Prelude: To Domathra (Isekai/LitRPG/OP MC)

“I will return at a later date,” Nephthys bid in farewell.

“I look forward to speaking with you more, Miss Nephthys. It has been a pleasure,” Grant replied, his left hand squeezing her shoulder.

“You, too, Yvette,” Nephthys said with a small smile.

She and Tara exited the guild, Nephthys sorting through her badges.

“Tiers three, four, and five. Unbelievable. Does the guild just…do anything high-level people want?” Tara groused from Nephthys' side.

Indeed, Grant had been rather cooperative, gifting Nephthys her choice of identifiers. The guild used a tiered rank system from one to five. 

Tier one was for fresh adventurers, people who had just joined and did not have enough levels to qualify for a higher tier. Tier two generally started around level one hundred, three at two hundred, and four at the soft cap of three hundred.

Levels were not the only marker for tier advancement, and this was especially the case for tier five. While four generally marked someone at or above the level cap, tier five was only granted to adventurers who had contributed significantly to society in some manner. 

Participation in a high-stakes raid, helping fellow adventurers out of a bind, or any number of good deeds could contribute toward advancement, but it was a high barrier to clear.

Grant had, undoubtedly, been so pliant with Nephthys in consideration of her record in Prelude. Grant was an NPC that she had met way back during vanilla Prelude, when she was called—

“So, is it Nephthys or Adelaide?” Tara suddenly asked.

Nephthys winced, wishing her shame would just stay in the past.

“It is Nephthys…now,” she replied.

“...okay. Why?” Tara asked, a follow-up Nephthys probably should have expected.

What was she supposed to say? How was she meant to explain to Tara that Prelude was her first online game? She had not realized you weren’t supposed to use your real name in online games!

The character remake that the Ashreach expansion allowed had been such a blessing, yet now, when the world was real, her past ignorance was coming back to haunt her like a ghost!

“How about a trade? I will answer your question, and you answer mine afterward. Fair?” Nephthys offered, feeling clever.

Tara was so guarded. She surely would not want to talk about herself—

“Sure,” Tara responded.

Nephthys sighed, not expecting an affirmative.

“Alright, well…I am somewhat embarrassed by that name. It is the name that my parents gave me, yet for reasons that would be difficult to explain, using it is…mortifying,” she explained with a grimace.

“Oh, okay…why, though?” Tara asked.

“Ah-ah, a question for a question, yes? It is my turn. Where are your parents?” Nephthys asked.

Tara froze, her eyes wide as she stared down at the path before her. Nephthys stopped, glancing around as people shoved past them. They stood in the middle of a wide footpath through the park, the crowd parting around them and shooting them annoyed looks. The sun was high in the sky, and this area was likely a popular lunch destination.

Nephthys gave Tara a few moments, but when she did not move, she started to worry. 

Uh oh.

Nephthys was reasonably confident when it came to leading a team. She had been a shift leader for almost a decade by this point, and she knew how to keep her team running. She knew about inspiring and momentum. She knew about negotiating with suppliers, conducting interviews, de-escalation, and all aspects of socializing as they pertained to leadership.

In basically all other walks of life, however, she was a complete novice.

Thinking quickly, she put her arm around Tara’s shoulder and ushered her away. Reaching a bench a little off the path, Nephthys quickly erected a privacy barrier, the two vanishing from sight and hearing, taking the whole bench with them.

What do I do? What do I do?

Nephthys gently lowered Tara onto the bench and sat next to her, her arm still around the girl’s shoulders. Tara’s eyes glistened, and Nephthys squeezed her close, placing Tara’s head against her chest.

“We are alone. No one can see or hear us,” she whispered.

Surprisingly, Tara did not burst into sobbing tears. She did not seem to do much of anything, merely relaxing against Nephthys, emitting the occasional sniffle. The two sat for several long minutes, the birds chirping around them, basking in the high noon sunshine.

“They’re gone,” Tara finally whispered, her voice sounding hoarse, despite her lack of sobs.

“I see,” Nephthys replied simply, her hand atop Tara’s head.

They sat in silence again, which lingered for several more minutes. Nephthys simply waited, not because she knew it was the right thing to do, but because she could think of nothing else to do. She had no siblings, no nieces or nephews, or even younger cousins. She had no experience with consoling others, least of all children.

“Mom died giving birth to me, and Dad…” she trailed off, but Nephthys had enough experience with familial trauma to glimpse the baggage.

“I am sorry, both that he did that to you, and that I asked so casually. That was a matter to be handled more delicately. I am sorry for blundering straight into it,” Nephthys said.

So, Tara’s mother died in childbirth, and her father did something terrible, something so bad that even a fourteen-year-old child held resentment. If there was one thing Addy had learned throughout her life, children did not hold grudges, legitimate grudges, easily.

Regardless, Nephthys chastized herself internally for prodding such a sensitive subject. That was an indelicate way to approach the issue with an adult, and Tara was fourteen. 

Really, she had mostly been wanting to know more about Tara: where she came from, why she was wandering around the Peaks, et cetera. She had not meant to dredge up any complicated emotions in the middle of the square.

Tara sniffed and wiped her face on her sleeve before sitting up straight.

“We were doing things, right? Where were we going next?” she asked, still wiping her face and not looking at Nephthys.

“We are headed to the bank. You heard Grant, yes? We can exchange currencies there,” Nephthys replied.

“Of course I heard…” Tara retorted, trailing off.

Nephthys merely chuckled, standing and offering her hand. Tara took it, stood, and the two headed back to the path through the grass, Nephthys dropping the privacy barrier as they went.

“You know, I was aware that you were spacing out during our talk with Grant. So was he, in fact. You do not have to hide it,” Nephthys ribbed.

“I was not! I was paying attention,” Tara harumphed. 

——————————————

Thunk.

The coin gave slightly as the man bit it. Nephthys was somewhat alarmed to discover the man, an official with the bank, verifying the quality of her coin the same way the proprietress of the inn had.

“Don’t gimme that face. We got weights and measures aplenty. This is just to get us off the ground. If I spend hours weighing all your coins out only to find they're counterfeit, that’s hours wasted where I could’ve just bitten them and verified in a few seconds,” the man said.

He had curly red hair with a matching beard that ringed his face. In fact, it was difficult to tell where the hair ended and the beard began. His face was flecked with freckles, and he had hazel eyes and a round nose. His face possessed a jovial quality that made his words sound abrasive rather than outright rude.

She and Tara were seated in a private room at the Gloamview bank, an institution Nephthys was surprised to learn existed. Prelude, though an MMO, was a survival-craft, meaning that gold and valuables were stored in player bases and guild vaults. 

There were no banks in the game, though she probably should have expected something similar to eventually crop up in a world that was real.

“This one seems legitimate, at least. How many coins ya got?” the man asked.

“How many can you exchange?” Nephthys replied quickly.

The man’s left eyebrow raised slightly as he regarded her.“You first,” he said.

A mound of coins suddenly appeared, covering the entire surface of his desk and spilling over onto the floor, pouring off all four sides like water. The clink as the coins shifted was nearly deafening.

“Yuwë’s wet tits, woman!” the man shouted over the din of sliding coins.

The coins suddenly froze, some hovering in the air. They began to shift and whorl, spinning about Nephthys like a mealstrom of wealth before vanishing, one at a time, back into her inventory.

“Your turn,” she said, wearing a slight smile.

The man scurried out of the room, counting on his fingers and mumbling, without saying a word in reply. No doubt he was off to check the vault. Nephthys suspected that even if they had enough coin to exchange, they would be unwilling to shrink their reserves too much, which was fine. She just needed enough coin to move about freely. She was not looking to purchase a castle.

“Who is Yuwë, and why would her tits be wet?” Nephthys asked, turning to Tara.

“The…goddess of water?” Tara replied slowly, incredulous.

Was this something she was supposed to just know? One of those ‘common sense’ things that everyone knew without knowing how they knew it? 

“Well, I would prefer not to gather the attention of any gods or goddesses, so I would prefer they not be named around me…nor their tits invoked,” she said with a scowl.

Tara let out a confused sound halfway between a scoff and a chuckle. To Nephthys’ relief, her question seemed to have chased the memory of how much wealth she had just flashed from Tara’s mind.

That would have been tough to explain.

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