13 - Sardines

We all retired to my room to have tea at the table and discuss some of the finer details of opening our shop. The girls sat in the odd chairs, and I sat on the bed with Toast, giving him some hearty bum slaps.

We'd gone back and forth a dozen times giving ideas for what to call the shop, but none felt right.

After several minutes of tea sipping and silence, Kana stood up from the chair, hitting herself off the table. She had a face that made it clear it hurt, but she didn't speak of it and dashed out of the room. When she returned a moment later, she had a folded cloth in her hands that seemed familiar to me.

"I wasn't sure when I should return this to you, I'm sorry I kept it for so long! But... it says something, maybe we could use it for our name?"

I took the cloth from her and unfolded it to reveal the t-shirt I'd been wearing when I arrived in this world. I felt my eyes well up a little to see it, considering I never thought I'd see anything from my world again. When I was kicked out of the village it felt inappropriate to stop back at the house I'd stayed at, so I lost the only things I had brought aside from Toast. 

I only wish I'd been wearing a shirt that didn't have such a lame design. Sardines? What was I thinking when I left the house in this?

"Mitsuta, what does it say?"

I looked again and read the name of the sardine company, with a slow realization that Kana might be on to something.

"Silver Bounty."

Kana clapped her hands together with a smile.

"Doesn't that sound great? It's something from your-"

She cut herself off before letting my secret slip in front of Maja. Good girl!

"From where you're from! And it kind of sounds adventurer-like. And with silver in the name people will know we're chea-"

She cut herself off again before insulting us. That's okay! You can say it!

"-affordable!"

Maja quipped in with so much to say I worried she would lose her voice from lack of practice.

"It does have a good ring to it, but what do we tell people we do? A proper job title will help us when we have to register our business, and make it easier for people to identify what we offer as a service. Silver Bounty isn't clear enough. You called us part-timers at first but that isn't very catchy."

The girls had a back and forth suggesting job titles, but so many of them were things that meant other things in my world, and I couldn't bring myself to give reasons why I was saying no to things like 'tasker' or 'handies'. Please spare me the humiliation.

We deliberated for 3 cups of tea before our breakthrough hit.

"A job title doesn't need to expressly say what we do. At least not at first."

Maja looked at me doubtfully.

"Hear me out. What was a seamstress called before they were called seamstresses? Why do we use the word blacksmith for someone that makes weapons and metal goods? Someone had to start using those words first, and then they caught on and everyone knows what they are and what they do, right?"

"I suppose so, yes."

"Well, what do we do? We do a little of everything right? Where I'm from you'd be called a jack-of-all-trades, multi-talented, or what I think we should call ourselves; all-rounders."

Kana chipped in with her positive attitude just when I was feeling foolish.

"All-rounder? That sounds cute! I like it!"

Maja who had been uncharacteristically challenging of my ideas so far, softened her expression to the meek and kind one I was used to.

"I like it too. I'm sorry if I came off as abrasive before. I Just... I want us to succeed so we can... all stay together."

Kana leapt up again and scooted around the table pulling Maja's head into her chest. Her long white ears pointed up straight and turned a bit pink. I'm so jealous! I pulled Toast in for a hug of my own to vent my frustrations.

"We will always be together Maja. We're family aren't we?"

The girls got misty and I gave them a moment to hug it out.

"So, are we all agreed on Silver Bounty as the name, and All-Rounders as our job title?"

"Agreed."

"Yes!"

Toast sneezed and wiggled around to escape my embrace, before jumping to the ground and spinning.

"Is that agreement or do you want food?"

He perked up at the f word and gave us some more spins. Kana opened her status screen and assembled his Goblin meat and veggie bowl.

"I'll go paint the sign then."

"Mitsuta wait, we haven't had dinner yet either, let's go to the tavern and eat something proper and warm!"

"We have to be tighter with our money until we open, Kana. You two can go, I'll just have the other half of my sandwich from lunch."

"No, you have to come! We have to celebrate after all! We're opening the shop tomorrow!"

"We are?"

"Why not? We have the name picked out! Me and Maja can pass out fliers in town now!"

"Shouldn't we have a grand opening?"

They stared at me blankly.

"A what?"

"Never mind. I guess there's no reason to wait. Let's do it!"

"Dinner first!"

That night we filled our bellies, talked at length about how fun things would be from now on, and how we could spend our lives just doing the things we were good at and make money doing them.

We returned to our little rooms with high hopes for the coming days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nothing. No one. Not a single inquiry or customer.

Why would it have been that easy? We took turns sitting at the counter for a full week and hadn't seen a single person in our shop except Pinnea, who had been having Kana mend some... nightwear for her girls. It must have just been out of pity too because Pinnea once told me she makes all her own dresses.

Maja asked the adventurers, who said the north district was too far for them to walk when injured. Kana asked some of the construction labourers who lamented that their wives would kill them if they went anywhere near the 'dance club' next door. I didn't ask anybody because I'd just been running off into the woods with Toast the whole time and didn't network with anyone at the guild! Idiot!

It wasn't entirely my fault I hadn't been talking to the adventurers. Every time I stopped at the guild to complete a quest, there was some uproar about Boss-Tier monsters roaming the lands, getting closer to the cities. It was unheard of for them to not be in dungeons, labyrinths, castles, or caves. I didn't want to stick my nose in and get caught up in something dangerous.

This was also in part why I stopped taking Toast out of the city the last week or so. I knew he was stronger than I could ever hope to be, but I still had a strong drive to protect him. Rumours had been going around about the wandering bosses being double the level of their in-dungeon counterparts. If the adventurers were afraid to face them, I couldn't take any chances with Toast, or myself. A Sagi almost killed me my second day here, just think of what a behemoth Boss-Tier monster could do to me. 

I couldn't ask questions about the Moroza either. If I got into detail about my experience with them, it might call into question how I defeated a Moroza Jika, a 'Boss-Tier', at level 1, and from there someone could find out about Toast. In my world, people are disgusting things that take anything unknown and rip it apart 'for science'. Animals are captured, locked away, even dissected. I couldn't trust strangers with our secret. We hadn't even directly told Maja yet, though she must have known something was different about us after all this time.

On the plus side, the adventurers had been so pre-occupied with the recent events that the low-level quests had piled up. And since we weren't getting any requests through Silver Bounty I needed to risk going back out there with Toast to make our rent. Boss monsters or not.

I grabbed a few of the usual hunting requests and left the guild hall to fetch Toast. On the steps outside I saw more groups of adventurers arguing about the bosses. Just as I passed one group an older man toppled to the ground in front of me. An adventurer in plated armour cursed at him.

"We don't have time for your wild goose chase! If it matters that much to you, pay the guild fee to request it and some newbie can waste their time!" 

I helped the man on the ground up to his feet. He was skin and bones with ragged clothing, and not a hair on his head.

"Are you okay?"

I wanted to tell off the adventurers, but the Japanese in me wasn't looking for that kind of conflict. The old man smiled sadly at me, but clutched my shirt with desperation and a hopeful look in his eye.

"Are you an adventurer? Please, you have to help me."

I felt nervous claiming to be an adventurer but I wanted to hear him out.

"My granddaughter. She's disappeared. She was just out with me, we were gathering food."

He was frantic and speaking in a disjointed way. I asked him to sit on the steps with me and explain. Apparently he was raising a young girl by himself. They weren't related and had been living in squalor on the outskirts of the city. They went into the woods often to gather mushrooms and herbs and things they thought they could eat. This morning they'd done the same, but just as suddenly as she was there, he'd turned around and she was gone. He couldn't afford to make a request at the guild, and with all the news spreading of the monsters around he feared for her life. He admitted they hadn't eaten in a few days because he'd been ill. 

None of these losers want to help for nothing, huh? No heroes to be found here.

Kana had just called us a family, so I was riding high and couldn't ignore the man's sincere plea to find his granddaughter. 

I had no skills and no power, but looking for a child was something I could handle, right?