With a weary sigh, Iuri trudges up to the fireside again.

"Someday I'll be done recounting all of the misadventures I bore witness to in the Bone Garden, but that day is not today. Today, I will tell you about the time I went to the Bone Garden with a child. Yes, a kid. Who, for whatever reason, decided to take up adventuring and risk grisly death against monsters. And, worse, the child kept asking to be hugged."

Iuri shudders. Few things are as objectionable to him as an unsolicited hug. He even used magic to avoid the physical contact.

"We eventually got the kid to understand that hugging people you don't know is wrong, but we couldn't get him to leave entirely despite the danger, so we decided to stick to mapping on this particular day. I happen to be a pretty deft hand with Cartographer's Tools, so I was handling it for the group.

"We entered a portion of caves that were guarded beneficially by a giant plant that was quickly named Seymour. If you know the reference, you can imagine how it looked. It wasn't capable of speech, but it was willing to eat zombies. Though... Come to think of it... Is that how corpse flowers are formed...?

"Huh. Well, anyway, we're working on mapping the area, and I guess the worms that lived in the ground there became agitated, and somehow, despite the fact I am fully covered with fassa on almost every inch of my body, a worm..."

Iuri stops, his teeth gritted. To this day, it does not make any sense how anything is able to encroach upon his body given how incredibly covered he is. Aside from his head and usually his fingertips, there isn't a sliver of skin that isn't covered. He's essentially wearing a magical wetsuit that resists wear and tear. But illogical things are going to illogic, eh?

"A worm ended up inside my arm."

There is very clearly an expression of dark revulsion on Iuri's face as he stares at a spot on the middle of the floor, still furious all these months later, lip curled in a sneer.

"I'd seen what those things did to Crakador on an earlier excursion. I was not letting that happen to me."

He swallows.

"So I cut the thing out."

He doesn't supply more detail than that. He doesn't really have to; it's awful enough on the surface of things, and details would only make it worse. Except for one particular detail:

"I did drink a flask of holy water, which at least seemed to kill the thing. I guess it's a good lesson in keeping a bottle of the stuff on hand; you never know when you might need to kill an unholy parasite."

With a sigh, Iuri raises his head once more.

"And I made a decent map in the end."

Tale concluded, he strides away.