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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 161, The Empty Dungeon
🕑 Added 2023-01-02 23:25:49 +0000 UTC~~~~
Tilde felt like she was finally fitting in, though she was well aware that she’d made a pretty horrible first impression, and not that great of a second impression. She’d said that they needed her and asked for a larger share, then came crawling back to them some weeks later, since it turned out that while they did need her, she needed them more. Finding a party wasn’t all that difficult, but finding a good party, and one at the right elevation, had proven to be much more of a challenge than she’d thought it would be — much more of a challenge than, by rights, it should have been.
Still, when their dungeon was a bust, she kept her mouth shut. She didn’t fully understand the relationship between the two parties, nor the depth of history they seemed to have with each other, which included two people that Tilde had never met: Lola and Kell. She was, in effect, taking their spot. So when the party spoke, she kept quiet, only listening.
“We got nothing,” said Mardin. “It was almost impressive.”
“By far the worst dungeon we’ve ever done,” nodded Grig. “In fact, the worst dungeon that I think I’ve ever even heard of.”
“They sucked the dungeon dry,” said Josen. He was tall, balding, and imperious in the self-important way that some boys his age could be. They were all eighteen years old, two years younger than Tilde, who had spent the last two years going into dungeons. They’d kept up a healthy pace, almost as many dungeons as she’d been a part of with her old party, which made them roughly matched on elevation, but there was an undercurrent of immaturity that was unmistakable.
“That’s an interesting hypothesis,” said Pinion. “We won’t know until they come out, and possibly won’t know even when they come out. Do you suppose that this has happened before? Selden dungeons for those who go in after the Settlers?”
“Er, that’s not the proper use of the term,” said Grig. “A selden dungeon is more … all monsters, no loot. This was no monsters, no loot.”
“One newt,” said Mardin.
“It was a salamander,” said Tilde. She knew her animals.
“And it did attack me,” said Mardin. “So it technically counts as a monster, even if it was easy to stomp.” The stomp had felt needlessly cruel to Tilde, perhaps just because of the anger with which it had been done.
“Does that imply that their party got a dungeon that used up absolutely all of the magic in the dungeon?” asked Marsh.
“That is the leading hypothesis,” said Pinion. “Which unfortunately means that our ability to derive useful information by comparison between the two dungeon runs is compromised. Next time we’ll have you go first.”
“It’s bad news that they used all the magic,” said Marsh. “Is that … is it legal for them to do that? Will they get in trouble?”
“Dungeons are only barely regulated,” said Josen.
“Yeah, and even a normal party takes from the available store of the dungeon,” said Grig. “It’s not insignificant for a party of our size. In theory you want to avoid places that other parties of your elevation have gone, but in practice no one bothers with that. Besides, weak dungeons have weak rewards, it’s a fair trade-off.”
“Er,” said Pinion. “That is, weak dungeons are correlated with weak rewards, since they’re presumed to be governed by the same mechanism. But it’s not always the case.”
“Why do you say presumed?” asked Mardin. “Isn’t it true?”
“It’s presumed to be true,” said Pinion. “We don’t actually know how dungeons are created. It’s possible that the distinct categories of things inside a dungeon have different origins, or are governed by different systems within the systems.”
“Urgh,” said Mardin. “Researchers.”
“It’s an important distinction,” said Josen. He was standing with his arms folded, somewhat away from the others. He considered himself to be better than them, and a more vital member of the team, which irked Tilde to no degree. He was marginally more likable when drunk, because he showed a bit of passion, but that passion was always for wizardry rather than anything she could relate to. The only reason he was friends with the others seemed to be that they had known each other for years, since they were young, and even then, they didn’t seem to like him all that much.
“Alright,” said Mardin after a moment. “I’ll bite. Why is it an important distinction?”
“In wizardry we start from basic systems and build them up in order to perform incredible feats of power and utility,” said Josen. That was just how he talked. “Pinion is attempting to do the opposite, to take the incredible and reduce it down into something that can be understood piece by piece from the structure of entads to the layouts of the dungeons. It’s likely an impossible task, even with all the blessings of Qymmos, but an understanding of the individual components and those that can be broken down further will be paramount to the endeavor.”
“Right,” said Mardin. “Sure.” He just barely refrained from rolling his eyes.
The dungeon had been a disappointment, weaker than even the first dungeon that Tilde had ever been to, which had been picked because it was expected to be weak. There had been three rooms, hardly anything adorning them, and a single ‘monster’, which was the small salamander that had quickly been put out of its misery. They’d found no entads, no ectad materials, no henlings, just those three small rooms that had little except for barren earth.
The Settlers still hadn’t appeared from within the dungeon, and they had gone in first.
“How long do we wait?” asked Tilde.
“We don’t need to wait,” said Mardin. “Personally, I’m going to head off, spend some time reading and praying, take a nap, and get over the disappointment of the dungeon.” He turned to go without even waiting for anyone to respond.
“I’m going too,” said Grig. “They can fill us in later, if they end up coming out.”
“They might not?” asked Pinion.
Grig drew a finger across his throat and made a gurgling noise.
“Ah,” said Pinion. He looked nonplussed, as though the idea hadn’t even occurred to him.
“Well, I’m staying,” said Marsh. “I’d like to be here when they come out, especially if they need some help.”
“I’ll stay too,” said Tilde. “I brought a book.”
“You brought a book to a dungeon?” asked Grig, who hadn’t left when he’d said he was going to leave.
“Dungeons can have a fair amount of waiting to them,” said Tilde. “There’s no reason not to bring a book, so long as you can keep it safe from the elements.”
“Huh,” said Grig. “One of the first rules of dungeons is that they’re never safe. You’re not supposed to be sticking around long enough to read a book.”
Tilde watched him. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to respond to that. Her own experience — which was more than his — was that dungeons were safe enough if you had properly cleared each room and created a fallback point.
“I mean,” said Grig. “It’s just, we were all in Junior League, and there are specific ways of doing things we all learned.”
“I was in the Junior League,” said Tilde. “I just disagree with some of the scripture they preach.”
“Ah,” said Grig. “Well, I guess I’ll get going, let me know how they did, if and when they come out.”
He scuttled off, and Tilde watched him go. Josen had left without so much as saying goodbye, and that meant that it was just her, Pinion, and Marsh. Pinion pulled out his own book, a slender volume on bardic magic, while Marsh seemed content to simply stare at the dungeon entrance.
The book Tilde had been reading was about warfare, an imagined battle between Inter and Kiromo using publicly known information about the military dispositions of the two nations. There was a good deal of speculation in it, and some of the speculative elements she simply didn’t agree with, but more noxious were the elements of fiction that the author had woven in. The characters had all the weight and heft of a cotton ball, and there were no less than three romance subplots that added nothing to the work, especially because they could be seen coming a mile off. There was also the stench of propaganda about the work, which leant heavily in favor of Inter, though Tilde had to imagine that was more because of the leanings of the author rather than any actual effort or pressure on behalf of the actual government.
She was skimming through another romance scene when she paused for a moment to look up at Marsh. It had been ten or fifteen minutes and he was still just staring at the dungeon entrance.
“Are you okay?” she asked him.
“Oh, fine,” said Marsh. “Just worried about them.”
“About her?” asked Tilde.
“No, all of them,” said Marsh. “They’re friends. Some more than others, but they are friends. Even Alfric has come back around on me. I think. I spend more time with them than the others in our party, so that makes sense.”
“Sorry,” said Pinion. “Come back around?”
“Er,” said Marsh. “You don’t know the backstory?”
“Not really, no,” said Pinion. “I have a full history of dungeons done by the party, thanks to Alfric, but I wasn’t aware that there was any … unpleasantness.”
It took Marsh some time to recount everything. Tilde had heard it all before, and zoned out just a bit, though didn’t return to the book. Marsh wasn’t a particularly gifted storyteller, but to his credit, he didn’t attempt too much in the way of defending himself or the others. They were the villains of the piece, and he cast them as such. He seemed happy to have gotten some kind of resolution in the end, with Lola cast out, even if it wasn’t by their own hand. He’d been stabbed, apparently.
Tilde’s previous party had their own drama, and she found herself thinking about that again, which had become a bit of a pastime now that they’d all gone their separate ways.
Discussions of party makeup often resulted in discussions of both gender and attraction. It was widely considered best if there was no romance within a party, and sometimes people tried to force that by having everyone be of the same gender — which had one large, obvious flaw (Garos), and one slightly smaller and less obvious flaw (jealousy and competition for partners). Either way, it was widely regarded that if you weren’t going to do that, it was better that the genders be at least roughly balanced. One girl with four guys, or vice versa, was a recipe for failure, the largest disadvantage you could give yourself.
That was how Tilde had ended up with her party. They’d wanted another girl.
Emi was the party’s cleric. She was an intellectual, always reading, whip-smart, and eminently likable. But where Tilde was tall, lanky, and got consistently described in cliches like ‘beanpole’, Emi was slender and well-proportioned, and her height never seemed to be an issue, was not, in fact, something that Emi or others ever gave any thought to. All three of the boys adored her in their own way, and all three had ended up sleeping with her.
It had hurt to not be considered, to not even be in the running. She understood that every part eventually developed their own petty dramas, and that these were often romantic in nature, but it still stung fiercely, and she ended up having to deal with her party members, console them when things felt like they were blowing up, play peacemaker and ‘group mom’ with them. There had been a time when she’d felt like she and Diedretch were on the outside, watching a love triangle, commiserating and possibly having their own flirtation … and then Diedretch had found comfort in Emi’s arms, same as the others.
All that was gone now. They’d ended on amicable terms, all of them, but there had been times when it was a complete emotional slog, a knock-down drag-out fight. They had talked about reunions or letters, but in the end, Tilde had taken her share of the money and split, and she was doing her best to look forward, not back.
So far, no one in the new party had made a pass at her. She didn’t imagine that they would. She was attractive in an unconventional way, which was a nice way of saying that most people weren’t attracted to her. Her face was more or less normal, but she was a lanky giant, and not in the way that clerics of Xuphin were giants. Her proportions were all wrong, stretched out, much more in her torso than her legs, and while she wasn’t self-conscious about it, she was very conscious of how others saw her.
“What are you reading?” asked Pinion.
“Oh,” said Tilde. She looked down. It had been at least five minutes since she’d read a word. “Just … a book on speculative warfare.” She paused. “It’s a little too concerned with its characters and narrative, a little too blase about creating a plausible world.”
“Interesting,” said Pinion. “But of course, in a real war between nations, there would be all kinds of things that only a dozen people even know about.” He looked up slightly. “Entads pulled from the vaults, monsters pulled from the dungeons, exotic ectad contraptions and wizardly warfare, things like that.”
“Pyros would get called up,” said Marsh, absently. “Though I don’t think we’d have much to do.”
“No, most of it would get handled by national instruments,” said Tilde.
“Why are you reading it, if I can ask?” asked Pinion.
“Oh,” said Tilde. “I don’t know. It’s of a genre that I normally like. Incredibly high stakes, the fate of the world, that sort of thing. Grounded though.” She looked down at the page she was on, where the buxom spy was seducing the handsome ectad engineer who knew state secrets. Of course she would fall in love with him, that was just how these things went. “More grounded, anyway.”
“Sorry if that’s a bad question,” said Pinion. “I always hated questions about what I was reading and why, though it’s such a natural thing to ask.”
“And you’re reading … something about dungeons?” asked Tilde.
“Well,” said Pinion, looking down. “It started off as being about dungeons, but the author used dungeons as a segue into other matters, now —”
He was interrupted by the sound of splintering wood. The tunnel that led into the dungeon was momentarily filled with wood, crashing and breaking as hundreds of wooden hands just barely pushed it through, and Tilde leapt to her feet, sword at the ready, instinct for combat pumping through her veins. The ship came to a stop though, and people slowly stood up from the deck of it, looking a bit puzzled that they had emerged from the dungeon. She missed the exchange of words, as her heart was still thumping in her ears, but she was able to slowly relax. Her mind had gone to dungeon escapes, which was natural, but apparently it was only a dramatic exit.
“There’s some damage,” said Alfric when he’d hopped down. “But it seems like it’s repairing itself. Pretty soon it’ll be ship-shape.”
He was right. The ship’s many arms were formed from the wood, and apparently could generate more wood from nothing. Curiously, the ship didn’t simply regenerate. Instead, the hands would create splinters, which they would then carefully slot into place, as though they were artisans putting together a delicate puzzle.
“Nice,” said Alfric, patting the ship. “This is a good get.”
“It’s really not,” said Verity. She seemed more hesitant to jump down from the ship, but it extended arms interlocking them to form steps for her. She smiled at the ship, and gave it a pat too once she was on the ground. “That is to say, we don’t have a use for it.”
“It would be good to get impressions now,” said Pinion. “Individually, ideally, so that there’s as little pollution as possible.”
“I can go first,” said Alfric. “Unless you want someone else?”
“I was hoping to speak with Verity, actually,” said Pinion. He looked at the ship. “Does it just … walk where you want it to go?”
“We don’t know yet,” said Alfric with a smile. “We’ll do our best to figure it out.”
“I think I’m going to go out, if we’re done for the day,” said Isra. “There’s still enough time for me to do a bit of scouting and hunting.” She turned to Mizuki. “Anything that you want to make for dinner?”
“Pig,” said Mizuki without hesitation. “Which I guess means boar. It’s been a bit since I’ve cooked for both parties, it’s temple day tomorrow … oh, and get something starchy, potatoes or something like that, and lots of vegetables.”
“I can try,” said Isra with a nod. She looked over at Pinion. “I’ll give my recounting later.”
“Looking forward to it,” said Pinion with a smile.
He went off with Verity, while Alfric and Mizuki looked at the ship together, particularly the wooden arms that sprouted in a thicket from the bottom like a forest of limbs. They apparently did not have time to do this in the dungeon. The arms weren’t still, and moved around casually, very lifelike, just in the same way that a person wouldn’t sit perfectly still.
“Anything I can do to help?” asked Tilde.
Alfric turned to look at her. “Your party came out early? We were in there less time than we’d planned, and you went in after us.”
“Our dungeon had almost nothing in it,” said Tilde. “Our running theory is that you somehow sucked the dungeon dry. If that bird boy was around, I’d suggest that he go in on his own to get another data point for Pinion.”
“That’s a really good idea,” said Alfric. “When you say nothing, what do you mean?”
Mizuki had made herself scarce, disappearing without fanfare, which had been accomplished through the use of a jade staff, one that seemed like a new addition. Hannah and Marsh had also gone off together, which meant that Tilde was alone with Alfric.
She hadn’t thought much of Alfric when she’d first met him. He didn’t leave much of an impression, and from everything she’d been told by his former party, she had expected him to be … less. He had been an overachiever in the Junior League, with rich and famous parents, and then had lost his carefully crafted party at the last moment and spent nearly a year floundering around. There was some suggestion that his ex-girlfriend had been responsible for his woes, and from everything Tilde had heard, she’d been awful, but it might have set Tilde up with the wrong ideas.
Last night, at the party, Mizuki had sat next to Tilde. She’d been an absolute terror while they were trying to play games, but at least she was a terror in a fun way. She had also taken it upon herself to be Tilde’s guide, not just to the games — which Mizuki only vaguely understood, though that might have been a bit — but to the table as a whole, to the house, and to the party. Mizuki was pretending that they were fast friends, and that was almost like being fast friends, though Mizuki had done almost all the talking.
Tilde had initially thought that this was flirtation, especially from the way that Mizuki would readily rest her fingers on Tilde’s arm or back. At a certain point though, just when Tilde had felt herself opening up to the idea, Mizuki had shifted to talking up Alfric.
“There is absolutely no way that anyone else wins this game,” said a slightly drunk Mizuki. “Alfric comes in with a plan, see, he started the game with a plan, cooked it up three nights ago and has been workin’ the variables ever since. Even the people at this table, their positioning, it’s all part of what he put to paper, or if it’s not what he decided was going to happen? Then it’s accounted for anyway. Flowcharts. He’s got them.”
“That sounds a bit extreme,” said Tilde, which felt diplomatic. Alfric was in the midst of explaining some aspect of the game to someone, but he could almost certainly hear everything that was being said.
“Oh, no, it makes him sound like he’s awful,” said Mizuki. “I mean, plans, right? Who needs them. But he’s very kind, always ready to help out, to put in the work, and honestly? It’s made me want to put in the work too, because I can’t stand seeing him take charge and then not pull my own weight. He’s very generous though. He’d give you the shirt off his back.” She turned to Alfric. “Alfric, give Tilde your shirt.”
“I’m not going to do that,” said Alfric, barely pausing in his conversation with Josen. A faint smile crossed his lips.
“He’s also very modest,” Mizuki continued, directing her attention back to Tilde. “He probably didn’t want you to see all his muscles.” She gestured to her own body, as though Tilde didn’t know where muscles were. “But he got his heart broken by Lola, just absolutely shattered, she was his only girlfriend and I get that he doesn’t want to risk that again.”
Tilde had thought that might be the end of it, but Mizuki continued on for quite some time.
“He picked up woodworking in a week flat,” she said. “Not even a week, like two days, something like that? There’s nothing that he can’t do. He knows the names of birds and fish, he’s studied fifty different weapons and fighting styles. You talk to him about knots, and he knows all of them.”
“Who doesn’t know knots?” asked Tilde.
“Yeah, right?” asked Mizuki, nodding in agreement. “What kind of absolute loser doesn’t know knots? But I mean my point is, he’s like a machine for self-improvement, like a wizard’s construct, clockwork, but in a good way, one of those that can tell you where each moon is. That’s nice, you know?”
“It does sound nice,” said Tilde.
She had thought about Alfric before going to bed. He wasn’t really what she considered to be her type — she liked men that were more expressive, quicker to joke, unserious types — but she was coming around on him and starting to see the appeal. She wondered whether that had been Mizuki’s intent. Mizuki did seem like a meddler, in a good way, and there seemed to be little other reason to spend an hour of their time drunkenly explaining all the ways that Alfric was great.
This was the mindset that Tilde was in when she was speaking with Alfric.
He was an attentive listener while she explained what their dungeon had been like, which was nice. Tilde wasn’t sure that she’d had someone listen to what she said with such obvious, patient interest.
“Our own was odd,” said Alfric. “No monsters, though there were hostile statues, so large and so dangerous that we had little choice but to run. I actually do think that we could have taken them, but especially with two, it would have been a challenge.”
“A challenge without reward,” said Tilde.
“No, the reward would have been more exploration,” said Alfric. “The place was huge, but the density of entads and ectad materials was actually quite low. I think next time we’re going to see whether Verity can iron out the kinks, naturally, but we’ll also plan for it to be a longer trip.” He rubbed his chin. “There were no creatures in the place, which was a bit of a shame, since I think if we could get them to our specifications, we could make a huge impact on the world.”
“My father was a bastlekeeper,” said Tilde.
“Really?” asked Alfric. “So you grew up around a lot of animals?”
“It was a bit … sad,” said Tilde. “We took in many that weren’t suited to this world, and others that were dungeon mad. Those needed to be dealt with at a remove, because if they knew you were there, they might beat their heads against the wall until they died, just trying to get at you.” She sighed. “I think it was good training for going into the dungeons, especially given how violent they were.”
“Have you ended up taking much from the dungeons?” asked Alfric.
“No,” said Tilde. “It’s something that I wanted to transition toward, but it’s quite difficult without the proper entad support. I think with Marsh on the team, there’s a good chance we can do it, but I haven’t broached the subject with him, and he seems to use his skill as a pyro more than his skill as a warlock.”
“There’s some difficulty involved in locking a living thing in place,” said Alfric. “He’s tried it on me during sparring. I didn’t particularly enjoy it.”
“You sparred together?” asked Tilde.
“We’ve tried it, yes,” said Alfric. “It’s one of the best ways to train, in my opinion. You get someone actively trying to use their skills against you. In Dondrian’s Junior League we would have monster matches, where you each get a rule you need to follow during the match. Sometimes it’s that you have to use a certain weapon, other times it’s that you have to use a certain tactic. The rules aren’t known to either participant, and the matches are often lopsided, which they think helps to prepare people for the process of learning and discovery that goes on in the dungeons.” He looked her up and down. “You’re a frontliner, would you like to spar some time?”
“Together?” asked Tilde. “I … suppose.”
“No pressure,” said Alfric. “I know you’re doing dungeons more regularly than we are. I went into this dungeon feeling like I was out of practice, and I think that bore out. I’d ask some of my party, but Hannah is the only one that comes close to being a physical match for me, and it’s good to be with someone new.”
Tilde felt her heart beating. He had only asked her to train with him, but there was an intimacy to fighting, she knew that well enough. She’d sparred with the members of her old party, and it had always been in those moments when they were drenched in sweat and panting with exertion that she felt attraction most keenly. She felt certain that Alfric didn’t mean it like that, and yet … there was a chance he did. Possibly she wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been primed for it the night before.
“Sorry you didn’t get anything new from the dungeon, by the way,” said Alfric.
“It’s fine,” said Tilde. “There was no hard work involved. If we’d had to go through a few tough battles to come out with nothing, we might have minded. As it was, we only wasted the trip.”
Alfric smiled at her. “Well, we’ll see if we can find a way to make that up to you.”
She felt, again, that heat at her collar. Mizuki had been right about him. He was nice.
“Now to see if we can move the boat,” said Alfric. He turned to Tilde. “Let me know if you have any thoughts?”
She moved to stand beside him and looked at the boat. It felt good to be asked for her input, and while she had never been very good at entads, for him, she was willing to try.
Comments
fbt
I liked this chapter, ty!
fbt
I missed that bit about Pinion's book, ty for pointing it out!
Dyllan Tô
Pinion reading something that used to be about dungeons 😂 And it looks like Mizuki's made competition for herself, what fun
