Chương 20: Gerald…Gerald Eat This Bread Please. I Want To See

Gerald Eat This Bread Please. I Want To See The dude talking downstairs to Gerald was in fact, not Ben. The door of room nine was open. Open like a fucking idiot. Open with the candle still burning on the washstand. Open into the hallway like Ben had assumed nothing in this world would ever try to come through it and had therefore left it ajar as a personal philosophical statement.

Maddy stood in the doorway with her towel around her and her wet clothes under her arm and the lavender stuff still drying on her shoulders, and she looked at her isekai-adjacent roommate. Ben was on his bed. Mouth open. Wax knife on the floor by his hand because his hand had gone slack and dropped it. Snoring. Snoring with an open-mouth confidence only achievable by a guy who had grown up with espresso machines and parents who paid for things. The candle was burning down to a stub and he had not noticed.

And why might he not have noticed. BECAUSE HE WAS FUCKING SNOOZING. He was supposed to be on watch. He was supposed to be on watch because they had agreed, in the dungeon, on the walk back, vaguely, that they would take turns again, and the agreement had apparently lasted about as long as it took her to walk down a hallway to take a fucking bath. Yeah okay. This dude would get killed in like three seconds. She thought about it for a second.

She thought about him in any version of this world that was slightly more committed to its premise. Elden Ring Ben. Dark Souls Ben. Berserk Ben. Ben sleeping with the door open in the Dark Souls version of this inn, which would have skeletons in the hallway and lore about why the skeletons were in the hallway. He would have died eight times by now. He would have respawned at the bonfire and tried it again and died again and posted about it. Or just wouldn't fucking respawn at all.

The system, evidently, had decided to be merciful. The system had decided that Mossgrove was a tutorial zone and that nothing was going to come through the open door tonight and the open door was therefore allowed. She walked in. She closed the door behind her. She locked it. She slid the iron key into the wooden lock and turned it and the lock made a satisfying clunk. The clunk did not wake Ben. Nothing was going to wake Ben. She set her wet clothes over the chest at the foot of her bed.

She set Bolt on her pillow because Bolt was sleeping with her. She set the Monster Tube next to Bolt. She kept the towel on because the alternative was crawling into the straw with no clothes at all and the straw had a personality she did not need to introduce to her bare skin tonight. She lay down. The straw made the straw sound. The candle flickered. Ben snored. She lay on her back and looked at the wooden ceiling beam with the unhappy-face knot in it. The knot was still there.

The knot had not moved since this morning. She had a small relationship with the knot now. She looked at her screen. The screen was floating beside her head, soft pink, sparkling occasionally, idle.

"Hey." It brightened.

"Wake me up at seven." A small pause. [Of course, Maddy! Sparkle] [The local time system follows a sixteen-hour cycle, with the rising of the yellow sun marking dawn. Would you prefer:] [Earth-equivalent 7: 00 AM (in approximately 9. 4 hours)?] [Or local dawn, in approximately 9. 1 hours?] Fuck does this even mean.

"Earth seven." [Of course! Sleep well!] The screen folded in on itself and shrank to a small star at the edge of her vision and went out. She closed her eyes. She thought about the caravan voucher. She thought about the deodorant. She thought about whether her mom was sleeping right now or whether her mom was awake and going about a morning that did not have Maddy in it. She thought about her mom in the kitchen with the chipped mug.

The thinking lasted about thirty seconds and then her body decided it was done with consciousness and pulled the plug. She slept.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. The blaring noise that should have been soft AI chirping birds noise was not ANYWHERE close to soft AI chirping birds noise. It was a fucking air raid siren.

The blaring noise was the sound of a country going to war, the sound of every fire truck in New York all at once, the sound of a metal building being torn down by a metal building, and it was happening inside her skull, and it was happening at full fucking volume, and her screen had unfolded into the room at maximum brightness and was strobing pink and white and pink and white and there was text on it that said: [GOOD MORNING MADDY! Sparkle] [IT IS 7: 00 AM EARTH TIME!] [RISE AND SHINE!] She sat up so fast her vision went black at the edges.

"WHAT THE FUCK." Across the room Ben had also rocketed upright. His wax knife was somehow back in his hand because his body had been ready for combat even in sleep, and he was looking around the room with eyes that had not yet finished loading, and his mouth was open in that same open way it had been when he was asleep.

"WHAT THE FUCK," he said.

"GO FUCK YOURSELF SYSTEM." [Have a wonderful day, Maddy!] The siren cut out. It cut out instantly. One second it was the apocalypse and the next second it was a small wooden room with a window letting in pre-dawn grey light and Ben sitting on his bed with the wax knife in his hand and Maddy with her hand on her chest because her heart was trying to come out through her sternum.

"What," Ben said.

"the fuck."

"I asked the system to wake me up at seven."

"That was the wake up."

"Yeah."

"That was the fucking wake up?"

"Yeah."

"That was a fucking nuke alarm dude."

"Yeah."

"What is wrong with this system."

"FUCK YOU CLANKER," she yelled at her screen. [Thank you for your feedback, Maddy!] Ben put his face in his hands.

Gerald was at his table. Gerald was at the same table he had been at last night and the night before and possibly every night of his entire NPC life, with his straw hat on the bench beside him and a tankard of small whatever in front of him and bread on a wooden plate and a small contented look on his face that suggested he had not lost any sleep over the fact that two foreigners had been in the building. The morning light was coming through the inn's window in stripes. The fire in the hearth was low.

John was polishing his tankard with his polishing cloth. Again. Obviously. Gerald saw them and his whole face did the lighting-up thing.

"Travelers! Off so soon?"

"Yeah Gerald," Ben said.

"Caravan."

"Ah! To Silvermarch. I heard tell from John. A fine city, Silvermarch. Many silks. Many spices. A lady such as yourself, traveler—" he looked at Maddy "—will find much to admire."

"Yeah," Maddy said.

"G-strings."

"Ha-ah. Another fun term. Eat before ye go. The road is unkind to an empty belly." He pushed bread at them. He pushed butter at them. He pushed a small bowl of something purple that looked like jam but might have been anything because the system had a loose grip on fruit. Maddy sat down because Maddy was hungry, and Ben sat down because what the fuck else could he do, and Gerald watched them eat. The old man had decided, for reasons known only to him or to his code lines, that he was their breakfast guy now.

She watched him while she ate. She watched him butter his own bread. She watched the way he turned the bread in his hand to get the butter even. She watched him take a bite and chew on the side of his mouth where his teeth were probably better. She watched him reach for the small bowl of purple stuff and dip his bread into it and then pause halfway and offer the bowl to her, like he had remembered, mid-motion, that there were guests at the table. His hand had paused. That was the thing.

His hand had paused, mid-motion, like a person whose body knew the rules of being a person, like a person who had grown up with siblings and had learned to share the jam before he took his own bite. Gerald was an NPC. Probably. But Gerald paused his hand at the jam bowl for a guest, and Gerald cried for his Pony thing, and Gerald sniffed when his feelings were hurt, and Gerald gave a stranger eggs from his basket because Gerald's wife Mira had told him eggs were good for travelers.

The system had also given them a screen with a fucking sparkle emoji and called the magic stat mana and put an innkeeper named John that liked to polish his stupid fake tankards, and the system was a piece of shit that could not write a paragraph of dialogue without using the word traveler, and if the system was the same thing that had written Gerald, then how the fuck was Gerald like this. The food was good. The bread was warm. The butter was real butter.

The purple jam was sweet and a little tart and she could not place the fruit and that was fine, she could not place anything in this world. The bread had a crust that crackled when she bit it and the inside was soft and pulled apart in strands. Whoever had baked it knew what they were doing. The system had not written this bread. The system did not know what bread was. The system thought wisdom was mana capacity.

So either someone in this world really baked the bread, and really kept the butter, and really sat at this table and paused his hand at the jam bowl because his body knew about guests, or the system was much smarter than it pretended to be, and was running a long, careful con on her about a goddamn loaf. She was choosing the bread theory.

She was choosing it because the other theory required her to chew through breakfast knowing the breakfast was a row of code lines designed specifically to make her feel safe before a fight, and that was a worse way to eat. If Gerald was real, Gerald was real. If Gerald was code, Gerald was extremely persuasive code, and at some point she was going to have to forgive herself for being persuaded. She ate her bread. Gerald talked about the road.

He talked about the merchant caravan and how they were a decent lot, mostly, with the occasional swindler, but the road to Silvermarch was well-traveled and the king's road agents kept it cleaner than most. He talked about the Old Bridge and about a stretch of woods past the bridge where the canopy thickened and the suns barely reached the road. His voice went a little softer when he talked about the woods, which kinda just sounded like how an old man's voice goes softer when he was telling a story about a place.

Or maybe they were going to get fucking ambushed by the Decepticons. Ben listened. Ben listened with his elbow on the table and his cheek in his hand and the bread halfway to his mouth, and at some point Ben said, "Gerald, where'd you meet Mira?" Gerald's face did a… warm thing. Stupid coded thing. Like he was nostalgic or some bullshit. Like he could actually remember things.

"Autumn fair, traveler. We were sixteen."

"…sixteen."

"Aye."

"You've been with Mira since you were sixteen."

"Aye."

"How old are you now?"

"Seventy come spring."

"…fuck."

"Aye."

"That's a long time."

"Aye, traveler. It is."

"And Lila's eight. How does that even make sense? Did the system—" Ben said, then cut himself. He looked at Gerald's eyes for a bit, like he was trying to see something in them.

"Forget it, actually. So. Your daughter's still pretty young." Gerald's face did a smaller thing. Patient.

"Aye, traveler. Lila came late. My Mira and I had given up on a child. Lila came anyway. My Mira calls her our second autumn child." He took a sip from his tankard. Ben was looking at his bread. He was looking at his bread weirdly. Like he was filing something for later. With his bread. Or something. But she knew. He had asked because he had wanted to know. He had also asked, she thought, because maybe he had wanted to give Gerald the chance to be a person. She did not say anything about it.

They finished the bread.