Steffan let the others speak a little before chipping in.
”And my name is Arbury. I’m a… chronicler, if you will, an explorer of the natural and of the human worlds, although perhaps that sounds a little pretentious. My two main interests, apart from ale, are investigating animals and people, especially people’s wisdom, and peoples that are less known. Both explain why I am here, I suppose. I’d love to find an undiscovered snail, for example, or someone’s belief of how the world works. More though I’d like to not get eaten by tigers, or cooked alive by cannibals, which is one of the reasons I travel with Ockerbie here. My strengths… I suppose are talking – and not always just in the sense of prodigious verbosity. Not been in too many scrapes I couldn’t talk myself out of. Except… well. Yes.”
Except for the ones that ended with either his sticking the bugger through the chest with his rapier, or his being expelled from the Royal Society, which still irked him mightily, he would have said, had he not wanted to keep some things to himself. Amongst the people he usually mixed with, or used to, he could more than handle himself – he’d stepped out more times than most scholars back home – but he was aware that out here he wasn’t exactly a warrior. Come to think of it, he wasn’t much of anything, really. He had a few tricks, but wasn’t sure they were worth much in a hostile jungle.