"Alys, babe, you are not going to believe what just happened to me!"

Alys Brangwin looked up from the drink that she had been peacefully enjoying up until the moment Joss Howland's voice had rung out through the Hunter's Guild bar.

"On the contrary, Joss. I gave up doubting anything that happens to you a long time ago. Also, I'm fairly sure that you didn't start out that precise shade of green, which will help my acceptance."

"If you drip paint on the floor, I'm putting the cost of the cleanup on your tab," warned Garn, the bartender.

"Naw, this isn't paint, it's—"

Alys reached out and ran her fingertip along Joss's shoulder guard, gathering a bit of the green goop, then held it under her nose and sniffed.

"Huh. This is cake batter, isn't it?" Alys did not follow the tired cliche of the career woman who couldn't cook; on the contrary, Motavia's most celebrated hunter was excellent in the kitchen. She'd be eating her own cooking while in the wilderness tracking biomonsters, after all. It behooved her to not only learn, but to get good at it. "The color doesn't fit with..." She paused, the fixed Joss with a glare. "You signed up for the Lost Pet job Dr. Zula was offering, didn't you?"

"Well, yeah, but how did you—"

Alys sighed. After the toadstool farm incident, she'd figured that most hunters would have had the brains to stay away from Dr. Zula's nonsense. In retrospect, it should have been obvious.

"So you figured that a pet is a pet, and if lost dogs always come to shortcake, then why not a carrion crawler?"

"Yeah! That's it exa—"

"Except that like Dr. Zula, you neglected the whole point that carrion crawlers aren't pets; they're undomesticated cave-dwelling monsters that consume meat. Obviously, it ran off back to the cave north of town where Dr. Zula got it from in the first place the instant it got loose, which is where the rest of us figured it was better left alone in its natural habitat. You, however, tracked it down, then baited your trap around the aroma of a baking cake...and it went for the cook instead."

Joss sighed.

"How did you know?"

"Do you know what the word inevitable means?"

"The baker's okay, though, right?" Garn asked.

"Of course!" Joss said. "I wouldn't be here getting a drink if they weren't."

"True," Alys said. Even Joss wasn't that thick or callous. "But tell me something. Given that you ended up covered in cake mix, just how long is it going to take the shop to get their equipment repaired so they can reopen?"

"Um...he said something about two weeks? I had to turn over my commission from the job to pay for the damages."

"Two weeks," Garn repeated.

"Whereupon you decided to immediately walk into a bar full of dessert-loving hunters and announce how it was your fault that they wouldn't be getting any shortcake for the next two weeks?"

Joss blinked. He then, for the first time, glanced around himself and realized that Alys and Garn were only about a tenth of his extremely attentive audience. Alys picked up her drink and moved down to the other end of the bar just in time to avoid the start of the brawl.

"If any of the furniture breaks on his thick head, I'm adding that to his tab, too," Garn muttered.