Unwillingly Summoned: Chapter 9 – Now You’re Making It Weird

James glare balefully at the mostly repaired wall. It turned out that he did have to pay for that. He also had to give Enrica something to help offset the loss from the business they weren’t going to get while the wall was getting fixed. It hadn’t even really put a dent in his available money, but it still bothered him. He thought that someone else should have been responsible for paying for those things. Like that idiot who had started the whole thing. I didn’t even throw the first punch, grumbled James mentally. Of course, the opportunity to get money from that guy had been swiftly lost. A group of people had rushed outside, grabbed him, and hustled him off somewhere. Probably to get medical care, thought James. He wanted to be bothered by that but couldn’t quite get there. After getting punched through a wall, that guy probably had needed to see a doctor or healer.

He’d broached the subject of finding the guy and shaking him down for some repair money, but Enrica had waved him off of that idea while muttering something about mass casualties. James had grudgingly promised that he wouldn’t go looking for the guy. Besides, it wasn’t like the whole thing had been entirely without benefits. Enrica had been angry about the fight and the impromptu extra ventilation in the front wall of her business, but she’d also been happy that someone had stepped in to do something. As the stepper inner, he’d gotten the gold star on his forehead and could now seemingly do no wrong in Enrica’s eyes. James was smart enough to know that it was always good to be your boss’s favorite.

Lysnia was a different matter entirely. She had started treating him like some strange amalgamation of a long-lost older brother and Captain America. It was not a dynamic with which he was entirely comfortable. Given how fresh losing his own family was, having a brand-new younger sister forcibly adopt him kept tugging at that wound and making it bleed again. The quasi-hero worship was equally uncomfortable. He’d sometimes catch her just looking at him with starstruck eyes. It made his skin crawl. The problem was that he couldn’t think of way to make it stop that didn’t involve being a huge asshole to someone who truly did not have it coming. The girl was so earnest that he resolved to just ignore it. It wouldn’t last forever. She might be from another world, but she was still a teenager, right? He’d been that age not so long ago and remembered having the attention span of a fruit fly. Something shiny was bound to cross her path and distract her soon.

As for Thareni, well, she’d always been practically mute, responding to most questions with gestures, glances, or, if it was positively unavoidable, monosyllables. Her behavior toward him hadn’t changed much, but he was pretty sure he was in her good graces as well. She’d deigned to answer him using three syllables on two separate occasions. He didn’t know her that well, but he’d intuited that likely qualified as gushing warmth from the girl. There had to be an interesting backstory there by his reckoning. Social creatures didn’t use that few words unless something had happened that convinced them other people simply weren’t worth the effort. Yeah, it was probably a super interesting tale, not that he expected he’d ever hear it. Things like that were also usually very painful. So, he wasn’t about to ask and return to the frozen social hell of monosyllables. As far as he was concerned, once you got a win, you should do what you could to hang onto it.

“No matter how many times you glare at that wall, it isn’t going to get you your money back,” Enrica said with a teasing smile.

“It’s not that,” he said.

“Really?” asked Enrica sounding genuinely surprised.

 James sighed and said, “It’s mostly not that.”

“Then what is it?” she asked, leaning on the bar.

“Don’t you have work to do?”

“I don’t since someone put a hole in my inn. You were my only guest, and nobody’s coming in for food. So, I literally have nothing to do but entertain myself by asking you questions.”

“Ugh, you need a pet or something,” said James.

Enrica smirked at him and said, “What an interesting thought.”

“I am not your pet!”

“Of course, you aren’t.”

Then, she reached over and patted his head.

“Okay, now you’re making it weird,” said James as he gently batted her hand away.

Enrica laughed and said, “If you’re bored, go do something. It’s not like you’re required to be here all the time.”

“I know. It’s just—” he trailed off.

He knew she was right. There was no reason not to go out into the city and look around a little. He should have done it already. The whole thing just made him nervous. When he’d been coming to the inn, he’d been on task. There had been something to focus on. It had let him ignore everything except getting to where he wanted to go. If he went out into the city without some specific goal, he didn’t know what would happen. And that was the issue. He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about this place or where to go or where not to go. Punching a guy through a wall had reduced his anxiety a little. He wasn’t completely helpless to defend himself, but he didn’t want to get into a situation where he needed to defend himself. The fact that avoiding such situations might be physically impossible in this world did nothing to encourage him to venture out. Still, he’d have to do it eventually. He couldn’t hide in this inn forever.

“Alright,” he finally said. “I guess I’ll go exploring.”

“Good,” said Enrica. “It’s best to be back by sundown. It’s pretty safe around here during the day, but people can get stupid at night.”

“Just people?” asked James, wondering about monsters.

“Usually,” said Enrica with more unconcern that James would have thought possible.

Then again, he hadn’t grown up with these problems. If there was a monster attack every six months in the city, it’d just become one of those things. Sort of like tornadoes appearing in the Midwest or earthquakes in California. Everyone knew about them. It was common knowledge that they were dangerous. But most people didn’t lose much sleep over them because there was nothing you do to stop them from happening. You just learned what safety precautions you could take, took them, and moved on with life. Just because a monster appearing in the city might freak him out, he couldn’t expect it to freak everyone else out.  

“Any other helpful advice?”

“Don’t punch anyone you don’t have to punch,” she said with a shrug.

“Oh, ha, you’re so funny,” said James.

“I wasn’t kidding. I’m serious. Don’t punch anyone unless you really have to. You could kill someone with that arm of yours.”

James straightened up at those words, suddenly feeling very serious about it. He hadn’t really considered that he might accidentally kill someone if he punched them. There’d been that moment right after he’d hit that guy, but when he didn’t die, James had pushed that concern to the back of his mind. A line about power and responsibility tried to push its way forward from his repository of pop culture knowledge but those kinds of things were still a bridge too far for him. He shoved that away as well.

“Duly noted,” he told her.

Taking a moment to steel his resolve, he walked over to the door, opened it, and stepped out into terra incognita.