“Eat while it’s hot,” said the village chief, smirking at the staring Elpaco.
To be completely honest, I’m not a big fan of being teased like that. I didn’t really like having dinner dangled in front of me making me salivate, either, but I was more interested in hearing what the village chief wanted to say. I’m not opposed to surprises in and of themselves, but I hate the anxiety of waiting for news you just know isn’t going to be good. It’s bad for your mental health, you know?
Cassandra and Tanne d’Arc were about as nervous as me, not touching their forks even after the village chief’s goblin servant cut off steaming pieces of herbed boar meat and loaded it onto their plates.
Nishka, blunt and easygoing as she was, and hungry Elpaco were the only ones to pick up the strange two-pronged forks of this world. Almost immediately, Cassandra cut in to chide the latter. “No, Elpaco. Neither our husband nor the village chief has started eating yet. You have to wait.”
“Oh, okay.”
Cassandra was being strict, trying to teach Elpaco manners, but I just smiled and lifted a hand to brush her concern aside. “Oh, it’s fine. It’s hard to think straight when you’re hungry, and we’ve been toiling the whole day at work.”
The village chief watched this exchange, then picked up her fork. “Hm. It’s important to take cues from our superiors. Let me begin, then. You too, Shooter.”
“Ah, yes. Of course.”
Ordinarily, I would’ve been starving at this point. But I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting back to the looming discussion. Still, my family wanted me to take the next bite, so I followed the village chief’s example and reached for a steamed potato on one of the dishes at the center of the table.
Steamed potatoes were never missing from any meal in this village, but these were identical to ones that might have been taken from our very own fields. The taste was akin to taro root; it was probably related to the plant that fed regions all around the Pacific.
These were cooked by wrapping the potato in fresh leaves from the plant and setting them in a steam pot. Steaming in the soft, green leaves added a hint of bitterness and a touch of color to them. When dipped in good boar meat sauce, they were damn good. The faint bitterness and bite of spice paired perfectly with the wine.
“There’s no reason we can’t talk while we eat. I’m told that you’ve sensed someone watching the area around the village.” The village chief brought a cup of wine to her lips and watched my reaction before continuing. “I’ve heard similar reports from the adventurers mapping the area. So I had the matter investigated.”
“Did guild administrator Camulla tell you?”
“No. Electra told me herself.”
Electra was one of the adventurers Nishka and I had interviewed face-to-face at the adventurer’s guild in Bulka, along with Gimul. Very muscular, very hardcore, very gorilla-shaped. She used a rapier, which was pretty odd in this world, so she made quite an impression. I remembered her combat skills being pretty jaw-dropping, too, though I still didn’t know how her preferred weapon performed against monsters.
“Why would she do that?” I asked dubiously.
The village chief’s lips pulled into a smile. “Because she’s someone I can trust, of course.”
Not to mention, Electra was a woman, and I’d seen them together a lot more often recently around the village and at the worksite. Maybe Alexandricia felt more at ease with a woman for a bodyguard, and this one was a particularly skilled warrior at that.
“To all appearances, the adventurer’s guild outpost has started operations. Everything is going smoothly so far.”
“So then why didn’t Camulla mention anything?”
“If you recall, Electra and Dyson were here before him. They took advantage of their familiarity with the area to join the mapping expeditions with the village’s hunters. And, they said they notified the adventurer’s guild of their suspicions that someone might be watching us.”
“Hold on, are you saying that Camulla hid that information?” I nearly dropped my wine cup, and not just because the wine would taste about as good on the floor. This was quite an unexpected development.
“What do you think, Shooter?”
“Well, I can picture a few scenarios. Maybe he didn’t feel like he should escalate unconfirmed information higher up the chain of command. Or maybe Camulla believed the report wasn’t true for his own reasons. Or maybe…” I said finally, “he had reason to ignore it.”
“I see.”
I once worked part-time at a web development company. The company was so greedy, they would take orders from any company for jobs even remotely related to web development. They would do work ranging from a storefront website for a mail order company to subcontracted social network games. The implementation team and development team members always called these companies suckers because the poor saps would bite at anything.
One day I got assigned to manage a project creating background images for a mobile game. My job was to get in touch with the illustrator who was handling the backgrounds and make sure we stuck to the client’s schedule, but the work got delayed for all kinds of reasons.
Maybe the illustrator just wasn’t up to the task, or maybe he had a backlog. There was also the fact that no matter how many pictures we sent the client, they would tell us to make corrections and resend them. In the end, the illustrator started telling me, “I’m almost done!” and then would try anything he could to squeeze out extra time or thwart me.
As they say in business, we had a failure to “report, inform, and consult.” The illustrator was clearly lying and pulling whatever he could to get away with it, sure, but ultimately we reached a stalemate over how to actually fix the problem. First, the picture would get to me late. Then I’d let the general contractor know and add in all kinds of excuses for the delay. Finally, the contractor would make excuses to the publisher. The chain of excuses eventually got so complicated no one could untangle it anymore.