As Hask departed the mess hall, I looked at Tessa. "That's our boss?"
Tessa grinned. "Yep! He's a bit of a hard-ass, but he's a good foreman. And he's my uncle! He insists that he'd never give me special treatment, but he does."
I smiled, but then looked curiously over to where I could see Alara staring intently at a tray of baked goods on a table. She didn't actually seem interested in dessert. "And what about her? What's Alara's deal?"
Tessa shook her head. "I'm honestly not sure. She joined us a couple of months ago. She's a really good healer, but she…doesn't seem to like us very much. She's angry at us all the time."
I could hear from her tone that she wanted nothing more in the world than for Alara to like her.
"She'll figure it out eventually."
Kael's comment caught me off guard. "Figure what out, Kael?"
He didn't look up. "How to be happier."
I sat with that for a moment and did not push it. I had plenty of time to get to know everyone.
We continued eating (I had to acquire another jug of water) and talking about our lives and janitor work. It felt strange: since I had woken up in the house of healing, everything I'd seen, everyone I met, I always felt like I was observing it all through a window.
But here, in the mess hall of the Janitor's guild…
I felt like I was in the room too.
I spent the rest of the day wandering with Kael and Tessa around the Guild Hall. They showed me everything: from the recreational facilities to the training grounds to the privies. I learned a lot about how the Janitors operate as well.
According to them, Janitors were not particularly well respected. That honor went to the Adventurers, who got all the glory, and the Merchants, who got all the money. The Janitors, meanwhile, got the mop.
That said, they were adamant that without the Janitors, the whole system fell apart — and after hearing the full breakdown, I was inclined to agree.
The short version: dungeons were self-contained labyrinths full of monsters, traps, and treasure. Because they produced everything from gold to rare ore to magical artifacts, they'd become the load-bearing pillar of the world's economy. Which, now that I thought about it, seemed like an insane thing to build a civilization on — but nobody had asked me.
The problem was that once adventurers cleared a dungeon out, things got strange. Magic energy — called mana — would leak from the empty space, monsters would start appearing in the wilderness, weather patterns would go sideways. General chaos. Scholars investigated. They discovered that every dungeon had a Core — a crystal or stone at its center that, when activated, would reset everything. Monsters respawned. Traps reset. Treasure reappeared from apparently nowhere. The dungeon was ready to be plundered all over again.
Simple enough, except it wasn't.
If the dungeon was reset without being cleaned first, the new monsters would consume the corpses of the old ones and emerge stronger. Residual magic would concentrate in the leftover gore and debris until it reached critical mass — at which point, arcane explosions. The kind that removed chunks of the surrounding landscape.
The Adventurers, predictably, decided this was someone else's problem.
And thus the Janitors were born. Go in after the raid. Remove the corpses. Clean the blood. Reset the traps exactly as they were. Bleed off the excess magic. Then reset the Core. Done correctly, the dungeon reappeared exactly as it had been, ready for the next group of glory-seekers to tear through it.
The job wasn't glamorous. It was gross, excruciating and — from what I could gather — frequently degrading. I suspected that was exactly why nobody wanted to admit how important it was. Acknowledging it would mean acknowledging that someone had to do it. And no adventurer worth his salt could imagine cleaning up after himself.
Perish the thought.
And so Janitors were quietly filed away as a necessary nuisance. Not worth acknowledging. Certainly not worth respecting.
Kael and Tessa both disagreed with that assessment, loudly and at length. I found I was starting to as well.
Somewhere during this educational session, we wound up at a tavern.
The Final Yak occupied a corner spot on one of the quieter streets off the guild district, its sign depicting a shaggy bovine creature vomiting into a bucket with what I could only describe as artistic commitment. Inside it was warm and unpretentious — dark wood, mismatched chairs, lanterns hung at irregular intervals alongside crookedly framed dungeon maps that had clearly stopped being useful long before they became decorative. The kind of place that had been exactly what it was for a very long time and saw no reason to change.
We ordered at the bar and found a spot at a table in the corner. The barmaid, a woman by the name of Trini, brought drinks for the three of us.
Kael took a deep breath after completing a rather long bit of explaining and sipped from his mug of ale, just long enough for me to get a word in edgewise. "So you guys are happy as Janitors?"
Tessa took the answer upon herself; her excitement from earlier had calmed somewhat after a day spent strolling and teaching. "I am. I think Kael is too. Not Alara though. She's not happy with anything."
Kael gestured with his screwdriver. "Alara is difficult to work with…damn good healer though."
My mind went back to the blonde-haired elf girl. How she purposely huffed and kept herself out of the conversation, and acted like she was better than us, but kept stealing glances at me and the others and half-opening her mouth to interject multiple times.
I shrugged. "I'm pretty sure it's all an act."
Kael looked puzzled. "What do you mean?"
I sipped my own ale thoughtfully for a moment before responding. "Well she's definitely angry. That's real. Doesn't seem like she wants it that way."
Tessa tilted her head to the side quizzically. "She's angry, for sure. She was a mage before she came to the guild. She came here a few months ago after being banished from the Scolar's Enclave for some reason. Only Hask knows why."
That made perfect sense. If I had a job that I actually liked and was good at, and was forced to essentially scrub latrines instead, I'd be pretty peeved.
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But something Tessa said caught my attention. "What do you mean enclave? Are Mages not all adventurers?"
Tessa shook her head. "Not all. Many do both, but a lot of Mages make up the Scholar's Enclave. They spend all their time trying to figure out how the dungeons work and why they exist. We know next to nothing beyond what we can see."
Kael had mentioned that briefly. I found it concerning that something the world barely understood was the load-bearing pillar of its continued existence. I shook my head. "So Alara gets booted from the Enclave and has to be here, cleaning dungeons? I'd be pissed off too."
Kael shrugged. "Doesn't give her permission to be an enormous bitch."
I snorted softly at his abruptness.
"True. She's just got a lot of walls up."
Tessa nodded. "That's what Uncle Hask said. He told us to be patient, and we've been trying." She eyed me quizzically. "You're really perceptive. I can tell you like to read people. I wonder why…"
I saw her eyes light up, and I exchanged a glance with Kael: we saw a storm coming. Tessa leaned over the table toward me. "Were you a spy?! An inquisitor? OOOOO OOOO, did you learn some huge national secret that got you in deep trouble?! Did you piss off a guild administrator? Are you a rogue? Do you read people to learn their habits so you can steal from them? Or maybe you weren't a criminal. Maybe - OOOOO- maybe you were a soothsayer, and you learned about people from helping them solve their problems! Or-or-or…"
I grinned and held up a hand to stop her. "You've got a wild imagination. I doubt it's anything like that."
Tessa huffed. "But that's not fun."
"True."
I chuckled. This girl was adorable. She cocked her head at me. "So how does amnesia work? How does it decide what you can and can't remember? What do you remember? Like, your name has always been Lorne, right?"
I wasn't quite sure how to answer. "I don't really know, honestly. I knew my name was Lorne when I woke up, but that was more or less it. Most of the rest I got from the Sisters at the House of Healing. And then there are other things that I somehow know but don't know how I know. So when I know that I know what I know, I don't always know if I know it or if I think I know…y'know?"
Tessa blinked slowly. "No."
Kael laughed. "Finish your drink. It's almost curfew."
That caught me off guard. "Curfew? Like a bedtime? Aren't we all adults?"
Kael shrugged. "We only have curfew on nights before we have a job scheduled. Guild policy and stuff. If we had tomorrow off, we'd be free to drink til we're silly and come back whenever. We technically don't even have to sleep at the Guild Hall when we don't have duty. A lot of Janitors have houses."
"But houses require gold."
"Exactly. And I don't know about you, but I'm still basically a kid."
"I mean, the whole group is, right?""Tessa is twenty."
Tessa jumped in. "Alara is seventy-seven."
Kael waved a hand. "Yeah, but that's barely an adult for an elf."
At this point in the conversation, we had tipped the barmaid and departed from the Final Yak. The sun had fully set, and the streets were emptying for the day. It was much quieter. We walked in silence until we reached the Guild Hall. Tessa smiled winningly at us. "Well, this is where we part ways. See you guys at the briefing tomorrow."
I was taken aback when Tessa threw her arms around me in an enthusiastic hug. Given her halfling stature, she was mostly hugging my thighs, but I felt the warmth anyway. "Welcome to the team, Lorne."
I felt a little bit of moisture well up in the corner of my eye, and wasn't fully sure why. I awkwardly returned the hug. "Thanks, Tessa."
She broke the embrace and bounced happily off toward the women's dorms. I watched her go curiously. "Is she always that happy?"
Kael nodded solemnly, a small smile playing on his lips. "Pretty much, yeah. She's got a way of seeing life that I don't understand. But it's part of why she and I are such good friends. She keeps me from getting too gloomy, and I keep her a little more level-headed."
"Do you?"
He laughed. "Well, I try. Come on. Let's get you up to our room."
We walked back in silence, which was easier than I expected, traversing much emptier hallways and descending stairs until we reached a plain wooden door that read:
LITHWELL CALLISTER
They hadn't wasted any time. Kael threw open the door and announced, with the pomp and circumstance of a herald announcing the arrival of a prince, "Home, sweet home! After you, good sir."
Upon entering the room, I saw that "Home, sweet home" was in fact two single-person beds, each with a locking trunk at the foot, two writing desks and two chifforobes. The furniture was divided perfectly down the middle of the room.
Kael's half of the room was a state of impressively controlled chaos: piles of metal gears and doo-dads, papers, books, and diagrams of all kinds scattered across his desk in a way that looked haphazard, but gave me the impression that it was actually a meticulous system that only Kael understood. He had a couple of charcoal drawings of buxom women in scandalous poses on the walls and a large chalkboard covered in what appeared to be a combination of numerology and runecraft.
My side was empty. Kael saw me note that. "You can make up your space however you want. Just try not to touch anything on my side. I don't always know if there's anything lethal in here."
I laughed but said nothing.
"There's a folding partition we can use to change behind. Now I have to use it. Don't want you seeing my downstairs bits."
If I had been eating or drinking, I would have choked. "Downstairs bits?"
Kael rolled his eyes, pulling a sleeping robe from his chifforobe. "My cock and balls. I don't want you to see my cock and balls. Better?"
"No! I hate that just as much."
"Well, fine. I'm sure we'll have plenty of time to come to an agreement on a mutually comfortable designation for male genitalia."
"Fantastic."
Kael disappeared behind the partition, and I watched garments get thrown, one by one, over the top.
"Hey Kael."
"Yeah?"
"What am I actually supposed to expect tomorrow?"
There was a pause. "Hard to say, really. Dungeon running is always kind of touch-and-go on the details."
"Great."
"That being said, there are some pretty good rules of thumb. You're brand new: go only where and do only what Hask tells you to do. Otherwise, you could die."
"Noted."
"Also, if something goes wrong, always defer to Hask."
"'Goes wrong'?"
"Sometimes monsters can respawn on their own, an overlooked trap might spring, excess magic could hypnotise you, or any number of things."
"Sounds like a blast."
"It actually is more fun than you might think, once you kinda get past the shock of it all. On my first dungeon raid I tried to re-arm a wall spike trap, but didn't notice the trap door to a pit with more spikes. Jumped away from that only to step on a pressure plate connected to a flame-spewer. It was pretty comical, I'm told."
I smirked. "Hilarious."
"You'll do great. Just remember: if something goes wrong, don't run away. Run toward Hask. You'll always be safer."
I contemplated that for a long moment. "You guys really trust the Foreman, huh?"
Kael stepped around the partition, dressed in his sleep clothes. His eye contact was unwavering and his expression deadly serious. "Out of this whole team, I've been with Hask even longer than Tessa. I trust Hask with my life. He's the greatest man I've ever known. You'd do well to put your trust in him too."
I was surprised by his complete sincerity. "High praise. I'll make a note of it."
Kael reached into his trunk and pulled forth a thin, paper-lined book and a glass bottle.
"We'll talk about the rest tomorrow. I've got to do some reading before bed."
I stared at him skeptically. "'Reading', huh?"
Kael seemed to wilt slightly under my gaze. "Yeah, reading! On a completely unrelated note, I took the liberty of making you some earplugs. They're in a box, in your trunk. They'll help you sleep."
I took that as the hint it was and went to find them. I killed the light on my side and got into bed, pulling the blanket up to my chin and rolling onto my side - back facing Kael.
"G'night, Lorne."
"Goodnight, Kael."