"Jeez. I wish I looked half as cool as that guy..." Ryan muttered to himself, "…No wonder he has a bunch of chicks with him. Better armour, bigger sword, what the hell am I doing? I look like I just walked out of an anime con."
He'd followed Ren's directions down to the letter and found himself mercifully free of the clutches of the suburban environment he found himself in. Ryan had lived in such a suburb for most of his young life before he got dragged to this world, so why was he so bad at navigating them? It perhaps didn't help that his eyes were running, thanks to the prolific number of pollen producing plants.
"Achoo!"
It was supposed to be an easy job! Ryan had run hundreds of them over the years to make his living. He was a missing person specialist. When he heard that the person in question had been sighted in a sparsely populated village on the border, he jumped for joy. It was a sure thing, a slam dunk, it was being offered to him on a silver platter. There was no way he was going to mess this one up.
Three days. Three days had passed since he walked under the archway that welcomed unsuspecting travellers inside. Three days of having his allergies flare up like an angry bear. An eyewitness could have released him from his torment, if there were any to find. But Ryan had learned the hard way that most of the homes within the town weren't occupied at all!
It was a story he'd heard a million times. A young woman up and leaves her family behind without a trace, and they want him to find her. Usually they have a good reason to get away, sometimes they'd wind up dead in a ditch by the side of the road thanks to some bandits, and sometimes those girls…
He didn't like to think about it.
In the borders of the Federation, cases like that were rare. Rebellious daughters from middle-class families were his bread and butter. They could afford to stay somewhere else away from prying eyes; with a friend, or renting somewhere cheap using their money. Mary Freeter was one of those rebellious daughters. Her father was actually rather influential, and having a daughter run away when she's needed for a strategic marriage wasn't good business.
The price for finding her was steep, and Ryan wanted to get his hands on it. But for some reason everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. He'd gotten lost, the few people in the town didn't want to speak with him or didn't know anything, and now some other mercenary was poking around the place. He mentally chastised himself – if he'd just kept his mouth shut and not said anything, he wouldn't have known about the bounty.
"Screw plants man, screw 'em!" he jeered, collapsing down onto a deck chair outside one of the shops. He liked to talk to himself – kept him sane during long jobs. "I should take a page out of that guy's book and get me a companion or two. I've got a good personality! And an awesome sword."
Ryan was plum out of ideas. During his odyssey in the winding streets, he explored every nook and cranny of the place he could find in the hopes that he'd merely stumble upon Mary by accident. That didn't happen. He'd already invested multiple days into the job, and without success it was getting harder and harder to justify staying. Effort didn't pay the bills, results did.
"I'm sorry Sir Freeter, I tried ever so hard to find your daughter – but she chose the biggest craphole town she could!" he sneered. He knew now why other people didn't like living in places like this.
"No luck finding the girl then?"
Ryan turned to face the intruder, it was the man who manned the boarding house where he was staying. He was very tall, with a gaunt face and a bushy mop of hair atop his head. Ryan shrugged, "No Mister Harding, no luck at all!"
"A mighty shame. How about a beer?"
"Uh, sure. I'm pretty thirsty."
He smiled and dipped into the building, returning a minute later with a tankard of light brown liquid. Ryan sipped the local concoction down and lamented his complete failure. The price was dangling over his head and clouding his judgement.
Mister Harding looked down on him from above for a moment, "No interest in the gardens?"
Ryan laughed, "With my allergies? No way. I've been holding my nose the entire time. I can't see, I can't smell. This really isn't my type of place, you know?" His top lip was covered with dried snot and his eyes were red and raw.
Harding's smile was strained, "Oh, but everyone puts so much effort into looking after them. It would be a terrible shame to take all that hard work for granted."
Ryan gave him a curious look, "Listen pal, sometimes people just aren't built for this kinda' thing. I'm one of them. When I moved out of my parent's place, the first thing I did was move to a big city to get away from the summers down there."
Now that took him back.
"There isn't a person in the world who hates plants. If you lived somewhere without them, you'd want them back soon enough," Harding argued.
"I don't know about that – there's a lot of weird folks out there who hate all kinds of normal things. This is a nice town, but I couldn't live here. Gotta' make a few compromises to be comfortable."
Harding bowed politely and hurried back inside without another word. Ryan was getting a weird feeling from the guy, even when the topic of the conversation was something as boring as his allergies. He sat there and continued to drink for an hour, his mind wandering back to the other guy he'd seen scoping the place out.
"Ren huh?"
Was he Japanese? If he was, Ryan thought about offering to swap swords with him. He shut himself down a second later by remembering that the sword was the legendary blade of thunder. What kind of idiot would he be if he gave that up for whatever Ren was using?
Ryan finished his drink and pondered his next move. He could justify spending another day searching, but anything more than that would put him into the red. He couldn't complete any other jobs while dedicating so much time to this one. He'd already questioned all of the shop owners and every person he stumbled across. None of them had any answers for him.
A problem for another day. Ryan was extremely exhausted from being lost for so long. He could handle himself out in the wilderness, but he was paying for a room in the boarding house – he wanted to get the full value out of it before he left. He entered the building and left the now-empty tankard on one of the tavern's tables for the owner to collect later. He wasn't at the front desk.
The small room was very well kept. Ryan was pleased with what he received for his money. He tossed his pack onto the floor and flopped back onto the bed. He nearly fell asleep as soon as his back touched the mattress. He wasn't going to stay awake much longer, but he had forgotten to do something. He clambered back to his feet and closed the door, locking it using the provided in-built latch.
He then returned to the bed and got himself into a more comfortable sleeping position.
Ryan drifted away and slept for several hours. He'd always been a heavy sleeper – but even so, the sound of someone fiddling with the door was enough to bring his consciousness back to the surface. Metal sliding on metal, a loud click, and then the hinges squeaking aloud as the door swung open. Hadn't he locked it the night before?
It was until the culprit was beside his bed that Ryan awoke fully, and when he did…
Wham! Thump!
The intruder collapsed to the ground, clutching his bloodied nose. Ryan wasn't born yesterday, it was going to take more than that to wake him up. A small jar rolled across the floor into the corner. It was the house's owner, Harding. Ryan couldn't bring himself to be surprised, he was the guy with all the keys. But why had he broken into his room?
Harding backed away into the corner and covered himself from further attack. Ryan ignored the quivering innkeeper and retrieved the jar he dropped. He uncorked the lid and glanced inside, finding it filled to the brim with petals, leaves and sap – put together into a foul mixture. "What the hell is this crap?"
"I didn't do anything!" Harding declared, wincing at an invisible blow being thrown his way.
"What is it?" Ryan asked again, "If you don't want to tell me, I can give you more than just a busted nose buddy."
Harding refused to speak.
Ryan hated this kind of messy business. There were a lot of people out there who just couldn't make do with the straight and narrow. He wasn't skilled in extorting people or making them act against their own best interest. He looked back down into the open jar. This wasn't just good room service, he was intending to do something with the concoction judging by the way he was approaching him in the bed.
Drink it? It was too viscous to do that, and forcing a sleeping person to eat something was much more difficult. He recorked the jar out of precaution, leaving it on his bed. Ryan reached down and dragged the owner back to his feet by the front of his shirt. Again, he cowered away out of fear of further retaliation.
"Who put you up to this?"
"Nobody!"
"That's a bunch of crap. What? Do you get off on breaking into your customer's rooms? Or are you trying to steal my sword?"
Ryan couldn't understand the man's reaction. He was acting like he'd done nothing wrong, an egregious case of playing blind and dumb. He backed him up against the wall and released him. He couldn't get out of the room without going through him. So unless he'd worked as a mercenary before, he was out of luck.
"I… I'm just an honest, hardworking boarding house owner…"
"You're not being very honest with me right now pal. What's in the jar? Why are you breaking into my room?"
He swallowed, "It's something we do for all of our new visitors…"
"Yes, and?"
"It's a gift! To make them want to stay! There's nothing wrong with that, is there?"
"Make me want to stay?"
"Y-Yes! The flowers, the lovely flowers! We're trying to attract new residents using our gardens! People just fall in love with them from the moment they arrive!"
"And what does that have to do with the jar?"
He tensed up, "T-The town's first lady… she told us to use it on people who weren't affected."
"Affected by the gardens?"
He nodded frantically. "She told us to make them smell what was inside!"
Smell? That must have been why he hadn't been affected. Ryan's nose was clogged thanks to the pollen. He reached into his pocket and showed him the image of the missing woman again, "Where is she?" You know where she is."
"I-I don't know exactly! She came into town a few weeks ago! She will have been moved to one of the houses, but I don't know which one!"
Ryan smiled, finally he'd gotten something. "Now, that wasn't so tough, was it buddy?" With a swing of his left arm and a hard body blow, Harding crumpled to the ground unconscious. He didn't need the guy spilling the beans on what he'd just revealed. The clock was ticking. Whoever this first lady was, she had a lot of damn questions to answer.
Ryan quickly gathered up his things and closed the door behind him. It was all or nothing now. He stopped in the hallway and had an epiphany – Ren and his companions had been getting up close and personal with the gardens already. If he could just find them and snap them out of whatever mind control insanity they'd been afflicted with…
Well, four heads were better than one. Now he just had to remember which way he came from.