Artyom awoke the next morning to a quiet room. The bed wasn’t particularly soft, but he’d slept right through the night… and the missed call he was now seeing on his phone.


    “You missed another night’s call, Artyom,” said Gus, the disappointment somehow clear in his monotone voice.


    “Looks like I slept right through it, sorry about that,” replied Artyom. “But the good news is I’ve found the hero…”


    “Why does it sound like there’s bad news attached to it?”


    “The hero looks like he’s from here.”


    Gus took a slow breath before replying. “To what extent?”


    “It’s his ears, they’re pointed just like the people from this world. Not to mention all the other physical traits that make him look like a perfect fit for someone born here.”


    “So why is he so familiar with Earth and Earth culture? Did our technicians make a mistake?”


    “Nope, he’s the real deal. Talked about celebrating his birthday at a Chuck E Cheese! Animatronics, arcades, pizza, all of it! He’s definitely not a pretender, and if this is a coincidence, it’s a nigh-impossible one.”


    The line went silent for a long moment. Artyom didn’t know whether Gus was still digesting the information or already coming up with a plan. However, he didn’t wait for him to finish.


    “I was able to convince him to let me join his party, and I plan to travel with him long enough to figure out what’s actually going on here. The only thing is the rest of his party wants me to prove myself first by nabbing some piece of armor from a nearby dungeon.”


    “Artyom,” began Gus. “If I were to relieve you of your ‘vacation’ right now, would you accept?”


    Artyom froze. “Where’s this coming from?”


    “Things are getting hectic on our front. It’s not anything we can’t handle, and there hasn’t been any loss of life on our side so far, but having you could make things easier for us.”


    Artyom slowly stood up from his bed and walked over to the window, which was just an open hole in the wall. The sun had already risen and shined its kaleidoscopic rays onto the city. He took a deep breath of the muggy air of the outer district. “Alright, what’s actually going on?”


    “What’s going on is I want you back, Artyom.”


    “Bullshit, something is up. You never lie about operations, so I know things are going well enough without me, and you sent me here for my own sake in the first place. You’re not going to withdraw me unless you have a proper reason. So what is it?”


    “I don’t know.”


    “You don’t? Mister strategy and operations?”


    “That’s the reason, Artyom. I don’t know what’s going on there, we’ve never encountered this sort of situation before. There have been pretenders but I believe you that he isn’t one.”


    “So you want to give up?”


    “I want to get my friend away from an unknown situation. You don’t have to rush into this and get yourself so close to this unknown. We can switch you out for a scout who can observe from a distance and do something when we have enough information.”


    “Later…” mumbled Artyom as his mind went to the Dark Lord’s war band, and the words of its commander. “They’re planning something, Gus. It’ll be soon too.”


    “You’re officially on a mission right now, so I can’t order you to immediately come back, but please think this through.”


    Artyom remembered the party last night as well. The likely overwhelming strength of those four women and their sheer pettiness; all that power and not one ounce of responsibility behind it. It didn’t sit well with him.


    “You’re right about one thing, Gus. There are too many unknowns and this whole situation doesn’t sit right with me. But if I just leave now, it might be an innocent kid from Earth who gets killed, and his blood would be on my hands. I’m staying.”


    Gus stayed silent on the other end for a long moment. Eventually, he let out a sigh, “Very well then, be careful, Artyom.”


    “I will,” said the man from Earth, as he hung up.


    Artyom looked around his room and at the bag of his hidden equipment. He didn’t know what this dungeon would hold, and even if the hero’s party members downplayed whatever danger lurked inside, he didn’t want to be caught unprepared.


    After bathing and getting freshened up, Artyom equipped all of the gear Gus had sent him. The sweatshirt and pants went on first, followed by the magic battery bracers and invisibility ring, and then the gun in a leather holster at his side. To top it off Artyom put on his loose linens, that while they looked a bit odd with everything underneath it, still made him look more normal than without.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    But even with all of his gear, he still felt naked.


    “No levels last night either,” Artyom said to himself. “I was sure Lensa’s blessing would make it work for me, but she said it wouldn’t take full effect until noon.”


    The man from Earth shook his head and stepped out the door, but came to an embarrassing realization. “I don’t know where the dungeon is.”


    <hr>


    It thankfully didn’t take Artyom long to find what he was looking for.


    As he entered the cartographer’s shop through its front wooden door, the smell of paint and parchment hit his nostrils, forcing him to reorient himself. The room he ended up in glowed with many muted shades of brown, from the oak shelves, to the rolled up sheets of tan colored canvas, down to the owner’s undyed linen clothes. The owner in question was a bald, unassuming middle aged man whose blister-covered hand held a brush that glided across the canvas in front of him.


    There was no bell tied to the door to announce Artyom’s presence, but the loud creaking of the door’s old hinges reverberated across the shop floor, bouncing between shelves and heralding the new arrival to the entire building. Artyom braced his eardrums, expecting the sound to be followed with an equally fortissimo creaking of the owner’s chair across the hardwood floor. It never came.


    The owner continued his work, heedless of the aural disturbance and potential customer.


    “Hello?” asked Artyom, somewhat surprised at meeting the first shopkeeper not showering him in platitudes upon his arrival.


    “Hey,” said the owner, his voice soft yet distant.


    Artyom made his way across the shop floor, past several tables and shelves holding rolled up pieces of canvas, all organized into specifically labeled piles.


    “Uh, I’d like to buy a map, please,” said Artyom. “One that shows the way to Crystal Kobold Crossing?”


    “Space F3, on shelf 4,” he replied, his eyes still glued to his work. “If you can’t find it, you’ll have to wait for me to finish this up first. And that’s not going to be for a while.”


    Artyom shrugged and began looking. He noticed that each of the shelves were labeled with a number at the top, and upon locating shelf 4, he saw that each of the rows had a letter etched into them.


    He located row F and walked over to the third column, where the space for F3 contained several rolled up maps. Artyom unfurled one of them and took a look at its contents. It contained the western entrance to the town and the area beyond that, which included a cave-like icon marked as ‘Crystal Kobold Crossing’.


    What was most surprising to him was that this town was named “Brimhaven” and that it took until now to find out.


    “Got it!” said Artyom.


    “Huh, that was fast,” mumbled the owner, finally looking up from his work. “Most people can’t even figure out my organization system. You have a locator Skill or something?”


    “No, it was pretty simple. The numbers and letters are all written down, they’re pretty hard to miss.”


    “Well you’re the first one I’ve heard say that. The name’s Carr, by the way.”


    “Artyom,” he introduced himself as he walked over to Carr with the rerolled map in his hands.


    “Two gold.”


    “Huh?”


    “The map costs two gold.”


    “Oh, right,” said Artyom, as he fished around in his bag for the last of his largest denomination. If things went well, he wouldn’t need to worry about money anymore, so he didn’t mind one last large purchase. Did expecting to mooch off the hero make him some kind of gold digger?


    Artyom handed the coins to Carr, who barely glanced at them before putting them inside his desk and returning to his work. He picked up the brush he’d placed down and focused his full attention onto the canvas in front of him, as if Artyom was never there.


    Having accomplished his goal, Artyom was ready to make his leave. But something about Carr caught his attention.


    “So…” began Artyom, ever the master at smalltalk. “Looks like you really like drawing maps.”


    “Mhm,” replied Carr, paying barely a speck of attention to Artyom.


    “You’ve been doing this a while?”


    “Twenty years,” he replied.


    Artyom nodded in respect. In all his travels, it was rare to find someone so dedicated to their craft who was still practicing it. Normally with levels and Skills, reaching a high enough echelon would get you poached by the nobility or allow you to live off a few token efforts, which resulted in stagnation.


    Someone still putting everything into their craft for so long meant high levels, which in turn meant some very interesting Skills. Even if it was for something as mundane as cartography, Systems tended to be very creative in what kind of abilities they granted for the highest of levels, and that had always piqued Artyom’s curiosity.


    “So what Skills are you using to draw those?” asked the man from Earth.


    “None. If I were, then the map would just show up on the paper.” Carr still hadn’t looked up again, but his eyes began to narrow and his grip tightened around the brush.


    “Why not use it then? It’d probably be a lot faster.”


    Carr halted his hand mid stroke before taking in a deep breath. He slowly lifted the brush off the canvas and set it aside, eyes still on the page in front of him.


    “I didn’t become a map maker to have a Skill do what I love for me. Besides, they all stopped working once I got my latest one.”


    “And which one’s that?” asked Artyom. Some Skills could subsume all previous ones, usually because they did the same thing or combined them into a single super-Skill.


    “It’s called ‘Emissary of Dharma’, whatever that means. But everything feels more clear since I got it, and making maps has been a lot more fun, so I don’t mind the trade-off.”


    Artyom stood still, processing Carr’s response. Maybe the System saw he wasn’t interested in what it had originally given him and swapped them out for something he would appreciate instead? Some Systems took peoples’ feelings into account.


    But what stood out to Artyom was that this man was different from so many others he had met along his journeys, and Artyom could understand how.


    The man from Earth slowly smiled as he made his way to the exit. “Hey Carr!”


    For the first time, Carr looked away from his work.


    “Keep drawing your maps.” Artyom opened the door and left the shop.