It sounded snarky coming out of her lips, but there was real concern somewhere in her heart. Or at least, I imagined there was.
“Hmm...I’m not sure if I like the idea of putting a big ugly weapon on our gondola. But it would be worse if the ship got sunk because we didn’t put it on. Maybe it was fate that we happened to get an exclusive bear-horn drop. Let’s do it.”
“Okay,” Asuna agreed.
I added, “Plus, since I’m sure the horn is likely to be attached beneath the waterline, we won’t have to look at it most of the time. So let’s set the horn as active, and...”
I put my hand over the finish button again. We counted down again and actually pressed it this time.
The window closed with an imposing, stately noise and the old man began to draw a three-dimensional model of the ship on the parchment. Within just a few seconds, he was done, and the word Tilnel was written at the top in dark black ink.
Romolo ceremoniously picked up the parchment and nodded in satisfaction.
“Now I will retreat into my workshop. Be patient, and I will inform you when I’m done with my work.”
And rolling up the parchment into a scroll again, the elderly craftsman disappeared into the tool room. The door shut and a very heavy vibration ran through the floor. Apparently his entire storeroom was an elevator.
I really wanted to see his workshop, but I didn’t want to risk getting yelled at and possibly ruining the quest, so I gave up on sneaking in and yawned instead.
“Mmmm...Man, this has been a long day.”
“I wonder how long it takes to finish up a boat,” Asuna wondered impatiently.
I grinned wryly. “In the real world it probably takes months, but here it might be a day at the worst...even shorter, I bet–three hours, five hours. If we announce the details of the quest, people will be beating down his door trying to get their own ships.”
“I wonder what happens in that case. Will it be like the Dark Elf camp on the third floor...an instance thingy? Where there’s as many versions of this house as there are players?”
“I don’t know, this is the middle of town...I bet that if someone’s currently in the middle of the quest, the door just won’t open...”
“Wait...you meant that if it takes three hours, the next person just has to stand there and wait outside the house?”
“More like three and a half, when you count the time for design choices. So that means at maximum, he could only serve six or seven groups in a day...Then again, three hours is just a hunch, so it might be shorter...”
I shrugged and Asuna gave me an indescribable look.
“The thing about your hunches is they’re eerily correct.”
“S-sorry...”
“Don’t apologize to me. Thanks to you, we got ours out of the way first...Well, let’s trust that three hours is right and make our way back to the inn.”
“That’s the problem. It just occurred to me while I was talking to you that if we leave this house, it might treat the ship transaction as its own new quest...”
“...Meaning that if we find out it’s ready and race over, and another party’s already in progress with their own quest, we’ll just have to wait outside the house until they’re done?”
“I think it’s quite possible. I mean, if the door remains closed until the person comes back to get the completed ship and nobody ever returns, it would mean no one can ever start the quest after you.”
“...I see,” Asuna nodded slowly. She took a look around the messy room. “Which means...we have no choice but to wait here until it’s finished.”
“Yep...”
I looked around as well and wondered where Mr. Romolo slept. There was no bed, sofa, or blanket to be seen. The doors went to the entrance and the workshop, and I didn’t get the sense there were any secret doors.
After a scan of the room, both of our sets of eyes eventually landed on the large rocking chair that Romolo had been sitting in not too long ago. It was the only spot in the room that seemed to support any kind of sleep.
I brushed aside a brief moment of temptation and made a gentlemanly offer.
“I can just sleep on the floor if you want the rocking chair.”
“...But...”
In her profile, I saw even more hesitation than when we were deciding whether or not to attach the horn to the gondola. She was probably trying to be considerate to me, but didn’t have the courage to sleep on the dusty floor. It was a very fitting concern for fastidious Asuna.
“It’s fine, really. Compared to camping out in the safe rooms of the labyrinths, I’m just glad this place has a roof. Besides, I have a personal skill of sleeping wherever I want. You just relax and take the rocking cha–”
“We can both squeeze into it,” she said, cutting off the second part of my gentleman’s offer.
“Eh?”
“It’s a big rocking chair. If we turn sideways, the two of us can fit on it.”
Sideways?!
Wait, not that part.
The two of us?!
My memory of the inn room in Zumfut on the third floor was still fresh, where Asuna pitched an unidentified fruit directly into my head. She already had a powerful personal barrier to begin with, and now she was suggesting that we squeeze together into a cramped rocking chair.
I couldn’t decide: to thankfully decline or to take her up on the offer? Eventually she turned away in a huff, put her rapier into her item storage, then sat on the leather rocking chair and turned ninety degrees to face the outside.
“I’ll go ahead and start getting some sleep. If you want to use the empty space, you’re welcome to it,” she announced, her back to me, then fell silent.
After a full two minutes of standing still, I snuck over to the chair. I was curious to see if Asuna was actually sleeping or not, but that would require circling around to her side and that seemed like crossing a line.
Inside, I put a hand to the bars of the backrest and pushed slightly. The chair rocked back and forth with a faint squeaking. Asuna did not move or react.
At this point, I truly had no idea what to do. My mind was a blank as the chair continued to swing, when–
“Mmh...”
Asuna grunted and fell over in my direction. Her eyes were shut firmly. If I focused, I could hear the sound of sleep breathing coming from her barely parted lips. She was definitely asleep now.
It was a wonder to me that the fencer, who’d been so sensitive when I met her on the first floor, was now so bold...but then I changed my mind.
At the time she’d been telling me I had a choice whether to use the chair or not, the fatigue must have been beating her down. She only made that offer because she didn’t want me to realize how close she was to a sleep log-out–though that MMO term did not apply to Aincrad anymore.
I couldn’t blame her. In the morning, she’d left the inn and raced through the third-floor labyrinth tower until we reached the floor boss. After the battle, we climbed to the fourth floor, floated down the river, and engaged in that mad chase with the shark-like tadpole thing; had a brief rest in town before starting the shipbuilding quest, battling several monsters, and finishing it off against a giant fire-breathing bear as powerful as a boss on its own. She never once said a word about being tired, but she had to be exhausted enough to fall to pieces as soon as we got back to town.
“...Enjoy your rest,” I whispered, and pulled the round stool from the table over toward the rocking chair.
There was not enough space there now that Asuna had rolled over, and even if there were, I didn’t want to risk waking her up.
I put a hand on the backrest and rocked it gently again. A slight smile snuck onto Asuna’s childlike face in her sleep.
Maybe she was dreaming of the finished Tilnel sailing along on the channel. I’d guessed three hours for old Mr. Romolo, but as I silently rocked the chair, I didn’t mind if he took just a bit longer.
The quest log buzzed into life at around four thirty in th
e morning, when the darkness outside the window was just showing the first signs of lightening.
The window said, The ship you ordered is complete. Head to the shipwright’s workshop. It was at one thirty that Romolo had descended into his workshop, so the time of construction was three hours on the nose, exactly what I’d guessed.
Asuna must have heard the sound effect, too, but she was still zonked out on the rocking chair, eyes closed. I was of a mind to keep rocking it gently for another hour or two of sleep.
But I had a feeling that if I did, she’d scold me later for not waking her up. I decided that once we got the finished boat, we could return to the inn for some proper sleep. I stood up and leaned over Asuna.
“Um, hello? I think our boat is ready.”
Her eyebrows twitched in her sleep, and she murmured something inaudibly, but did not wake. I put a hand on her shoulder and shook it gently. It occurred to me that I’d been gently rocking her for the last three hours, so a little more vibration wouldn’t do the trick.
I decided to gradually increase the pressure of my rocking and started calling out, “Good morning, rise and shiiine...”
Suddenly, Asuna bolted upright with a bizarre sound.
“Hwulyuh?!”
I had to fall backward to avoid getting a head-butt right to the chin. The fencer looked around, bleary-eyed, until her eyes focused on an empty spot in the air just in front of her.
“...Was that weird noise...from this window...? What is this...?” she mumbled. I shook my head.
“No, it’s just the quest log updating...No, wait...”
That didn’t make sense. She would have heard that sound the same time I did, and that was far too long ago for her to be waking up now. So whatever window Asuna was seeing had to be...
“Oh, I see...So I can just close this, then,” she muttered, reaching out with her finger extended.
“Aaaaah! Wait, wait! Stop! Stoooop!!” I screamed. That bellowing had bumped her up to 70 percent wakefulness, and her hand jumped and stopped.
“Wh-what?!”
“Don’t press it!!”
“Huh...? Umm...”
She looked back in my desperate, screaming face with suspicion, then glanced more closely at the window only she could see.
“...Activate automatic teleportation of subject due to harassment code violation...?”
She suddenly clutched her body and looked at me. The remaining 30 percent of sleepiness evaporated instantly, and her eyebrows shot up into the air.
“Wh-wh-what did you do to me while I was sleeping?!”
“I didn’t do anything!! I was just trying to wake you up!!”
“If that was all, then the harassment code wouldn’t have gone off!!”
“I-it’s your fault for not waking up!!”
Before we could go further down that spiral of pointless argument, I held up a hand.
“W-wait. Something’s not right...The order of the harassment code deployment is wrong...”
“What do you mean?” she asked, still wary. I chose my words very carefully.
“W-well...When the harassment-prevention code activates upon inappropriate contact, it delivers both a warning and knocks the offending hand away, eventually developing into forced teleportation if the contact continues, from what I understand...”
“...Meaning that when you were touching me, you should have been getting warnings too?”
“B-but there weren’t any. And it didn’t knock my hand away...So I just kept shaking you, trying to get you to wake up, until you just leaped up like that.”
“...Hmm...”
She was finally settling down a step below her stage of nervous caution. Asuna looked down to reexamine the details of the warning window, but I was still beside myself with nerves. If she hit the yes button, even on accident, I would be instantly teleported down to the prison area beneath Blackiron Palace, all the way down on the first floor.
Fortunately, she just pored over the details of the window before shrugging.
“It doesn’t say anything aside from asking if I want to activate the code. So I should press no, then?”
“P-please...”
“Fine, pressed.”
I let out a long sigh of relief that I had evaded the danger of prison and slumped down onto the stool. She just shook her head and stood up from the rocking chair.
“I have no idea what all of this is about...but we can ask Argo, I suppose. Anyway...did you even sleep?”
I honestly wasn’t sure what kind of response Asuna would have if I told her that I’d spent three hours just rocking her chair for no good reason while she slept, so I kept it vague.
“Erm, I might have nodded off for a bit.”
“...Where?”
“On the stool there.”
“...Oh.”
She looked back down at the rocking chair where she’d slept, then decided to change the subject without further comment. “And why did you try waking me up so vigorously that it set the harassment code off?”
“B-because the boat’s finished.”
She instantly glared at her quest log with ferocious concentration, and her face lit up.
“You should have said that earlier!”
“It was the first thing I said...”
But the fencer ignored my rebuttal and rushed back to the front door, then hit the brakes on her third step.
“Wait, the log says to go to the workshop, but this isn’t the shop itself.”
“Good point. And it doesn’t seem like old gramps is coming back here...which means...”
I walked over to the door to the tool storeroom on the opposite wall from the entrance and gripped the dimly gleaming handle. It turned slowly, heavily opening just a crack.
“I think this is it, Asu–”
Before I could finish, something pushed my back and tipped me forward into the storeroom. Asuna had essentially delivered a body blow in the process of rushing into the room. No sooner had I closed the door than she turned on me and demanded, “Well?!”
I looked around hastily and found a suggestive lever on the wall. It would be one thing if this was a dungeon, but I decided there couldn’t possibly be any traps in the middle of a town. It was safe to pull.
The entire room rumbled to life and started descending. The storeroom was indeed a giant elevator leading down to the underground workshop.
After about twenty seconds, the rumbling stopped and Asuna pried the door open impatiently.
“Ooooh!” she marveled. I whistled.
It was huge. The room above felt fairly spacious, but this was closer to an entire factory in scope. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all made of solid stone, and there were massive work platforms, wooden hoists, and various stacks of large-scale ship materials with plenty of room to spare.
But the feature that most drew my eye was a pool–no, a dock– installed in the center of the room. It was a channel about five yards wide filled with clear water that passed across the room and to a massive door on one side. It must have been connected to the town’s canals through that door.
Romolo was standing at the side of the dock, hands on his hips. He gazed over the surface of the water at the graceful form of a two-seat gondola that glittered bright under the workshop’s countless lamps.
I followed Asuna over to the brand-new boat. There was a ? mark over the old man’s head, which meant we needed to talk to him to advance the quest, but I couldn’t help but look at the fresh new gondola.
It was about twenty-three feet long and just over four feet wide. The body was painted a gleaming ivory white, while the sides and prow were a deep forest green. The two leather seats and the rest of the interior were calm shades of brown. As I expected, the horn was probably affixed beneath the prow and was barely visible through the water.
Lastly, I couldn’t help but stare at the beautiful, flowing calligraphy of the name Tilnel on the side. I finally turned to the elderly shipwright.
“...T
hank you very much for this fine boat, Mr. Romolo.” “Hmph. It’s been a long time since I was this satisfied with a vessel,” the old man muttered happily, scratching at his whiskers, before suddenly adding, “However! After driving this poor senior citizen into his workshop, you’d better not let her sink!” “We’re not going to!” Asuna cried. She looked like the blood was rushing to her head, and those stars were back in her eyes. “We went through hell to gather the supplies to create this boat. We’ll treat her well, Grandpa! Thank you!”
I was afraid the cantankerous old shipwright would object to being called “grandpa,” but Romolo snorted in apparent satisfaction, then took a step back.
“In that case, the ship is now yours. I’ll open the gate for you, and then you can row it wherever you like.”
“Yes, sir!” Asuna bubbled and hopped into the gondola. I lifted my leg to step into the boat after her, then stopped it in midair. “H-hang on a sec...Mr. Romolo, where’s the boatman?”
The Tilnel was built with two seats, just like we ordered, but the space at the prow for someone to man the long oar was empty. There was no sign of any other NPC in the spacious workshop.
“Kirito, the person who rows a gondola is called a gondolier,” Asuna said prissily from the front seat, but I didn’t care about that.
The old man raised an eyebrow at my question, then spread his knotted hands.
“Boatman? There is no boatman.”
“There’s not?! Then...how will we move the ship?!”
“That’s obvious. You stand there and pull the oar.”
“P-pardon me?!” I screeched, stunned.
Asuna was entirely unfazed. “Oh, so that’s how it works. Well, let’s get going, Kirito!”
Either I should be really happy that there’s an in-game manual on ship control, or I should be really angry at the corners cut by whomever decided to sink the fourth floor in water, I thought as I timidly gripped the long oar.
If the manual that came with the gondola was to be believed, controlling the boat wasn’t that complicated. If you tilted the oar forward, it would advance, and if you held it straight up, it would brake. Tilting it backward would cause the gondola to back up, and pushing left or right resulted in the proper turn. The gondoliers in Venice no doubt needed much more complex skills in real life, but they’d simplified the process for the game to make it more fun.