Chapter 177: The Bear Receives an Invitation

Chapter 177:
The Bear Receives an Invitation

 

AFTER ORDERING THE STUFFED animals from Sherry, I headed to the Adventurers’ Guild. It was time to finally get my reward for the mines. It’d been a few days since I’d slain the golems, and I was told the Adventurers’ Guild in Crimonia would have received word of the quest’s completion by now. All I had to do was pick up my reward at the guild.

When I got to the guild, I consulted with Helen.

“Miss Yuna, you took a quest at the capital?” Helen asked while taking my guild card to examine it. “Looks like you investigated some golems at a mine and slayed them. Yes, we have the information from the capital. The quest is complete.”

The golems had stopped appearing at the mines, so normal mining operations had resumed. I guess that meant that either the mithril golem or the bearyllium I’d found really was the source of the golems…maybe?

Speaking of the bearyllium, I was still curious about that stuff. But the dwarf town was far away, so I decided to put that on hold for now.

Helen returned my guild card to me, gave me my quest reward, and then looked at me rather seriously. “By the way, Miss Yuna…”

“What’s up?”

“I overheard some of the lady adventurers saying you’re selling something very tasty.”

“Do you mean the cake?”

“Could I put in an advance order? You’re sold out by the time I’m off work and I won’t have a day off for a while.”

The other female guild workers nodded along with Helen. I guess the cake really was popular enough to be sold out by the time they were done with work. The bakery did close early, after all.

“I asked the kids at the bakery if they could reserve some for me the other day,” Helen added, “but they said they couldn’t do that.”

We got a lot of reservation requests, but I heard from Tiermina that they wouldn’t be taking any. I vaguely remembered going along with it with some vague response. “I’ll leave it to you, Tiermina.” Something like that.

“So, would you take a reservation for me?” Helen clasped her hands together as she asked for this favor.

“That’s unfair, Helen,” one of the people at the reception desk protested.

“Yeah, how could you just order one for yourself?” another one said.

“Well, I’m friends with Miss Yuna,” Helen told them.

Wait, when did we become friends? I thought, but I didn’t say that out loud. That aside, Helen had done a lot of stuff to help me until now.

“I can’t really reserve cake for you,” I admitted.

“I knew it...” The staff members looked disappointed. C’mon, I wasn’t done talking!

“But I have a cake on me right now, so you can all have some together.” I pulled out a strawberry shortcake from the bear storage. The women working at the guild all perked up. It was one of Nerin’s practice cakes, so it’d probably taste as good as the ones on sale.

“Is this the cake everyone’s been talking about?” asked Helen.

“Make sure to slice it up and share,” I told them.

“Um. How much do we owe you?”

“It’s fine. We’re friends, aren’t we? This time it’s my treat.”

“Oh, Miss Yuna!” Helen stood up and firmly grasped my bear puppet. “Th-thank you so much.”

“No need to make a big deal out of it,” I said.

“So many adventurers have been bragging about how good it is. We were so jealous.”

“Well, if you like it, you can come by and order more when you have a day off?”

“Of course! I’d love to go eat at your shop.”

Helen and the two guild staffers thanked me profusely.

 

Once I got back to my bear house, I decided to play with Kumayuru and Kumakyu for a bit. They did such a great job at the capital that I needed to reward them, you know? “Get in here, you two!”

They trotted along to me, and I gave ’em a hug. We passed the time playing until dinner when someone came by the house.

I opened the door to find Fina out of breath. “Why’re you in such a hurry?!”

“Th-the le-let-t-ter.”

A letter? Weird. Before hearing her out, I took out a pitcher of water and a cup from my bear storage and handed them to Fina. Fina gulped down all the water in one go and caught her breath.

“All right then,” I said, “what is it?”

“Didn’t you get one, Yuna?”

“A letter?”

Fina looked like she was holding said letter in her hand. Now that she mentioned it, I hadn’t really ever paid attention to my mailbox. I mean, who would even send me a letter in this world? Who would bother to send one? They hadn’t in my old world, so I couldn’t see why they would here.

“Please double check, Yuna!”

“Sure, okay.”

Fina rushed me along and forced me to check my bear-shaped mailbox. There really was an envelope inside.

“Oh, thank goodness,” said Fina, with a sigh of relief. “You got one too.”

But from whom? I checked for the sender.

“Misana Fahrengram…” Who was that? It seemed familiar, somehow. “Is this someone you know, Fina?”

“It’s Lady Misana. We met her on the way to the capital for the king’s birthday festival. The noble Lady Misa?”

Oh, right—Misa was just Misana’s nickname. I hadn’t recognized her full name. But why was Misa sending me a letter?

I decided to invite Fina in so she could tell me the details. “Did you read the letter, Fina?”

“Yep, I read it. It was an invitation to Misa’s birthday party.”

“A birthday party?” I broke the seal and scanned the letter. Just as Fina had said, it was an invitation to Misa’s birthday party.

“Um…I understand why you would get one, but why would Lady Misa send an invitation to me?! It’s a noble’s birthday party!” Fina gave her own letter a troubled look.

Honestly, I thought it made a whole lot more sense for Misa to invite Fina than me. They’d been getting along pretty well in the capital, after all. They’d even wandered around the city a bit.

“What do you think will happen if we turned her down, Yuna?”

How was I supposed to know? I didn’t know the etiquette when it came to nobility in this world. Plus, going to a birthday party sounded like a real pain. I hadn’t gone to a single one of those things in my original world, let alone a snooty one for nobility. Sorry, Misa—I really didn’t want to go hang out with a bunch of aristocrats. Ugh, and they’d probably all be wearing pretty dresses. I’d look like a total clown in my bear onesie…

So I had my own reasons not to go, even if they weren’t the same as Fina’s. Could I turn down the invite?

The two of us didn’t know much about the nobility, so we just couldn’t seem to figure the whole thing out. But there was someone who could give us an answer.

“We have to ask Cliff and Noa,” I said.

“You mean Lord Cliff and Lady Noa?” Fina asked.

“Sure, those guys. If we got invitations, Noa probably did too.”

It was getting a little late in the day, so we resolved to visit Noa the next morning.