As night started to fall, Alice was startled out of her stupor by the loud clang of a bell that shook her out of her thoughts, ringing seven times before falling silent. She realized that she was sitting around and moping at a terrible time – she needed to find a place to sleep, as well as somewhere which hopefully had a hot meal. She hadn’t had anything to eat for several hours, and her stomach was informing her in no uncertain terms that it was very unhappy with her. She was interested in finding out more about the Church of the System, and the priest made it seem likely that she would be welcome back to the church if she visited again. She would go back to investigate more when she was thinking a bit more clearly. For now, she needed to focus on food and shelter again.

She got up and went back to looking through the dock district – if she was paying attention, she could hopefully find an inn or something to stay the night.

It took another half-hour of searching, but eventually she came to a building advertising ‘Room and Board for one silver sun a night. Daily Special (meal) available for two copper artisans and three copper paupers.’ Alice was pretty sure copper artisans were the big copper coins and copper paupers were the small ones, meaning this was a little over half of a silver sun. Since a meat and vegetable skewer costs around one copper artisan, this seems like a decent price? Although it depends on quantity as well. Still, worth checking. She stepped into the building, already thinking.

If I’m careful about this, I could probably learn a lot – I have a good idea what some aspects of this world look like, but I have no clue what the geographical situation looks like at all, or what the ‘recent news’ being passed around among random people looks like. If I just find a place to sit down and listen in as people talk, I could get a great deal of useful information. If this Inn serves alcohol, that would be even better, since people are less likely to mind a random person asking questions if they’re drunk.

After snapping out of her funk, Alice had several questions she wanted to confirm – for one, the rarity of mages. The merchant at the square had claimed there were less than twenty mages in the town, and Alice hadn’t seen anyone use magic besides the woman lifting construction materials at the docks. However, while she was just guesstimating, she had seen hundreds of people in this town during her walk here, and she would be surprised if the town’s population was below 1,000. It might even be significantly higher – maybe 2,000? Maybe even 5,000? Were mages really so rare?

Apart from that, she wanted a better grasp of geography. She wasn’t particularly interested in getting caught up in the crossfire between the Sigmusi Empire and the country she was currently in, so finding somewhere new to live would be ideal. Preferably somewhere she would be able to get access to research about either dimensional travel, the System, or both, and where the nation would be willing to let mages work for their education. If she could find an area where her life was less at-risk, she could devote more time and energy to her research.

She stepped into the inn. She took a look around, and realized that the building was far more populated than she had expected – she hadn’t been sure how many people would be staying at the inn, but it looked almost like the inn doubled up as a restaurant or something, with several workers happily eating and chatting with each other.

A {Barmaid} continuously ferried meals and alcohol between the kitchen and various tables, moving faster than she had any right to but not fast enough to quite keep pace with the incoming orders. Apart from that, a man also whisked coins off of tables and helped the {Barmaid} when he had time, while occasionally firing a joke or a smile at one of the customers. Alice looked around the room, not quite sure where to go to ask for a room and a meal. Was there some custom here she was missing? There didn’t seem to be a counter of any sort that she could simply walk up to. What was she supposed to do?

Hesitantly, she stepped into the room, and the man who was moving around the room gave her a broad smile. “Welcome, come in! Take a seat.”

Alice looked around the room, trying to find an empty table. There were none, but she realized after a second that this might actually work to her advantage – if she could just chat with her tablemates some, it would probably be much easier and less suspicious than it would be to try to awkwardly listen in to random strangers talking halfway across the room. Therefore, she looked for the busiest table which still had an open seat, and sat down with a group of five {Laborers}, four men and one woman. After less than a minute, the man who had been whisking coins around earlier stepped up to her.

“Hey lass, what can I get you? Meal, bed, or both?”

“I’m looking for a room and a meal – I need a place to sleep for the night.”

“That’ll be one silver sun, two artisans, and three paupers – if you want breakfast tomorrow, I can make it a round two silver suns instead?”

Alice thought about it for a moment before she nodded, although she involuntarily winced a little. That was another tenth of her remaining money gone. Perhaps the innkeeper had seen her wince, but he had a thoughtful expression. After a moment, he made her an offer instead.

“Hmm… Lass, if you’re interested, you could work for your meal instead. Tessa is my only {Serving Girl} tonight, so I’m a bit short-handed, and none of the {Laborers} would be interested in extra work after a full day of hard labor. If your effective strength and Dexterity are above 75, you have any sort of memory or learning boosting perk, and you’re willing to work for the rest of dinner and tomorrow morning, I’m willing to waive the fees for the meal and a bed for the night. Are you interested?” The man gave her an easygoing grin. Alice tried to think – she really was short on money, but would this make it harder to gather information?

Actually, this might make it easier – she would have an easy excuse to be moving around the room, chatting with customers, and popping in and out of conversations. As the night moved on and the {Laborers} became more and more drunk, it would probably also be easier to gather information from them. Her previous plans would have involved her trying to eat as slowly as possible to stick around these conversations, but it would seem much more natural this way…

“Sure, that seems good to me. Can I eat dinner first and then get started?”

“Sounds fine! Daily special?”

“What’s the daily special?”

“Potato, Corn, and Spidercrab stew with spring Aelthys.”

What the hell is Aelthys? At least I recognize Corn and Potatoes… and spidercrabs again? Hmm... They seem pretty abundant in this part of the world, so I can see why they would be a common food.

“Sounds fine with me.”

The man disappeared back towards the kitchen for a bit, before reappearing with a hot bowl of soup. Alice could clearly identify the potatoes and corn in the soup – they looked, unquestionably, exactly like the vegetables from Earth she was familiar with. Mixed into the stew were bits of spidercrab, which, at this point, she was heartily sick of. Finally, there was… some sort of white and grey round plant pods mixed in? It looked rather unappetizing, actually. Sort of like someone had taken a pinch of ashes, taken some liquid hand soap, mixed the two together, and declared it fit for consumption. Morbidly curious, she took a wooden spoon and hesitantly put one of the plant pods into her mouth, before her face lit up. Even though it looked disgusting, the flavor was actually sort of close to carrots, though the texture was kind of oddly foamy. It complemented the potatoes and corn well.

After that, Alice finally turned her attention to her tablemates, trying to listen in on their conversation.

“-with the pay here, it’s not affordable. Is it really worth it? [Organic Mages] cost an arm and a leg, and a regular [Doctor] can still help out, right?” The man wearing scruffy trousers and a tunic said.

“It’s too nasty for a normal [Doctor] to help out with – we got a level 37 to take a look at it, but he couldn’t do much about it, and there’s not enough time to get him to someone with a class with a perk specialized in fighting it off. The [Doctor] said it might be a fungus instead of bacteria causing it, so we’re trying to figure out how the heck he could have gotten it. We don’t have it, and he shouldn’t have wandered near the woods, so I’ve got no idea where it came from. Since most [Doctors] get Perks specialized for diseases or bacteria, finding one specialized in fungus is either a huge search, or a job for an [Organic Mage] that doesn’t need specialized Perks.”

“Hell, Marc, I’ll pitch in a bit. I owe ya one for helping me when mah fool son tried to get a mana baptism two years back.” The man reached into his pocket and dug out one silver crown and two silver suns, before handing them over to the man who had previously been talking.

“I don’t mind helping a bit – I can skip drinkin’ for a few days, even if it’s a damn shame. Ah hope he makes it through.” The woman at the table flipped over a few silver suns.

“My little girl is turning ten soon – help me catch a spidercrab for her first {Achievements} after your son gets better, all right?” One of the others gave the man a few silver coins.

Uncomfortable, Alice turned back to her meal as the final member of the group wordlessly handed some money over to the man who was having fungal problems, while he thanked the rest of the group, eventually giving them a giant bear hug while making blubbering sounds. Even though the conversation held a wealth of information for her, she felt that it wasn’t right to keep listening in – it was obviously a deeply private conversation. Still, she filed what she had overheard away for future reference – [Organic Mages], [Doctors], and the fact that even though she had seen plenty of evidence this world was somewhere in the pre-industrial era, these people seemed to have a pretty good idea what caused diseases, and even knew the difference between fungus and bacteria, apparently. Her first guess was that it was due to some quirk of the System, but there were plenty of other reasons that people might have advanced medical knowledge as well.

A few minutes later, she finished eating, and went to find the {Innkeeper}. She had learned a lot just from the first little conversation snippets she had overheard, and she was eager to start hitting the other tables and see what she could find.

“Are you ready, lass? All right, so it’s not too hard – just grab the meals and move them to the table in question. We use a table number system, with that table being table one and the one closest to the door being table sixteen. Just bring drinks and meals to the appropriate tables - there’s only one meal and only one kind of alcohol, so it should be pretty easy to remember. We aren’t some fancy restaurant in the capital or the like, after all. Apart from that, when you get some time, chat with the customers who don’t have anyone to chat with, all right? Keeping the positive atmosphere in the Inn is important, after all.”

“Got it,” said Alice. Probably in order to make sure that she understood what she was doing, the [Innkeeper] watched her while she was making a few of the meal deliveries, before he started to drift back towards his regular routine of whisking coins off of tables and chatting with the customers.

It was another four hours before Alice finished up, but as the patrons got progressively drunker, she was finally able to start extracting some useful information from people instead of random disconnected tidbits about their lives. After her shift finally ended, she lay in her bed, looking at the ceiling and thinking about what she had learned.

Apparently, she was currently living in the kingdom of Illvaria, which was the westernmost country in the Shil Confederacy. The Shil Confederacy was best characterized as the ‘Fuck the Sigmusi Empire’ alliance, and all of the members in it were fairly united in their goal of not being conquered by their much stronger western neighbor. Each individual nation varied wildly in size and strength, with some nations being the size of a city of a few thousand people, and some being closer to Illvaria in size, which had almost a million inhabitants.

Illvaria itself was the nation that most directly bordered the Sigmusi Empire, and so was the first nation to bear the brunt of the Empire’s strength when it tried to expand east. As a result, Illvaria’s military was excellent, and the nation specialized in training mages, boasting the best magical academies on the continent. Currently, Illvaria was trying to recolonize the Southern Region of the country, which had been uninhabited due to the aftermath of a war with the Sigmusi Empire about 70 years ago. For reasons she wasn’t entirely clear on yet, the king of Illvaria thought that right now was a golden opportunity to resettle the south, and was making a concerted effort to support the recolonization project. Right now, anyone who managed to found a city with enough population had a good chance of getting a royal charter for the region, and if they held onto it for five years they would get a noble title that would be passed on to their children.

This had spawned a boom of rich merchants and some wealthier noble families to try founding towns in the South, either to expand their family holdings or to officially get into the noble circle. The Sigmusi Empire, unenthusiastic at the prospect of their eastern neighbor gaining strength, had launched a campaign of harassment against the recolonization effort, which had begun a few years ago with the open bounty on killing mages, as well as minor espionage and saber-rattling at the border. Most Illvarian mages weren’t interested in moving south even before the Sigmusi Empire started making trouble, and after the declaration even fewer were willing to move south.

To the direct north of Illvaria lay the green wastes, where a large number of nomadic raiders known as the Rakari Tribes lived in a vast plains area. They frequently raided south into Illvaria, but were usually kept at bay by a huge line of forts directly on the border between the two. Even farther north, between the Green Wastes and the coast, lay the Free Trade Cities, a group of city-states who were mostly united in their hatred of the raiders when it came to land, but competed fiercely over trade on the seas. From across the sea to the North of them was the Central continent, where the majority of the human race lived. Apparently, the capital of the Sigmusi Empire was also on the Central Continent, and their presence on the Southern Continent was actually a large colony of the main Empire. The two were respectively known as the Sigmusi Imperia on the Central Continent, and the Sigmusi Colonia on the Southern Continent, but most people just called them both “The Sigmusi Empire”.

Farther east was the Corellion Empire, also known as the Celestial Empire. It lay in an area rich in both farmland and resources, and was relatively geographically isolated. Their coasts gave them free access to the Free Trade Cities, and they also had some southern passes that gave them access to the Shil Confederacy, but they were mostly closed off from external invasions and preferred to do their own thing. They also controlled most of the dyes on the Southern Continent, which, when coupled with their incredibly fertile farmlands, gave them a huge population and incredible amounts of wealth.

To the west was the Sigmusi Colonia. They were the ones who posed the most direct threat to both Alice and the Illvarian nation. The main Sigmusi Empire was the top power on the central continent, but wasn’t powerful enough to dominate the other goliaths that lived there. Therefore, they had turned their attention to the Southern Continent, setting up a colony that boasted an incredibly powerful military and had access to several Immortals from the mainland.

To the south of Illvaria, Sigmusi, and the Corellion Empire was… unknown. People basically just knew that the mana got more and more dense the farther south you went past Illvaria, and thus, the monsters grew stronger and stronger. People referred to the area as the ‘mana wastes,’ because the mana was so dense it was functionally a wasteland of death and monsters.

It was only after getting a rough summary of the continent that Alice understood how well and truly fucked she was geographically. She wanted to leave the Illvarian South, because of the huge threat to her life present in the region, but her odds of surviving if she ran looked slim. If she ran south, the only end she could see was becoming monster food. Whatever lived that way was much stronger than the vinebears, and those were dangerous enough. To the west was the Sigmusi, where she was likely to get her core harvested if anyone discovered she was a mage. Not to mention, Illvaria and the Sigmusi were more or less semi-openly skirmishing, so going west would be like travelling through a zone filled with two sides of a guerilla war. She had no confidence that she could survive a warzone.

The Shil Confederacy, to the East, may be united against external threats, especially the Sigmusi Empire, but that was far from actually being united – anytime a bigger threat wasn’t present, the 400+ nations in the confederacy reverted back into a giant mess of squabbling, conflicting nations, meaning there was always a war going on inside of the Confederacy. Even if the Corellion Empire to the far East would probably be Alice’s first choice when it came to places to live, trying to get there was probably guaranteed to send her to the grave instead.

Finally, to the North was the heartland of Illvaria, which was considerably safer than the South. However, first she would have to exit Cyra, with stronger and stronger monsters wandering around the area as spring came. As time passed, most of the monsters would be put down by either adventurers or the army, but right now monster season was just picking up, and this area was still very newly settled – monsters were just outside the gates, sometimes literally. Most people came south or returned north with adventurer escorts to deal with monsters and stray outlaws, unless they had Perks to ensure their safe passage – and she had no way of affording this passage, since the cost would be measured in gold coins. Not to mention, if they found out she was a mage, she had no way of guaranteeing they wouldn’t turn on her for a bigger payday, since the Sigmusi bounty on mage cores was far higher than whatever payment she could scrape together. The bounty on live mages was even higher – since the empire was renowned for legal slavery and for their ‘dog soldiers’ formed from war prisoners, Alice was very much not interested in joining the Sigmusi Soldata Magicka, especially not under whatever means they used to control their enslaved soldiers.

In other words, she was stuck in this town for the foreseeable future. That wasn’t to say that it was all bad – Illvaria was renowned throughout the southern continent for its mages and magic academies. Nobody in the Inn had mentioned even the tiniest fragment of ‘heroes from another world’ or even just ‘another world,’ so Alice thought it was likely that people from another dimension were at least rare, if not unheard of. If she wanted to find a way home, she might be best served by staying in Illvaria, at least when it came to accessing studies on esoteric topics. However, that was true of the Illvarian North – not the South, which was a newly settled frontier area.

As an interesting side note, she had discovered that the people of this world had an excellent understanding of the human body, and could directly and accurately reference all the purposes of the internal organs as if they were obvious, common knowledge. Alice found this a little curious, both because it seemed to confirm that humans on this planet were, internally, exactly the same as her, as well as the fact that they had good understanding of medicine even if several other areas that seemed like they would have well-developed weren’t. People had an understanding of microbes, diseases, the heart and lungs pumping blood and oxygen throughout the body, but even though they had electromagnetic mages they had no electricity? Did mana somehow make electricity not work? Alice found herself both intrigued and confused by this thought – how did mana interact with electricity and the laws of physics she was familiar with, anyway? In theory, temperature was just the movement of atoms, but kinetic mages didn’t seem to be able to interact with temperature at all, and there was even a separate category of magic called ‘thermal magic’ that, as far as she knew, did temperature related things. Furthermore, one could apparently stop ageing if they levelled up enough, while other people seemed to age normally or age at a slightly slower pace. For all of these questions, she had a single, burning question: why?

For now, she had no answers. Before trying to experiment on her own, it would be best to look at what the natives of this planet had discovered – something she would need books for. And in the south, unfortunately, there were few books available, and those that were actually available were expensive, costing at least several silver crowns, and books on magic usually cost at least a golden sun and some silver crowns in exchange. Her ability to piggyback off of other’s research and really figure out what the hell was going on was very limited right now.

She sighed, staring at the ceiling while laying on her bed. Even though she was still determined to find a way home, it really didn’t seem like it was going to be easy. Her parents and friends would have to wait – she was stuck here for the time being.

She eventually fell asleep, but only after several hours of fitful and uneasy staring and thinking. She did not sleep well.

* * *

The next morning, Alice had a breakfast of a few eggs and some sort of chewy spidercrab and vegetable dish. She had expected meat to be expensive if this world was like medieval Europe, but she saw meat products for sale pretty frequently – maybe it was surprisingly cheap due to monster activity? Something interesting to explore.

She helped the innkeeper take orders and shuffle meals around during the breakfast rush – as far as she could tell, the inn was a fair bit more popular as a restaurant rather than as an actual inn, which was amusing to think about. The conversations in the morning were much quieter, probably because the patrons were a fair bit less drunk. As a result, Alice didn’t manage to extract all that much information that she didn’t already know. However, she still felt less directionless than before – at the very least, she had a rough idea what the surrounding countries and geography looked like. With free room and board and two free meals, she felt like she had gotten a good deal.

“You do good work, lass. On nights when my {Serving Girl}s aren’t around, you’re welcome to come back if you want somewhere to work.”

Alice simply shrugged – she wanted to find something to do with magic as her profession, preferably where she would be able to look at books and do some research in peace without getting hunted down and murdered by the Sigmusi or the people looking for a quick payout from them. Right now, she was thinking about trying to find a job at the {Enchanter} she had found earlier, or the Bookseller that she had previously seen.

Her tentative plan was immediately interrupted when a loud knocking sound came from the door, and then two {Guards} stepped into the room.

They looked towards her, and a moment later, {Sense Hostility} began picking up hostility in both of their gazes. Not a lot, and certainly not to the point where the Perk was screaming at her, but it was more than enough to make her want to run.

“Miss Alice? I am going to have to ask you to come with me.” One of the guards looked at her with a menacing expression. Alice briefly debated trying to run away, her thoughts turning into chaos in seconds. The {Guards}? Why? What did she do?

If she ran, there was no way in hell she would escape – she had no doubts that the average person in this world was way stronger than her if they looked like they were older than twenty, and the {Guards} were both at least in their thirties, if not older. One of them held up an badge which bore the insignia of a pile of coins sitting underneath a silver sword and a silver eye, and the {Innkeeper} immediately got out of the way as if he had just discovered she had a contagious plague.

“May I ask why?” Alice managed to squeeze out of her throat, panic rapidly overtaking her as the {Guards} stared at her like pythons looking at their prey.

The {Guard} said nothing in reply, simply speeding up. In the span of seconds, he appeared before her, and then seemed to accelerate again before he grabbed her wrist and then jerked her body forward. Suddenly, the strength drained out of her body, and she could feel her body’s movement become sluggish, her physical stats suddenly draining.

“I have her. Let’s go.” The other guard quickly grabbed her other wrist, and she could feel even more of her physical stats drain away. Then, she was walked out of the inn, her body struggling even to stay upright between her captors as her strength plummeted, her limbs like heavy lead and her stomach churning with anxiety.