Cass Ration Jr. stood in the doorway and looked at me the way she looked at everything—with the mild, focused appraisal of someone cataloguing a variable.
"The dingalong," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Father's upgraded dingalong."
"Yes."
She waited.
I had known this moment was coming since Cass Ration Jr. Sr. had first said the words show her with the calm certainty of someone issuing a task that couldn't possibly fail. I had spent portions of the return journey attempting to reconstruct the upgraded dingalong from memory. The memory was not cooperative.
What I had was a freaking Dingdadooooo. That was the beginning. Then… yeah, something. Then the long one—the catastrophic one—okay, how the fuck am I supposed to memorize that thing? Remember my ass.
Cast Ration stood beside her, watching with the attentive warmth of a man waiting for something excellent.
Whatever. Just say something random.
I took a breath.
"Eyeyeyey," I said, trying my best not to cringe.
The silence that followed was a different quality from the usual silence I had learned to expect in this world. This one had weight.
Cass Ration Jr. had gone very still.
Cast Ration's mouth was open.
"Eyeyeyey," I said again, slightly quieter, because I had no follow-up and I needed somewhere to put the sound.
Cass Ration Jr. pressed both hands to her chest. Her expression—which I had, over three days, catalogued as ranging between focused efficiency and mild appraisal—had moved to somewhere I hadn't seen before. Somewhere that looked, against all probability, like awe.
"He searches," she said quietly, to no one. "Even in the dingalong. He searches."
"Eyeyeyey," Cast Ration repeated slowly, tasting each syllable. Then he looked at me with the full brightness of a man receiving the best news of his life. "Brother-buddy. That is the most beautiful dingalong I have ever heard."
Huh?
"It's—" I started.
"Father will weep," Cass Ration Jr. said. She had the composed certainty of someone making a factual prediction. "When I tell him all the praises I have for this, he will weep. He truly made something incredible."
I thought about the actual upgraded dingalong. The syllable catastrophe. Dingadadingadadingdonglalawhopwhop—
"Sure," I said.
Cast Ration clapped me on the shoulder with the enthusiasm of a man for whom this moment had completed something. Cass Ration Jr. nodded once—her version of a standing ovation—and returned inside with the brisk efficiency of someone who had witnessed enough and needed to process it productively.
I stood in the doorway of the unplanned house, in front of the beef flower field, in the aggressively happy morning sun.
The search continued, apparently.
"Meyer," Cast Ration said, appearing beside me again. He had the look of someone remembering something helpful. "You know Basedland?"
"No."
He pointed down the road—not toward Fesceland, the other direction, slightly south. "Town. Two kilometers. Maybe less."
I looked down the road. Then I looked at the farm. Then I looked down the road again.
"Two kilometers," I said.
"Yes."
"That direction."
"Yes."
"And I have been here for three days."
"Yes."
"And nobody mentioned it."
Cast Ration considered this with the genuine thoughtfulness he applied to everything. "You didn't ask," he said finally, with the tone of someone who had found the only explanation necessary, "Remember, search for Ey is hard. Hard to look find a single beef when you are busy looking at the whole chunk of feces."
What does that even mean?
Ignoring my impulse to say that out lout, I looked at the road. I looked at the farm. I looked at the aggressively happy sun, which was doing nothing useful.
How did I miss an entire town.
"Right," I said.
Cast Ration beamed. Cass Ration Jr. appeared in the doorway behind him, handed me a cloth bundle with the efficiency of someone who had already decided this was happening, and disappeared back inside before I could say anything.
"Rations," Cast Ration said. "For the road."
"It's two kilometers."
"She worries you'll become skinnier," he said simply.
I took the bundle—wait.
Everything felt too sudden. Didn't I, like, arrive here just some minutes ago?
I turned toward the road that had apparently been leading to a town this entire time without mentioning it.
"Safe travels, brother-buddy!" Cast Ration called. "Come back! Tell us what you find!"
"Uh…" Eventually, I said, "I will."
Whatever.
I started walking.
Two kilometers. I covered it in less than thirty minutes, which meant I had been living on a farm three days' walk from Fesceland when there had been a town less than half an hour away the whole time.
This world continued to be very strange.
...
Basedland was smaller than Fesceland and quieter—which was not hard—but it had the same quality of a place that had been built by people with random intentions and no plan at all.
No wall, no gate, no guard. It was a free pass. I walked in with no problem.
Inside, there was a square, some buildings, people moving between them. A market at one end, booming with… people who were dancing? The smell of something cooking… smells like bread; I bet that it's beef. Also, there was a child throwing rocks at a fence post with the focused dedication of someone training for something.
Normal… right, normal. I suppose that… compared to other places and people whom I encountered, this was much more normal.
I walked into the square.
"Excuse me," said a voice.
I turned.
A man was walking toward me from the direction of the largest building, which had the specific look of something official—more deliberate than the buildings around it, with a door that opened inward and a small sign above it that I couldn't read from here. The man was middle height, thick through the shoulders, with the expression of someone who spent considerable time arranging things and had opinions about when arrangements went wrong.
He was looking at me the way I looked at things I hadn't fully processed yet.
"Hello," I said. "I just arrived. I am Meyer."
He stopped.
"What?" he said.
"Meyer," I said. "Nice to meet you."
"What?" he said again. His expression had shifted. "No. I'm Mayor."
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
"Meyer?" I said. "You are Meyer too?" I paused, doing the mental arithmetic. "Or are you referring to the role? Mayor?"
"I am Mayor," he said.
"Yes," I said carefully, "I'm assuming that you mean the role of mayor. Which is a different thing. I am Meyer, and Meyer here refers to my name—"
"As I already said," the man said, abruptly picking his nose with his pinky finger, "I am Mayor. Myname is not Mayor." He stopped. Something moved through his expression—before he sneezed directly at ma.
Ha, guess what? I managed to dodge that. I saw it coming the moment his nostrils enlarged.
He then said, "Myname is the guy who shits his pants every day."
I stared at him.
"…Your name is the guy who shits his pants every day?"
"What?"
"What?"
"Huh?"
I stared at him. I stared back at him.
Silence. Then, I held my hands out.
"Wait wait, let's try to sort this out. So I… I am Meyer—"
"No, I am mayor."
"Fu—okay, okay. You are mayor. My name is Meyer—"
"As I said, Myname is not mayor. He is the guy who shits his pants every day."
"I wasn't—huh?" I stopped. I started again. "What is your name?"
"Ai," he said.
"I," I repeated.
"Yes. Ai."
"So when I said—"
"I am the mayor of Basedland," he said, with the precision of someone filing a document. "My name is Ai. Myname—" he paused, and the pause had the texture of a man managing an ongoing situation, "—is a different person, who lives here, and who I have had to deal with my entire career."
I processed this.
"Does Myname know," I said carefully, "that his name creates this problem?"
"What do you mean? Are you stupid?"
"What?"
Ai looked at me for a long moment, his pinky finger never stopping.
"Have a good day." Then he said.
He walked back into the official building. The door closed behind him with the specific finality of someone ending a conversation that had gone in a direction they hadn't approved of.
I stood in the square of Basedland, beneath the aggressively happy sun, and thought about Myname. Ai. What the fuck? What's with all these names in this world—
Don't overthink, Meyer. Just… accept it.
I sighed. Then, I realized. Somewhere in this town, a man named Myname was living his life, and every time someone confused themselves in a conversation, they came to him first. Every single time.
I felt, suddenly, a deep and specific sympathy.
Poor bastard, I thought.
Then I walked on.