Kizuna leaped onto a nearby crate and pointed with a paw. “Beacon’s two blocks east. But watch the merchants — they fluster you.”
Belfast remembered the charm. She placed it on the ledger. It glowed faintly, the thread harmonizing with the ink. Her voice, soft and exact, read the Keeper’s notations aloud. Each item became less heavy as she named it: worn rope, a lantern with a cracked lens, a list of names that had nothing left to come home to.
A brass clock tower chimed thirteen. Belfast’s eyes narrowed. Somewhere beyond the cobbled lane, a bell made of gears and glass answered, and a procession of travelers marched past — rogues with telescopes, clerics whose stoles glowed faintly, and a hulking knight whose pauldron bore the sigil of a ship. adventuring with belfast in another world v01 best
And so the maid— that was, Belfast—began her ledger of otherworldly duties, where tea and tact were an adventurer’s truest weapons.
Belfast’s brows drew together; merchants were a problem she could solve with a smile and ledger. The market swallowed them in a tapestry of smells: spiced rations, oil for lamps that burned blue, trinkets humming with runes. An old woman offered a charm and called Belfast “milady” with such reverence that Belfast’s composure almost softened. Kizuna leaped onto a nearby crate and pointed with a paw
Belfast rose, polite to the bone even in confusion. “Apologies. I must acquaint myself with this… locale. Would you mind if I inspected the household accounts?”
They bargained: a cup of tea for a guiding current; a patchwork of song for a seam in the dark; a promise to remember names of lost ships. Belfast kept the ledger’s pages tidy, folding a hundred-year-old apology into the margins where the Keeper had once hidden it. The sea-wraiths, annoyed and amused by such ceremony, relented. She placed it on the ledger
Belfast inclined her head. “Precision is a form of kindness. Tell me the facts.”