Chương 19: We HAVE to Go There. For…Plot Purposes

For…Plot Purposes She set the rest of the goblin loot on the bar. The three rusted knives. The bone fork. Ben's amulet. And—after a small hesitation that she chalked up to the talisman's influence—she lifted the Talisman of Greed off her neck and set it on the bar with the rest. The talisman pulsed once on the wood. It did not approve. John picked through the loot. He nodded at the knives. He nodded at the bone fork. He picked up the talisman. He picket up the amulet. His face did a thing. His face did a big thing.

His eyes went very wide. His jaw made a small clicking sound. He set the amulet down on the bar very gently, like the amulet was something that was one bad set down from fucking his shit up. He looked at Maddy. He looked at Ben. He looked at the amulet.

"... travelers."

"What dude," Ben said.

"This. This amulet."

"Yeah."

"Where did you—""From the Hobgoblin. From Eldarion."

"From—from Eldarion?"

"Dude," Maddy said.

"It's the name of the fucking dungeon." John was visibly processing. The NPC priority tree was clearly upgrading the encounter from "innkeeper transaction" to MAJOR LORE FLAG ACTIVATED in real time.

"Travelers. You must report this. You must report this to the guild. The guild in Silvermarch. This is—this is a matter that cannot be settled in Mossgrove. This is a remnant of Eldarion the Cursed who tried to—""Yeah okay we know the story," Ben said.

"—transform himself to fight the DarkVeil lords and instead—""Yeah."

"—became the very thing he—""STOP TALKING JOHN." Ben said it like it was hurting him. Maddy put her hand on Ben's shoulder. John finished his sentence anyway, because John was an NPC and the sentence was queued.

"—sought to defeat." Ben put his face in his hands. A panel chimed for both of them at the same time. [New Quest!] [Report the Talisman of Greed to the Adventurer's Guild in Silvermarch.] [Reward: XP, guild appraisal, unknown bonuses.]"There it is," she said.

"There it fucking is."

"It was loading the whole time he was talking."

"Of course." John was still going.

"The guild in Silvermarch! Silvermarch is the great trading city to the north—a great city, much larger than Mossgrove! It has many guilds, many shops, many merchants—and silk, of course, Silvermarch is famed for its silk. A lady such as yourself, traveler—" he looked at Maddy "—would find clothing more suitable to her liking, perhaps. The silk of Silvermarch is much sought after across the kingdoms." Maddy's head came up. Her head came up like a Goddess Tier subscriber hearing the queue chime.

"... silk."

"Yes, traveler."

"Like. Silk silk."

"Yes." She turned to Ben.

"BEN."

"No."

"BEN WE'RE GOING TO SILVERMARCH."

"You are literally being baited."

"I'm not being baited."

"You are being baited by a quest hook that John just dropped and the system just confirmed."

"It's not about the silk."

"It is about the silk."

"It's not. I want to find my limits. I want to test the system. I want to learn about the world. I want to—""You want underwear."

"I — okay. Yes. I also want underwear."

"You want SILK underwear."

"I never said that out loud."

"You were going to."

"…" She turned back to John.

"We'll leave for Silvermarch. Like…tomorrow. Probably. How far is it?"

"Three days' walk. Or—there is a merchant caravan that leaves in the morning. You may travel with them, if you pay." Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"How much?"

"Two silver each."

"Done. Wait. How much is one gold in silver?"

"It is ten silvers."

"Gimme ten silvers. Well no. Six. We're taking the caravan." John counted out six silver and slid them across. Maddy took the silver. John took the loot, minus the amulet AND the talisman, which she had picked up and put back around her neck before he could touch it again, and produced from somewhere a small leather chit with a stamp on it that he said was their caravan voucher. She put the chit in her—well, she did not have a suitable pocket—she put the thing in Ben's hand because Ben had pockets.

He took it without comment.

The bath chamber was up the stairs and down a side hallway. It was a small wooden room with a wooden door that closed and locked and a wooden tub in the middle of the floor and a small wooden bench against one wall and a small wooden shelf with a clay jar of something that smelled like lavender. A girl in a brown apron had brought up buckets of hot water. The girl had poured the water into the tub. The girl had bowed slightly and left. The water in the tub was steaming. The water in the tub was very clean.

Much cleaner that the… toilet incident. The water in the tub was the first clean water Maddy had seen since she had woken up. Well. Died. Whatever. She stripped. She stripped without the only-fan-streaming-glamour, the crop top over her head, the bra, the shorts off her hips, the Air Force 1s kicked into the corner of the room, the Talisman of Greed lifted carefully off her neck and placed on the wooden bench because she did not trust the talisman in water. Bolt went on the bench beside the talisman.

The Monster Tube went on the bench. She was naked in a wooden room in a fantasy inn with her weapon on the bench beside her and her cursed jewelry on the bench beside her weapon. She stepped into the tub. The water was hot. The water was the perfect kind of hot.

Hot enough that her body, which had been wound tight for thirty-something continuous hours, took the heat as permission to stop, and she sat down in the tub, and the water came up to her ribs, and she leaned her head back against the wood, and her body, slow, released. The part of her that had been in survival mode too long. The part she'd forgotten was a part. It remembered to do its job and let go. She closed her eyes. She did not move for about a minute.

The water held her in a way that nothing else in this world had held her. She opened her eyes. She reached for the clay jar of lavender stuff. She unscrewed the lid. She sniffed it. It smelled like lavender, the same lavender as the deodorant, the same lavender as her mom's bathroom in eighth grade. She scooped some into her palm and lathered it into her hair and her arms and her thighs and her stomach and every place a person could be lathered. The lather smelled like home.

The lather smelled like a home that was not this home and was not her home and was somewhere in between. She washed. She washed thoroughly. She washed the dungeon out of her hair and the goblin blood off her forearm where it had dried in a thin streak from the third room and the dust off her ankles and the wax-pen-smoke smell out of the back of her neck. She got out for a second. She picked up her shorts, her sport bra, and her crop top from the wooden bench. She dropped them in the tub.

She would have done laundry at a laundromat for two dollars and seventy-five cents back home, but here she was a girl in a wooden room with a wooden tub, and the only laundry she had was her own body's recent former clothing, and she was going to wash these clothes herself with lavender stuff like a fucking medieval peasant. She squatted in the tub. She scrubbed the shorts. She scrubbed the crop top. The bra. She wrung them out. She draped them over the edge of the tub. She got back in.

The water was now slightly less hot. She summoned her stat panel. The panel slid in beside her head, soft pink, sparkling. [MADDY] [Level: 10] [Class: Engineer] [HP: 150/150] [MP: 40/40] STR: 18 | DEX: 21 | INT: 21 | WIS: 20 | CHA: 24 | LCK:???] [Skills: Thunderbolt, Hyper Beam] [Titles: Dungeon Breaker] She stared at it. She stared at it for a long second. Dungeon Breaker. She was a fucking dungeon breaker. The girl who had been bouncing on a dildo two days ago for $14.

99 a month was a Level 10 Engineer with HP 150 and MP 40 and a class she had earned by killing a tragic hobgoblin scholar with a Hyper Beam she had named after a Pokémon move. The girl who had been a half-credit shy of dropping out because of a Stochastic Processes midterm she had not started was an Engineer. The system had given her the class. She had a class. A fake class. In a fake system.

In a fake world that the system had built for her so she could complete its fake quests, and she did not even know what the goal was, did not even know whose game she was playing. She didn't even bother checking whatever bullshit Dungeon Breaker was supposed to do. The water was now lukewarm. She thought about her mom.

She thought about her mom on a Tuesday morning in the kitchen, drinking coffee, the cheap kind, the brand with the yellow label, in the mug that had a chip on the rim that her mom had been planning to replace for about ten years. She thought about her mom at the table with her phone in her hand and the phone not lighting up because Maddy was not calling.

She thought about her mom in the apartment, in the late afternoon, going to Maddy's bedroom door because she had not heard from Maddy in a few days, and she thought about her mom finding Bolt missing and the laptop closed and the bed unmade and the closet half-open, and her mom not knowing, not knowing yet, but starting to know. Her mom would call. Her mom would call campus security. Her mom would file a missing persons report.

Her mom would never find a body because Maddy had not left a body, because Maddy's body was here, in a wooden tub in a fantasy inn under two suns with a hobgoblin-killing class and a fucking sparkling pink screen. Her mom. Her mom. Her mom. She started crying.

She started crying quietly because she did not want Ben to hear, because Ben was somewhere downstairs probably drinking ale with Gerald and explaining to Gerald what a Cybertruck was, because Ben had been very careful around her crying since they met and she did not want to be the person who burdened him with it. She cried in the lukewarm water with her arms around her knees and her hair plastered to her shoulders and the lavender smell drifting up off her skin. She cried for her mom. She cried for the apartment.

She cried for the Snorlax plushie that her ex had bought her. She cried for Bolt, who had been a sex toy with a personality and was now a lightning spear with a personality. She cried for Lefant, who had been the bravest thing she had met in this world. She cried for how the lavender stuff smelled, which was the cruelest thing the system had done so far. She cried because she was tired.

She cried because she could not call her mom and tell her mom about the dungeon and the boss and the dwarf and the Pokémon move and the talisman and the silk in Silvermarch, because her mom would not believe her, because there was no mechanism, because she was on a planet whose stars she did not recognize and whose grass was pink and whose people called underarm sticks deodorant for some fucking reason. She cried until she stopped crying. She wiped her face.

She washed her face with the lavender stuff because her face had snot on it. She got out of the tub. She used a towel that the girl in the brown apron had left on the bench. The towel was rough. The towel did the job. Her clothes were still wet but they would dry by morning. She wrung them out one more time. She wrapped the towel around herself. She picked up the Talisman and put it back around her neck. She picked up Bolt. She picked up the Monster Tube.

She stood in the small wooden bath chamber in a towel with her cursed jewelry and her lightning spear and her energy drink potion, and she looked at the wet clothes on the floor of the tub, and she felt clean, and she felt empty, and she felt like a person whose entire emotional inventory had just been through a fucking colonoscopy. She took a breath. Outside the bath chamber, somewhere down the hall, she could hear the inn doing its evening business.

She could hear Gerald's voice, louder, in a story, and she could hear another voice that was almost certainly Ben, saying something in the slightly tired tone of Ben she could begin to recognize. He was being good about it. He had been good about most things, actually. He had been a piece of shit about INT, and now about CHA, but he had been good about most things. He had volunteered to take first watch. Still fell asleep but… at least he offered. He also had not made her feel weird about the OnlyFans thing.

He had not made her feel weird about Bolt. He had not made her feel weird about anything, which was a very low bar for a guy in his early twenties but a bar that most guys in their early twenties failed terribly. At least Ben's not so bad. She picked up her wet clothes. She tucked them under her arm. She opened the door of the bath chamber and walked back to room nine in a towel, and the inn's hallway was warm, and the lavender smell followed her, and the talisman pulsed once against her chest like it approved.

Or it wanted to trade more bullshit. Hard to know.