my old world. I start to pulls things from his pile and put them into my bag. It doesn't feel any heavier, and I know doesn't take up that much space. Maybe three cubic feet, far less than the twenty that I have ready to go. His quiver is nicer than the one that I traded to him, and sits well on my hip next to the bag.

I put the extra arrows along with everything else in the spatial bag, then I start looking around at the other items in the shop while Gigi and El start to make their own trades. I notice that El puts one of her three battle axes on the table along with the furs she's collected, and I notice that Gigi is busy counting her money instead of adding things to a small pile she has.

She is also giving up everything that she had from our old world, but she wasn't one to collect furs and fangs, so she has very little of that to offer Glacrow. I see on the shelves several items of jewelry, and I wonder if they are magical. Sure enough, a little bit of staring tells me what they are and what they do. Bracelet of toughness. +4 vigor. Ring of protection. +5 armor. Necklace of the wary. +4 awareness. Choker of might. +4 strength. Ring of the Magi. +4 presence.

On and on, items that will add +4 to any of my stats, a few other items of protection that will add to my armor. I want all of them, naturally. But I doubt I'll be able to afford them. Depends on how much money 28 gold and 110 silver really is. When the girls finish with their own trades, which are not as even as mine was, I go back over to Glacrow, who is counting the coins that he took from the girls.

I try to catch sight of how many coins and what kind, so that I can kind of get an idea of the value of everything. It looks like the coins are mostly silver, which is encouraging.

"How much are these other items?" I ask, pointing at the stat boosting items.

"Glacrow thought you might have such a discerning eye," he says.

"So happy to see that he was correct! These items are twenty five gold each, and well worth the price. They grow with you, adding that bonus no matter how high your stats get. You won't see an item that becomes useless as you level up here. All of them continue to offer benefit to you. That is Glacrow's guarantee!" Twenty five gold. That means I can only afford one of them. Which is most important to me? Which stat do I need the most boost to?

Initially, my thought is to go with agility; the higher that is, the more damage I do with my bow and the higher my defense gets. But agility is also by far my highest stat; I have almost double the next highest stat, which is vigor. So maybe I don't need the augment for that. I need to augment what I'm not good at. I'm not good at charisma, but I haven't found any need for it yet. Though, looking at Glacrow, this might be exactly when it's needed. Will I be able to haggle with him when my charisma is so low?

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Do I really care about haggling? I mean, it might be a skill that I can earn, which would get me closer to finishing that quest, but aside from that, do I really need to be all that charismatic? Or is that something I can let someone else worry about? Maybe we'll make a friend who is charismatic as hell, who can be our face when we sell things in the future. Willpower will give me more stamina, and it's relatively low right now.

It's only at 25. Which is more than double my charisma, but still. I think willpower is the way to go.

"Will you take 20 gold for this?" I ask, pulling the bracelet of willpower off the display case. Glacrow looks at me, then at the bracelet. He smiles and shakes his head.

"Glacrow cannot go so low," he says.

"If he did, then Glacrow would lose money. And losing money means losing his shop, which means no more shopping for adventurers like you with such good prices! No, he cannot afford to go down to twenty. But he can drop the price to twenty four, just for you, because Glacrow likes you, hunter. He likes your smile, and wants to see it more, and will forgo a full gold to see it more." That's better than I was expecting. I didn't think he'd budge at all. I decide not to push it.

I also get a notification that I have, in fact, learned a level of haggling. I get an idea of what the value of money is, at least based on each other. One hundred copper pieces equal one silver, and one hundred silver pieces equal one gold piece. One hundred gold equals one platinum, but those are hard to come by, as a hundred gold is considered a lot of money. I can stay for the night in an inn for between one and five silver, and can expect to pay a few copper for a meal.

I think back to the way my father once explained the economy to me. He told me to think not in terms of dollars, but in terms of a product that will have the same constant value, like a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger is always worth the same, even if the price changes. Because inflation and all that kind of stuff happens to all products at once, it's a good measurement of things. So if a hundred cheeseburgers is worth the price of a night at a hotel, that tells me how much a night at the inn costs.

So that all tracks. I think the money system might make a certain amount of sense, though I can't be sure yet. Money in general doesn't make sense. It's worth whatever people will accept it for. But coins of various denominations have an intrinsic value to them. One gold is always going to be worth one gold. So maybe there isn't inflation to worry about. Maybe the economy is based on how much coins are worth for the value of their materials more than anything else. I don't know. I don't get money.

But I know that I have essentially four gold and ten silver left, which should be plenty for me to live on, especially since I can go out and hunt for food and can provide my own shelter with a little bit of work. The forest is big, and probably as full of game as it is of monsters, so I shouldn't have any trouble, given my class. Once we're done shopping and significantly poorer in coin than when we came into Glacrow's, we need to decide what to do next.

Do we call it a day and find the lodgings that are provided for people like us, or do we see what else the city has to offer?

"I want to find quests," El says.

"Even if we can't complete them right away, I want to get as many of them as we can. Then I want a bath, and maybe a night in a bed. Then we can go out and live in the forest for a while. But I want a little bit of comfort before we do."

"I could go for some comfort," Gigi agrees.

"And definitely could go for some quests. I feel like whatever level we're at, we could be higher, and we need to work to keep up with everyone who's already been here."

"Someone here is probably a higher level than we can manage," I say.

"Someone killed the tutorial god, right? There must've been a massive amount of experience for that. I mean, it's a god."

"Good point," El says.

"All the more reason for us to get some quests and then go out and start grinding through them. But I still want my night in a bed, and a hot bath. And a nice meal." We wander among the roots of the giant tree, and soon come across a row of guild halls. There's an adventuring guild, a hunting guild, a number of crafting guilds, a mage guild, and a scout guild. We start with the adventuring guild.

Inside is a large room where people who seem to be adventurers are waiting in long lines to speak to people at windows like in the DMV. Shrugging at El and Gigi, I get into one of the lines and start waiting. Luckily for me, it's not long before I reach the front of the line.

"Are you registered with the guild?" the young woman asks me. She has dark green skin, with eyes to match, and fiery red hair that contrasts really well with her skin. She smiles at me, but it's a customer service smile.

"No," I say, smiling back as warmly as I can.

"I'm, um, new."

"New adventurers start out with leather tokens," she says, pulling one out and placing it on the counter in front of me.

"This token identifies you as a member of the adventurer's guild. After one hundred renown is earned, you can trade it in for a steel token. You must have a steel token to take advantage of the guild's store. Leather tokens are provisional memberships, but they allow you to accept quests. Do you understand what I've just explained to you?" She looks at me, and I nod.

"Good. See one of the adventuring books to see available quests. Place your mark if you accept the quest. Thank you." I can tell that I'm dismissed, and I look around to find the adventuring books, whatever those are. Turns out they're large tomes along one wall. I take my token and walk over to the first book on the left, figuring that if they are set up by level, these will be the easiest quests. I'm right about the difficulty level, but I'm wrong about where we should be looking.

The first few quests that I find are only worth 250 to 500 experience. Those are good quests for low levels, but I need more intense quests that are worth more experience if I want something that Gigi, El, and I are going to be willing to spend the time working on. I don't want to go out and hunt low level monsters while we're at this high of a level. We'll come back to these if we ever die and have to regain levels again.

It takes me a little while, but I eventually find a quest that fits our ability level and sound interesting. Adventurer quest: Find and clear a bandit outpost. Reward: 50 renown, 15, 000 experience. Adventurer quest: Clear undead from temple and destroy the monster generator. Reward: 40 renown, 12, 000 experience. Adventurer quest: Delve into a dungeon and clear it. Reward: 75 renown, 20, 000 experience. All of those sound doable, so I put my initials next to each one. As I do, the quests register in my quest log.

Gigi and El both come and put their initials next to mine, having finished getting their own tags. We next go the hunting guild. It's much the same, including getting a leather tag. The offered quests there are all for various monsters, and I have to use my best judgment to figure out which ones we should take. Hunter quest: recover pelts from brown bears. Progress: 0/5. Reward: 10 renown, 1, 000 experience. Hunter quest: recover pelts from shadow wolves. Progress: 0/5. Reward: 20 renown, 2, 000 experience.

Hunter quest: recover pelts from greater lynxith. Progress: 0/5. Reward: 30 renown, 4, 000 experience. Hunter quest: recover panther claws. Progress 0/20. Reward: 40 renown, 6, 000 experience. That gives us enough quests to get our steel tags for both guilds.