Chapter 39: One More Time
He could still taste the stew on his tongue as he made his usual breakfast of bread and cheese. That made Simon clench his fist in frustration as he tried to figure out what could have possibly happened. Sure - the proprietor hadn’t seemed to care for him, but she certainly didn’t poison him. After all - he’d had the same food and drink as Thomen and Yars had. Everyone else had been really great too. He doubted that they’d decided he was rich enough to kill in the middle of the night. They didn’t seem like the type, which meant that he was missing something.
“No,” he told himself. “You’re overcomplicating this, Simon. There are really only two options here. Either you died last night, or you didn’t. If you died, then it was probably that bandit motherfucker following you, and if you didn’t, then there’s a real possibility of some kind of glitch. Some rubber banding effect.”
He knew this wasn’t a game, of course, but the metaphor still worked. Who was to say that if he got far enough off track from what he needed to do, the magic at work here didn’t just put him back to start all over again? As a theory, it was worth exploring, but the only way to do that would be to walk all the way down that damn mountain again.
Simon sighed loudly at the thought. Just because he’d been able to survive a blizzard and hike for miles didn’t mean he wanted to do it over and over again. It would be worth it if he could spend a month or a year in civilization but for a single night?
“Kind of a pain in the ass,” he told himself as he lay back on his bed and tried to brainstorm something else that might be a better use of his time. All of his other ideas eventually led through the zombies, though, and he had zero wish to go there yet. No matter what he found, he was sure it was going to hurt. It always did.
So, after wasting half an hour, he finally grudgingly got ready and started the whole ordeal all over again. This time the only real change he made was to gather a couple smaller coins from the hidden treasure hoard on level two just in case he ran into someone that couldn’t make change for a whole gold piece. He didn’t know how many of one kind of coin exchanged for how many of another, of course, and the likelihood of being cheated was still high, but he could figure all that out later.
The trip through the snow was uneventful, and though he was still annoyed that he had to light his campfires with a flamethrower, he made it work. Once, on the second day, he smelled the smoke of someone else’s campfire, which told him someone else was out here, but he didn’t investigate.
“It’s probably just more bandits,” he told himself.
This time when Simon finally reached that main road, he thought about trying the other direction, but he was hungry, and he’d already spent the last three days wandering around the wilderness, so he wasn’t eager to spend a fourth when he knew where a perfectly lovely inn was. Instead, he strolled down the road like he didn’t have a care in the world, and though ambushing the ambushers would have been funny, he just let things play out as they had the first time, just to see what would happen.