“You can’t come into the town,” said Terry for the tenth time.

Drumstick made pitiful squawk-roars and gave Terry what he’d come to recognize as its version of sad eyes. Dusk was not helping things as she sat on Terry’s shoulder and gave the enormous chicken-lizard a smug look. He also did his best not to look at Haresh, Ekori, and Jaban. They were at least doing their best not to laugh out loud, but he kind of missed the days when they were afraid of Drumstick. That had been drained from them by Dusk’s intermittent bouts of dominance over a creature that, relatively speaking, was the size of a mountain to her. Not laughing out loud did nothing to hide the amusement on their faces as Terry tried to wrangle the unhappy Drumstick.

“Look,” said Terry in his most reasonable voice. “I know you’re not dangerous, and they,” he waved a hand at the other adventurers, “know that you’re not dangerous. But you’ll scare the people living in town. You don’t want to scare innocent people, do you?”

Drumstick made a sullen noise that Terry interpreted to mean no. Progress at last, he thought.

“Good. Plus, there might be adventurers in that town who won’t know you aren’t going to hurt anyone. They might chase you or even attack you. I don’t want that to happen. I’m sure that you don’t want that to happen. Do you?”

Drumstick made another noise that Terry was forced to interpret as a no, although it had a much more fearful quality to it. How in the hell did this become my life? Reasoning with a fifteen-foot chicken-lizard? That’s some shit that never even made the top one thousand possibilities for my bucket list. Still, he walked over and patted one of the big, scaly wings that Drumstick had instead of arms or front legs.

“Just hang out in the forest and let me check things out in town. If it looks okay, I’ll find us somewhere to stay that you can go too. Alright?”

Drumstick’s head hung in a defeated way. A wholly unintelligible noise issued from its enormous beak. I guess that’s agreement. I hope so anyway. Head still hanging, Drumstick trudged off into the forest. Terry felt vaguely bad about excluding the monster, but the threats of the chicken-lizard inducing panic or getting itself killed by some local adventurers were real. Well, maybe not the threat of getting killed. Drumstick would just run away if someone attacked, but some injuries might be possible. Given the number of cores and monster corpses it had devoured, the chicken-lizard was probably powerful enough to give most rank three adventurer teams a run for their money.

Of course, that was just guesswork. For all Terry knew, Drumstick could take him in a fight. Except, that would involve actual fighting, which just didn’t seem to be a life goal for the absurdly large thing. Terry turned to rejoin the other adventurers and found Haresh determinedly staring in another direction, while Ekori had her hands clapped over her mouth. Jaban wore a huge, amused grin. Terry mustered as much dignity as he could, which wasn’t much, and marched past them toward the town. He tried very hard not to think about how ridiculous he must have looked bargaining with Drumstick. He also tried not to think about why he’d bargained. He didn’t want to feel responsible for the chicken-lizard but the stupid thing was just so helpless. He honestly thought it might starve if he ever sent it away.

Arriving at the town was entirely painless. The guards just said hello and waved them through. As they moved through the streets, it was everything he could do to not feel suspicious of everything he was seeing. People were being… They were being nice to each other. This can’t be for real, thought Terry. I’ll test it. He picked a man at random and walked up to him.

“Good afternoon,” said Terry.

The man stopped and smiled.

“Good afternoon to you, young man,” said the random stranger. “Can I help you with something?”

Terry hadn’t thought things through. Or rather, he’d thought through how he would handle it when this random encounter went violently wrong. He hadn’t even considered what he’d do if the guy turned out to be a decent human being. It just hadn’t occurred to him. Man, I never used to be this cynical. Shit. I need to say something. The other man was looking at him with a mix of curiosity and mild concern. Terry racked his brain for some mundane thing a traveler might need to know. He spouted the first thing that came to mind.

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“Um… Can you tell me if there’s an Adventurer’s Guild Hall in town?”

“Oh sure,” said the man, his face brightening into a smile.

Terry nodded along as the man gave him directions to the guild hall and thanked him. Okay, that didn’t go the way I thought it would, but it was just one guy. For the next hour, Terry randomly stopped people to ask them mundane questions about where to find things, wandered in and out of shops, and generally made a mild nuisance of himself. While not everyone was as blindingly cheerful as that first guy, everyone was patient and polite. Even the surly-looking elderly woman answered his questions. She was a bit waspish about it, but he saw that she was that way with pretty much everyone who crossed her path.

He was surprised to learn that the Church didn’t have a church building in the town. In fact, he saw no evidence of them having a presence there at all. He desperately wanted to ask why, but he knew that religion was a touchy subject. Digging into the reasons why a town would or wouldn’t have a church was a great way to wear out his welcome in a hurry. He eventually found his way to the Adventurer’s Guild Hall. Haresh was sitting at a table and chatting with a man who looked well into his middle years. Ekori was looking at the contract wall that only held a few loose pieces of paper, some of which looked to have been up there for a while. Jaban was standing at the bar and talking at the woman behind it. She was pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way. She also wore a brittle smile but seemed to be putting a lot of effort into not being offensive.

Terry shook his head and went over to save the woman from Jaban’s unwanted attention. He clapped a hand on the young man’s shoulder, which caused Jaban to falter in the middle of some story that no doubt made him out to be a hero.

“Well, I’m sure that was all very interesting, but I do have some business to conduct,” said Terry.

“I can wait,” said Jaban.

“I expect it’ll take a while,” said Terry.

Jaban shot him a look that even Terry recognized. It was a look that countless men in countless bars and clubs had given each other back in Terry’s old world. It was a look that said, Dude, I’m working my magic here. Terry gave him a sympathetic look and slowly shook his head. It was another thing that had passed between countless men in countless gin joints. It said, Dude, it’s never going to happen even if you stand here flapping your gums for the next five hundred years. She’s just not into you. Jaban’s eyes narrowed before he glanced at the woman, finally seemed to see the strained smile, and deflated.

“Yeah, okay,” said the young man and walked away.

The woman behind the counter exhaled a relieved breath.

“Thank you,” she said.

“No problem. He’s—” Terry hesitated, unsure how to describe Jaban. “Well, he’s young.”

Terry felt kind of hypocritical saying those words given that he wasn’t that much older, but he supposed they were probably important years.

“Did you actually have business to conduct or were you just being nice?” she asked.

Terry realized he’d been standing there in silent contemplation for long enough that it was probably getting awkward. Then, he saw that the woman was smiling at him, a real-looking smile, and twirling a bit of hair around a finger. His lack of social competence was coming back to bite him. He thought he’d read something about those being telltale signs that someone was into you, but he wasn’t sure. He fell back on a sure thing.

“Oh, yeah, I do actually,” he said, setting head sack on the counter and pulling out his guild identification.

He realized that he’d forgotten that it was a rank two badge when the woman’s eyes went wide. Well, crap. I bet this is about to get really awkward. He watched her do that verification magic they did, and her eyes went even wider.

“Rank two,” she whispered in awe. “I’ve never even seen one of these before.”

“Yeah. Rank two. That’s me,” said Terry in a limp voice that the woman didn’t seem to register.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “A rank two. A real rank two.”

“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread that around,” said Terry in what he expected was a vain attempt at minimizing the damage.

The woman looked from the badge to him and back again several times. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Closed it again. Then, she thrust her hand over the counter so fast that Terry took a wary step back, a little afraid she was going to attack him.

“Analina Terrick,” she said.

He regarded the hand for a few seconds. A little reluctantly, he took the hand.

“Terry,” he said.

She started shaking his hand and just kept shaking it.

“It’s such an honor to meet a real rank two. I cannot tell you how long I’ve waited to meet someone like you. Have you killed a lot of powerful monsters? How did you get so strong? Can you teach people to get that strong?”

The questions just kept coming, and Analina never paused long enough for him to answer. She also just kept shaking his hand. He looked down at his trapped extremity. Yep, this is definitely awkward. He glanced over his shoulder to see Jaban glaring at him from across the room. So awkward.