Japan in Alagaësia

A Peasant Incursion

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A Peasant Incursion

Reiwa 2 December 6

Sheets on straws by the grimy floor made for poor sleeping accommodations, and even more so having to share a small room with three strangers, one of whom was on the verge of dying. Perhaps soon to be more than one.

And the cold. Kiyoshi knew he shouldn't have expected an exclusive fireplace in their room, but he had held onto that hope until at last they had arrived at their door (that had taken some time, especially the "carrying a dying man through the corridors" part, a task which had fallen to the female stranger and Kiyoshi himself). Any heat that reached them was generated from a larger hearth closer to the center of the building, and they slept with their hantens on.

What bothered him was that many people back in Japan probably didn't have it much better. They were still dealing with dire energy shortages, and this winter was as cold as those a century ago, before the effects of anthropogenic climate change had set in. Causes of death from hypothermia were expected to be an order of magnitude higher than during an average winter in the 2010s, made worse by the shortages of caloric sources. At least Covid you could isolate from. He worried for his parents...

Sighing quietly, he got up from his corner of the room, pushing aside the comforter. Frustratingly, Eisaku had had to make another trip to the red seal ship last night to get those as well as the extra bed sheets, even though they were supposed to be quarantining—at least the handover of items had occurred under strict infection control measures. The inn staff had seen it fit to provide them a single bed of straws and one linen bedspread for the five of them! Kiyoshi and Eisaku had reasonably (or perhaps unreasonably by local customs) refused the arrangement. The two had thus set up the impromptu solution of sleeping on the dark wooden floor strewn with some of the straws and their own sheets and comforters, leaving the actual bed to the other three. There wasn't really much in the room but the bed anyway, besides the spartan nightstand and mildewed timber walls.

The candle had burned out, and what little light came from the narrow crevices of the window shutter. Kiyoshi struggled to find the tetracycline.

Just how were they going to convince the two non-symptomatic strangers to take the tetracycline?!

They had tried to last night, with questionable success. The woman (he guessed a mother) had seemed terrified by their insistence, shielding her son behind her back (the man lying unconscious on the floor). The two Japanese had taken the capsules themselves, to demonstrate its safety, and Kiyoshi had tried his utmost to explain why they should be taken in broken local language.

It hadn't worked, and he suspected it wasn't just due to the language barrier, but also fundamental differences in worldviews and patterns of thinking and reasoning, which were of course culturally conditioned. The capsules were dangerous, and the two Japanese sought them harm, no matter what Kiyoshi said. And the mother had seemed convinced that the two Japanese would force-feed it to them (which wasn't actually the case, as he did require the informed consent of at least the parent), and before he had realized she had tearfully snatched the capsules from his hand and downed them all herself, apparently in the hopes of "sacrificing" herself to save her son. And Kiyoshi had felt sick with himself, sick because the only reason the mother had taken the capsules was because she believed them to be dangerous, and opted to save her son from that fate. In a roundabout way he had forced her to make that choice, even though that was the very opposite of what he had wanted them to think about the capsules and their choices. And her presumed son still hadn't taken the antibiotics...