"That's a great idea and all, but I need to bring my wife on board with it. No woman would be happy to be left inside while her husband goes to the woods with an unknown younger woman, after all. What do you say about coming home to meet her?"
Mutt was that kind of guy. A man who valued his wife and cared about her feelings above anything else. A true gentleman in every sense of the word.
"That sounds good. I would like to meet her, yes. I don't want to make her think that I am her rival or anything."
Cecilia understood he was being considerate of his wife's feelings and wanted to do the same. If she were on the other side of the equation, she would want to be treated the same way, after all.
After some more banter and a last mug of coffee, they walked to Mutt's home, and Gertrude went to do the butchering, with Marya in tow.
:::
"Margarete, I'm home! I brought a guest!"
"Welcome home, my dear!"
Mutt announced his arrival at the door, giving time for his wife to ready herself. The voice that came from inside was gentle and warm.
They walk into the house to find the woman sitting on a rocking chair in the dining room. The house is simple and rustic, exactly how Cecilia imagined countryside houses to be.
There are no sofas, but wooden chairs and a table. Some chests on the corner completed the furniture.
Margarete was a pale woman who seemed to be reaching her late twenties. She had beautiful golden hair cascading in swirling locks on her back and striking blue eyes. Despite those two traits, her facial features screamed 'NPC.'
The one biggest feature right now, though, was her belly. The fully grown belly of a woman nine months pregnant. Cecilia had seen pregnant women before, in the hospital, when the nurses would take her to the garden in a wheelchair.
"My love, this is Cecilia, the girl I rescued yesterday. I brought her to meet you."
"Oh, hi, Cecilia. I'm sorry I can't stand to greet you properly. I've been feeling a bit weak lately. It's probably because the baby's about to come."
"Hi, Margarete. No, it's okay. I understand. Have you been eating well lately?"
Cecilia lived long enough in the hospital to learn some things from hearing the chatter of the nurses. Including some telling symptoms of pregnant women with anemia.
And the woman in front of her was indeed pale. Not only that, but her skin was also visibly dry and with some bruises. She was breathing heavily, and the feeling of weakness also added up to that.
"Well, I can't say it's been too bad. I only miss the meat."
"Darling, did Orion go to the farm?"
Mutt interrupted, asking about their son, and she promptly answered.
"Yes, he went to help with the harvest. He will bring some fruits and wheat on his way back."
"Is that so? I wanted to introduce him to Miss Cecilia as well. He's our eldest son. He will be twelve next month."
Cecilia barely registered that information, because her mind was already fully focused on Margarete's health.
"Mutt, why isn't Margarete eating enough meat?"
"Well, you see… I'm the only hunter in the village, and the monsters have really been more numerous and aggressive lately. So I often return without catching anything."
"It's not his fault. The other day he came back with a nasty wound in the arm. Gladly the mayor had a potion in his home and gave it to us free of charge."
"Yeah, if it wasn't that, I wouldn't be able to hunt ever again. But today was a lucky day, as I killed not one but two dire hares. Gertrude is butchering them as we speak."
Cecilia remembered the nurses saying that anemia in pregnancy wouldn't be enough to cause miscarriage, but that it could weaken the baby, leading to higher risk in their first weeks of life.
She activated her Appraisal technique.
[Name: Margarete
Race: Human
Character Level: 4
Jobs: Seamstress (4)
Nation: Drakestadt
HP: 12/12
SP: 1/3(11)
MP: 5/5
Attributes
Skills
Techniques
Status]
The stats screen opened by Appraisal only showed the most important data first. To get more information, the player had to open the submenus. That was to avoid a big screen taking over your field of view every time you used it.
((No wonder she feels so tired… Her Max SP is drained down to 3. And, probably, her regeneration must be very slow right now. That's why it's still on 1, even though she's sitting. Okay, let's open the status screen.))
[Status:
Anemia
Pregnant]
((Yup, as I thought. Well, the solution for it is quite simple.))
"Margarete, I'll perform some healing magic on you. Just hold on a bit, okay?"
"Ok."
Cecilia closed her eyes, trying to remember the incantation for the spell that would heal minor illnesses. She could just say 'heal,' but that would be too flat and uncool. Unbecoming of a proper priestess.
"Anphorion Lysara. Nythea lytha, anthyra phorion."
(Journey of Return. Death fades, rebirth continues.)
After finishing the chant, she takes a deep breath. When she exhales, a soft, silver mist escapes her mouth. The mist flutters with spectral butterfly wings, covering Margarete and slowly adhering to her body.
After a brief moment, it shines for an instant and then vanishes.
"What was that…? I feel so much better now!"
Cecilia quickly checks her with Appraisal.
[Name: Margarete
Race: Human
Character Level: 4
Jobs: Seamstress (4)
Nation: Drakestadt
HP: 12/12
SP: 3/11
MP: 5/5
Attributes
Skills
Techniques
Status]
She opens the status window, but there is only the 'Pregnant' status. It worked perfectly.
((Now that I'm calm, I see that she has a job, though it's quite low level. I wonder what her skills are.))
Cecilia opens Margarete's skills to check. It would be considered rude, or even offensive, to do that to a player. But Margarete was an NPC, or so Cecilia thought, so she had no reservations about it.
[Skills:
No skills.]
((Huh? No skills? How does she do anything? Whatever, I'll check that later.))
"Thank you so much, Cecilia! I'm really feeling so much better now!"
"Hehe. It was nothing. Just a minor spell."
"No, really. I'm so grateful. It was beautiful..."
Satisfied with the results of her healing, Cecilia turned to Mutt, who was watching it all with his eyes full of wonder.
"Okay, the anemia is gone. Mutt, make sure to prepare a healthy meal for her today. She had an illness brought on by a lack of eating proper food, especially meat. It's quite common in pregnant women. I will head to the forest to hunt."
"But… alone? I couldn't…"
"Worry about your wife. I'll be fine. I am an adventurer, after all. I can deal with some measly monsters. It's the least I can do, after you found me yesterday and brought me safe and sound to the inn."
"That was nothing of importance…"
"So this is also nothing of importance. Isn't that so, Margarete?"
Margarete smiled in agreement.
"She's right, dear. Didn't you just see what she is capable of? If a woman says that she can do it, she can do it."
Defeated, Mutt slumped his shoulders.
"Okay, you win. Just please promise me that you'll be safe. I don't want to have to go rescue you again."
"Hehe, don't worry. I promise."
"That reminds me… Why were you really in the forest yesterday?"
((Eeeeehh… I forgot that there was that question I dodged earlier because Gertrude helped me.))
"Darling, it's rude to pry into other people's lives. Can't you see she's uncomfortable? And right after she just performed that spell for us!"
Margarete is a woman perceptive enough to understand that there was something deeper going on, from Cecilia's reaction alone. Something that wasn't related to her ability in combat and that it would be better not knowing.
"Alright, I'm sorry for prying. But before you go, I want you to at least take you to talk to the mayor. It's important to keep him informed of such things so he can do something in case you don't come back."
With that, the situation was settled. All that remained was for Mutt and Cecilia to go to the Mayor's house.
:::
As they walked through the village's streets, Cecilia couldn't help but look around everywhere. The sights were at the same time familiar and absurdly alien.
Some of the houses there are still the same that were built five hundred years ago. A testament to the superior skills and materials available at the time.
Cecilia was part of the workforce that built the place, and the streets were still exactly the same from when they were built… which would be five hundred years for the village, but just a few weeks ago for Cecilia herself.
The biggest difference that made it all so uncanny was the level of detail and individuality of objects. Games have limited stocks of textures, so things like building stones were very uniform everywhere.
That's something that distinguishes a game from reality at a glance.
The streets' cobblestone wasn't an exception to the rule. They were the same everywhere… in the game.
But not here. She could see that even though the original tiles were still there, two important things were very different from the original.
First, floors in games tend to be composed of flat surfaces to save rendering processing. There are several things that you want to be really detailed in a game, and the floor is rarely one of those. Even with rugged terrain, the valleys and peaks were smooth.
But here… every individual stone was its own thing. It felt exactly like walking on real cobblestone streets. They each had their own format, with grooves and notches filled with sand and gravel, always uneven.
But the second was even more eerie. It was possible to see how the original square sets of stones were copy-pasted from one another… but the wear and tear of the centuries of people walking around and weather falling down was different for each one.
Inside the tile there was variation, but all tiles were clones of one another. Yet, here the stone of the corner was broken, there it was not, and over there it was broken differently. Some had moss, some hadn't.
That was the single most terrifying thing she had seen since waking up this morning. The concrete, undeniable truth. This was the world of the game, but it was reality. A five-hundred-year-old reality.