In the Land of Leadale Vol. 5 Read online

  Aside from helping around the house, Luka had no duties to speak of. Moreover, Roxine was such an efficient housekeeper that she required no assistance at all.

  “Hmm. I’ll tag along since it looks like I’ll be able to introduce Kuu to people now,” Cayna told Roxilius.

  “Very well.”

  “You’re gonna…help clean, Mommy Cayna?”

  “I’ve gotta introduce Kuu to Mimily.”

  The two had technically met before, albeit when Kuu was still invisible to everyone except Cayna. It was better to properly acquaint people with Kuu before any issues arose, especially since Cayna had no idea what this world thought of fairies. She’d be in big trouble if they turned out to be taboo.

  Roxilius went ahead to the bathhouse while Cayna took Luka and Kuu to the inn.

  “What’s that you got there?” Marelle asked, staring in shock at Kuu floating over Luka’s head.

  “Wow! Miss Cayna, what is that?! Who is that?!” Lytt squealed, her eyes gleaming with wonder.

  “This is Kuu, the new fairy living with me. I hope you’ll get along.”

  Granted, Kuu wasn’t exactly new, but Cayna kept the introduction short and sweet since explaining the entire situation would be a headache. She gave a small bow, which Kuu dutifully mimicked, saying, “A pleasure, a pleasure.”

  “Awesome!”

  Lytt, who was in the middle of wiping tables, gripped her towel excitedly. Her face lit up in amazement just as Luka’s had the previous morning. Cayna mistakenly took that to mean that young girls adored fairies even in this world, too.

  “Pardon me, Marelle. May I speak with you for a minute?”

  “Come on, Cayna, why so stiff? How long have we known each other by now? You can tell me anything.”

  Cayna still lacked basic knowledge of modern-day Leadale, and Marelle was the one person she could go to for answers.

  Just like when they first met, Marelle gave Cayna a hearty thump on the back. “Quit bein’ so formal!”

  “Cough… Right. Are there any local fables about fairies?”

  “What, you don’t know? They say happiness comes to children who encounter fairies.”

  “Urgh…”

  Cayna’s heart sank with guilt at the mess she’d unintentionally stepped into. She couldn’t say for sure if Kuu was an actual fairy, but she didn’t want to mislead Luka and Lytt or give them false hope.

  As she contemplated this, Marelle gave her a pat on the shoulder and whispered, “Don’t you worry. A girl’s gotta get out there and find her own happiness, not wait for it to fall into her lap. That’s one lesson Lytt’s gotta learn the hard way.”

  “Y-you’re really something, Marelle…”

  Marelle left an incredibly strong impression. Cayna’s cheek twitched; she could practically hear the other village ladies telling her this was exactly how a country girl ought to be.

  An awkward smile spread over her face as she pictured Lytt growing up to be just as plucky and dauntless—a transformation a long-lived high elf like Cayna would probably witness firsthand if she stayed in the remote village.

  I dunno if I want Lytt to turn out like her mom, though…, she thought as she started leaving for bathhouse-cleaning duty with the two girls in tow.

  “Whoa! What’s that, Miss Cayna?” Latem exclaimed from the entrance, just as shocked as the girls had been.

  “Kuu is Kuu!” the fairy replied.

  “This is my new housemate, Kuu. I hope you’ll be friends, Latem.”

  “So fairies are real after all…”

  His shock, however, was for a different reason. When Cayna questioned him further, she learned that every race had similar children’s stories. The ones involving fairies, however, were typically told to girls.

  “The stories basically say you gotta wait for your prince to show up. Y’know, that sort of thing. And those kinda people aren’t self-sufficient. We dwarves think it’s a sign of weakness.”

  Cayna was taken aback by his curt, cold practicality. In this fantasy world, she never would have expected a dwarf to imply she get a reality check. She couldn’t tell if this was a matter of educational differences between the races or because dwarves were overall a people of action.

  At any rate, the two starry-eyed little girls were having absolutely none of it.

  “Hey! Don’t crush our dreams!”

  “It’s…not nice.”

  “What, you seriously think seein’ a fairy brings good luck? You gotta get out there and make your own luck!”

  “Yeah, my mom said the same thing, but can’t you at least let a girl dream?!”

  Lytt must have overheard her mother earlier. Luka, meanwhile, didn’t add much to their bickering; instead, she stood silently by Lytt’s side and simply glared at Latem. Just as Cayna was wondering how she should mediate, Roxilius took advantage of a lull in the conversation and stepped between the three children.

  “Things will only grow more heated at this rate,” he said. “Let’s set the issue aside until we’ve finished cleaning, then we can continue the discussion.”

  Roxilius spun Latem around and showed him to the men’s bath before turning to Cayna and giving a slight bow. In other words: I’ll see to Latem, so you go ahead and take care of the girls.

  Lytt’s cheeks were puffed out angrily, and Luka was on the verge of tears. Cayna consoled them as they all entered the women’s bath.

  “Okay, you two. Save your squabbling for when your chores are done.”

  “Squabble, squabble!” Kuu chirped, clueless to the fact she was the cause of said squabbling. She flitted through the air and mimicked Cayna’s tone of voice. When they entered the changing room, Mimily caught sight of Kuu.

  “Y-Your Holiness?!” the mermaid shouted, her face twisted in shock and horror as her tail jerked violently. A moment later, she cried “I—I do apologize!” and pressed her head to the ground in prostration before Kuu.

  Cayna rubbed her temples tiredly. I’ve seen an awful lot of groveling lately, she thought. “Relax, Mimily. Kuu’s got nothing to do with the Water Spirit. She’s not even a Wind Spirit. She’s a fairy.”

  “Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.”

  Kuu lamented the mermaid’s lack of eye contact. Cayna drew the fairy to her chest and roused Mimily to lift her head. The mermaid gazed at Kuu reverently.

  “Is she upset with me?” Mimily murmured fearfully.

  “Aw, she’s just sad because you won’t look her in the eye.”

  “Oh my gosh! I-I’m so sorry!”

  Dark clouds hung over the dejected Kuu as Mimily stared blankly and wondered how to cheer her up. The clouds quickly cleared at Cayna’s direction.

  “Kuu is Kuu!”

  “Um, hello, Kuu. I’m Mimily. It’s very nice to meet you.”

  As soon as their eyes met and the two introduced themselves, a smile blossomed on Kuu’s face. Mimily immediately pressed a hand to her chest in relief.

  “Phew. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d offended the Great Fairy…”

  “Whoa, hold on,” said Cayna. “What’s this Great Fairy stuff? I thought your village revered the Water Spirit.”

  “Yes, we do. We also had similarly tiny beings—palm-sized mermaids without wings—the village used as messengers. We call them Great Fairies.”

  Cayna looked between Kuu and Mimily and felt like she’d seen something similar. She couldn’t put her finger on where, though, and moved on. At any rate, she figured the messengers were some kind of ocean fairy.

  While Cayna and Mimily talked, Luka and Lytt grabbed deck brushes from the equipment box in the changing room and prepared to clean the bathhouse. Once the flow of hot water was halted and the tub drained, they started scrubbing. Anyone could turn the water off and on with a tiny bit of magic.

  The drainage was controlled by a dam that only needed to be opened. The overflow usually spilled into the washhouse behind the bath. Most people used Mimily’s laundry services, but as low as her rates were, the service wasn’t free. Anyone without the cash on hand had to do their own laundry.

  One of Cayna’s magical devices purified the water from the washhouse and hot-water bathhouse and converted it for agricultural use. Roxilius maintained the fields’ irrigation channels since he obviously didn’t have enough to do already. This system reduced the time spent constantly drawing water from the well and was a hit among the villagers.

  Cayna couldn’t think of any other ways to improve life in the village; she decided to set aside her remodeling plan for the time being unless someone demanded something. She had offered to loan out golems and Earth Spirits to help cultivate the fields, but everyone had politely declined.

  Mimily went over to where the girls were cleaning and flushed the filth away with a water spell. She had mastered crawling along the ground recently, which made her look like the mythical Lamia. It was an amusing sight; Mimily didn’t have a long serpentine body like Lamia, so her tail did most of the work. Its feverish sway reminded Cayna of a dog’s tail, and she accidentally let slip a giggle.

  “Something the matter, Cayna?” Mimily asked.

  “N-no, it’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “Slither, slither, swish, swish.”

  Cayna did her best to keep a straight face as the mermaid eyed her suspiciously. However, she trembled violently and cracked once the clueless Kuu started imitating Mimily.

  “Luka,” Mimily said, “please tell me Cayna’s biggest mistakes in secret later.”

  “Hey…!”

  When Cayna heard Mimily speak of such nightmares, she hastily wiped the grin off her face. After all, Cayna knew several ways the mermaid could embarrass her in front of Luka.

  Luka considered this request for a moment before nodding and saying, “…Okay.”
r />   “Lu betrayed me…,” Cayna moaned.

  “I’m pretty sure this is your own fault, Miss Cayna.”

  Just as Cayna was devasted by one blow, Lytt followed up from behind and backed Mimily. She was obviously still upset about the conversation with Latem.

  Mimily finally noticed the younger girls’ long faces.

  “Did something happen?”

  “Well, you might say there’s a culture clash going on.”

  After Cayna explained the earlier incident, Mimily nodded.

  “Hmm. So they’re fighting?”

  “I’ve had arguments with friends, too, but we never butt heads like this. What advice should I give…?”

  “You’re the mother figure. Shouldn’t you be the voice of reason?”

  In Cayna’s case, nearly every group experience had taken place within the game. She’d usually just go along with whatever her guildmates and fellow party members wanted, so fights were few and far between.

  After Lytt and Luka finished cleaning, Mimily had them sit on a bench in the changing room.

  “You’re usually busy talking to each other, so it’s rare to see you this quiet.”

  “…Yeah.”

  “Miss Mimi…”

  The girls sat next to each other and silently stared at their feet.

  “Cayna told me a little bit about what happened, but could you try to remember your conversation earlier?”

  Mimily smiled as the girls closed their eyes and mumbled their recollection of the event in the same way.

  “I wonder, did Latem really dismiss your dreams?”

  ““Huh…?””

  “Even if he said, ‘Waiting is weakness’ and ‘Grab it yourself,’ that doesn’t mean he was disregarding you.”

  “Y-yeah.”

  “…Uh-huh.”

  The girls had been defensive in the moment, but they now understood the truth in Mimily’s measured words. They realized statements like Dwarves think waiting is weakness and We have to grab it ourselves were not necessarily denying their dreams.

  “Besides, Latem said, ‘We have to grab it ourselves.’ That must mean he has dreams, too, right? So with all that in mind, what should you do now?”

  “Say…we’re sorry.”

  “Apologize.”

  As the girls expressed their remorse, Mimily nodded with a smile. “Good answer.”

  Luka and Lytt stood up and ran outside. Hardly a second later, a loud, shocked, and frankly strange cry rose from the men’s bath as the girls made their apologies.

  “Whaaaat?!”

  Moved by the commotion on the other side of the wall, Cayna cried, “Oh!” and started clapping.

  Mimily’s temple let out an audible twang.

  “Caynaaaaaa! Please sit down right there!”

  “Huh? What? What’s wrong, Mimily? This is sudden.”

  “That was not an ‘Oh!’ moment just now! ‘Oh’?! Honestly, what are you even doing?!”

  “Huh?!”

  Finding herself at the mercy of Mimily’s wrath, Cayna suffered an hour-long lecture on communal living. Although a lost mermaid, Mimily was still raised as a future queen candidate.

  Racial differences aside, she tearfully drilled into Cayna how a role model should behave. Well, other than the parts about being a mer-monarch, that is.

  As Cayna’s complaints rang into the heavens, Roxilius was relieved to know the children were smiling innocently together once more. Naturally, he ignored the chaos coming from the women’s bath.

  Private butler or not, he still had to look out for himself.

  “Ack, that was rough…”

  Cayna and the others left the bathhouse after Mimily was done with her verbal lashing. The three children had apparently cleaned the men’s bath together and enjoyed pleasant conversation while the mermaid was chewing her out. Latem had to help out his parents in the afternoon, so he headed home.

  “Mom…are you okay?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Never better.”

  Cayna, Luka, Lytt, and Roxilius were walking in an orderly line back to the inn to drop off the innkeeper’s daughter when Luka tugged at Cayna’s cloak worriedly. Mimily’s lecture seemed to focus more on the art of leadership than the role of motherhood, but Roxilius doubted Cayna would find the information very useful. As he mumbled to himself to stay on his toes around the mermaid, he said something to the effect of “I must be going” and began to veer away.

  “Oh, you got patrol duty, Rox?”

  “No, I have been asked to do an unrelated job. I thought I should take care of it now.”

  “A job? Is it something only you can do?”

  “No, anyone can do it.”

  When Cayna inquired further, she learned the job was gathering eggs. The village chickens continued to roam freely like they owned the place, and there were eggs everywhere. Anyone could take them home, but the ones laid in tricky, out-of-the-way spots slowly spoiled. Therefore, each family was periodically responsible for checking the village for these eggs.

  Cayna’s household was apparently next down the list, and it was now Roxilius’s duty to go on an egg hunt.

  “Right, right, the eggs. What if we looked with Survey?”

  “Oh! I’ll help, too, Miss Cayna!”

  “Shouldn’t you get back to the inn, Lytt?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s no problem as long as I’m home by dusk!”

  Cayna glanced around and saw chickens popping out of a nearby barn. It seemed like a frustrating search on foot. Magic was much more efficient, but she wouldn’t be setting a good example for the children.

  Instead, she took out a handled direction arrow from her Item Box and gave it to Luka.

  “…?”

  “What’s this?”

  Luka and Lytt had no clue what it was and tilted their heads in confusion.

  “Write what you’re looking for on that arrow, and it’ll point you in the right direction. You’ll find it in no time. If there’s more than one, it’ll pick whatever is closest.”

  “So we should write ‘egg’ on it?”

  “That’ll include eggs in people’s houses. ‘Eggs on the ground’ should do the trick.”

  The girls took the pen Cayna offered and audibly pondered over the arrow’s surface. They knew their basic characters but were unsure how to fit a hiragana phrase into the roughly thirteen-by-ten-centimeter space. The size of their handwriting hadn’t changed since Cayna first taught them, so she thought it’d be strange if they couldn’t fit more than four characters on a small blackboard instead of a notebook. She’d written in large letters to help them see her examples easier but desperately hoped they’d realize that wasn’t their only option.

  After a moment, Luka wonkily wrote “Eggs on the ground” and showed it to her.

  “Is this okay?”

  “Yeah, that looks great, Lu. Now, if you grab the handle…”

  Lytt followed Cayna’s instructions, and the arrow spun wildly before pointing left to an area behind them. The wall of a house stood there, but it was surrounded by wild grasses.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not past the house,” Cayna murmured. She parted the weeds, and two eggs rolled out. Kuu quickly flew in and picked one up.

  “Egg! Egg!”

  “Don’t drop it, Kuu.”

  The egg was about 30 percent of Kuu’s own body weight, and Cayna warned the dexterous fairy to be gentle. Using her Craft Skills, she made several handlebar baskets sewn from nearby vines right then and there. Cayna’s sudden ability to freely put something together without a template as long as she directed its shape made her even more suspicious of Kuu.

  Cayna’s expression gave nothing away as she handed out the baskets and told everyone, “Okay, let’s meet up after we’ve got a whole bunch.” They separated into three groups: Cayna with Kuu, Roxilius by himself, and Luka and Lytt together.

  Roxilius watched the two girls merrily set off on their egg hunt.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “That’s my Find-It Buddy. It was in the Item Box in Liothek’s tower.”

  “Huh?”

  The appearance and effect of an item was often tweaked to personal preference, so there were plenty of things Cayna couldn’t understand unless she tried them out herself. Cost and materials determined the quality of an item, so it wasn’t like people could just pull things out of thin air.