It turned out that making a house that's gone unoccupied for a while into something actually livable was more work than it looked like on the surface. Terry had assumed that it would just need a sweep and maybe a quick trip to the market to get whatever he needed. Oh, how wrong he was. The quick sweep turned into hours of scrubbing the floors to dislodge long-settled dust and dirt. Then waiting around for it to dry to see if he’d missed any spots. I literally changed worlds, and did I get vast cosmic power? Well, okay, maybe a little bit, but I also have to be a janitor. That just doesn’t seem right. The suckitude of being Truck-kuned to this place ought to get me a pass on any and all cleaning responsibilities. Yet, it seemed that home cleaning was another of those universal truths that transcended time, space, and fair play.

Then, there was the problem of furniture. There were no Ikea stores in Chinese Period Drama Hell. There were no Walmarts, Big Lots, Lowes, or Home Depots. And there was still no internet. Absolutely anywhere Terry might have thought to buy furniture, even cheap furniture that he didn’t intend to keep for very long, was a non-starter. While the others had proven themselves only intermittently helpful on the cleaning front, mostly from gross and unfeigned incompetence, they were more helpful in finding furniture. Ekori seemed to want to be actually helpful, while Jaban seemed to be looking for any excuse whatsoever go to back to town. Terry thought that the kid ought to recognize a lost cause when he saw one but to each their own. Even so, both of them managed to track down and buy some serviceable tables, chairs, and a storage cabinet or two.

Terry had worried that they were going to come back with furniture that was situated close to the floor. Then, he realized that he was being really American and lumping all Asian cultures together since short furniture was mostly a Japanese thing. Fuck me, thought Terry. I think I just Asian Indexed this place. And this town is more like the movie version of some medieval British village. Is there an ignoring the obvious trope? Way for me to just embody some tropes like a jackass. He didn’t know that invoking tropes was an entirely bad thing other than proving that his brain was broken in some important way. Still, he worried that even accidentally bringing a trope into his orbit was like inviting disaster. What if they acted like magnets and attracted each other? They’d be swarming over his new home like a swarm of locusts and attracting madness in no time. Dear God, annoying nobles will start falling out of the sky.

It took him quite a while to shake that particularly unsettling thought. Fortunately, he had errands of his own to run. He ventured over to the market and haunted the vaguely familiar stalls looking for some basic pots and pans. He found them, although he was bitterly disappointed to realize that pretty much every single one of them was cast iron. He didn’t have anything against cast iron. It was great for some things, such as pizza and cornbread. Unfortunately, it wasn’t great for everything. At least, it wasn’t in his very limited experience. Terry was a child of triply stainless-steel cookware, which he considered the Jesus Christ of home cooking. There were very few things you couldn’t scrub off of those pots and pans with a firm application of a stainless-steel scrubber.

Cast iron, on the other hand, was the high-maintenance girlfriend of home cooking. You needed to be super careful with it. You weren’t supposed to use soap on it. It was all warm water, sponge baths, and whispering sweet nothings to it in the vain hope that it wouldn’t lose its shit and claw out your metaphorical eyes. On top of that, he didn’t know if he could even get a fucking sponge in this world. How am I supposed to clean this shit? Not that any of that mattered in the slightest because it was cast iron or nothing. He’d managed to clean the ones he’d used on the road. He was pretty sure he did it all wrong, but he’d done it. So, Terry grudgingly paid out of his rapidly dwindling supply of cash to buy the stupid cast iron pots and pans. He made a couple of other quick stops to grab some meat and veggies, then carried it all home. No matter how much he didn’t look forward to figuring out how to clean that cast iron, he did look forward to a steady supply of hot meals.

“Now, if only they had refrigeration,” he whined to himself.

As challenges went, not having refrigeration was not the biggest hurdle for the moment. The town was close and things were generally affordable. He was a lot less sure what would happen when winter rolled around. He sincerely doubted there was a vast infrastructure devoted to hauling vegetables from warmer climates to cooler climates. I’ll have to ask Haresh about that later. Terry was vaguely musing about making a nice stew, or something stew-adjacent courtesy of forgetting to buy flour and forget about anything as esoteric as corn starch. He stepped around Drumstick, whose head was currently pulling double duty as a napping spot for Dusk. He frowned to himself. I’m going to need to go find something to kill soon. Drumstick might not need food every day, but everything has to eat to live. Adding that to a growing to-do list, he took his recently acquired treasures into the kitchen.

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He rinsed off the new cookware and promptly dried it before plopping the big pot down on the stove. He got a fire going and then opened the windows. That let some of the slightly cooler air outside drift inside on the thinnest of breezes. He got to work peeling and chopping vegetables. He had been relieved to discover that this world did have potatoes, onions, and garlic. He’d even managed to find some carrots, peas, and corn. There had, however, been no sign of celery anywhere. I’m going to miss celery. He didn’t much care for it by itself, but it was one of those things that went into pretty much every soup and stew. It was the kind of flavor you didn’t notice until it wasn’t there, at which point you learned to care very much about the stringy, crunchy stuff. He’d just pushed the chicken into the pot when he heard a bloodcurdling scream.

Terr abandoned the pot to race outside. He found Analina shrieking and pointing at Drumstick, or rather at Drumstick’s partially exposed head. The chicken-lizard was cowering around the side of the house with just enough of its head in view that it could watch the Adventurer’s Guild administrator with one big eye. Terry looked at Drumstick, who he was pretty sure had just been lying there doing absolutely nothing until the screaming started. He looked at Analina, who he was pretty sure was having a panic attack. He looked down at Dusk, who was crouched at his feet with her hair standing up. Her head swiveled back and forth so she could give both Analina and Drumstick dirty looks. Terry sighed and put away the jian that had found its way into his hand.

“What are you doing?” shouted Analina. “You need to kill that thing!”

“Calm down,” said Terry. “Drumstick isn’t going to hurt anyone.”

“Calm down? Calm down?! How you can tell me to—” she trailed off as a confused look crossed her face. “What’s a drumstick?”

“That’s a Drumstick,” said Terry with a gesture as the mostly hidden chicken-lizard. “And it’s harmless.”

“Harmless,” said Analina with a flat look.

“Harmless,” agreed Terry. “The kitten is more dangerous than Drumstick.”

“You mean to tell me that you’re keeping a cockatrice as a… A pet?”

Terry mulled that over before he said, “Pet is probably a strong word but sure. Let’s go with that.”

“Those beasts are killers,” said Analina.

“I’m sure that they are as a rule. I’m just saying that this one isn’t. I mean, didn’t you notice how it ran away from you? For that matter, have you gotten any reports of random attacks on people or livestock by a giant chicken-lizard?”

“I, well, no. But that’s not the point. You can’t know that it’s going to stay docile.”

“I guess that’s true, but I generally find that history is a good measure of future behavior. That thing is a coward. Dusk here,” said Terry, scooping up the kitten from the ground, “was sleeping on its head earlier.”

“But why do you have it?” demanded Analina sounding increasingly exasperated.

“It followed me.”

“That’s it?”

“What were you expecting? I didn’t set out to tame it. It just keeps showing up.”

“But why didn’t you kill it on sight?”

Terry shrugged.

“Look, I’m happy to kill things that are violently aggressive toward me, but how aggressive does Drumstick look to you?”

Analina focused her gaze on Drumstick, and the chicken-lizard shuffled out of sight with a frightened squawk-roar. Analina let out a huff of annoyed breath.

“I suppose I see what you mean,” she admitted. “But we’re going to need to talk about this.”

“If you say so,” said Terry.

Before he could say anything else, Haresh came wandering back from wherever he’d gone. He looked from Terry to Analina.

“Did I miss something?” he asked.

“Did you know that he’s keeping a cockatrice as a pet?” asked Analina.

Haresh blinked a few times and said, “Yes, but Drumstick is harmless. The kitten sleeps on it.”

Analina threw her hands up in the air and shouted, “This is not how adventurers are supposed to behave!”

“He’s rank two,” observed Haresh. “As I understand it, they behave pretty much any way they want.”

Analina opened and closed her mouth a few times before she leveled a finger at Terry.

“That thing is your responsibility. If it hurts anyone—” she started.

“In the highly unlikely event that happens, and it's not obviously an accident, I’ll take care of it,” said Terry. “Is this why you came out here?”

“No,” said Analina with a long-suffering note in her voice. “I have a contract for you.”

“Well, that certainly didn’t take long. Let me guess. It’s stupidly dangerous, and there’s just no one else who can take care of it? And since you gave me such a sweetheart deal on this place, I’m going to feel indebted enough to you to take this contract. That about the size of things?”

Analina made a valiant effort to keep her expression neutral but there was a flush creeping over her cheeks.

“I wouldn’t describe it exactly like that,” she said.

Terry snorted and said, “Alright. Let’s hear it. What needs to die?”