Making Money
“I’m back, ma’am!”
Lammis throws open the inn door, puts me down, and yells a greeting.
In the impressively clean, hall-like area stands a well-built woman holding a broom, her mouth wide-open as she looks this way.
“Y-you’re safe! I was worried. Oh, I hope you’re not a corpse fiend. Are you breathing properly?”
“I’m alive, really! A lot happened, but I managed to make it back.”
The inn’s mistress pats her to confirm as Lammis explains through a wide grin. I don’t know whether this place has a lot of nice people, or if Lammis is just a lovable character, but she doesn’t seem to be in a bad position here.
“Those hunters with you came back all covered in wounds, and they said you were dead. My daughter yelled at them and refused to believe it, though.”
“I know; I worried Munami, too. I’ll have to apologize later—”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Lammiiiiiiiiis!”
A shout loud enough to shake the hall rattles their shoulders up and down. Lammis turns around and sees the girl coming down the stairs.
She’s carrying a big basket filled with laundry. Her braided hair is tinged with red, and she has a triangle bandanna on her forehead. Her apron has a simple color scheme, the same as the mistress’s. Perhaps it’s the inn’s uniform.
She isn’t much to look at, but while she gives a plain impression, she has sharp eyes that make her seem bright and intelligent. To put it bluntly, she’s like an inconspicuous maid.
But she flies down the stairs in a rush and charges straight for Lammis before putting the laundry on the floor and grabbing her shoulders.
“Wait, you’re alive! You’re not a corpse fiend, right?!”
“M-Munami, I’m alive—I promise! Look!”
Munami must be the mistress’s daughter. The apple doesn’t fall far—she said exactly the same thing as her mother.
She’s shaking Lammis back and forth so hard it looks like the poor girl’s head will snap off. Maybe you should stop now…
“I swear, Lammis, how much are you going to make me worry? I demanded that the people who went with you tell me everything, and they said they left you by yourself and ran away. I spread the worst rumors I could about them so that they can never live in this settlement again. Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.”
She looks down, her face covered in shadow. Very scary. She must be the type who gets dangerous when she’s mad.
“So that was why you got your things together in a hurry and left…” The mistress sighs.
“By the way, what is that?” asks Munami. “That thing you put in the entrance. It looks really heavy.”
“Oh, I found it by the lakeside.”
“Lammis…you picked up something weird again? Don’t you remember when you brought back that frog-fiend child and caused a huge mess?”
“Y-yeah. B-but this time is different! That baby over there saved me. It’s really useful.”
With both mother and daughter glaring at her, Lammis starts floundering, explaining how she met me, my abilities, and what she plans to do.
“I understand where you’re coming from, but…,” says the mistress. “Lammis, even if you do want to go back to the surface and see Hulemy, what about the money for the transfer circle? And do you have enough to pay for a room at an inn? You look like you lost all your things.”
“Oh, right. I have nothing left… I can’t do anything.”
Bombarded with a stream of questions, Lammis falls to her knees in exhaustion, hanging her head.
…Most of her wallet’s precious contents are inside me. Thinking on the terms I’ve heard in the conversation thus far, we have the surface, a transfer circle, and a dungeon.
We’re inside a dungeon, and to get back to the surface, you need to use a transfer circle. And you need a significant amount of money to use it. Finally, Lammis is flat broke. My bad.
Inside a dungeon, huh? It doesn’t feel like we are, but I’m a vending machine anyway, so… At this point, common sense and things not making sense to me aren’t important. I just have to accept how things are.
Even though I want to cut into their conversation, if all I can say is “Welcome,” “Thank you,” “Please come again,” “Get one free with a winner,” “Too bad,” “You’re a winner,” and “Insert coins,” what am I supposed to do?
Meanwhile, the conversation is drawing to a close.
“Well, there’s nothing for it, is there? You’ll have to work here at the inn for a while. I wonder whether that box can attract customers if you put it outside. It’ll sell what it has, too. Two birds with one stone.”
I could wish for nothing better. “Welcome.”
“Whoa, it really can talk, can’t it? I’ll leave attracting customers to you, then.”
“Oh, but Karios the gatekeeper asked me to bring it over that way every once in a while.”
“That’s fine. I don’t mind you slipping out to bring it there and come back.”
“Yes, ma’am!”
And that was how my life in this settlement began.
The settlement houses only around a hundred people, but the residents change by the day. As far as I can tell, the only permanent ones are the ones doing business geared toward hunters.
Hunters are people who put down monsters, collect materials, take on escort requests, or explore the dungeon in the hope of finding rare treasures worth entire fortunes. The Hunters Association has a branch here in the settlement as well. They hand out quests to the hunters and buy their materials.
Oh, right. Apparently, this is one of the dungeon’s floors, or strata, called Clearflow Lake. Being inside a dungeon with a sky… All I can say is that other worlds are amazing.
I hear that it takes three weeks just to go from one end of this stratum to the other. The main creatures living here are the fish and shellfish in Clearflow Lake proper, plus the frog people they call frog fiends. Apparently, there are creatures called the Three Powers as well, but I don’t know much about them.
My sources of information are, incidentally, listening to Lammis chat about something or other every day, eavesdropping on the inn patrons, and—
“So I say to the guy, ‘Hey, it’s our job to protect this place from outlaws.’”
—Karios, who works as a gatekeeper. He seems to have free time in spades, and he frequently starts talking to me whenever I’m set up near the gate.
“Welcome.”
“Right, so those frog heads have been more active lately, so we’ve been seeing more injured people. It’s always around this time they send out a big hunting party to deal with them.”
“Welcome.”
It seems like I just need to put in a word or two every now and then to show him I’m listening, and I have to admit, it’s easy to just keep saying “Welcome.”
A hunting party… It’s only been a week since I got here, but I have been seeing new hunters showing up often lately.
“And now I’m thirsty, but I’m getting tired of the same old drinks.”
Well, that’s because you buy at least five of them every day. Though maybe it is about time I stock something new. I’ve built up a fair supply of points, after all. I instantly became famous over the past week for my uniqueness and the flavor of my products, so I’ve had surprisingly good sales. Let’s take a look-see.
[Vending Machine] |
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(C) Mineral Water | ¥1,000 1SC (x130) |
(C) Milk Tea | ¥1,000 1SC (x24) |
(W) Corn Soup | ¥1,000 1SC (x19) |
(N) Pressed Potato Chips | ¥1,000 1SC (x36) |
PT 3,253 |
|
{Features} Cold Retention, Heat Retention |
|
{Blessings} Force Field |
|
Thanks to refilling several times and selling over four hundred items, I have more than three thousand points now. I’ve been saving them up, since there’s no telling what’s to come, but I’m getting an itch to add a new feature, too.
Even the cheaper features that I want cost a thousand points to add, so I’ve been sitting on the fence about it, but I should be able to buy at least one without worrying too much.
Wait, maybe I should do the reasonable thing and get different products. For example, if I get the cup ramen Hot-Water-Dispenser feature, it would change my vending machine body. I’m nervous about it affecting the other items, but… No, I can already put up barriers, add features at will, and my human mind resides within a vending machine. Maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about something so sensible.
Now, then. Rather than letting my thoughts roam free, I should consider the needs of my customers first. The gatekeepers, Karios and Gorth, are my most frequent users. Let’s think about what they might want.
I recall they wanted something more filling. I’d like to offer them cans of oden stew, but will they be able to open them? It doesn’t look like pull tabs are common in this world like they were in mine, and I can’t give detailed explanations, either.
I suppose I have to give up… No wait, that could work!
Remembering something, I search through the list of makers, find what I’m after, and use thirty points to add one hundred cans of oden.
“Whoa, you lit up. And now there’s a new item in ya. The price… Three thousand, eh? Three silvers is a bit steep. But there’s something new to buy, so I can’t hold back!”
I feel you. I totally understand. A new item in a vending machine is a terrible magic. I empathize so much it hurts. All the more if the container has a delicious-looking photo of rising steam printed on it—I wouldn’t have been able to resist.
Come to think of it, the fact that they understand the numbers but not any of the letters still feels weird to me, but that just brings up the question of why those characters are there at all. I’ll just chalk it up to some sorcery at work.
The strata in this dungeon, compared to the outside world, seem to be easier places to save up money, but it’s probably more dangerous as well. For those who can dance around the high-risk, high-return investment effectively, it certainly seems like people don’t have any financial issues.
That’s why the merchants here have chosen to do business in a dangerous land. They can sell everything for a higher price than on the surface, and it’s more likely they’ll come across precious goods.
The gatekeepers protecting the settlement itself seem to be compensated handsomely, which is why they favor me with their business so much. I don’t think this price setting would work if I were dropped in a safe town on the surface.
“Oh, this one’s hot. Wait, how do you open it?”
I thought that would trip him up. But take a good look at the can. I know from this past week that Karios and Gorth are both very observant, so I’m hopeful.
Karios picks up the can in his fingers and looks at it closely. Gorth takes interest as well and watches out of the corner of his eye. After turning the can around once, both of them seem to notice.
“Hmm? There’s a picture on here. Is this how to open it and how to eat what’s inside?”
That’s right. This manufacturer’s oden is made for people who aren’t familiar with the packaging, and it has a detailed explanation drawn on the side.
After a certain place in Tokyo nicknamed “electric town” popularized it, canned oden spread overseas as well. Enthusiastic tourists started buying it, but many foreigners didn’t know how to eat it, which led to an outbreak of burning incidents. This manufacturer decided to put a clear set of easy-to-understand instructions on the can so even people who didn’t understand the language could still figure it out.
“Hmm. So you give the thing on top a little bend, and a pull… Whoa, now that’s a good smell! And then you push it all the way up, and it’s open!”
Great, phase one is complete. Now I can provide cans of this type to these two. My product lineup is getting bigger. They’ll spread the word to the others, so in a few weeks, most of my regulars should be able to handle it.
Karios pulls out one of the skewers stuck in the oden to make it easier to eat. It’s got the golden trio on it: quail egg, chikuwa fish cake, and konjak cake.
As a thin trail of steam rises from the skewer, he puts it in his mouth, biting into the quail egg sitting at the top first. After chewing twice, steam erupts from his nostrils and he squints. “Oh, oh, wow. This is insanely good. This might be my new favorite. The boiled egg has a complex flavor, but it’s still light inside, and the moment I put it in my mouth, the juice mixed with the yolk just flows right out… Man, this is good! I bet it would go great with booze.”
Finished with the quail egg, he takes a bite of the chikuwa.
“Shoot, this has a ton of flavor, too. Irresistible! I’ve never had something with a texture like this before, but it tastes vaguely fishy. How on earth do they make these? Under that is… Oh, whoa, it’s soft like jelly, but I still like it. Ha-ha-ha. Interesting!”
It looks like Karios is enjoying the chikuwa and the konjak, too. He drinks up all the soup stock as well. Then, with a satisfied look, he fishes three more silver coins out of his wallet before Gorth interrupts and inserts his own coins.
“H-hey, I was just about to buy one!”
“I’m next.”
That had the perfect effect on them. Looks like I can expect these cans of oden to sell.
That was how word of the oden got out and caused a local boom in Clearflow Lake. The recent weather—considering how cold it’s been getting—contributed to my sales, too, so I should be able to look forward to further success.
