Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Topher took a few deep breaths, trying to adjust to the situation. Okay. As annoying as it was, he had to admit it made sense, just like everything else so far in this ridiculous scenario -- his Unique Skill, while incredibly dumb, was in fact a thing he'd been trying to do all his life. Well, no sense arguing against it, he thought resignedly. Looking around, he noticed that the other kids had started filing out of the great hall -- off to have adventures or join the military or whatever, wasn't it? So what were they supposed to do?

"Wait here," he muttered the others, and struggled to his feet before schlepping his way over to the bearded guy with the mirror -- probably the Boss Wizard, I guess -- and waited around awkwardly until he captured the man's attention. "Hey, sorry, pal -- Topher Bailey, we met earlier, you probably don't remember." The wizard frowned, but Topher wasn't here to waste time. "The crowned guy -- guessing he's the king or whatever -- said we were F-Rank, and that meant we could do whatever we wanted, right? So where do we go to do that?"

The bearded man looked sad. "Sir Hero, I'm afraid there is no place for you here in the castle -- all our resources must go to the training and support of the S-Rank heroes, and by extension the lower-rank heroes who assist them. I can arrange for a guard to escort you out of the castle, but beyond that, I can do nothing for you."

"Wait, seriously? You're not even gonna give us, like, a few bucks for a hotel?" Topher was surprised, but not that surprised. Life had taught him to be ready for a kick anytime he was down.

"As I said, Sir Hero -- " Topher noticed that the Sir Hero title was beginning to stick in this guy's craw a little -- "we have no resources to spare. I do, however, wish you the best of luck." Hefting a big wooden stick -- I guess it's a staff, if I gotta use dork words here -- with a small grunt of effort, the bearded man turned and departed. Topher assumed, correctly, that the conversation was over.

Well, better make the best of it. He looked around, searching for ideas -- the room was almost empty already, leaving only a scattering of bags and backpacks that the kids had dropped when they'd been carted off to wherever. Sighing, he began gathering them up, using his Attract Object power occasionally to test it out. It seemed like it only worked on some of the bags -- the lighter ones -- and he could only gather up about five before he was pretty overloaded. Staggering back to the red-curtained alcove where the other F-Rankers awaited him, he dropped them off, then went back for the rest. It took him about four trips, all told, but when he was done, red-faced and panting, they had a sizable mountain of them.

"What are you getting these for, Bailey-sensei?" asked Makoto, wrinkling her bandaged nose in disgust. "It's not like we're gonna be going back to school, or anything."

Topher sighed. "We're broke, kid, and they're gonna throw us out on the street. We need to take anything that's not nailed down." He counted up the bags, eventually reaching a total of twenty -- looks like about half the kids hadn't had their bags on them when the Interdimensional Child-Snatching Spell had gone off. "Looks like we get about four each -- put one on each shoulder, then one in each hand." He demonstrated, grunting, and found that he could just about manage it despite having chosen the four heaviest bags -- he was the only adult, after all. "Paper Guy, you take these four, and Veggie Kid, you take these. Leave the lighter ones for the girls."

"Omigosh, so sexist," growled Makoto. "I'm not weak or anything! I can carry whatever!"

"You've got enough to carry lugging around that chip on your shoulder," interjected Hotaka as he loaded up his own bags. "Don't worry about us, Bailey-sensei. Just lead the way."

"Like I know where I'm going," Topher muttered. He gestured to one of the soldiers standing around, carrying a big halberd and wearing a stupid-looking helmet. "Hey, you there! The Big Wizard Guy said you'd take us outside!"

The guard, looking bored, sauntered over and nodded. "If you're ready, F-Rank scum. This way, and be quick about it."

The fuck he just call us? Topher opened his mouth angrily to complain, then yelped in surprise when Noboru stomped on his foot. "Thank you, Guard-san," the fat boy said obsequiously, giving Topher a look which unambiguously said Shut up, stupid. Grumbling to himself, Topher followed the guard, keeping an eye on the kids as they shuffled along beside him.

After a few minutes, the guard led them out a large gate into a filthy courtyard, tipped his helmet mockingly, then went back inside. As the gate shut behind him, Topher rounded on Noboru. "What's your problem, Rotundo? I was gonna give him a piece of my mind!"

"Bailey-sensei," said Noboru, surprisingly patiently, "I think you need to adjust your thinking. The customer is not always right, here."

Topher paused. He took a deep breath, slowly, then let it out in quiet frustration. Jesus, the kid's right. They can probably kill us here without any consequences. No cops -- shit, they are the cops. A large number of uncomfortable realizations regarding his previously privileged state of existence began to queue up in his mind for later.

"Hey! Hey, you guys! F-Rankers!"

Topher turned, surprised, and looked in the direction of the shouting; a tall, skinny Asian guy in his mid-twenties was hustling towards them, dressed in a baseball cap and T-shirt. Oh thank Christ, another normal person. Topher waved a little nervously, then began heading in the man's direction as the kids tagged along.

"Oh man, I'm so glad I got to you first," the man puffed as they reached each other. "I'm Ichirou Watanabe. Please tell me you have cigarettes. I'm dying over here."

Topher chuckled, pulling out his battered pack and offering the other man a cigarette with a practiced tap. "Only got a few left, pal, but help yourself."

Ichirou nodded a little bow as he took the cigarette, then gripped it with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands; there was a little puff of smoke, and suddenly he was holding two identical cigarettes. He handed one back to Topher and lit the other with a little wooden match. "My Unique Skill is Copy Mundane Object, man. I just needed one to clone." His face was lean and hungry-looking, with a wispy beard and mustache.

"Oh damn, really?" Topher blinked. "You must be super rich, then!"

Ichirou shook his head. "It sucks. I can only copy one thing at a time, and I can't make copies of copies. They're real though, at least, not like illusion or anything." He took a deep drag on the cigarette like a man gasping for air, then slowly let it out with an expression of almost agonized relief. "Thank the gods. Ohhh, baby, it's been a long ten years."

"Jesus," stammered Topher, exactly as Noboru and Hotaka exclaimed "Ten years?!" in unison. He grimaced, signaling them to be quiet. "Listen, let's go somewhere we can talk. We're confused, and it sounds like you might know more about what's happening than we do. Plus, I gotta find a place for these kids to stay." And me, he thought to himself miserably.

Ichirou nodded. "Yeah man, come with me. I got a place set up when I saw 'em casting the Summoning Spell." Topher started after him, but the other man held up a hand in warning. "I gotta be up front with you, though -- I'm only helping you to get some of that stuff you're carrying. We have a deal?"

Topher thought, pausing, then nodded. "We'll sell you some of it, sure. Haggling can wait." Ichirou nodded back, then turned to stride off towards the courtyard's exit.

As he followed the younger man's slender back, Topher kept noticing things about the surrounding world that surprised him. It was very clean, for a start; for what looked like a medieval sword-and-sorcery world, there was a lot less sewage and trash everywhere than he'd expected. It was also surprisingly roomy, with even the narrowest streets easily ten feet across, and somewhat sparsely populated -- even with lots of people milling around the castle, he still only saw a few dozen other humans at most. There were also a few other weird creatures strolling around -- a dragon-guy, a cat-lady, and what he was pretty sure was a centaur -- but he resolved firmly not to worry about those things until he had other, more basic questions sorted out. Ichirou led them down a few streets, through an alley, and up a flight of stairs behind a sturdy-looking wooden building up into a loft above a stable.

"Sorry it's not nicer," the other man shrugged, "but I'm not that well-off. Even this is costing me most of my savings from the last couple of years."

Topher shook his head dismissively. "It's fine, pal. I'm thankful you're helping us at all -- it's more than the jerks at the castle did." With a sigh, he turned to the kids, counting heads to make sure they hadn't lost anyone before handing one of his bags to each of them. "All right, you kids start taking everything out of the bags and sorting it so we can decide what to keep and what to sell to Mister Ichirou here. Keep everything where he can see it, yeah?" Hotaka and Haruko nodded together -- they were kind of acting as the leaders now, he noticed -- and began to work with the others to unpack and sort the contents of all the bags and backpacks. He turned back to Ichirou. "So, you lookin' for anything in particular? Any of this stuff sell well, here?"

"Jesus, man, cigarettes first of all -- at least one of each different brand we got -- and some plastic bags if they got' em to keep 'em fresh. I can copy a pack as many times as I need, but rotating the brands helps." Ichirou shrugged. "Other than that, as many of the bags and backpacks as you can spare, plus any tech that'll keep a charge for a while -- phones, calculators, all that kind of stuff."

Topher sighed, understanding. "Guessing there's no Wi-Fi here. Is it just like, completely Game of Thrones?"

Ichirou tilted his head, confused. "Game of what? Is that an American thing?"

"Oh crap, sorry," grunted Topher, shaking his head. "I keep forgetting you're all hearing Japanese when I talk."

Ichirou chuckled. "It could be worse, gramps. When my batch got summoned, we had a guy from like Zimbabwe or something in the mix. Let me tell you, that dude was confused as hell."

"I guess that's as good a place as any to start." Topher leaned forward, scratching absently at the seat of his cargo shorts. "Why are most of 'em Japanese kids? And why'd they summon 'em? Do they do this a lot?"

Ichirou stroked his chin, leaning back a bit. "Well, I don't know much, but I'll tell you what I do know. The first summoning apparently happened about a hundred years ago -- some kinda Evil Hell King Guy was threatening to destroy the world, or something, and they cast a Summoning Spell and some kids showed up. They checked the kids' statuses, and it turned out some of them had some kinda crazy overpowered skills that were incredibly rare here. They go off, beat up the Evil Bad Guy, everything's happy. Then, about ten years ago, it happens again, and they cast the spell again -- that was my class." He looked around, sighing. "This one real pretty girl came up S-Rank in everything, super amazing S-Rank sword skill that could blow up cities, that kinda stuff. So she goes off to kill the Demon King, but this time she doesn't make it all the way there -- got merc'd in the Lava Mountains somewhere, along with her whole party. The king sent in the army with all the C- and D-Rankers, but they didn't even make it past Dragon Valley. They've been saving up Magic Stones for another summoning since then."

Topher whistled. "Damn. Maybe we got lucky getting sorted into F-Rank."

"Right?!" Ichirou chuckled, slapping his thigh -- he had jeans on, Topher noticed, while most of the rest of the people outside had been wearing historical-type clothing. "Life might suck for us F-Rankers, but at least we're alive. I don't think any of the rest of my class lived through all that."

"What, not even any other F-Rankers?" asked Makoto, pausing in her sorting to spin around with a surprised expression. "Are we gonna die?"

"You're not gonna die. Quit freaking the others out." Topher gestured dismissively at her. "Were you the only F-Ranker in your class?"

Ichirou shook his head. "There were four of us, but one wouldn't stop freaking out and the guards put him down. Real cold, man, shut the rest of us up fast." The younger man shivered. "And then there was Rudo -- the big black guy from Africa -- he didn't want shit to do with any of us, lit out on his own right away." He shrugged. "That just left me and Hana-chan, and she died last year from cancer."

Jesus. Topher wiped his face with his hand. "I'm sorry. That must have been rough."

"Kinda funny, ain't it? You get transported to a magic world, and you die in your twenties to cancer." Ichirou laughed, but there wasn't a lot of mirth in it. "Probably coming for me too, as much as I smoke. But I probably got a few years left."

"What about healing magic?" asked Noboru, stacking the last of a pile of notepads. "Couldn't they cure it?"

Ichirou shrugged. "If we had money, maybe. Hope none of you kids were rich back on Earth -- F-Rankers are poor here."

"Does that mean the regular people here have ranks, too?" asked Hotaka as he wrapped a set of ten ballpoint pens with a hair-band. "Do they have to get scanned with that big mirror, too?"

Ichirou nodded. "Everybody has status here, kid, but most people are C-rank at best. Only us Otherworlders are B-rank or better, for the most part. But you can see your own status anytime you want; just say 'status open' and will the pop-up to appear. The big mirror in the castle's only important because it lets other people see your status."

After a few minutes, all the supplies had been extracted and sorted; Topher took the top notepad off the stack and grabbed a spare pen, then started making a list in the upper left corner. "All right, let's see here. Noboru, you start counting from the left, and Makoto, you start counting from the right. When you finish counting a stack or a group, tell me, and I'll write it down."

The final tally came out to nine backpacks, eleven suitcase-style bookbags (he didn't know what they were called in Japanese, and didn't ask -- he just wrote "backpack" and "bag"), twenty-eight pens, eighty-two pencils, forty-five textbooks, twenty-nine notebooks and pads of paper, fifteen calculators, eleven cellphones, nine packs of cigarettes (mostly from two bags that he was pretty sure had belonged to delinquents), eight boxed lunches, six packages of weird flavored bread, four condoms, and one vibrator. "Any of you kids want to keep any of this stuff in particular?" he asked, but none of them did, other than a notebook Haruko clutched possessively to her chest. Topher was impressed. "Noboru, you don't want none of the breads or whatever?"

"Hey, Bailey-sensei, I'm fat, not greedy," protested the chubby boy. "These are otherworldly sweets, they probably sell for a lot here!"

Ichirou nodded. "They'll definitely turn a profit. What about you, gramps? You want any of this stuff?"

Topher pondered, then nodded. "We'll keep four of the backpacks, I guess. I can't imagine the cellphones and stuff would be very helpful compared to how much they'll sell for."

"Bailey-sensei," interjected Hotaka, "shouldn't we keep the textbooks and paper and things? We don't know how much of the science and stuff we'll have access to here, and letting the people of this world have access to some of that knowledge might be dangerous."

"To us, or to them?" Topher chuckled and shrugged. "But it makes sense. All the textbooks, I guess, and the pens and paper too."

"Keep the pencils, stupid," hissed Makoto. "We can shorten them with knives, but we can't refill the pens."

"Jesus, alright, the pencils. Christ, you kids are pushy." Topher grumbled as he separated his tallies out on the paper, then showed Ichirou the final count-up. "What's all this worth? And don't lowball me any more than you need to, we both know you're already gonna give us half or less of what you'll sell it for."

Ichirou chuckled, glancing over the page. "For this much, I can probably give you about forty gold -- the bags in particular will sell really well here, and I can keep cloning the calculators as long as they work to do big fancy sums for the castle nerds."

"Hang on! What's that actually worth?" Noboru jumped in, looking a little alarmed. "What's that in yen? Or dollars?"

"Kid's got a point, Ichirou," Topher added. "For all we know, forty gold is the price of a cheap beer around here."

"Hey, take it easy," Ichirou said, raising his hands defensively. "One gold is about a month's pay here. Breaks down to ten silver for a gold, ten bronze to a silver, and ten copper to a bronze. So a gold coin is about a hundred bronze, and a bronze is about the cost of a big meal here."

Topher did a little math, somewhat shakily -- it had been a long time since he had had to do anything other than punch numbers into his phone. "So that gets us... about eight gold each. What rent are we paying for this dump?"

Ichirou sighed, obviously feeling very put-upon. "Five bronze a day. So about a gold and a half a month." He gestured. "C'mon, man, this is a sweet deal for you guys. You think anybody else is gonna deal with a bunch of F-Rankers?"

"Easy, kid, easy," Topher patted the air in what he hoped was a placating manner. "Let's all be cool, yeah? Planet Earth Friends, remember?" Grumbling, he did a few more questionable sums on the paper. "Can you go up to fifty? That's ten gold each for us." Should be more for me, being the babysitter, he thought to himself sourly.

Ichirou groaned, but nodded. "All right, fifty. But you'll have to wait for me to sell and come back -- I don't have that on me."

"Hey!" Makoto jumped up, all the blood rushing to her face. "What's to stop you from just taking the stuff and running off?"

"She ain't wrong," Topher pointed out. He scratched his neck a little. "I guess take a couple things, sell 'em, then come back and split with us? Not that we don't trust you, but..." he let the rest trail off as his palms started to sweat. Be cool, Bailey, be cool. He might have a gun to clone in that back pocket.

It took a few more tense minutes of negotiations, but eventually they settled everything to everyone's satisfaction -- Topher wrote up a bill of sale, charged off some of the inventory to Ichirou, and had him sign a promissory note for the outstanding profits. It was all very boring and stuffy (as Makoto kept complaining), but Hotaka unexpectedly came to Topher's support. "There's a reason these boring things were invented, I think," he chimed in as Ichirou was protesting for the tenth time about the unnecessariness of it all. "Bailey-sensei, you did this for work, right? So I think we should acknowledge your expertise." Topher kept his mouth shut and did not reveal that he had last done office work in his thirties, before aging out of it and beginning a slow slide into progressively underskilled jobs -- a trajectory that had terminated in spinning a sign outside a tax preparation office, followed by yet another back injury and a progressively desperate series of long-term disability claims.

Making his best effort at good penmanship, he signed everything and tore the sheet in half, handing one piece to Haruko and the other to Ichirou. "There, now everybody's honest. We'll be waiting for you when you get back." Ichirou nodded and started gathering up bags, then eventually squirmed out the ill-fitting door and disappeared into the streets.

"He's probably gonna screw us over," Makoto complained. "It's not like our cheapo contract is gonna stop him, either."

Noboru shrugged. "I think we should be counting our blessings, honestly. The girl in front of me had 'Masturbation (Rank C)' show up in her skill list for everybody to see, so her day is probably going even worse than ours right now."

Everyone turned, open-mouthed, to stare at the heavyset boy. "Jesus Christ," exclaimed Topher into the silence which followed, "you kids are fucked up."