Chapter Three Hundred and Eighty-Five - The Go Fish Inn

We stepped into the Inn and found it to be rather quiet inside. There were a few people eating at round tables dotted across the main floor, and more were at the bar counter at the end of the room, sitting on butt-worn stools while chatting between each other.

There were lots of lamps hanging from the ceiling, many of which had glimmering magical lights hanging within. A lot of blue lights, actually, it made the room surprisingly bright and the light from the lamps was competing with the warm glow from the big hearth off to one side which was warming the entire room up.

I took in a deep breath through my nose to sniff at the air. It smelled like fish. Cooked fish, spices and potatoes and that tangy scent that came from cooked roots. My tummy perked up curiously.

“Hi!” someone said, and I snapped my attention away from my stomach to pay more attention. There was a young woman flouncing her way over to us. She was about half a head shorter than me, even with the antenna sticking out above her head, two of her hands were patting down her pale green dress, the other two were hanging onto a steel tray and a few menus carved onto a wooden slat. “Welcome to the Go Fish, the best inn in all of Codwood!”

“Isn’t it the only one?” Amaryllis asked.

“It is!” she said cheerfully. “Did you want a table?”

“Sure!” I said with a nod. “I wasn’t too hungry before, but it smells so good in here that I’m reconsidering that.”

“Could use a bite to eat,” Calamity agreed.

“Right this way then!” the waitress said. She bounced over to a table off to the side and then fussed with the cutlery. “Ah, do any of you need anything special?” she asked.

“Anything special?” I repeated.

She bobbed her head up and down. “Special utensils for eating? Special chairs?”

“Um, no, I think we’re okay with, uh, human chairs and such,” I said with a glance to my friends.

Calamity wiggled his fingers. “Broccoli and I are basically a few ears and tails ahead of normal humans. What about you, princess?” he asked Amaryllis.

“I can manage with this kind of cutlery just fine,” Amaryllis said as she pinched a fork between her talons, then made it spin around between one talon and the other.

“Fantastic,” the waitress said as she handed us some menus. “If you need any help, or have any questions at all, just holler.”

“Oh, I have one,” I asked. “Or several, really.”

“Sure thing!” she said.

“What’s your name? I’m Broccoli, and this is Amaryllis and that’s Calamity. We’re explorers!”

“Oh, explorers!” the moth woman exclaimed. “That’s fancy! I’m Wendy Winded, it's a pleasure to meet you.”

“Do you mind if I ask you what you are?” I asked.

“I’m a waitress,” she replied, which set me off to giggling.

“I think she meant your species,” Calamity said. “Never met anyone with quite so many arms, and with wings to boot.”

I nodded along. “That’s right. I’ve seen a few people like you wandering around in Codwood, but you’re the first I’ve gotten to talk to.”

Wendy smiled and placed a couple of hands on her hip. “Well, I suppose we aren’t too common outside of our little woods. We’re mothfolk. We’re not too different from the average person, I guess. We all want warm food, a roof over our heads, and to stare at the moon for hours on end.”

I wasn’t so sure if I wanted to do that last one myself, but Wendy seemed very nice and I didn’t want to contradict her. “Thank you,” I said. “Ah, I think we’re going to need a minute to order up.”

“Nah, just give me whatever’s fresh,” Calamity said as he went to toss his menu on the table. Then he paused and turned towards Amaryllis. “Ah, assuming I can get paid real quick.”

“Don’t worry about the meal,” Amaryllis said. “I’ll have this one, the blue fish? It seems interesting.”

“Oh, if we’re all ordering now, then, um.” I scanned the menu quick as I could, eyes bouncing along the choices. “Oh, maybe this fish and veggies plate, but without the fish.”

“Without the fish?” Wendy asked.

“Do fish count as meat? It upsets my tummy, even if it smells really good.” I shifted in my seat. “Okay, maybe just a small cut of the fish?”

Wendy patted me on the shoulder while writing down our orders. “Sure thing. I’ll be back with all of that in no time at all!”

I watched Wendy go, then leaned back in my chair. “She was nice. Do you think she’d know about the wedding?”

“A random waitress?” Amaryllis asked. “Maybe, but only if it’s big news. Codwood doesn’t strike me as the information hub I was hoping to find. It’s barely large enough to be called a town.”

“I could go around and ask,” Calamity said. “I can be quite charming, nya know.”

Amaryllis huffed a very disbelieving sort of huff that Calamity didn’t need any help translating.

“Hey, it’s true. Give me a bit of silver to spend on some drinks and those fishermen over there will be all buttered up and sharing their best secrets with me.”

“We’re not here to learn where the best fishing spot is,” Amaryllis said. “What we’re looking for is a lot more delicate than that. If we can’t learn about the wedding here, then the only place we might discover any good information is over in Inkwren. That’s several day’s travel from here.”

“Aren’t we heading that way in any case?” I asked.

“Yes, but I want to know whether or not we’re too late to do anything or if we just need to hurry along and pick up the pace. Knowing can only help us in the long run.”

That was fair.

Amaryllis talked about a few ways we could learn more about the wedding, but they mostly amounted to petitioning the local equivalent of leaders and paying people to listen to others talk for us, which all sounded kind of complicated.

So when Wendy returned with our meals balanced on a tray, I smiled at her and just asked. “Hey, Wendy, did you hear anything about a big wedding going on in the south, near Port Royal, maybe?”

“Oh, the dragon wedding?” she asked.

“That’s the one,” I said while I pretended not to hear Amaryllis’ strangled squawking.

“I can’t say I’ve heard much about it, just that it was happening. Judas could tell you more.”

“Judas?”

Wendy half-turned and pointed to the counter with one hand while the other three organised our table. “He’s the inn’s owner. Nice guy. He hired me even if I didn’t have much experience with this kind of thing.”

‘You’ve been doing a great job so far,” I assured her. “Are you new to Codwood then, or are you a local?”

“Oh, I’m somewhat new,” Wendy said. “I’m an only child, and I live alone besides, so I was one of the first to move to Codwood a few years back.”

“The first mothfolk?” I asked.

She nodded, and I appreciated the way her antenna wiggled. They were like stiffer ears. “Mhm! A bunch of us live nearby, but I wanted to see the world just a little. Then soon after I moved things back home started to take a turn for the worse and now it feels like half of Codwood is folk like me.”

“What happened?”

Wendy shrugged. “I wasn’t there, you know, so this is just gossip, but I heard that the dungeon broke. Now there’s no way for there to be more of us. Well, except for the old fashioned way, of course. I’m a third-generation mothfolk, but my mom and dad only have two arms each!”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “So the dungeon used to give people moth classes?”

“Mhm. That’s the gist of it. Anyway, I’ve got other tables to tend to. Call me if you need anything.”

So, if Wendy was to be believed--and I didn’t see a reason why not--then the dungeon problem might already be fixed. Though not in the most ideal way.

“Does that happen a lot?” I asked Amaryllis. “Normal humans gaining a new class and evolving like that? I mean, I’m guessing it’s how buns happened, and harpies maybe?”

Amaryllis sniffed. “You think harpies came from humans? Broccoli, it’s the other way around. Clearly some harpies got lost, found a human dungeon, and traded in their perfectly usable wings for arms. Then they just spread around, as humans do.”

“Oh,” I said. I... supposed that was possible.

“Nah, way I hear it, humans are way more common than anything else out west,” Calamity said. “But I heard that most folk are actually the descendants of a strange kind of elf that spent a lot of time in dungeons. That’s why most folk have two arms and two legs and the whole torso bit as a common feature.”

“That sounds absurd. Besides, harpies have a clearly different structure to them, and what of the cervid?”

“Hey, I’m just telling you what I was told, nya know,” Calamity said with a wiggle of his fork.

I hummed and started to eat. Maybe Amaryllis was right, and maybe not. It was probably unfair to assume that everyone had started as human though. That was clearly my own bias as a--was I a former human?--as an ex-human talking.

“Well, whatever. I still think it’s neat that an entire new species can just pop up like that from one community of people with similar classes.”

“It generally comes with a decent advantage for those who want to live in the area,” Amaryllis said.

“Huh?” I asked as I chewed on a carrot, it was glazed over with some sort of fishy oil that tasted strange, but kind of good too.

“Wendy over there, I imagine her species is well adapted to whatever forest she came from. Most dungeons have links to the environment you’ll find them in, so if they give a class which turns a person into a slightly different species, then that species will generally be well adapted to the environment too.”

“Oh,” I said. That actually made a lot of sense. But then... “What kind of environment leads to people getting bunny ears?”

Amaryllis paused mid-bite, frowned, then shrugged. “It’s just a theory,” she said.

We continued to eat, and I didn’t regret getting some fish, it was super tasty, even if the fish was a bluish-white colour that I wasn’t used to seeing on any fish I’d ever eaten before. As it turned out, my appetite ran out before my plate emptied, so I gave the rest to Calamity who was more than happy to finish things off for me.

Then we sat around and chit-chatted about not much at all while the food settled.

Once we were properly done, we stood and headed over to the counter at the front. The man that Wendy had pointed out--Judas--was cleaning some mugs off when we arrived, though he put them down and smiled. “Hey there, Enjoy the meal?”

“It was great!” I said. “And Wendy was very nice too.”

“Good to hear,” he said. Then his mood improved even more as Amaryllis stacked a couple of silver coins on the counter before him. “Is there anything else we can do to help?”

“Actually, yes,” Amaryllis said. “We’re with the Exploration Guild.” She tapped her lapel with her pin. “We’re looking for some information. Wendy mentioned that you were the person to ask.”

“Ah, well, I’m a good listener,” he replied. “But if you want to get me yammering properly, I’ll need to have a sit-down first. I can’t work and chat well at the same time.”

“We’ll pay you for your time,” Amaryllis said.

And so we found ourselves back at our seats soon enough, but this time with the innkeep himself at the table.

***