Thankfully, we didn’t actually end up having to wait that long, and soon enough we were heading out again on our first independent quest. We didn’t even have to leave the city for this one, which was convenient.

  “Alright, go through it one more time for me,” Cassie requested.

  I pulled out the portable copy of the quest sheet that we’d been given with a sigh. “Quest Classification: Pest control. Quest posted by Mildred Williams. Quest Location, 48 Leviticus Road. Quest Objective: Eliminate all unwanted creatures on the premises. Quest Reward, three silver pieces and five copper pieces.”

  Cassie raised an eyebrow as we walked. “Yep, it’s still the same. Why, as precisely as you can, did you think that was the quest for us?”

  I threw my hands in the air. “I don’t know! I panicked, okay? I admit it. I was up there, and everyone was waiting, I grabbed the first thing I saw. And it’s not like I could just ‘go back’ and ‘find another quest’ or anything.”

  “You literally could! This doesn’t even pay for our room, Lia!” Cassie complained.

  “I know! I’m sorry, alright?” I huffed. “Why couldn’t you go up instead? You know I suck at this kind of thing!”

  Cassie dropped her gaze. “I just… I wanted to help. It’s important to confront this stuff, so that you can get better at it. I thought it would work out. Sorry.”

  Damn it, why did you have to have such a good answer to that?

  I sighed again. “It’s fine. There’s no way this will take all day, so we can find something more exciting later. It’s only…” I glanced up at the sky, tracking the location of the sun. “About ten thirty-ish? We’ve got time.”

  “I’m still convinced that’s magic,” Cassie stated, squinting up at the sun like she thought I was lying.

  I shot her a sideways glance. “I taught you how to do it a couple of years ago. Don’t you remember?”

  “Uh… Definitely! Yeah, of course I remember. One hundred percent,” she lied through her teeth, even having the audacity to shoot me an innocent grin after the fact.

  “You can just say you forgot, it’s fine. I forgot about the presence of an entire lake, it’s not like I can judge.”

  Cassie sighed theatrically, wiping her hand across her forehead. “Phew. I know that my cover was flawless, but I actually did forget.”

  “Really?” I said flatly.

  “I know!” Cassie glanced at a sign as we passed. “Hey look, we’re here. Leviticus Road. Just got to find the right building now.”

  We stopped and both looked down the street, which continued on until a sudden end at a what looked like a church, albeit a small one. The street was lined with street lights on either side, and the houses here were all separate buildings. They even had tiny sections of greenery out the front, just enough for some brush and a few flowers.

  I peered over the fence of the building nearest, spying a little plaque on the door that declared this house to be number ‘24’. Sure enough, the one on the other side of the street was labelled ‘25’, which meant that our destination was probably right at the end of the road, not far from the tiny church.

  After a few minutes of walking and checking each house number as we went, we managed to find our destination. It was a fairly small house, seemingly only one story tall with a small, well tended garden surrounded by a cute little wooden fence. All in all, it seemed like a nice place.

  We walked up to the house and Cassie knocked on the door, the two of us lapsing into silence as we waited. Several seconds later the door opened to reveal an elderly woman, standing behind the door with a broad smile on her face.

  “Hello, dears. Why might you two young ladies be visiting?” She asked.

  Cassie answered for us while I held up the quest sheet. “Good morning, ma’am. You posted a quest with the Adventurer’s Guild yesterday. We’re here to complete your request.”

  The old woman’s expression brightened further. “Oh, lovely! Come in. In, I say. You two make yourselves comfortable, I’ll fix you up some tea so I can explain.” She shuffled into the house, but only after watching and making sure that we both entered first.

  “Please, ma’am. We don’t need tea, we’re just here for the job-” Cassie tried to explain.

  The old woman was having none of it, however. “None of that, dearie. Everything’s better discussed over a hot drink. I’ll even use the good stuff for it: proper griffin milk. Rare, but ever so good. Oh, and do call me Mildred. All of this ma’am business makes me feel old.”

  She watched expectantly as we made our way into a cosy little sitting room. There were far too many chairs arranged for one old lady, and each of them had at least two cushions. A fireplace crackled in the middle of one wall, beating back the mild chill of the autumn winds.

  Once we were both seated, Mildred toddled off into the next room to make her tea. I’d never even heard of the practice of milking griffins, but the only tea I’d ever had was the herbal tea my mum made sometimes, so I wouldn’t exactly call myself an expert. At least I knew it would probably be really expensive, given how rare griffins were these days.

  “It’s lovely to have company, isn’t it?” Mildred called from the kitchen. “My grandson never visits anymore, and my Gregory passed a few years ago. I don’t mind the quiet, but it does get lonely sometimes.”

  She bustled back in, bow holding a platter that shook dangerously. Despite all the movement, none of the drinks on it spilled so much as a drop. “Alright, take your pick. I’m afraid I forgot to ask you how you take it, so I just made them all like I prefer. I’m sure you’ll love it.”

  Cassie and I shared a look, before she took one with a shrug. After a moment more of hesitation I followed suit, taking a sip of the dark brown liquid. It was… strong, that was for sure. The taste lingered in my mouth like a heavy blanket even after I swallowed, which I could have done without. Still, it wasn’t the worst thing I’d ever consumed.

  “Now, ma’am-” Cassie began.

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  “Mildred,” she insisted once again.

  “...Mildred. What exactly are we dealing with here? You just labelled them as, and I quote, ‘unwanted creatures’. We’re going to need you to demystify that for us a bit, so that we know the best way to handle the situation.” Cassie took another sip of her own tea. Then another, much deeper gulp. It seemed like she was a fan.

  “Oh, very professional. That’s an excellent attitude, young lady. You’ll go far with an outlook like that. Now, the pests. They were… let’s see. About this big,” Mildred held her hands about two and a half feet apart. “Kind of like rats, if you’ve seen them. The adorable little things used to live wild around this area, you know. Darling little rascals, but not as common these days.”

  Rats, of course, were incredibly rare in the modern day. The story went that an Archmage of legend known as Grimsby the Weary, tired of his spiritual cat hunting the things down and leaving them in his tower, the majority of the population on the continent. He didn’t want to kill them all off, just enough that he wouldn’t need to deal with them. Nowadays they were more like cute exotic pets than how they were described in history books, which was as common pests.

  Despite his questionable problem-solving skills, the same Archmage was credited with the removal of all mosquitoes everywhere, filing in their roles as pollinators by layering a mental compulsion onto a huge number of wasps and ants. Overall, he was pretty beloved by a lot of people.

  “They’re… rats?” Cassie asked. “But big.”

  Mildred waved one hand, the other nursing her own cup of tea. “Oh, no. They are rather like rats, that’s all. No, they couldn’t be rats. Too scaly, for a start.”

  Scaly? That would have been helpful to throw into the description.

  “Where exactly are they?” Cassie asked her. “As in, are they inside your house, or are they in the area in general? If they are in your house, where?”

  Mildred answered quickly. “They’ve taken over the basement, I’m afraid. There are rather a lot of them, I hope you don’t mind.”

  “That’s fine, Mildred. Why don’t you stay here while we take a look?” Cassie suggested as she stood, placing her empty cup onto the table by her seat. “Where’s the entrance to your basement?”

  “There’s a hatch under the stairs. You’ll know it when you see it. Thank you again for doing this for me, dears.”

  “No problem, Mildred. Oh, and sorry for any noise. You know how it is.”

  With that said Cassie strode of into the hallway, so I hurriedly put down my half-finished cup of tea, nodded vaguely to Margaret and followed after her. When I caught up she was levering open a door underneath the stairs that I hadn’t even spotted when we’d first been ushered inside.

  When she managed to open it, she was assaulted by a veritable cloud of dust that flew from the door. It was like someone had purposefully trapped all of the dust in the house behind that one door, and we’d just released it after years of imprisonment.

  I walked up behind Cassie and peered into the room while her lungs recovered. There was a lot of stuff in the room, all of it seemingly abandoned to the whims of time. Mostly, the room was just dusty shelves packed to the brim with old knick-knacks, but wedged between the shelving and half-buried under a load of discarded holiday decorations was the outline of a trap door.

  I stepped fully into the storage room, crouching down and wiping the dust from the visible portion of the trap door. It was built directly into the floor, so it fit pretty snugly. Fortunately, after shifting some of the refuse that covered the door I discovered a little handle that had been concealed.

  After a moment of silent mourning for my sinuses I grabbed the handle and pulled, hoping to get the trap door open without much issue. Unfortunately for me, Fate seemed to have other plans. The moment I put even a little bit of strength behind the metal handle, it snapped directly off in my hand. I ended up barely stopping myself from collapsing into the shelving behind me.

  Cassie, who had poked her head in the room just in time to see my failure, laughed as I fell backwards. “Loosened it for you,” I muttered as she stepped fully into the room.

  Being probably smarter than I was, Cassie did not try to bodily open the clearly dilapidated door without thinking. Rather, she simply muttered a few words, waved a hand and opened it with her magic. Immediately, and without any issue.

  I shuffled back into place beside her and gazed into the basement. More specifically, I gazed into the gloom that covered everything more than five steps in, which helped no one.

  The darkness didn’t last long though, at least for me. Before I even remembered that I could my body starting tweaking my eyes, allowing them to take in more light. Before my eyes (literally) the dark began to clear up, revealing a stone basement that clearly hadn’t been visited in years. It made me wonder how Mildred even knew about whatever beasts were plaguing her.

  I started making my way down the steps, not waiting for Cassie. That buzzing in the back of my skull from when I was chasing Hansen was back. Whatever I was hunting was down there, I knew it. At this point trusting spontaneously manifesting instinct was par for the course, so I followed the gentle nudges that it gave me as Cassie followed behind, her conjured light illuminating the room and allowing us both to see in better detail.

  It turned out that this basement was actually a wine cellar, or at least it used to be. It was a bit colder down here than it had been upstairs, and there were tons of wine racks lining the walls. There weren’t many actual bottles left, though. Not on the racks, anyway.

  The floor was absolutely covered in smashed bottles. There must have been quite the collection down here once, but now it was all shattered glass. Strangely enough, however, there was no actual wine on the floor, just glass.

  In the shadows, my eyes caught movement behind one of the wine racks and latched onto it. I had to resist the urge to lunge at where I saw it, instead hanging back. “Something moved that way,” I informed Cassie, pointing in the direction I’d seen it going.

  “Anything big?” She asked.

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t get a great look though.”

  “Alright, well keep an eye out. Your eyes are better than mine down here, so you’ll probably see something first.”

  I nodded, keeping my eyes peeled as we moved on. I caught movement twice more, each time barely spotting it and each time having to fight the desire to leap onto whatever was hiding from me and catch it.

  As we traversed the maze of wine racks, I kept relying on the strange sense in the back of my head that seemed insistent on guiding me. It wasn’t exactly accurate, but every little helped at the end of the day.

  After what felt like hours of searching, but was probably minutes at the most, I finally managed to catch a proper glimpse of whatever was moving around down here when it made the mistake of getting too close. It was grey, I could tell that much. Sleek, too.

  This time I couldn’t resist the urge to pounce on the little creature, my claws out before I even realised what was happening. By the time I was cognisant of it I’d already speared the monster on three of my claws, punching through its scales with ease. It let out a high pitched squeal, which trailed off as it died.

  I heard a commotion behind me and turned to see Cassie with her hand on her heart. “You alright?” I asked casually, like I didn’t have a corpse impaled on my fingers.

  She waved me off. “I’m fine, just tense. This place is kind of putting me on edge, so maybe don’t suddenly move like that, yeah?”

  I grimaced. “Sorry. I got it, though.”

  She gave me a thumbs up. “Good job, honey.” I couldn’t quite tell if she was being sarcastic or not, so I decided to take the compliment and move on.

  I turned back to examine the creature, only then realising that it was completely gone. Instead, my hand was covered in… water? Just regular old water, covering me and the floor beneath me. The only thing that was left was the monster’s thick, sturdy claws, clearly meant for digging.

  I racked my brain for a name to attach to the former monster that had leaked onto the floor, but I came up completely empty. I couldn’t think of a single monster that liquidated itself on death.

  “Do you know what it was?” I decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask Cassie, since she’d spent more time with our bestiary than I had.

  She shrugged. “Nope. We should probably check the bestiary.”

  “…”

  “What?” She asked.

  “Neither of us have our bags, Cass. How are we meant to look?”

  “Well, um… Okay, you win,” she conceded. “Still, there’s no way that we’ve got the only one, right?”

  I was about to respond when my eyes latched onto more movement from behind Cassie. I drew my sword and shifted into my bug-like form in preparation. “Nope. Definitely not the only one.”

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