Chapter Eight- Town Nile (2)
1103 Words
“Oh!” Driya stood on her toe tips and tried to see the carriage better. “So was that… Emperor Velinzhag?”
“I don’t think so,” Kitty whispered back. “It doesn’t exactly feel like him. But why don’t we see if we can find an inn first and settle down?”
“Great, can we do that?” Fluffy asked, peeping up.
“How many Roras do we still have left?” Jackson asked.
“A thousand and five hundred, last time I checked,” Kitty said, calculating the numbers in her head. “Enough for one night and dinner, I guess.”
“We haven’t even had breakfast yet,” Driya pointed out as they walked into a hotel across the street. “So we’d need more money for just dinner and one night.”
They arrived beside a counter, where an old man sat. Jackson walked up to him and knocked on the counter. He peered up.
“Uh… We’d like to have lunch here. And dinner. And… Can we stay here overnight? And maybe breakfast in the morning?” He asked.
“Staying for one night is one thousand Roras,” he began. “Lunch, whatever you order, the cheapest combination is fifty. You have…” He looked at Driya, Fluffy, and Jackson. “Three people? Then it’s one hundred and fifty. The cheapest dinner and breakfast combination is a hundred and twenty-five Roras. So it’s one thousand eight hundred and twenty-five Roras.”
“Oh. Uh…” He looked back, he hadn't counted Kitty’s yet, and their fund was already not enough. “Maybe we should change a—”
But Driya cut across him, pushed him aside, and slammed a paper down onto the counter.
She fixed her gaze on the man behind the counter, and he backed away a few steps.
“First,” She began fiercely. “We need two rooms. It says right here— one room for a night is five hundred Roras. Two rooms per night is eight hundred.”
“I- that’s—” The man staggered., but Driya drove on right across.
“Second,” she snatched out the menu from the shelf and slammed it on top of the paper on the counter. “The cheapest lunch combination is ten Roras. We need four. Dinner is forty and breakfast before six is free.”
The barman gawked at Driya with his mouth half-open.
“Third,” She pointed to the advertisement board at the hotel’s front. “It says that in celebration of the arrival of the four rulers, all purchases are eighty percent off. So that makes it…”
Kitty quickly made a fast calculation in her head and whispered to Driya; “eight hundred and thirty-two.”
“…Eight hundred Roras.” She finished with a flick of her eyebrow. Kitty couldn’t help giggling.
The barman stood frozen and blinked for a few seconds, but he quickly gasped and came back to his senses. “Y-Yes, of course. My apologies, madam.” He said trembling, and Driya dumped a pouch of eight hundred on the counter, picked up the silver keys, and marched off for the stairs in brisk steps without looking back.
“Hmm,” Jackson rubbed his nose. “So he’s been lying. Wait— is it really eight hundred?”
“No,” Driya confessed. “I saved us thirty-two Roras.”
Later on, they found two rooms and Kitty slipped off her disguise, solidifying herself once more, and followed Driya into their room.
She had lunch later (sandwiches and juice), read a book for the whole afternoon, and finally had dinner (sandwiches and soup). Their room condition was not bad. There was a bunk bed with a small bedside table and a cloth hanger. Later on, they discovered a small door that led to a bathroom that smelled like pine. In fact, it was the first toilet Kitty saw that was built out of wood.
She was taking her nighttime stroll outside somewhere around eight, when heard strange noises behind a building, in the overgrown savannah.
She edged closer and hid behind a large water tank. Keeping her breaths quiet, she listened to their conversation.
“…But that’s not right, their age difference is too large! What kind of twins has the age difference of two hundred years?”
“That might be the case— or not.”
“What do you mean? Start getting your sentences straight first already!”
“If one’s been growing for two hundred years… While the other one leapt straight to the end, their age difference remains…”
“Wait… Do you mean…?”
“There were six main people that participated in the Great Raid. As far as we know, two of them ‘died’ and one disappeared. Six years after she disappeared, the other three that remained vanished one after another. Slowly the world forgot about them and moved on.”
“But do they know about this?”
Kitty bit her lips and heard the shuffling of clothes, she guessed the person shook his head.
“Is there anyone else that came with them?”
“A couple more. But we know none. And we know that none of them knows about this.”
“So… Am I to kill them before they do?”
There was a pause.
“No,” said the other voice. “You had one simple order— kill Jackson. And you still haven’t done it even though there were thousands of great chances.”
“But— that’s—”
“So from now on, keep your mouth shut and start doing something that can really help.”
Kitty pressed herself deeper into the shadows as the two figures jumped and disappeared on the roofs.
Breathing quickly, her mind crazed through what she’d just heard and analyzed them quickly.
So… The questions are…
Who are they? Who are the ‘Twins’? Why do they want to kill Jackson? What does this have to do with the ‘Great Raid’? Who’s the ‘Couple more’? Will Jackson’s plan tomorrow risk exposing himself to them? Who participated in the Great Raid, and who ‘disappeared’? Is it Shelly the dragon?
She walked out of the shadows after making sure they were all gone. She looked up, wondering if she should tell this to Jackson…
Suddenly, she kicked something. It was a piece of paper, rolled into a ball.
She picked it up and unfolded it, scanning the message—
Do not tell anyone about the Scars.
- Writer
