“Moving on,” Ewald rescues me by changing the topic. “Why did we think that Axelos would take so long to gain control of the high-end asset?”

His use of the first person plural is somewhat suspect. In my experience, about half the time “we” is a real attempt to not accuse someone of botching the job. The other half of the time, though, it’s there to stand out and draw attention to the speaker’s belief that it’s someone’s fault, rather than the whole team’s responsibility. I don’t call Ewald on it since he’s not glaring at anyone from his seat at the table or otherwise demonstrating hostility, but I keep an ear out for more.

“Tha’s on me,” Bob admits nonetheless. “When I tracked ‘im ’e was drawin’ an’ fillin’ in a big circle. I watched ‘im draw fer ’bout fifteen minutes, looked at ’ow much ’e had left, and guessed he’d be a’ it fer eight hours a’ least.”

“It wasn’t the first time we’ve been blindsided by his Gift,” Heather says. “I think it’s the first time he actively misled us, however.”

To me, that means that something made him change his behavior. “Did he spot Bob following him? Or,” I say, “maybe he noticed you casting the tracking spell somehow?”

“’ts possible,” Bob mutters. “I’ve been hittin’ ’im with it erry time I could and I gotta touch ’im ta do it, ’e mighta wised up.”

Anna joins in. “How often do you depend on tracking spells like that? We’ve considered picking one up,” she says, “but our targets don’t often survive multiple encounters, so I’ve always had higher priorities.”

“Not a lot,” Heather says. “Bob’s usually more effective doing other things. Healing Agnes, for example, or poisoning our enemy. Axelos appeared to be immune to poison, however.”

“Madman’s half undead hisself,” Bob gripes.

“We’re a bit short on nonlethal effects past that, strangely,” Liv says. “A lot of our targets go down with broken bones or holes in their legs that Bob heals once we have the situation under control.”

I wince. I guess that grievous bodily harm counts as nonlethal with stereotypical fantasy healers around, but it’s still a pretty significant level of violence.

“One more reason you’re probably happy to have Hard Wizard Whitney joining up, no doubt,” Katell says. “I can’t imagine you get a lot of jobs where you go to lethal force immediately, the way we often have to against beasts.”

“I am hoping that Whitney can develop techniques to physically disable or restrain suspects, yes,” Heather says.

“I really need something so I can write down the list of spells I need to research,” I say humorously.

“We can get you a slate like Heather’s,” Liv says. “They’re standard issue for Hard Wizards.”

----------------------------------------

It seems like those are the only big questions, and the debriefing winds down relatively quickly after that. I think that Liv and I were the only ones that’d had any real negative reactions. I wouldn’t say they were dealt with, but at least we’d gotten things out and talked about them a bit. Liv had the feeling of someone that was going to go train into the ground to deal with a perceived failure, and a few minutes of talking and some reassurances certainly aren’t going to convince me that a little practice would ensure I wouldn’t get someone killed in a fight.

The Caulfield Hunters bow out at this point, apparently preferring to relax and unwind on their own. Ewald in particular started drooping as the debriefing proceeded. I wouldn’t be surprised if casting a sleep spell once every five minutes for upwards of an hour and a half took something out of him.

“So! Now that that’s all done with,” Liv says once we’re on our own, “I vote we all try to get to know each other, since we have a new teammate and all.”

“I’ll be right back, one moment,” Heather says. She heads off to the upper floor, where I know the restroom is.

“No icebreakers,” I warn, glaring at Liv, threatening her with as much wrath as my nerdy-couch-potato body is capable of. “I already know all of your names anyway.”

“That’s an interesting name for them,” she laughs. “But no, I agree with you. When you have as much Perception as I do they’re lethally boring. I was thinking we’d just go around and talk about our hobbies?”

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“Not a bad idea,” I say, adding to what looks like general agreement with the idea.

“I’ll start, then,” Liv says happily. “I do art! Not just the music, either, I do all sorts of visual art too.” She reaches over to her backpack and retrieves a lump of wood, roughly shaped into what might be a curled-up sleeping cat. I can’t tell much from this distance, especially given how unfinished the carving is. “When I’m on the move it’s mostly carvings like this, but back home I do oil paintings as well.” She smiles. “I originally learned so I could reproduce maps and the like, but now I do it to relax. It’s nice to be able to share things with other people, you know?”

“Y’shoulda seen ’er when she’d just got started,” Bob laughs. “‘Fore she went’n practiced. Tha’ time near Fordlams, right?”

“Hey! Us getting lost in the woods was at least half your fault,” Liv complains. “What were you on that time? Powdered Atlatlean chimpanzee feces, was it?”

“Femur! Powdered Atlatlean chimpanzee femur, y’ uncultured musclehead.”

Ji addresses me, drawing my skeptical stare away from the pair’s bickering. “The Lady Wizard may be interested, albeit disappointed,” he tells me, “to learn that Bob became a public servant solely so that the Government of the Republic could be induced to fund his profligate consumption of cultivation aids.”

“—know yer System has’n Intelligence st-!” Bob cuts off, clearly having heard Ji’s aside to me. He pivots on the top of his staff like some kind of kung-fu gun turret. Ji’s upside-down feet somehow exude an equal and opposite air of distaste. “Like y’don’t do th’ same thing,” he says, aggrieved. “An’ at leas’ when I partake it won’ get outta hand. Who did we hafta rescue from th’ sewers in Gouledel last hundred?”

“Boys, get a room,” Heather interrupts, having returned at some point. “To return to the topic, they both cultivate,” she says.

“Bob claims he only does it for fun, but they’re neck and neck,” Liv adds.

“As much as different Cultivation Gifts can be compared,” Heather says. “Even I leave the cataloging of those to the professionals. They’re almost guaranteed to be transmissible and they evolve sometimes. The Republic alone has tens of thousands of them.”

“I take it you’re a… Gift enthusiast,” I ask. “I’m not sure what the right word would be. Connoisseur? Gift-spotter? Gift-watcher?”

“Observing and studying rare Gifts is my hobby,” Heather confirms. “The sport is called Gift-watching.”

“It is to the Lady Ranger’s credit that Team 24 is composed almost completely of Visitors, rare Gifts, and exotic builds,” Ji says.

“You mean that not everyone has such insane Gifts?” I blurt out. “Oh. Uh. I mean…” I trail off, embarrassed.

Agnes waves off my awkwardness. “You have the right of it, Whitney. Of our company, Bob on his lonesome could be called typical. Magical Gifts so soft as mine are difficult to transmit and thereby become rare,” she indicates herself. “Ji’s Gift of Cultivation focuses itself… unusually. Heather’s Gift and Liv’s build are unique in their entirety.”

“Except for a few Guard kids that’re following my example, I’m the only Perception-specialized user of my Gift in the Republic,” Liv says. “Saga users have theorized Perception builds for a while, but I was the one that discovered the triumph that raised my stat cap-growth enough that I could really start to see the scaling kick in.”

“An’ liter’ly nobody’d heard of Heather’s Gift ‘til she came outta th’ BIA stacks w’ it dur’n her internship,” Bob says.

“My supervisor was foaming mad,” Heather laughs. “Switching Gifts like that wrecked that hundred’s task planning. But I knew this was the one I wanted.” She smiles in satisfaction and flops triumphantly back on her bed, maybe the most emotion I’ve ever seen out of her.

“I suppose I’ll have to add myself to the ‘normal’ pile,” I say. “Unless the emergency grimoire is one of those Gifts that nobody picks up for some reason?”

Liv waggles her hand indecisively. “Middling? There’s always someone, but the kind of people that’d do really well with it tend to get scared away by the destructive effects license it requires. And it’s not the only option for that mindset.”

“I can believe that,” I say. Given what I’ve learned just about their currency markets, I bet that Gift-backed medieval fintech is just as good for making medieval money as information-age fintech is for raking in information-age dollars. “Back where I’m from, a lot of people with my skillset would outright refuse to participate in military service.”

There’s a bit of a pause there, nobody seeming to have much to say.

“Anyway! I should probably talk about my hobbies,” I say, trying to move on from that. Getting bogged down in politics on my first day in another world is… sort of the last thing I want to do. Or to have to do. I’d really like it if I could have a nice fun isekai protagonist adventure. Have to be careful that that doesn’t make me choose to overlook evil, but- I’m getting sidetracked again. Focus, Whitney. “I tend to rotate through hobbies every, uh, hundred days or so,” I say. “But it’s mostly programming, writing fiction, or playing video games. …Do you know what video games are? Have any Visitors popularized the idea?”

I get a wave of shaking heads all around. And one bafflingly negative foot-wiggle from Ji, who is still balanced upside-down on one hand.

I grin. Not only do I get to explain programming, I get to explain video games and programming to a bunch of medieval experts who have enough context that I might be able to get the concepts across without having to start over at multiplication.

It probably says something about me that I already have a lecture ready to go for this precise situation, composed while futilely trying to get to sleep after reading a particularly tragic waste of the isekai formula.

It says something awesome about me, is what I really mean.