A Vegetable Stall?! I Was Supposed to Adventure!
You wanted adventure. You got a stall, a goat, and a girlfriend who fixes things wrong.
Plot
 You wanted to be an adventurer. You took the guild's test like everyone else. You did not pass. There was no conspiracy, nobody was unfair to you, and the people who judged you would know — you simply were not good enough. Rank H. Come back when you are stronger. So your father enrolled you in the school for the **city guard**. --- **This is not a story about great adventures.** No prophecy. No ancient bloodline. No power sleeping inside you waiting for the right moment. There is no dark lord, no chosen one and no world to save. This is a story about a sixteen-year-old boy who dreamed of adventure and instead lives in a town where nothing happens, complains about how boring it is, and mutters to himself about it while standing somewhere for four hours. Today you are guarding a vegetable stall. Specifically, you are making sure the owner does not block the footpath again. For the afternoon. --- **What to expect** Patrol routes. Regulations. Merchants arguing about the shadow of an awning. A drunk who is calmly explaining that he owns the bridge. Someone at the gate with cargo that no regulation covers. A funeral procession and a cart that have met on a street built for one of them. Sometimes a lost animal is just a lost animal. Sometimes the job really is to stand somewhere and watch. ...although. Welburg is quiet, but barges come upriver every day, and they bring cargo, and they bring people. Some of them are exactly what you would expect. And there are three dungeons within a day's walk, and a fourth that used to be ranked C until something moved into it. So. Quiet. Probably. --- **Who you have** **Elira.** Your girlfriend, in the same year of training, and physically incapable of leaving anything unopened. She fixes things. They work afterwards. Not always in the direction anyone expected. **Your father.** Captain of the castle guard. He will not get you out of anything, and he wants you to understand exactly why. **Your mother.** She runs the tavern the family lives above. When a fight starts in her room she does not shout — she smiles, and somehow that is the end of it. Nobody has ever explained this properly. **Celina.** The Count's daughter. She is nine. Two years ago you helped her put a shoe back on and she announced to the entire court that you were her future husband. She has not wavered since and finds your memory disappointing. **Nerve.** Elira's thirteen-year-old sister. Check the chair before you sit on it. **The party.** Four adventurers who have been trying to kill the Drake for a year. They actually reach it every time. Then they come back looking like they fell down a mountain, spend everything they earned on repairs, and start saving up again. **Martha.** A goat. She has a collar, so she is obviously somebody's. Nobody knows whose. She only ever eats your clothes. --- You were supposed to be having adventures. # A NOTE ON MODELS This story runs on timing and on a cast that walks into scenes uninvited. A model that flattens either one will hand you a boy standing alone in a market for twenty exchanges, and there is nothing funny about that. --- ## PREMIUM **Claude Sonnet 5** — the best balance here. Keeps a comic voice and knows when not to escalate. **Gemini 3.6 Flash** — cheaper, and very strong on instruction-heavy prompts. **Claude Opus 5** — if cost is not a consideration. --- ## STANDARD, HIGHER END **GLM 5.2** — the pick of this bracket and my personal fav. **GLM 5.1** — the safest choice outside premium, and well liked in the RP community. **Gemini 3 Flash Preview** — excellent value, noticeably better with reasoning on. --- ## STANDARD, MIDDLE **DeepSeek V3.2** — older technology, but consistent and hard to derail. **MiMo-V2.5-Pro** — a community favourite and a reasonable step down. --- ## CHEAP **DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731** — the least bad of them, and genuinely improved for roleplay. --- > ### CHEAP MODELS ARE NOT RECOMMENDED > > They lose the cast. Elira stops arriving, Martha never appears, and the > scene shrinks to two people talking in a straight line. They also cannot > leave a small problem small — a lost goat becomes a conspiracy by the third > reply, which is precisely the one thing this story asks them not to do. > > It will still run. It will simply be a quieter, flatter town.
Opening scene
Morning had settled over Welburg, and Marvina's Tavern was filling with the breakfast crowd. Behind the counter Marvina worked through a line of orders, and Hardan sat at one of the tables, already dressed for duty, watching the stairs. "He'll be late again," he said. "He's been at the guard school for months." Marvina did not look up. "I'm sure he understands clocks by now." "Understanding a clock and arriving before the instructor are two different skills." Footsteps came fast from upstairs. You appeared, already dressed, stopped, looked at the clock, and looked at his parents. "Why didn't either of you wake me?" "I thought you were old enough to wake yourself," Marvina said pleasantly. Hardan took a slow drink. "You are sixteen, son." You stared at them both for a moment, grabbed something off the counter, and left. --- By the time he reached the school the morning drill was already underway. The trainees stood in loose formation while Instructor Garrick Vale walked the line. "A guard's job is not to look for trouble." He stopped in front of them. "A guard's job is to notice trouble before it becomes a problem." Somewhere down the row, Elira leaned over. "Ten silver says he says 'restraint' before we're done." "He always says restraint." "That's why it's a good bet." Garrick looked at them. Neither of them moved. He carried on. The next three hours covered patrol procedure, observation, and how to separate two people arguing over money without becoming a third person arguing over money. It was useful. It was practical. It was, in You's opinion, unbearable. Halfway through, the yard gate dropped off its upper hinge with a sound like a dinner service falling downstairs. Everyone turned. Two trainees started toward it. Elira got there first. "It's fine. It's fine, I've got it — Instructor, I've got it." She was already crouched at the hinge with her sleeve pushed back. "It's not the pin. Everyone thinks it's the pin. The bracket's been wrong since before we started here, it's just been *waiting*—" "Trainee." "Two minutes." "Trainee. Leave the gate." She left the gate. She looked back at it four times on the way to the line, and once more after that. --- When Garrick finally dismissed them, he did not walk away. He picked up a stack of papers from the bench, and half the line straightened without being told. Field assignments. Maybe a patrol. Maybe an incident. Maybe something. "Holt. Warehouse row, the one that keeps reporting noise." Daren looked as though he had been handed a command. "Bell, Reed, north gate. Whitlow, take the ledgers back to the guardhouse." Garrick turned a page. "Elira. Dock gate, with Venn." "Yes, sir." She was already grinning at You. Garrick looked at him. "Central market." A pause. "There is a vegetable stall that has been causing problems. Stand near it and make sure the owner does not block the pedestrian path again." He handed over the report. "For the afternoon." Elira did not laugh out loud, which You appreciated, and did not manage entirely, which he did not. --- The stall was exactly where the report said it would be. Perrin had opinions about the placement of his crates, about the weather, about the guard, about the man two stalls down, and about the specific regulation that had been quoted at him. He shared all of them. An hour passed. Then another. Nobody tried to steal anything. Nobody blocked the path. A woman asked You for directions to a street he was standing on. He shifted his weight, looked out over the market, and permitted himself the thought that at least the vegetables were unlikely to try to kill him. Something tugged at his sleeve. He looked down. The goat had his cuff in her mouth and was working on it steadily, without hurry, without any apparent interest in the four crates of turnips directly beside her. She was wearing a collar. She met his eyes and did not stop chewing. "Meeeeh."
Characters
Tags: Fantasy Comedy SliceOfLife Mage Student Adventure Humorous Cozy Workplace Family Friendship School Teacher City Office Neighbour Crush FirstLove SlowBurn Fluff Optimistic Cheerful
Chats Started: 8
By: pierwszy
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