Sebarius takes another careful from his mug, carefully gauging the feeling of drowsiness settling in his mind and decides, that he really shouldn't have any more, unless he wants to make a complete fool of himself in front of these two, who show absolutely no signs of even just being tipsy.

While Crystal's fixates him with great clarity in her eyes, Aiko looks far more uneasy, but still wide awake.

Sebarius breaks the eye contact, clears his throat briefly and explains, "Now, the first encounter, right?"

It was somewhere around late November last year.

The autumn gales had already lost their warm touch from the late summer sun and instead now carried the scent of approaching winter.

Farmers left and right were busy making sure that their stock and their harvest were safe and secured in the silos and life itself began to withdraw into the earth—

"Quit it with the poetry and cut to the chase already."

"Alright, alright, I get it. Jeez, I'm paying you for your time, so at least let me set up a setting!"

"I don't care about your setting, nor do I care about your 'epic' story."

"So what do you care about then?"

"Your money and if you insist on wasting our time any further, you will be leaving this place completely broke with little more on you than those rags you call clothes. Am I understood?"

"...yes, ma'am," Sebarius caved, making a mental note, that Crystal's patience was still running thin.

So, stormy November night, full moon and all that.

I had staked out the ruins for a good week already and was just about ready to give up, when one of the guards I had hired for the night hours woke me to tell me that the seal on the ruins had been broken.

When I asked them who it was, they admitted that they didn't see anyone, when they showed up from taking a leak, the seal was already broken.

Naturally I was wide awake by the minute, throwing over my clothes and my gear.

By the half hour I stood in front of the now wide open ruins gaping maw, which lead down into an uncertain darkness.

Oh and in case you are wondering, I did neither explore nor take anything from the ruins beforehand.

I didn't want to risk scaring off my prey by tampering with the ruins.

"So your plan was to wait until the fox came back out and capture him then? What if there were other exits?"

"Of course I considered that, which is why, in the week before, I carefully checked the vicinity for any sort of hint of 'an additional exit'. Of course you never know with these kinds of ruins, but seemingly this hole in the rock was the only accessible entrance and, as such, also the only available exit. But no, that was not my plan."

So yes, I gathered my muscles for hire, which are far cheaper than seasoned adventurers, left two at the entrance and took the other two into the ruins with me.

"You tried to catch the Zeaphyr fox with just 5 people? The famous thief who managed to evade capture by trained guards and law enforcements for years? Pretty cocky, don't you think?"

"Yeah well, despite not looking like it, my budget was pretty limited at the time."

"And what about the traps within that ruin? No offense, but – how many traps did you disarm yourself before that? Cause you see, 'hired muscle' may be good for heavy lifting and simple tasks, but sophisticated tasks like disarming traps does usually end well with them."

"I've studied enough ruins to know a thing or two about the traps used at the time."

"So you were the 'seasoned adventurer' at the site? Well, considering that you're now only sitting in a wheelchair, I guess you got off lucky."

"I'll have you know that I did not lose anything or anyone to a trap in these ruins!" Sebarius exclaims, banging his fist onto the table, coaxing a faint smile from Crystal's hooded face.

'Damn it. She totally set me up to lose my temper and I fell for it…' he thought, making a mental note to definitely not have any more alcohol this evening.

Speaking of traps though, there was something peculiar I noticed almost straight away.

The traps were still armed and untouched, meaning that whoever was inside these ruins did neither trigger nor disarm them.

Which only left the option of 'evading' them, which is, mildly speaking, by far the most difficult course of action, unless you knew exactly what you are doing.

So, when we came to one of those classical 'corridors of doom', you know the kind of 'step on the wrong tile and you'll get skewered' kind of pathway, I used a trick I learned from my mentor.

See, most of these are triggered by the weight of a person on the springtrap tiles.

So we threw a pig, already dead of course, onto the course and watched the trap do its work.

It was a bit of a gambit, because some builders were so paranoid, that once the trap is triggered, the pathway becomes inaccessible for good, but those are fortunately rare and far inbetween.

Usually they are content with just killing the intruder.

Sebarius takes another sip, starting to wonder, when this stupid mug would finally be empty, while Crystal asks with a smirk, "So you sprung the trap with a poor old pig, huh? And probably warned any treasure hunter for kilometers to come that you were in there while you were at it. So much for the element of surprise."

"I didn't have much hopes to surprise the Zeaphyr Fox to begin with, so yes, I'd rather err on the side of caution than taking my chances in trying to bypass or disarm the trap."

"Good choice. Things like that can well end very ugly. Though next time I suggest using a live pig."

"You…what?!"

"You heard me. These buggers can run really fast and can trigger the entire trap in one go if they're lucky. And if they are not…well, depending on the kind of trap you're facing, you'll get a free pig roast for dinner."

"You–! You are evil!"

"No," Crystal replies, taking another sip from her own glass, "Just pragmatic."

Sebarius shakes his head to clear it up again from the haziness trying to get a hold of him and continues, "So, we keep venturing deeper into those ruins…honestly, I really don't know how people ever did these things with torches instead of portable electrical lights."

"Focus, please. Or did you have too much already, lightweight?"

"I—I am fine, thank you very much."

After bypassing the standard repertoire of safeguards of the time, we finally arrived at the grand chamber, the heart of the ruins, where I first saw the three of them and the sight was breathtaking.

Two women, one swinging along the ceiling from one hold to the next like I had only ever seen it in the circus, while the second woman was shouting up instructions she read from a stone slab in her hands, while a fox was agile dodging the attacks of what I can only describe as a giant stone guardian somehow come to live trying to smash it.

Upon setting sight on the gargantuous creature, my companions immediately made a run for it, but I stayed and watched in awe, as the woman on the ceiling performed a somersault in mid air, landing on the back of the giant, pulling out something I could not make out, but she used it to remove part of its stone armor and then..."

"Then? Then what?" Aiko asks, now seemigly mildly amused by the story, while worry briefly flashed on Crystal's face.

Briefly, but not briefly enough to escape Sebarius' attention.

"Ah yes, we've been calling the Zeaphyr Fox a 'him' the entire time, haven't we? How silly of me, I should've told you from the get go that the great thief was in fact a young woman. But don't go telling people now, after all we don't want to break their preconceptions, do we?" Sebarius says with a wink.

Crystal gulps for a second and then asks, "So, what happened next?"

The giant just shut down.

Just fell over and stopped moving as if there never had been any life within it to begin with.

Unfortunately for me, the woman on the ceiling, whom I assume to be the Zeaphyr Fox had long since spotted me, grabbed the artifact on the pedestal in the room and pulled another lever in one fluid motion, which made the door I was still standing in rumble dangerously.

I just managed to jump back before the thing slammed shut in front of my face.

By the time I had figured out to get it open again from my side, they were long gone.

How they managed to get out of that supposedly sealed room, I don't know to this day.

"Sounds like you've got your ass handed to you on a platter, huh?"

"Yes, that is a rather apt way to describe it. But this encounter only increased my fervour to find her again. So my chase continued and still continues to this day."