Long Island

Chapter 8: Waiting...

'What a pain!' Its not like Swamy didn't want to get famous, but for completing a great adventure or achieving a high reward. He wanted to be famous after he got strong. After all everyone targets the famous guys in order to beat them. Whats more, he also didn't want to be mugged by crowds of people asking questions. He didn't want more people overtaking him.

Back home, he quickly checked the forums. Yeah, there was a big talk about him going on. He found the original post and started reading every reply. Soon he relaxed. First time he was glad of people's overarching imagination. Ofcourse some of them had been right about some stuff, but with so many things people had assumed, he thought it didn't matter. No one recognized him for sure which was more than enough for him.

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Raka lifted his head at the sound of bells.

"Welcome, how may I help you?", said Neona who was standing beside him at the counter of the food shop. The old lady who came in had a cloth or leather made, he wasn't sure, shopping bag with her.

"Hi, please give me 2 stones of blackfruit, half a stone of bluebird eggs and a half stone of baylise leafs. Oh this pie looks nice, is it blueberry, then I will have one as well!"

"Yes, Raka could you wrap up the pie for her. I will get the other things" saying which she started measuring the stuff on a balancing scale. Raka wrapped the pie in paper and waited for her to finish. Soon after, she got the lady's bag and placed all the items in it.

"Thank you for coming. Have a nice day!" which Raka repeated after her as the old lady customer left the shop with another tinkling of the bells.

Raka was enjoying his time working at Neona's store. The atmosphere was excellent and most of the customers friendly enough. The best part was he got to learn about so many new things about the island and the world in general.

Stones were a unit of measure of weight and almost half a kilo, according to his estimate. Blackfruits are actually black and are found growing on trees in the forest, on the south side of the village. Only strong hunters went there to hunt, and brought this fruit. Seems it was quite a delicacy and so a bit expensive. Bluebirds were blue sea birds which traveled from island to island and often nested on this island. The birds themselves were fierce and strong slightly larger than the two headed wolf. But their eggs were delicious. They could not be hunted as they were always found nesting in groups of hundreds. Neona reckons she once saw a group of almost 500 flying together. But they had this tendency to leave unhatched eggs behind when it was time for the group to leave. People waited for them to leave, and quickly collected the eggs, before other animals could find them. It happened more than once, that even animals were waiting for the birds to leave and the hunters had a fight on their hands. She said while laughing.

A gold coin equals 100 silver and a silver equaled 100 copper coins and seemed to be the adopted currency in this world. However there were some countries far away which dealt in a different currency as well.

The people in the north of the island tilled the land and grew apples, oranges, blueberries, wheat, rice, cacao, baylise leaves and other things. By the way baylise leaf tasted like bay leaf.

The closest island to Ilmentia is Brittanica to the north, Khardoum to the east and Dalmund to the south. The west sea was too dangerous and people who traveled there didn't return alive so no one knew what lies there.

'Dalmund, so that's the other starter island.' Wondering if the other starter islands were close by as well, he asked about Fedora and Singoor, the other starter islands. "Oh Fedora is the next island after Khardoum about 50 leagues east and Singoor is east of Dalmund not far from it." she replied. In real life one league is a little over 5 kms. Hoping the developers had made the same use, 50 leagues would be around 250 kms.