Just an Ordinary Rat Snake

[Outside the West Gate, the West Bank of the Kamogawa]

The Library-City Dungeon, with a population of fewer than 3,000 souls, was by no means a populous place, yet it had gone so far as to hire on adventurers to get the rice transplanting done. There was the sowing of soybeans and corn as well, and the work was at its very busiest, when one such day, from the direction of Iruma to the west, there arrived a party made up of an elderly nun, two attendant ladies-in-waiting serving as her guards, and an old serving-woman in her retinue.

"Pardon me, but I should like to be put in touch with whoever represents the Adachi dungeon."

"It is not quite that I represent the dungeon itself, but I am the aide-de-camp scribe and our representative in external affairs, Marie, the Director of Books of the Shiso."

"As for myself, my son has married and an heir has been born, and my husband has passed away, so I took the tonsure and set out on a journey, meaning to build a hall to enshrine the Kannon and to spend the rest of my days there. The truth is, though, that along the way I picked up a peculiar creature. It is a snake that speaks the tongue of men, yet it calls itself a dragon. And this creature insisted that I absolutely must come here."

So saying, the nun drew out of a bag a large, dull-green snake.

"You there, bhikkhuni, 'snake' is rude. I am Vasanti Sharmishtha, that is, Vasanti, daughter of Sharmishtha. The jade dragon who governs water. I came here having learned that this land has water in abundance."

A beastfolk normally requires a brain of some considerable size, so a snake weighing about a kilogram is a rare thing.

"Oh? A snake-beastfolk, is it. Any way I look at it, you're just an ordinary Japanese rat snake, though…"

"I keep telling you, I am a dragon. A dragon."

"If you're a dragon, can you fly through the sky?"

"I cannot fly. I have no wings."

"Can you breathe fire?"

"Out of the question. I would burn myself."

"Can you knock back great quantities of liquor?"

"Liquor I adore. Liquor. This nun won't drink, so…"

A snake, being an animal, does not drink liquor.

"Now, what a thing to say to the princess."

The old serving-woman scolded it. She was a lady-in-waiting who had come along when the nun was married into the family, an old companion of long standing.

"There are but a limited number of sects that permit one in holy orders to drink. And besides, I have never had any taste for liquor to begin with."

As the nun said, in this world the drinking of monks is restricted.

"Can you hoard up treasure?"

"There would be no point in hoarding it. Treasure I have no use for."

"Can you devour sacrificial maidens?"

"I do not. What I eat is eggs, or small birds, or mice. A sacrifice wouldn't fit in my mouth in the first place. A dragon can only swallow things whole, you know."

"Sorry, I teased you a bit too much. So then, Vasanti-san, what can you do?"

"I can make it rain."

"Now that would be useful. Would you give it a try right away?"

"Erm, if I could be supplied with water from the Dungeon Core…"

"From the Core?"

"Even a dragon cannot make something from nothing, so to bring down rain I need water."

"In short, you're a living watering can… Still, you do seem like you'd come in handy for sprinkling water over the woods and the pastureland."

"… A watering can…"

Vasanti, gripped about the body by that woman over there (who, biologically speaking, has no sex), with a bamboo tube thrust into her bottom (her cloaca) and water poured in, found herself picturing the figure she would cut, spewing water from her mouth like a Merlion, and shook her head to drive the unpleasant image away. (Vasanti, of course, has no idea what a Merlion is.)

"Let me see, calling you 'Reverend Abbess' would be jumping the gun a bit. From here on we'll be building any number of villages, so a temple is going to be absolutely necessary. In a sense it's first come, first served, so if you'll pick whatever spot within this dungeon's sphere of influence suits you best, we'll see the land prepared for you. As for the building itself, we can't quite provide anything worthy of a proper temple at the moment, so for the time being we'll set up something temporary, and put up the real thing at a later date."

"Leave the choosing of the land to me."

A strangely high-and-mighty snake.