“You and your friend are in real trouble, young sir! What were you thinking!? Leaving like thieves in the middle of the night! And tonight, of all times! You are lucky chevalier Trisgord found you when he did! Else you two could be dead by now…! Are you listening to me, Nathan!”
“I… You are right… From where I come, I can go more or less wherever I want with little danger. Sure, you could get robbed if you aren’t careful but… but none of that matters, does it? I am not in Seattle anymore. I can’t keep acting on assumptions when my new reality is fundamentally different from my old one. And yet I can only keep guessing without information. If I am to survive here, I need answers…” Nates eyes flash from the scars on his arm to the nun. Monsters weren’t skills, so… “Mother Olga, what are monsters? Is it normal for them to appear in the city? Where do they come from? Do they spawn on the darkness or do they reproduce the all-fashion way? Do they drop loot when they die? Do they come from eggs…? No, scratch that. Are they all like the Saw-Imp or are there different types…? What about Dragons? Are dragons a thing here? Saw-dragons? What about…?”
“Stop-stop!” The woman massaged the bridge of her nose, bags apparent under her eyes, “Look Nathan. I gather that due to your condition, it’s inevitable for you to have many questions, but I don’t have the time not the energy for answering them. Besides, Dana is sure your memory will come back with time.”
“But I…”
“That said,” she interrupted again, her eyes softening, “let me put to rest some of your fears; monsters don’t materialize from the shadows. They are just animals with skills. Not ghosts or daemons. You are perfectly safe here.”
“But then how did…?”
“The Saw-imp that attacked you escaped from the menagerie of some idiot with more money than sense.” Mother Olga came angrily, “It found you and Zolydane by mere chance… That’s not to say you should wander the streets after sundown! The town is plenty dangerous nowadays, even without monsters roaming around!”
“But if they are animals with skills, how do they…?”
“Enough with the buts, child!” mother Olga placed the trey she carried on his lap, and gestured to the steaming bowl of porridge, “Eat and rest for now. Healing with skills takes a lot from the body… Let’s see… If you behave and promise to be careful in handling them, I’ll speak to mother Dana about lending you some books from the church’s library. You can look for your answers there… You can read, right?”
“I… don’t know?”
With a grunt of irritation mother Olga looked around until she spotted the book Uric had been reading.
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“Here! Do you understand this?”
“The Adventures of Oscar the Rose Knight?” Nate tilted his head at the completely alien glyphs that none the less made sense to his eyes, but then a red faced Uric hurried to snatched back the book from his hands.
He and Olga stared at the boy.
“I…ahem… Don’t want to lose my page.”
“Right…” the nun deadpan, “I’ll bring you a couple books so you can entertain yourself while you heal, and maybe fill in some of the blanks in your memories.”
“That’s… a… That sounds grate. Thank you.”
Olga sniffed, but didn’t left the room until she saw him eat all the porridge..
In eating and chatting with Uric, Nate came to understand better the actual situation.
Like the nun said, the monsters had escaped from an illegal nobleman’s menagerie, somewhere near the port district to sown chaos all over the city.
As a result, mother Dana and her colleagues had been working nonstop to save as many lives as they could. To hear Uric tell it, the church’s main chapel had become something like a campaign infirmary.
Imagine the horror in the mothers’ faces when two of their wards, who were supposedly sleeping upstairs, appeared admix that disaster, one of them heavily injured to boot.
Apparently, a certain Ordzag de Trisgord, who Nate assumed was Zoly’s brother, had found the monster attacking them just outside his home.
The nobleman conducted himself like a true hero, killing off the beast and bringing them both back to the orphanage. Uric seem to be verry taken with the guy, and for what he gathered from his excited explanation, Zoly’s brother appeared to be an actual knight… of sorts.
Well, that at least explained the huge sword the man had impaled the Saw-imp with. He tried then to question the boy about this so-called knight, curious of what skills someone like that might have instore, but alas, Uric couldn’t help him there.
Not only did he know little about the subject, but apparently discussing the skills of a third party was frown upon, doubly so if said party happened to be of noble blood. The boy even clammed up for a second there and Nate had to struggled with some verbal gymnastics to change the subject.
From all this chat, Nate also got the impression that the chubby kid knew exactly what problems were Zoly and her family experimenting, – something he himself didn’t knew. The funny thing was that the brat’ so called best friend was oblivious that his long-time roomie was actually a girl. Nate had no Idea how she had managed to keep Uric in the dark for all the months they have known each other; Uric was not stupid.
That said, despite how irritating Nate found the whole ordeal, he knew it was none of his business. That’s why he decided to do his best not to clue Uric on Zoly’s last little secret.
Somehow, he managed to keep up the ruse despite his terrible acting. Turns out that the sole perk of being the crazy kid was that no one look deeply into his awkward behavior.
In the end, Olga came back with four thick volumes for him to read and chased Uric off into doing his daily chores.
Now alone in the room, Nate sighed forlornly at the closed door. He reached for the books with his good arm, hiding the disfigured one under his sheets, and skimmed over their content one by one:
An encyclopedia, a history manual, a compendium of popular folktales and, of course, a copy of the Sacred Rolls of the High Mother – Selene’s Bible.
“Well, this is a start, I suppose…”
