They were interrupted by the sound of someone ascending the stairs. An Anuran larger than any that they had previously seen entered the room. “They are ready. Please follow me.” The voice was definitely male, and the bright red coloring dominating most of him confirmed the gender. Not waiting for a response, the Anuran turned and went down the stairs.

They entered the room where they had met with the three village leaders the previous day, and they were greeted with the same three faces. The Anurans were all sitting at a large table, and the group sat down in the chairs across the table from the three. When they were all seated, Svelta spoke. “I would like to thank you all for meeting with me today. I learned a great deal about you.” Ewtain wasn’t sure what she had learned about him in the very short time that they were together, but he kept his thoughts to himself. “We have discussed the matter, and we do not feel comfortable with this one in the village.” She pointed right at Ewtain, drawing a few befuddled looks among his friends. He had been prepared for the decision. He knew the meeting had been bad; it was just not clear why.

“The rest of you are free to stay and help our village prosper,” Gelum added quickly, seeming to sense the mood in the room.

“Wait. Let me get this straight,” Vultressant said with a good deal of emphasis on his words. “You’re fine with the lizardman whose race likes to make snacks out of your race, but Ewtain has to go?” The last he said with his best, ‘you are all a bunch of idiots’ tone.

“The Korak means us no harm,” Svelta said.

“And Ewtain does?” Vultressant’s voice had gone up an octave in frustration.

Gelum pointed at Ewtain. “He shrouds himself from us!”

Ewtain had finally had enough of this. He had spent the day either waiting for his chance to speak or worrying about the interview that had gone badly, and he decided to blow off some steam. “Is this because I’m Asian?” he asked in a mocking tone. The three elders looked at each other confused, and he saw in his peripherals that Taloc had brought his hand up his forehead, looking up in disbelief. Ewtain knew that he was exasperated, but the expected rebuke never came. “If I had known that this world was racist, I would never have signed up for this. Oh wait, I didn’t sign up for this… Unless I did, I didn’t actually read the EULA. I am relieved that you couldn’t read my thoughts, because then you would know that I had been wondering if you all taste like chicken. Whew. Glad I was able to slip that by.”

“This is going sideways,” Vultressant said, turning to Ewtain. “Dude, relax. We’ll either get this straightened out or leave with you.” He then motioned to Isla, who nodded back.

“You were thinking it too, right?”

“Ewtain, please stop talking. We can certainly all work this out.” Isla’s words were very soothing, and the stress that he had felt increasing in magnitude since their time in this world faded away in an instant. He relaxed and just nodded dumbly at her.

“Why do you feel like Ewtain is a threat?” she asked their hosts, but mostly she focused her gaze on Svelta.

All three Anurans visibly calmed as she spoke, and after a pause, Svelta replied. “He hides his true self from us. We do not know his class, although he is clearly some manner of rogue, and he must be very strong to completely nullify any detection attempts that we have made to discern his motivations. As we cannot know his intentions, we feel that it is unsafe to allow him to stay in our village.”

Ewtain rubbed his temples with his right hand, and in a weary tone he said, “I am a Night Stalker, which I would’ve happily told you had you been willing to have a discussion with me. Instead, you had me wait all day only to spend less than three minutes interviewing me.”

“Three minutes?” Vultressant asked. “You got back at least an hour after Vanya did, and she was the last to go before you.” He looked at Svelta. “Did you take a break after Isla or something?”

Before Svelta could reply, Ewtain answered the question. “There certainly could have been a break, but I came back while you guys were practicing the bow, and I stayed on the first floor until the meeting started.”

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Vultressant took a moment to absorb this new information. He then tilted his head and raised an eyebrow toward Svelta. “Why only three minutes?” he asked.

She folded her arms and appeared somewhat bristled by the question. “Anything that he said could not be verified and therefore could not be trusted, and now he admits to being a Night Stalker. They are vile assassins, and we do not wish to have one in our midst.”

“That’s just the class that he was assigned during character creation,” Taloc interjected.

“To be fair, I was trying for an assassin.”

Taloc looked at Ewtain, who put up both hands in surrender. “We are all neutral good, if alignment is a thing here.” He eyed Maroftis and amended his statement. “Well, maybe some of us are chaotic good, but we took our classes for the stats and skills and not due to our desire to do evil, or even our desire to do good for that matter. Our experience with Assassin classes is that they are formidable in battle, and helpful for exploring dungeons safely.”

The leaders were unphased by Taloc’s explanation. “However it was done, he made a choice to be a Night Stalker. Regardless of the reasons for his choice, he must leave,” Gelum said. He had obviously made his decision and would not be swayed.

Vultressant turned, made eye contact with Isla, and nodded to her. She nodded back and addressed the Anurans. “Would you please reconsider? We are good people, and we will work hard to become valuable additions to your community. We had not planned to stay very long anyway, so could you allow Ewtain to remain for just a few days? We could do some tasks for you as payment.”

All three of them paused. Gelum and Svelta looked at each other and appeared to be reconsidering, but Cynila broke the silence by speaking for the first time. “No! We have made our decision.” She appeared to be addressing the other two Anurans, who then appeared to cease their consideration of Isla’s request.

“How about one day?” Isla asked.

Svelta tilted her head to the side, appearing to consider the request, but before she could respond, Cynila said, “You may stay the night, but we will post guards at the storehouse. If you decide to stay without your Night Stalker, we will make arrangements for you, but if not, you leave at first dawn. Now, please go.”

“You know,” Ewtain said, getting warning looks from Isla and Vultressant, “where we come from, we have to determine the trustworthiness of someone by their actions. We don’t have absolute truth detection. Sometimes, you just have to trust people. If we ever come back to this place, try to remember that.”

It appeared as if nothing could be done to salvage the situation, so they got up to leave. Vultressant turned back before reaching the door to the room and asked, “Any chance that Tollaisa can come by tonight to help me with the language again?” Svelta nodded. “Thank you.”

They made their way back to the storehouse.

They had two escorts back, both of whom remained outside the building and were apparently part or all of their guard for the night. When they were all upstairs, Vanya said, “Well, that could have gone better, and what kind of last request was that, Vult?”

He turned his hands palms up and said, “What?” She just shook her head. “Hey, I just want to get my Anuran language up to rank ten before we go, so I can see what happens.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” she said, although Ewtain thought that she still seemed to be bothered by the request. She then rounded on him. “All right, spill it. What happened with your interview?”

Vanya spoke it in a good-natured manner, but Ewtain, who was still frustrated by the day’s events, felt cornered, and his response was rather defensive. “I have no idea! She got me in there, asked me a couple of questions, told me to lie to her, and then she left!” His response was nearly a shout, certainly compared to his normal mild manner, and Vanya held up her hands, indicating that she had not meant to upset him. “I’m sorry,” he said. He did his best to calm himself. “I… had a bad day.” He was letting the stress of being stuck on this planet get to him, and he took a deep breath to center himself. I need to embrace this. He had always been able to adapt to any situation, so he vowed to do so here too.

“No problem,” she said. “Well, if your meeting went like that, their comments about you shrouding yourself or whatever makes some sense.”

“How so?”

“You have some mind protection thing, right? You used it against the mummy.” When he nodded, Vanya continued. “That probably blocks the truth spell that Svelta is using, and they don’t like the unknown.”

“It doesn’t seem to work against Isla,” he said, “but we could go back and let them know.” He doubted that it would work.

Vultressant laughed. “After that Night Stalker and Asian nonsense, that ship has sailed.” Ewtain shrugged, and Vultressant quickly added, “We’ll be fine. It’s probably better for us to move on than to stay here anyway.”

“I feel bad that I wasn’t able to persuade them into keeping you here.” Isla said. “I did make three levels in my persuasion skill, even though I failed, so at least we know that skills can be increased without success.”

“It looked like you had two of them swayed until they were cowed by Cynila,” Taloc said, “and you calmed Ewt down at the meeting. Did you get any notifications about the encounter?”

“I told you before, keep your witchery away from me,” Ewtain said.

“Don’t worry, I would never try to force you to do what I want,” Isla said coyly. This elicited a smile from Ewtain, who then nodded and put his hood up, obscuring his face.