I was frankly very skeptical.

  In my head, I decided that this hominid was very suspicious. Our species had bad blood between us for centuries, and his proposal was as ridiculous as a mountain dwarf inviting a forest elf to live in an underground fortress.

  It was just common sense. Only an idiot was naive enough to think that a dwarf and an elf could be friends, and I could only conclude that this man had entered this conversation in bad faith. If I couldn’t trust the things that he said, how could I even trust that he’d be a reliable customer?

  I was just about to walk away from negotiations, when the man added a very tempting offer.

  “Would you like some wine?” He suggested with a wide grin. “You can take a whole keg if you want. For a charming wolf like you, I’d give it away for free.”

  Alcohol.

  Again, it was another speciality of the hominid civilization.

  It was no secret that the beastkin of the Great Pins loved alcohol. In fact, I even knew of children’s stories that featured this legendary stereotype. There was an old fable that a hominid farmer once left out a pitcher of wine next to his pen of defenseless chickens, and a hungry wolf who stumbled across it gorged himself on the alcohol until he was drunk. The next morning, the farmer promptly slew the inebriated wolf. Altogether, it was a cautionary tale against senseless greed.

  Truthfully, my species had a very poor tolerance for alcohol.

  However, our love for this hominid beverage was undeniable, and I was definitely tempted.

  I couldn’t remember the st time that I tasted this sweet drink. Was it months? Over a year?

  “You should join us for dinner,” the strange man offered cheerfully. “Tell me your story. Where do you come from? I want to learn all about you.”

  + + +

  It was starting to drizzle.

  In the back of my mind, I was cognizant of the fact that the river was definitely going to flood soon. However, I figured that I still had another hour or two, and I had grown up frugal enough that I certainly wasn’t going to decline free stuff.

  A free keg of alcohol? The people of my tribe would have traded it for two entire sheep.

  Of course, there was always a chance that this invitation could have been a trap, but I didn’t have anything particurly valuable on me. It wasn’t possible to live a life completely free of risk, and drinking wine alone with strangers was certainly perilous in its own way.

  Perhaps these hominids believed they had the upper hand — that they were the ones tricking a vulnerable girl into a disadvantageous situation. If that was the impression they had, then perhaps it was better to py into their preconceived notions. By making them think that I was a naive, oblivious, and frivolous young beastkin girl who didn’t know any better, maybe I could even get them to lower their own defenses.

  “Ooh… wine?” My eyes sparkled as I acted out the role of fictitious character. “I love wine! I’ll definitely stay for some wine!”

  My sleek tail swished back and forth eagerly.

  The hominid supervisor ughed heartily.

  “That’s a fine attitude,” he said. “You tribal women have such fun and exotic personalities.”

  At that moment, I gained an inkling of suspicion that this man definitely had a taste for beastkin women. This wasn’t entirely surprising — drugs (alcohol), sex, food, and religion were the motivating forces of human civilization since the beginning of time, and hominid men were famous for sticking their phalluses into anything that was remotely hole-shaped.

  For that matter, this realization helped me rex.

  If he was just a muscle-headed brute who acted from his dick, I could definitely manage this.

  I’d much rather deal with this kind of sexual simpleton over a complex vilin who had secret objectives and ulterior motives. Libido was an easy thing to understand, and I didn’t fear a handful of ordinary hominid men. From a physical perspective, I was confident that I could match the strength of a handful of flimsy monkeys.

  At the very least, I had a set of sharp canine fangs — and they didn’t.

  + + +

  The bronze-armored guard looked particurly unhappy, but he didn’t say a word.

  The supervisor led me through their encampment, and I could roughly see the way that it was organized. Most of the houses were built out of mud, cy, and thatched reeds. These were simply the most abundant materials along the river, and it didn’t make much sense to spend a fortune on imported timber when they were just a small band of farmers.

  “This is Atis,” the supervisor introduced the guard to me as we walked. “He’s been my second-in-command for years. He’s a grumpy fel, but I promise that he’ll warm up to you after you get to know him.”

  The guardsman scowled.

  “As for myself, I’m the hierophant (warrior-priest) of this settlement. You can call me Ram. If anyone is acting like a pain-in-the-butt, you can always come and find me. I’ll knock some sense into anyone who’s causing a ruckus. We’re all good friends here.”

  Hierophant Ram cheerfully called out to some of the borers, asking if they’d like they to join him for wine and bread beside the fire pit, but they immediately shied away as if they had been asked to sacrifice themselves to the mythical man-eating Cyclops.

  Evidently, their behavior seemed to contradict his idealistic cim.

  Their supreme leader frowned slightly as he turned back to chat with me.

  “I don’t know why they’re always so shy,” he compined.

  Atis, the guard, had a stoic expression on his face.

  Meanwhile, Ram grabbed an enormous jar of alcohol (the size of a small tub) and sat down on a wooden stump beside the camp’s bonfire. It must have weighed at least a hundred pounds, but he didn’t even struggle as he effortlessly lifted the vat and took a gulp from the cy container.

  Seconds ter, he wiped his face, his eyes brimming with satisfaction.

  “Want your own jar?” He asked me.

  “I can’t drink all of that,” I admitted, staring at that enormous thing.

  “No problem!” Ram fshed a smile.

  He reached for a cy bowl beside him and dunked it inside of his vat of wine. After it was submerged, he took it out and passed it over to me, dripping with a sweet golden liquid the color of amber.

  I accepted the bowl and sniffed at the liquid.

  The pottery had excellent craftsmanship. The contoured surface was a perfect circle, which meant that it could have only been crafted with a potter’s wheel. Pottery was yet another speciality of the Urukai civilization, whereas the nomadic tribes lived with turtle shells and misshapen bowls that looked like they were crafted by kindergarteners using py-doh.

  “Do you like what you see?” Ram was practically glowing with pride as he guessed my thoughts.

  He was obviously a nationalist who took great pride in hominid technology.

  I took a small sip from the bowl.

  “I don’t think this is going to be enough to convince a tribe of nomads to settle down in a farming vilge,” I told him frankly. “…Even if you ignore the fact that there’s hundreds of years of animosity between our species.”

  The hierophant ughed.

  “You didn’t even wait to hear the details of my offer,” he said.

  “Would it even change anything?”

  “I’d pay each one of you wolf-people a shekel of silver every week you stay in my town. It’s honestly a very good money. The wine, bread, and roof over your heads is free — provided that you put in some bor to help out the community. If you don’t work, you don’t get to eat.”

  I did some rough calcutions in my head.

  While I certainly wasn’t an expert on hominid society, I knew approximate benchmarks, like the fact that an ordinary borer earned a wage of 1 shekel per month, and that it cost roughly 30 shekels to purchase a sve.

  Honestly, the hierophant’s numbers didn’t even make sense.

  If he was that desperate for manpower, it simply would have been cheaper in the long run to purchase a boat full of sves. It seemed rather suspicious that he’d rather pay for short-term bor, although it was entirely possible that he simply cked the gold to purchase enough sves upfront. If that was the case, was this just a ponzi scheme to attract as many people as possible, and then abruptly stop the payments when he ran out of cash?

  “Sorry, I don’t think my people would be interested. The math doesn’t work out.”

  Ram grinned even further, intrigued by my quick response.

  “The wolf people can do arithmetic without their hands? Is that some type of strange sorcery?”

  He took out his hands and counted with his fingers.

  “4… 8… 12…” Ram raised a finger for each month. “That’s 60 shekels in a calendar year, which is a whole lot of money. How many sheep can you even buy with sixty shekels? I’d be giving that to each person who joins my vilge… completely for free.”

  However, I simply took a small sip of wine.

  —Four times twelve was 48.

  Unfortunately for this man, it was going to be impossible to deceive me with numbers. While mathematics and cuneiform were innovations of hominid civilization, the memories that I gained from my other life made me fully competent with mental arithmetic.

  This man was definitely a scammer.

  He seemed to think that he could outsmart an uneducated barbarian with wordpy and numbers.

  + + +

  Out of politeness, I listened to the hierophant pull numbers out of his arse for another ten minutes while I sipped away at the pretty cy bowl which was decorated with hieroglyphics. He was certainly very sneaky, adding and subtracting a couple of values that would have been difficult to spot if you didn’t have elementary multiplication tables fully memorized.

  Finally, I stood up to my feet.

  “Hey mister, can I take this jar of wine?”

  I pointed to an unopened vat of alcohol that was beside him, interrupting him mid-sentence.

  “Oh… yeah… sure, you can take it,” Ram said.

  The rain was slowly starting to pick up pace, and I could see rge droplets of water plopping right into the cy bowl in my hands, constantly creating ripples on the surface.

  “The weather’s getting worse, so I’m gonna leave now,” I said.

  The hominid supervisor suddenly looked surprised.

  “You won’t wait for the storm to pass?”

  “Nah.”

  “But you barely touched your bowl,” Ram remarked, noting that I had only taken a few small sips out of the wine that he had given me.

  I ughed all of sudden, with a slight flush on my cheeks.

  “I’d pass out entirely if I drank that entire cup,” I expined. “Honestly, I’m already a little tipsy from the amount that I had. It was very tasty wine though. Thank you.”

  I wasn’t joking when I said that my species had a remarkably poor tolerance for alcohol.

  The hierophant looked incredibly disappointed.

  “Will you come back soon?” He asked me. “I’d love to have your company again. It was very refreshing, and I hope we can become good friends.”

  “Sure, if you’re still here,” I replied sincerely.

  “Still here?” Ram sounded quizzical.

  I approached Hakka and began to gather my belongings for departure.

  “Mother Nature can be a little demoralizing sometimes,” I told him.

  ?