Terry had never been much for group road trips in the halcyon days before Chinese Period Drama Hell. He didn’t hate traveling. He actually liked seeing new things. Well, he liked seeing new things when there wasn’t a constant implicit threat of being attacked and eaten by something dredged from the darkest corners of some nightmare. No, it was the trip itself that he couldn’t really stand. He never saw the appeal of being trapped in a car with other people. The arguments about music, when to stop, where to stop, and the debates about who couldn’t or wouldn’t eat what kinds of food drove him insane. He’d never been much of one for philosophy, but he was just certain that Sartre had gone on a road trip before he wrote that line about hell being other people.

His own social ineptitude didn’t help with those situations. So, he recognized this little team-up with strangers for the fraught scenario it was. There were just endless ways that the whole thing could turn awkward. He didn’t think it would end in violence, but intense awkwardness was a special horror all its own that he wasn’t eager to endure without cause. Except, he had the burning need to gather information as a cause. He just wasn’t sure how to go about getting that information without just bluntly asking for it. He’d never been particularly good at manipulating conversations to gently massage the information he wanted out of other people. All of a sudden, a stupid argument about what music to play sounded nice.

Instead, the group moved down in awkward – so very awkward – silence. Like most uncomfortable situations, though, it didn’t last forever. It just felt like it lasted forever. Eventually, Terry remembered that he was the new guy in the group. It was on him to, however clumsily, get the ball rolling. He eyed the other three and tried to think of an inoffensive question he could ask. When he realized that he had no way to gauge what would be offensive, he looked for any question he could ask that wouldn’t result in an immediate return question he wouldn’t want to answer. It was a shockingly small number. He had a lot of secrets that he wasn’t in a hurry to divulge before getting a better sense of these people.

“How long have you all been adventurers?” he finally asked.

“How long has the sun been burning?” asked Haresh, only sounding like he was half joking.

Terry glanced up at the sky like he was taking the quip seriously.

“At least a week?” he asked.

Humor wasn’t Terry’s strong hand, but it seemed to land well enough. Jaban snorted. Ekori, well, she kind of smiled. Haresh let out an amused little grunt.

“Yeah. It’s definitely been at least a week,” said Haresh before he got a thoughtful look. “I guess I’ve been adventuring for… Gods, it’s got to be close to fifty years now.”

Terry tried not to gape at the man. The guy looked like he was, maybe, in his forties. Admittedly, he was grizzled in a way that suggested some of those been hard years. But even assuming Haresh had been adventuring professionally since he was twenty, it would put the man in his seventies. He’d heard of people being well-preserved but this seemed extreme. Apparently, that whole gimmick about people aging differently in these isekai worlds was a real thing. Of course, Haresh couldn’t end it there. Oh no. Why stop there when he could upend Terry’s expectations even more?

“I should have listened to my father. He told me that adventuring was the kind of thing you take as a first profession. ‘That’s something you get out of your system young,’ he told me. I was a merchant for a long time before all of this, but I wanted to go out and do brave things. Turns out, you don’t have to be young to be stupid. How about you?”

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Terry tried to gather his thoughts, but he was too disoriented by Haresh’s apparent age to come up with anything too complicated. The man wasn’t in his seventies. He was in his eighties or nineties or maybe he was more than a hundred years old. Terry just said the first thing that came to mind.

“It’s definitely been a week,” said Terry.

That actually generated a few laughs from the other three, which he had hadn’t expected but was happy enough to take as a win. Haresh hiked a thumb at Jaban and Ekori.

“These two are as fresh as newly fallen snow when it comes to adventuring. Barely five years between them,” said Haresh, ignoring the weak sounds of protests the younger adventurers made. “Their mother convinced me to take them on. You’ll have to get the rest out of them yourself if you want the whole story.”

Terry looked at the pair, but they wore identical, opaque expressions that told him they weren’t planning on adding to that story. Well, I guess I won’t push that. They clearly don’t want to discuss it. They’re probably rich and decided to slum it as adventurers for a while, or something like that. He wasn’t sure why he thought that about them, it just felt right. It was something in the way they carried themselves. Something he could sense but not necessarily put his finger on.

“Where are you from?” asked Ekori.

He glanced at her and went with his usual line.

“North,” he said.

“Oh, where in the north?” she followed up.

Well, shit, I guess I should have expected that question, thought Terry. He tried to think of the best way to answer that question without answering it and decided to go with something that was at least half true if profoundly incomplete.

“It isn’t there anymore,” he said. “I can’t go back.”

That drew a sympathetic look from Ekori, while Jaban grimaced a little, and Haresh just gave a knowing nod. They’d drawn the wrong conclusion he’d led them to. It was still true as far as he knew. The way to his own world wasn’t there anymore, and he doubted he could go back. The loss was real enough that he didn’t have to fake the pain in his voice or on his face. His world might as well have been destroyed in a war for how out of reach it was for him at the moment. That dark cloud hung over them all for a moment before Jaban swooped in like a certain cowled vigilante to save the day.

“Why did you become an adventurer?” he asked.

Terry smirked and said, “The purest and truest reason in the world.”

“Which is?” asked the young man.

“Money,” said Terry. “I needed money. Well, to be more precise, I needed food, and everyone seems to want money for that. Greedy bastards.”

Terry made sure to smile while he said it. He didn’t begrudge farmers for wanting to get paid for their efforts. He knew he didn’t have the patience to grow and harvest food. He also didn’t have the knowledge. Everything he knew about agriculture, horticulture, soil composition, and irrigation could fit onto a small index card with room to spare. He knew even less about raising animals. Still, the comment worked, and the last lingering discomfort passed. It seemed that Terry had been talking Haresh’s language because the man pointed at him.

“You see, children. That is how most people end up becoming adventurers. It’s a job. If you have the skills for it, you can feed yourself. Never underestimate the motivational power of hunger.”

“Sure, if you’re a rank four or five,” agreed Jaban, “but he’s a rank three. You always said that’s when people are starting to get serious about it.”

“Well,” said Haresh with a philosophical air about him, “there’s eating, and then there’s eating well.”

“I also enjoy luxuries like shelter and a hot bath from time to time,” added Terry.

“Ha!” barked Haresh. “Shelter! You must be doing well for yourself if you’re splurging on shelter. Hot baths, though? Decadence, I tell you. Pure decadence.”

“It’s true,” said Terry. “It’s true. My moral decay is legendary.”

Terry could see a bit of the merchant coming out in Haresh. The easy banter had let Terry relax enough that he stopped hyper-analyzing everything he said. It was nice, but it was also something he’d have to keep an eye on. He was a little surprised that Ekori and Jaban hadn’t joined in, though. He wasn’t sure if they were warier or just took longer to warm up to people. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to him that they might have decided he was more like Haresh than like them. He found it a little amusing to imagine that they thought of him as some far more experienced adventurer that they needed to be respectful around. Oh man, if they only knew.