Chương 30: Stanley Cup Water Power Era

So here was the situation, laid out by Maddy's brain against her will, because her brain would not stop doing this: They were not soloing a D-rank. Duo-ing. Whatever. She was a level 11 engineering student holding a dildo on a stick, Ben was a level 9 lit major with a knife made of dank wax, and the system—the same system that had looked into her pockets and decided her starter weapon should be a vibrator—wanted three people at level 10. They needed a third. Specifically they needed a monster.

Some enormous unit who could hard carry two dumbasses through a hole while the two dumbasses stood at the back contributing vibes. A fucking… chad. On tren. A walking sword with a guy attached.

"Sylvael said the Gilded Tankard," Ben said.

"She said that's where the newbies go. Like fucking…level-twos. Farmboys who just got a wooden sword and their first rat quest." She hauled the silk bag up on her shoulder.

"That's a whole tavern of us. Weak, broke, lost, dogshit. Why would I go recruit a worse version of myself."

"…so not the Tankard."

"We want a freak. Somebody scary. Like a fucking frat bro that got isekai'd with a Four Loko that became a big ass sword. We just gotta find where the scary ones drink." The bags came first, though. She was not pub-crawling with a sack of silk smacking her ass the whole way, so they went to the Bronze Lantern to dump the haul and get a room. The Bronze Lantern was a step up from anything Mossgrove had. More pixels. More render budget.

Big fat logs of wood for the walls, the kind that took real polygons, and a ceiling tall enough that the system had bothered to put rafters up there nobody would ever look at. Lavender. Everywhere. In jars on the tables, in bunches hung off the beams, stuffed into little pots on the windowsills, because the system had one scent and it was committing to the bit. And sofas. Purple sofas. Low and tufted, arranged around the hearth like a hotel lobby. Did sofas even exist in medieval times.

She was pretty sure they didn't. She was pretty sure the sofa was a like, 1600s-onward situation. This world just rawdogged time periods. Threw a tufted Wayfair purple couch into a fantasy tavern next to a guy with a sword and called it a day. The innkeeper was wiping down a tankard, because apparently that was the one fucking action sequence innkeepers came installed with. Maddy walked to the counter.

"Yo. Dude. We need a room. Two beds." She hesitated. Fuck it. Worth a try.

"Sylvael sent us." Maybe that'd get them a fucking…big tits purple eyed elf discount.

"Three silver a night, traveler." AH FUCK YOU DUDE.

"…sure." She slid the silvers across, then, because it had been itching at her: "What's your…name?"

"John, traveler." She went still. Ben went still.

"Wait," Ben said.

"Mossgrove guy."

"Mhm." Maddy's eyes narrowed at John #2 like he'd done something.

"Two cities, two inns. Two…Johns. That's not a coincidence. It's like a…cartel or some shit. One guy. It's John Lavender Mafia and he franchises—drops a John in every town with a rag, a tankard, and one fact about fucking wheat or whatever."

"There's a John factory," Ben offered.

"Right. There's a John factory and, like, the deodorant comes out the back."

"From their backs. Like. From their assholes." Maddy looked at him for one second. Then another. Then another, like watching him would make him reconsider.

"Very not lit student of you. Foul mouth." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

"I'm brainstorming." John the innkeeper took all of this in with total sincerity, which was worse than any reaction he could've had.

"Hey," Maddy said to him.

"You know a John in Mossgrove? Runs an inn, scammer vibes, possibly head of a lavender cartel?"

"I do not know him, traveler."

"Liar." She leaned on the counter.

"Okay. I don't give a shit. Where do, like, uh, the strong adventurers drink? The real ones. The hard-carry types."

"The Dragon's Den, traveler. Up on the merchant street. Strong folk. Famous folk." John #2 leaned on his counter, like he was about to tell them the fucking Big Mac sauce recipe.

"Expensive folk."

"Cool. Thanks. Stay…weird, John #2."

"Your room is upstairs, travelers. Enjoy your stay with us." Ben flipped him off. John #2 smiled. They went upstairs and opened the door to their room. They dropped their—well, she did, Ben carried fucking nothing except his dead cellphone and his wax knife—stuff on the beds. Wait. The beds. They were actual mattresses. Not the sack of hay shit with delusions Mossgrove had called a bed. Mattresses. With feathers. Or some other bullshit but frankly she could not care.

She pressed a hand into one and it pressed back, polite, springy, like a bed from a world that had invented the box spring. The room was bigger too. More render budget up here as well, apparently. Two beds, a window with actual glass, a little table, and a door in the corner that turned out to be, she opened it to check, a private bathroom. A bathroom. In the room. There was plumbing. There was a basin with a spout and the spout, when she cranked it, produced water.

Old-style, cold as balls for probably ten minutes until magical heat did magical thing, sure, some hand-pump old thing situation, the water coming out with a groan and a shudder like the building was being asked to do something undignified, but it was running water, indoors, in a fantasy inn three blocks from a guild that pinned quests up with daggers. This world made no fucking sense. Sofas it shouldn't have. Plumbing it shouldn't have. A scent budget of exactly one (1) lavender.

Mattresses next to guys with a broadsword and fucking magic wands. It had yeeted six different centuries into one building and slapped a fantasy font on the sign. She loved it. She wasn't going to say that out loud. But she loved it. Ben had to physically drag her out of the room because she wanted to stay there her whole life. They walked to the tavern. The Dragon's Den was, and this genuinely pissed her off, kind of sick. There was a dragon.

Carved, enormous, coiled around the central beam with its head hung over the door and its jaws cracked open, and somebody had gone goblin mode on the scales, real detail, which meant somewhere in the render budget the system kept a guy whose entire job was Cool Dragon Builder. The fireplaces burned blue. Some powder in the logs, some alchemy nonsense, the flames coming up cold and electric blue and soaking the whole room in a color taverns were not allowed to be, and Maddy hated how hard it went.

It went so fucking hard. Anyway. The clientele was a fucking diversity stock photo. Silver-armor randos doing a shit load of nothing. A pair of elves at a table sitting with a very… immortal-elf adjacent spinal posture. Two big green guys with tusks arm-wrestling for coppers really going at it, making sounds that… yeah. Two guys going at it. You know it. A girl at the bar with fox ears, a tail, and very sharp red nails, sipping something pink.

"Furry," Ben said.

"That's a normal lady here, dude. You can't just—""I'm being observationally accurate."

"You're being a little racist."

"…"

"It's okay. We'll work on it." And then they stood there, because it turned out neither of them had the faintest goddamn idea how to do this. How do you walk up to an armed stranger and go hi, want to almost fucking die in a cave with me. There was no tutorial. No onboarding packet. Welcome to Valoria, here is how to cold-approach a mercenary without getting your ass reverted on itself.

Maddy had run a thousand-plus-members OnlyFans, she had banned grown men for a living, and she could not figure out how to recruit one sword guy in a bar.

"Let's just eat first," she decided.

"Eating isn't a plan."

"We sit, we eat, we scope the room, we lock a target. It's like…recon. With this duck thing."

"This isn't fucking Warzone."

"Shut up Ben. And I'm hungry so." She really was hungry. The duck thing was everywhere. People had a purple duck on their plates, roasted, glistening, purple, with a green salad thing and a pale wedge of something, and there were tankards and tall glasses of smoky blue liquid that matched the fire, and— She stopped. A girl was sitting alone near the blue flames, eating the purple duck. Sadly. Pushing it around the plate, each bite its own small funeral. And next to her plate, just parked there, was a Stanley cup.

A Stanley cup. A STANLEY cup. The forty-ounce one. The handle one. Cream colored, scuffed, sweating condensation, sitting on a rough wooden table under a carved dragon in a fantasy bar, full of presumably water, owned by a girl eating purple duck alone and feeling bad about it. The floor dropped out of Maddy's chest. She grabbed Ben's arm.

"Ben. The cup. Look at the fucking cup." Then she clocked the leggings. The girl shifted and Maddy caught the seam, the waistband, the specific sheen—Lululemon Aligns, the exact pair she'd owned, in a drawer, in an apartment, in a life that had a heating bill. She did not have to watch this girl butter fucking bread for ninety seconds and file her. The whole filing system just clicked off. Stanley cup. Aligns. Saddest duck in the building. That was a girl from Earth or Maddy would eat the dragon raw.

"BEN SHE'S FROM EARTH. GO. MOVE. WE'RE GOING." The girl looked up because two people were rushing their asses at her, and her face braced for whatever insane fantasy bullshit was about to happen, and then she saw Maddy's shoes.

"…you," she said.

"Are those—are those Air Force—""You have a Stanley cup," Maddy said.

"YOU'RE FROM—""Yeah. You too. Hi."

"OH MY GOD."