Sebarius puts down the mug after his theatratical pause, always monitoring the two robed women carefully, well aware that he was teethering on the brink of loosing their attention.

"I am not going to bore you with the trivialities of my training. Suffice it to say, that I quickly learned, that my teacher did not help me out of goodwill or compassion for my situation at the academic society. Not by a long shot, actually. But to understand his motivations for helping me, I need to go on a tangent which I hope you'll bear with."

"Go ahead then, I like a good sob story just as much as the next girl."

"What makes you think it's a sob story?"

"It's always a sob story with these kind of people. Like a lost partner for whose demise they feel responsible and for which they are now trying to make amends."

Sebarius raises an eyebrow and cannot help but wonder, just how much these green eyes had already seen.

You are correct, though I shouldn't be surprised by that, considering your profession.

After all, you require a keen eye for detail and the motivations of people, don't you?

Either way, during one of our exercises, after I messed up his challenge for the fifth time, he had a bit of a fit of frustrated rage.

He yelled at me, "How do you ever expect to make it like that on your own, Robert?!"

Now, I've been called a number of things by him already, like 'dipshit', 'idiot', 'loser', but 'Robert' did not register as 'motivational insult to do better', so I picked myself up from the dirt and got into his face.

"Who is Robert?"

At first he was flabbergasted, but quickly realized his slip and groaned.

"You're not going to forget that name and just try again, are you?"

"No. You yourself have taught me, that I need to understand the motivation of the people I am working with, so I won't be caught with my pants down when push comes to shove. So...who am I replacing? Who is Robert?"

With a big sigh, he lead me back to his home, into the study he had told me I needed to stay out at the very beginning.

There he pulled out a picture of a small adventurer party who was camped out with big smiles for the camera in front of some ancient ruins.

He pointed to a boy standing next to him and replied, "That's Robert...my older brother. He was an adventurer just like me. But he did not work for the academic society, who is trying to understand what happened to the people who came before us. No, he was more interested in the things they left behind...particularly the shiny ones, if you get my drift."

I nodded and said, "A treasure hunter."

"Exactly. And you know what that means, don't you? He was always on the lookout for new and entirely unexplored ruins, because once the academic society waltzed in, there was nary anything of value left to sell to collectors. Same goes for competing crews, of which there are more than you would think."

I nodded and remembered a few of the expeditions I had been a part of...more often than not, the ruins were  already stripped clean of just about all portable items one should have expected, the dust not even having properly settled where they had been.

I also remember what I had called those who would pilfer our cultural heritage for a pretty penny...'petty thieves'.

And it was at that point, when I realized, what my mentor had meant, when he had said, that the skillset required by adventurers and thieves was the same...he would know. His own brother was one.

"So...what happened to him?" I then asked, pretending to not notice the tears in the eyes of my mentor.

"...this picture...was taken on the day of his death, actually. I don't know what happened exactly, but him and his crew had found this new, almost untouched precursor ruin that was just aching to be...explored. Supposedly he went in all by himself and never came back. According to the testimony of the man who broke us the news, the whole place came down in the middle of the night, with Robert nowhere to be found. The suspected, that he triggered a trap of some sort. I mean okay, that's part of the business and can happen to anyone...mess up and death is the price you pay, we all know that. But I couldn't believe it...Robert had been training me much like I'm training you now. He was the cautious type and didn't leave anything to chance. 200 raids with his crew and not a single casualty...okay, not all of them were successful and he even aborted a few because the going got too dangerous, but that's what made him a great leader...he knew when to quit. And just like that, he was supposed to be dead? Killed in a ruin he went in all himself? By a trap he 'overlooked'? No, not Robert. Not my brother."

I kept talking with him a little longer, about how nobody is without fail, but he remained adamant about it. Robert wouldn't have fallen prey to a run-of-the-mill trap. No, something else must have happened to him...which is why he himself became an adventurer after the death of their parents. He teamed up with the academic society, because he knew that they were his best chance to get into that ruin that supposedly took his brothers life.

"So, did he ever find it? The place where his brother died?" Aiko asks and Sebarius believed to have seen something moving beneath her hood, but quickly dismisses it.

This is, after all, not the time to jump at shadows.

Instead he shakes his head and replies, "I don't know, actually. I didn't want to stress the issue any further and he didn't say anything else either...I just figured if he wanted to talk about it, he'd tell me."

"Wait, you mean you just let it go?! When it only got interesting?!" Aiko exclaims, rising to her feet.

"Calm down already, Aiko. It was not his place and that's not the story he wanted to tell us. Just a little tangent...am I right, Mister Sebarius?"

I nod and reply, "Very right, Ms. Crystal. But it helped me understand the fervor he was trying to carve the word 'caution' into my mind with...it also reinforced my understanding, just how dangerous my ordeal might prove to become. Because ruins and their traps are static and unchanging...they are predictable. People, on the other hand, are ever changing. That makes them much more unpredictable."

"...you think someone 'helped' Robert to an early grave, don't you?"

"My mentor seemed to think it. At least the 'murder board' in his study suggested he did...but there were too many question marks at the time. I was but a mere distraction to his efforts...and quite possibly a desperate effort to keep him from spiralling down towards self-destruction himself."