The village elders say that adventure is dangerous, that it leads to a life fraught with conflict and tragedy. They say adventure isn’t worth it and then tell the village children to take chances and make messes as they grow up, all in the same contradictory breath. The elders advise the next generation to be better than they, to learn from their accumulated wisdom and old mistakes. But don’t go on adventures. Don’t seek wealth and danger and fame. Only degenerates and deadbeats with no skills suited for polite little shortsighted villages do that sort of thing.

At least, that’s how it sounded to Fio every time she heard old Alexios, the wrinkly prune of a man that had spent so much time out in his turnip fields he’d turned the color of dirt and had all the fun drained from him, give the same tired old talk to the most recent class of schoolchildren to be punished with an outing to his overly manicured garden. She’d hated that talk when she had gone with her class to his garden and listen to his folksy wisdom, and ten years on, she was only more disgusted with it. Elder Alexios meant well. She knew that, but using the warm grandfatherly laugh and gentle tone of experience to crush the dreams of small girls that wanted nothing more pure than to leap into battle swinging a sword bigger than her own torso into the oncoming hordes of slobbering whatevers was just cruel.

“Stop scowling so hard.”

It was enough to make Fio scream. It was a disservice to future generations, a willing acquiescence to mediocrity in a backwater town no one had ever heard of or ever would without the claim of producing a big shot adventurer. A daring doer that dared to do whatever it took to get the gold, save the local princess, clear a dungeon level of slimy things that used a language comprised of growls and gurgles. A name like Tarik “The Wall” Van Rumpade, three time conqueror of the Dungeon of Endless Goblins. Or “Sword” Murdoch, master of the Double Double Broadsword Style. Names you could hang your proverbial hat on. Names that got statues in front of important buildings. Names that could afford a gladiator stadium, for crying out loud!

“Fio, breathe. Then please put my soup on the table before it gets any colder.”

Fio took a deep breath in through her nose, puffing out her chest and frowning all the harder. She pulled her eyes away from the massacre of schoolchildren's’ hopes and dreams happening across the street and pulled out a chair from the table she was serving, dropping into it in annoyed defeat. The tray she held landed on the table with a clatter, the spiced turnip soup sloshing in its bowl but most of the sluggish liquid stayed stubbornly unspilt. “It’s not fair, Meredith.”

Meredith frowned at the other girl, gingerly lifting the soup bowl after its contents had settled. She dropped all of her crackers into it to start soaking up the broth. “You’re going to have to be a might more specific. Are we bemoaning the unfairness of the world in general this time, or do you have a particular target in mind?” She pressed her spoon into the mush that had formerly been crackers, mushing those poor squares even more. “I know you blame Mr. Torreg for never amounting to anything more than waitress, second class, but c’mon...he’s harmless.”

“I know.” Fio tried to smile wisely, like her grandfather did when he remembered why he had walked into the living room of her family’s home for the third time, but it came out as an exasberated sigh and her face collapsing into her folded arms. Then she started kicking. “It’s still unfair! I coulda had class!”

“You dropped out.”

“I was in the wrong training, Mer.”

“You just don’t like dealing with reality.”

“If I was a great adventurer, I wouldn’t have to! I could have been the most badass warrior ever! I could have worn platemail and carried a shield the size of this table.” Fio slapped the cheap wagon wheel-style table with the back of her hand. “It would have been glorious and you know it. I would be rich and famous and make Alexios Torreg suck eggs for his crimes against my ambitions!”

“Oddly specific, that.”

“You know what I mean.” Fio grumbled into her uniform’s shirt sleeve, turning her head after a moment to look at the tavern that had become her life. Day after day, night after night she came here and waited on tables, cleaned the latrines, mopped up the vomit after the farmhands had their inevitable one too many. It kept her in coin, helped her family live a touch more comfortably. Elder Alexios, owner and primary supplier of the turnips that went into the tavern’s “famous” soups and stews, said it kept her out of trouble.

“This place is wrong for me, Mer. It’s just as bad as the mage training. Maybe worse, if you count the emotional turmoil I put myself through by working for my arch nemesis to pay for—if I look up right now, am I going to see you rolling your eyes at me again?”

Meredith chuckled, spoon slicing through her processed wheat and moist turnip pulp. “Nope. I already got that out of the way. But if you want a replay, I can indulge you. You are my bestie, Fio, so you deserve to get the full thing.”

“Nah, that’s ok.”

“I can add some sparkles to it. Make it a whole production, Fio!” Meredith chuckled again, leaning down into her friend’s line of sight. “Afterwards, I can throw a few fireballs around. You know, for emphasis.”

“You can’t throw fireballs, Meredith.” Fio scowled, but she aimed it mostly at the object of her displeasure and sole source of income. Mostly. “You aren’t high enough for those kind of spells yet.”

“How would you know? You dropped out of the training, remember?”

“I know enough to know you can’t manage more than an aggravated puff of smoke.”

“I’ve gotten better, dummy.” Meredith smirked, her lips perfectly copying the curve of the local spellcaster trainer’s, Haylee Hedvig. A general thorn in the side the yokels she was surrounded by, the old lady had agreed to teach the basics to the small number of children produced by their village that showed an aptitude toward the arcane arts.

Fio pushed herself up and gave her friend her best eyeroll and puffed cheeks combo she could manage. “If you were that good, Mer, I’d be able to see the mole on your chest. You can barely tell you even have breasts in that get up. Won’t it interfere with your arcane motions or whatever the popular excuse is these days?”

“Pffft.” Meredith sighed and took a bite of her lunch. She grimaced and reached for the salt before trying a second spoonful. “Are you seriously still hanging onto that? Not all spellcasters end up in those skimpy costumes you see in the papers and storybooks.”

“Yeah, some of them are priestesses. Then, instead of a cleavage window, they get robes that are as tight as a second skin with a bunch of ridiculous bits hanging off and flapping majestically in the breeze! A female spellcaster is apparently destined to a life of being on the back line of any fight. They support or they heal, and gods forbid you don’t have the perfect body to pull off the lingerie ‘armor!’”

“I’m still pretty sure that’s just to sell more of those storybooks and papers to the bards and lonely guys that lumberjack eleven months out of the year.”

“It doesn’t matter! That’s what people expect these days from female adventurers in general and from you spellcasters specifically!” Fio stood suddenly, her seat clattering loud enough against the floor of the tavern’s deck to draw the momentary attention of it’s owner from where he was directing a dozen kids in proper turnip care. “I want to be a warrior! A fighter, Meredith! Gimme armor from head to toe any day over those flimsy robes and thigh high boots. Put a halberd in my hands and to hell with a staff! I want to be a real adventurer!”

“One: rude. I’m a spellcaster, you dork.” Meredith waved her spoon around idly. “Two: you scored pathetically on the strength and dexterity tests, but high on the intelligence tests. If you want to be an adventurer at all, you’re gonna have to buckle down and learn how to do the basics, just like I did.”

“Why can’t I be a warrior though? You don’t have to be that strong, and really, it’s more a stamina game than outright brute strength…”

“Besides the reasons I just gave you?” Meredith sighed and took another experimental bite of her meal. Finding it more to her liking, she jabbed the spoon into the mush. “You weigh less than a child, Fio! Even if platemail came in petite, you’d die of heat exhaustion—or just plain ol’ regular exhaustion—within the first day. Face it, you aren’t warrior material, sweetie.”

Fio opened her mouth for another well thought out, unassailable retort when she heard the sound of a dirt-colored old prune clear its throat. She froze, mouth open and finger pointed accusingly at her best friend, for a moment before slowly turning to face her employer. Elder Alexios stood at the edge of the tavern’s deck, flanked by a gaggle of grubby gawking children. He did not look particularly pleased about abandoning his regularly scheduled generational indoctrination.

“Fio.”

“Yes?”

“I pay you to serve the customers, not go on and on rather loudly about adventurers.”

“But...but…” Fio grinned nervously, gesturing at Meredith with both hands. “I am serving the customers, see? The customers are served. All one of them! And before you ask, yes, I have cleaned the latrines. I even managed to mostly get rid of the smell in the gents’ one.”

Meredith lifted her soup bowl up high and smiled too. “She’s not lying sir. I am served. Quite nicely, in fact. The turnips in this batch are very hearty, your attention to quality in your produce is outstanding.”

“Thank you, Meredith, but you don’t need to stand up for Fio.” The elder frowned, leaning against the short fence that firmly separated the deck and the road and acted as an emergency hitching post whenever more than one horse showed up. “She’s a big, tough girl. Said so herself. So it should be no problem for her to go and find something in the back to clean or organize. Unless she wants to see about finding some other gainful employment? Or is that too much to ask, like training with Miss Hedvig was?”

Fio pushed her lips together into a pale, narrow line. The edges of her mouth twitched for a moment before she spoke again, shakily. “No, Mr Torreg, it’s not...too much to ask.” She turned stiffly and collected the tray she’d brought Meredith her turnip soup with. She bowed politely, plucking at her long hemmed skirt in a curtsey before turning once more and fleeing into the tavern.

“Oh, and Fio?” Alexios called after the girl. “Feel free to take any leftovers home with you tonight. Meredith says the soup is pretty good today.” He looked at the sitting mage for a moment. “When you head home yourself, Meredith, tell your mother and grammy I said hello.”

Meredith nodded silently.

“Good girl. Now...children, where were we?” The elder clapped his hands, his dark face lighting up. “Oh yes, how deep to plant the seeds and when to do it! Come with me. I’ll make fine young farmers out of all of you eventually.”

---

---

“Have I mentioned with the last five minutes, how stupid and beyond reckless this is?”

Fio snorted in response, folding a thick blanket around her personal items and lashing it to the pack she’s scrounged from the basement. It held enough rations for a few days and some bandages. It was a pretty pathetic starting gear package, but she had to start somewhere.

“Mer, I’m not going back to the tavern. Not after today.” Fio cinched the last strap on her mothballed backpack, sniffing back a fresh set of tears. “I can’t take it any more. I’ve got to get out there and live my life the way I want while I still have a choice in the matter.”

She let the pack drop onto her bedroom floor, looking around at the evidence of her childhood. The posters on the wall of famous Adventurers. The cheap little wood figures of knights and archers posed in mock battle with an equally cheap but much loved wooden dragon. The dolls, dressed as princesses in their stupid pointy hats or mages in their stupid pointy hats, where her mother’s addition, forced on her after she’d passed the magical aptitude test and graduated into the most unrewarding part of her twenty years.

“I can’t go back into the training, Meredith. I can’t. I refuse to be some hedgewitch, doing minor magics and handing out starter quests to better adventurers. I refuse to be the mage on the back row, throwing support spells around like some sort of ridiculous public service...and...I refuse to let this village chew me up and spit out another farmer’s wife slash spinster slash kooky cat lady. Adventure is everything. Adventure is life worth living.”

Her best friend sighed. “One one hand, I agree with you, Fio. But on the other...I’m worried about you. The world is big and dangerous and well...you aren’t.”

“Give me time, Mer. I have a plan. There is a dungeon within a day or two’s walking distance. It’s known to have a decent population of low level rats and slime molds.” Fio flashed Meredith a smile, her thumb up. “It’s the old fashioned way: get experience and loot, rinse, repeat until you can take on bigger and badder stuff with better stuff.”

“Okay, but hear me out for a second. What if you didn’t do that, and instead, took a different training than the spellcaster route? Miss Hedvig knows other who can teach you. Drop out or not, she doesn’t hold any grudges I know of. Heck, she probably appreciates that it’s not both of us making a total ruin of her potion lab!” Meredith leaned over, putting her arm around Fio’s shoulders. “We grew up together. You are like a sister to me, Fio and I was kinda planning on us being cackling old bettys together too.”

“What other training would I do, Mer? You’ve said yourself that I’m not fit for warrior training.”

“What about splitting the difference?”

“What?” Fio blinked, turning to regard her friend as if she’d grown a second head.

“What about becoming a skills based sort of adventurer? They need to be smart, and being small is usually a plus! Hey, you might make for a great ninja! And so long as you stay away from the leather armor crowd, you wouldn’t end up in anything bondage-chic...but if you do, you could totally pull off the spikes. No one would mess with you!”

Fio shrugged, rolling her eyes in tired exasberation. “Mer...I appreciate the sentiment, I really do. But I can’t do that either. If I start a whole new type of class training now, I’ll be in there with kids half my age. I’d never live that down. And what if I failed at that too, hmm? I couldn’t show my face again. As much as I don’t like folks like elder Alexios, I’d miss you too much to stay away forever.”

“Aw!” Meredith grinned, scooping her friend into a full bearhug. “You’d better miss me!”

“Now will you let me go?”

“But I just started hugging you.”

“Not that! Sheesh...the adventure into the unknown part, remember?”

“Well…” Meredith sighed again, her grip on Fio tightening. “I won’t stop worrying. If I don’t hear something from you in a few weeks, I’ll be mounting a rescue mission, mark my words.”

“So long as I’m getting rescued by the best, it’ll be worth it. But you mark my words, Mer. I’m not going to fail this time. I’m going out and I’m making a name for myself that this little rinky-dink can be proud of!” Fio chuckled and returned the hug before reaching down to lift her discarded pack. It felt like destiny in her hands. Internally, she was a little sad swelling orchestral music hadn’t spontaneously started when she did.

“Time to get going, Meredith. I’d rather not have my folks to deal with too. One tearful goodbye is plenty.”

“So, out the window like we’re sneaking over to my place for a sleepover?”

“I’ll hold the ladder steady, you go first.”

---

---

“Note to self: get a horse next time you want to go somewhere more than an hour’s walk from your house.” Fio wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, flicking the sweat into the bushes that lined the rutted dirt track that lead to the dungeon she’d pinned her hopes on. “Buy it. Steal it...I don’t care, just get one. All this walking is for the birds!”

The entrance itself was a simple stone archway set into the side of a forested hill. At the top of the arch, carved into the huge keystone itself was the date the dungeon had been constructed, originally as a prison, if her research which consisted of asking her grandfather about it once a few years ago was to be trusted. Below those ornate numbers were dozens, maybe hundreds, of other dates crudely scratched into the stones signifying when some adventurer or party had come through and cleared it out of the nasty creepy crawlies that infested it over and over again.

Fio squinted through the dappled sunlight at the carvings, looking for the most recent date. Most of them were faded by time and weather, but a few still slightly with fresh marks. Sadly, they were pretty much illegible too. “Looks like the last couple of guys in here were just as hard up lowbies as I am. Hopefully, there’s been enough time for the place to refill. Fio needs herself some levels and a couple of pieces of armor. I don’t even care if they match!”

An hour later, she shrugged off pack, letting it crumple onto the dusty floor while she leaned back against the wall and slide down to crumple with slightly less grace than her backpack. As far as she could tell, she was at least halfway through the first level and she hadn’t seen or heard a single thing. Not even rats had repopulated the dungeon since the last adventurer. Where there were no monsters to fight, there was no gear to loot and her pack was as empty as ever. She was grateful for the shafts in the ceiling that let in light, but they were starting to thin out and the air was getting cooler the farther she went.

“Second note to self: invest in torches.” Fio groaned, listening to the soft echoes of her own voice. “Maybe if I try hard enough I can will myself into developing a see in the dark skill. That’s a thing...right?”

She smiled ruefully at that. Determination was the one of those traits adventurers favored. Along with bravery—or at least a lack of a strong sense of self-preservation—and luck, it was the most favored.

An hour after that, no manner of determination was enough to raise Fio’s spirit. The dungeon seemed to just go on and on, a series of halls and rooms that lead to more halls with more rooms, all of them devoid of monsters to kill or treasure to loot. The second level of the place had been mildly interesting when she reached a huge pit lined with platforms that dropped away if she stood on them for more than a brief moment. The rubble pile on the third level presented a climbing challenge, but still she had no noteworthy experience, no loot to call her own. Not even junk to sell to a merchant back in town.

Now, Fio found herself on the fourth and final floor of the dungeon, in front of yet another of those stone archways. “Is this place allergic to doors? No wonder it gets raided by every Tom, Dick, and Janny come lately adventurer! Gah!” She threw up her hands, stomping angrily across the threshold. This room was bigger than most and had a raised dais that looked picture perfect for a huge chest stuffed with gold coins and one of those fancy looking jeweled sword hilts that were way impractical—tactically speaking—but looked good above the mantle.

However, just like all the previous chambers, it was completely, totally, and infuriatingly—empty.

It even lacked any other way out, which meant it was the last room, her final reward for a dungeon cleared, an adventure had, a life lived how she wanted to live it!

“Gods damn it all! I come all this way, leave everything behind and all I get it this? A dusty. Empty. Good for nothing, pre-plundered vault that doesn’t even have the decency to have a door—let alone a lock to pick or final guardian to slay! Not that I could slay it since I was hoping for a weapon drop early on that would carry me until I found a decent upgrade!”

“Grrrrrrrrrahh!” The dungeon echoed back her own impotent shouts of rage. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair at all!” Fio ripped off her backpack and hurled it at the back wall with as much force as she could. “Stupid dungeon! Stupid dreams! I wanted to be a real adventurer! I wanted to be great and now look at me! I hate this!”

She screamed until her throat hurt, but when the echos stopped, Fio heard the faint sound of stone grinding against stone. “Uh...huh...um...in the stories...grinding stone noise...is never a good thing…” She looked over at her pack, crumpled against the wall and swallowed hard as brick after brick pulled back and away, revealing a dark recess. The grinding stopped a moment later when a final section of wall vanished, revealing of all things, a rotten old coffin fit into the dirt and roots behind the carved stone.

“Okay...when I said that stuff about a f-final g-g-guardian...I was kidding! Um...yeah, just j-j-joking!”

“I thought you said you wanted to be a real adventurer?”

Fio froze. The voice, deep and masculine, sounded like it was coming from the coffin. “I...uh..I’m not equipped for an encounter with the undead, so...uh, sorry to disturb you. I-I’ll just run away quietly now and you can go back to sleep or whatever!”

“Oh hohohohoh! It’s been too long! I feel like stretching my ectoplasm.” The coffin began to open slowly, creaking and groaning in the most cliche and terrifying manner possible. “And you, young man, are going to stay a while and listen to what I have to say.”

“Lady.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m a girl.”

“Oh.” The voice paused, as if considering this. “Well, whatever. It works all the same to me. Now let’s you and I discuss your very near future. Hehehehe…”

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