Roger was getting ready to close up for the night. Usually he didn't stay this late, but today there had been a lot of fires for him to put out. Not literal fires, thankfully, but plenty of problems. The most thorny of which was dealing with the Chrisly issue.

He hadn't been in the tavern when it happened, but Roger had heard enough about it. Thank goodness that strange human had been there to help Jessica. Who knows where that would have gone otherwise. Of course, now he had to worry about what kind of retribution the Difmers would get. The idea that they would realize it was their son's fault, and not that of Roger's village, was laughable. If they were smart and honorable enough to think that way, their family likely wouldn't be part of the tutorial to begin with.

The easiest form of retribution they could take would be that Chrisly and his group would no longer come around Elstree to reset their dungeon. That would have been a serious problem for Roger, except for the encounter he had just had. It made him glad he had still been here.

There was a group of recruits wandering around, it seemed like a party of four beastkins. He had gotten reports of them being in the village previously, but this was the first time he had actually gotten to see them. He had heard they were in town yesterday, but by the time he had gotten to the tavern, they had left with the busboy. At least he had been in time to deal with the fallout of his escape.

Roger didn't actually have much experience with fulfilling Town Quests. In the settlement he had worked in before volunteering for the tutorial, they had been large enough to have a dedicated adventurer's guild. Adventurers and others turning in quests would do so there, not at the Town Hall.

He knew the theory of how it worked, but the details were definitely different. There were no guild badges here, so they had to rely on the Quest Ball to verify the completion of the bounties. Roger was impressed that the recruits had managed to complete the village's dungeon, they hadn't seemed that impressive when he saw them, but the ball didn't lie. Perhaps it was because they weren't wearing their gear.

After upgrading the village to tier four, thanks in large part to the last group of new residents boosting the population, their dungeon had changed from an obelisk to a proper dungeon. This was both good and bad. It was good because they didn't have to kill the boss at a set time, in the real world, to keep it from releasing monsters. Instead someone just had to complete the entire dungeon before the timer ran out. Even after that, it would only leak lower level monsters for quite a while before more dangerous threats were released.

If this party was capable of completing the dungeon, then they were much less reliant on Chrisly and his goons. The only problem was, once he was healed, that odious man would most likely be back for revenge. If he found the beastkin, unless they were much stronger than he thought, they would be wiped out like that party of insectoids that had tried to enter the village.

Closing the hall door behind him, Roger made the short trip to his home. One of the perks of being the mayor was that he had a lovely house, just off the main square. The corners of his mouth curled up at the grandiose name for what was, at the moment, simply a slightly wider section of the road. Thinking of the square reminded him of the first time he had seen the human who became the busboy.

He hadn't arrived with the most recent group of volunteers. He had come in the following day all by himself. He was not the first to make the journey from one of the other villages, and he would not be the last. Or at least Roger hoped he wouldn't be. Roger had arrived at his office that day to find the man standing before the town's new quest board. He was peering intently at each paper in turn, as if memorizing the details.

When Roger had tried to greet him, he had discovered that the man was mute. After a round of charades where Roger realized he was a migrant who wanted to join his town, he had told him to check in with the farmers to see if they needed more help. Usually he would do a more in depth interview to determine where he would fit in the best, but the thought of trying to do that with a man who couldn't talk, was exhausting.

He had mentally wiped his hands of the strange man that day, but it hadn't done him any good. It was all because of that quest board, too. Most of the bounties that the village currently had available were of the collection variety. Find ten of these, gather twenty of those, bring back the legs of thirty of these things. They were often vital for villages for three reasons.

The first benefit was that it provided hard to acquire ingredients for crafters in the town. Blacksmiths, Alchemists, Enchanters, and others would be able to purchase these items from the village to improve their products. It also provided a nice income for the town coffers. The problem for Elstree was that they didn't really have many crafters, and most of these items would just accumulate in their vault.

The second benefit was upgrade points for the Town. Improving your village from tier to tier could usually be accomplished by building certain structures and increasing the population. To reach tier five, however, or to be designated an actual town, you also needed upgrade points. There were a variety of ways to do this, completing quests and bounties was one, but you could also get points from certain economic achievements and from leading or defending invasions of other settlements.

Now that Elstree was a tier four village, these points were critical to their future growth. The trade agreements he had with the nearby town were helping, but they really needed bounty points if they were going to stay ahead of the nearby settlements. Without any adventurers based in the village, anything but a collection bounty was out of their reach.

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Even those were dangerous. There was some mundane wildlife in the area, either level one or zero creatures, that the assigned hunters could kill for food. However, there were now more dangerous beasts wandering around out there. Even a level three monster was too much for any solitary hunter. That's why they had taken to traveling in groups recently. They had also been the sole source of bounty points.

While they wandered the fields and forests in the area, they were keeping an eye out for not just animals to kill, but also the items required to complete the collections. The number of jasper mushrooms, whatever they were good for, he now had sitting in the town vault was ridiculous. But each bounty turned in not only got them points, but it also got them money.

That was the third way in which bounties helped the village. Each one rewarded the person turning them in, usually with money. This then added currency into circulation that would often be spent in one of the shops. That was a win-win. Not only that, but the village also received from the Network ten percent of whatever bounties were turned in. This was supposed to encourage towns to help people complete bounties and quests, and therefore grow their strength. The forty gold Elstree had just earned from the dungeon's completion far outstripped every other reward turned in so far.

However, it was closer than it might have been, he had to admit, if not for the busboy. Most people had thought he was slow, probably due to prejudice since he couldn't speak. The man had impressed the mayor, however. Instead of going to meet the farmers that first day, he had set out on his own, and without any kind of weapon, went around and completed four different collection bounties. None of them had required him to kill any creatures, but it just wasn't safe out there for a single unclassed human.

After turning them in, he had simply pocketed the coins and gone back out for more. The man had made the trip three more times in the first two days, before Roger had taken pity on him and gotten him a safer job in town. He had talked the brewer and owner of the tavern into bringing him on as a busboy and giving him a room upstairs. Roger figured he would miss the rewards from the bounties, but he wouldn't have the death of a resident on his conscience.

Turns out that he had been wrong in a couple of ways. The first was that when other villagers heard of what the man had done, they worked up the courage to copy him. They weren't foolish enough to go out alone and unarmed, but they had gotten into small groups and started completing bounties as well. Not only was it benefitting the town in both money and points, but it was adding some coin to the residents pockets, as well as giving them achievements that would benefit them if they ever managed to get a class. That was highly unlikely, but it could conceivably happen.

He had also been wrong about the now busboy staying safe. Even before he clunked Chrisly on the head, and man did Roger wish he could have seen that, he was going out at night after his shift and in the morning before it started, to complete more bounties. He had also started turning in more dangerous ones, requiring him to harvest parts from creatures he killed. Roger had been unable to figure out how he was doing it without at least some kind of weapon. Never mind the killing, how was he cutting them up?

That mystery was at least partially solved when one of the bounty groups had spied him taking on a small boar. They weren't that close, and it wasn't all that light out, but they swore they had seen him wielding what looked like one of the large serving spoons from the tavern. They said it even glowed a little in the dark, the only reason they had seen it.

Other groups had reported seeing the same thing, and some people had taken to calling him Silver Spoon after that. If it was truly one of the spoons from the tavern it definitely wasn't made of silver, but Tin Spoon just didn't have the same ring to it. It hadn't had time to spread much, but several people were using it since it was better than calling him busboy. Well, it hadn't been catching on before…

Arriving at his door, he unlocked it with his key and went in. The lock was a new addition and had cost quite a bit from the Network Store. As the mayor, he had limited access, and he had felt bad using the town funds for a personal item, but he had felt justified in purchasing it.

"I'm hoooome!" he called out.

The sound of feet running upstairs preceded Jessica's appearance on the stairs. When Roger had arrived at the tavern on that fateful day, he came in just as Chrisly's goons were starting to turn their attention on her. Luckily the other residents had been driven to intervene by the busboy, Silver Spoon's, intervention. They were positioning themselves between the three conscious classers and the terrified Jessica.

After he arrived, he had quickly apologized to the group, those words had burned coming out, and promised to help them track down the perpetrator. He had then quickly gotten Jessica out of there while they helped their unconscious members. Roger had managed to get one of the village's carts for them to load them on. Unfortunately they didn't have any livestock to pull the thing, and the adventurers had felt it beneath them, but a few of the stronger residents had volunteered to pull it. Usually it was used for shipping lighter goods to the nearby villages and the town, and these men were tasked with moving it. Hopefully the men he had sent wouldn't be punished for Chrisly's condition.

Jessica bounded down the stairs and leapt on Roger, wrapping him in a full body hug.

"I missed you!" She whispered into his ear.

Roger returned the embrace before setting her down. "That's just because you were stuck here all alone."

After rescuing her from the tavern, he had needed somewhere to stash her. Almost all of the residents were obviously on her side, but if push came to shove, they couldn't stand up to adventurers, especially an Aristocrat. It was easier if they could rely on the fiction that she had fled, so Roger had given her one of the extra bedrooms in his house, and installed a new lock that only he had the key for. It was unlikely the adventurers would resort to a door to door search, they were much too lazy for such a tedious task, but it paid to be careful.

Roger and Jessica's relationship had just been starting when this all happened, but they had become much closer in the day since. Sitting down to dinner with her, he told her all about the beastkin party and how they had taken the busboy as a follower. Jessica was happy to hear he was safe. He smiled, looking forward to telling her about the next bit of gossip.

"Speaking of the busboy, you'll never believe what the rest of the villagers are saying about him…"

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