Chapter 39: What is paper?
"Your drinks. They have become the talk of the city now," the man said. This threw Aric off as he had no idea that he even had a public presence. He always thought that he kept a low profile and people didn’t know about him. It was better that way, at least for the time being. The man seemed to notice the change in Aric’s expression, so he said, "You are quite intelligent for your age. Your face suggests that you didn’t like that people are talking about you. Hahahaha... Someone of your age would love to see their name written in golden letters."
This made Aric more irritated, and he replied, "I am not like others. Don’t lump me together with the rest of the people around."
"You talk funny, my boy. You don’t need to be scared. Not many people know about your drinks, and everyone thinks it’s that dear old Albert who is selling those drinks, but those who have connections... Hmm... Like me... know who is the original inventor. I have to tell you, I loved your drinks. Tell you what. Sell me 1000 cokes and I will give you a runic circle worth of 2 gold coins," the man said.
"Uncle Albert isn’t that old," Aric said, now calming down a little.
"I spoke of gold coins and that was what you want to talk about?" the man said. Aric only shrugged his shoulders, and his attitude was enough for the man to understand that Aric didn’t want to talk about the drinks at all.
"I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Gopher, and you can just call me by name. Don’t add ’Uncle’ to it when you speak out loud or call me," Gopher said. Aric could see that the man was very sensitive about age. He even called Albert old even though the man had just crossed 40. But then again, the average age of the people around would probably be less than the ones in his world.
"What do you need?" Gopher asked this time as Aric seemed to have put on a thinking cap. Aric came back to his senses and then asked Gopher, "Do you sell paper here?"
"Paper? What is that?" Gopher had never heard that term before, and Aric suddenly realized that the people here didn’t know of the word paper. They were just accustomed to parchments or hard slates, and that was what they were called. There were also fountain pens to write on the parchments and chalk to write on the slates.
Aric didn’t waste more time and brought out a bundle of paper, which was tied from all sides with straw ropes that were locally made. He had gone to Echorysia and brought these A4-sized papers and bundled them using locally made thin ropes.