Sheila the adventurer

After leaving, we started to walk around the city of Tiaanway. There were many shops, food stalls and houses around. The atmosphere was similar to Lorel but everything was still new to me. We bought some food since we were starting to get hungry after looking at the stalls. Sheila really liked the food and kept staring at different foods. So I kept buying many types of food to satisfy her curiosity. We both ate until we were full. That meant Sheila ate 3 times more than me. Maybe we didn't have enough food at lunchtime.

Once we had eaten our fill, we decided to buy some clothes for Sheila. It didn't make sense to keep borrowing clothes from Leana. They didn't fit Sheila properly anyway. It took more time to buy clothes than I had anticipated. Since I had some money, I didn't mind but we only had 3 silvers left after shopping.

We continued strolling aimlessly. I wasn't worried about getting lost since we could always ask anyone where The Horn was. It had been almost an hour of wandering when we suddenly came across the adventurer's guild of Tiaanway. Since we were here, I decided we should check it out.

It was evening, the guild was quite busy. The building was very similar to the one in Lorel. There were registration desks and the drop off location. The ladies at registration desks were just as beautiful as the Lorel city ladies. This further confirmed my speculation about the guild's hiring methods.

Sheila had been looking curiously around since we entered. She asked me about the guild and I told her as much as I knew. Apparently she didn't know much about adventurers or even the fact that Tien and Nina were adventurers too. I remembered what Cleo had said before about registering Sheila as an adventurer. It can help us find out her level and also set up her identity as an adventurer instead of a bandit.

I told Sheila what I wanted to do and she readily agreed. Since I knew how the process went, I told her that she would need to lie on the form and say that she was from Lorel. This way it would be harder to find out that she was a bandit. Once the story was set, we went to the registration desk.

I had already told Sheila that she should do the talking since it would be weird if a small kid was doing the talking when the woman with him could talk herself. It might make them suspicious.

"Um… I… I want to register" Sheila said this to the registration lady whose name was Grinelda according to her name tag.

"Sure. Please fill out this form."

Sheila knew how to read and write and was able to fill up the form. She handed the form back to Grinelda once she had put in the details we had discussed.

Grinelda proceeded to take out the identifier device and asked Sheila to put her hand on it. Sheila looked at me and I nodded at her in encouragement. She put her hand on the device and it turned red. It slowly turned green and finally stopped.

Grinelda looked at the bottom and said "You are 27 years 3 months old. Your strength is 10, agility is 3 and Magic is 3. You have medium aptitude for strength based professions and low aptitude for agility and magic based professions."

She looked at Sheila in surprise and said "Your magic aptitude might be low but you might be able to learn some simple spells that could help you in an emergency."

I was surprised that Sheila's strength was the same as Leana. It meant we might not be able to keep Sheila in check without Cleo. I didn't know who was better at fighting since strength wasn't a measure of that.

Grinelda handed over Sheila's guild card once it was ready. Sheila took it happily and showed it to me. She looked really happy to get the card. It seems that getting this card wasn't a bad idea. Now I know how strong Sheila was and it might also help Sheila integrate in our group. Not that I wanted her to join our party…. She was a bandit after all. I looked at Sheila's happy face and had a hard time trying to hate her for being a bandit, for how she helped the bandit queen. I knew she had done wrong but somehow I couldn't picture Sheila doing all those things. If anything, Sheila was like a young girl after being freed from the bandit queen's influence. Did we actually manage to save 3 instead of 2 people today?

"Your mom is quite a strong woman. She just registered but she should be able to move to F and then to E rank in no time."

I was so surprised that I didn't bother to get embarrassed about being thought of Sheila's kid again. I looked at Grinelda in confusion and asked "Why would she be able to just to E rank so quickly?"

Grinelda smiled at me and said "A strength level of 10 is quite high for an F rank. Usually you would be promoted to E rank around this level."

Huh? Wouldn't that make Cleo really strong? She was as good as or better than an E rank adventurer. But weren't Janet and Val D rank adventurers? But they were much stronger than Cleo. It seems I need to understand more about this ranking system.

I wanted to ask more about the system when I was suddenly pushed to the side and fell down.

"Out of my way kid!"