Bog Standard Isekai

The coals had grown dim, just a little bit of orange that shone faintly onto Sion’s face from underneath, making him look like he was going to tell a ghost story. “Steamshield is the city of the future.”

“Really,” said Brin, not quite able to keep the skepticism out of his voice. His experience in this world was like living in the past in most ways. Sure, it was a magical and wonderful version of the past, but still archaic.

“Yes, really. People will point to their great machines and their factories as proof, and I hope to see those too, but most of all, it’s a mindset. For example, in Prinnash, when the Frenarian Opera came to Aberquay, they had to tell everyone, ‘Here’s an old thing that we remember from ancient Nhamanshal.’ But when they started in Steamshield, they said, ‘Come and see this new thing we invented.’”

Rhun crossed his arms. “My sister’s husband went to Steamshield once. He said that everyone there is low-leveled, like children. None of them can fight, and none of them can make anything either, not even the women. They buy clothes in stores because no one can sew, and they eat every meal in a restaurant because no one can cook. No one from Steamshield will ever move away because they couldn’t survive anywhere else with their lazy ways.”

“I think someone from Steamshield will tell you that they would never live anywhere else because they are the only place civilized. They pipe water into every home, as well as gas to warm them and light their lamps. Even the poorest houses have this.”

“Absurd,” said Rhun.

“My apologies, sir, of course you may be right. I haven’t seen it myself and can only rely on hearsay,” said Sion.

“No… no, I spoke without thinking,” said Rhun. “In truth, we saw such things in Arcaena as well. Only, it pains me to hear you speak of Frenaria so highly as if the accomplishments of Prinnash mean nothing.”

“My good man. Do you fear I will go native? Then let me say this plainly: My heart belongs to my craft and my country, in that order. If Prinnash is weak, then it should be made strong. If Steamshield has something that we lack, then we should find it and take it back home,” said Sion.

“Now that, at least, is something I can agree to,” said Rhun. He grinned, and Brin wondered if Sion could see it. He was fairly sure he could only see because of darkvision; the coals had grown dim and clouds covered the night sky.

The other two succumbed to sleep shortly after that, but Brin was restless and stayed up late into the night, dreaming about his future.

In the morning, they rode again towards Frenaria and Steamshield. Brin felt well enough to ride his own horse, and Sion was visibly relieved to be the one to guide his enormous wagon. The trip wasn’t exactly quick; they were careful to not stress the giant wagon. If it broke an axel, they’d have to beg help from a [Woodworker] of some sort, and he wasn’t optimistic of finding someone with the right Class in the few fishing villages that dotted the road between Aberquay and Bragova.

The road they traveled followed the coast for the most part, and Brin found his gaze drawn constantly back to the sea. It looked so peaceful and serene, just like the ocean back on Earth did, but he knew that he wouldn’t have to travel very far into the water to come face to face with horrible monsters. Now and again, he sent a few Invisible Eyes down into the deep, wondering if he might find any half-siblings from the other side of his family. But if any Aberfan Sirens had survived long enough to make their way here, he didn’t spot any during the day, and nothing troubled his dreams at night.

Sometimes when they stopped for the night, Marksi would slip off to the ocean and go under the water to hunt. When he returned, his fingers would be webbed and his body would be flatter and more eel-shaped, but he gradually undid those changes over the course of the night, and when they woke again, he was back at the body shape he’d configured for land.

Other nights, he stole off into the wilderness on the other side to go hunt. The land here was rocky and full of hills, but not as dry as many other places in Prinnash, so there were trees anywhere the soil was deep enough for it. It would be tough terrain for their horses, or even for a person on foot, but Marksi seemed to enjoy the challenge of it.

Rhun started making noises about wanting to go hunting, too, but it wasn’t quite as simple as letting him join Marksi at night. Rhun wasn’t exactly stealthy, and he didn’t have darkvision, so he’d only scare away the creatures Marksi was after. Brin promised to scan the surroundings with Invisible Eyes and let Rhun know if he found anything worth tracking. The only thing he found was a level 30 giant boar.

Rhun and Marksi made a pretty interesting team when they took it down. Rhun only used his towershield to defend against the boar’s wild charges, while Marksi attacked. Marksi wanted to find a way to fight with his claws, so he transformed them again and again mid-fight, trying to find the right size and shape that would let him penetrate the tough hide of the boar. Rhun eventually tired of the ordeal and knocked the boar out with his shield. Now that it was unconscious, it made a much better target for Marksi to test his claws on.

Sion dressed the kill and bundled up the meat, and Brin felt a little useless sitting back and guarding the wagon while the rest of them took care of everything.

They had pork for most every meal after that. Rhun and Sion quickly tired of it, Brin was just happy to have meat. It had been a rare treat at the monastery.

That wasn’t the only way the monastery had an effect on him. Once, when they crossed a [Merchant] traveling the other direction and stopped to compare notes on the road, the [Merchant] talked about how boring the journey had been. “I feel like I’ve crossed this exact beach three times already.”

“I know! I feel like the godling Ifulu, when he pursued the sky gem through Sezorat’s labyrinth,” said Brin. At the time, it had felt like a perfectly natural thing to say, but of course, that wasn’t a story anyone would be familiar with unless they spent a lot of time in a monastery.

The [Merchant] had laughed uproariously at that and then said, “Oh, bless you, my boy. The world needs more innocent souls like yours.”

Once the [Merchant] was out of earshot, Rhun asked, “That’s not real right? This Ifulu. You were teasing him. There’s no such godling as ‘I fool you.’”

“No, he’s real! It’s in one of the Major Writs. You know how the Earth is a labyrinth that Sezorat created to try to keep the demons from assaulting heaven, right? Well–”

“He’s teasing us. He has to be,” said Rhun.

“Oh, my friend, you jockey of jocularity. How can your wit fly so free as to imagine these severely satirical scenarios,” said Sion.

“I swear I’m not making this up,” said Brin.

Of course, they didn’t leave it there, and for the next week, they regularly peppered their conversations with such observations as, “Ah yes, this reminds me of when Anshar replaced his head with a watermelon” and “Oh, dear, I can’t help but recall the time Eridu taught six nightingales to play Jagosi.”

He didn’t mind the ribbing, exactly, but it definitely nailed home how weird he was now. Neither of them said anything when he continued to start each morning with his recitations to Solia, but he felt self-conscious about it anyway. He was churchy now. He didn’t want to go to a new school as the churchy kid. Never mind that this was the silliest possible thing for someone with the memories of an adult man to be worried about–he was going to start his life at the tower as the cool kid.

Which meant he needed to switch his personality fast, but to what? He couldn’t turn back into old Brin at the snap of his fingers, and would he even want to? He’d been a total wreck back then.

They reached the border without trouble, though when they stopped at the Prinnashian fort on their side of the border, the soldiers ordered them to stop and wait while they checked Sion’s documents. It turned into a daylong ordeal. The guard needed to talk to his supervisor, who in turn needed to consult his superior, who interviewed the three of them separately and then together before finally setting them on their way.

They traveled a mile in the dark to the city gate of Bragova, where they were waved through after a single glance at Lumina’s ring. They stayed in the city for two days. Now that they were safely in Frenaria and there was no longer any possibility of Sion’s dragging him back home, he wanted to check over the inventory in the wagon, which meant unpacking and repacking the entire thing.

It was work that even Brin could help with, and after an exhausting day of carrying boxes around, the System rewarded him.

Vitality +1

[Scarred, but Healing] rate: 435% -> 444%

[The Death Curse of the Great Witch Arnarra] -85% Vitality -> -84% Vitality

The change to [Scarred, but Healing] and the curse was just the effect of time, but his Vitality could still be trained. It might even be easier to train now that he got tired more easily. It proved that the decreases he’d seen during his time in the monastery really had just been because he’d been sitting around all the time. If he got into a regular exercise routine again, he should see that shoot back up.

A few days after leaving Bragova, though, the System had disappointing news for him.

Strength -1

His body simply wasn’t sturdy enough to handle him using his full Strength yet. Until the curse wore off a little more, he would continue to see deterioration.

For the rest of the journey, he walked alongside the wagon instead of riding. The sooner he trained his Vitality up again, the sooner he’d be able to get back into a weight-lifting routine. Marksi ran alongside him. The dragonling was also determined to get back into fighting shape, and the fat, wobbly dragon belly started to shrink as the days went by.

After Bragova they turned away from the shore and moved inland, following a major highway straight towards Steamshield.

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Traveling south and west into Frenaria was like traveling from winter into spring. The weather grew warmer until the patchy remnants of snowfall gave way to green grass and budding flowers on the trees.

Brin didn’t spot any more monsters with his Invisible Eyes, but that didn’t mean Marksi and Rhun’s hunting trips were over. He often saw rotting human shapes stumbling through the fields and forests. The undead still infested Frenaria, and any time Brin spotted one, they paused their journey for the amount of time it would take Marksi and Rhun to ride over and kill it. He saw them one-by-one mostly, never more than two or three, but they were everywhere, spread out through the whole country so that there was no place that was safe for a person to travel alone.

Frenaria was a nation of walled off little forts, completely separate from the wilderness. Fields and pastures had to lay outside the walls, of course, but that meant that [Farmers] had to travel back and forth each morning and night. He never saw anyone traveling outside the walls alone, not even to a barn on their own land in the middle of the day. He wondered if this was a new effect of the ubiquitous undead, or if it was a well-established tradition born of living in a world where monsters and predators could level up faster than the [Farmers] and [Shepherds] they preyed upon.

Brin continued to go through the potion regimen. The previous week’s worth of potions didn’t seem to make him feel sick at all, to the point that he started to wonder if they were even working. A few of them weren’t to be imbibed; instead he was supposed to drop them into open cuts on his skin. He had Sion or Rhun slice him open when needed–his [Scarred, but Healing] Skill really didn’t like self-inflicted wounds.

He was about halfway through the bottles when a notification appeared.

Alert! You have earned a new Achievement!

Poison Survivor

You have survived exposure to more than seven deadly poisons and venoms.

Unlocks the [Poison Resistance] Skill

Poison Resistance [1]

Your body has an increased ability to fight poison, toxins, venom, and impurities.

He merged the [Poison Survivor] Achievement with [Survivor of Travin's Bog] to unclutter his status screen.

After he swallowed the next potion that evening, the Skill changed again.

[Poison Resistance] leveled up! 1 -> 3

[Recovery] leveled up! 14 -> 15

Out of all his recent gains, this was the one he was the most excited about. He missed having an early levelling Skill that showed easy and quick progress like that, and now he had two. He was tempted to start knocking back the rest of the poisons right there and then, but no, he would stick to the instructions. They clearly knew what they were talking about.

They moved onwards, and the population became denser. Now, the landscape became a long quilt of connected farms, broken up only by the occasional village. Gone were the empty, wild spaces between bastions of humanity, and here, at least, he didn’t see any of the random undead roving around. That didn’t mean that the undead didn’t leave their mark. Several towns bore the scars of recent combat, hastily-patched walls and a few burned down homes. One of the villages they passed was completely empty, the homes either burned down or decaying from the weather, and the fields in the near vicinity were growing wild.

The sign that they were really nearing Steamshield was first the crowds, and then the roads. They landed on a highway that made Brin think that all the other roads he’d traveled on to get here didn’t deserve the name. This one was paved; it was eight feet wide and made of closely locked white brick. The traffic in both directions was so heavy that they had to wait a bit before turning onto the road. Then once they were on it, Sion constantly had to guide the wagon to the furthest edge so that carts and wagons going the other direction could get by.

Sion’s wagon was massive, the size of a mobile home, and yet it didn’t stand out much against all the other odd conveyances. He saw wooden mobile homes three stories high, complete with drapes over the windows and a chimney pouring smoke into the air. He saw quick little hackneys darting and weaving around the slower traffic, and a long train of wooden wagons all hooked together in a line, led by one high level [Caravan Master] at the front. What really made his eyes pop were the honest to goodness horseless carriages, and not just the ones that were being propelled by [Caravaneer] Class Skills. There were wagons with steel engines to push themselves along, guided by gloved hands on steering wheels with spokes like a ship’s helm.

They poured steam from pipes at the top, but Brin hesitated to call it a full steam engine; they weren’t recognizable to the engines he remembered from Earth, and he was willing to bet they ran on a mixture of magic and technology rather than pure coal-fired locomotives.

Still, he was already seeing signs to back up Sion’s claims that Steamshield was the future. He supposed he shouldn’t be that surprised. The great war machines had been self-propelled, but he’d never really seen one of those used so he hadn’t given them a lot of thought.

He turned off his Invisible Eyes. He wanted his first glimpse of the city to be with his own natural eyes, and at the same time as his friends.

The further they rode towards the city, the more modern the surroundings became. The little towns they passed began to look less like simple villages or more like suburbs, complete with short decorative fences and little gardens in front of each home.

A city loomed in the distance, but it didn’t look nearly big enough. Sion assured him that it wasn’t.

“That’s Landsport. We’ll stop there, and then arrange travel further into town. Actually, you may want to leave Rhun and I there. I expect you’ll want to explore the city proper, and I’ll need to arrange storage for my cargo before we continue on,” said Sion.

Brin really did want to keep moving, but they’d come this far together, and he wasn’t going to abandon Sion just because he was impatient to see the city. “Nah, take care of everything you need to. We can go together when you’re ready.”

Landsport was small but dense, with towering buildings that rose ten stories or more. The streets were packed and Rhun had to get down to the ground in front of the horses to guide people out of the way so that Sion could move through.

Sion found his way to a warehouse controlled by a Wogan affiliate group, and engaged in a long and drawn out negotiation. Thankfully, Sion didn’t invite him to join the negotiations, so he was able to sit on a bench outside, but that did nothing for his impatience. He was dreadfully tempted to throw up some Invisible Eyes and get a look at Steamshield, but he resisted.

He’d had a lot of time to think in the monastery, and one of the things he thought about was the proper use of his powers. On a battlefield or in an emergency, everything was permitted, but for his normal life, he needed some guardrails. One of them was that he knew he needed to limit his spying to information gathering, not to entertainment. He didn’t want to become a person who lived his entire life vicariously through floating cameras.

So he waited, and watched the people. They mostly dressed in plain grays and blacks with little adornment, which was new. In Hammon’s Bog everyone wore colorful and expressive clothing, and now that he thought of it Prinnash was the same, but here there seemed to be one style that was considered proper and everyone tried to reach as near to it as possible. For men, it was a long gray overcoat that went to the midshins. For women, bulkier coats went to the waist, and then a pencil skirt underneath that went to the ankles, though they were often much tighter than would be considered modest anywhere else.

Everyone wore hats, and those at least had more variety. Men wore short-brimmed bowlers or long, floppy toques. Once in a while a man who looked like he had money would sport a tricorn, often trimmed in gold. The hats of the women were much more varied still, and defied Brin’s ability to come up with names for them.

Brin stood out in the semi-formal attire that the Order’s knights wore on leave, but at least he wasn’t in full armor like Rhun, though neither he nor Rhun got half as many stares as Marksi did.

One shy girl watched from behind the corner of a building for fifteen minutes before finally working up the courage to walk up and ask about him.

“What’s her name? Is she tame?”

“His name is Marksi, and he absolutely isn’t tame. He is nice, though,” Brin responded.

He told her all about the little dragon, and Marksi allowed her to admire him, because after all, what dragon didn’t like to be admired? She eventually skipped away, excited to go tell her friends, and Brin hoped he’d be gone before she came back. Not because he didn’t like kids, but because he suddenly felt anxious about being at the center of a whole gaggle of them.

The girl didn’t return, and after four long hours, Sion finally emerged from the office where he’d been cooped up. “They have officially agreed to enter negotiations.”

“What?” Rhun asked. “All of that and negotiations haven’t yet begun?”

Sion shook his head sadly. “You have a lot to learn of the business world.”

“I do not wish to learn it!”

“But more importantly, they’ll store the wagon for now. So we can head into town!”

Sion practically danced as he led them further through the packed crowds of the city. Brin supposed he shouldn’t complain about the crowding; it was nothing compared to some of the cities in his old world and no one jostled and pushed him, but it was more than he was used to. Marksi hated it. He refused to cave by climbing up on Brin’s shoulders, but he walked with his shoulder firmly leaning into Brin’s leg.

Sion led them to a line, and when Brin asked him what they were waiting in line for, he refused to respond. Luckily, the line moved at a constant pace, near a normal walking speed, and soon led them to wrap around a building and into the open air to where the longest and most advanced piece of machinery Brin had ever seen in this world awaited.

“Sion. That’s a train!” Brin said.

“It is! Yes, I believe our first glimpse of the city should be done in style,” he said, and handed Brin a ticket. Value Sense gave Brin a price, enough to outright buy a horse and carriage. His eyes narrowed and Sion looked smug because they both knew that Sion wouldn’t let Brin pay him back. When had he even gotten the ticket? He must’ve convinced those local [Merchants] to buy him one.

They stepped onto the platform and a porter stepped up to take Brin’s luggage. Inside, the train itself was appointed like one of the fancy hotels that Hogg liked to go to. One big difference between this place and his old world–public transportation was not for losers. No, this was a place for tricorns and top hats, and Brin was weirdly self-conscious about his bare head.

They made their way down the train’s interior, past a sitting room that smelled strongly of women’s perfume and men’s cigar smoke. Then there was a tea parlor, because of course there was. Hogg would love this. The next train car after were the private boxes, and they found their box in the train car after that one. It was small but richly furnished, and a porter came by soon after they sat to explain the amenities and give directions. Brin ordered some snacks and tipped him a silver before Sion could.

Soon, the train was on the way. He didn’t hear the grinding of metal or the screech of steam, though both of those things may well have been happening. Each of the boxes were screened for privacy with extremely obvious illusion magic. It was good stuff, too, because it blocked out any annoying noises while allowing a bit of a thrum to act as white noise, because too much silence could be more distracting than too much noise. He couldn’t read enchantments yet; that was something he hoped to learn in the tower, but he could feel the way the magic was working and he memorized it as best he could.

They spoke little and nervously. Their backs were to the setting sun so when they arrived, they’d be seeing Steamshield from the same angle that the sun did. Currently the view from the window was of an enormous lake, with sparks of sunlight sparkling on the water. The Alent was so large that he couldn’t see all the way across it, not even from the raised track that the train was gliding across.

Then, the train turned, and Steamshield was in sight.

First, he noticed the smokestacks. Every building seemed to have a thousand-foot-high chimney that belched white smoke into the air, leaving the entire city under a cloudy haze that gave it an otherworldly feeling. The second thing he noticed was steel. Steel bridges over canals, steel crosswalks linking one towering building to another. Metal water towers, traffic signs, and lampposts. Steel doors and staircases and pipes, so many pipes crawling like vines over the buildings. The city was a shield of steel, covered in steam.

He’d expected a quaint medieval city with a big wizard tower, and what he saw instead was a modern city in the middle of their version of an industrial revolution.

The Tower, at least, looked exactly like he’d expected it. Huge and magical and thrumming with power, it rose above the mass of modernity, a skyscraper, but the product of ages past. The base was built like a massive cathedral, but then a spiral shaped column of cement and glass rose out from the center. Above that, it expanded upward and outward, losing its purposeful regularity in favor of a mishmash of different styles and purposes, with odd belfries, minarets, and ballroom-sized balconies jutting off the sides. Some windows were dull and empty, some shone bright with different-colored lights, and some flickered and flashed with magical light. The top was domed with a spire of living lightning as if they’d caught it mid-strike and froze it.

It was breathtaking, and not just because of the way that the setting sun painted the entire scene in pinks and reds. He was here.

That was the Tower.