Chapter One: Hopes of a Reunion

“What the hell?! Has grandma been alive this whole time?!”

Under the starry sky, my screamed words echoed through the quiet streets of Ninoritch. There I was, standing in the backyard of my shop, screaming “Grandma!” into the night air like a madman. My poor neighbors. I can only apologize.

“Sh-Shiro? What’s wrong?” Karen said, utterly shocked by my sudden outburst.

But I wasn’t finished. “If you’re alive, why didn’t you tell me?! I thought you were dead!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. I eventually ran out of breath, and I let myself slump to the ground. The gentle evening breeze tenderly caressed my cheeks.

“Sh-Shiro, are you all right?” Karen tried again. “What was all that about?”

“For several years now, I’ve thought my grandma was dead,” I explained. “But here you are telling me she’s not, and well...” I paused as I tried to sum up my emotions. “I guess all the feelings I’d been bottling up just kinda overflowed back there.”

“Hm. Do you want to talk about it?” Karen offered. “It might make you feel better.”

“I appreciate your concern,” I said sincerely. “Well, I guess if you don’t mind listening to me prattle on about my issues for a little bit...”

“No, of course I don’t mind,” she assured me. “And it doesn’t just need to be ‘for a little bit’ either. You can talk for as long as you like. It’s fine.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” I said, then promptly launched into my tale. “It all happened seven years ago. At some point, grandma just suddenly stopped answering my calls and...”

I recounted the tragedy that had befallen the Amata family seven years prior: grandma’s sudden disappearance that had led our entire family and all of her neighbors to assume she must be dead, the ensuing family dispute over what to do with her house... I basically told her everything. Well, except for the fact that I was from another world, of course.

“I see. So Alice the Immortal Witch—your grandmother—suddenly went away without telling anyone, huh?” she summarized once I was done.

“Yeah. But from what you just told me, she’s been alive this whole time. That’s why I was so surprised, and well...”

“You couldn’t help but scream,” Karen said, finishing my sentence for me.

“Yup,” I confirmed. “I do feel bad about disturbing the neighbors, though.”

“Well, you just this minute learned your grandmother was alive when you thought she’d been dead for years. It’s no surprise your feelings got the better of you.” She paused and glanced at the beer bottle in my hand. “Especially considering you’ve been drinking,” she added with a teasing smile.

“Sorry if I weirded you out,” I said sheepishly.

“Don’t worry about it. Besides, if you hadn’t been drinking, we probably wouldn’t even have been talking about your grandmother in the first place. Plus...” She brought the beer bottle up to her lips and took a few gulps from it. “I got to try this delicious alcohol! From now on, you should always invite me over to drink with you, instead of drinking out here alone.”

“Really? You don’t think I’m a pain when I’m a bit, uh, tipsy?” I asked.

“Nope. It was actually pretty fun seeing this other side of you.”

I laughed. “Well, please pretend that my little outburst was all down to the alcohol and wipe it from your memory, all right?”

“Don’t worry,” Karen reassured me. “I won’t tell a soul what happened here tonight.”

“What about the ‘wipe it from your memory’ part?” I prompted.

“Well, you don’t usually let your guard down around me, so let me have that at least.”

“I’d say my guard is pretty much always down,” I said and sighed dramatically, which made Karen chuckle. I ended up laughing too. “Still...” I said after a little while, “grandma’s alive, huh? She...” I choked up slightly. “She really, really is...”

I felt my vision going blurry and I quickly turned away from Karen so she couldn’t see my face. She could probably have guessed why, but she didn’t comment on it.

Grandma was alive. So what should I do now? It was no secret that I was a grandma’s boy. If it were at all possible, I’d love to see her again, even if it was just once. No, scrap that. Once wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to see her many, many times. I wanted to see her and watch action movies with her, like we used to. But if I wanted to go look for her, it’d mean leaving Ninoritch, and I’d been told the wider world was full of all sorts of dangers. There were monsters, of course, but also all manner of bandits and brigands, which meant there was no way I’d be able to go look for her all on my own. I’d need to at least hire a few bodyguards to accompany me on my perilous journey.

I crossed my arms and let out a pensive “hmmm.” For someone like me, who didn’t know the first thing about the world of Ruffaltio, would it even be possible to find grandma? I let out another “hmmm” and would probably have intoned a few more if Karen hadn’t picked that moment to pat me on the shoulder. She must have been feeling bad for me and decided she couldn’t just stand there and do nothing.

“I imagine you’ll want to go look for your grandmother, Shiro,” she guessed correctly. “But I suggest sticking around in Ninoritch for a little bit longer.”

“Stay here?” I said, somewhat confused by this bit of advice.

“Yes. Last year, your grandmother came to our little town for the harvest festival. Perhaps she’ll come again this year,” Karen suggested.

“She might,” I mused. “Grandma always did love lively places. She used to take me and my little sisters to festivals all the time.”

She would be in high spirits the whole time we were there, claiming that “as a born-and-bred Tokyoite,” festivals always made her tingle with excitement. Except she wasn’t a Tokyoite at all. She wasn’t even from the world Tokyo was in.

“Well, there you are, then,” Karen said encouragingly. “She seemed to enjoy herself a lot last year, and she danced the day away. I think it’s very possible she’ll come back this year.”

Grandma dancing, huh? The only type of dancing I could imagine her doing was the Bon festival dance. If I recalled correctly, I was pretty sure she’d once caused quite a stir at the Bon festival due to how impressive her Bon dance was.

“It’s two months until the harvest festival,” Karen said, holding up two fingers to emphasize this. “This year also marks the town’s 120th anniversary, which means the marketplace will be even busier than usual. You can expect to see plenty of stalls and carts in the town square for the duration of the festival, and many people who have left Ninoritch and moved elsewhere will come back for the day, bringing their families with them.”

“So they’ll all be coming back to their hometown to celebrate, huh?”

“Exactly.”

Quite a few people in Japan also went back to their hometowns for this exact same purpose.

“Also, people must’ve heard about your grandmother—Alice the Immortal Witch—being at the festival last year, as I’ve had quite a few inquiries about this year’s festival,” Karen added. “Most of them asked if Alice would be there again this year, though some just wondered if we had an inn in the town.”

“Oh?” I said. “That means there might be a surge of tourists coming to Ninoritch around the time of the festival, then, right?”

“As always, your deduction skills are mighty impressive, Mr. Merchant. That’s right,” she confirmed with a nod. I noticed her cheeks were slightly flushed because of the alcohol. “Yup, we might get a lot of tourists coming here to celebrate the harvest festival this year. From what I’ve been told, nearby cities are even planning on running stagecoaches to Ninoritch for the festival. So I’m now being forced to organize something that’s on a much bigger scale than anything I’ve ever had to before,” she said with a shake of her head.

Despite putting it like that, she was grinning from ear to ear, which wasn’t all that much of a surprise because if lots of tourists came to the town, they’d naturally end up spending money here. And if the residents earned more money, the town’s tax yield would go up too. Of course Karen would be happy about that.

“The adventurers from the Fairy’s Blessing guild will also be here for the festival,” I pointed out. “I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun.”

“I hope so...” she said with a sigh.

“It will,” I reassured her. “Besides, it’ll be a good opportunity for the townsfolk to get to know all the new adventurers.”

She chuckled. “You know, it’s weird. You’ve somehow managed to convince me.”

The biggest guild in the country, the Fairy’s Blessing, had recently set up a subsidiary branch in Ninoritch, which had brought an influx of adventurers to the town, but as they’d all arrived at around the same time, they were having a hard time integrating with the townsfolk. After all, adventurers spent most of their time fighting, and they came across as intimidating. I was pretty much used...