RPWP (4)

24)

“You declined, Thomas?”

Tomi hummed as he looked up from his screen, drinking his milkshake, to see a guy a couple of years younger than Tomi, hair dyed and styled. Not in a stylish way, really. More like in a way that made the guy look like he rolled out of bed and left home, forgetting to fix his hair. Plausibly, that could even be the case, as far as Tomi knew. Maybe it was old products being used to death. Tomi didn’t trust him to wash his hair, really.

Before him was one of Peter’s friends. Tomi wasn’t exactly familiar with Noa. Peter had already been friends with the guy long before he and Tomi met while Tomi was in college. For some reason, this particular guy insisted on speaking English as if Tomi couldn’t understand him otherwise; as if he didn’t speak with Peter primarily in the Peter’s first language. Sure, Tomi didn’t speak the same dialect and naturally with an accent due to his first language, but on the other hand, English was his third language. It was, to say the least, counterproductive to assume he knew English better.

“It’s Tomi. Still,” Tomi said as he put down his milkshake. “But yeah. It’s not going to monetise itself. Get a sponsor. Maybe a proper producer. You here to convince me to change my mind about that?”

It had been several days since Tomi declined. He had thought the discussion was already over.

“I am.”

Tomi wasn’t surprised about this. This NPC of his life had always been somewhat antagonistic. What did he have against Tomi? Tomi didn’t know.

“Think of the opportunity. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

“It sure will be if I starve.”

“Now you’re being dramatic. You were like this during the school project, too. Always saying all sorts of bull. ‘This angle is wrong, don’t spend so much time on that, move this here, do that there—’”

“The school project gave me a grade. I am not working for free.”

“Everyone is getting paid. We’ll have—”

“Shared revenue from a project with no guaranteed profits is not income.”

“Peter said you’d say that.”

“You should have listened.”

“I know you can be convinced.”

“Mhm. If you pay my rent and all living costs for a month to show how sincere you are.”

“I can’t afford that.”

“Then I’m not doing slave labour. Your empire already fell, so you can’t decide what my people do for a living. Farm your own lands. I’ll work on my own tiny patch, even if it barely feeds my household, thank you very much.”

The other gave Tomi a confused look. Maybe he didn’t know the history between the neighbouring countries very well.

Not his problem.

Tomi just turned to his laptop and clicked out of the browser tab he was looking at before typing his response to a sponsor email one-handedly.

He slurped on his milkshake through the straw.

He really needed to find an agent.

25)

The sponsor would be great, but Tomi really took his audience’s opinions to heart, even when they just wrote it in the chat as a joke.

No sponsor was the verdict.

Tomi politely declined and asked if instead of doing a sponsored segment the company could suggest more of an event that he could participate in or similar.

His instinct was to directly ask for just a bunch of products to review, but he had been told more than once he was too blunt. So he asked in this way instead.

If they asked for a suggestion of what he meant, he would include it in the suggestions. Easy.

Why people abroad liked making things complicated was beyond Tomi’s comprehension.

26)

Sometimes Tomi would be reminded that he was a foreigner.

Sometimes he got the “Are you from the north?” and he would just roll with it and say he was. Around where Tomi moved several years ago to study, being from the next country to the right on the map, and being from the north hardly differed. Both were exotic, but the north perhaps more so, but at least he wasn’t asked to “say something” in his first language.

Once, when someone said that, he just replied in his second instead of switching. It wasn’t the funniest joke ever, but it had people around the person who asked laugh, because Tomi hadn’t switched languages after all.

Tomi moved here precisely because it was far from home, but his grandparents and some cousins didn’t speak the majority language, so he had some basic understanding of it. He understood most of what was said even though he sometimes had to ask for clarification, and sometime had to do so using English. At times, the other person would switch to English in response, but Tomi always told them he asked for clarification, not a translation.

Eventually, he was confidently speaking his second language.

It had been perfectly functional to begin with, unlike for most immigrants.

For that was indeed what Tomi was on paper — an immigrant.

And yet, nowadays he was less at home where he originally was from.

27)

“Tommy.”

Tomi looked away from his screen.

“Are you still here? Don’t you have better stuff to do than staring at someone responding to business emails?”

“What sort of business emails are you getting? Is it like a mailing list from some camera manufacturer or something?”

As Noa tried to peek at Tomi’s screen, the latter nearly slammed it shut.

“Dude, don’t look. It’s my email.”

“And?”

“I like my privacy.”

“If it’s a business email, reading it is fine.”

“If it’s a business email, reading it is worse. I might be under an NDA for all you know.”

“Then why reading it at a fast-food place?”

“Anonymity in numbers.”

“Bullshit.”

Tomi was unfazed by this and just grabbed his phone to continue checking the emails for The Solitary Paladin.

However, he noted that Rowen, his mod, had messaged him on the social app.

Sorry, can’t go online this morning. Please survive without me.

He couldn’t bother writing a response so he just sent a voice message: “Traitor. You think I need you to shield me?”

He then went to into the streaming app to change the chat settings for his livestream later that day.

Knowing he would need to prepare earlier without a mod in chat, he glanced at Noa. “I won’t do it. The web series.”

He gathered his things before he added, “The more you ask, the bigger the no. Now I gotta go. I have to work, unlike someone idle enough to haunt me.”

28)

Tomi set up his computer and camera. He gathered the things he needed for his stream.

Player handbook. A monster manual — which he himself compiled while he was hacking the rules and would share on his site afterwards. His usual resources for oracles and NPC, location and encounter generation. His game journal so he could write some notes to remember what was going on. A set of four-sided dice and a dice tray. A deck of tarot cards — which Tomi’s dad bought him after grandma Lehtonen had once called an older deck he had “witchcraft” and thrown it into the rubbish bin.

His mum had apologised to Tomi for her mother’s behaviour and Tomi still pretended he hadn’t heard his mother’s upset voice talking to his grandmother through the walls whenever it came up. It always did when he went to meet cousins who had been there that day. It had made an impression on them all.

For different reasons, naturally.

He shuffled the deck absentmindedly as he went to get a bottle of water to keep at reaching distance. He noted when he opened the fridge that he didn’t have any chilled water prepared. He must have forgotten to put in the bottle in the morning. He checked the freezer, and noted he had none there either. Not even any ice cubes.

He awkwardly scratched his chin. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. He could feel it. He had been pretty busy lately, and his days weren’t standard nine-to-fives so he hadn’t noticed the difference between one day to the next.

“Man, I’m fucking haggard,” he muttered. He took the handful of steps between the kitchenette and his gaming table and put his deck on it. Even if he didn’t show his face, he abandoned the idea of chilled water in favour of being clean-shaven. He really didn’t want to deal with the audio of him touching his face and his stubble made noise that he needed to clean up in post for a clean VOD.

He had once skipped shaving, and, because his setup was too sensitive, it picked it up.

It had haunted him for days when he saw the comments when he looked up from his game. What kind of ASMR had they landed on?

No fucking clue, really.

He sure wasn’t going to do it again, though.

There was still a while left when his face was as smooth as a baby’s bum. He grabbed his keys and his wallet, slipped his feet into a pair of Birkenstocks and then went downstairs.

The evening air was chilly, but he walked across the street and entered through a metal door covered in advertising. Light pilled out from within briefly while a bell chimed above him.

The woman behind the counter looked up from her magazine, gave Tomi a once-over, and rolled her eyes. He didn’t bother with her. If she couldn’t appreciate he was in a tanktop and joggers in this weather, that was her problem. He lived across the street anyway — who bothered with a jacket when it was still above freezing at that distance?

Tomi went straight to the tiny little soda section. He could hear someone talk to the woman at the counter in a language he understood just as well as they would understand his first language.

Which was not at all.

He grabbed a couple of juice bottles and a bottle of mineral water, then snatched a bag of snacks on the way to the counter.

He didn’t carry a lot of cash, but he had some bills and more coins than he could imagine collecting.

The woman told him the total before even adding it to the register and as he tried to figure out if he had enough coins to avoid using the bills, he heard an enthusiastic, but heavily accented, “Tomi!”

He just grunted a greeting, while counting coins. When Tomi moved in across the street, after he quit university and refused to move back home, the shop owner had somehow immediately clocked him as a foreigner.

Something, something, “your face, not local” and “small eyes, very thin”.

He was dragged into the shop-that-didn’t-look-like-a-shop.

Tomi could see the difference between the two neighbour ethnicities, but his local neighbours couldn’t. Most foreigners couldn’t.

The woman at the counter had been mortified back then and said, “Dad, stop,” and something Tomi couldn’t understand.

Tomi revelled in her mortification in silence for some time. After two or three weeks, he just told her directly his face really wasn’t local.

She had been red-faced when she realised he migrated, too.

Now she could even sit and judge his late-night attire.

The shop owner prattled on about the state of the world, while Tomi made no effort to respond, just focusing on his coins.

He then cursed. Natively, obviously.

But curses are curses and the man asked what was wrong.

“No. Just didn’t have enough coins.” He pulled out a bill to pay with.

“No problem. You get friend discount,” was the response.

Tomi put the bill back into his wallet before having even fully pulled it out. He didn’t even know what the owner was called — he never caught it — but he wouldn’t decline a discount.

Peter was so stingy in comparison. He would never offer Tomi a discount, and they had know each other since the same month as Tomi moved abroad.

29)

“Today’s session begins in a shop,” Tomi said before anything else. “Let me set the scene in a moment, but first we need to do all the important work.”

He grabbed his journal and opened it up on a blank page. As he spun his pencil in his hand, he said, “Hello y’all. You good? It’s you solitary paladin here again. Although, this game doesn’t have paladin, so while I do the character generation, I’ll put up a poll on which option there are.”

Tomi tapped his pen against the paper.

“What game do you think we’re playing today, friends?” Tomi saw someone write a very popular and well-known title. “Not even close. But it does cater to a similarly sized group, usually.”

He waited for a while before he pulled the Player’s Handbook into the frame.

“Yessss. This one. I got the rulebooks like last month after preordering them. I have spent my free time chopping it all up and put it into a blender to make it possible to play solo. I’ve had multiple people requesting it already. Made for about four to eight players and a game master, this is one that heavily relies on the GM. Which means…”

Tomi pulled one of his resources he had — a binder he has compiled — into the frame.

“We’re inviting the GM generator onto the stream again. That means slower gameplay.”

He looked at the chat reacting and noticed a comment. “‘Why are the replies restricted? I had to pay for this.’ Our druid elf abandoned me earlier, so there’s no mod. You have to have a subscription and not just be a follower to write regular messages. Sorry about that. I just don’t have enough eyes. I’m a paladin, not a monstrosity of an angel.”

He then added, “And I also turned down a sponsor today. Pay me so I can pay my rent.”

He laughed, making it sound like a joke and opened up the Handbook. He began explaining all of the classes one by one and then picked out a few options: War Healer, Warrior, Rogue Knight, and Shieldsworn.

He went into more details about these four that he had chosen could be his paladin interpretation for this run. He also explained how each worked mechanically.

After all. The chat would choose the class for him.

30)

wstrbstr256o2: (€50.00) pick shieldsworn pls & thx

Tomi sat for a moment in silence.

It was fine to ask.

It was even fine to just tell him to pick it in a paid message.

But why did this person pay… 50 goddamn euro for it? Afraid he wouldn’t see it? Well, he definitely was seeing it now.

Also, what was going on with that username??

“Uh, thanks for the 50 euro… letters and numbers. That’s a little more than you needed to get over the threshold to have the message approved. I was going to have a poll, though?”

There were a bunch of members who posted laughing emojis. Others were crying. Others were trying to campaign against Shieldsworn now and trying to convince Tomi to remove it from the list.

Tomi wasn’t that easily affected either way. “I’m making a poll either way. I’ll give it ten minutes or so until I’ve rolled the rest of the details of my character. There are random table for character creation. And what isn’t int he character generation table, we have other resources for.”

After making the poll he opened up the Handbook’s character creation table. “Let’s pick species first.” He rolled a few d4s and looked through the table. “All right. A faun. That’s… going to be something. And this faun is…” He rolled a single d4. “…female. Do I have a table of faun names for the girlies?”

He continued to generate his character until he had an essentially complete character background to a faun named Ynna.

“So, what do I make out of this?” Tomi said, more to himself than to the chat as he look at his notes for his rolls. He softened his voice and made it lighter to sound more feminine, although he hardly needed to try much. “I’m firstborn to parents who ran the local inn and sold exotic goods they got as payment for shelter. It makes perfect sense that not everyone might have been perfectly honest about the background, but unfortunately they still managed to offend someone they shouldn’t. They ended up harbouring a criminal and the entire family was implicated for treason… Wow, I’ve had a horrible childhood.” He paused and looked over the rest of his background rolls. “As a young adult, I was brought to a large city where I was sold into slavery. However, I escaped after much hardship and found a patron in a noble to serve. It was during my service I learnt the foundations—”

He looked up and saw a list of paid messages that had scrolled as he did his rolls. At the very top was another message from Letters and Numbers.

wstrbstr256o2: (€50.00) campaigning to the chat. paladin is essentially a shieldsworn a rogue knight is not

He saw about forty percent had apparently agreed with Letters and Numbers. Warrior was second at just under thirty percent.

“Are you all so easily convinced by some random letters and numbers? Did you all get bribed? Don’t you usually ask me to play anything but paladin because it’s inherently not a solo class?”

The responses he got were a bunch of messages simply replying “I admit, esteemed paladin, I was bribed”. Tomi was left speechless on stream for the first time in a long while.

I can’t have a content creator and not some of his content he creates.

Also, I can’t mention a die and not roll it or bring a tarot deck into a story and not pull the cards. These are what the universe offered this boy.