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Chapter Forty-Three — The Girl-With-No-Name (AKA Dreamer)
Chapter Forty-Three — The Girl-With-No-Name (AKA Dreamer) The Girl-With-No-Name (AKA Dreamer) sat on a rock and chewed at a particularly tough piece of jerky. The meat was singed on the edges, cooked in a fire that Feli had lit next to one of the wyvern corpses.She watched the inspector with narrowed, suspicious eyes.The Girl-With-No-Name was a tough, battle-hardened warrior.She had fought bandit lords and eaten them, she had trampled goblin hoards and eaten them, and she had been patted by even the most scarred members of the Adventurer’s Guild. Those that saw her knew that she meant business.Her pretty dress was stitched up and was covered by a bandoneer with snack bottles. She had a knife in a sheath by her hip, and another tucked under her ruffles. Her body was as scarred and grizzled as her gear.There was a plaster on a boo-boo she’d gotten on her shin one time when she tripped while running to eat a troll. A scar that she looked on fondly now that it had stopped hurting.“Wha’ch’a want?” she asked the inspector.The man had tagged along with her party as they went on a mission to eat a whole flock of wyverns. So far, they tasted like chicken, but chewier. It was pretty good meat.Someone at the guild told her that eating meat would make her big and strong, so she ate all the meat she could.She ate all the meat she could before learning that too, but maybe with less enthusiasm.“I just had a few questions,” the inspector said. “About you, mostly.”The Girl-With-No-Name monched down on a bone and cracked it so that she could slurp out the marrow inside. Nice and gooey. “Mmm, go on then,” she said before tossing the bone down her throat. She loved wings, they were so fun to eat.“Who are you, exactly?” he asked.This guy had shown up to inspect her party. Not much to say there. They were all tough-as-leather adventurers. Some of the best in the world, even. “Just a girl with no name,” The Girl-With-No-Name said. “But I actually do have a name, but I don’t want to use it or else the other me might find out I’m here.”“Pardon?”“Yeah, alright,” The Girl-With-No-Name said. “But I won’t be forgetting.”She didn’t know what that meant, but she’d heard it in an inn once from one of the cooler adventurers, and she always wanted to use the line.“Okay,” the inspector said. “Where do you come from, then?”The Girl-With-No-Name sighed. She pulled another wing from the edge of the fire. Lorean had brought some sauce, and it was sizzling nicely on the fatty skin. “Look, lemme tell you my deep dark origin story, okay?”Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.“Uh, alright.”“So, one day, I was with this girl. The best girl in the whole world. My job at the time was to find these bandits. Low-level runts. Wastes of space and time, but someone had to take care of them.”The inspector nodded. He’d probably heard of the sort.The Girl-With-No-Name shifted on her rock. Her bum was getting sore, but she couldn’t sit on the grass. That was too soft and nice, and a proper hard boiled adventurer wouldn’t do that.Besides, it was hard to get the grass stains out of her dress. The blood stains at least looked cool. “So, I needed to find these bandits in a hurry. I made several hundred of myself to scour the woods. The me who found the bandits first would win a prize beyond compare.”“What?”The Girl-With-No-Name sighed again. “A head pat,” she muttered as she looked into the sky longingly. “I was one of those me’s. Lost in the woods, too slow to return, and guaranteed to lose besides. So I just... wandered off. Maybe I’d find more bandits and get pats for those, you know?”“I... think I understand.”“So, I found bandits, then more of them, then I ran into these three buffoons. Junior adventurers, trying their best. I decided to lend them a hand.”“You stole all our food,” Feli said.“And since then, they’ve grown into an excellent team,” The Girl-With-No-Name continued.“All I do is pamper you all day. I haven’t fought anything in months,” Jean said.The Girl-With-No-Name chuckled. “That’s not true. Sometimes you give me piggyback rides. You’re a valuable member of the team.”“I am increasingly confused,” the inspector said.“Look, I was lost, so I found a new thing to do, a new... purpose,” The Girl-With-No-Name said. She closed her fist and narrowed her eyes. “A new reason to live. I’m going to be the very best adventurer, until everyone knows my name.”“Which you don’t have.”“And then she’s going to welcome me back with open arms and so many pats.”The inspector looked at her party members, but they mostly just shrugged.“These stories, they’re always about a girl, aren’t they?” The Girl-With-No-Name asked.“Trust me when I say I’ve never heard a story even remotely like this, and if I hadn’t seen you summon tentacles from the void to kill a group of wyverns I would be far less likely to entertain you.”The Girl-With-No-Name sniffed and shook her head. He didn’t believe her. Not entirely.It didn’t matter. With time and effort, she would prove herself, and once she did, she’d return, triumphant and powerful, back home.She looked forward to it.“Hey, can we cook the eyeballs too? Those are juicy!”
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Chapter Forty-Four — GWNN
Chapter Forty-Four — GWNN “What do you mean?” the Girl-With-No-Name asked.Meetings at the adventurer’s guild were very very serious business. That’s what her friends told her, at least. Jean had gone through several lectures about how their team had to look presentable and professional when meeting at the guild so that others would take them seriously.The Girl-With-No-Name even took a bath before the meeting, and put on her freshly patched pretty dress and all of her armour bits on too.She looked presentable and professional as she stood in front of the guild’s main counter on her tippy-toes and pouted professionally at the lady behind the counter.“I’m sorry, but your team has been marked as, ah, under certain regulations that prevent us from allowing you to take on any more missions for the moment,” the lady said.“That’s outrageous!” The Girl-With-No-Name said. That was a word she learned recently, and one that sounded very professional too. “I demand to see your manager.” The Girl-With-No-Name did her best impersonation of Feli that one time she found a fly in her soup.“I... yes, I can accommodate that much,” the lady said.Things moved quickly after that. The Girl-With-No-Name called over her team, who were all a little miffed about the sanctions, and then they moved over to an office where the current leader of the guild was waiting for them.“Well, you see,” he said. “It’s not so much that the team isn’t allowed to take on missions, it’s that, ah, it’s the guild’s opinion that certain members of your team aren’t old enough to apply for membership within the guild.”“What?” the Girl-With-No-Name asked. “Who’s not old enough?” she squinted at Jean, but Jean had a couple of wrinkles and a bit of white hair at the temples that he trimmed to hide sometimes.“That would be you,” the guild officer said with a gesture towards the Girl-With-No-Name.She crossed her arms. “That’s wrong.”“Pardon?”“I’m older than time. I can’t be too young because there was no young when I was made,” she said.That earned her a lot of confused looks and not much else. She insisted that she be allowed to take on more missions. She was only just starting to get really famous, and she’d need every bit of that to be able to return to Abigail all proud and happy.The guild officer guy refused.“But I’m old enough!” the Girl-With-No-Name insisted.“You look like you’re barely thirteen,” he replied, and that was that.The Girl-With-No-Name considered forcing the issue, she considered forcing the officer’s head through a wall, and she considered forcing her tentacles all over until everything was broken, but in the end she decided to be the bigger person. “Fine then. How old do I need to be to join?”The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.“At least an adult,” the officer said.The Girl-With-No-Name had no idea how long that was! Everything was unfair, and mortals sucked. She crossed her arms and stormed out of the room, her teammates following after her.“Hey, it’s not all bad,” Lorean said.“It’s fine,” the Girl-With-No-Name muttered. She rubbed at her eyes which had gotten a bit wet because of how frustrated she was. “I guess I should just go back to Abigail then. I just... I wanted to go see her like a big hero.”“Come on,” Jean said. “You’ve saved dozens of small towns, taken out bandits, wrecked wyverns. You are a hero, even if the guild refuses to see that.”“Yeah, but you’re not a hero unless people know about it,” the Girl-With-No-Name said. “And Abigail won’t hear about my exploits if I can’t continue exploiting things.”Feli patted the Girl-With-No-Name on the head. “Hey, hey, don’t worry. Look, where does this Abigail live? You’ve been talking about her for ages, but you never said before.”“She lives in that city with the five hills.”“Alright, that’s a little ways to the south, but we’ve travelled further before,” Feli said. “How about we all go with you? The four of us. Maybe we can have a few adventures on the way? There’s plenty of small towns on the way south, and nothing says we can’t help the locals without being part of the guild.”Lorean raised a finger. She did that whenever she was about to tell someone that they were wrong. Telling people they were wrong was Lorean’s hobby. “Point of fact,, the guild charter says exactly that.”“Then screw the guild charter,” Feli said. “They’re not letting us do any more quests? Too bad, we’ll do the quests anyway, and they won’t see a penny of it.”“Ah, I’ll have to look, but we might be able to take on non-paying missions and quests, actually,” Lorean said. “We’ll need to cover things on our own though.”“We can afford it,” Jean said.“Yeah! And helping people without accepting payment is like... half again as heroic as doing it for coin,” Feli said. She patted the Girl-With-No-Name some more. “See? It’ll all work out.”The Girl-With-No-Name looked up to her fellows, then wiped her eyes again. “Thank you,” she said. She had a great feeling about this plan. Her tentacles practically twitching with eagerness to get going.So they got going. Jean found a cart and bought some donkeys, the girls dragged the Girl-With-No-Name around as they gathered supplies, and by nightfall the Girl-With-No-Name and her friends were on the way south, to be big damn heroes and to go meet Abigail at long last!
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