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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 148, Bellies
🕑 Added 2022-11-16 18:19:55 +0000 UTC~~~~
“It’s kind of a relief, in a way, because one way or another it’ll be over,” said Mizuki.
“I don’t find that relieving,” said Verity. Her lips were thin.
They were outside of the extradimensional space, in the village, together. There had been fallout from what Alfric’s mother had said, loud arguments, and he did feel betrayed — but she had lived through the day several times, and had at least told them rather than violating disclosure. In his opinion, the losses had started to pile up, more losses than Ria Overguard had ever faced before in a long lifetime of battles. Or maybe it was just who she was, when the other things were stripped away. She’d brought the fight.
“It might mean the end of this place,” said Alfric. “Unless Cate is willing to bend the knee, which … seems unlikely.”
“How much force do you think Inter can actually bring in?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, are we talking about an actual battalion? What even is a battalion?”
“A battalion would be a thousand people,” said Alfric. “Though I don’t think that’s what it will be.”
“It’ll be the Knives,” said Isra.
“Probably,” said Alfric. “Though for all I know, Inter has some kind of dedicated anti-dragon force that they keep up their sleeve for situations like this.”
“They’d have gone after her in Plenarch,” said Verity. “Right?”
“She was a government official in Plenarch,” said Alfric. “It would not at all surprise me if dealing with dragon sightings fell under her purview.”
“Ooo, that’s a neat trick,” said Mizuki.
“You say that as though you admire it,” said Hannah.
“I do,” said Mizuki. “I would love to be in charge of investigating my own crimes some day.”
“That’s not a crime, flying above a city,” said Isra.
“I actually did get called down from the air when I was in Plenarch,” said Mizuki. “Though you’re right, if it was a proper crime, they’d have to start arresting swallows.”
“We need a plan of action,” said Alfric. “We have today to get something done, and my own two undone days to do it. Potentially I could call on my siblings by exiting the demiplane, but I don’t know whether or not they would be willing to help with a diplomacy mission.”
“Is that what we’re doin’?” asked Hannah. “Seems that diplomacy has failed.”
“No,” said Isra. “Ria’s plan — Inter’s plan — is still diplomacy. It’s diplomacy backed by overwhelming power. That was always her plan.”
“It seems like a foolish plan to me,” said Verity. “Like trying to get someone to do what you want by threatening them with a club.”
“Does that not get people to do things?” asked Mizuki. “If someone threatened to beat me with a club — well, I would fireball them, but if I didn’t have that, then sure, I would say ‘please don’t beat me with a club, I’ll do what you want’.”
“Depends on if she’s more like a cat or a dog,” said Hannah. “A cat you can beat as much as you want, and it just learns to be sneaky, doin’ the thing you beat it for when you’re occupied with somethin’ else, watchin’ you carefully to make sure you’re far enough away and the like.”
“Do you … beat cats?” asked Isra.
“No, as I said, all the cat would learn is to be a sneak about it,” said Hannah. “And no, I’ve never done that with a dog either, never had a dog, but from what I’ve heard, dogs do learn in a way that cats don’t.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” said Isra.
“So if Cate is a cat, she’ll just do all the same stuff, but be sneaky about it, waiting until there’s no oversight,” said Alfric. “And if she’s a dog, then she’ll get smacked on the nose and submit?”
“In the analogy, sure,” said Hannah.
“She really, really seems more like a cat,” said Mizuki. “They’re solitary creatures, right?”
“Cats, or dragons?” asked Isra.
“Dragons,” said Mizuki. “I mean, cats too, but you don’t hear about dragons making a lot of friends.”
“We don’t know anything about dragons,” said Alfric. “I think almost everything that the Dondrian Museum has to say about dragons is wrong or incomplete, given we didn’t even know about their connection to demiplanes.”
“That ‘we’ didn’t know?” asked Mizuki. “‘We’?”
“That wasn’t apparent to the scholars of Inter based on a lack of evidence,” said Alfric with a sigh.
“Mmm hmm,” said Mizuki.
“We have approximately ten bells until the witching hour,” said Alfric. “I do think we go to Cate, explain things to her, and make a plea for a peaceful end.”
“Which means what?” asked Verity. “Submitting to the higher power?”
“Mom won’t be in control of things anymore,” said Alfric. “She hasn’t said where the battalion is, if she’s right that it’s here already — and I don’t think that she would have said anything, if there was any hope of us stopping it. Inter will have negotiations first, not backed by the sword, just with the sword off to one side, looking innocent, or with the sword only implied by the fact that there are a few people in nice clothes with some paperwork.”
“You’re mostly guessing, right?” asked Mizuki.
“Yes,” Alfric admitted.
“I feel like it won’t go well for them,” said Verity. “That’s my understanding of Cate.”
“They’ll have chrononaut support, and will let her know there’s chrononaut support,” said Alfric. “Her other option is trying to battle it out, trying to kill the unknown number of people that Inter has sent in to contain her. They’ll be prepared, and as much as mom hasn’t been able to score a single victory, I have to imagine that they’ll have the fire problem dealt with, at the very least.”
“So we go handle the situation before it becomes a situation,” said Hannah. “Go to Cate, tell her that we snuck in, that this all goes far better if she comes clean and goes to them first.”
“And you think she’ll respond to that?” asked Isra. “Do we … want that?”
“A peaceful solution?” asked Verity.
“A living dragon of enormous power,” said Isra. Verity gave her a dirty look, as though the answer was obvious, though to Alfric, it did seem a bit complicated.
“I like this place,” said Alfric. “I fully believe that humanity went after the dragons at some point, maybe before modern history, before the creation of Inter as a state, before most of the major changes that the Editors had implemented — and I think that Inter might think that Cate was too much of a threat, and decide that they have no choice but to kill her.”
“You want to save the Wildlands,” said Mizuki.
“I do,” said Alfric. “It’s unique, or … not unique, because I don’t believe that Cate is the last of her kind, but there’s nothing else like it. And if we can get Cate to treat with Inter, to have relations with it as one nation to another, then it’s possible other dragons will pop their heads out. How many other places like this could there be?”
“How many other atrocities?” asked Isra.
“That’s actually a good point,” said Hannah. “If the wizards find a way to punch in rather than out, then this is just the first of many situations that will need to be dealt with.”
“Mmm,” said Isra, frowning.
“You don’t think so?” asked Mizuki.
“I’m thinking of being told that I was hunting too much,” said Isra. “I didn’t like that, nor agree with it, and if I had been able to force my way out of it, I would have. Do you think all dragons are like this one?”
“Hard to say,” said Alfric. “But we have less than ten bells now.”
“I’ll go to Liara, tell her to tell Cate that we’ve been ‘caught’, that this needs to happen today,” said Hannah. “And then we’ll see.”
~~~~
They rode the tram up together. Alfric had been to the palace before, on an undone day, largely so that he would know the layout in case there was ever cause to go there. He’d been using his undone days every day, and for him, it had been nearly three weeks in the demiplane, much of which had been spent in the Wildlands. After the first few days he had no illusions that he was doing anything useful there, only learning things about a place that was largely incidental to their problems.
The thing he’d learned most was that he wanted this to be his life, going off into the Wildlands, whether alone or with others, a wildling rather than a dungeoneer. He’d learned that he wanted this place to be preserved.
“So do we tell her … everything?” asked Mizuki.
“Everything,” said Alfric. “That’s disclosure. You don’t hold some things back because they make you look bad, or because you’re afraid the other person is going to react poorly.”
“But I am afraid,” said Mizuki. “She’s got breath hot enough to turn me crispy. I don’t want to be crispy.”
“I’ll protect you,” said Alfric. “You know that.”
“You know, somehow that makes me feel better,” said Mizuki. “I think it shouldn’t, but it does.”
“To be clear,” said Hannah. “We’re telling her about Ria, about the battalion, the assumed incoming diplomatic team?”
“Yes,” said Alfric with a nod.
“That seems like it makes their job a lot harder,” said Verity. “It seems as though you’re putting your mother at risk. As though my house will be burned down seconds after the witching hour?”
“Mom won’t be there,” said Alfric. “Either this is the undone day where she sees what we’re going to do, or she’s already seen. I don’t think we have the means to stop the battalion, if we even knew where it was, and we don’t know how it got in.”
“Er, there’s some stuff at the house I’d also like to not be burned,” said Mizuki. “Stuff that’s in extradimensional space.”
“We’re not worrying about it,” said Alfric. “It’s inconsequential. If Cate is going to set the world on fire, we’ve failed, so let’s focus on not failing.”
“Well, I think I’ll keep my mouth shut,” said Mizuki. “Negotiating with dragons has never been my strong suit.”
The tram came to a stop, and they stepped off together. The feili girl was waiting for them, looking nervous. Alfric wouldn’t have known what she was except that Hannah had said, and he felt a bit of inexplicable nervousness about her being there. Old enough to have been a part of Cate’s last colony, almost certainly an extreme outlier if she was here, and an enigma that wanted poking at — if only they didn’t have a dragon to talk to.
“She’s irate, as you might expect — as you’ve probably already experienced, Alfric,” said Liara.
“It’s my first time through the day,” said Alfric.
“She detests chrononauts,” said Liara. “Try to do as little speaking as possible.”
“Are we safe?” asked Mizuki.
“No,” said Liara. “She likes stowaways and has you dead to rights, but would have been happier about this if she’d caught you right away. Then it might have warranted a slap on the wrist, a ‘did you really think that you could trick me’, now it’s my own betrayal and a feeling that this went on under her nose, as much as she acknowledges that I’m the one who caught you.”
“Are you safe?” asked Mizuki.
“I stood by her during a civil war,” said Liara. Looking back at Mizuki. “I’ve known her for a hundred and fifty years. She knows that what I do, I do for love.” She looked at Alfric again. “It would be nice if this were your last day. She’d like that better, having you against the wall.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” said Alfric.
They were led to a part of the palace that wasn’t on the map that Verity had drawn, which was no real surprise to Alfric, who’d grown up with a house whose doors led to different places around the country, whose rooms were only connected through expensive magic that his parents had acquired. From the hidden hallway they were taken to a large door, and through it, a mountaintop that was far away from anything they had known to exist in the demiplane.
It was a ruined place, filled with fire and brimstone, some of which Alfric could feel settle in his lungs. It smelled bad and had a certain taste to it, like eggs that had gone off. They had a view of spectacular surroundings, the same blasted landscape, though there was at least some variety to it, plains of sulfurous yellow and woods of thick red bramble. There were fires in many places, distant mountains spewing lava, and a heat in the air. It was, overall, alarming, and matched to no place that Alfric had ever known. He assumed that it was an illusion, or something like it, possibly generated by entad, but he couldn’t rule out that they had been transported somewhere else.
Five plain wooden chairs sat in a line in front of a large iron throne, and Cate was waiting for them there, dressed in furs rather than one of her usual dresses of silk or some other delicate material. The warm clothes, when Alfric was already starting to sweat, seemed to make a point.
“It’s all a bit much, don’t you think?” asked Mizuki, even as Hannah had begun to bow.
This was a horrible thing to say, but sometimes Mizuki was just like that, trying to lighten things with a joke. If that was what got them burned to a crisp, he wasn’t sure that he would forgive her.
“Oh it is, it is, a ‘bit much’,” said Cate. “But you don’t go to the theater and whisper to your friend that it’s all stagecraft, do you?”
Mizuki glanced at Isra. “Depends on the friend.”
“Sit,” said Cate. “Please.”
They sat down. The chairs weren’t comfortable. Mizuki was right, it was a bit much.
“Is this, uh, real?” asked Alfric.
“This place?” asked Cate, gesturing around them. She raised an eyebrow. “It is, in fact. This is part of the Wildlands, stabilized a great while ago, one of the most horrible places that anyone has ever encountered in their wanderings. It was appropriately immortalized.”
“We’re sorry,” said Verity.
“For?” asked Cate. She leaned forward slightly.
“For lying, sneaking, spying,” said Verity. “For not being forthright with you from the start.”
Cate regarded them. She reached into her furs and pulled forth a small blackish sphere that swirled as though it had something inside it, the one that Alfric had seen in the past.
“Hannah, Isra, Mizuki, you can have your memories back,” said Cate. She touched the sphere only lightly, then replaced it within her furs.
“Wait,” said Alfric. “You had approached them?”
“Yes,” said Cate. “When there were opportunities to get them alone. They can tell you about it later, and I don’t believe it’s germane to a discussion here, but they would have gotten their memories back, had they been technically alive and on the material plane at the time. I did return everyone their memories, as promised.”
“Er,” said Mizuki. “I’m off-balance here.” She had a perplexed look on her face.
“I did nothing to harm any of you,” said Cate. “I believe I only mildly annoyed the five of you in pursuit of your dragons. Four of the five of you came here without an invitation. Verity, I hope that my civility here doesn’t cause you to mistake the depth of my anger and feeling of betrayal.” That ‘civility’ was somewhat undercut by their present location. Cate took a breath. “I want to know everything you have to say about your actions while here.”
There was a brief moment when it wasn’t clear who was going to do the talking, then Alfric opened his mouth and kept up a steady stream of words for what felt like a very long while. Cate’s face remained impassive. Alfric held nothing back, not even that his mother was sitting in an extradimensional space within Verity’s house — or at least, that’s where she’d been when they left. He didn’t think that she was in any danger. Ria’s policy was to reset if the five of them weren’t back before the witching hour. They’d been caught before, with varying results, but permanent death was never in the cards.
“I have not accepted your apology,” said Cate once Alfric had finally brought her up to the present. “What you did, you did without proof of wrongdoing on my part, fueled only by suspicion, and by your own account, even after you had resolved that everyone was being taken care of you kept digging for no other reason than mistrust.”
“I wasn’t trying to paint us in a good light,” said Alfric. “I was trying to be honest and objective about what happened and why.”
Cate gave a snort of disbelief, rolling her eyes as though his words disgusted her.
“He really does mean that,” said Hannah.
Cate regarded Alfric. “I don’t trust chrononauts,” she said.
Increasingly, Alfric didn’t blame her, but there was a wide gap between ‘some chrononauts’ and ‘all chrononauts’. His mother was at least trying to do the right thing, as much as she was stepping on important precepts. That Lola had been allowed to exist, had been able to continue on unchecked, was another black mark against the clans.
He pursed his lips, not wanting to actually voice agreement, nor quibble about whether trust should apply to him. In his experience, someone asking for trust was one of the most suspicious things they could do.
“I do still like it here,” said Verity. “I do empathize with you, with wanting your own place.” She had her hands folded in her lap. “I am sorry. I’ve been sorry.”
“There are still problems here,” said Hannah. “Beyond the army knockin’ against your door, there’s some discontent among your people, and keepin’ them here, not lettin’ them leave, is the biggest thing that does need changin’. It’s why we stayed, once we saw that no one was bein’ outright killed.”
“You use that as an excuse for crossing into my sovereign territory?” asked Cate.
“We didn’t actually know it was yours,” said Mizuki. “We didn’t even understand demiplanes, I guess.”
“You still don’t,” said Cate. She sat back in her throne. “And who do you side with, in the coming war?”
“We’re against a war,” said Alfric. “We don’t know what they’re bringing to bear, what they’re coming in with, or even how they got in. We think they’ll send diplomats, maybe a few diplomats, but we’re not agents of the state, except in some unofficial capacity that made sneaking into the demiplane legal in the first place.” He wasn’t sure whether it would have been legal or not, but they at least had coverage.
“They’ve got chrononaut support,” said Hannah. “Hundreds of undone days to spend, if they want it, which it seems they might.”
“They don’t understand the power of draconic might,” said Cate. There was a frightening firmness to her voice. “My kind have stopped razing the countryside, have kept our predations far from humans for centuries, have ensconced ourselves in our demiplanes to the extent that we barely know of the existence of others. We claim no territories in your world. Perhaps it’s time that Inter learned a long-forgotten lesson.” There was a gleam in her eye. Alfric found it familiar. It was the same gleam his mother had sometimes had when talking about Cate.
There was silence from the five simple chairs, though they exchanged some looks. Hannah’s seemed practical, ‘does she really think that she can take on the entire unified nation of Inter?’ while Verity’s seemed sad, as though she was working on accepting the bad outcome as a simple inevitability.
For his own part, Alfric wanted to offer advice, to tell Cate that she couldn’t possibly win, that with a hundred attempts they could certainly kill her, and they would kill her if it seemed like the other option was facing loss of life. He had no way of framing that that didn’t sound like a threat, no way of telling her that wouldn’t push her further toward a battle of some kind. He wasn’t even entirely sure that she would lose, since there were clearly things about dragons that people didn’t understand. There was a demiplane core somewhere inside her, or as a part of her, and he worried that she could draw on it somehow, or at least use it with less of a transfer time than a normal demiplane might require. There were lots of things she could do to make herself incredibly inconvenient to kill.
“Honestly, maybe you should just go for it,” said Mizuki. “I mean, kill a whole bunch of people, make them come to you, groveling? It’ll all be undone days if you light Dondrian on fire, so you can just open with that just after the witching hour.” She had her arms folded and legs crossed, bouncing one leg on top of the other.
“Do you think that I wouldn’t?” asked Cate.
“Burn a city down?” asked Mizuki. “I guess I don’t know, but you’re a decent person. You’re providing for people, you tried to make sure they knew what they were getting into, you really didn’t need to give a bunch of memories back to everyone and completely burn your bridges back home. You feel bad about eating sheep or whatever. So I guess no, you want to kill people, but it’s more the idea of killing than the actual killing.”
“You come here, having been caught in your lies and sneaking about, and suggest that I won’t kill?” asked Cate.
“I didn’t say that,” said Mizuki.
“I can sense sarcasm, girl,” said Cate. “When you say that perhaps I should burn down Dondrian, your voice is laced with disdain.”
“It’s not because I think you won’t do it,” said Mizuki. She leaned forward. “It’s because I think it would be evil and idiotic. So that I think there’s a chance you’d do it out of spite is about a low opinion of you, rather than because I think you’re weak.”
Cate stared at Mizuki for a moment.
Then she rose from her throne, growing taller as she did so, furs dropping to the ground, then other clothes slipping away. Mouth opened wide, pointed up at to the sky, and Alfric thought that she was going to let out a gout of flame, but instead, her mouth opened wider. It was wider than a human mouth could open, and a dragon’s snout pushed out from it, ripping apart the lips and cheeks. The dragon emerged from within the body, enormous, leaving a ruined husk behind.
In her true form, she was as tall as a building, though not approaching the size of the one that Dondrian kept in its largest museum. Her scales glistened and her body dwarfed the throne, which she quickly crushed with a swipe of her tail. The mountaintop felt small with her there, towering over them, and she lowered her head with the sinuous motion of a snake, angling her body down so her face was only three feet away from Mizuki.
“Sorry, sorry!” said Mizuki. She was wincing, gripping her chair tight.
“Who are you?” asked Cate, voice now ten times as loud, low and rumbling. “Who are you to have a low opinion of me?”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it, I’m sorry!” said Mizuki.
The breath from Cate’s nostrils was pushing Mizuki’s hair back, her dragon’s fangs clacking against the ground.
Yet as impertinent as Mizuki had been, as downright hostile, Cate was doing nothing more than threatening, showing her power, hungry for submission.
It was, Alfric thought, how it would go with Inter. They wouldn’t be impertinent, not like Mizuki, but they would have their own demands, and some of those demands would be seen as the same kind of hackles-raising comments. He wasn’t sure that there was a path forward, not if Inter was going to want concessions from her, bonds placed on her, interference with her demiplane and the society she was trying to create. She would want submission, to feel like she was important, worthy of respect, and he was skeptical that the government could give her that. He had no idea what to say though, what could possibly allow both institutions — Cate and the government of Inter as represented by its diplomats — to save face.
“You need the people behind you,” said Verity.
Cate turned to look at Verity, twisting her head and then reorienting her body.
“The people?” asked Cate.
“The people of this demiplane, and the people of Inter,” said Verity. “You’re not going to frighten Inter like this. You’re terrifying, when you want to be. We know that flame is so hot that it can boil steel. But if you bring force against Inter, bring force to the table, they’ll start thinking about all the ways that they can kill you. They’ll look at your flame and find a counter. They’ll look at your scales and find something that can pierce them. Hide, and they’ll search every corner. They will never submit.”
“Then perhaps the small one is right,” said Cate. She placed a claw down not far from Mizuki’s feet, and it dug into the ground. “Perhaps I should go with wings spread and flame raining down.”
“No,” said Verity. “You go the opposite direction.”
In her draconic form, Cate no longer had eyebrows, and was so large that they could only see parts of her at once, so it was hard to read her expression.
“The opposite?” Cate finally asked. Alfric could already see what Verity was proposing though, and hoped that Cate would go for it.
“The framing that Inter will use, that Ria used, is that you’re a dangerous animal,” said Verity. She wasn’t wilting under Cate’s gaze, not like Mizuki had. Alfric wasn’t sure that he would have been that calm. “Inter moves by the will of its people. They see you as a criminal, someone who’s stolen away its citizens, that’s engaged in theft against them, is responsible for crimes. But so long as there’s no public support, no one can act against you. That means that if people think you were right, you’re in a better position against Inter. It’s that, not your might, that will get them to show their belly.”
“Mmm,” said Cate. “They do not particularly like me. There are stories in the paper about the missing, with testimonies from those who I had approached.”
“You bring in stories of your own,” said Verity. “You have genuinely helped people, gave them an escape from intolerable situations, allowed them to live a life away from abusers, from strangling obligations — and no, not all of those people who left their old lives were sympathetic, but many of them are. And all you need is two or three, the best stories.”
“There is too much of the past,” said Cate, shaking her head. “Too many mistakes, too much history that will feel, to them, like it was immediate. Humanity lives and dies, then says that it has changed, that it has no longer beholden to what came before. I have no such luxury, even for things that happened seven hundred years ago.”
She was considering it though, the idea of stopping Inter coming in with blades out by simply being sympathetic.
“Some of the concessions that they would ask for can be given freely,” said Alfric. “Assuming that it’s not important to you, there are things that you can do ahead of time, before they try to negotiate, which make it more difficult for them to unsheathe their blades.”
“Such as?” asked Cate.
She didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and probably thought that this was his second or third time through the day, using their previous conversation against her.
“Immigration policies,” said Alfric. “You’re worried about people leaving, that’s understandable, but most of them don’t want to leave, and there are plenty who’d want to come. As soon as you say that people are free to go whenever they want to, Inter loses half their reason for being here. Inter coming into a demiplane to aid well-fed former citizens who can leave at any time is incredibly unpalatable to the average citizen.”
“They cannot stomach my power,” said Cate. “You misunderstand what people will do when threatened.”
“Kindness is the threat,” said Verity. “Inter isn’t some huge beast. It’s people. Those making the decision aren’t just looking out for their fellow citizens, they’re looking out for themselves, and no one is going to send in a battalion if it costs them too much.”
Alfric thought that was an entirely too cynical view of the political reality of Inter. There were good politicians, people who would do necessary but unpopular things. If Alfric were a politician, he would act in the interests of the people and employ the law in an even way, regardless of whether it was immensely popular or not. An unpopular application of the law was a sign that the law needed to be changed, but the law couldn’t be just ignored because there was a victim who deserved it or a charismatic perpetrator. That didn’t apply in this case, he didn’t think, which was unique through Inter’s history, but it made him skeptical that Verity was right.
“There’s no time,” said Cate, after a long moment of contemplation.
“Time is tight,” said Alfric. “They’re here already, somewhere, and I would guess that they’ll be impossible to find, or with chrononaut backup if they are found. You can get the ball rolling though. We can help.”
Cate eyed him.
“We want to help,” said Alfric. “I want to do this the chrononaut way, with full disclosure, being honest and forthright. We never should have done it the other way.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” said Cate, her loud voice rumbling. She flapped her wings once, kicking up dust. She looked off into the distance of the sickly landscape. “I feel, at any moment, that one of you will bring up my intolerable hypocrisy.”
They were all silent. Mizuki had gone quiet after Cate had transformed, and was still gripping her seat with white fingers. The threat of death felt closer with Cate as a dragon, long tail whistling through the air, but Alfric had faced death before — had died before.
“No?” asked Cate, looking at them. “Then I will flagellate myself in my own time, once this mess is dealt with.”
“Do you agree?” asked Verity. “To make these changes, to put out stories in papers, puts them on the back foot?” She looked so earnest, which wasn’t normal for Verity.
“I will try,” said Cate. “And the moment they bring out the knives is the moment I stop showing them my belly.”
