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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 150, Wild
🕑 Added 2022-11-23 18:02:33 +0000 UTC~~~~
Verity didn’t particularly like the Wildlands. They made her nervous. By contrast, Mizuki seemed to enjoy them enormously, visibly enjoyed them more than even Alfric, and she had a smile on her face the whole trip.
“The trick is to go with the flow,” said Mizuki. “Are we walking to a mountain? To a lake? A little village? Doesn’t matter!”
“It’s a lot more stable with five people,” said Alfric. “Mostly because you have eyes everywhere.”
“More stable with me, I think,” said Isra. “Because I have eyes everywhere.”
“True,” said Alfric.
“We should have done this ages ago,” said Hannah.
“There were things going on,” said Alfric. “It made a lot of sense for us to separate.”
“Still,” said Hannah. She took a deep breath through her nose. “If you can put up with the murderous dragon, perhaps the Wildlands are worth it.”
“I wouldn’t say murderous,” said Alfric.
“Leaves a bad taste in my mouth, that’s all,” said Hannah. “Offends my sense of justice.”
“You pushed for peace though,” said Mizuki.
“Ay,” said Hannah. “Peace is best for everyone all around. I’m only sayin’ that my sense of justice didn’t take kindly to it. When you get older, you’ll understand that you need to quell the part of you that wants people to get bashed in the head for their wrongdoings.”
“If you’re suggesting that I shouldn’t have bashed Lola on the head —” Mizuki started.
“No, no, nothin’ like that,” said Hannah. “But there’s somethin’ to be said for compassion to our enemies, hopes of reform, gentle forgiveness, and all that. It’s of Garos.”
“Symmetry,” nodded Verity. She did like that, and felt no small amount of symmetry with Cate. It was, somehow, easy to imagine herself in the same position, even though she was a long-lived dragon. She could imagine having mistakes lorded over her for the rest of her life, and the deep regret at the actions of a person that she no longer was. She kept that thought to herself though, because she knew that not everyone felt the same way.
This was their last full day in the demiplane. Cate had offered for all of them to stay, except for Alfric.
“You’re a chrononaut,” Cate had told him. “It’s impossible to get away from them, but I won’t let one stay here simply by dint of having crept in.”
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Alfric had frowned.
“No offer was ever extended to you,” she’d said. “The others I thought had their charms, but you … you’re industrious, but you come from a good home. You have the restlessness of someone who was well-fed, the eagerness of someone who’s suffered little. Being a chrononaut alone would have been enough for me to disqualify you, but you aren’t temperamentally suited to being among the people I’ve chosen.”
He hadn’t taken it well, which for Alfric meant a frown and some polite disagreement.
“Immigration and emigration will be done seasonally,” said Cate. “It’s easier for everyone that way, especially as I need to be the one to ferry people. In a month’s time, we’ll have applications sorted out for those who wish to come live with me. If you still wish to stay, there will be people to consider whether or not you’re suited.”
That was a gentler way of saying ‘no’, but it was clear he still felt wounded.
Verity watched him as they walked. There was something mournful in how he looked around, knowing that it was likely the last time he was going to see this place. Of course, in the Wildlands, everything was gone in the blink of an eye, never seen twice, but she could understand what he was feeling.
“You’re alright?” she asked him after moving close to him, far enough away from the others that if they were eavesdropping, it was impolite.
“I’m fine,” said Alfric. “I really thought that it would be a choice.”
“And now it’s not,” said Verity. “You’re kicked out.”
“Yeah,” said Alfric, letting out a long breath. “I don’t want to feel like I’m stuck being a dungeoneer.”
“You could easily be something else,” said Verity. “Anything else, really. But I suppose you’re not used to having limitations placed on you.”
“No,” said Alfric. He raised an eyebrow at her. “That’s not a dig?”
“Oh, no,” said Verity. “I’m just saying … you’re the great Alfric Overguard, man with infinite resources and a can-do attitude, capable of doing whatever it is he wants. Having a mountain that you’re simply not allowed to climb is new.”
“It does have that going for it,” said Alfric, laughing a little bit. “I think you underestimate how long I was out in the cold, looking for a good dungeoneering party and failing. It feels like that.”
“Will you apply in three months?” asked Verity.
“No,” said Alfric. “Or … probably not. It depends on how things are going with the party, whether we’re going strong or falling apart. It depends on how many people apply, whether they can scrape together a proper government, whether it all falls apart and ends with a sword falling down on someone’s neck.”
“Seems unlikely, at this point,” said Verity.
“Yes,” said Alfric. “Thankfully. As much as I agree with Hannah’s ‘sense of justice’, I’m glad that no one is going to have to be killed over this. And we’ll see how the long-term experiment goes. I know Cate is still pushing for as minimal of an internal government as possible, partly for her own sake, but … it’s not going to involve us.”
“No,” said Verity.
Cate had asked Verity to say, and Verity had said no. It seemed very possible that Verity could have made a good life for herself in the demiplane, but she’d thought that she could make a good life for herself in Pucklechurch too, or anywhere else in the world that wasn’t Dondrian — though she had more confidence now that she’d have been able to forge a path there as well, so long as it was her own.
The weather was nice, though Verity was on-edge, thinking that at any moment she might accidentally summon up a monster they’d have to run away from. The world warped around them as they went, always when they weren’t looking, and Isra kept her senses confined so that she wouldn’t have such a stabilizing effect on their surroundings. Mostly it was boreal forest, and while the species changes and the scenery differed, it didn’t differ all that much. From time to time they would all close their eyes at once, which helped to induce changes in what was on the horizon.
They’d been walking for a good thirty minutes when Mizuki picked up a stick and gave Verity a poke.
“Do something!” said Mizuki.
“I’m trying,” said Verity, which was only partly true. “If you poke me with that stick again, I’m going to make you regret it.”
“The border has an anchoring effect,” said Alfric. “There are self-consistency principles in play. We might need to go further, but we don’t have anything that can move us as a group.”
“So, explain this to me like I’ve been zoning out every other time you talked to me about it,” said Mizuki. “And also like you don’t expect me to remember what you’ve said beyond this conversation, because realistically I’m never coming back here.”
“The easier explanation just uses some simple math,” said Alfric.
“I’m out,” said Mizuki. She gave me a smile.
“Alright,” said Alfric. “You’re reading a book. You’re sitting there trying to predict the next word. That’s pretty easy, right? If you’re in the middle of a sentence, sometimes it’s —”
“Obvious,” said Hannah.
“Yes,” smiled Alfric. He’d paused just long enough to let someone fill in the word. “But predicting the word after the next word is harder, and predicting a word on the next page is harder than that, and if you just read the first page of the book, you won’t be able to make many predictions at all about what the last page is going to look like.”
“That’s not really been my experience,” said Verity. “Endings are easy to predict.”
“It’s maybe a bad analogy,” said Alfric. “But the center of the demiplane gives some definition to its surroundings, and the further into the Wildlands you go, the less that definition matters to what you see.”
“Verity is right, it’s usually pretty easy to predict an ending,” said Mizuki.
“I’m trying to break down something I don’t really understand into a concept that’s easier to digest,” said Alfric. “I was going to write up my adventures in the Wildlands.” He shrugged. “Maybe it needs work.”
“No, I think it makes more sense than whatever you were saying before,” said Mizuki. “And then the people who are in the Wildlands, they’re like … people holding a page of the book, say page 146. And if they go forward, they can get to page 147, but that means giving up page 146, and if they go back to 146, it’s different, because it’s just a made up 146 that was invented on the fly from whatever was on 147.”
“I didn’t find that any easier to follow,” said Isra. “Mizuki’s addition somehow made it more confusing.”
“She gets it though,” said Alfric. “Though this is the fourth time I’ve explained it to her.”
“And a book is linear, ay?” asked Hannah. “This is different.”
“Linear is easier to understand,” said Alfric. “I think the best analogy takes the simplest version of the concept. I don’t necessarily think that books are the best, but at least there’s something there to latch onto.”
“So,” said Mizuki, raising her stick and pointing it at Verity. “You think that this is going to be like the dungeons?”
“The dungeons were possibly built on the bones of the Wildlands,” said Verity. “Cate thinks so, anyway. We’ve all noticed the similarities, and the simplest explanation is that the Editors were taking something that already existed and just making their own version of it, more like writing a variation on someone else’s work than composing a concert completely from scratch. But …”
“But there are a lot of questions about that,” said Alfric. “Questions that I don’t think we’re ever going to answer unless we could get a candid discussion with the Editors. The mechanism is obviously different, there’s no dragon involved —”
“That we know of,” said Mizuki.
“— and the most significant difference is that the generation here is continuous, dependent on who’s looking where,” Alfric finished. “With dungeons, the whole dungeon is ‘created’ at once from the moment the first member of a party steps in.”
“That’s one of the things I didn’t understand about what was happening in the dungeons,” said Verity. “The strange things — dangerous things — seemed to be there whether I was first or last.”
“It’s a clue as to the nature of it,” said Alfric. “Though when in a party, there’s some melding of personhood, which — I mean, you know, you’re a bard.”
Verity nodded. The ‘blending of personhood’ was often remarked upon by bards, as it was one of the things that helped them to be more powerful when singing songs for those in their party. Alfric was almost always the first one into the dungeons. If Verity was affecting the generation, it wasn’t happening when she stepped in, it was when Alfric did, through the mechanism of the party. This had a frightening implication, which was that if Verity was ever stupid enough to go into a dungeon on her own, the problems would be five times worse.
“Please,” said Mizuki, throwing back her head. “You said you’d felt something when we were at Cate’s death mountain, I just want to see what you can do, even if it’s dangerous. Especially if it’s dangerous.”
“Alright,” said Verity. “Everyone close your eyes please, shut off your senses, and give me a blank canvas?”
“You’re mixing metaphors,” said Mizuki. “It would be, uh, squinting so that we can only see a single line of the page of the book we’re on?” Her eyes were closed tight.
“Shh,” said Alfric.
“Don’t shush me,” said Mizuki. She leaned over and poked him in the ribs, and they rough housed for a bit, eyes closed, until Isra told them that it wasn’t the time.
They were along a river, which was flowing gently by them, short grass dotted with small blue flowers and so many insects moving away when they walked that it was like puffs of chitinous confetti by their feet. From what she knew, Verity didn’t expect to be able to change their immediate surroundings, not things that would change the acoustics, but she turned her attention to the distance, where closing her eyes for a second was enough to make mountains appear and disappear. It would have been better to do it in a place with a view, somewhere that would make any changes more immediately obvious, but perhaps a sheltered area was better. They hadn’t exactly chosen this spot, it was just the place where Mizuki had gotten bored.
Verity had felt something. It might have been because she was so worried about the Wildlands, so in tune with her own anxiety and fear about accidentally calling something forward. She was trying to tap into that, to see what it was, and if possible, she was going to change it.
Bards had extra senses, honed over long periods of time. A bard pulled on what was there, and had some sense of what was there, though only vaguely, even for a master. There were threads to pull on, hard to feel unless they were the sole focus of a performance, threads of the senses like flavor and vision, Mizuki’s ability to see magic, Alfric’s swiftness, Hannah’s strength. Those were notes that could be woven into a song, increased or diminished, warped by the music.
Verity could feel the Wildlands, not a note to be plucked, but a vastness that was, itself, plucking.
“Most of the song …” she began, feeling it out as though she was saying a lyric whose ending she didn’t know. “Most of the song is about the completion of what’s come before, dominant moods and —” She stopped abruptly, because she’d felt it for just a moment.
“Okay?” asked Mizuki.
“Improvisation,” said Verity. “For an audience. I don’t know if that’s actually a metaphor, I think that might just be the whole of it.”
Alfric’s cheek tensed, but he stayed quiet. Verity could practically hear his question. ‘So, can you do something with it?’
Verity looked at the horizon. “I’m getting there. Give me a minute.”
Due to the peculiarities of her training, Verity hadn’t done all that much in the way of collaboration or duets. The orchestral lute was its own orchestra, that was the entire point, and she’d been much more about the music than the magic. There was a way bards had of weaving their magic together that she was certainly no expert at, something that was more than just adding two things together. There was influence on each other, and if Verity could feel what was being plucked from them, then it was possible that she could change it, impose at least a small part of her own will on it.
Verity looked at the horizon, where there was currently a mountain, and squeezed her eyes shut. She tried to hone in on the sensation, that of being drawn on for a song, and hummed a few bars to get herself in the right mindset, not spinning up her own magic, but testing that she was right about where things were.
She opened her eyes, and the mountain was gone, but it was hard to tell whether she’d actually done anything.
“This might take some time,” said Verity.
“As in hours, or days?” asked Alfric.
“I have no idea,” said Verity.
“How long do we need to stand around with our eyes closed?” asked Mizuki.
“You can go back,” said Verity. “I think that I at least have a handle on what I’m trying to do.”
“Respectfully, the Wildlands can be dangerous,” said Alfric. His eyes were still closed. “Not in the same way that a dungeon is, but if you’ve had some insight, I don’t want to have that vanish into an undone day.”
“I’m not sure that it will work,” said Verity. “And I’m really not sure that it will work for dungeons. But if you had to tell me anything, I suppose you should tell me that it’s like a duet.”
“Unless you actively want us gone, I think I’ll stay here,” said Alfric. “We can put up a tent, make a fire, stay out of the way, minimize what we’re actually looking at.”
“Alright,” said Verity.
“We’ll need lunch,” said Mizuki. “The question is, can I cook a meal while blind?”
“I have faith in you,” said Isra.
“I’d rather not have to heal burns,” said Hannah with a sigh. She opened her eyes, blinked a few times, and looked at Verity. “Take a break then? Or are you on the cusp of it?”
“I’ll go wander off,” said Verity. “Just … don’t look in my general direction.”
By the time an hour had passed, there was a smell of wood smoke in the air, and the first signs that a stew would be ready to eat in not too long, though Mizuki was insistent that a proper stew needed to meld the flavors, which took some time. The food was a combination of things they had in storage and some root vegetables that Isra had foraged for.
At the end of that time, Verity could semi-reliably make the mountain in the distance appear or disappear.
“Alright, I’m not saying that’s not impressive,” said Mizuki. “However, I’m concerned about how long we’re allowed to stay out here, and whether or not we have enough supplies.”
“I can forage,” said Isra.
“We could probably stay out here indefinitely,” said Alfric. “At some point Cate would come looking for us, and I imagine she’s got entads to find people, because that’s exactly the kind of thing that I would get if I were her. But between the five of us, I think in a year we could have a house built, nice warm beds — I suppose textiles would be a problem.”
“Skins,” said Isra.
“Ah, right,” said Alfric. “We could have our own small tannery.”
“Do you know how to tan skins?” asked Isra.
“No,” said Alfric. “I sort of assumed that you did.”
“A bit,” shrugged Isra.
“Well, we’re not doin’ that,” said Hannah.
“Just as an exercise in thinking about it,” said Alfric. “Obviously we won’t.”
“But maybe,” said Mizuki.
“Oh come now, you want to get out of here more than anyone,” said Hannah.
“This is true,” Mizuki nodded. She stirred the pot of stew. “I’m going to be a wizard, even without my wizard friend. I have a house, a cat, and a dungeoneering career that I’m still hopeful about.”
“Verity, I know it’s early, but do you think this gives you some insight?” asked Hannah. “That what you’re doin’ here will help with dungeons?”
“Yes,” said Verity. “Though … I don’t really understand it, because there’s such a sharp difference between the two. I can feel it here, but in a dungeon, crossing the border, it’s all at once.”
“Not quite all at once,” said Hannah. “There’s a gap. I know for certain that I feel it.”
“I also don’t know how it’s possible that I was doing anything accidentally,” said Verity. She frowned. “I really didn’t want to put the party through the wringer, Alfric especially.”
“We got rich off it though,” said Mizuki. “I never minded much.”
“If you can accidentally make a near-copy of a theater,” said Alfric. “Then I think the upper limit on what you can do intentionally is very high. And if you can teach a skill at dungeon manipulation to other bards, it will change the entire profession, making it safer, more lucrative — better, in a word.”
“It’s going to take time,” said Verity. “I think I’ve had the insight here, but even another few hours with the Wildlands might only be enough to get, say, a church to appear in the distance. And dungeons are harder to test, because you can only go in once. Exploring them, getting feedback on what you’ve seen, takes much longer, and carries its own dangers.” She made a fist for a moment, then released it. The whole thing was frustrating. “It’s like learning how to play an instrument, but you’re only allowed to try a few notes a day, and if you play a note wrong, your finger gets cut.”
“I don’t think it’s as bad as all that,” said Alfric. “Besides, we have far better mobility than we once had, and I think we can stop treating dungeons as valuable resources to be conserved. If we want to pursue this, then I think we adjust our thinking and really focus on it, to the exclusion of ‘actual’ dungeons. We’d still have to explore, to get you the feedback, but we could do it.”
“Aw, he’s getting excited again,” said Mizuki. She was sitting next to him and bumped into him. “There’s the dungeon guy we know and love.”
“I want to temper expectations,” said Verity. “Though I do think, if this is the thing that Xuphin chose me for … it’s not that bad.”
“Hooray!” said Mizuki.
“I need to get more practice in,” said Verity. “The stew will be another hour?”
“It’ll be ‘done’ in ten minutes, but yeah, an hour to simmer,” said Mizuki.
“You need to let the flavors meld,” said Hannah. “You know, I still don’t really know what that means. You talk about ‘depth of flavor’ and I’m left scratchin’ my head. And that’s from a baker.”
“Baking and cooking are totally different,” said Mizuki. “The only thing they have in common is some of the ingredients and the fact that you put the end result in your mouth.”
“Are you challengin’ a cleric of Garos to find more similarities between two things?” asked Hannah.
“I’ll leave you to it,” said Verity, getting up from the chair Alfric had pulled from extradimensional space.
She walked far enough away that she could hear their voices but not make out the words, to a spot with a good view of what was in the distance, and felt again for the improvisation of the Wildlands.
The book metaphor wasn’t actually that bad, she thought, but it did bring to mind the question of who the author was. Similarly, imagining the Wildlands as a musician, perhaps something that was literally using something from the same suite of powers, made her wonder about whether there was some intelligence behind it, rather than just a process. It was generally accepted that for dungeons there was nothing remotely smart about them, but there was no reason that the Wildlands had to be the same. She had asked Cate, who seemed to have no answers on the subject, though it was hard for the woman not to act like she was wise and mysterious.
After another hour, Verity could reliably cause a church to appear or disappear on the horizon, though she had no control over the shape that it took, the aesthetics of it, and hadn’t actually gone to check the interiors of any of them.
“Everyone is eating,” said Isra, who had crept up. Verity jumped, just a bit. She’d been lost in her own mind.
“Okay, I’m almost done,” said Verity. “I’m getting somewhere.” She pointed in the distance, through the trees, careful not to lose sight of the steeple. “Do you see that?”
“That church?” asked Isra.
“Yes,” said Verity. “I did that.”
“Impressive,” said Isra. “But come, let’s eat.”
Verity followed her, and found a bowl had already been ladeled out for her, topped with a dollop of cream and some fresh herbs, which was just as she liked it. It was too hot to eat, though Hannah seemed to be handling it just fine, so Verity shared what she’d learned, and told the others what she thought she could do.
“That’s fantastic,” said Alfric. “Really. Only two hours’ time and you’ve pretty much got it.”
“No,” said Verity. “Learning new things, it’s like that sometimes, you have enormous jumps in your ability, then run straight into a wall where you’ve learned all the easy things and only have the details and technique left, which will take years.”
“Oh just let him have it,” said Mizuki. “He’s excited about dungeons again.”
“Sorry,” said Verity. She ate a spoonful of stew. “I do think that there’s some cause to be optimistic. I also think that trying this when I can’t take my time, when it’s a different system entirely, when I’ll be crossing over the threshold, will be much more difficult. And I’m not sure that it would ever be possible to do the things that might be racing through Alfric’s mind.”
“You could create a custom entad,” said Alfric with a goofy grin. “Think about that.”
“Alright, he’s going overboard,” said Mizuki with a sigh. “But I’d rather have this than the other guy. And hopefully he’s not going to go back to being glum about the Wildlands.”
Alfric’s smile fell, just a little bit. “I do like this place,” he said. “And I wish that I’d had the option to say no. I think I would have said no, really, it’s just … that got taken from me.” He shook his head. “I’ll deal with it.”
“No,” said Hannah. “You’ll deal with it with other people, and if you do get to the point where no one wants to lend you an ear, I should hope that we’ve got the courtesy to tell you that you need to move on.”
“Thank you,” said Alfric. “It’s still fresh, I guess.”
“What’s the first thing everyone does when we get home?” asked Mizuki. “Personally, I’m going to find the cat and pet him like his life depends on it.”
“Restock,” said Alfric.
“Track down Marsh, I suppose, who I imagine misses me terribly,” said Hannah. “Then explain things to the church, as much as they need to know.”
“I’ll talk to some birds,” said Isra. “There have surely been happenings in the forest. And I have gardens to check on.”
“Oh no, the garden!” said Mizuki.
“You forgot?” asked Isra.
“I wouldn’t say forgot, but yeah,” said Mizuki. “Probably all gone to seed now, or eaten up.”
“It’ll be fine,” said Isra.
Everyone was looking at Verity, who felt like she needed to contribute. There were things that she needed to do in Pucklechurch, and other things that she wanted to do, but there was really only one thing she’d been feeling after the stress of being in the demiplane and having too many fears hanging over her head.
“I’m going to go home and practice the lute,” said Verity.
“Really?” asked Mizuki. “That’s it?”
Verity looked off at the Wildlands, and a church that was still sitting in the distance.
“Practice makes perfect,” she said. “Now, I think we have about three hours before we need to head back. If it’s alright with everyone, I’m going to make the most of it.”
Comments
fbt
I'm really liking this and the last few, ty!
