Chapter 8:
Breakfast and Gol Army
“HEH. This is quite delicious,” I said. I was crunching on a perfectly toasted round bun for breakfast.
“You can buy it at this one back-alley bakery. Many travelers completely pass it by, but everything they make is cheap and extraordinarily delicious,” Mr. Chotos said.
“Hmph.” I dignified him with an offhanded response as I dipped my spoon into the warm soup.
The breakfast menu at Mr. Chotos’s house was impressively balanced. Lined up on the dining table before me were smoked meat, fried till crispy; scrambled eggs; warm bread; brightly colored bean soup; a salad of fresh vegetables; and goat’s milk.
In fact, this was quite the civilized spread. He really put thought into proper nutrition. Also, little details like the salad being a mixture of unrecognizable vegetables and the mysterious yellow beans in the soup once more brought home that this was another world.
Mr. Chotos and his daughter sat opposite Gol and me. This gang of an old man, a young girl, a beautiful elf goddess statue, and some guy from another world crowded around a living room table made for a truly bizarre tableau.
I had to admit Mr. Chotos was good at cooking. But, well, that was a given. After his wife died, he’d had to raise his daughter as a single parent. Moreover, he was so deeply in debt that punks were hassling him at his shop. He surely didn’t have the means to hire a housekeeper.
As I frowned at his bald head, I couldn’t help thinking about how his wife had died despite his desperate ploy to get medicine that ultimately did nothing for her…and about how he’d had no time to mourn her, because he’d needed to care for his sickly daughter while paying back that massive debt.
That kind of stress and trauma would make anyone go bald. I definitely would have.
Mr. Chotos had matured, gone bald, and improved his cooking. He’d had no choice. But he probably still worked hard to do it.
……
Well, even if that was true, I still wouldn’t forgive him for his awful money-grubbing tricks, never, not for the rest of my life!
Incidentally, as I partook of this breakfast, I wore those lame pajamas. Why the heck was I wearing them in front of other people, you ask? Well, because I forgot I had changed into my sleepwear when I made my way to the living room. I was utterly relaxed, as if I were in my own home.
When Mr. Chotos saw these pajamas, he looked at me with an expression full of endless questions.
Bastard, what’s with that face? You got a problem with my slick duds? Well, this is my formal wear!
In any case, it seemed my pajamas were considered tacky by this world’s standards as well. The lameness of these pajamas transcended dimensions.
But I didn’t mind. After all, the only people who could see me were Gol, an old man, and a young girl. No need for concern.
Notably, Teru loved my pajamas. Just as expected of a reasonable lady. She saw the cat(?) print and gleefully shouted, “It’s Thunder Grizzly!”
If the young lady said so, then no matter what anyone else said, the true identity of the strange animal on my pajamas was forevermore “Thunder Grizzly.”
“Hey, mister,” I said to Mr. Chotos as I chewed my toast.
“Hm?” he answered around a piece of smoked meat.
“Um, is there a library around here?”
“What? Is there a book you want to read?”
“Yeah, kind of. I was thinking about looking up more stuff about golems.”
“Oho, an earnest student, I see.” Mr. Chotos frowned with the following apology. “Unfortunately, Tibar is a rest stop that just so happened to grow into a town. There’s nothing as extravagant as a library in these parts.”
“Oh, is that so? That’s too bad.”
My question had been loaded with an implied sub-question, i.e., “Do you people even have the concept of libraries?” Based on Mr. Chotos’s reply, I could be confident that although this town didn’t have one, libraries did indeed exist.
I had expected as much. There had been plenty of printed books in Zairein’s hideout, so I assumed this world was advanced enough to make ample use of the printing press. As to why I needed books? Obvious! Studying. I knew practically nothing about golems, to the point that messing around with Gol had ended in a tragic malfunction. I needed to read and study in order to circumvent another such inadvertent disaster.
Thus far, the precariousness of my situation had meant I had thought only of survival and monkeys. However, now I had returned to civilization and could go back to thinking like a human. I was no longer among the monkeys; I needed to understand how to live among people. Ergo, I needed books, and plenty of them.
As I moved on to the salad, Mr. Chotos said, “Still, a library, huh? I don’t think you’re going to find an institution with a collection advanced and technical enough to interest a golem wielder at your level out here in Sadie territory.”
“Huh?”
Oh no, Mr. Chotos, you misunderstand—I wouldn’t be able to read such difficult spellcasting material. For, uh, religious reasons.
If possible, I wanted a nice, tame book for young boys like Let’s Move, Automobiles!, but for golems. Yeah, you know, Let’s Move, Golems!
I had suspected this already, but…was this man overestimating my abilities?
Hey, mister, to tell you the truth, your Teru over there—yeah, her, the giggling one with a mess of scrambled eggs and red sauce around her mouth—is far more well-informed than I.
I had taken to likening the body of knowledge I had about this world to that possessed by a child in elementary school. But…but! My run-in with the lighting device had proved I lacked even the level of knowledge commonly available to Teru, who was five years old. In other words, based on this new information, I revised my self-assessment: I was more ignorant than a kindergartener.
At any rate, I needed to express that I was, in truth, an incompetent moocher. If I didn’t, our discussion was bound to go nowhere. “It doesn’t have to be technical, per se,” I said. “I just want something to read.”
“Eh? Well, whatever. If that’s all you’re looking for, we’ve got a bookstore.”
“Oh, really? I’ll go there, then.”
Forget libraries, I was all about bookstores now! For the time being, I would rely on one of those to teach me the golem fundamentals.
Although, one day, if possible, I would indeed need to visit a library or something like it for those technical academic books. I still needed to research Luvel Zairein’s summoning spell. I hoped that studying the spell that had brought me to this world might help me determine a means of returning to my old one. Also, it would be great if I could cure my amnesia.
On the other hand, my present lack of memory and the matter of my return weren’t precisely straightforward problems.
Regarding my amnesia, I was presently able to enjoy my life with Gol in part because I lacked any memories of my loved ones back “home”; in other words, I had no attachments. However, if I were to recall those memories without knowing how to return to my loved ones, I might be racked with the despair of homesickness. I was sure I would miss those people more than I was prepared to.
As for my return, if I did discover how to get home, I absolutely could not go home alone. I needed to bring Gol back with me.
Of course! There’s no way I could leave my adorable, precious Gol alone in such a perilous Jurassic World.
I despised the sort of inhuman trash who acquired pets on a whim and just as frivolously abandoned them at animal shelters. I would never do such a thing, even if my own life were at stake. I would take care of Gol until the very end. That was why, at the very least, I needed to find a method of return that would take both of us. I refused to settle for anything less.
Also, if we could return to my original world, I needed to make sure I got my memory back before we left. I mean, right? There was no telling what kind of problems would arise if I were unable to recall the names and faces of those I knew, let alone my own name. I wouldn’t even know if I had family. So even if I did manage to return to my original world, without my memories, I would be utterly socially inept.
Argh! What a complicated mess of a situation! To begin with, the one person who likely knew the most about my memory loss and a possible method of return—that idiot Zairein—had already killed himself! I couldn’t believe I’d been so carelessly dumped here on hard mode. He was definitely messing with me. I really, really wanted to beat the crap out of that bastard Zairein.