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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 118, That Sort of Thing
🕑 Added 2022-07-11 16:11:58 +0000 UTC~~~~
The return trip to Dondrian was done without the Overguards, and there was a part of Mizuki that felt a little hurt by that. She knew that self-sufficiency was something they prized, and that they didn’t want to be ferrying teenagers to and from the other side of the continent, but it seemed unfriendly in a way that she didn’t like. The Overguards had six children though, so maybe it was just that if they allowed trips to happen, the obligations would spiral out of control until they were spending most of their time doing ‘favors’ for people.
It wasn’t an enormous inconvenience though, since Verity was going to Dondrian anyway. The party had the dagger, which could transport them across unlimited distances, so long as someone was cut with it, and so long the transportation would only need to be done once a day. Unfortunately, not long before they were set to leave, Alfric reported that in an undone day he’d finally taken the dagger to Filera, and she had told him that it did not, in fact, have unlimited range. Instead, it could only go twenty hexes along the shortest path, and Dondrian was quite a bit beyond that.
The solution, then, was to stuff everyone into the trunk and hope that it would follow Verity all the way to Dondrian at its ludicrous speed.
“You know, the garden stone seemed really good when we got it,” said Mizuki. She sat in one of their wooden chairs, with Emperor at her feet. The dog had taken a liking to her, and the feeling was mutual. She was going to be sad to see him go. “But we end up spending a lot of time here, and none of the improvements have really made it feel like home.”
“Sorry,” said Alfric. He was doing his best to carve something with a stone knife, which was going poorly. He’d already cut himself once and needed Hannah to fix it.
“That’s not on you,” she said with a wave of her hand. “All the improvements have been great.” She looked around the garden stone, which now had a few wooden structures, most of them fairly bare bones. Getting things into and out of the stone was a bit of a hassle, and it didn’t allow metal, which had made some of the woodworking pretty tedious. Mizuki knew that because she’d worked with Alfric on a lot of the dry fitting they’d done before moving pieces of lumber in. “But it’s still not a place that I would voluntarily spend four hours, not without a big city to explore at the end of it.”
“We’ve already been there once,” said Hannah. She was reading a book she must not have been too engrossed in. The chairs sat around a center table, where there were some snacks that Mizuki had prepared, mostly cured meats and smoked cheeses, and some fresh vegetables from the garden, which was now producing a fair amount for them. “How much more is there to see?”
“Uh, it’s a huge city,” said Mizuki. “I saw maybe five streets worth of it? And only the main hex. There are all kinds of places I still need to check out, little shops to go investigate, things to see, that kind of stuff.”
“I saw a lot,” said Isra. “But I was looking through the bird's eyes.” She was petting Marsc, as they’d elected to bring the herb dragons along with them. There were entire bales of herbs ready for them, some of them foraged rather than taken from the backyard garden, which was thinning like the hair of a middle-aged man, at least where herbs were concerned.
“If your parents aren’t okay picking us up, will they be okay with us staying there?” asked Mizuki.
“Yes, and I checked ahead of time just to be sure,” said Alfric.
“I don’t want to be in your mom’s bad graces,” said Mizuki.
“You won’t be,” said Alfric. “She likes you.”
“Even though we don’t do enough dungeons?” asked Isra.
“I don’t think she cares about that too much,” said Alfric. “We’re moving up, that’s what matters, though even that I don’t think she cares too much about. What she wants is a self-sufficient child who can make his own way in the world, and I think I’ve proven I can handle myself.”
“I’m strangely excited about the concert,” said Mizuki.
“Why strangely?” asked Isra.
“Well, I don’t know, Verity’s been practicing something like six hours a day, I’ve heard each of those songs probably a hundred times,” said Mizuki. “You would think that I’d be tired of it, right?”
“There’s no novelty to it, no,” said Hannah. Her eyes were on her book, but she was clearly not reading. “But there’s something nice about that, like your favorite meal that you’ve eaten a hundred times before.”
“To be clear, none of us have the songs from tonight’s concert as favorites, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, it’s fine music, and I think I appreciate it more after having heard it so much, but it’s not a favorite, not the sort of thing that I would ask a tavern bard to play.”
“Most tavern bards couldn’t,” said Isra.
“Verity was a tavern bard,” said Mizuki. She crossed her arms.
Isra rolled her eyes, then flashed Mizuki a smile. “She’s the most overqualified tavern bard in history, and I think we all know it.”
“Oh, speaking of,” said Hannah. “It seems that Clemency, Verity’s replacement at the Fig and Gristle, got engaged to Micah.”
“Micah, that guy who was pining after you?” asked Mizuki. “The apprentice blacksmith? Sorry that didn’t work out for you.” She giggled.
“You laugh, but it was a bit of weight off my shoulders,” said Hannah. “I kept seein’ the poor boy around, and the way he’d look at me, I could tell he was still wonderin’ whether there might be a way to make it work. That was even after Marsh and I were arm-in-arm for temple day.”
“They’re doing the Cairbre thing?” asked Mizuki. “Marriage first, then build up a relationship after?”
“Seems so,” said Hannah. “Though I imagine that it’ll be a smaller affair than the monstrosity of a weddin’ we just went to. A handful of people, maybe not even that, considering that she’s been in town for all of a month, and he’s a transplant himself.”
“I don’t know if I’d want to do another wedding, even if I were invited,” said Mizuki.
“Which you won’t be,” said Hannah. “But if you were, I would expect you to go.”
“Verity is the only one that’s close to Clem,” said Mizuki.
“If you were invited, it would be because the girl doesn’t have any friends,” said Hannah. “I’d expect you to do your duty.”
“Could I still grumble about it?” asked Mizuki.
“Of course,” said Hannah. “Just not within earshot.”
“So many rules,” said Mizuki with a groan. She looked over at Alfric. “I can see why you prefer the good old days.”
“Not quite the same,” said Alfric. “I have no problem with fulfilling my social obligations.”
“Bah,” said Mizuki. She turned back to Hannah. “Do you think we need to do something about Clemency?”
“How do you mean?” asked Hannah.
“Well, like you said, if she’s got no friends, do we need to … be friends?” Mizuki frowned. “When my family left for Kiromo I was all alone.”
“So you go from not wantin’ to attend her weddin’, to deliberately tryin’ to be her friend?” asked Hannah with a laugh.
“I don’t know,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I mean, I don’t want to be her friend, but if she’s got no other friends, then —”
“You’d do the right thing,” said Alfric.
“I don’t know if it’s the ‘right’ thing,” said Mizuki. “But there’s a difference between a wedding that I don’t really want to go to and a girl who’s super lonely because no one took time out of their day to look after her.”
Isra looked up from the herb dragon she had in her lap. “I don’t think I would be her friend.”
“Why not?” asked Mizuki.
Isra shrugged. “It can be a lot of work to take care of someone. Being a friend means more than just spending time together.”
“Ay,” said Hannah. “Bein’ a shoulder to cry on, helpin’ them out when they’re sick, there are real costs to bein’ a friend to someone, though they’re costs we’re more’n willin’ to pay for people we care about. But if you don’t care about someone, if you’re just there because you feel it’s a good thing, it’s somethin’ you need to take into consideration.”
“Being a friend isn’t a transaction like that though,” said Mizuki. “It’s not like Alfric’s dumb entad bidding system.”
“While I’ll agree—” Alfric began.
“I mean, I’m just saying, if any of you were sick, I would help out, and not because I thought that was the cost of doing business or whatever, because I care about you,” said Mizuki. “I like helping friends. It makes me feel good. If you’re talking about fake friends, then yes, it would be work, and I don’t know, I guess you’re saying that you’d fake it until it felt real somehow?”
“Somethin’ like that,” said Hannah.
“And if it wasn’t?” asked Isra. “If you never felt like you were friends?”
“Then you’d have given it a shot,” said Hannah. She shrugged. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out.”
They busied themselves with their own matters for a bit, which for Mizuki meant trying to read through a wizard book she’d been mailed by Rayedhcraft. It was the sort of thing she felt vaguely guilty about, since it seemed like she should have had to pay for it, but Kell said that it was pretty standard, a way to help people move past some of the entry-level stuff without needing direct instruction.
The book was, to put it bluntly, boring. Mizuki thought maybe that was their way of trying to scare people off, and the reason they had sent it in the mail was to make her second guess her choice. Still, she slogged through it, reading passages three times to make sure they stuck in her head. Some of it was needlessly dense and filled with jargon, and it under-explained things that it apparently thought were obvious.
‘The transom of the well must be malginated in most cases when becondution is expected,’ Mizuki would read, and then she would have to look in the glossary, or flip back a few pages in order to try to make sense of the sentence. The ‘well’ was the thing that stored mana, the ‘transom’ was a rigid reinforcing structure, ‘becondution’ was when the well was emptied of mana (but that also seemed to have some other importance), and ‘malginated’ or ‘malgination’ had something to do with changing the immaterial substance that a wizard worked with, in a way that didn’t seem very obvious to Mizuki. She kept looking through the book, trying to find some clear comparison of the terms, but the glossary only said that ‘malgination’ was one of the fundamental properties of the material, and offered only comparisons to other words that Mizuki didn’t know. Normally Mizuki’s approach to words she didn’t know was to let them wash over her like waves crashing against a shore, but you couldn’t do that with a technical work.
She tried to cope by taking lots of notes, but her paper was filling up pretty rapidly, and she wasn’t entirely sure her notes were right. If Kell had been in their party, she would have seen if he was available and bugged him about it, in the hopes that he could explain ‘malginated’ to her, but in point of fact, he wasn’t in their party.
She was thankful that Emperor was along with them in the garden stone, as he seemed to like being a good foot rest, and when there was something she didn’t understand, she could reach down and scratch him behind the ears, which let her pretend that she was taking a break for some actual reason besides just frustration.
They arrived in Dondrian after four hours in the garden stone, which wasn’t all that bad given that they hadn’t had to pay a single cent for any of it. Verity was there to greet them — the chest had been running to her, after all — and she seemed to be in a good mood, which was mildly surprising.
“No sign of my mother,” said Verity. She had a grin on her face. “No letter from her either. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, but so far, so good.”
“Be careful,” said Isra. “She might be waiting to strike.”
“I know, I know,” said Verity. “But I feel like if this is the response, then I actually did accomplish something.”
“I’d agree on the caution,” said Hannah.
“Bah,” said Verity. She let a frown settle on her face. “Fine.” She turned to Alfric. “It’s the first time through today?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I’m hoping that you don’t have much trouble, Vertex has a dungeon today, Marsh has a check-in with Hannah later.”
“The playing will be fine, I think,” said Verity. The levity vanished. “I feel a knot in the pit of my stomach about it, but I put in the effort, and if it’s the same as last time, that will have to do.” She turned her head to the side, cracking her neck. “And if mother has something to say about it, I think I have a better idea how to handle it.”
“With violence?” asked Isra.
“No,” said Verity, looking alarmed. “No, no, I’ll just tell her, like I should have done from the start. I’ll be firm but polite, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll be firm and rude.”
“Easy,” said Mizuki, though she felt incredibly skeptical. Verity’s mother still had a hold on Verity, and Mizuki could practically see the old woman’s hand wrapped around the base of Verity’s ponytail. Verity had years of training in being her mother’s puppet, and that wasn’t something that could just be shaken off in a fortnight.
“I think we should go to my house now,” said Alfric. “We’ve got a lot of time before the concert, and we need to get Emperor back where he belongs after his extended vacation.”
“Aw,” said Mizuki. She leaned down and gave the dog a hug. “I’m going to miss you, little guy.”
“He’s practically the same size as you,” said Alfric.
“You’re just jealous that you don’t get kisses,” said Mizuki. She put her face next to the dogs and made a kissing noise, and was given the penalty of a slobbery lick, which she wiped off with her sleeve.
They eventually did get going, though Isra elected to stay with Verity. The plan was for them to be in the city for two days and return home by the same method when Verity was returned to Pucklechurch. They were only going to the concert on the first night, not the second, which meant that Mizuki had something like a day and a half in the city. That didn’t seem like quite enough to her. After their first trip to Dondrian for the opera, she’d been able to see enough of the city to get some ideas about what else she might like to see, and overly pushy tax assessors aside, she had really liked her taste of city life.
It was strange how much Alfric’s house felt like home to her. Emperor bounded up the front steps and Mizuki followed after him as he made his way to the kitchen. He sat in front of the food bowl there and looked at her as though she hadn’t fed him the entire time he’d been staying at her house. Mizuki looked around the kitchen for something to feed him, but she wasn’t entirely sure why the house had a kitchen, given that they used entads to create almost all of their food for them. When Alfric came in, he went right to one of the cupboards and opened it up, then set a piece of bright red venison loin into the bowl for Emperor.
“I didn’t realize he got such good meat here,” said Mizuki. “He’s been deprived.”
“He has,” said Alfric. He looked down at the dog. “Poor boy.” Alfric seemed to employ sarcasm most often when it came to the family dog.
“Well, I think I’m going to drop my clothes and things off in one of the guest rooms, then I’ll be off,” said Mizuki. “What time are we meeting back here?”
“Fifth bell,” said Alfric. “What are you going to be doing in the city?”
“Well, I have lots of money, so I was going to see if I could find a shop where I could spend it,” said Mizuki. She’d been quite responsible with the money, and it was starting to itch.
“Prices are a bit better around Pucklechurch,” said Alfric. “Unless you’re buying an entad, in which case it depends on what you want.”
“Oh, I’m not looking for anything in particular,” said Mizuki. “I’ll probably just wander around and come back with a bag of things that I don’t need.”
Alfric frowned at her. “That’s one way to do it, I guess.”
“I suppose you have some kind of budget and itinerary?” asked Mizuki.
“I do,” said Alfric. “I also looked through Rolaj’s book last time we were in Liberfell and talked to him about the best places to go shopping in Dondrian. He’s far away from here, but he’s heard things through the grapevine.”
“That does sound nice,” said Mizuki. She was sorely tempted to abandon her plans and go with him. “You’ll have to let me know.”
“You could come with me,” said Alfric. He raised an eyebrow in her direction.
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I’ve got a city to explore, and we’re only here for two days.” And more time alone with Alfric felt, in some way, like she was putting herself in a position to make a mistake. She shouldn’t have said the thing about kisses.
“Mizuki!” said Alfric’s mom, Ria, as she came into the kitchen. She opened her arms wide, and Mizuki found herself mildly embarrassed to be wrapped in a hug.
“Hey,” said Mizuki.
“I’m sorry to have to say this,” said Ria as she let go, “But there’s some disclosure that must be done.”
“Mom?” asked Alfric. “You had a reset?”
“Nothing to be concerned about,” said Ria. “It was a recreational reset, I have lots of days to go around.” She turned back to Mizuki. “You and I had a lovely conversation about marriage and its pitfalls. I wish that we could have it again, but obviously it would be different the second time around, and I’ve found that in cases like this, sometimes what results is more of an unwanted lecture from a chrononaut than a proper conversation between equals.” She looked over at Alfric. “Could we have some privacy for a moment?”
“Sure,” said Alfric, though he didn’t look particularly comfortable with it.
Once he was gone, Ria turned back to Mizuki. “Oh, nothing objectionable, it’s just that you and I had a private conversation, and it would be rude to share it with Alfric.”
“Okay,” said Mizuki. It was hard not to feel intimidated. Ria was quite possibly one of the most powerful people on the entire planet, the most proficient dungeoneer of the last century, maybe more. She could be armed and ready for combat in the space of a heartbeat, and was probably loaded down with so many defenses that she couldn’t be taken by surprise. She looked like a friendly, smiling mom in a purple chiffon dress, but there was a lot more to her.
“You talked a lot about your grandfather, who you were apparently pretty close with, and your mother and father,” said Ria. “Sorry, this is always difficult, and one of the reasons I try to avoid the need for disclosure.” She shook her head. “It was late at night, after everyone else had gone to bed. You were by the fireplace, with Emperor, who you’ve grown quite fond of. You were talking about the wedding you had all been to, and that turned to talk about marriage, and you said that you didn’t really understand how your parents had done it, or how Harmon and I did it, how we got through all those years without ruining it.”
Mizuki frowned. It was frustrating, hearing it secondhand like this, but she thought there was probably no way that it wouldn’t be. Most of what Alfric told her about undone days was dry and boring, and he’d said that it was hard to report back on a conversation, mostly because summarizing was difficult work. She hadn’t quite believed him until he’d made her do it as a test, and she had grudgingly accepted that he wasn’t bad at it, it was just a hard thing to do. Now, talking to Ria, she was realizing how true that was. Or maybe being bad at telling people about conversations ran in the family.
“The answer that I gave to you, which I want to give you now, is that we screw up all the time,” said Ria. She was giving Mizuki a soft, motherly smile, of the sort that Mizuki hadn’t gotten a lot of lately. “What matters is what you do once you screw up. It’s admitting to your mistakes, trying to grow as a couple, giving the other person some leeway when they’re the one who made the mistake, all kinds of things. Every successful marriage you’ve ever seen has been the result of two people with a steady cart, it’s two people who were willing to pull up their sleeves and work things out.”
“I was talking about marriage?” asked Mizuki.
“You were talking about how you didn’t think it was for you,” said Ria. She shrugged. “You seemed sad about it.”
“Ah,” said Mizuki. “That does sound about right. Well, thanks for telling me, and thanks for the advice. Anything else I should know?”
“No,” said Ria, shaking her head. “So far as I know, you had a good time in the city, a good time at the concert, and just needed to vent a bit. But I know your family is far away from you, and if you need someone to be there for you, you just let me know, alright?”
“Um, alright,” said Mizuki. “Thanks. Was I —” she hesitated. “Was that all I said?”
“Just about,” said Ria. “Why?”
“No reason,” said Mizuki. “Just curious. Alfric does the disclosure thing with me a lot, and he’s pretty through, I think. This wasn’t too different, I’d just — you know, there are things that are on my mind, and I’d wondered whether we had talked about them, maybe.”
“No,” said Ria. “Or if we did, they didn’t leave an impression on me.”
“Maybe tonight then,” said Mizuki. She felt incredibly awkward. “I like the idea of talking with you.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” asked Ria.
“Um, sure,” said Mizuki.
Ria leaned in and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I like you better than any other friend of Alfric’s he’s ever brought home.”
Mizuki took some time to put her things away in one of the guest rooms, this time picking cotton white for herself. The house was, as ever, a highly magical place, and a part of her thought that if she had just three days in Dondrian, she would be best off spending all her time just moving through the rooms and discovering their secrets. Still, she had plans for her day, and she had resolved not to waste her time, as she so often did.
Mizuki’s first stop was a section of town with a relatively small number of Kiromon transplants, just enough of them to have a single street filled with traditional Kiromon businesses. There was a part of Mizuki that had expected it would have a feeling of home, but it was immediately clear that this was a different sort of culture, not at all like what the Kiromon exiles in Liberfell and Pucklechurch had created for themselves.
Kiromo, like Inter and Tarbin, was a country that had been formed from other countries. Unlike Inter, Kiromo had not had a relatively smooth integration of its three component countries. Instead, there had been long periods of political strife and horrifying complicated problems with the administration of the country, including something called a ‘salamander’ that Mizuki didn’t entirely understand, except that it wasn’t a literal salamander. Things were better in Kiromo now, especially with the new Emperor, but a place like this was a reflection of earlier struggles, and most of the people weren’t from the same part of Kiromo that Mizuki was.
Mizuki tried not to stare, but the faces were a bit rounder and a bit flatter, and they were of a stockier build. It hadn’t been what Mizuki expected. If anything she felt like more of an outsider, because in the rest of the city she was a citizen of Inter, and here she was different.
She didn’t let that stop her though.
“Ooo, what’s this?” asked Mizuki as she stepped up to a cart of street food.
“Alga tümchi,” a woman in a loose wrap replied. “Only five rings. There’s a bench to eat at.” She gestured to a small place that could seat, at most, eight people across a few tables. A couple were already eating soup there. The algo tümchi was a salad of some kind, and the cart had almost a dozen different containers with tongs to pluck things out. It was a bed of leafy greens, which then got layered with all kinds of carrots, onions, bits of meat, and a few miscellaneous nuts.
“Can I have two?” asked Mizuki.
The woman nodded and began preparing the bowls. Mizuki regretted asking for two as the process went on. She’d thought that it was a salad, and that she’d need two for a proper lunch, but there was a surprising amount of food for five rings each, and the bowls were somewhat overfilled, piled high.
“Is this like kide hirin?” asked Mizuki.
The woman paused only briefly, but then kept going with a scoff. “Kiromo dugt Tümchi.”
“Um,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t really catch that.”
“It means Kiromo isn’t the same as Tümchi,” said the woman with a cluck of her tongue. She held out her hand, and Mizuki stared at it for a moment before realizing it was a request for payment. It took a moment of fumbling in her bag, but Mizuki laid out the rings. “Similar, not the same.”
“Okay,” said Mizuki. “Sorry, I don’t really know what Tümchi is, or if I’m saying it right.”
“It’s a small island, a northern part of Kiromo now,” said the woman. She handed the bowls over to Mizuki. “A hundred and fifty years ago, my ancestors fled the encroaching empire.” She nodded to the two salads, which Mizuki had in hand. “Similar customs, similar food. Not the same.”
Mizuki took the food over to one of the small tables and began eating, first trying the Anyspoon, then switching to a fork when that proved a bit difficult. She was very aware of the woman with her stall. There wasn’t all that much foot traffic, so Mizuki just sat there eating her two salads, feeling like there were some eyes on the back of her head.
Mizuki looked around the area and wondered whether this whole area was filled with people who were four or five generations past some horrible thing happening in Tümchi. She was basically two generations past some horrible thing happening in Kiromo, and she wouldn’t have been able to say all that much about it, just a handful of sentences, maybe. Her grandfather had left because the Emperor was a bad one, and her grandfather had returned when the Emperor was a good one, and that was more or less that. She knew that she’d seen a map of the islands that made up Kiromo, and her grandfather had explained things for her once upon a time, but she’d been ten years old, and the relative positions of these different people hadn’t really stuck in her head.
It was all so much easier when she didn’t really have to worry about that kind of thing. She knew Pucklechurch, and she could visit other cities, or make journeys out into the countryside for dungeon runs, but she didn’t need to know. And with cooking, she never really cared whether something was like it had originally been done in Kiromo. There were certain flavors and scents, and certain dishes, but as she ate the salad she wondered whether it was authentic, whether it had been passed down from mother to daughter through the ages. She was halfway through the second salad when she thought about mistakes, and what to do about them.
“Hey, is this really how they make it in, um, Tümchi?” asked Mizuki. She hoped she was saying that right.
The woman stared at her for a moment. A few other customers had come by, but it was pretty clearly off-hours. “I don’t know,” the woman said. “I’ve never been to Tümchi.”
“Have you had kide hirin?” asked Mizuki. “Because I’ve had it, but it was what my mom made down in Pucklechurch — which is near Liberfell?” The woman kept shaking her head. “Well, it’s next to the Proten Lakes, kind of, in Greater Plenarch.”
“Ah,” the woman said.
“I don’t know what kide hirin is like in Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “So I’d guess that it’s ‘Kiromo dugt Pucklechurch’.” She smiled, and the woman gave a tentative smile back.
“Old tensions,” the woman said with a sigh. She turned to help a customer, and Mizuki returned to her salad. She had thought that would be the end of it, but the woman came to sit down next to Mizuki. “Sorry.”
“Oh, no worries,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “I don’t know anything about anything, I didn’t mean to step on your toes. See, with kide hirin, it’s basically whatever veggies and meat you have, sometimes with some fruit, and pickling no more than one ingredient because of the balance of flavors and stuff like that. Oh, and also you add oil sometimes, I guess. So I was just wondering, I guess, whether this was the same, if there’s something special about the meats you pick, or the veggies, or anything like that.”
“I look and see what’s on sale at the market,” the woman replied. “Never fruit, never sauce, unless it’s nulda, which is fish sauce, vinegar, and oil, with some chiles.”
“Interesting,” said Mizuki, and she meant it. “It’s really good, though I shouldn’t have gotten two bowls.”
They talked a bit more about foods, and what they liked in what was nominally a salad, and at the end of it, Mizuki felt better about her big mouth.
Her time in the city passed quickly, so quickly, in fact, that she was almost late to get dressed for the concert. She was scolded by Alfric and tried to play it off as though she was just being loose with the rules as always, but she did feel a bit embarrassed about it. There was a part of her that wanted to talk to Ria and see whether she could borrow a dress and some quick makeup, but Ria was nowhere to be seen, and if Mizuki had done it in the undone day, she thought it was something Ria should have mentioned.
Mizuki hadn’t known what to expect from the concert, but there were an absurd number of people there, all for Verity. Unlike at the opera, their party didn’t have a cushy box with food service, and the place was so packed that Mizuki felt mildly uncomfortable. She liked people, but there were just so many of them that it felt oppressive. Then the music started, and Mizuki let herself get lost in it, which was a necessity, because talking during the performance was utterly prohibited, and talking into the party channel would have been incredibly rude given who the performer was.
The performance was lovely, and there was something different about hearing it in a proper theater rather than out in the woods or from another room in the house. All the music was a bit over Mizuki’s head, though Verity had only tried to explain the importance and artistry of the pieces a single time, which had felt a bit half-hearted.
When the concert was over, they were allowed backstage, and there were hugs for Verity, which she seemed quite thankful for. Alfric had brought flowers, which he’d kept sitting on his lap through the whole concert. Mizuki had been hoping to meet the fabled Edil Parson, but Verity’s awful mother was nowhere to be seen, much to Verity’s relief. It had seemed like the whole thing might ultimately blow over, that the concerts would be ‘enough’, and with the concert done, the five of them had a night on the town together, with as much drinking and dancing as they could fit in without compromising Verity’s ability to perform the next day.
It wasn’t until the next night’s concert that things with Edil really came to a head.
Comments
fbt
a big Yay! for serialized media and all the lovely stories it enables! >;P I really enjoy the frequent bits. Tradpub schedules mean i've often entirely lost interest in an IP by the time a sequel comes out, generally. At least the mini-cliffies don't last long, and authors are pretty good (mostly) about not going overboard with it.
Ross Owen Qualls
A big boooo for serialized media and it allowing/necessitating cliff hangers
