Compendium:An adventurer

An adventurer? Me? I can't say I've ever considered myself that... more a... seeker. Seeker of madnesses, dreams, shinies, gleamings, skies, ferns...

Adventurers, on the other hand, they kill stuff. They crawl dungeons. They spend big and party loud and they go in groups... there are no groups for what I do. There isn't even a market for it, at least not out of the cities, and I can't say I'm fond of the things. Too many people, too few with a care in the verse for what gleams in the dark or grows in the light or flutters by on a streamer of wind, or for much of anything at all. After all, who wants a detailed topographical map of a random set of mountains? Or a collection of plant clippings and moss samples, or a study on the habitations, efficiencies, progressions, interactions and effects of a set of vampiric mushrooms on a particular ecosystem?

The 'adventuring' is only a financial endeavor. I need to fund my orchid hunts and skyseekings somehow, since I can't exactly write grants for my own brand of the science of madness. Not without knowing people, at any rate, and knowing the right ones can be difficult indeed. So instead, every now and then, I look down from the vivid bloodied blue and teal sky that gleams in the last few rays of the reddening sun, away from the fires of the volcano below and I step back from the volcano's edge...

I head for whatever bounty seems nearest. Kill a monster, bring back proof. There is little joy in it, and less adventure. It is a job and nothing more, exacted with the same precision as I would dig up a fern, though perhaps a little more care. Perhaps a little less, as unlike the fern, the monster need not survive.

End result is the same, though. Village hails me as a hero and pays me... but they do not look up.

They never look up.

Pity the sky holds no interest for them.