Honeypot, the disappearing Rogue from earlier, stood before them.

The young man was standing there with the biggest smile Orion had seen him wield yet, one hand holding a cooked sausage on a stick, the other waving with vigor.

“Hi! You’re Arika, right? I’m Honeypot. Nice to meet you.”

“Uhh,” Arika said, “hi?”

“This…” Orion pointed at Honeypot. “Is the person who disappeared earlier, the one I mentioned to Felsteg.”

“A pleasure.” Honeypot grinned ear to ear. “By the way, you two sure took your time getting back from the temple. What took so long?”

“How did you know we died?” Arika asked, suspicion heavy in her voice.

Orion used Portal and appeared in front of the sly rogue, face contorting in anger as he grabbed him by the cloak. “How did you know we died, Honeypot?”

“How did I know?” He put his hands up and adopted a look of faux ignorance. “I was there to witness your deaths, naturally.”

“You were there?” Arika asked.

“I helped finish you off, Arika. No need to thank me. You’re welcome.”

Orion pulled back his free hand, intending to punch the teen in the face.

“Wait!” Honeypot and Arika yelled in unison.

“You can’t attack anyone in town. The defensive array will slaughter you instantly,” Arika said.

“Besides,” Honeypot said, looking annoyingly unfazed. “You’ll want to hear the rest of the story.” He smiled and waggled his eyebrows. “It’s a good one.”

Orion stared at the Rogue in front of him as he clenched his fists. “Alright.” He lowered his raised hand and let go of Honeypot’s cloak. “Explain yourself.”

“Well!” Honeypot began, straightening his cloak and making a show of brushing off his shoulders. “As soon as I saw that party approaching, I dropped into stealth. I have stealth, by the way. It’s an ability, which as it so happens, is called Stealth. Anywho, I’d already heard whispers of a party that had a Mage with serious fire power that was killing innocent adventurers. She wore a blood-red robe and walked around with a party leader that looked like the ass-end of a turnip.” He looked at Arika. “Sound familiar? Naturally, I felt it prudent to monitor the situation. From afar, of course.”

“So you didn’t stop me from going out with them, but you wanted to watch them kill me?” Orion asked.

Honeypot held up a finger, signaling that he had more to say.

“Sure, I could have warned you, but to what end? If I let you know they were trying to lure you out of town to kill you, they would have had the freedom to follow you, or, even worse, they could follow me around for the foreseeable future, stopping you and or I from getting anything done. I assume that isn’t an ideal situation for you, someone who arrived five days late? I also assumed at that point that Miss Explodey Death over there was a member of their party, and therefore, one-hundred percent down for the whole murdering-innocent-people thing.”

“Okay. So what then?” Orion asked. “You followed us out to find the spawn? To confirm that the party were indeed killers? You said that you helped kill Arika? Why?”

“Sheeeesh.” Honeypot leveled a flat look at Orion. “I’m the one telling the story here. I’ll get through all the details in good time, in the correct order. Stop interrupting me.” He cleared his throat. “Where was I? Oh yes, I was following you, and was shocked to see Miss Explodey Death here turn and try to use said explodey-death magic—”

“My name is Arika,” she said, unamused.

“By the gods, everyone is a critic!” Honeypot sighed. “Fine, I was shocked to see Arika about to unleash said explodey-death on her own party instead of you. Happy? Good. So anyway, I see the meat-head with the hammer turn your knee into paste before hitting Arika like a pinata that owed him money. It was wild seeing him move so fast being that size, by the way. Like an obese man-child witness the last bit of brisket being eyed off by someone else at a buffet. He moved like Luffy in third gear, I could almost see the steam coming off him.”

Orion and Arika stared back at him, not understanding the last sentence.

“Really?” Honeypot asked. “You guys never read One Piece? You’re missing out. Oda is a once-in-a-generation storyteller.”

Arika turned to Orion. “Do you have any idea what he’s talking about?”

“Forget it,” Honeypot said. “I digress. Where were we?” He pointed to Orion. “He killed you after a solid villain monologue, yada yada yada, then Felsteg moved on to Arika. He was going to give you a slow and torturous death, so when he pulled out his long, firm sword and tried to sheath it inside of your body cavity. I—”

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“If you keep talking like that.” Arika took a steadying breath. “I will kill you. Town rules be damned.”

Honeypot sighed dramatically. “Ahhh, there’s truly no appreciation for the spoken language anymore. Very well then, when he stabbed your abdomen with a definitely-real-and-not-metaphorical sword, I may have given his arm a bit of a… nudge. My intervention moved his arm, and therefore, his sword, far enough inside of you to ensure you’d die before the weird lanky one could heal you back. And that’s about it, yeah.”

They both stared at Honeypot in shocked silence, unsure whether to believe him.

“How did you make it back to town?” Orion asked. “That doesn’t line up, Honeypot. They would’ve killed you, too.”

“Oh, my stealth is superb. It kind of has to be. It’s the only ability I have.” He shrugged. “You should have seen it. They didn’t even know I hit his arm—it was glorious. Felsteg was blaming Kauri, Kauri was trying to tiptoe around saying it wasn’t his fault without saying it was his boss’ fault, and Brick looked like a monkey seeing arithmetic for the first time, judging by the look on his face.”

Orion and Arika still stared, completely dumbfounded.

“I know this has been quite an unpleasant day for the two of you,” Honeypot continued, “but I quite enjoyed myself. It’s rare that I get to inject a little chaos and do the right thing at the same time.”

“Okay.” Arika said. “Because of services rendered, assuming that tale is true, of course, I’ve decided that you have permission to call me ‘Miss Explodey-Death’, or whatever you want, really.”

A look of such mischief crossed Honeypot’s face that Arika quickly amended, “Only once a day, and within reason. Really, though, thank you for stopping those monsters from doing that to me.”

“Finally!” Honeypot threw his arms up. “Some gratitude! No need to thank me. I had a good time, and it was the right thing to do. Wait! You can thank me by inviting me to the party.” He leaned in conspiratorially. “You guys did form a party, right?”

Orion and Arika looked at each other, then back at Honeypot.

“You really want to join?” Orion asked.

“Naturally. I wanted to join you before you added a walking nuke-dispenser to the roster. Now I need to join you, simply to be as close as possible to the ensuing chaos, if nothing else.”

“We would make quite the party,” Arika said with a wry smile. “A Fire Mage with an explosion, a Spatial Mage with only a portal, and a rogue with only invisibility.”

“Oh, I’m not a Rogue.”

“What then?” she asked. “An assassin? A devotee of death? It’s all the same, right?”

“Well, more or less, actually, yeah.” Honeypot shrugged. “Besides, we’re only five days into this world. You can’t expect to have fully fleshed out classes this early on. That’d be terrible game design. Think of the progression!”

“I understand the individual words that just came out of your mouth,” Arika said, “but I have no idea what you said.” She glanced at Orion. “Did any of that make sense to you?”

“It did, and I’m sorry to say, he made sense.”

“Get used to it,” Honeypot said. “I do that a lot.”

“What, confuse people?” Arika asked.

“No, well yes, that too. But I meant make sense. I make sense a lot.”

Orion turned to Arika. “Well, what do you say? Should we invite this miscreant here into our party?”

“Hey!” He narrowed his eyes at them playfully. “First of all, one of you is a mobile bomb-dispenser, and the other somehow got himself killed and left his party within a few breaths of arriving in this world. You’re both miscreants too, by my reckoning. Second, I resemble that remark.”

Arika cocked an eyebrow. “Don’t you mean resent?”

Honeypot crossed his arms. “I said what I said.”

Arika sighed. “Well, he seems like a handful, but I did say he could call me whatever he wanted once a day. It’d be hard for him to collect unless we keep him around, so...”

“Hmm. Yes. Quite.” Honeypot nodded, straightening his back and rubbing his chin. “It would be going back on your word to deny me, and you seem like a dignified woman of repute.”

Orion smiled. “It’s settled then.”

With a minor effort of will, Orion extended the invitation, and Honeypot joined the party. Orion breathed a sigh of relief, content that he had already found two party members. The day was shaping out better than he had expected, especially after the earlier dagger-to-the-cerebrum he’d been on the receiving end of.

“By the way,” Honeypot asked, “was that witch Miriam still in the temple when you respawned?”

“Uh, witch?” Arika shot a flat look at Honeypot. “I thought she was lovely every time I’ve seen her?”

“You, my walking war-crime, are a terrible judge of character.”

“What makes you call her a witch?”

“Well, she hasn’t actually done anything quantifiably witchy.” He shrugged. “It’s more of a vibe. Who would just stand there, giving out information for free all day?”

“Uh, someone nice?” Orion said. “Or someone designated by the System to do so?”

“Nope. Not buying it. She’s dressed like a priestess and hangs around a temple all day helping people, being all…” Honeypot squinted and wiggled his fingers. “… mysterious. There’s something fishy about that white-robed charlatan—mark my words.”

Dismissing what was clearly another of the rogue’s idiosyncrasies, they walked around the square together in search of new members. They might have separated to cover more ground, but with three members present, they presented more of a united front.

Despite the square being filled with adventurers, not many people were looking for a party—there were some free agents, however. The issue was that the people still looking for parties seemed rather picky, a trait that was likely the reason they found themselves without one. None of these picky individuals seemed desperate enough to join them, especially after hearing of their skills, classes, and relatively low levels.

Honeypot continued to present himself to prospective party members as ‘sort of like a rogue’. When anyone pressed him on the details of what he was, he replied in a grand voice, while fluttering his fingers, “Mysterious!”

This, Orion reflected, was not encouraging people to join them.

After some hours, he began to lose hope. Would they have to split up to even have a chance of joining a party? A few groups were quite interested in the utility that his class could provide, more than one of which made a sly offer for him to leave his party and join them. Others, as it turned out, also thought his ability was a game changer. Even those not thinking tactically seemed oddly enamored with the idea of teleportation. He, however, wasn’t willing to abandon the two people who had shown him compassion so far in this world—so they persevered together.

Honeypot was still projecting his usual confidence, but Orion could tell that Arika was growing as worried as he was. As the light of the sun waned, he began resigning himself to the fact that they might have to be a party of only three.

Felsteg and his party could enter town again just before midday the following day. Who knew how far they would go to get their revenge on Arika? No matter how many members they had, they would have to leave town tomorrow, before the enemy party’s lockout expired.

As these worrying thoughts plagued his mind, Orion felt a tap on his shoulder.

He spun, and his eyes went wide.