Book Two Chapter 44 - Bards
Bards
"LEUKE!"
I wave my hand over my head to get his attention when I see him walking with Captain Anara. They both slow down as they identify the voice and come to a complete stop when they spot the two of us approaching.
"Hero Remmi," Anara is first to greet us with a nod of her head.
"Morning, Captain!"
She frowns at my greeting. "I'm not your captain, Miss Lee. You don't have to call me that."
"And I've told you before," I answer without hesitation, "you can just call me Remmi. The titles get burdensome after a while, especially among friends. So as long as you insist on calling me Hero or Miss, I'm calling you Captain!"
She turns from my gigawatt grin accompanying my declaration to focus on Ayre without so much as a hitch. "And Ayre, it is good to see you on your feet again. I understand you had quite a rough time of it after the celebration of the mining agreement."
Ayre's frown isn't as trained as Anara's, and comes across more as a surly pout. Then he directs it at me. "Does everyone know how I spent yesterday?"
I shrug in innocent self-defense. "What was I supposed to say? She asked why you weren't with me, and I told her you were recovering from a hangover. It's not a big deal."
Anara chuckles at our antics, a surprisingly casual behavior from her. She must be off-duty. "Not that I'm not charmed to see the both of you, but I distinctly heard that it was Leuke you called for."
"Ah, that's just because I saw him first," I plead. "He sticks out a bit."
Then I start putting the pieces together. Anara acting like she's off-duty, her and Leuke walking somewhere together … Did we just interrupt …?
"Oh, I'm not offended," she insists while I'm still assembling the puzzle. "He sticks out more than just a bit."
Leuke for his part just gives his big grin as he rubs the back of his head. "It's the red hair, isn't it?"
"Between that and the fact you're taller than most people around you," I make the comparison, "you're like a lighthouse." I hold up my hands in insistence. "But if you two were doing something, we don't want to keep you. I just needed to see if there was anything Leuke wanted us to pick up for the supplies for the dungeon run tomorrow."
"Me?" he asks with a look of confusion, halfway pointing at himself. "Not really. I just use a sword, and Ryutaiji doesn't really dull. Even if it did, I have my own whetstone and oil. Ointments and salves for burns, I guess. Ogre's Grotto isn't really a fire dungeon, but it's got some hot spots, from what I've heard."
"What you've heard?" I ask. "You live right next to it, and you've never gone before?"
"Always wanted to," he cheerfully replies. "But then, I wasn't a Hero the last time I was back home, either. Just a farm boy that joined the town guard."
Of course Leuke's a farm boy, I think when I hear that. How much more stereotypical could his backstory be? Well, at least a dragon hadn't burned his hometown to the ground, or something. He seems to have missed that part.
I look around quickly and rap my knuckles against the wooden leg of a nearby stall. When Anara, Leuke and Ayre all look at me in confusion, I get an embarrassed grin on my face.
"Sorry, superstition from back home. Had a thought and wanted to ward it off."
Ayre finds words first. "Your people have superstitions? I thought you didn't believe in anything magical."
"We don't. That's why it's a superstition!"
Their faces grow more confused, and Anara asks, "You mean … something that brings good luck?"
I rub the side of my head roughly as I mull that over. "Mmm, no, more like something irrational, because it's got no logical connection to the reason you're doing it, but you do it anyway like you think it's going to change anything."
"Wait," it's Leuke's turn to speak up, "so you don't actually believe it will do anything, but you do it anyway?"
"My logical side understands that knocking on wood cannot in any way ward away bad things from happening," I try to explain again, "but it's so ingrained in my people from being a thing for so long that it feels uncomfortable if we ignore it, like we're tempting fate. That's a superstition."
"You don't sound like you really believe in fate, either." Ayre's tone is half-accusatory, half-confused.
"Ehhhhhh," I give awkwardly while I wiggle my hand in the air in front of me.
"Sacred Yorin is going to be very cross with you if that's the best answer you can give to a question like that."
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"I'll work on it," I promise. "Look, fate is a very complex topic with a lot of layers to unravel, both philosophical and spiritual. If you insist on all of my thoughts on it, we'll be here all day, and we're all going to end up very confused. Suffice it to say that my position is that we chart our own path, but that doesn't preclude overarching plans of greater beings based on ideal choices or expectations of what we'll do."
Leuke raises his hand. "Um, I'm confused already. This is sounding more like one of Benny's talks."
Ayre just crosses his arms judgmentally. "Collegiate."
"You're the one who brought it up," I protest at the utterly unfair accusation. "I just knocked on wood because I didn't want Giri burnt to the ground by dragonfire."
That earns me another look from all three of them, though this one is seasoned with apprehension.
"What?" I ask with a shrug. "You do have dragons, don't you?"
"Yes," Anara confirms slowly. "But why would you be imagining our home being set ablaze by a dragon in the first place?"
"Eheh …," I grin nervously, rubbing my upper arm with my other hand. "Nothing serious, really. It's just that the stories often go like that. I was thinking of how stereotypical Leuke is as a Hero, but stories always have some sort of inciting incident where something big happens to propel the protagonist out of the comfort of their home and onto the trail of adventure."
"... You mean like getting summoned halfway across the Empire and being anointed a Hero?" Ayre ventures as if he thinks I'm not putting due thought into this.
"No, like a bandit attack, or a dragon just happening to torch it, or the Big Bad Evil Guy had beef with someone close to you and sent forces against your village to get to them!" I take a deep breath to refill my lungs. "The point is, something big always happens to get the protagonist moving, usually in a way so they can't easily go back!"
Enter a third round of staring before Ayre breaks the silence, turning to the others as if he's the local Remmi-fessional. He folds his further arm from them under his chest and motions toward them with the closer one. "... Remmi's people have … very active imaginations."
"I'm gathering," Anara comments flatly, adjusting her footing as she turns her attention to me. "Remmi, I think you might find stories in the Empire a bit … less extreme than you are accustomed to."
I frown at the way she says that, like it's something wrong with me. "Well, honestly, that doesn't really surprise me," I say instead of complaining as I cross my arms. "There's a lot less reading done in the Empire than back home, so it only makes sense that storytelling is simpler."
This time, at least, everyone just looks confused. It's Leuke that asks, "Wait, what does reading have to do with stories?"
"That's the most common medium by which stories are shared over time," I point out. "Bards pass on, oral histories are inconsistent, and plays are historically the entertainment of the rich, but the written word can survive for a thousand years, and anyone who can read can enjoy their stories at their own leisure."
"That's right," Ayre says as if putting something together, "your people have a lot of leisure time, don't they? It makes sense you would favor longer stories, then, and with your obsession with codifying everything, it was only a matter of time before you formulated storytelling."
I refuse to consider the possibility that my frown has become a pout. "Why are you phrasing all of that like it's bad? And we didn't formulate stories. We just noticed the trends and structures of good stories."
"If you spend a lot of time like that, though," Leuke puts in thoughtfully, "you must have a lot of bards. Not everything is enjoyed written, after all, right?"
I consider my answer for a moment before giving it. "Eh, yeah, I'd say we do, but probably not as many as you're thinking. The profession's a bit different for us than it is here. Our media has a much wider dispersal for even a single performer, so instead of a whole lot of them at every town square and pub, we end up with a relatively few really, really famous ones that specialize in particular performances. A lot of other people aspire to become famous performers, too, but most of them never make it for the fierce competition."
"Can't they get their starts playing the popular pieces at a local level?"
When Anara asks that, I snap my fingers and point at her. "You'd think so, wouldn't you? But didn't you seem like you thought it was odd that I recognized a recording device like I did?"
It takes her a moment to make the connection, but then her eyes widen as if with a horrible thought. "No … Those devices are expensive! If we didn't have them for work, we'd never even see one. You couldn't have so many of them that you use them for such a frivolous cause …"
"We have so many of them that we build them into other devices as features," I correct her. "And why listen to an inferior impersonator when you can listen to the real thing with the push of a button? Honestly, it kind of killed off the bardic profession as you know it here overnight."
Leuke looks amazed and Ayre looks exhausted with my antics, but Anara is staring at me like she's trying to process that I eat kittens for breakfast or something.
"Remmi, your people are terrifying."
I sigh and shrug. "Yeah, I get that a lot." Then I shake my head. "Look, Leuke, I'm sorry I mentally scarred your date, but there's one more thing I needed to cover with you, and Ayre and I will be out of your hair."
"My what?" He looks panicked for a moment, but schools his expression quickly as he chooses to focus on the second part of what I said. "I mean, uh, what is it? Something about the dungeon run?"
"Yeah," I confirm. "We need to get a bit of an early start. I got a letter from Chief Ronolo this morning saying that he wants to speak with us specifically before we go into the dungeon."
That manages to get both his and Anara's attention, and they're focusing on my words again.
"Chief Ronolo of the Huohi?" Anara elaborates further as she clearly shifts into her Guard Captain persona. "Why? Has something gone wrong with the dungeon? Is there something wrong with the mining agreement after all?"
All I can do is shrug. "I don't know. He didn't say. You'd think if it were something that serious about the dungeon, he would have elaborated on it, or at least told the guard about it."
She nods. "Yes, that would have been the appropriate protocol."
I return her nod with one of my own. "And if it were about the mining agreement, I can't imagine that there'd be any need to mention the dungeon. But that's all I know. All he said was to speak with him before we go, that's it."
Their expressions are so serious that I can't help but break into laughter. "Really, guys, relax! I'm sure it's nothing serious! He probably just wants us to gather some specific resources from it or something! Stop worrying so much! What's the worst it's really going to be, an escort mission?"