(Start of Book 3) Chapter 102: Negotiations
“That’s a big building.” Tulland gaped at the large, stone building in front of him. “Even from the outside. That’s huge.”
The smallish girl in polished armor next to him was visibly less impressed. If anything, he’d have to say the look on her face was more of confusion than awe, most of which was aimed directly at him rather than the building they had just spent the last few minutes walking to.
“Really?” She scrunched her face up before turning and taking a longer look at the building. “Were all the buildings on your planet tiny? I mean… how big was your house?”
“I don’t know. Maybe about as big as the place we had in the last safe zone? We had the downstairs room for cooking, eating, and my uncle’s work. And upstairs there was a room for each of us to sleep in. Why? How big was your house?” Tulland asked back.
One of the fun things about knowing a princess was that they didn’t actually go around advertising that fact. They certainly didn’t like to be treated like a princess. Or at least that was what Tulland assumed was the case, as evidenced by behavior from the only princess he knew. Tulland wasn’t sure how much variance there was in castle size country to country and world to world, but at the very least he understood that a meeting hall that was enormous to him here in this place might not be all that big judged by a lot of standards out there in the greater universe.
Luckily, communicating about house sizes wasn’t the kind of thing that came up a lot. Since being tricked into jumping into The Infinite, Tulland didn’t have a lot of reason to exchange world-information with the few other adventurers who had also jumped out of the difficult-but-manageable environment of their original worlds into The Infinite’s push-further-until-you-die, ultimately doomed path up increasingly difficult floors.
“Oh. You know. The normal size.” Necia shifted her weight with unconscious discomfort, rocking her center of gravity over one leg and then the other. “Like anybody’s.”
“Gotcha.” Tulland wondered if that meant her house was more like the size of several of these meeting halls or his entire island. It felt rude. “So should we go in?”
“Game plan first.” Necia nodded towards a bench, and used her still much higher than Tulland’s level of strength to nudge him towards it. “Before you go into a meeting like this one with all of the adventurers in The Infinite who have gotten to this point, you want everyone on your side to be on the same page.”