Ascendance of a Bookworm

The next morning, I leave the bed for the first time and get a look at the rest of the room.

Whoooa, it’s like a hotel.

The room is over four meters long on each side. In one corner sits the canopy bed, but there’s also a round table, three chairs, and a fireplace. In addition to the simple furnishings, though, the floor is covered in a thick carpet and curtains are swaying in a window whose glass has a rippling, undulating design, as if to stop people outside from looking in. It may be a simple room, but it is very obviously one that a lot of money was spent on.

Also, near a chair by the door, there is already a servant woman waiting for me.

“Good morning. Please, wash your face here. When you are dressed, I will lead you to the dining room.”
“A… alright.”

She briskly prepares a bowl of hot water for me to wash my face in and hands me a clean cloth. I’m a little nervous at being treated so graciously.

“Please, change into these close. This may be rude of me to say, ma’am, but it would be troublesome for you to be seen in this house in your own attire.”
“I understand.”

The clothes that she produces look like Freida’s old clothes. At the sight of them, however, my heart jumps for joy, seeing that they aren’t extremely worn and constantly patched together like mine are. I quickly comb out my hair as well and do it up with my hairpin. The servant looks at my hairpin curiously, but doesn’t say a thing. With that, my preparations are complete.

I’m led to the dining room, where Freida and the guild leader are already waiting for me. I realize that I haven’t yet thanked the guild leader for helping me out.

“Good morning, guild leader. I am very grateful for all of your assistance.”

The guild leader nods slightly in reply. Freida quickly rushes over to me, then pats me on my forehead and the nape of my neck. I flinch when I feel her slightly cool hands on my skin, but she doesn’t seem to care.

“Good morning, Maine! It looks like your fever’s gone totally away, doesn’t it?”
“Good morning, Freida. I doing great! I’m feeling very refreshed.”

Ah, was she feeling my temperature? Now that I actually understand the reason behind her sudden action, I give her a cheerful smile. She smiles happily back at me, and we both turn towards the dining table.

The guild leader harrumphs. “It’s good to see that you’re doing well, but this is all the help you’re going to get with the magic tools. I bought these so that they’d be ready if something happens to Frieda, after all.”
“Grandpa!” objects Freida.
“It’s just like he says, Freida,” I say to her. “They’re things he collected for your sake.” I turn to the guild leader. “Sir, I am deeply grateful that you sold me such a valuable magic tool. Thank you.”

It was an extremely precious thing that he’d had to use his connections and money to their maximum extent to acquire. Even though I’ll be paying him back financially, it was amazingly good fortune that he sold it to me in the first place.

“Maine,” he says, “think hard about what you’ll be doing after this.”
“Yes, sir,” I reply.
“Now then, we should send word to your family that you’re awake. I’ll send a messenger; is there anything you’d like to tell them?”

I’m a little startled when he mentions sending a messenger, but I realize that there’s no way that the guild leader would walk to my house himself. Sending a messenger is only normal for him. He calls over a young man, who confirms with me where my house is.

“Umm,” I say, “Could you ask them if they could bring some ‘simple shampoo and conditioner’ with them as a thank-you gift for Freida, please?”

We still call it simple shampoo and conditioner at my house, but it really doesn’t seem to the the kind of name that you can immediately remember after hearing it just once. The messenger’s face is strained as he tries hard to remember exactly what my message is.

“Sim-pull sham…? Um, I’m terribly sorry, but might I ask you to repeat that for me?”
“Ummm, if you tell them to bring the liquid that makes hair shiny, I think they’ll understand. I’m sorry to have to trouble you with this, but thank you very much for your effort.”
“Liquid to make hair shiny. I understand, ma’am.”

As I see the messenger off, I notice that the guild leader is looking at me intently, stroking his chin. For some reason, I suddenly feel like he’d had a disturbing sort of smile on his face as he was watching me just a moment ago.

“You certainly do have some interesting things, Maine,” he remarks.
“That’s right, Grandpa,” says Freida. “I thought for sure we’d get her in exchange for that magic tool, but now I’m really disappointed we didn’t.”

With neither Benno nor Lutz here, the thought of getting cornered by these two is terrifying. They’d swallow me whole in the blink of an eye.

“The money for the magic tool!” I exclaim. “Let me pay you for that.”

I’d be in trouble if I got overcharged for some reason or another, or if the price suddenly raised on me, so I immediately touch my guild card to the guild leader’s, completing the transaction.

“You really did have that much… Benno,” he grumbles, vexed.

Somehow, Benno managed to dodge his way through the net the guild leader had laid out to snare him.

Good job, Mister Benno!

---

“Maine, please eat as much as you like.”
“Don’t mind if I do!”

It’s hard to keep my face from shining. I mean, the bread they brought out for breakfast is white bread! Real, white bread, made only with flour! On top of that, I can use as much honey as I like; isn’t this too luxurious? After stuffing my face full of sweet, delicious bread, I reach for the soup.

The soup is pleasantly salty, but I feel like all of the savoriness of the vegetables has escaped. It seems that, as expected, once they boiled the vegetables to completion they just threw out the leftover brother. This seems to be a pretty well-established practice in the culinary arts around here. The bacon and eggs are amazingly delicious, and for dessert they bring out a selection of fruits.

I’m deeply moved by this luxurious breakfast. It’s like something I could have gotten in Japan. The breakfasts of the rich sure are delicious. As I enthusiastically chow down, the guild leader looks at me with a frown.

“Maine, who taught you your manners?”
“I wasn’t really taught, I don’t think?”

I’m not technically lying: I’d dug out books on manners and gone to family restaurants to practice them, but I was never actually formally taught manners. The guild leader, however, only frowns more deeply, looking at me with naked curiosity written all over his face. I, however, don’t pay him any mind as I finish my breakfast. If I let it bother me, I lose.

Shortly after breakfast is finished, the guild leader heads off to work. As Freida and I rest, we’re notified that guests have arrived. It seems that my family has stopped by to see me on their way to work.

“Maine!” says my father, leaping into the room with outstretched arms. My mother shoves him aside. “Whargh?!”

“You’re awake!” she says. “I’m so glad. When Lutz told me that you’d collapsed in Mister Benno’s store and had to be carried to Miss Freida’s home, I thought my heart was going to stop.”
“I’m sorry to make you worry,” I reply. “Freida has the same sickness I do, so she knows a lot of things about it that I didn’t.”

There is no way I could tell her outright that I just spent two small gold and eight large silver coins to use a magic tool. She’s faint on the spot.

“Miss Freida,” she says, “thank you so very much.”
“Mommy,” I say, “did you bring the ‘simple shampoo and conditioner’ to thank Freida with?”

I couldn’t really think of anything else to thank her with besides money, but since her baptismal ceremony is tomorrow, I think this is excellent timing for making her hair sparklingly clean.

“We did. I don’t know whether or not something like this is a good thank-you, though. Tory?”
“Thank you for helping Maine, Miss Freida,” says Tory, handing Freida a small jar.
Freida takes it with a smile, bending slightly at the waste. “You are very welcome.”
“We really are very grateful,” says my father. “Lutz told us that Maine was in a very serious condition. Thank you very much for saving my daughter.” He turns to me. “Maine, you seem to be doing better; will you come home today?”

His eyes convey that he wants me to return home immediately. Since my family is already worried, I personally want to return home as soon as it looks like I can, but Freida stands in my way, smiling.

“No, as we discussed earlier, Maine will be staying here until the day of the baptismal ceremonies so that we can keep an eye on her condition. I would be deeply troubled if she suddenly got worse.”
“…Ah, right,” says my father reluctantly.
“We’re sorry for the trouble,” says my mother, turning to face Freida and bending slightly at the waist, “but please take care of Maine.”

As I wonder if this is some sort of greeting, I lean a little bit closer to get a better look, but Tory reaches out with both hands and grabs me firmly by the cheeks.

“We’re going to work now. Make sure you don’t act up like you usually do, okay?”
“Alright, Tory. Come pick me up on baptism day! Good luck at work!”

My family rushes out, looking like they’re in a bit of a hurry, passing Lutz, who is just arriving, on their way out.

“You’re awake! How’s your fever? Has it really gone down?”

Just like Freida had done this morning, Lutz pats my forehead and the nape of my neck, checking my temperature. Since he just came in from outside, though, his hands are freezing cold compared to Freida’s, and I let out a yelp.

“Wait, Lutz! Your hands are cold!”
“Oops, sorry.”
“Sorry I made you worry. I’m okay now, though.”
“…You’ll be okay for about a year, right?”

Lutz’s lips are pursed, silently saying that we can’t celebrate just yet. However, the fact that we put this off another year is itself momentous.

“Yeah. …I’ll use that time to think about a lot of things, and try looking to see if there really isn’t something we can do about it. First off, I have to make a book.”
“That’s all you ever think about! Well, I’m going to go tell Master Benno that you’re awake. He said yesterday that he’d come to check in on you later this afternoon.”

When Benno’s name comes up, Freida suddenly scowls. She’d taken a step back at some point, but now that she’s heard that she steps forward to muscle her way in.

“Oh dear, this afternoon would be a problem. Maine and I promised each other that we’d spend the afternoon making sweets! Isn’t that right, Maine?”

Somehow, I get the feeling that it wouldn’t be that good an idea to let Benno and Freida meet. I can’t help but get an awful premonition that I’d wind up awkwardly sitting between the two of them as they glare at each other, caught between a rock and a hard place.

“So, Lutz, I’m sorry, but if you say you’re going to Mister Benno’s shop, could you tell him that as well?”
“Yeah, sure… but what are you making? Something new?”

Lutz, of course, finds the talk of my promise to make sweets with Freida far more interesting than whatever he has to do with Benno.

I shake my head, chuckling. “I can’t decide on what we’re making until I’ve talked with the person who does the cooking here.”
“Oh my,” says Freida, “you haven’t decided yet?”

Until I know what kinds of ingredients and tools I can use, I can’t really come up with any solid ideas about what we’ll make. Also, if the cook is a cooperative sort of person, we’d be able to make something that might take a while to do so. If they’re only just putting up with us, though, I’d prefer to make something a little simpler.

“I have no idea what kinds of ingredients or tools we can use, so I can’t decide yet.”
“You could make things with Lutz, though, right?”

Freida purses her lips, looking as if she doesn’t understand my explanation. Since Lutz’s lifestyle is similar to mine, the tools and ingredients that he has at his house aren’t going to be vastly different from those at mine, but since Freida’s house is so vastly different, I can’t really even compare the two of them together at all.

“I only really tell people how to cook. At Lutz’s house, I use his family’s ingredients, and he and his brothers help out a lot. Right, Lutz?”
“Yeah, since you don’t have any strength, and you don’t have any endurance, and you still haven’t grown up.”
“I think we’ll be done this evening, so I think we can save a bit for you to sample, you know?”
“Seriously?! I’m looking forward to it!”

Freida seems to be burning with some sort of sense of rivalry with Lutz, and after she scowlingly watches him walk out the door, she turns to me, cheeks puffed out in the most adorable sulk.

“You’re too nice to him.”
“Oh, no, not at all. It’s the opposite. He’s way too nice to me.”

At those words, Freida only sulks even harder. To be honest, I have absolutely no idea why she might possibly be doing this.

Freida suddenly points directly at my face. “Alright! Then I’m going to be way too nice to you too!”
“Huh? Why?”
“Well, you’re my number one best friend, but I’m not your number one best friend, and that’s not okay!”

What an adorable creature. I want to mush up her little cheeks.

“Well, would it make you feel better if we did all the girls-only things I can’t do with Lutz, then?”
“Girls-only things?”

I start thinking about all the things I enjoy chattering with Tory while doing. Freida’s hobby is money. Playing with dolls like a normal girl is probably outside her norm. That might still be fun, but apart from that, there’s not whole lot of things we could do to spend time playing.

“Like, taking baths together and wash each other’s hair, or just lazing around on the bed and chatting about things, you know, things only girls can do with each other?”
“Why, that sounds wonderful! Well, to start, let’s go see the cook about making this sweets, okay?”

Freida grabs my hand and pulls me along towards the kitchen. There, I see a slightly chubby older woman who looks to have just finished tidying up after breakfast. She looks to be around the same age as my mother, and her demeanor seems to be much like Lutz’s mother, Auntie Carla’s.

“Ilse, Ilse,” says Freida. “About the sweets we’re going to be making today…”
“Yes, yes, young lady,” she replies. “You’re going to make them with your friend? You’ve told me about this very many times by now.”
“What kind of ingredients might we be able to use?” I ask.
Ilse’s raises her eyebrows the tiniest bit. “When you say ingredients, just what are you planning to use?”
“Ummm, basically, flour, butter, sugar, and eggs. We don’t have sugar at my house, so we use jam or honey, but if I might ask, do you have any here?”

Depending on your tools and ingredients, there’s a huge difference in the kinds of sweets that you can make. There’s a very good reason behind the fact that all I’ve been able to make at Lutz’s house has been pancakes and french toast.

“Yes, we have sugar.”
“Really?! Amazing! Um, uh, then, do you have an oven?”
“We do. Do you see it over there?”

Ilse shifts slightly to one side, and I can see a large wood-fired oven behind her. My heart quickly fills with ever-increasing expectation. I clasp my hands tightly together in front of my chest, looking eagerly up at Ilse.

“Since you’ve got an oven, you’ve got pots and pans that you can use in an oven, right?”
“Of course we do.”
“And scales?”
“That’s right.”

Ilse shrugs her shoulders as if I’m asking the most obvious things in the world; I, however, jump for joy.

“Woohoo! We can bake a ‘cake’!”

Recipe after recipe bubbles up through my brain. Of course, these are recipes that I know the various ingredient quantities for.

Huh? But… even though I remember the recipes, I don’t actually know how to translate grams into this world’s units of weight. What do I do now?²

Since I’ve been focusing so hard on the thought of making sweets, this completely slipped my mind, but you need more than just ingredients and tools to make sweets. If you don’t get the amounts of each ingredient just right, it’ll end up a failure.

When I was making parucakes at Lutz’s house, I did it all by intuition, which meant that the puffiness and thickness varied every time. Since my audience was boys who didn’t actually care about anything except quantity, I managed to pull it off, but if I want to make something in earnest, I need precise measurements.

Isn’t there anything I can do? Some sort of sweet that I can make without being able to measure things in grams…

I try to recall any recipes that I can make without knowing the measurements, and come up with something that fits exactly from a book I read on French cuisine.

“Ummm, I think we should make a kind of sweet called a ‘pound cake’.”

Pound cake, or quatre-quarts in French, is a cake made with equal quantities of flour, eggs, butter, and sugar. If we make pound cake, then it doesn’t actually matter what the actual weight of the ingredients are. All we have to do is measure the same amount on the scale.

“I haven’t heard of it,” says Ilse. “What kind of sweet is that?”
“It’s a sweet that you put equal amounts of flour, eggs, butter, and sugar into.”
“You really want to make something like that?”

Ilse looks at me with startled eyes. I flinch a little bit, then walk back my previous remarks.

“…If that’s not okay then we can make something else?”
“It’s not that it’s not okay, but do you really know how to make something like that?”
“Yes!”

I get her to promise to make sure the oven is ready by the time we’re ready to make sweets, and then Freida and I withdraw from the kitchen. After that, we start looking for some aprons for the two of us. Freida, who has never helped around the house in her life, seems to have never worn an apron before. One of the female servants digs some out and offers them to us, asking if they’re what we’re looking for. We put them on, and then cover our hair with large handkerchiefs folded into triangles.

When the time we promised to start cooking comes around, we head to the kitchen, where Ilse is there. She looks down at us, a mirthful twinkle in her eye.

“Oh my, young lady,” she says to Freida. “You look quite fired up!”
“That’s right. I will be helping make it as well!”

Unfortunately, we don’t have a cake pan, so instead we find a small iron pot to use instead. Then, we get to work.

“So, how about you start by explaining how to make this?” asks Ilse. “If I don’t understand the process from start to finish I won’t be able to make it.”
“Of course,” I reply. “First, we need to measure out the ingredients. Then, we need to warm the eggs up to about body temperature and then whip them together with the sugar.”
“How should we warm up the eggs?”
“Umm, we could fill up a bigger bowl with hot water and put the bowl with the eggs in there.”
“Ah, a water bath. Then, before we measure the ingredients, we need to heat up the water first.”

Unlike with a gas stove, we can’t actually boil water immediately. This is really obvious, but since I haven’t seriously made a cake before, there are absolutely going to be trivial details that I just won’t notice.

“Whipping the eggs and sugar together is the most important part. Once they’re whipped until they stand, then we slowly cut in sifted flour. Then, we add melted butter, but very carefully to avoid ruining the eggs.”
“We’ll need to melt the butter too. Once everything’s mixed, then we bake it?”
“That’s right.”

Ilse, who seems to have understood the directions, takes out a scale and places it on the prep counter. Then, she starts giving us directions on how to measure out the ingredients, which have already been lined up for me. While Freida instructs us on the use of the scale, Freida and I measure out equal quantities of each ingredient. Meanwhile, Ilse starts heating up the water.

First, we measure out the eggs and the sugar, then warm them up in the hot water. When they get up to body temperature, Ilse devotes herself to whipping them together. How frothy they are will have a big difference on the cake’s fluffiness and flavor. As she does this, Freida and I measure out the flour and butter.

“This should be perfect,” says Ilse.
“Let’s coat the inside of the pan with butter now.”
“Why?”
“It’s so that we can make sure it’s easy to take the cake out of the pan.”

We smear butter all around the inside of the pot, then lightly dust it with flour. Since we have neither a cake pan nor anything to use as parchment paper, we don’t have a choice.

“Next, should we sift the flour?”

We start sifting the flour, taking care not to send it flying everywhere. We sift it three times in total, since it’s really important that it be full of air.

“Oh my,” says Freida, “the eggs were yellow, but now they’re white, and they’ve grown quite a bit in size.”

As Ilse whips the eggs, her whisk clattering against the bowl, Freida looks at her with some sort of envy. It’s really obvious that she wants to help with the whipping, so Ilse laughingly offers the bowl and the whisk to her.

“Want to try?”
“I do!”

She happily starts whipping the eggs, but very quickly hands the bowl back. Without a hand mixer, making a cake is a very strenuous process.

“How does this look?” asks Ilse, showing me the bowl of whipped eggs and sugar.
“Perfect! Now we add the flour.”

We set the sifter once again on top of the bowl and slowly add the flour. Using a wooden spatula, I cut the flour into the eggs and sugar.

“We’ll mix it like this. Next will be the butter. Is it melting?”
“That’s right,” says Ilse, “after we warmed up the water I put the butter next to the stove.”
“Miss Ilse, please switch with me. My arms are really tired…”
“Good grief,” she laughs. “Neither of you two young ladies has any strength.”

Smiling, she switches with me. We add the butter to the dough in much the same way, then mix it together. Freida brings the pot we’re using as our cake pan over, then looks on with gleaming eyes.

“While we’re pouring it in, we need to hit the pan like this so that we don’t have any bubbles.”

Since the pot is so heavy, I leave it to Ilse. Ever since the start of this process it seems that she didn’t think Freida and I could actually do this, so she helpfully follows along with my instructions.

“Now, once it bakes in the oven, it’ll be all finished.”

Since I don’t really know how to use a wood-fired oven, I think leaving that to Ilse is the best idea. When she opens the oven, a blast of heat roars out. She quickly puts the cake batter inside, then closes the door with a clank.

“I think it’ll be done by the time we finish cleaning up,” I say.

We try to help Ilse out as she briskly moves through the kitchen, tidying things up, but wind up caught halfway between help and hindrance. Freida, who can’t stop expectantly fidgeting, looks very cute.

“Is it done yet, I wonder?”
“Not yet,” I reply.

Ah, now that I think about it, there aren’t any bamboo skewers in this world, are there? How the heck am I going to check to see if it’s done?