“Arwin likes to save her favorite bits for the end of the meal. Isn’t that right?”
“…Correct,” she said bitterly.
While April quickly resumed eating, I turned to Arwin and mouthed, “Liar.”
She smiled and mouthed back, “Bite me.”
“Thanks for dinner,” said April, all smiles after the meal had allowed her to collect herself. Meanwhile, the princess knight was in a dour funk after eating her eggplant.
“Just relax and think of this as home,” I told her. When I got up to wash the dishes, April stood beside me and dried off the plates. She could have stayed seated and relaxed, but I let her help if she wanted to think of it as the cost for staying with us. Too much accumulated guilt didn’t do the mind any good.
“The truth is,” April murmured, wiping a plate with a cloth, “I wanted to be a teacher.”
“You mean a professor and scholar, like your dad?”
“No, like a schoolteacher. Someone who teaches reading, writing, and arithmetic.”
It didn’t really click for me because I’d never gone to school. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Arwin was having the same reaction. Neither of us had any experience with it. Me because I was born poor, and her because she was a princess. Teachers had gone to the palace to tutor her one-on-one.
“There are people at the orphanage and the guild who can’t read or count properly. It’s not because they’re stupid; they just never had anyone teach them,” April said.
“I suppose not.”
It had been that way for me. My parents, family members, and neighbors were too poor to bother with book learning. Putting food on the table came first. Picking fruit and hunting animals fed a person quicker than reading books. Letters couldn’t fill a stomach.
But once I saw the outside world, I understood better. People without education either spent their lives poor or had whatever they earned stolen from their pockets by others. There was no escape. A child born into that system would be trapped there for their entire life. And so the cycle of poverty went on.
“When I’m grown up, I want to build a school here, where I can teach reading and writing and all kinds of other skills people can use.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” said Arwin. It was exactly what I’d expect her to say, with how she always thought of the people first. I had a different opinion, however.
“It won’t work,” I said. “You’d be throwing money into the gutter. If you want to do it—”
“…Fine, forget it!” April raged, cleaning her last plate and stomping on my foot before she left.
“Well, that was uncalled for.”
I hadn’t meant anything bad by it.
While April took her bath, Arwin and I discussed the future. There was so much to go over that I was afraid I’d forget some of it, so I made sure to cover the important things.
The preachers and the sufferers.
“Sam? It doesn’t ring a bell,” said Arwin, putting a hand to her chin. There was no one among the adventurers or the guild staff by that name.
“It’s probably a nickname, short for Samuel or something along those lines.”
“Don’t recognize that, either.”
She said she’d check with Noelle and the others, but we were unlikely to get a lead.
“So it’s someone who goes into the dungeon but isn’t an adventurer or a staffer. Assuming he’s real.”
“He’s not a carrier. The old man keeps tabs on all of them. They’re locals.”
He had to have learned his lesson after Levi. I wouldn’t believe he’d gotten lax again.
“Then that would leave… Oh, what was it you called them…?”
“The pickers? Hmmm.”
Pickers were the folks who scurried around the first floor of the dungeon, picking up monster materials even adventurers didn’t care about, then selling them back to the guild for a pittance. They were considered bottom-rung scavengers.
There might be something to it, but it would be difficult to identify the target for a different reason this time. Many people who’d lost their jobs after the stampede had turned to picking in the dungeon to make ends meet. New people were going in and out every day. It would be a major chore just to identify them all. Plus we didn’t even know if Sam was this guy’s real name. He could very well be using an alias.
I would’ve liked to learn more, but Donald was in the afterlife.
“There’s another thing I’m concerned about, though I don’t know if it has any connection to this,” Arwin mumbled. “Adventurers have been disappearing lately. And it’s all folks who’ve just shown up recently.”
“Isn’t that normal?”
Bad luck was a part of it, but it was also just a fact of life that if you didn’t have a good grasp of your own limits, didn’t know the ins and outs of this particular dungeon, and took unnecessary risks, it would likely be fatal.
Arwin understood my point, but she shook her head. “I asked Noelle to look into it. Some of them have died in the dungeon, it’s true, but most just in town. From what the gatemen said, it was as though they were fleeing the place.”
“That sounds normal, too.”
People got a full head of steam and charged into the dungeon, only to find things weren’t as they expected. They struggled, then buckled under the pressure and fled for their lives. That was another common story. If anything, the quick thinking to turn and run deserved praise, not condemnation. They would live to see another day.
“Some of the adventurers who fled the town were four-stars. I saw them at the guild before they left, and the entire party was injured. They looked bruised, as though they’d been beaten with sticks.”
“So you think someone ganged up on them?”
Were they ambushes? Or lynchings? Such things happened to adventurers, so it was hard to say if they had any connection to potential sufferers.
“I don’t know. None of them wanted to talk about anything. I made a note to ask them later, but they had left the town by that night. So I don’t know who did it or why.”
Strength and reputation were an adventurer’s lifeline. No one wanted to announce to the world they’d been defeated.
“And it was only new folks who ran out of town?”
“As far as I know, yes.”