Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Workplace accident

Hineni hobbles into the adventurer’s guild. He isn’t sure how he has gotten here, let alone fully dressed. But here he is.

 

The last thing that he remembers, he was eating a frog on the floor of his bathroom. Also, his scarf smells like owl for some reason. Unfortunately, it is the middle of the day. He would have preferred to come at night, but it just so happens to be daytime right now and he just so happens to desperately need a priest, right now. Some of the eyes at the tables, recognizing him, immediately shoot his way. The others, only having heard the whispers of the night-story follow their compatriot’s gazes, staring at the man who is clutching his side, walking up towards the counter.

 

The tired receptionist looks at him, her eyes widen as she recognizes him.

 

“I need a priest,” says Hineni, dropping all forty of his Obols down onto the counter, looking over his shoulder at the first few people who are already getting up to rush his way.

 

“What for?” she asks, taking the money and sliding it down into her till.

 

“I think I’m dying,” says Hineni, opening his menu to display his health-points and status just before he falls down to the ground, returning to the blackness of sleep once again.

 

Hineni wakes up, very much not dead.

 

Lazy morning sunlight shines in through the large window of the room that is clearly not his. The man instantly sits upright, the blanket covering him falling down as he looks around for the owl. But as his wide, fearfully paranoid eyes settle, seeing no owl, he realizes his next dilemma. Hineni jumps out of the unusually clean and comfortable bed, the linens of which don’t even smell, wrapping the blanket around himself. He’s undressed, for starters.

 

The man paces over to the window, feeling remarkably strong on his legs. He looks down outside of it, out into the bright morning-shine world below and recognizes the road there. That’s the spot outside of the adventurer’s guild. That means he’s upstairs inside of it, it looks like the second floor.

 

Hineni rubs his head, looking down under the blanket. The infected wound has been healed and professionally treated. The bandage however, looks comically out of place compared to the severe burn scars all around it. He covers himself back up, looking for his clothes.

 

He remembers. He came to the guild. They must have healed him.

 

His clothes aren’t here. Hineni sighs, going to the door and peeking out of it. A face appears right in front of his. It jumps back, yelping in surprise and Hineni does the same, shutting the door again.

 

“Good morning,” says the voice from the other side of the door. His brain processes the tired face he saw for a second just then, it’s the receptionist of the adventurer’s guild. The one with the tired eyes. “Can I come in?” asks a voice from the other side of the barrier.

 

“No,” says Hineni, leaning against the door.

 

“You shouldn’t be up. Give that wound a day or two more to heal, okay?”

 

Hineni looks around the room again. “Where are my clothes?”

 

“Uh, they were all dirty so we had them washed,” she explains. “But you don’t need to worry, I’ve seen you naked for the last two days now.”

 

He turns his head, his eyes wide like that of a fearful deer, staring at an approaching. “You what?”

 

“Can I come in?” asks the annoyed receptionist again.

 

“No!”

 

She leans against the door, from the feeling of it, lowering her voice. “Can I come in if I bring your clothes?”

 

Hineni thinks for a second. “Fine,” he agrees. He hears a sigh on the other side of the door and a set of footsteps walking away. A minute later, someone knocks again. Hineni scoots the door open an inch and she pushes them inside. He grabs his clothes from her and gets dressed. It’s some random assortment of undergarments, shirt and pants from his own room, that somebody had apparently gone inside of without his permission. For some reason, he has been given three socks. “Can I come in now?”

 

“Not yet!” calls Hineni, putting on his coat, his scarf and his hat as well. He looks down at his once-blistered hand. He doesn’t have a glove yet, but he supposes he’ll have to buy some today “Okay,” he says, stepping back to the side and putting his hand into his coat’s pocket.

 

The elf opens the door, walking in without a care in the world. “It must be nice, having a god who cares about you,” sighs the woman without skipping a beat, sitting down on the trunk at the foot of the bed and staring up towards the ceiling in what Hineni would describe as a very unprofessional manner. The rules of customer-service generally dictate hiding your dead-inside-eyes until you are alone. But he has something more pressing on his mind. The man clenches his fist.

 

“Do I owe you anything?

 

“Huh?” she asks. “No, the fee is covered. We just took it out of the rest of the money you didn’t take before.” She yawns, stretching her arms and falling back onto the foot of the bed behind herself with her upper body, her eyes closed. Hineni waits for a moment, waiting for her to continue with her story. But she doesn’t. She has fallen asleep on the spot.

 

He supposes that now is as good a time as any to leave. He has the answers that he needs and his body is whole again. He has work to do. Hineni checks his scarf and leaves the room, shutting the door noisily behind himself so that she wakes up. He doesn’t want her to get caught sleeping on the job, after all. Rushing across the upstairs balcony and down the staircase, he tucks his bad hand deeper into his pocket together with the extra sock. “Ah, wait!” calls the elf, having apparently woken up, running after him. Hineni does not wait, making a beeline down the staircase. Before she makes another scene that gets him embarrassed in public.

 

Though, this might be too late. Hineni stops on the staircase. He feels all the eyes on the bottom floor suddenly turn his way. Several people at the tables jump up, clearly wanting to make a beeline towards him. Being chosen by a god is unfortunately a big deal, even if it’s by an obscure god. Power seekers, people looking for work, the desperate, the hungry, the eager, the adventurous, they would all be coming to him now, looking for an introduction, for work, for positions of note.

 

He was ready to die in his last moments before and now, feeling the entire room watching him, he is sure that that was the right choice to have made. He just wants to be left alone. Hineni freezes on the stairs, feeling his heart thrashing in his chest and a familiar dewy sweat begin to form on his body.

 

A young woman stands by the bar, waving an iron short-sword that he recognizes as the one he made the other day. “Hineni!” she shouts, pointing at the sword with his own signature on it.

 

“Come sit with us!” shouts a large man in the back.

 

“You need a healer?” asks a woman who is clearly not a priestess and a small, blue-robed figure jumps up into the air, waving their hands, trying to get his attention.

 

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The bar erupts into noise as the people begin to either fight amongst themselves or proceed to make a direct beeline towards the staircase. This is it. This time he’s going to die for sure. Hineni feels it.

 

A hand grabs the scruff of his coat from behind, jostling him back a step. “This way,” says the tired elf. Hineni snaps out of it, quickly following her back up the stairs and into a different door. “I tried to tell you. People have been leaking in since they heard about a new prosi.”

 

“Tell them to head to the temple or to some other guild,” sighs Hineni. “There are at least three others around the inner city.”

 

The woman shrugs, opening a second door to a stairwell and peeking inside. “They’ve probably already tried all of them and got turned down, so you’re the next best thing.”

 

“Great,” says Hineni, sounding very unenthusiastic.

 

“What happened, by the way?” she asks, nodding her head towards his stomach. “That wound was pretty infected.”

 

“Work-place accident,” says Hineni, always staying a full flight of stairs away from her. She saw too much, she knows too much. He can never come back here again. He’ll have to find a different way to get new orders now.

 

She stares at him for a second and then shrugs, opening a door to the outside. “This’ll take you out to the back.”

 

“Thanks,” says Hineni, his hat lowered so that he doesn’t have to look into her eyes. He makes a rush for the door, walking right past her and out of it, into the daylight awaiting him on the other side.

 

“Come back soon!” she says, waving after him

 

He never intends to come back.

 

Hineni, ashamed of having to walk outside in broad daylight, hurries as fast as he can back to his house, checking his pocket for his keys. Did he lock his door? He doesn’t remember tugging on it to check. He hopes he locked it. What if somebody steals his…

 

Hineni stops.

 

- Dusty books? Ancient bedsheets? His barrel of ready-made sword-blades?

 

He doesn’t even have anything of value that could be stolen, he realizes. A long sigh escapes him as he makes his way through the busy town. Walking through the many bustling crowds that fill the streets and who jump in and out of stores and shops of all kinds makes him more than nervous.

 

“Did you get to that new floor in the dungeon yet?” asks a voice as he passes the group by.

 

“Yeah! We made it down to ten, but then someone ran out of soul-points because they wasted them,” insinuates the man in metal armor. The robed figure next to him laughs innocently, as if she had no idea who he was talking about.

 

It takes him a few minutes to push through the street, towards his home. Adventurers are running around him on all sides, making their way to and from the dungeon. For a brief, secret moment, he finds himself smiling as he walks behind a group of five people heading straight towards it. It’s almost like he’s one of them and for that minute, he allows himself to pretend that he is.

 

But then he reaches his house and has to stop and open the door to his left, while they keep on walking straight ahead, laughing and having fun together and talking about how the dungeon is going to reset tomorrow.

 

He sighs, jiggling his door-handle.

 

Unlocked.

 

It opens with a familiar creak and he steps inside, closing the door tightly behind himself. Exhaling deeply, he stands there for a second with his back against it and then takes off his hat and begins to lower his scarf. Maybe he’ll sit at his table for a few hours.

 

No. No… Hineni shakes his head. He has work to do. Swords to make. He’s a weaponsmith, after all.

 

He nods to himself, ready to get to work. Walking through the room, he notices that something is odd though, something is different. Looking around, Hineni notices that everything is…

 

Hineni narrows his eyes, doing something he has never done before. He touches one of the other tables, pressing his fingers into where the thick matting of dust and ash had lain, having been collecting there since that distant day in his childhood. It’s gone. Cleaned away.

 

He runs to the next table, then the next one. Clean.

 

Hineni runs over to his table. The mug is wiped off and turned upside down. The book, closed with a feather stuck inside to mark the once open page.

 

The confused man looks around at his home. Every surface has been scrubbed and cleaned. He heads into the washroom. All of the walls that must have been entirely blackened only a few days ago are spotless. There’s only a tiny cracked tile by the bath itself, scorched on the edges, to give proof of any happening. He moves through the back stairwell behind the washroom, heading up to the corridor and to his own room. Hineni tears open the door, fearfully expecting to see his room clean and his bed changed.

 

It is, the room at least. His bed however is still covered in his old sheets, and lying in it, is the odd owl demi-god, Obscura. Hineni stares, bewildered, at the creature that has wrapped itself in his old, somewhat bloody, blankets.

 

But then, he just quietly closes the door and heads back downstairs towards the forge. It’s good to be back home again.

 

Obscura has given. Now it is time for Hineni to give back.

 

 

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