After a couple of minutes, we were interrupted by the arrival of a plate of scrambled eggs sliding in front of me. I started, twisting around in my seat to look in the direction it came from, and an older looking man stared back at me. It took me a moment to place him, before I recognised that he was the owner of the house. He was in his sixties, maybe, and had appeared to opt for wearing just a loose robe, which was fair, this was his house. I looked down at the plate, and back to him.

"Is this for me?"

His smile was warm and genuine. "Of course, dearie. Eat up, I know you must have had a long night." He bustled off into the kitchen.

I gave Julie a questioning look as I started eating. She nodded.

"We told him about you last night, it's why he was willing to let you stay the night here. Said that he didn't think it was appropriate for a man on his own to wander around the streets at night."

Not what I was asking, but whatever. I'd complain, but people did try to mug me, so I can kind of see his point. It's not like I look like I can set people on fire. Well, I guess with my eyes the way there were now, maybe I did? Shrugging to myself, I kept eating. The eggs were nice, well cooked and fresh, and I polished them off quickly.

The clink of my fork against the plate as I put it down was obviously some kind of signal, as the owner made his way back in surprisingly quickly afterwards.

"Hungry, were we?" He smiled at me. "It's always good to see a lad with a healthy appetite. Would you be a dear and help me clear up the table?"

I looked down at the table briefly. It wouldn't be that difficult to tidy things by hand, but why bother? "Sure, I can do that." I waved my hand and spoke the word to activate my ring. "Presto!" Sue me, it was an easy word to remember. As I concentrated, the plates and cutlery slowly cleaned and stacked themselves.

Turning to the old man, I spoke. "Is that good, or is there something else?" He slowly shook his head, picked up the stack, and walked out. Huh.

The conversation around the table had stopped. Julie seemed surprised, Sabrina looked curious, and the other two had weirdly considering expressions on their faces. Sabrina spoke up with a barely suppressed eagerness. "You're a mage?"

I dithered slightly on how to respond to that. "I mean, technically, I guess?" No need to reveal the cantrip was from an item, I'd rather it not get stolen. "I've got that, and I can breathe fire, but the fire breathing is pretty much the focus of my abilities." I didn't know how well 'supernatural persuasion' would go down either. Probably best to just not mention it.

Lidda drummed a couple of fingers on the table thoughtfully. "So what exactly is your job, then? That's a fairly specialised skill set." She'd tilted her head to one side, and her eyes were slightly unfocused.

Fuck, how do I explain my job in a way that makes sense to anyone? "...I'm a scholar?"

Lidda's eyes focused on me. "You don't sound sure about that."

"It's complicated." I took a moment to figure out how to phrase it. "Ok, so, I guess I'm more of a researcher? I look into topics, and then write up basic guides for them so that other people can use them to learn things without going through all of the research that I have to do."

Zahri raised an eyebrow. "That pays well?"

"Well, not really, but it gives me a decent amount of spare time, and I enjoy researching and learning things, so it kinda works out."

Zahri hummed in response. There was a brief pause in the conversation, and as I tried to figure out what to say to make it less uncomfortable, Sabrina spoke up again. "So how does this spell to breathe fire work again?" She was patting her robe as if looking for something, before turning to Lidda with a hand outstretched. Lidda sighed, reached into a pouch, and pulled out a folded sheet of paper and a small stick of charcoal, dropping them into Sabrina's hand.

"It's not a spell, really." Sabrina paused during the act of unfolding the paper, and sent me a betrayed look. "It isn't. I'm a Dragonfire Adept." Confused faces. Ok, just make sure you don't compare it to a 'dragon-themed warlock', no idea how well that'll go down, and I've only just realised how much dancing around topics I'm doing. I really need to find a way to research cultural clues or something. "My soul is connected to the might and magic of dragonkind, and I can draw a small amount of their existence into myself. It's the kind of thing that sounds more powerful than it is. No, let me rephrase that. It's the kind of thing that if I were more powerful, would be as powerful as it sounds. At the moment, though, it's pretty much the gouts of fire thing." The confused faces had moved to somewhere between disbelieving and appreciative.

Zahri hummed again. "Dragon-blessed." She nodded, as if everything made sense, and turned back to Julie. "Invite him along."

Sabrina stopped scribbling on the paper. "Ooh, yes, having someone I can bounce ideas off it always useful. I mean, no offence, but you all glaze over whenever I bring up magic."

Lidda and Julie both started trying to talk at once. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and whistled sharply. I took another breath in the ensuing silence. This not understanding stuff thing was starting to get old.

"Thank you. Would you mind explaining what exactly it would be that you'd be inviting me along with, before you start talking about me as if I wasn't here?" My tone had taken on a cloyingly venomous tinge to it. I probably shouldn't be so rude to people to had helped me for no reason, but for fucks sake, I'd like to be emotionally balanced for more than 3 seconds before something unbalanced me again.

Julie squirmed in her seat slightly, before straightening her back. She seemed more confident, all of a sudden. "We're an adventuring party, which means we do odd jobs and tasks that are too dangerous for the average individual, and outside the reach of the guard or army. We've been hired by James to deal with a nearby problem. The crypt near where his wife is buried has started having an undead issue. Our job is to deal with that. Zahri was, I believe, saying that you'd be useful to bring along, Does that clarify things?" Sabrina reached under the table and patted Julie on the knee, earning her a smile from Julie before she forced her face back into a more serious expression.

I nodded. "Ok, that makes sense, thank you for answering. I have a number of questions, but I guess that you might have some as well, depending on why you actually want me with you."

Lidda scowled. "I'm not sure I do want someone I've not really met or fought with alongside us. You can fight, right?"

"I've sparred with people before," Larping counts as sparring, right? "but I've not had, you know, serious or lethal fights. I've never needed to. But yeah, I can fight, although I'm best off just breathing fire." Lidda raised an eyebrow at me. "My turn. Who's James?"

"I didn't realise we were taking it in turns." Sabrina interjected. "James is the owner of the house you're in, gave you breakfast." She pointed to the doorway to the kitchen behind me. "Went that way. More importantly, this fire. What's it like? What can you do with it? How hot is it?"

"Oh, of course, that James. I didn't realise you meant that James. Why, I'd have known nearly immediately you meant that James if anyone had brought up his name before." Damnit brain, tone down on the sarcasm. "And what's fire like? It's kind of a hot orange wobbly thing." I said tone down, not up. Still, it got a snort out of Lidda, and she'd eased up on the scowl, so that's something. "But I can spit out a line of it, getting it about 30ft away. Or breathe a cone of about half that. It's painfully hot, but not instantly deadly. I don't really know what I'd compare it to.

"So, why does this" don't say 'antiquated shitehole', don't say 'antiquated shitehole' "somewhat more quaint place have its own crypt?"

Julie decided to answer this one. "It doesn't, not really. The crypt is actually part of the old kingdom of..."

"Queendom."

"What?" Julie stared at Sabrina, who'd interrupted her.

"The correct term would be queendom. Even if we ignore that it's the term for any monarchy-lead country, Sennia is ruled by a queen, so it'd be a queendom anyway."

For some reason, Julie glanced at me, before looking back to Sabrina. "What's wrong with kingdom? I mean, Sennia was first founded by a king, right? Doesn't that make it a kingdom?"

"Only what we now think of as modern Sennia was founded by a king. The first Sennia, or ancient Sennia, was founded by a queen. Queendom is the correct term."

"Alright, sure." Julie turned back to me. "Anyway, yeah, a long time ago Sennia was a lot bigger than it is now, and it's currently slowly expanding. The crypt was here before the village was founded, and the loggers decided to use it and the graveyard around it as their own graveyard, until apparently the dead woke up and killed someone, so the loggers decided to leave it alone. Our job is to go in and make all the dead, erm, not moving again, ideally without dying."

Huh, so I've literally wandered into the path of adventurers about to go on a dungeon crawl. That seems... weirdly convenient. I guess they're the ones most likely to interfere with a situation, but what are the chances that one of them was on the gate yesterday? Bah, no point in immediately jumping to paranoia. Even if it is a set up of some kind, they still strike me as good people, even if I'm not getting some cultural clues.

"Ok, so are you all seasoned adventurers then? Seeking out a fortune at the edges of society, that kind of thing?"

Julie blushed. "Well, not exactly seasoned, precisely. We've done a couple of things together, but this is the biggest one." Well, there goes the faint hope that I could ride their coat-tails for some levels. I wasn't really expecting to be able to anyway, but it would be nice to dream.

"Slow and steady may not always win the race, but it does reduce your chances of dying horribly to a hideous monster you weren't prepared for, so I get that." I noted the blush increasing on Julie's face, but it was joined by a grin. "Do you have ideas what kind of undead are in the crypt? I can probably deal with zombies or skeletons, but if it's something like a mummy I'm right out."

Julie looked at Zahri. Zahri looked at Sabrina. Sabrina looked thoughtful.

"I have to admit to not being that familiar with the taxonomy of the undead. Does it make that large a difference between those options?"

I resisted the urge to plant my face into the table. "Does it make a diff... Of course it makes a difference! That's like saying you're going to fight a scaly beast, I went 'Monitor Lizard or Dragon' and you asked me if it mattered! A mummy could probably single-handedly wipe out this village."

Sabrina blinked. "Oh. Hmmm. Worth noting. The fact that only one of the individuals who were at the crypt before died would indicate that undead that strong are probably not there, no. You'll need to tell me more about the different types of undead, it will be useful knowledge to have."

A rapping of knuckles against the table brought my focus back to Julie. I felt slightly like a ping-pong ball bouncing around them all. She bit her lower lip. "If you do come with us," at this she raised a hand to forestall Lidda "if you do, you won't have fought with us before. I don't want to take you into somewhere for you to die."

She looked like she was struggling with what to say next, so I decided to pre-empt her. "Lidda, can I borrow one of your knives?" At her confused and suspicious look, I reassured her. "It won't take long, and I won't damage them. They are sharp, right?"

"Of course I keep my daggers sharp, what kind of person do you think I am?" Despite the offended tone, she pulled a knife out of one of the sheaths and handed it to me. I rolled up a sleeve.

Julie started to stand. "Mazhiron, what are yOU DOING!" Wow, it was like they'd never seen someone stab themselves before.