The guards were given a day to recover from their thrashing before Riza’s trial run. Those who weren’t in the infirmary being guinea pigs for something called ‘aspirin’ were staring down at a tiny lizard girl like she was a child who had accidentally walked onto the field.

  “I get that you’re making a point, Captain Hamrick, but I don’t want to accidentally kill this girl,” one of the soldiers said, pointing at her with a blunted training sword.

  Hamrick glanced side-long at Jessica, clearly sharing the man’s concern. Truthfully, Jessica did too. While Riza claimed to be a huntress and a warrior, nothing actually proved those claims. For all Jessica knew it was bluster.

  “Have a go of it. If you knock her upside the head she can get some of that miracle medicine up in the infirmary,” Hamrick said.

  Jessica froze. “Uh… it’s an analgesic, not a—”

  The guard stepped forward and swung down with his blunted sword, treating it like a warclub rather than a training weapon. Riza stepped in and to the side of the swing and slammed her own sword into his solar plexus. Curses and air vomited from his mouth.

  “Now two of you,” Riza said, cocking the sword back at her side like she was going to do a samurai sword swing thing.

  Two guards stepped forward and tried to circle her and in the blink of an eye Riza’s sword flung toward the one to her right. He held up his own sword to protect himself and in the next moment had a lizard biting down on his hand. Yelping, he dropped the sword into her grip and she cracked it against his ribs, bringing him to the ground.

  “How’s that fair!? You can’t bite!” the remaining guard said.

  “You can’t,” she said with a grin full of blood. “I can.”

  The remaining guard used his size advantage to swing in wide arcs, refusing to give Riza an opening. Like this he backed her toward the fence of the mustering ground. Her slit eyes flicked wildly around. Jessica was curious what she was looking for.

  This question was answered when Riza found a patch of dirt and bolted for it. Scooping some in her hand, she cocked back to pelt her opponent with it, only to have him shield his eyes. Instead of throwing it, she dropped the dirt and used the pause in his swings to sprint behind him and yank him to the ground by his cape. Once on the ground, she drew her knee to his neck and hovered two clawed fingers over his eyeballs.

  “Three next,” she said. “And I want to start the fight on the ground with my eyes closed.”

  “I think we’ve seen enough, lass,” Hamrick said. “If you can teach my men to do all that you’ll be the best instructor this castle has ever seen.”

  “Better, I will teach you to defeat that lamia, so that if you ever find a nest of her kind you can eradicate it,” Riza said.

  This boast restored the guards’ morale after being beaten by someone the size of the crown princess. Jessica wasn’t too happy about the rationale, but she wasn’t about to mess with things that seemed to be working out.

  Meanwhile, on the other end of the courtyard, Naga was playing a game with the kids where she swept her tail back and forth while they jumped over it. How Riza could watch this and still have it in for the lamia, Jessica had no clue.

  Besides speaking to the king, her other immediate goal was getting the two of them to tolerate each other. With nothing coming to her on that front, she focused on the king angle.

  “How do you think I can get into the king’s good graces?” Jessica asked Galloway as the two of them were synthesizing morphine.

  “You already are, aren’t you?” the old physician replied.

  “Not in a way that matters. I guess what I really mean is I need his ear. I’m trying to— please don’t take this the wrong way, you have a very lovely fantasy world here, but I want to return to Earth and to do that I need to know if it’s even possible. For that I need to meet Magnus. Although, if you’re about to tell me it’s actually super easy and none of that is necessary I could just about kiss you.”

  Galloway chuckled. “Sadly, no. Your guess is correct. If there are means to return to your world the Emperor would know of them. If he doesn’t, they likely don't exist.”

  Jessica’s stomach tightened. She had known that might be a possibility since reincarnating but for the sake of not giving into despair she actively ignored it. It felt unfair she might be stuck in Tushita permanently. Not that there was such a thing as fair. On Earth or Tushita. The real world wasn’t a story with a beginning, middle, and end and character development where everyone learned a lesson and then went home.

  Galloway must have seen something on her face, because he put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “If adventurers can wind up here, I’m sure you oughta be able to go the opposite way somehow. It’s like a glass tube, isn’t it? It might be harder to go back up, but it’s not impossible. Otherwise we’d never have to worry about beakers boiling over!”

  Jessica gave a small smile. Maybe it was just coping, but his words made sense to her. If there wasn’t a portal between Tushita and Earth, she wouldn’t have ended up here. And that was leaving out the fact that everyone spoke contemporary English.

  “I take it no one has ever tried?” she asked.

  Galloway rubbed his neck. “Not that I’ve ever heard of… But don’t take that as a reason to lose hope! Someone’s gotta be the first and I’ve never heard of adventurers trying to leave before. I usually hear them saying they never want to. You’re the first one I know of.”

  Jessica sighed. “Grad school turned me into a masochist I guess. Oh, but did you have any ideas for how I could speak to the king? He’s my ticket to Magnus. If I can impress him with some kind of technological invention to revolutionize his kingdom’s economy, I figure he ought to… I don’t know, hook us up? Do a little networking?”

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  “I’m not sure His Majesty knows the Emperor that well either, truth-be-told. The Emperor rules from Mandara which isn’t even on this continent. It’s on Aparagodaniya across the ocean to the West,” Galloway said, gesturing in the vague direction of the castle harbor.

  “I thought the king knew the guy for some reason.”

  “The various kings meet with him every ten years to discuss the state of the realms and adventurers and the remnants of the Demon King but I wouldn’t say His Majesty knows him well enough to ask for an audience. The Original Eight are the only ones who have that privilege. That and his concubines. Asking him about a portal to Earth will be tough, even for an adventurer.”

  Jessica flicked the beaker of aspirin crystals.

  “So I invented aspirin for nothing, huh?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. They helped my headache!” Galloway said.

  She mentally crossed off the King Capra path to Magnus. It was her fault for not trying to falsify her own premises before proceeding with her hypothesis. Asking Galloway from the start could have saved her precious time.

  “I don’t suppose teleporting is a thing?” she asked.

  “Some adventurers can but only within the continent. Spells can’t take you across the ocean. Only ships can. And airships. Or flying creatures, if you have one.”

  Sadly, Jessica had made friends with reptiles instead of avians. If she had engineering knowledge she could’ve invented steam ships. Alas, for as well as she could explain the thermodynamics of a steam engine, that was not the same as knowing how to build one.

  Jessica set the finished bricks of morphine out to dry and washed her hands. Talking with Galloway had cleared away her delusions about an easy solution, but that was still an important step. A scientist had to be objective after all. No sense brooding over incorrect hypotheses.

  “Thanks, uncle,” she said.

  Galloway blushed at that. She’d called him that accidentally a few days prior and, seeing how flustered it made him, landed on it as a nickname.

  “You’re smarter than most adventurers, Jessica. I think you’ll do alright,” he said, patting her on the back.

  More than anything else, Jessica needed information. About Magnus for sure, but also about Tushita. It was becoming more and more clear that the extreme big picture Morkal had given her about the Tapestry was not going to cut it. At a minimum she needed to know how much danger she was in from other adventurers.

  She decided to ask Riza and Naga, but that would have to wait until tomorrow. All her various duties plus acting as minder for Riza and Naga had exhausted her. As soon as she got back to her apartment she collapsed onto the bed beside an equally tired Riza and Naga and the three of them went to sleep with only a few minutes of inter-species bickering.

  She feels plastic in her hands, slick and warm by her sweaty palms. She has been fighting the same boss over and over for hours. One more fight will do it. Just one more.

  “Why do you want to kill it so bad?” her dad asks.

  She looks up at him like he’s stupid. “So I can get to the next part.”

  He chuckles. “Why do you want to get to the next part?”

  “That’s the point of a video game!”

  Even at the age of 10, she has a clear sense of what things are for. Video games are for beating. They’re not like shows or books where you are on a fixed ride. If you’re bad, you can fail to finish.

  “Have you explored around Railpond yet?” her dad asks.

  “Yeah, and the stores just sell stuff from other areas. There’s nothing there.”

  “I like the music there. I like the anvil sound they use to give it the sound of being in a factory or some place. It’s such a cool mood. Did you talk with The Conductor yet?”

  “The old guy with the weird gun? Dad, who cares?”

  “You know you can recruit him to the party.”

  “What!? How!?”

  She can see her father’s grin, his misaligned white teeth biting down on his lower lip. Her mother keeps insisting he go to an orthodontist about them. He never does. She remembers his teeth better than his face now.

  “You’ve gotta figure it out yourself. I can’t spoil it for you!” he says.

  “No! C’mon dad, tell me! I wanna get to the next part!”

  He refuses. She has to go back and talk to The Conductor and actually read through his sob story about the trains all getting taken away by The Empire and how he wants to live a life on the rails, just in case there’s a clue for how to recruit him. The train-obsessed geezer gives her a mini-quest at the end to go tell his wife where to dig up their savings.

  She’s convinced when she gets back The Conductor will be a recruitable party member.

  When she gets back, he’s gone. The spot where his sprite stood is empty. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of reward for completing the mini-quest. Not even the special-looking gun The Conductor had. He is simply gone.

  Between that and the sad, brassy music theme that plays in Railpond, with its echoing anvil strike like the last gasp of a closing factory, she feels a painful emptiness in her chest.

  “Did I mess up?” she asks her dad who watched her play through this part by her side.

  He shook his head. “Huh. Guess he’s not recruitable.”

  “So what was the point!? That quest was stupid!”

  “I liked it. It’s probably my favorite spot in the game. It’s so short and simple, but it drives home what the Empire did to Railpond, doesn’t it? Don’t you understand the villagers’ anger a little more now?”

  “No, it just made me feel bad!”

  “It’s supposed to,” he says in a tone she takes as patronizing.

  She gives up and goes to play with wooden blocks. She’s probably too old for them, but whenever she’s upset they calm her down. When she returns to the game after school the next day she beats the boss on the first try and is off to the next section and never thinks about The Conductor or Railpond ever again.

  From top to bottom, Jessica’s body felt like one big check engine light. She was thirsty, tired, sore, and desperately needed to go to the bathroom. Surgically removing herself from Riza and Naga’s embrace, she tip-toed out and down the hall to the privy. Once her business was finished she walked along the battlements to flush out the funky mood her dream left her in.

  She walked carefully along these battlements. Only the occasional torch broke the swallowing darkness. Far off in the distance she could see the ocean illuminated by the moon where it poked through clouds like steel wool. Despite being the end of summer, the night and the sea wind were cold enough to make her regret not bringing shoes or a cloak.

  After walking for several minutes she felt better and was about to head back inside when she heard a rock fall to the water below. Her heart leapt but she heard and saw nothing else. There was nothing on the bridge but her and the smell of seawater.

  "You've always been a nervous wreck, Jess. It’s nothing new,” she mumbled to herself, doubling her pace back to the north tower.

  Jessica was nearly to the door when a masked ninja jumped onto the path. This was such an unexpected sight that for a moment she wasn’t even sure if she should be scared.

  “H-Huh? Are you— are you attacking me?” she asked.

  “No, I’m distracting you,” the ninja replied in a teenage boy’s voice.

  From behind, a sack hood went over her head.