The woman leaned over the counter and scrutinized me from the tips of my toes to the very top of my head. Here I was with pants and a poncho, but back then, I was just wearing a vest and loincloth. Weirdly, that thought made me sad. My pants had slid up my butt crack, so I adjusted them to get my little dude some breathing room.
“Hello, miss. I hope you’ve been well.”
“Oh, th-th-thank you. I’m so glad to see you doing well…? Ha. Um. Oh dear, but that piercing in your belly button…”
“Yeah, I’ve been through a bit of trouble and, long story short, I ended up as Nishka’s slave. Oh! Please don’t tug on the piercing…”
“Oh, I’m very sorry.” The receptionist withdrew her hand in embarrassment and looked back to Nishka. “Ah, but how can I help you two today?”
“Can you take a look at this? I dunno what it says, but Gimul said that since there are some settlers from Apegut Forest here in town, we should get in touch with ’em at the guild.”
“Here, let me see it.” The receptionist took the letter of recommendation Gimul had written up from Nishka. The wax seal on the parchment was already broken. She carefully unfolded the letter and brought it closer to her face. “Ah yes, I see. Your village chief has relatives here in town, and they live in a very affluent neighborhood. This says that one of them is an adventurer and if you run into any trouble, to go call on them.”
“Whoa, they’re an adventurer, too?”
“It also says that another relative left the homeland to earn money in the craftsmen’s district and now owns several tenement houses. Both are goblins.”
So Nishka was right, it was a community of goblins from the Apegut village.
“Could you tell us the name of the goblin adventurer? We have a contact in the more affluent district who is also an adventurer, so there’s a chance our acquaintance knows them,” I told the receptionist, thinking of my former mistress, Yoi.
“Let me check. Hmm…the name is hard to pronounce…” She peered at the parchment. “Someone named Y…Yoi’hady Jumei.”
Nishka and I nearly spoke at the same time.
“What? It’s Miss Yoi?”
“The baby girl? Seriously?”
The receptionist blinked. “I’m sorry? I-Is that the person you know?”
“Yeah. She’s the one who owned Shooter before me.”
“Yes. She used to be my master.”
At the word “master,” I saw the receptionist’s eyes glance down at my belly-button piercing. Everyone loves the sexy piercing, eh? It’s enough to make a grown man blush.
“I-I apologize. Please don’t tell your master that I said her name was difficult to pronounce.”
“Certainly not. Consider it forgotten.”
“There’s actually a bit more in this letter. It says when you’ve gotten everything in order to send a group of settlers to the village, please notify them by letter.”
“I see. Thank you.”
I suppose that when Gimul said to send a letter, he meant for us to send one with a messenger pigeon from the adventurer’s guild. I thanked the receptionist and accepted the parchment back from her.
“You’re quite welcome. We will continue advertising for settlers, too, of course. As of right now, we’ve had…hm…oh yes! One hundred people express interest in the posting. If you could let me know a date you prefer, I can arrange for everyone to gather here. Gimul asked me to hire adventurers as escorts and send them out to the village with you.”
“Wow! A hundred people have answered?”
“That’s great! That means we’re done here, and we can go back home.”
“Then let’s get started. When should we set the date to meet them?”
Nishka and I jumped right into talking next steps. I couldn’t believe it was finally happening!
“If you can give me a few days’ notice, I’ll be able to contact everyone. Those hundred people are merely the ones who expressed an interest. I can’t say for sure whether they will all want to actually move out there.”
“That’s fine. Do you have any news about the hunters?”
“Let me see…unfortunately, the response on that front has not been so prolific. It would appear that only one person has thrown their hat in for the job.”
Oof. Not nearly as many as I hoped. I nodded thoughtfully and borrowed a quill from the receptionist in order to take notes on the back of the letter of recommendation.
“Hey, I thought you said you couldn’t write!”
“I don’t know how to read or write the letters of this land. I can manage to make notes for myself, though. More importantly, what should we do about the hunters? There are fewer candidates than I thought we would get.”
“Why can’t we just pick some good ones out of the settlers and teach ’em how to be hunters? Some of the villagers have caught stuff like rabbits before. They could learn,” Nishka offered. It was a reasonable compromise.
“That makes sense. In that case, can you please have them gather here in three days’ time? Will that work?” I asked the receptionist.
“Will do, sir.”
“That just leaves the adventurers…”
Which wouldn’t include Yoi and Mari at first—they had a quest coming up soon that they couldn’t cancel, though I knew they’d come along after that. But what to do for the next few days?
“Has anyone volunteered for that? It isn’t as though we’re asking them to stay in the village forever.”
“There have been a few adventurers who said they would escort the new settlers as long as they didn’t have to stay in the village permanently. The rest will depend on budget negotiations, I suppose. Also, the guild is going to send an adventurer out to run the new branch in your village.”
“Excellent. That’ll save us some trouble.”
Nishka gave a perfunctory “great,” as if she couldn’t be bothered with any of this, then looked at me. We decided to get back together in three days’ time to meet the candidates for immigration and the representative for our new guild branch.
“It’s pretty wild that the village chief and Yoi are related though, huh?”
“Yeah. But then again, Wak’wakgoro told me that the village chief was from somewhere else before she married into the village. I guess this explains that ‘somewhere else.’”
“Ya think so? I s’pose we can just ask Yoi to get the whole story.”
We were already headed for Yoi’s mansion so that we could write to the village chief and let her know what was going on, so why not? Still, I wished Gimul had told me about literally anything sooner. What a tease. “Hey, Nishka?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you know why goblin names all have that weird pause in them?”
“I suppose it’s because they’re all from the ‘glp!’ tribe.”
“Uh.”
“Hey, don’t look so skeptical at me! It’s true! I’m sure of it! Like, ninety percent sure. Ninety percent of thirty percent!”
So she’d just made it up and decided that it might as well be true. Ah, Nishka…