Another quick sniff confirmed that there was nothing to eat, screw or fight in the immediate vicinity. How boring. There was a faint chittering of mice somewhere in the woodpile, but that was hardly worth his time. After contemplating the distressingly empty scene for a moment, he wandered down the hill to Raven’s Mill.
It was immediately apparent that more of the humans were in town than normal. And the excess didn’t seem to be doing anything except scratching fleas. He wandered through town, accepting the occasional pet on the head that was only his due, headed in the general direction of the kitchens. So there he was, peacefully minding his own business, when he spotted what he had been searching for; a new dog in town.
Perhaps apprised by an instinct for trouble, after a few moments the napping Rottweiler opened up his eyes and scanned the area. Much to his surprise, the first thing that he saw was the world’s largest house cat. Glaring at him. Balefully.
Azure wasn’t too sure what was going through the doggie’s simple little mind, but it probably was something like this: Cat. Big cat, but cat. Must chase.
The Rottweiler began barking frantically, on his feet now and edging closer to the cat.
Azure cleaned one paw, sliding the five centimeter retractable claws out to carefully get underneath.
The dog got closer, barking harder, unable to believe that any cat, no matter how large, would be stupid enough to stand up to him.
Azure used the paw to clean his ear, rubbing hard to make sure he got it good, one eye closed in apparent ecstasy.
Finally, enraged beyond reason, the Rottweiler charged. With an apparently startled yowl, Azure leapt straight into the air, landing on the dog’s back. The yelp that was emitted was more of a scream as sixty kilos of happy cat landed on the dog’s back. The Rottweiler tried to roll and for a few moments there was nothing but dust, yelps and the furious yowling of an enraged tomcat.
Finally one side of the dust cloud spit out a badly mauled Rotweiler, which disappeared into the distance. As the dust settled Azure was revealed peacefully cleaning a spot of dirt off of one leg. After a moment he stood up, stretched, then wandered over to the patch of sunshine the Rottweiler had previously occupied.
Checking the area for signs of threat, he turned around a couple of times, dug at the ground to prepare it to properly accept his personage, and curled up in a ball. In a moment he was, apparently, sound asleep. But one ear was cocked vertically and twitched back and forth as if it were a doggie-search radar.
Herzer awoke with a feeling of disorientation and it took him a moment to remember that he was back in the dormitories in Raven’s Mill. He had been sleeping out for so long, or so it felt, that the dimness of the interior was startling. He felt in his pockets for his chits and was relieved they were still there. After bathing the night before he had hung around with Courtney and Mike through dinner, then afterwards had wandered around the town. The entire population of the surrounding area seemed to have descended upon the town in anticipation of the free-day. The town was filled with groups of people, most of them sitting around talking. Almost no one had anything in the way of cash or trade available to them so while there were some merchants offering wares, there was very little in the way of buying.
Herzer ended up buying a small leather pouch to hold his coins and tossed a few more of those coins to a redheaded female fiddle player who had staked out a spot by the stream and was playing mostly traditional Celtic ballads. But the privations of the previous month had taught him the importance of always knowing where your next meal was coming from so he was careful not to run through his spare change too quickly.
After a moment he sat up, rolled up the fur blanket and stuffed it in the wicker basket, grateful for both of Bast’s gifts. After the previous week he had become used to the relative comfort of a bed made of spruce boughs, especially compared to hard packed earth. But the blanket had enough cushion that it mitigated sleeping on the ground again. The part that annoyed him was that he had no place to leave anything; if he left the basket and blanket in the dormitories it was sure to disappear in an instant. That thought extended to the fact that except for his clothes, basket, blanket and now pouch, he had nothing of his own. Mike and Courtney didn’t even have that. He had stepped in one moment from a life of wretched affluence to complete lack thereof. He realized that he wanted a place of his own, even if it was just a bed and… a place to store his blanket in relative security.
He walked out into the town wondering abstractedly if joining the apprenticeship program was really the best thing he could have done. He had skills related to this technology level. He knew he could fight, if he could get his hands on some weapons and equipment. There were things to be gathered in the wilderness; he remembered June’s comments about clothing and how nobody had anything. There were deserted homes aplenty in the wilderness. He could find them, somehow, and pull out anything of value. Surely that would mean more than a couple of extra chits a week and bleeding hands from cutting trees.
On the other hand, some of the homes belonged to people who were right here in Raven’s Mill. And how would he feel if someone went into his bungalow and took all of his clothes?
He thought about that for a little longer and contemplated, for the first time in his life, the whole subject of looting. All the games he had played had assumed an ethical indifference to it. Kill the orcs, take their gold. He suddenly realized the games never included hungry orc children when their crops had been burned.
Even a bow. He knew next to nothing about hunting but he knew that he could hit what he aimed at. He wondered for a moment if he should go look up the guard force and try to enlist. Did it make sense to waste another twelve weeks of his life learning things he would never have a need for? He knew he wasn’t going to be a maker of charcoal or a woodcutter or a tanner. There had to be something more than this.
These gloomy thoughts carried him through his morning ablutions, peeing in the public jakes and washing his face in a font of water diverted from an uphill stream. He walked over to the community kitchens looking anxiously at the sky. The sun was well up. He had slept through the majority of the morning and he was afraid they might have already closed to prepare for the lunch meal. His stomach was rumbling and it would be unpleasant to wait.
They were open, however, and the smell from the kitchens made his mouth water. He handed over his chit to a pleasant-faced girl holding down the entrance and walked over to the serving line. To his amazement there was far more than a bubbling pot of mush. The mush was there but so were eggs to order, fried potatoes, rounds of a golden, rich-looking bread, jam, butter and piles of steaming sausage being kept warm in pans by the fire. Instead of the usual roughly formed wooden bowls there were slabs of wood.
“This is nice,” he said to the server, giving her a warm smile.
“The council decided that a rest day should mean a day of celebration,” she replied, smiling back. “So they allotted extra food for today.”
“And better,” Herzer said. “What can I have?”
“Take anything you’d like,” she said with a vixenish grin. “But eat everything that you take.”
“Hmmm…” he replied.
“How would you like your eggs?” she asked, picking up a frying pan.