We arrived back at the capital, and touched down near the same rear gateway that we’d left through...where I found Willem waiting for me. His arms were crossed, and his scowl was intense.
Oooh boy. Here we go... Someone must’ve spotted Gon on the horizon and warned him so he could intercept us. What now?
“H-Hey! We’re back,” I said, doing my best not to look Willem in the eye as I spoke.
“So, can you tell me why I’m standing out here, Mukohda?”
Y-Yikes! Your tone of voice is freaking me out, Willem! “I’m, uhh, sorry,” I replied.
“We’ve had this conversation before, you know?” Willem said. “I expressly told you to report in before you left town.”
“I am so, so sorry!”
I really did feel bad about it. Sure, my familiars had rushed me out the door, but forgetting to drop by and let the guild know before I left had been a pretty big mistake and was totally on me.
Fortunately, I’ve got something for him that might make up for it! “But, umm, the place we went hunting this time turned out to be pretty unusual, and I brought a souvenir back for you! I think this’ll work out well for the Adventurer’s guild, in the long run,” I said, keeping a very careful eye on the guildmaster to see if my offer was doing anything to offset his righteous fury.
“A souvenir?” Willem repeated.
“Right! I guess I should start by telling you about the place we ended up visiting...”
I gave Willem the short version of the story, telling him how we’d gone up to a mountaintop caldera where we’d found all sorts of dinosaurs to hunt. The further into the story I got, though, the paler Willem’s face became.
“Again! You did it agaaain!” Willem wailed with such incredible pathos, I almost expected him to fall writhing to the ground. His shoulders shook with emotion. I asked him what he meant, and eventually, he collected himself enough to clarify. “There’s a kids’ book called The Adventures of Hayden. It’s a collection of tall tales that just about any kid who grew up in an environment where they could get their hands on books would’ve read at one point or another. You know, full of the sort of stories that they read to kids in church to help ’em learn their letters. Anyway, all those plants and monsters you described sound exactly like ones that show up in that book. Nobody really knows when The Adventures of Hayden was written anymore, but it’s broadly known that it’s a flight of fancy—pure fiction from start to finish. Or at least, it was until now, anyway!”
Oh. You know, I had a feeling that not many people had been up on that mountain...but it was literally something out of a storybook? I have a terrible feeling that this is about to get complicated.
Hearing that I’d been to an uncharted locale no one had ever visited and fought monsters no one had ever heard of probably wouldn’t have been too hard of a pill for Willem to swallow, considering our history. Hearing that I’d gone to a place described in presumably fictional storybooks and fought monsters straight from the pages of those fantastical tales, however... Well, let’s just say that considering how it would land with him made me shiver.
“I’ll be taking a long, hard look at the evidence you brought back,” Willem continued. “I’ll need to loop the higher-ups in on this too—this is something they’ll need to make a judgment call on, no doubt about it. There’s not a chance I’m doing all that alone, so you’ll be coming with me to the guild to explain yourself. Now.”
“Okay...” I weakly moaned.
And so I was escorted to the capital’s Adventurer’s guild, in the same sense that criminals were “escorted” to prison. My familiars, meanwhile, acted perfectly innocent as they followed along behind me.
You four do know that this is all your fault, right?!