Left to their own devices - free of Demriv’s hounding while she apparently fought her way to stick with Onirioago - the trio made their way back down to the docks. Kaldalis felt like he was in a bit of a daze. A part of him wanted to just go to the courthouse and set up a tent there so that he wouldn’t fuck anything up. But three days was a long time, and he suspected that planting himself in one place for the duration of their stay was going to get him in trouble.

Especially if he suspected Onirioago had a plan.

And that went double if that plan involved making him look crazy.

Big Mike was overseeing a group of workmen who were unloading cargo from the ship, while Garyung and Kaldalis’s other friends seemed to just be milling around at the near end of the dock, staying out of the way.

“So,” Kaldalis said, once they reached the rear of the group. “What’s going on?”

“I could ask you the same,” Garyung said. “Where’re the sisters?”

“Onirioago is in custody,” Gavinkim said. “Demriv had some complaints and stayed with her.”

“That’s not ominous at all,” Myrin grumbled.

“We have three days,” Kaldalis said, “and then the three of us have to be at the trial. So we have some time to kill. And to watch out for Onirioago trying to pull shenanigans.”

“We have stuff to do while we wait,” Balrim said, gesturing at himself and Myrin. “We left the Baimer questline unfinished, so we’d like to plug away at it a little bit for fun and profit.”

“There’s good money in that,” Garyung confirmed. “I actually have some… assets as a result of the questline to check on.” He coughed nervously. It was a flimsy cover for what he and Kaldalis discussed - him trying to hand Cotanaku over to Zara peacefully - but he wasn’t keen on admitting that in front of everyone. But he apparently had the resources to back up the story, if he was a member of the landed elite around here.

“I have some family to visit,” Gavinkim said, glancing up at the city. “I’m sure they’ll be happy to see me, despite the unpleasant nature of our visit.”

“I haven’t been to the Baimer library in weeks,” Bangen said quickly. She started to rub her hands together in obvious excitement. “I have so many things to cross-reference with our discoveries from the expedition.”

“We’ve got tutorial quests,” Ess said. “We could fill some time with those.”

“Yeah, we’ve got this thing,” Reno added, holding up a little slip of paper. “We should get whatever it’s worth.”

Kaldalis went into his journal menu, where he’d hidden the tutorial quest he hadn’t been able to do. Unhiding it, it joined his other quests along the right side of his vision.

Adventurers Wanted!

The call has been put out for adventurers who wish to support the Kingdom of Zara in its hour of need. Present your Adventurer’s Chit to the castle steward to begin your journey!

Trade Adventurer's Chit to Steward Sapani 0/1

“I’ve got the same quest,” Kaldalis said. “If we’ve gotta be here for three days, it might be a useful chance to learn what we were supposed to be told from the start.”

“We need to set up a base camp first,” Garyung said. “In a manner of speaking. If we’re going to be here for three days, we need places to sleep at night.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Bangen said cheerfully. “The League looks out for its own. We just need to find an Adventurers League Affiliated Inn and check in. It won’t be the best quarters, but it’ll be enough.”

“Ugh,” Ess grumbled. “We’re gonna have to do awkward room arrangements, aren’t we?” She started to count out the members of the group. “I don’t know if-”

“Individual rooms,” Bangen said with a smile. “Don’t worry. Unless you’re on the books as wed, the League puts you up individually.”

Kaldalis was kind of impressed by that. And happy that they’d avoid whatever weirdness might be involved with assigning rooms. Individual rooms also meant they didn’t have to take responsibility for accounting for Demriv’s accommodations.

“I’ll probably be staying with my family, anyway,” Gavinkim added. “So don’t worry about me.”

Bangen was able to quickly locate an affiliated inn. Apparently the indicator was very subtle. The place was called the Equal Oak Inn, and Bangen pointed to the typography. The letters ‘al’ in Equal were more stylized than the other letters, which was all it took to indicate Adventurers League affiliation.

The main room of the inn was something like a tavern, filled with large round tables, each one fitting five or six narrow chairs. The lighting in here seemed fine, but it was mostly coming in through large windows on the front. The place was likely to be very dim in the evening, with very few lighting fixtures for the large room. This early in the day it was overseen by a single Talsar man who had the distinction of being the largest Talsar Kaldalis had ever seen. He wasn’t as large as Garyung and Gavinkim - Bhogad were just that large - but he was obviously well-muscled, though the lack of definition spoke of actual strength and not just cosmetics.

The innkeeper was a portly Suyon woman, and the administration desk was sized for her, not for customers, so they each had to bend down uncomfortably low to present her with their Adventurers League identification information to secure their rooms. She seemed unconcerned by the obvious inconvenience it caused, and from her conspiratorial grins at Myrin, Kaldalis suspected it was intentional.

The folks who were staying here got their rooms set up, and Kaldalis headed up the narrow stairwell to see what waited for him. Bangen wasn’t kidding that it wasn’t the best quarters. The bed was sized for a human, meaning that his feet were going to hang off the side. He was glad Gavinkim had intended to stay with his family. He shuddered to imagine Garyung laying on a bed this size, with both arms hanging off the side and enough leg hanging over the foot of the bed to put his knees on the floor. It didn’t help that the room was barely wider than the bed, with not even a window, and just a candlestick set upon a sidetable that appeared to have been sawed down on the sides to fit in the room without one side overhanging over the bed. He wondered if it was a luxury that the door opened all the way without bumping into anything.

“Shitty,” Kaldalis said to himself with a smirk, “but serviceable. I guess you get what you pay for.”

“Yo, Kal,” Reno said, interrupting his examination of the room. “Ess and I are headed up to the castle to find this Steward guy and turn in our chits. You coming?”

“Yeah,” Kaldalis said quickly, stepping out and closing the door to his room, feeling a strange sense of embarrassment at how shitty it was, even though Reno was likely staying in an identical space. “Let’s get this chit done.”

Ess was already waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like the group had already divided themselves out among their tasks. Gavinkim was gone, and as Kaldalis got back to the tavern level, Balrim and Myrin gave him a brief wave as they were just on their way out the door. Garyung and Bangen were seated at one of the round tables, and the big Talsar man was busily frying something over a wood stove.

“So we’re probably getting through all the tutorial shit today,” Kaldalis said, “and then we’ll see where the questline takes us?”

“That sounds like a plan to me,” Ess said with a smile. It lacked the sad quality that she’d had when talking to him earlier. Kaldalis wanted to confront her about what she’d said on the boat and get some kind of clear explanation, but he absolutely didn’t want to do it in front of other people. He wasn’t sure how to react to her behavior, but for now it seemed he was stuck letting it slide.

“Make sure you put a dungeon run on your to-do list,” Garyung said from his seat. “They go down smooth here, when compared to the chaos of what we faced on the expedition.”

“A dungeon? Going smoothly?” Kaldalis put a hand to his chest in fake shock. “I’ve never heard anything more ridiculous.”

“Kal,” Garyung said, gesturing for him to come closer. Kaldalis obliged, since he didn’t want to keep shouting across the room any more than Garyung did. “I really want you to give the Zaran way of doing things a serious try.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Kaldalis asked.

“Because it’s going to seem very weird, after what you’ve seen.” Garyung looked over at Reno and Ess, who had followed to stand near at hand, including them in the conversation. “The whole adventurer experience out in Cotanaku and Panbu has been an unstructured mess. I’m assuming Monsoon can’t really keep up with us when we have so much influence over what goes on. But here? Baimer is rock solid. Everything here is curated and controlled.”

“What do you mean?” Ess asked.

“It might seem…” Garyung paused and winced before saying it. “It might seem a bit boring. You all haven’t done a quest yet where there’s a nonzero chance of just dying out there in the jungle. System scaling will make the monsters you face numerically dangerous, but the Zarans have created a safe way for people to interface with the systems here and get stronger without risk. I think Monsoon intends for it to be a way to explain NPC adventurers. After all, what kind of idiot would pursue a career facing unnecessary near-death if permadeath was only one twist of fate away?”

Kaldalis noticed an uncertain grimace on Reno’s face. Kaldalis didn’t like being reminded of the lost NPC adventurers any more than she did, but it did make a kind of sense. Monsoon was playing up the game’s difficulty curve into worldbuilding. He could respect that. Kind of.

“It’ll get better,” Garyung promised. “Just don’t throw your hands up and ragequit right away when the experience isn’t what you expected.”

“Alright,” Kaldalis said, patting Garyung on the shoulder. “I mean, my alternative is to spend the next two days in a shoebox hotel room staring at the wall. I really doubt a too-easy tutorial is going to be more boring than that.”