Mike walked around the tree holding the hem of his pants as if he had just pulled them up. He looked towards Crosse, who had moved and was across the fire from him now. He was grabbing a bundle that shimmered in the light of the fire, more leaves?

As Mike got close he turned around with the bundle in two hands, it was long, flat but thick and was indeed wrapped in leaves, though these seemed more silvery than the ones he had handed Mike. He walked up and placed the object wrapped in the silvery leaves into the edge of the fire on the hot coals.

Mike blinked having understood, foil, the leaves were wrapped around something to protect it from the coals and cook the contents. As he thought this he the twinge of a notification from the tattoo, what had he just unlocked? Cooking, it had to be, he hoped it counted towards the three wilderness survival skills he needed.

“All done aye?” Crosse asked as he got closer.

Mike nodded, “Thanks for the leaves, I don’t know what I would have done without them. What are you cooking?” for the first time since coming to this dimension, Mike felt hungry.

Crosse grinned at the question, “the peryton. I carved off the edible bits after patching you up, it’s a damned shame that I can’t take the whole thing, but standing around a bloody carcass for too long in this forest is a great way to get dead. Almost as bad as passing out next to one.” he said, giving Mike an incredulous look.

“In my defence, I did manage to kill the thing before passing out, that was a close call for sure though,” Mike said as he sat down next to his jacket, he could feel the Pouch of Dark mana gems now. Even stronger than he had during the fight, though not as strong as when he had touched one. There was more than a thousand mana stored in that little pouch, more than he could use if he tried.

The spells he had been casting had been costing less than 20 mana most of the time, they weren’t weak though, Chill touch had saved his life. He wondered how much mana the spells that Ishare had been casting cost, or that beam of light that Ailish had hurled. A lot, he imagined, especially for that latter one.

“I’m still very curious how you managed that by the way. The way my friends and I manage is by finding it and baiting it into a trap, where we then pelt it with arrows from thirty metres away.” He said as he placed another leaf-wrapped slice of bird-deer meat into the fire.

“Is it a bird-deer or a deer-bird?” Mike wondered out loud as he tried to think of a credible explanation as to how he had killed the massive beast.

Crosse huffed a laugh, “the one you killed? A bird-deer. They get progressively more deer as they get older. If you ever see one that is deer-bird, run. Those bastards would rip you apart and hang your intestines on their antlers as an ornament. They don’t fly nearly as much though, so you can hear ‘em coming before they start screeching at you.” The statement didn’t calm Mike any.

“Don’t worry, those live further West, closer to the coast, the bigger the beasts get the further east you find ‘em. Some do wander this way though, so it pays not to let your guard down, which I assume you did. Which is bad, cause the little ones can kill you just fine if you're dumb. Now how did you kill the thing, no more evading.” He seemed to be getting more serious, his accent was thicker and his brow was curving down, it seemed he had enough of the sidestepping.

Mike took a deep breath, he needed to tell the hunter something, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. “It kept swooping at me with those screeches, I managed to barely dodge it a few times,” He started rolling his right shoulder some, feeling the pain of the hit it had taken with a wince, “but on the last dive it went for me with its antlers, I managed to drop under it and stab with the dagger blindly, I guess it wasn’t expecting that, and I manage to stab it in the neck.”

Mike stopped, not sure how believable it would be to this experienced hunter. Likely not very, before the hunter could voice his doubts Mike spoke up, “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there are things I don’t know if I can tell you, I’m not from around here, which I’m sure you guessed, and my memory is all jumbled and blurry,” Mike finished again, hoping that the act of telling an obvious lie and then coming out to it with a less obvious one, seeded with truth, would work.

Crosse sat for a few moments watching him, “you’re right I don’t believe that first tale, sure you stabbed it in the throat, but if you’d caught it on your knife like that it would have landed on top of you, and if it hadn’t you'd have broken your arm stopping that thing with just a dagger. But I am willing to believe that you aren’t from around here, and that you don’t know your memories right, with all the GIlded folk in this forest I imagine most folks have had a spot of amnesia now and then, isn’t often that they leave someone out here in the wilderness to die afterwards but that's not unheard of.” Crosse explained, looking less suspicious, but still curious.

“So what do you remember, and why don’t you speak a lick of Manish? It isn’t like one of ‘em to go to the effort of erasing an entire Language from someone's head, they’d have to be at it for weeks unless they were old as the hills” He asked, looking even more curious.

Mike sighed, glad that the older man had believed him some, he had thought that memory loss might be a believable story, considering his experience. “I don’t remember much, I remember being in a ‘facility’ they called it, one of the others there told me that they had taken me cause I was unique in some way, but that was later. I couldn’t understand a word when I woke up, but they were there, and they taught me. I learned to speak Gildaic in days, after that they left me alone.

“The other prisoner or, maybe test subject, was a Dark Elf, he said that I should go now, that his god demanded it. Then I remember this forest, standing out here with nothing but the clothes on my back and in my pack, and this dagger in my hand.” Mike continued, trying to keep some semblance of truth to the tale.

Crosse watched and listened as Mike told this part of the story, looking interested at the mention of the facility, and thinking in silence after Mike was done. “Well that is a curious story, a Dark Elf, you don’t see their folk in these parts. So you have no memory of your life before this facility?” he asked.

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Mike scrunched up his brow, trying to give the impression of effortful recollection, after a few moments he shook his head, “only blurs, nothing that would be useful for surviving on my own in the wilderness.” he said.

“You said you learned Gildaic in only a few days, that’s a mighty fine feat, I only know it cause my parents taught it to me growin’ up, just in case. Most folks don’t need it as it's only really used when talking to the Gilded ones, cause they take offence to being spoken to in anything else, or at least the haughty ones do, some don’t care.” Crosse explained.

“Are they common then? I only saw two in the facility and the Dark Elf, but it was implied that there were more. Yes, I did learn it in a few days, though it was dark and hard to tell time down there. They seemed to imply it wasn’t the only thing I could learn fast as well, but they didn’t teach me anything else.” Mike asked hoping to use his amnesia story to start learning the baseline common sense of this world. He had no idea what the social status of the Elves was or their population, he didn’t even know the baseline ethics and morality that this world adhered to. He needed to learn those fast before he committed a faux pas that caused him trouble.

Crosse’s eyebrows rose in surprise again, “they did a number on you, didn’t they? No, they aren’t particularly common, especially not this far from the capital, they stick to it mostly, but there are quite a few of them spread out between towns and cities around it. I suppose if you really can’t remember then you don’t know where that is, do you, it’s south of here about a month and a half’s walk.” Crosse explained.

“That still doesn't explain how you killed the creature though. So you showed up here with no memories of how, with nothing but the dagger and your clothes? So how did ya get the bugger out of the air? He’d have to have been for you to make the kill you did.” Crosse said with a smirk, obviously not having been diverted from his initial goal of inquiry

Mike sighed, breaking eye contact by looking down. “I don’t know how to explain it, from what I know it’s impossible and too many people knowing could get me in a lot of trouble. I know you saved me back there, but I still don’t know if I can trust you with that. I don’t know if I got sent here by mistake or if the High Elves put me here on purpose for some reason.

“The Dark Elf, I don’t know what he did, just that he mentioned his god, which sounded ominous as hell. So I’m sorry, I can’t give you a clearer explanation, why are you so curious anyway? Does it matter how I killed it? so long as it is dead.” Mike finished, a little out of breath towards the end, his voice had gotten more heated than he had intended.

He had been trying his hardest not to dwell on the fact that he was essentially alone in this world, but he had always hated being interrogated, and facing that there had broken down those walls. Crosse had saved him, the second stranger in this strange world to help him, be it for his reasons or pure altruism. But Mike couldn’t know if he could trust him. Ishare had had his angle on things, one that Mike still didn’t understand.

He had known that Mike could use Magic. The major thing that separates his kind from Humans, but he had helped him escape, could he have used the shard to escape himself? He had said that the High Elves and Light ‘couldn’t be allowed to have him’, but what did that mean? Could no High Elf ever be allowed to know of his abilities? Was a god looking to have him somehow? Were multiple?

Before he could get any deeper into his internal rabbit hole of anxiety, Crosse spoke up, “I’m sorry about that, you’re right, I’m prying.” Mike looked up at him and saw him moving to turn the wrapped stips of meat on the coals. “I have a bit of a personal interest you see, I live in a small village right here in the forest, less than five hundred of us in total. We aren’t the type of people to trade and barter with other settlements.

“We all live around one rather old High Elf, though she doesn’t bother us much or us her. About a hundred and fifty years ago our ancestors hear that she was living out here keeping her little section of the forest safe, so they decided to come out here and ask for her sanctuary, they would reasonably serve her and she would protect the town, we would fend for ourselves unless something that we couldn’t deal with came into play.”

After reaching this point Crosse moved his leather gloved hands and plucked the two pieces of wrapped meat out of the coals. He stood and walked around the fire to place one on the ground in front of Mike, then he pulled out a sheathed dagger, Mikes sheathed dagger, and handed it to him hilt first.

Mike took it then watched as Crosse sat down and pulled his knife from a sheath under his padded jacket. Mike hadn’t paid much attention to the hunter’s attire until now, but he seemed rather similarly dressed to Mike, though his outfit seemed more worn. Crosse pulled out his knife, a more utilitarian tool than the one meant for stabbing things that mike had. He used it to cut open the wrapping of leaves, revealing cooked meat on the inside.

Smelling the meat for the first time, Mike felt his stomach protest again and, mimicked the action with his knife, though clumsily, using his left hand. He took a deep breath of the meat as he saw Crosse cut off a piece of his cut, skewering it on the end of his knife and bringing it to his mouth. The still-hot leaves spread out beneath the cut of meat to keep it off of the ground.

Mike again mimicked him, putting the meat in his mouth. It didn’t, despite his expectations, taste like chicken. No, it was red meat, though, of a leaner kind than Mike was used to, he still chewed it with relish, He couldn’t remember having eaten since lunch the day he was ‘summoned’.

After eating for a few minutes in silence Mike sighed again. “I’m sorry for snapping at you, I’m just really on edge. Please continue, I want to know as much as I can about anything, why do you have a personal interest in how I killed the peryton?”

Crosse smiled at him sideways and continued as requested. “Well the village, named Inaholme, after its most important resident, did fine for the majority of the past century and a half, the old High Elf having only need to intervene with the average folk a few times to turn away a big enough threat. Hunters like myself have been enough to take down wandering pests like the perytons and similar beasts.

“But in the last couple of years, something has been changing. We have been seeing a lot more of the aggressive kind of beasts, not that most of them wouldn’t attack you if they saw you alone, but ones like the peryton that are unreasonably aggressive, they are threatening the village in numbers, and if this continues lady Ina might just decide to leave, she hasn’t said so herself, but it's a pretty common sentiment that if protecting the village became more work than it was worth for her, she would just go somewhere else more peaceful.

“If that happens we would be left out here in the forest without our big stick to scare the smaller beasties off. That’s why you see me out here alone hunting the peryton, normally three or four of us would work together to take one down, but I’m one of the most senior so it was just me sent out this way for it. The others have spread out to deal with some lesser threats” Crosse explained and Mike had an idea where this was going.

“So you want to know how I killed it with just a dagger, cause if you have that or can do it again, then you would be able to help others with their jobs and possibly deal with the problem entirely.” Mike had a distinctly unsettled feeling, had he stumbled into a Quest-line? In response to that thought, Mike felt a jolt of pain run up his arm as if it had been swatted, hard, making him yelp in pain.