Casual Heroing

“Do you have a family or are you alone?” the woman said while drinking her third beer.

“Alone,” Stan took his beer and gently sipped it.

“Oh, then you take the little pupper. They are all the rage among [Beggars], aren’t they? Get more coin in your pockets with one of them or something. I’m traveling too much to bring it with me. But you know what? Let’s call him Grigio – it means gray in my original language. Don’t let the accent fool you. Oh, but you know what? I’m happy that you don’t have a family. First, you take care of the pupper. That’s good. Second,” she added while raising a hand to get yet another beer, “if you don’t have kids, you can’t be a bloody terrible father, can you? That’s brilliant. Wish my dad had thought of it.”

“Your father?”

“Yeah, an arsehole. Spent more time working than with his family. And my mum even got back with him. I don’t know if it’s because I got back here younger or what, this body has lots of hormones when I speak. Am I going to cry? Nah. No crying.”

“Not all parents can carry the burden of a family.”

“Oh no, that’s not fair. I—well, I didn’t have kids. Didn’t want to make my family as miserable as mine,” the woman says looking at her glass. “Goddamn Ebola. That’s a fitting death, isn’t it? Doctors without borders, am I right? No? whatever. I’m talking to a homeless man after getting to a magic world. Isn’t that funny?”

Stan simply listened. There was something in what the woman was saying. She was above level 20 in a weird class, and that’s always a sign to look out for. Common people get common classes.

“Do you beg for money? Do you need money? Do you want me to give you some money? How does it work, do you have begging hours and that’s it? Like, do you always leave out a little cap or something to get the money?”

“I’m good. I have… patrons. What about you? What’s your income?”

“Oh, I help people. Goddamn potions would put me out of business if people knew how to stitch their wounds, wouldn’t they? Been doing surgeries here and there. Helping where I can. Turns out, if you save someone’s kid, they will give you all the money they can. Wish I knew some magic, though.”

“You go around helping?”

“Well, not helping. I look for people with trouble. I help wherever I can. You know, I even made some money with dental procedures. Dentists think they are so holy, don’t they? If I can have open-heart surgery in the third world, can’t I patch a molar you think? Preposterous. Dentists should probably be jailed. That’s one of the few things my father was right about.”

“[Dentists]?”

“Oh, right. You don’t have those. You have [Healers]. Well, dentists are crook who take care of crooked teeth,” she said taking a swig from her mug, “not funny? Oh, don’t laugh your tits off, careful there. But whatever. You get some cavities and people here go nuts because potions can’t fix that now, can they? So, I go there, chip it off, put this paste I have [Alchemist] make.”

“That is a problem…” Stan frowned. “And you can fix that?”

“Oh, sure can.”

“Is you’re a dad a person who helps people as well?”

“Was. Help? Maybe. He took care of bones. Orthopedic surgeon.”

“I never met any [Orthopedic Surgeon].”

“Guess this world wouldn’t have any,” the girl shrugged. “Fuck him, anyway. He was a terrific surgeon but a terrible father. Obsessed with efficiency, with winning. He was the most competitive person I have ever met. He would wake up at night and draw up diagrams on the wall from memory. Supposedly, my father always told me I would be ever grander than him. He said that his IQ and my mother’s wiles would make me unstoppable. I liked the idea of being a doctor, always have.”

“How did you father pass?” Stan asked.

“It’s—I’d rather not talk about it,” the woman’s face suddenly darkened and she moved a dark lock from her forehead. “He was haunted. That’s how he described. Like a curse. He needed to compete for first place. He loved my mum so much… but even that didn’t stop him from… whatever. Anyway, Stan, what are you up to these days?”

She jarringly closed the argument about her father and switched to a silly question.

“Nothing. I’m still looking for something…”

“Begging is not nothing. Better than just rotting away, no? And I bet you have to time to decide what you want to be when you grow up.”

As Stan heard that, he couldn’t help but smile.

“You still have to tell me your name, young woman.”

“Penelope,” she said in a completely different voice, as if speaking another language, “but you can call me Penelope. Always hated how it sounds in English. Less dignified.”

“How did you become a beggar, anyway? How does that happen?”

“You lose purpose,” Stan replied.

“You lose purpose,” Penelope smiled. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. But my life was so much different. Now, here I am in this weird world talking to you, a homeless beggar.”

“You are not rude,” Stan smiled, wondering where this woman came from.

Penelope seemed to think about that for a moment. Then she raised her mug in a salute.

“I won’t pretend that I didn’t want to be rude, never managed to hold up that image.”

Stan raised his mug for yet another toast.

“Penelope,” the homeless man said gently.

“Hm?”

“Your name is Penelope, but what about—”

“I hate my name. My mom decided to be…” she swallowed a few times, “patient. And smart. Said I would be a patient and smart woman. She was so proud… I’ll never forget it. She loved my father more than life itself. When she died, he…”

A maid came where they were talking and tripped, launching the drinks on their table.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” she apologized profusely for the interruption, but Penelope waved his comment away.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry.”

As the maid went back to fetch new drinks, Stan looked at Penelope and asked: “Not angry?”

“Because she spilled a drink? I’m not a lunatic.”

Many thoughts went through Stan’s head as they talked. The woman seemed obsessed with her father and whatever he had been doing where she came from. At the same time, it seemed that something deeper was at work, some kind of powerful magic that had brought her there from some place he did not know – and that was something. There were not many places the [King] of Elves had not visited. Even Teiko was no strange land to him. Apart from Kome, where he never dared set foot, he had been on every single continent. However, as she continued to speak, it became increasingly obvious that she was not from anywhere he was aware of.

And not just that, the woman had gone on a tangent about knowledge of the body—she had revealed things to him that he had never heard before. Some made sense, but the more she spoke, the greater the aura of mystery around her. Stan thought that his secret background was something hard to match, but if a simple woman like this could hide so many secrets, how many other people had something to say… maybe, after all these centuries, it was time to listen, to stop acting.

It was time for quiet, for reflection. He wasn’t sure he would be forever a beggar, but he would spend time in reflection, feeding his newfound companion and maybe helping out [Beggars] in Amorium. Among all the cities in Lucerna, it seemed the best bet to reside in the one famous for its greenery.

The woman was clearly drunk, but she went on and on for hours on end, talking about all and absolutely nothing without stopping. The newly found Stan, now [Beggar], apparently, started smiling halfway through. He had stumbled upon a new life, hadn’t he? And why not? What did he have to lose? A fit retirement for a disgraced [King].