Setting the Scene (2)

“W-what rumors?” I hesitantly asked.

The muscular man rolled his glowing eyes. “Are ya daft? People been sayin’ the queen’s gonna die for a while now. There’s a bet goin’ around that she won’t even make it to her 92nd birthday comin’ up next month. Thirty million reales if you can believe it. If you’ve got her ring, then that’s lookin’ like the sitch.”

“...I see.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Sure, the queen had one foot in the grave, but she was very much alive. A month? No way. She could probably live another year with that monstrous strength.

“So, the ring–”

“Yes?”

“I can give ya thirty thousand reale for it.”

“...”

“Hm? That not enough for ya?”

“H-huh? Well…” It wasn’t that. I had no idea how much thirty thousand reale was. If it was thirty thousand U.S. dollars, that was a lot of money. I could buy a pretty nice car with all the latest gadgets and gizmos. But if it was, say, thirty thousand lebanese pounds, then it would only be worth a single gumball. At that point, it was better suited as a children’s toy. Well, at least I knew it was worth more than that, since the maids at the castle said a thousand was a lot.

“...hmm. How much is a loaf of bread around here?” I decided to ask some probing questions.

“Haah?” He looked at me in disbelief before coming to a realization. “Ah, not a native, I take it? Your Southern Realeish is pretty fluid.”

“Thanks?” I knew English, not Southern Realeish. Actually, how could I understand what anyone was saying? Sure, in preschool, we learned a skill to translate oral and written words, but I didn’t expect that to work here. Just goes to show how little I understand magic.

“So a loaf of bread? ‘Bout two or three reale.”

“And a meal at a restaurant?”

“Probably twenty, but you can find some from ten to fifty.”

“What about a hotel?”

“A hundred to one fifty with your looks.”

That means one reale is about one U.S. dollar… wait, that’s actually thirty thousand dollars then?!? It took four months of streaming to make that much, and the queen just handed it over like it was no big deal! Well, royals were uber-rich, after all. Wait a minute… this was a ring from royalty. If I thought about it that way–

“How about a hundred thousand for the ring?”

The man’s grin turned into a scowl. “Lookie here boy, that’s a lot of money.”

“But it should be worth that much if it’s from the queen, right?” I said pointedly.

“...are you sure you wanna be playin’ with fire?” His eyes pulsed again as mana flowed through the loose dirt. Ah, I understand now.

Welp, time to bluff!

“Going to attack me with earth magic?” I questioned nonchalantly, hiding the metaphorical sweat dripping down my neck.

“...lucky guess.”

“Well, five spikes to the neck is a surefire way to kill someone.” The man looked surprised, but it was a rather common tactic back in my only semester at university. As a non-combatant in a world full of combat spellcasters, you had to know more than this to survive. My mana sensing skills were a result of that. Still, it's scary how skillful the people in this world were.

A second passed. Then two. The air wasn’t really tense, nor was it awkward. It was more like an empty threat, if I had to describe it. And, as if to confirm my suspicions, the mana soon dissipated.

“Sixty thousand reales, I ain’t going any higher,” the man sighed. I, of course, smirked.

“At least make it seventy thousand, and throw in some information about the capital.”

“Fine, fine,” the man waved me off, going behind a wall at the back of the room. He returned with a plain back a few minutes later, tossing it over. “I broke up some of the reales into smaller bills. That good with you?” I opened the bag to find it stuffed with a couple hundred bills. Most were thousand reale denominations, but there were a few hundred, fifty, twenty, ten, five, and one reale bills as well.

“That’s perfect.” I took about five hundred reales worth of the smaller bills and put it in one of my buttoned pants pockets.

“So, what do ya wanna know?”

I rapidly fired off all of my questions, mainly asking about where to buy clothes, a good hotel with meals included, and a job. The man looked a bit annoyed, but he answered each of them without complaint. Apparently, the street we were on was in the hospitality zone, so most of the places I was looking for were only a few minutes away. That explained why a pawn shop was here – for the probably valuable foreign goods – but not why the place seemed so sketchy, even for a ‘no questions asked’ establishment.

Anyway, clothing stores here were roughly the same as my world. The main difference was the quality, as I expected. Most off-the-rack clothing was rough and dull-looking, with a two to three figure cost. If I wanted something more like my current clothes, I would need to go to one of the higher end shops, but that would also come with an equally high four to five figure price tag. I wasn’t sure what ‘rough’ felt like, but if it was somewhat similar to my crappy five dollar knockoff t-shirts, that should be fine.

Hotels were pretty similar as well, but which one you could stay at largely depended on your caste. There were apparently over twenty of them, but they could broadly be grouped into three categories: the lower, middle, and upper class. The lower class were basically the common people making average pay and living an average life. The middle class were made up of wealthy merchants and nobles – the type of people willing to spend a premium for ‘quality’ goods. Finally, the upper class represented the heads of state and royalty. The man recommended a hotel not too far from here that catered to lower and middle class patrons. However, he said the food wasn’t that good compared to the others in the area. When I asked why he recommended it then, he said, “Why else? For the bombshell hostess.”

…well, it is a bit cheaper than the other hotels…

Unfortunately, getting a job was looking like a bust. To apply for a job in this city, you had to have some form of id, and if you didn’t have one, you were considered an illegal. Of course, it wasn’t hard to get it. Tourists received one when they entered the gate, and you could apply for one at city hall if you ever lost it. I thought it would be simple to sneak out and reenter the city; however, the man shut that line down with a brief, “Don’t even bother. It’s not gonna work. My eyes never lie.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, and he wouldn’t elaborate, so I just put it on the backburner. There were a few jobs I could try on the street anyway, so it wasn’t a major issue.

With all that, I gave a brief thanks to the man and got ready to crawl out. Why can’t he just open the–

“One more thing before ya leave,” the man stopped me. It sounded oddly similar to the queen’s tone.

“What?”

“Whatever ya do, don’t go to the castle.

“Those who do never return alive.”