Chapter 92: Number Boards

The next day, on the morning of the second day of the request to organise the Adventurers’ Guild reference room, Ren handed Fred and Loren a set of small boards bound together with cord.

“Today I’m going to write the numbers as numbers, so if you can’t make them out, look at this.”

“Huh?”

“Eh? What’s this?”

Fred and Loren, handed the bundle of boards, looked puzzled. Victor came over with a slightly awkward look on his face.

“Ren. Fred and Loren can’t read letters, you know…”

“Yeah. That’s why I thought they could look at these.”

On the front of each thin board was a number, and on the back, lines drawn to the same count as the number. Fred, turning the boards over one at a time with a puzzled look, suddenly went wide-eyed.

“Ah! Aaah! I think I’ve got it!”

“Eh?! What is it, Fred?”

“Fred-nii? What have you got?”

When Loren pressed in on Fred, Fred gave a broad grin.

“Heh heh! Want me to tell you?”

At Fred’s self-satisfied tone, Loren went sulky and pushed out his lips.

“Ehh…?”

“This here is…”

“Aah! Don’t say it! I’m going to think about it a bit more!”

Loren flicked hurriedly through the cord-bound boards, comparing the face with the letters written on it against the face with the lines, over and over. After turning about three of them, it came to him.

“Aah! So the character with three lines on the back of it means ‘3’? And this one’s ‘4’?”

“Correct.”

“Yesss!”

Loren threw his arms up in delight, as though he had won a prize. Victor took the bundle of boards from Fred and flicked through them, looking impressed.

“Well I never. That’s brilliant. With this, we can manage even when things are written in numbers. Ren, was a tool like this kept at the guild?”

“I made it.”

“Huh?”

Victor’s eyes went round, and he looked at the bundle of boards again. He even held it up to the light coming in at the window.

“Amazing. It’s like something you’d buy in a shop. The letters are neat, and these boards are all the same size!”

Victor praised him with shining eyes, and it made Ren feel a little ticklish.

Just as he had said he would, on the boards giving the classification instructions he wrote numbers rather than actually drawing lines to the count. At first Fred and Loren kept staring back and forth between the numbers on the instruction boards and the numbers on the bundle, but as they gradually got used to it, they checked their answers against the bundle less and less.

At the break, while the Young Branch Squad were sitting round a table drinking weak medicinal herb tea, Ren brought over the bundle of boards with the cord taken off.

“Hey. Shall we play a number-guessing quiz?”

“A quiz? …And what do we do?”

“It’s something I just thought of…”

From the unbound bundle Ren laid the boards out one by one, number side up, scattered about.

“The person setting the question says a number. Say they call ‘3’ — then you take the card with that number on it. Quickest one wins it. If you take the wrong card, there’s a penalty.”

“Ohh. That’s good, that is. …But I’ll know them straight away, won’t I…”

“Will you give it a try?”

“Right!”

Victor nodded and called over to the party members.

“Let’s all have a go for now. …We just take the board with the number that gets called, is that it?”

“Yeah. …Right, here goes. …’5′!”

“Ah!”

“…Heh.”

After waiting until they had drained their medicinal herb tea and the cups had been set aside, Ren turned over a card with a white back and read out the number. The one who took the card marked “5” in a flash, without a moment’s hesitation, was Colette.

“Colette, you’re quick!”

“Ehh? Hang on a moment! It’s not fair, the ones who can read numbers know straight away.”

“Then learn them, why don’t you.”

“Not that fast, I can’t…. Ah, but I know this one. It’s ‘1’, isn’t it.”

Loren said it, picked up the card with “1” written on it, and turned it over. On the back a single line was drawn.

“There! I looked at loads of them earlier!”

“Right! Take the board for a number that hasn’t been called and the penalty is missing a turn.”

“Ehhh?”

Loren, looking thoroughly crushed, put the board marked “1” ruefully back down on the table. The one on a penalty pulled his chair back a little and waited.

Fred smirked.

“If a ‘1’ comes up, I’ll take it.”

“Don’t you take it! Don’t call ‘1’!”

“‘7’.”

Whip.

“Colette, you’re quick!”

“…Victor, you can read numbers, can’t you?”

“Obviously I can!”

Victor rolled up his sleeves, looking put out. And the next card Victor did somehow manage to take. Loren managed to get hold of the “1” card, but Colette took nearly all of the rest, so out of sheer frustration he settled on a contest with Fred, just the two of them.

Just as it was heating up, the break came to an end.

Loren, a fierce glint in his eyes, gave the bundle of boards a rattling shake.

“I’ll have them memorised by midday! Then we go again!”

“Right. I’m not losing to you either, Loren.”

Fred too lifted up the fist gripping his bundle of boards and showed it to Loren.

At midday, the moment they had finished eating, Loren and Fred began their contest just as they had declared. Colette read out the numbers. Both of them had got far quicker at taking the cards than before. Victor, watching them, spoke to Ren with a beaming face.

“It’s amazing. Loren and Fred can read numbers already!”

“I’m glad…”

Ren, relieved, turned his eyes to the instruction boards. On the first day he had drawn any number of lines on the instruction boards so that the instructions would get across even to someone who couldn’t read numbers. But being able to read them was more efficient.

He had heard that Loren, after being told off for messing about with a sand-filled board, had stopped going to the church and never learned his letters. If people couldn’t read letters, they wouldn’t use the reference room. Wondering whether he could get them to learn letters, he had even thought of making some tool other than a sand board that could be written on again and again.

What if he mixed something into glue to make it slower to set, he had wondered, and he had gone so far as to make one prototype.

But Victor’s remark that Loren had “messed about with the sand board” had stayed in his head. Even if he made it out of glue, Loren might mess about with that too.

In that case, was there not something they could learn from while messing about? That was the thought from which the number boards had come.

Using “Small Box Divide” he could turn out large quantities of boards of a uniform size, so making them hadn’t taken very long.

Loren and Fred were snatching the boards from one another, raising happy peals of laughter. Feeling somehow contented, Ren let his mouth relax and wrote letters on the card in his hand.

Victor noticed the card in Ren’s hand and leaned in to look.

“Oh? …Are you making cards for letters other than numbers as well?”

“Yeah. I thought it’d be better if they understood the words we use for organising the reference materials.”

On the back, the word “magical beast” and a picture like the silhouette of a horn rabbit. On the front he wrote the first letter of the word. He went on writing other cards too — “medicinal herb”, “beast”, “bird” and the rest — combining the first letter, the word and a picture.