Part I: A Day: Orientation
Mila
She is having a bad day. Admittedly, every day as an Isekai Orienteer is a bad day. By Orienteer standards, this is almost a good day. Mila is wearing the newer of her two dresses, freshly rinsed in the river. Her regrettably natural pink hair is recently cut and all but hidden with her pointy elven ears under her classic black witch hat. And her six orientees so far have all been half-casters. Not pure martials with their stupidly overpowered strength and reflexes. Not mages who, like her, are doomed to menial employment in this broken world. No babies, corpses or asphyxiating fish people either.
She can’t decide what is worse. With the dangerously superhuman martials, all it takes is an orientee with a shitty personality for the Orienteer to be staring down the barrel of injury, disability or death. Since she started a year ago, they’ve had to majorly repair the Isekai Orientation Center twice due to idiot martials. On the other hand, a mage orientee makes her a de facto grief counselor who must also relive the angst of her own trip through the celestial Passage and into the IOC. The weeping, the bargaining, the denial, a desperate search for loopholes, the weeping again. She did it, they all do it. At some point they realize that you took the only mana they are ever likely to possess in this life. Then it’s rage, or despondency, or passive aggressive sarcasm that meanders into actual aggression. Not that there’s anything to fear from a mage beyond a slap fight.
But the half-casters are not so bad. Not so dangerous, but they have the stats to leave the village and serve as mana vessels for the hunt without dying to the first spiny fox rabbit that looks at them sideways. Do they get to feel powerful? No, not really. Do they have to kiss the ass of the martials in their assigned party? Yes. But do they get to experience more than a crusted over pinhole of this goddamn fantasy world? Yes, emphatically. Mila resents them too, but it beats the abject fear and disdainful pity engendered by the martials and mages.
Mila is up again soon, with only Fucking Peter ahead of her. He sits impatiently in the Orienteer booth next to hers, as always, a perpetual nervous energy machine. One leg shaking, each little goblin fingernail worked across his lower row of teeth, words escaping here and there from his internal monologue. He shows no self-awareness of any of these tics.
Mila is careful to look anywhere in the room besides Peter’s booth. As if she is getting acquainted with this octagonal wood and stone room for the first time. She counts two Orienteer booths on each of seven walls, a mana orb for each pair of booths and a large, open doorway on the eighth wall. She feigns awe for the geodesic dome atop the nine foot, padded leather walls, and the semi-translucent scraped viscera skylights that account for about a third of its panels, but provide almost no useful light. She is absolutely absorbed with the oil-fueled brass fixtures that do light the room. Literally anything to avoid the appearance that she is available for a conversation where Peter will be both overly familiar and insulting.
A gentle white light pulses in the center of the room as the next orientee appears. A baby! A baby for Fucking Peter, a full-on new born screaming infant! There is no way to square why anyone would choose an age lower than perhaps thirteen, but they keep doing it. And now it’s Peter’s problem. Is this actually a good day? She chastises herself for even considering the possibility. Fucking Peter would still deserve his coarse appellation if he hadn’t made it part of his literal name as, he claims, a test for swear filters. On shift today, there is no better recipient of a baby.
Peter picks up the baby, swaddled, but not diapered, from the cushioned dais at the center of the IOC. He places the infant’s hand on the mana orb shared between his and Mila’s booths and writes out a receipt on a wooden chit. The baby coos while touching the orb before resuming its wail. Peter seems impressed by what he sees in the mana orb. Probably a mage, which is lucky for Peter because the last thing you want is a baby martial. Mila can’t win them all. Peter cradles the baby with more facility than you’d expect from a twenty-something man or goblin, hands the chit to the clerk and heads out the door to the orphanage in the Isekai Quarter. His slow pace confirms he’s getting a healthy commission from that little squealing mana rock and taking it easy for the rest of the day.
Mila has a moment to herself where she is neither avoiding conversation with the goblin nor informing someone they lost the reincarnation lottery. The martials have it better, but any way you look at it, this is a garbage world. The white light pulses again.
A tall man, no, a half-elf appears. He has kept it pretty plain in the color palette, all browns, except for some highlights in his hair and an unusual shimmer in his eyes. Looks like a mage, Mila thinks, appraising his lanky frame and sighing. She plasters on the friendly face every Orienteer employs to ease the mana drain and approaches the half-elf.
“Welcome to Tryavna, the Sreda Valley Kingdom, the jewel of Svatonia! I’ll be your Isekai Orienteer. You can call me Mila,” she says with the requisite bravado.
“That was like a real Willy Wonka situation. The tunnel, the colors, the sounds,” the half-elf says, looking dazed.
“Yes, everyone here has experienced the Passage,” Mila tries to hold a friendly face, but she is terrible at derailing descriptions of the Passage, and feels her frustration escaping. “Let’s begin your orientation in this world. Please approach the mana orb.” She gestures toward the small orb on its pedestal.
“The Passage? Do you think that’s adequate? I mean, I would say portal or wormhole or I don’t know, magical mystery tour?”
He is not derailed, but she’s grateful when he lets her take his elbow and lead him to the orb.
“I’ll run those suggestions up the flagpole. Which vocation did you choose?”
“Oh, um.” His expression is blank, as if struggling to move beyond the Passage experience. “Jack bard. I mean jack-of-all-trades bard.”
So not a mage. A half-caster, but possibly an idiot who picked the very first vocation and subclass on the list. Why doesn’t he look even a little bit strong? “And your name?”
“Halver.”
“Well, Halver, jack-of-all-trades bard, you may touch the orb.”
When he touches the orb without question, Mila masks her feelings of surprise and gratitude with a placid, benevolent and mildly bored expression. Halver shudders and gasps. The number ten appears on the orb. About all Mila could expect from a half-caster. Half-casters are low risk, some reward. You are unlikely to cry and your pocket isn’t empty at the end of the day.
“Halver, as a bard, you will play an important role in this world. You will be matched to a hunting party with martials and other half-casters. Your role in the hunt is critical, for only a half-caster like you can both act as a mana vessel and survive the wilds.” Looking again at the scrawny half-elf, Mila isn’t sure she believes the last bit of her practiced speech. But it won’t be her problem. “This way,” she motions to the large exit door, privately delighting in the easy commission from this shell-shocked doofus. “Show this to the clerk, then join the line on the right for equipment and party assignment.” She hands him a wooden chit with 10 and Mila scrawled on it. And then she is done with him.
Halver
He heads to the doorway, still reeling from his reincarnation by some goddess in a cloud realm, and only beginning to register the Passage and this intricately geometric, pre-industrial room, when a harsh, strobing light behind him throws a flickering silhouette of his body in front of him. The chatter of a half dozen idle conversations becomes silence, punctuated by the faint call of a crow from outside. When Halver turns to look, a lot is going on at once. Mila scurries back to her booth. Her colleague, a frogfolk person, approaches the central dais with a gait that somehow combines groveling and hopping. Around the room the remaining Orienteers are trying to make themselves small and inconspicuous with marginal success. The fox beastman clerk beside Halver hides behind his tiny desk. On the central dais, the strobing light slows to a pulse before fading to reveal a massive person pretzeled down to the apparent diameter of the Passage.
A roar from the contorted giant rattles the skylights and flickers the oil lamps. The frogfolk rears in terror before changing their approach to a hands-and-knees crawl. The giant wrenches her right arm from behind her neck and back, shaking out two unnatural joints in the process. The frogfolk licks their eyes in an approximation of a nervous blink as the freshly straightened giant arm sweeps toward them, flinging them into a padded leather wall. The frogfolk adheres for a moment before peeling off the wall into a jumbled, twitching mass on the floor.
The giant is yanking her left arm from between her criss-crossed legs. Halver’s Orienteer, Mila, is slowly approaching the giant, hands raised in front of her chest in the international sign for don’t kill me. “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’re here to help. You have the best vocation!” she says, forcing a cheery tone through her obvious terror. She stops well beyond arm’s reach and rests her left hand on the nearest mana orb. The orb glows a faint pink and Mila winces before pulling her hand back as if from a hot stove.
The giant bellows while trying to pry her knees apart. Halver feels a twinge of satisfaction, as if he were very hungry and swallowed his first bite of lunch. Tiny blurry text appears in the bottom left corner of his vision. As he moves his eyes toward the text it enlarges and comes into focus.
Mana: 1
Having mana to work with, Halver wonders if he can help. The goddess gave him magical affinities, but no spells. The only way he knows how to spend mana is using ephemera, the instrument-less musical mastery he chose. A song of calm, he thinks, maybe I can do that with one mana. He opens his mouth imagining singing a song, but instead pushes the mana from within himself, willing the air to vibrate. It’s a simple song, long wordless notes urging serenity to everyone who can hear it. The rasping breaths from the frogfolk heap ease, the clerk peaks out from behind his desk, and Mila, several moments too late, motions elaborately with both hands before saying, “Calm,” with serene confidence. The giant, freshly disentangled, loses her rage, flopping her legs off the front of the dais while propping herself up with her arms behind her.
Mila moves to Halver, speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Nice try, but you’re not going to get very far without mana.” She gets closer to whisper, “Meet me at the Crushed Spirit after dark,” and winks suggestively. Then, aloud again, “Off you go, the line on the right.”
Halver opens his mouth to protest it was more than a “nice try,” when it occurs to him that the special attribute he got from the goddess might be a little more than special. He nods and heads out through the door.
