The stream led to a road, which was more than he'd hoped for.
It was a proper one too, it was wide and well-maintained, with smooth stone paving that had faint luminescent lines running through it like someone had mixed glowsticks into the concrete. Trees lined either side, deliberately planted and evenly spaced, their roots carved around rather than through the road. Whoever built this took their infrastructure seriously.
He stepped onto it and looked both ways.
Left went uphill and curved out of sight. Right went downhill and he could see, through the tree line, the distant suggestion of rooftops.
He went right.
The walk took about twenty minutes. Gradually the forest thinned, the road widened, and the rooftops resolved into actual buildings, tall, elegant structures built partially into living trees, with arched windows and trailing vines that looked intentional rather than neglected. Bridges connected higher levels between buildings. Everything had a kind of organic geometry to it, curved where human architecture would be straight, grown where it would be built.
It was genuinely beautiful.
He was appreciating it a mild detached interest, which meant he was appreciating it at about forty percent capacity. The other sixty percent was focused on identifying something edible.
He followed the road into what appeared to be the city's outer district, smaller buildings here, market stalls just starting to wind down for the afternoon, a handful of people moving between them with baskets and packages.
People.
Elves, specifically. Pointed ears, graceful builds, the kind of general aesthetic that suggested everyone here had simply decided to be attractive as a cultural policy. Most were women. The few men he spotted were either very young or accompanied and walking close, heads slightly down, not making eye contact with strangers.
He filed that away without fully processing it yet.
He found a food stall selling something that smelled like roasted meat and herbs, run by a broad-shouldered elf woman with her sleeves rolled up and the energy of someone who had been on her feet since dawn and was not interested in problems.
"How much for one?" he asked, pointing at the skewers rotating over the heat.
She told him a number in a currency he didn't have.
He smiled apologetically. "I just arrived. I don't have local currency yet, is there anything I could—"
That was as far as he got.
The stall vendor had looked up from her work at the sound of his voice, specifically, he would later understand, at the register of it, lower than anything she encountered on a daily basis, and had gone very still.
He noticed her expression change. He did not yet know what it meant.
"You're—" she started.
"Hungry, mostly," he said.
She gave him four skewers for free without another word and then just stared at him while he ate the first one. It was good. The meat was well seasoned and tender, something like rosemary but sharper.
"Thank you," he said. "This is really—"
He became aware that he had an audience.
It had accumulated quietly, the way audiences do when no individual person thinks they're being obvious about it. Three women at the adjacent stall. Two more who had slowed their walking and stopped walking entirely. A girl sitting on a step across the road who had put down whatever she was reading. All of them looking at him with variations of the same expression, somewhere between surprised, uncertain, and something else he couldn't quite categorize.
He looked back at them.
Nobody said anything.
He took a bite of the second skewer.
"Is there something on my face," he said.
Several people made sounds. None of them were words.
The vendor behind him recovered first. "Where did you come from?" she asked, and her voice had dropped to something careful, like she was asking a question she already knew the answer to and was verifying.
"The forest," he said, which was true and unhelpful.
"Alone?"
"Yes."
The look she exchanged with the woman at the next stall communicated an entire conversation that he was not party to.
More people had stopped. The small crowd had approximately doubled in the two minutes he had been standing there eating, and it was still growing at the edges, new arrivals craning to see what the gathering was about and then going still when they saw.
He finished the third skewer. The silence had a texture to it now, it was not hostile, more like everyone was waiting for someone else to do something first.
A woman near the front of the crowd finally stepped forward. Tall, well-dressed, the kind of composure that came from practice. She looked at him the way you look at something you're trying to accurately assess.
"Forgive the attention," she said, with the tone of someone who was not particularly sorry. "It's just that we don't often see—" a brief pause "—unaccompanied males in the outer district."
"Is that a problem?" he asked.
"Not a problem," she said. "More of a... rarity."
He thought about the ratio of women to men he had observed since entering the city, and the way the men he'd seen were moving. Then the vendor's face when she'd heard his voice.
The [Accelerated Comprehension] trait connected several things in quick succession.
"How rare," he said.
The woman smiled not answering the question. "Where are you headed?"
"Somewhere I can exchange for local currency and find lodging."
"I can direct you to both," she said, immediately, and three other women behind her made almost identical offers in the same breath and then looked at each other.
He ate the fourth skewer.
"I'll just follow the main road," he said. "Thank you for the directions."
He started walking.
The crowd parted. He could feel eyes on his back for the entire length of the street, and when he glanced back once from a distance, most of them were still watching him go.
He faced forward again.
"Okay," he said quietly to himself. "So that's going to be a thing."
---
He found a currency exchange without too much trouble then traded two small gemstones he had pulled from his storage ring, which had apparently come pre-loaded with a modest assortment of valuables because the system had some sense of practicality, and then found an inn run by an older woman named Sera who looked at him with the calculating focus of someone doing rapid mental arithmetic.
She gave him a room. A good one which was unprompted. It had a ground floor which was garden-facing and had a private bath.
"Meals included," she added, when he hadn't asked.
"How much extra is—"
"Included," she repeated, and that was the end of the conversation.
He sat on the edge of the bed in his new room and looked at the ceiling.
The system icon pulsed gently at the edge of his vision. He pulled it open and looked at his skills again. [Beloved of Fortune] Already doing things, apparently.
He closed it.
Outside, the city was winding into evening. Through his window he could see the luminescent lines in the road brightening as the natural light faded, and somewhere above the tree-buildings someone had lit lanterns that swayed gently in the breeze.
It was a nice view.
He was in a foreign body in a world he didn't know with skills he hadn't earned, and apparently his existence here was already causing minor disruptions just from walking down a street.
He thought about that for a moment.
Then he thought about whether the inn's included meals extended to breakfast, and decided that was the more immediately relevant concern.
He'd figure the rest out tomorrow.