Temporary Solutions

Yuya stank again.

There were no showers on Nod. The anime didn’t generally dwell on that detail of pre-industrial societies. Baths were an option, but in a desert town like Ak-Toum, the only convenient place to take one was an irrigation ditch, with nothing but stalks of grain for privacy, and enough mud you were likely as not to come out dirtier than you went in. Not to mention the snakes. If you wanted to get properly clean, you had to draw your bath, bucket by bucket, from a well. He supposed today he would try his best with a single bucketful and a rag; that seemed to be how most of the locals did it, most of the time.

The sheepskin bedding the mistress of the house had provided hadn't helped the matter; the providing sheep were not long dead, and the wool had not been very thoroughly washed of their barnyard smell. As Yuya rolled out of it, he supposed he should be grateful for that kindness. As long as he kept using his cellphone to show off what drawings, music, and videos he had saved in this alehouse, and kept drawing a crowd, he had free room and board here. It was, as he had guessed on first entering, a somewhat large private residence with a seating area for serving food and drink. The business was run by one Gahari bi-Shodal, who lived here with her husband Bakhra ba-Bakhbar and their children. She brewed ale and cooked pottage to serve, while the rest of the family harvested the millet and barley used to make the stuff. They did not usually rent out beds as an inn, but they had room to take overflow from Ak-Toum's single dedicated flophouse when a large trade caravan came through. Or when Gahari wanted to monopolize a wandering entertainer like Yuya.

He stripped off his t-shirt, and checked the mark on his shoulder. As far as he could tell, it had appeared on his skin when he arrived on Nod, though it took until his one ill-fated attempt to bathe in an irrigation ditch for him to take his shirt off and see it. It resembled a tattoo, but it was not perfectly black, but rather a very dark brown, as though his skin were releasing melanin constantly to maintain this pattern. Superficially, it resembled a character in the cuneiform-like writing used in Ak-Toum, but he couldn’t read any meaning from it, and something about it seemed… unknowably ancient. He pulled a tunic over it, a simple beige thing he had bought with money earned using his phone.

He powered up his phone, and checked the battery. Twelve percent. He had stretched it out surprisingly long: he had been away from Earth for nearly seventy-two hours, which seemed to line up fairly closely with three of Nod's day-night cycles.

Yuya climbed down the ladder from the loft. The rest of the family was already up and about their business. Father and children were in the fields, while Gahari served the townsfolk who customarily took their breakfasts later than the farmers, the tradesmen and shopkeepers.

She wasted no time when Yuya reached the ground floor.

“Yuya, you lazy excuse for a minstrel! Give us one of your babbling songs from your fancy music-and-picture box!”

At least she didn't accuse him of stealing it from a sorcerer again. And she was giving him tacit permission to play one of his J-pop or K-pop songs for the patrons who appreciated that music– so utterly unlike anything they had heard before– even by way of deriding it. She was proof that Jalabartan society was not the pit of misogyny he first suspected, at least not so deep of one that a woman couldn't do business or speak sharply to a man. Whether that sharp tongue made it easy to hold onto his feminist sympathies in these adverse circumstances was another matter.

The music made it clear that whatever let him speak and read the local language was contained inside his brain, however it had gotten there. Lyrics in Japanese, he could still understand fine, Korean and English he still knew only bits and pieces of, but all three languages were exceptionally strange-sounding and incomprehensible, according to the natives.

This morning, after setting out his tip mug, he put on the intro theme to a popular anime. The song itself was bright and uplifting, and the show it came from was about a young man like himself trapped in a virtual reality video game, one with a world superficially akin to yet profoundly different from the place he was in now. A few of the morning patrons bobbed their heads and mumbled along in mangled Japanese, and the tips trickled in. He still didn't have their system of currency completely figured out, but the square coins seemed to vary in thickness as well as material, though never in width. Most of the coins he'd gotten were copper or pewter, and his thinnest one was silver, but he had yet to see a gold coin.

By midday, Ashset returned. The young farmhand had bags under his eyes, and a distant gaze that spoke to late nights spent restless. “Heaven bless you, Yuya,” he said, sitting down, “do you have any more art of… that girl?”

Ashset had latched on to a character from one of Yuya's mobile games. Another gacha game, this one with the peculiar gimmick of making its characters as anthropomorphic representations of particular firearm models. A little something to appeal to the gun nerds. Ashset seemed to struggle with the concept of a gun when Yuya explained it, and not to care all that much what the strange object in the girl's hands was. Being a reimagining of a compact German submachinegun, she was surprisingly… petite, given Ashset's earlier comments about girls in Ak-Toum marrying too young. But of all the fanart Yuya had downloaded of her– and it was surprisingly much; some artist he followed on some social media site must have liked her, too– none was particularly racy, and that didn't seem to bother Ashset one bit. He seemed not so motivated by arousal as by some kind of protective instinct. Well, Yuya didn't really prefer one kind of obsession over another, as long as it kept a customer coming back.

Pulling these images up, Yuya told him quietly, “My device here won't work for much longer. See that bar in the corner? When that runs out, it becomes a useless lump of metal and glass. Savor this, Ashset, it might be your last viewing.”

Ashset was still for a moment, then rose. “In that case, let me fetch somebody. I will be back.” When he returned, he had a girl in tow, about Yuya's age and, as far as the people of Ak-Toum went, pale. She held a charcoal-tipped writing utensil like a pencil or marker and a small, rough-edged sheet of papyrus.

“Almali here is one of the better artists Ak-Toum has to offer. If she can capture the gun-girl's likeness, before it is lost forever, the last of the money I can spare until I am next paid will be split between you and her, and I will count myself as owing each of you a favor besides.”

Yuya nodded, and briefly explained to the girl how to scroll between images on his phone. Once she was finished marveling at the glowing display, she picked out her references. Then he beckoned for Ashset to sit on the other side of him while she worked.

“I know I've asked you a lot of strange questions over the last couple days.”

“Basic truths of life, yes. Things every child ought to know about how to live, the gods, Heaven and the Turquoise Throne, and so on.”

“They can't be that strange for someone from far away to ask. I’m sure there are many different cultures and religions even on Nod.” He had come clean to Ashset about not being from Lugo, but to a youth who had never traveled farther than the next village over, the difference between another country and another planet was trivial. “Anyway, the last thing I need to know about is magic. I've heard sorcerers mentioned here and there since I arrived, mostly people assuming I was one, or that I stole my phone from one. What do you actually know about people who can use magic?”

Ashset fidgeted at the question. “Well, I cannot say I know much, in certain terms. Those who do… well, we get only a few visitors each year in Ak-Toum, but one or two outlanders I have met before you did let on that they had experience with such folk. They seemed frightened even to recount those experiences in any detail. I gather that sorcerers come in a few different types, and the type I have heard the most about is the witch. But that is through children's stories, about them luring little boys into desert caves to devour them. They may not exist at all. Two types I can be confident do exist are the astrologer and alchemist. A peddler from Lugo mentioned them as the only two schools of sorcery tolerated under the laws of that land, and astrologers only begrudgingly. Astrologers can tell the future from the stars, so he said, and alchemists produce wondrous potions and change one material into another. It is thanks to their arts that the emperor of Lugo has reigned for five hundred years.”

Scientists or psuedo-scientists working in laboratories and observatories, with maybe a little bit of a supernatural edge, Yuya thought. Alchemy might be something worth learning, if they really have kept the same emperor alive for five centuries, but I should start with something I can do with just my hands and a few incantations, if such a thing exists here. “And what about… magic that lets you launch fireballs from your hands, or levitate, maybe manipulate time? Anything like that?”

Ashset shrugged. “I asked a local tax collector about the laws here in Jalabarta pertaining to magic, not long after the talk with the peddler. He said, in addition to astrologers and alchemists, our Great Temple also sanctioned certain select djinn-invokers. What that art is, I do not know past what the name suggests, but the tax-man emphasized that it was dangerous and needed to be tightly regulated. The only other people alleged to use magic, at least in my hearing, are the shamans of the Bekhites and Cainites, the barbarians who live on the steppe north of here.”

“And what powers are they said to have?”

Ashset sat silent for several seconds, then said, “Let us speak of happier things, friend. Tell me more of Japan, and the distinctive robes that land's apprentice priestesses wear.”