So This Is What Passes for Food
Shaaaa...
Watching the droplets fall from the watering can, I had a thought. Why was I even doing this?
I'd been sure I'd summoned something impressive. What I got was Unit 3, quite possibly the most useless summon in recorded history. I tried to put that bulk to work in a fight, but a tree spirit was non-aggressive and unfit for combat even in the game, and this one went out of its way to avoid a scuffle. The result was a giant that did nothing but take up space.
Still, I couldn't summon the thing and then leave it to dry out and die, so I found myself doing garden work that had never been in my stars. At least there was a well a short walk behind the garden, so watering the plants wasn't all that hard. Thank god the well didn't run dry.
I'd meant to dump the job on Unit 1. For reasons I could not fathom, she refused to the death, and I became the official Unit 3 watering staff.
Which made me wonder—did Unit 1 and the Unit 2s actually dislike Unit 3? I'd felt a strange tension from the very first day. Ever since I brought Unit 3 home, Unit 2-1 had flatly refused to get down off my shoulder. The Unit 2s hated sunlight to begin with; they even crept away from the light leaking in through the windows. And yet they'd followed me all the way out to the garden, where the sun came down in a direct assault, and they were still holding on. Unit 3's sudden arrival must have been a genuine shock, at least by their standards.
The Unit 2s I could excuse. Their nature and a tree spirit's lifestyle simply didn't match. Unit 1, though—I had no idea why she hated Unit 3. I told her to go water it and she wouldn't obey at all, which was why I was standing here now. She'll take an order to charge a wolf, but give Unit 3 some water is beneath her? That's actually funny. Is it really worth being that jealous?
Unit 3, at least, seemed to follow me well enough. Imprinting, maybe? When the sun hit my face while I watered and I squinted, it raised its leaves to shade me. When my collar looked about to get soaked, it extended a thin branch and lifted the cloth just a little.
Useless was still useless. And yet, somehow, I didn't hate Unit 3 all that much. A tree moving right in front of you is just that strange, and that fun. I remembered getting scolded as a kid in elementary school for spending a whole day poking at a plant with leaves that moved, because I thought it was amazing. Some of that feeling was coming back.
Leaving it like this felt like a waste. Maybe I should make a swing. This mansion had absolutely nothing to do for fun, and I was bored. No phone. No TV. No computer. For someone who'd spent an entire life in an ocean of information, this forced dopamine detox was honestly a bit of an ordeal. I wasn't at an age where swinging would thrill me, but it still had to beat lying around staring at the grain of the patched boards in the roof and counting them, right?
Then I thought it through. Make the swing seat out of wood, and Unit 3 would throw another fit. Swing plans: abandoned.
God, this tree spirit. The more I thought about it, the more useless it was. God, this thing. If it didn't at least look cool, I really would have thrown it out on the spot.
Anyway.
Once the watering was done and I came back to the mansion, the Unit 2s swarmed up onto me with a chorus of eeeing—! as if they meant to scrub the smell of sunlight right off my clothes. Unit 2-1 directed the rush so diligently that I wasn't actually bowled over, but the visual pressure of a black tide sweeping over me was no joke.
A little time passed, and every patch of me that had warmed in the sun went cold and chilly again. Sure, that meant the dirt and dust had been shaken off and I was far cleaner than before. It still left me feeling oddly bitter. In summer I might have called it refreshingly cool, but still.
Once the Unit 2s' welcome was over, Evelyn and Unit 1 were there to greet me.
"Your dust spirits are always so full of life. Did you get the garden watered all right?"
I nodded. Ever since the day of the Unit 3 incident, when the mansion had been wrecked, Evelyn had kept coming by even after the roof was fixed, patching this and that around the place. So her actual job was hunter, right? Then why was she this good at fixing a house? Because she lived alone in the forest? At this level, your average carpenter ought to pack it in. Was manual dexterity part of the game company's stat inflation too? Either way, I wasn't complaining. A sturdier, safer mansion was nothing but good news.
"All right, Unit 1. Ira's back, so how about we take a break too?"
Clack.
A few days of working side by side, and Unit 1 already seemed to have gotten quite close with Evelyn. Maybe because Evelyn had learned she wasn't some monster born of wicked necromancy. Considering the first impression those two had made on each other, it was remarkable progress.
I was leaning on the balcony that overlooked the garden, letting the breeze hit me, when Evelyn suddenly pulled something from her bag. A lunch box, on closer look. Not a grand one, really—just something packed together like rice balls.
Right. I hadn't eaten a single meal since I got here. Was that because I was undead?
She must have caught something in my face, because she asked, out of nowhere.
"Now that I think about it, Ira—you don't need to eat, do you? Food, I mean."
I nodded. It had been days since anything passed my lips, and I felt neither hunger nor appetite. Was this what those trendy diet shots felt like? Even before, I'd skip meals when eating was too much trouble, and I'd never cared much about food, so it wasn't a real problem. Still, after forgetting the sensation of chewing and swallowing for days on end, I was suddenly curious. What did food in this world taste like? I wasn't hungry. I was just, purely, curious.
"Want to try some?"
I'd barely finished the thought when Evelyn broke off a piece of that rice-ball-like thing and held it out. She really did have sharp instincts. Or was I just that easy to read?
I took it. And immediately began to regret the choice. From a distance I hadn't noticed, but in my hand it looked profoundly unappetizing. A cautious sniff didn't produce anything like a sudden, blazing desire to eat. If I followed my heart, I'd say no thanks and hand it straight back. But Evelyn was watching me with expectant eyes, and I couldn't refuse. If I'd been any good at refusing things, I never would have accepted the name Ira Elysia in the first place.
So, with no other option, I put it in my mouth.
Ugh. This was seriously awful. It tasted like nothing but grass. The texture sat somewhere between bread dough and rice cake, loaded with the scent of some unidentifiable fruit and a heavy reek of weeds. I'd rather chew the raw ingredients than eat this.
Evelyn, though, laughed as if she'd expected exactly that reaction.
"Ahaha. It doesn't taste as good as it looks, does it?"
Did everyone in this world actually live on stuff like this? I knew, as common knowledge, that spices had been precious in the medieval era, but I wasn't sure Eternal Arcadia had been written with that setting. Maybe Evelyn's food only ended up like this because it had to keep and travel well. Even then, that horrific flavor was beyond understanding.
Eating it made me miss the old days all over again. The chicken-and-pizza combo from the place down the street, the one I used to order on days I scored a rare drop. The chicken was good. The pizza was good. If this was the universal standard of food in this world, then even the most tasteless neighborhood franchise chicken joint would do a roaring business, no question.
"Do you... always eat only things like this?"
"Not always. That's just food I carry because it's easy to eat outside. Most days I go to Andy's inn for a meal."
As expected. There was no way this garbage was the universal flavor of the world. If everyone alive were satisfied with a taste like that, I'd rather go my whole life without putting food in my mouth.
An inn, though. So in this world, an inn doubled as a restaurant. Fair enough—it would be strange for a village this small to have restaurants stacked on top of each other. When you're doing neighborhood business among people who all know each other, who's going to open several dining rooms and try to compete? Still, the news that something more like actual food existed gave me hope, and I asked.
"Does that inn... happen to have anything like pizza? Or chicken?"
"Hm? What's that?"
The blank look on Evelyn's face made me a little uneasy, but I did my best to explain in a way she could follow.
"Um, pizza is—you roll wheat dough out thin, spread tomato sauce over it, put cheese on top, and bake it in a stone oven—"
"And chicken is a kind of fried chicken. You take a chicken you've cleaned properly, coat it in seasoned batter, and put it in oil—"
For a moment I even shoved my social anxiety aside and let an absurd flood of words pour out. What else was I supposed to do? I really wanted that chicken and that pizza. Evelyn looked fairly startled by the outburst. Unfortunately, the dishes I'd described were apparently not on the inn's menu.
"Sorry. The inn doesn't have food like that either."
"Ah..."
I had never been more disappointed. Unbelievable. How could this world have no chicken and no pizza? I could survive without pizza. Chicken, though—chicken was soul food to me now.
And then, in the middle of that despair, a good idea struck me. What if I cooked those dishes myself? What if I started a culinary revolution in this world?