Chapter 106: Eugene
A well-cut jacket. Polished shoes. The man, his grey hair tied back at the nape, looked steadily at Ren with cool blue-grey eyes.
Ren looked up at him warily.
“All those things” could mean any number of things.
The sorting of the reference room?
The quill pen?
The letter-board game?
While he was thinking it over, Mikaila spoke to him.
“Ren-kun, this is the gentleman who wanted to meet you.”
“Me?”
“That’s right.”
The man stooped a little to bring his eyes closer to Ren’s level.
“How do you do. My name is Eugene. Not the Royal Capital — I work at the guild in a town some way from here. Materials Procurement Overseer for the Adventurers’ Guild, Eastern District of the Kingdom. A guild employee, in other words.”
Ren hurriedly bowed his head too.
“I’m Ren.”
“Yes, so I hear.”
Eugene’s tone was somehow amused, and his eyes rested on Ren with interest.
“Might we talk in the back for a moment?”
“Yes…”
Eugene indicated the far side of the counter, and Ren tensed a little.
Uneasy, he followed after Eugene into a narrow room like a reception room.
Eugene offered Ren a chair and dropped heavily into the seat opposite.
Then he looked at Ren steadily with those blue-grey eyes, and smiled.
“…I gather it was you who sorted out the reference room.”
“Yes.”
“And the writing implement that uses charcoal?”
“That was me too.”
“And the letter-board game?”
“…Yes.”
With each answer, the man’s eyes grew a little rounder.
“You thought all of it up on your own?”
“Victor and the others gave me their opinions, but…”
“The thinking was yours?”
“It was me.”
“Well now…”
Eugene folded his arms. He looked at Ren for a while.
Had he said something strange?
Just as Ren was beginning to worry, Eugene spoke.
“How old are you?”
“Nine.”
“Nine.”
The man repeated the word. Then he looked at Mikaila. Mikaila was standing with her back to the door and her arms folded.
“I did tell you. I wasn’t making it up.”
“You weren’t at that.”
“Quite so.”
The two of them were satisfying themselves about something. Ren alone couldn’t follow.
Eugene turned back to Ren.
“I was shown the reference room. It’s become very easy to use.”
“Ah, yes…”
Ren was rather pleased.
He had done all that classifying and sorting. Praise for it made him simply glad.
“Thank you very much.”
“Cutting grooves into the sides of the boards to tell them apart is good, and the notion of managing them by number is good. It’s been well thought through.”
Ren felt self-conscious and quietly looked away.
“And then the writing implement! That’s—”
Eugene’s voice rose a little.
Mikaila set the char quill pen and the char-core quill pen, both wrapped in cloth, on the table.
Eugene took up the char-core quill pen and wrote on a board.
“…Rub it hard and it blacks, so it won’t do for formal documents, but doing without an inkpot is the merit of it. Extremely convenient to carry. You’ve worked the tube grass nicely. Easier to hold than a quill pen used as it comes.”
“Tube grass?”
“The tube-shaped stem at the grip.”
“Ah, that…”
The hollow stem he also used when making simple arrows was apparently called “tube grass”.
It wasn’t a medicinal herb, so it hadn’t been in the guild’s reference material. He was glad to know the name of it at last.
Eugene lifted the char-core quill pen from the table.
“No inkpot to carry. Quick to write with. For numbers or marks it’s perfectly practical.”
So saying, he drew a curve or two on the board with the char-core quill pen.
Eugene rubbed the writing with a finger. The black spread a little.
“It won’t do for a formal contract, mind.”
Ren nodded.
He had known that much himself.
“But for adventurers it would be useful,” Eugene said.
“Drawing a map in the forest. Recording a tally of kills. Noting where a medicinal herb grows. Copying out the details of a request. For such purposes it’s more than enough.”
Ren’s chest grew a little warm.
“Thank you very much.”
“I’m not finished yet.”
This time Eugene picked up a letter board.
“This is interesting as well. Teaching material for letters, is it?”
“That wasn’t what I meant by it…”
Ren’s face went a little troubled.
“I only wanted people to use the reference room more.”
Eugene laughed under his breath.
“I see. But the upshot of it’s literacy teaching — and aimed at adventurers, at that.”
Ren tilted his head.
He hadn’t meant to do anything so grand.
Eugene studied Ren for a while.
Then he came to the point.
“Ren-kun.”
“Yes.”
“This char-core quill pen.”
He set the char-core quill pen down on the table.
“I would like the guild to sell it.”
Ren went rigid.
“Eh?”
“Nothing is decided yet, of course.”
“The staff will trial it.”
“We’ll hear what the other branches think.”
“We’ll look into whether it would sell at all.”
Having said that much, Eugene laid a sheet of paper on the table.
“Which is why it’s a provisional contract.”
“Pro… visional contract?”
“Yes.”
Eugene smiled wryly at Ren’s reaction.
“Put simply—”
“It’s a promise that nobody will copy the thing you made and sell it without your leave.”
Ren blinked.
“If it sells, I get money?”
“You do.”
“And if it doesn’t sell?”
“Then nothing.”
“Do I lose anything?”
“In the main, no.”
Ren thought it over for a while.
Then he asked, nervously,
“Do you really think it’ll sell?”
Eugene smiled a little.
“Whether it sells, I can’t say. But—”
He rolled the char-core quill pen under his fingertips.
“I wanted one myself. The guild master and Mikaila both say they want to try it.”
He left a beat.
“That alone makes it worth the trial.”
Ren said nothing.
Sell, or not sell.
More than any of that, he was glad to be told that something he had thought up had value.