Chapter 6: A Stressful Misspelling

Chapter 6:
A Stressful Misspelling

 

I’D BEEN SO BUSY with the tournament, hike, and personal business that I hadn’t seen Zeral in a while. Today, he showed up at the drugstore with a downcast expression.

“Hey. Why the long face?” I asked. “You look like you’re dying.”

“I thought I’d say my goodbyes,” Zeral replied.

Excuse me? “What, are you transferring to a different school?”

“Transferring…?”

Right, those jokes don’t work here. “Never mind. So, what’s the deal? Going out of town on vacation?”

“I guess you could say that. Y’know, I do think I’ll go somewhere nice. I’ve done my best in this world.” As always, he dragged the chair for regulars over and sat down in front of me. “Know how you just said I look like I’m dying? That’s because I actually am.”

“If you want me to cure a terminal illness or something, could you not set the bar too high?” I said nervously. “I’d need time to prep.”

“Wait, if I did ask you to create a treatment like that, you would?”

“Well, er…we’re friends, after all.”

“Reiji, buddy!” Zeral tried to hug me.

I pushed his face away with my palm. “Quit it, creep.”

“Don’t be so aloof! Once I’m gone, you’ll regret acting like that. You’ll see. You’ll say, ‘Oh, how I wish I was kinder to him when I had the chance!’”

Hold on. I thought he was just messing around, but he’s acting super serious. This is actually starting to sound dire.

Zeral teared up, baiting me to ask what was wrong.

Fine, I’ll bite. “What’s up? I’ll help if I can.”

“Reiji, buddy!”

“Too close! Too close!” I shoved his face with as much power as I could muster.

“It all started three days ago,” Zeral began.

Here he goes.

“I made a written oath,” he continued. “You get where I’m going with this, right?”

Nope.

“Yeah. An oath never to speak to another woman outside my family for all eternity. My beloved Feris forced me to.”

Yikes. Talk about a ball and chain. Jealous as I was that the guy had a girlfriend, I’d never envied their relationship in the slightest. “I get it. You broke the oath, right?”

“Like hell! I never break a promise, Reiji, pal.”

“No? Either way, the oath itself is crazy.”

“Let me get back to my story. So, I wound up writing an oath never to talk to another woman. It began, ‘I hereby pledge to Faris.’ To Faris.”

Why’d he say it twice?

“Look.” Zeral pulled a roll of parchment from his belt. He opened it, revealing a document that really did swear utter loyalty to his controlling girlfriend.

Yup. There it is: “I hereby pledge to Faris.”

“What’s your point?”

“Pal, you’re missing something.”

“And what would that be?”

Zeral jabbed his finger at the line and read it again. “‘I hereby pledge to Faris.’”

Wait…Faris? Her name’s Feris. “The name’s wrong!” I blurted as it dawned on me.

Zeral sighed. “I made an awful mistake.”

If he showed Feris the oath, she’d freak out over this “Faris” person, leading to Zeral’s untimely demise and subsequent journey to the afterlife.

“Can’t you just rewrite it?”

“This was all the parchment I had left.”

“You’re rich! Buy more!”

“I don’t have time! She’s coming by for the oath today!” Zeral screeched to the heavens, beginning to sob. He was a nervous wreck.

Parchment, huh? I’d only ever seen Lord Valgas use the stuff; I’d never spotted it in any of the shops around town. It just wasn’t something commoners needed or had access to. I wrote things down at the drugstore, sure, but always on scraps of cloth and stuff. Important documents like oaths and letters apparently required parchment, though.

“I had five sheets originally,” Zeral added. “But I messed the other ones up already.”

“How many mistakes did you make?!”

It was clear at a glance that each line of Zeral’s oath was pretty long. Every sentence reiterated his eternal love for Feris and his promise to ignore other women.

You’re more likely to make a mistake writing a long line, I reflected. And Zeral had screwed up Feris’s name. There was no walking that back.

“That leads me to now.” Zeral stood, slouching sadly. “Reiji, buddy, thanks for everything.”

“Hold your horses!” I exclaimed, eliciting a puzzled look from the guy. “Just wait.”

At first, I assumed we could scratch out Zeral’s misspelling with a knife or needle. This was an “official” document, though, so that’d look bad. Still, there was a specific product nobody in this world would be familiar with. Even if they were, they’d have no clue it’d been used after the fact, so it could definitely fool someone.

I headed into the lab, where Noela and Mina had been listening to Zeral’s story quietly.

“Master, Noela help,” the werewolf girl offered immediately.

“I’d like to help too,” Mina said. “I’d hate for one of your precious few close friends to pass away!”

Don’t say it like that, Mina! It’s humiliating. “Thanks, ladies. I’ll take you up on that.”

“Groo!”

“Great!”

Giving the girls instructions, I went ahead and created the new product. Once I’d poured the ingredients into a bottle, the mixture glowed predictably.

 

Delete Fluid: Reverts paper to its original blank form. Spread fluid on ink to erase it. Fast-acting and quick-drying.

 

With this Delete Fluid, we should be able to touch up Zeral’s oath.

“What this, Master?”

“Well…”

Looking around, I found a note I’d stuck on a shelf. I pulled it down and brushed some Delete Fluid on it; the writing began to vanish.

“Arroo! Disappear?”

“The ink’s completely gone!” Mina exclaimed.

“That’s what this stuff does.”

It was evident from Noela and Mina’s tilted heads that neither girl understood how I’d apply the product.

I headed back into the drugstore. “Hey, Zeral. If you use this stuff, you should be fine!”

I brushed some Delete Fluid on his oath right away. The transparent liquid was the exact same color as the parchment; even if you knew it’d been used, it was incredibly tough to spot. Someone unfamiliar with the product would never notice which lines had changed.

Zeral gasped. “Th-the misspellings are gone!”

“Yup. Now you can just rewrite the spots where you messed up.”

“Thanks so much, Reiji, pal!”

“I told you, that’s too close!”

I scuttled away from Zeral and then got him a quill pen with some ink. It didn’t take him long to correct his mistakes. “I did it! So much for dying!”

Congrats, bud.

As Noela and Mina quietly watched Zeral celebrate his new lease on life, I sensed a dark presence at the drugstore door.

“Would you like some tea, Mr. Zeral?” Mina offered.

Uh, Mina, now’s a bad time! I quickly covered the girls’ mouths.

“M-Miphter Reiji?” Mina asked from behind my hand.

“Groo?”

“Thanks, Mina! I’d love some!” Zeral chuckled, his face relaxed.

He was unaware of the foreboding aura that emanated from Feris, who now stood right behind him. “I heard you were at the drugstore, so I came by to check on you,” she said, her bloodshot eyes staring at Zeral from behind. “What are you doing, my love?”

“Eek…” Zeral breathed.

I slid the hands covering Mina and Noela’s mouths over their eyes instead. These two aren’t ready for R-rated horror.

“You seem to be having a good time,” Feris continued.

“Eyaaaugh!”

Smiling and bidding us a gracious goodbye, Feris dragged the soulless husk of Zeral out of the drugstore by his collar.

I wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. I guess his untimely death was inevitable. Well, I’m glad the girls didn’t get caught up in it.

As I lifted my hands from their eyes, they questioned me immediately.

“What was that for, Mr. Reiji?”

“What happen, Master?”

“Something tragic,” I replied, gazing blankly into the distance like a hard-boiled film-noir detective. Yeah…tragic. Good luck in your next life, Zeral.

 

***

 

A few days later, Zeral reappeared at the drugstore with palm marks on both cheeks. He silently bought a single potion.

Stay strong, buddy.