Chapter Text
Rei had the closing shift today, exhausted after another day of short-staffed shenanigans. But almost as soon as she'd closed the door, the floor of the entryway glowed white until it blinded her.
When her vision cleared, she found herself in the middle of a crowd of people in odd clothes.
They were equally stunned, but not as equally confused, and it was deeply unfair. Some were laughing a little giddily, the kind you get when an enormous strain was relieved.
Someone shifted in front of her, and her attention was caught by the only other person in the room who made sense, a high school girl by the looks of it. But before she could decide what action to take, the double doors of the enormous room swung open to admit a literally redhaired young man in, frankly, S-tier cosplay.
He approached knelt to address the high school girl, offering a hand elegantly. “Are you the Saint?”
Things continued to make no sense, and he swept out with the girl beside him, and Rei had to take a moment to absorb the fact that this goddamn rude asshole just completely fucking ignored her and left her there.
The rest of the crowd also had the same difficulty, and she could see the awkward looks they gave each other when they realized the same thing. After a solid two minutes of waiting for someone to take the initiative, Rei got off her knees and grabbed the nearest motherfucker by the collar. Did this bitch have blue hair? At first she had thought it a normal black, but on closer look it was a dark navy blue.
He gave her an explanation that sounded like some light novel bullshit about summoning a Saint to dispell the growing miasma, and it sounded like so much horseshit that it tipped her anger level over from subliminal to abso-fucking-lutely liminal.
She released him and got the fuck out of that great hall. There was no reason she should stay here and put up with this shit. But this goddamn place was bigger than she thought, a honest-to-god stone-and-plaster castle, that she was lost within the first two turns. It didn't do much to stop her, even when she heard footsteps behind her.
Some asshole in honest-to-god light armor managed to get in front of her and block her path with his arms outflung and begged her to stay.
“Why?”
He flinched at the question, but eventually talked her down and lead her to a beautifully furnished parlor. He did have a point. She was a stranger in a strange land, with no money, no connections, and no nowhere to go, godfuckingdammit. Also there were monsters or some shit. He may have been right, but she freely fantasized about tearing him a new one.
The door opened again, but it was a maid with a tea cart of beautiful china and snacks. She accepted a cup of tea, and it was absolutely delicious and honestly did more to soothe her anger than all the mouth-noises directed at her before now.
It didn't last long, as they left her to stew alone in that fancily furnished room for a whole goddamn hour, feeling the damp armpits of her work polo and the dampness around her ankles from her sweat-soaked socks. Her work khakis were well broken-in and comfortable, but she had spent more than ten hours in them at this point. She wanted a bath. She wanted things to make sense. She wanted someone to glare at besides this silent maid who had done her no harm.
Finally some official of some kind bothered to show up, but at least he gave a more thorough explanation of what the fuck was going on. It still sounded like some JRPG bullshit, and he shied away from looking her in the face.
But she'd been running on adrenaline fumes for a long time, and she couldn't put up with much of a fight when they offered her a room to rest in. She was conked out of the sofa before the maid could even turn down the fancy, canopied bed.
Frankly, she was glad to spend the next week in bed. She'd covered extra shifts this week and was paying for it. But after awhile, she was gotdamn bored. No internet, no memes, no trashy BL webcomics. Just the maids wanting to dress her up in frilly dresses that were not to her tastes.
Rei managed to escape the room in one of plainer ones. And she found the library.
It was magical place – rather literally. She could understand the foreign glyphs of their language in Japanese. The light globes on the walls that she didn't entirely register as being non-electric (and she had no good excuse for such obliviousness) until one of the librarians adjusted their glow with a word and a gesture.
But she spent hours and days reading whatever took her fancy. How long had it been since she'd had the leisure to do that? Most of the books she gave up on as lacking the necessary context, but she did find out that magic was indeed something that existed here, that even commoners used. How bizarre, yet entirely expectable – for an isekai.
She conducted a few little tests – giving a librarian a list of topics she'd written out for future reference. He didn't understand them. She tried using a few homonyms and puns on him, but since they often had to resort to defining terms and explaining each other anyway, results didn't seem all that conclusive, but it didn't disprove her theory that they did not, in fact, speak Japanese even if it sounded that way to her.
Florian was a good sport about it, though. She tried not to impose herself upon him too much, carefully took note of how formally the librarians spoke to each other. He didn't ask her any questions about herself, for which she was grateful. It was obvious enough that she was a foreigner, and he seemed to take it at face value. She wasn't sure what story to spin for him in the first place.
On his recommendation, she went to visit the Medicinal Floral Research Institute.