Anya finishes her explanation.

It doesn’t seem like an unlikely story, so I believe her in regards to the running away part. Whether or not I believe she sympathizes with monsters is still up for review, and I’ll be doing that personally.

I get up from the table, completely through with today. Anya looks as though she wants to say something, but doesn’t. She lets me walk towards the stairs to my room, but Lillia doesn’t allow my escape so easily.

“Hey, you. Have you no manners? You're really going to leave a maiden alone at a table without having wined nor dined her?"

I stop only to say, "Yes, yes I am."

To which she responds, "So you're a fucking loser, basically."

A loser? Did people use that term as an insult? Certainly, it did sting, so it's doing its job.

I don't like when insults land on their mark, and humans seem to be particularly good at doing that. Perhaps it was a hidden skill of theirs, passed down from generation to generation. Suddenly, I'm much less inclined to leave the room for fear of appearing to have lost yet another thing today. What I had lost at, or was losing, was not yet clear to me. All I knew was that I'm going to try my best not to.

I stiffly return to my seat across from Anya, and because I'm directly across from her, I make eye contact with her. She looks away. I should've just gone to sleep.

I don’t know why I’m so irritable right now. Was it because I lost in close combat to an adventurer today? Perhaps. Was it because my whole existence is just fucking garbage and I've lost my purpose in life? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s something else, that I haven’t quite figured out yet.

I’ll entertain the idea, but so far it looks like either of the two former options.

Anya looks like she’s about to die of embarrassment. Or maybe she already has, considering how green she looks. I don’t think that’s a healthy skin color for any human.

Regardless, she hasn’t moved, which is good, because if she got up then I wouldn’t be able to prove Freckles wrong. I yell out to Lillia, commanding her like the servant of this establishment that she was.

“Bring me that grog you were so proud of. A lot of it. I need it after this week’s events. I…”

Ma’s face flashes before my eyes. Her smile. Her unconditional love. I can feel her warmth through my thoughts, like she never even left.

“I need a lot more than grog.”

Lillia looks ecstatic, like she had won an imaginary war. Maybe this was part of her sales strategy. If it was, then it was working perfectly.

“You need a lot more than grog, you say? Have I got the deal for you!” Lillian darts away from the front desk, as if she was waiting for this moment her whole life.

Before I even begin to wonder where she is, I hear her signature mischievous voice.

“Hey, boneheads! Bring out the mega-veggie plate! We got a paying customer here, and he’s hungry!”

‘Shame I couldn’t say mega-meat-lover's plate, since Anya’s strictly vegetarian.’ Lillia laments over small things to herself. She loved saying that name. It really rolled off the tongue, in her opinion.

Did I… not notice a kitchen? I peer over at the desk, trying to see if there were any visual indicators that may have given me a clue as to whether or not there was, in fact, a kitchen.

Not a single thing.

Okay, it’s not my fault this time, there’s actually just a whole kitchen in the back of this floor that Lillia hides extremely well.

Anya and I sit in awkward silence for about forty minutes, which is just absolutely horrid. Is this what dining at a restaurant is like? Am I supposed to make small-talk the WHOLE time? How humans live as a social species, I’ll never know, for various reasons. I start to regret challenging Freckles.

She’s sitting at the front desk again, looking smugly at both of us. Bastard.

Just before forty-five minutes passes, a bunch of men in white clothes and white hats burst from the door behind the front desk, carrying an assortment of silver plates. They all have wooden domes over the top of them.

They’re obviously food-carrying devices of some sort. I wouldn’t know, considering I’ve never set foot in any sort of human eatery, or any other species’ eatery for that matter. At most, I’ve seen the guild bar, and that was about it.

I never bothered even stealing from grocery stores, because I figured that if it was in the grocery store, it was probably in the wild too. Why would I risk everything to harvest yet ANOTHER edible plant? What a dumb idea.

The men set down a series of plates before us, remove the domes from them, and then wordlessly disappear to the room from which they came.

That was… interesting.

Several plates of cooked vegetables lie before us, probably in adherence to Anya’s supposed dislike of dead monsters. I’ve seen most of these vegetables before on the human marketplace, but there are also many fluffy white kernels of something I’ve never seen before.

They’re small and look like maggots, but their difference from said larvae are obvious enough for me to not ask if they are.

“Anya, what is… that?” I poke my fork at the white shit.

She looks at me like I just asked what rocks were. In fact, I think her expression might’ve been even more intense than if I had asked that.

“Sun… That’s rice. Have you perhaps, never seen rice before?”

I shake my head. Her jaw drops.

“Rice is a super common food, though. Where did you live before this, that you’ve never eaten it before?”

I don’t look up from the plates.

“I’d really rather not talk about it.”

Then Lillia shows up with a silver platter of at least ten overflowing wooden mugs of grog. I take one wholeheartedly and chug the whole thing. Wow, this tastes like shit. I know it’s supposed to make you feel better, but I don’t think it’s working on me.

Oh wait, I feel it. Give me another.

After my second, I begin to wolf down my food like it’s going to leave any second. Gotta get that out of the way before I drink more.

It’s delicious. All of the vegetables are crunchy, crisp, and full of flavor. I can tell it was seasoned, but with what, I was no expert on. All I knew was that it tasted good. Anya is astounded at how fast I eat my food, but the hardened expression I had elicited from her earlier due to my unrelenting questioning had all but faded. Now, she was just looking at me like I was one of her flowers that she took so much interest in.

I don’t pay her any mind and continue to down my grog.

Maybe Lillia did have something to brag about in this.