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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 108, The Warehouse
🕑 Added 2022-06-06 16:12:56 +0000 UTC~~~~
“We’re still working on paring it down,” said Grig. “Obviously there’s a ton of stuff here, and a lot of the certifications have been stripped off, and there are other problems, but just ask and I should be able to tell you whether it’s up for grabs or not. Please no testing.”
“What do you mean certifications stripped off?” asked Mizuki. She was looking at a collection of glassware, all in different colors and designs. The golden glowing hair and eyes had lasted three days before wearing off, and she had said the only reason she didn’t immediately reapply them was that they might be going to the concert before it would wear off again.
“When the Unspeakable Queen left, she took her counterparty with her, and per the terms of the initial agreement, which were generous to us, she had to leave behind all of our collective stuff,” said Grig. “In theory, it was a sweetheart arrangement for us, but either by her directive or her parents or someone on their payroll, all this stuff got dumped off in basically the most inconvenient way possible. Certifications came from clerics of Qymmos, or in some cases, other entads, and most of them were just stripped from the entads that were handed back to us.”
“That’s a jerk move,” said Verity.
“Well, you know,” said Grig. “There’s a reason she’s Unspeakable.”
“So you don’t know what any of these do?” asked Mizuki, pointing at the collection of glassware.
“No, we know some, maybe most, just because we remember them,” said Grig. “Just ask and I’ll see if we know. The others were supposed to be here today, but Josen is off ‘training’ with Kell, Mardin is missing and not responding over the party channel, and Marsh is too busy canoodling with his girlfriend.”
“Har har,” said Marsh, who was in private conversation with Hannah off to one side.
“Seems like a scam,” said Mizuki. “We have to ask about each one? For the good ones, you’ll just say ‘oh I don’t know’, so we get stuck with the bad ones.”
“That was the deal,” said Grig. “It was for the bad ones, the trifles.”
“You know what I mean,” said Mizuki.
“I really don’t,” said Grig. “We’re not trying to rip you off here, these are just —”
“It’s sometimes better to just ignore her,” said Hannah. “She’s havin’ you on.”
Grig looked around at the others. “I want it to be equitable.”
“A likely story,” said Mizuki. She pointed at a small marble. “What’s that one do?”
“Um,” said Grig, moving closer. “Stores memories, I think? You can test it out.”
“I’d thought there would be more,” said Alfric. He seemed none too impressed by what was in the makeshift warehouse.
“Fifty dungeons,” said Grig with a shrug. “Most of the best big money stuff is either being used by the party or off at auction, unless it’s been sold already. There are still, er, three hundred pieces or so, that’s plenty.”
It was, as Isra understood it, supposed to be a quick stop, but she could already tell that it was going to take them the better part of the morning. Part of it was that Mizuki was in a particularly silly mood, part of it was needing to inquire about most of the entads in order to know their functions, and the final part was Marsh and Hannah being in their own little world.
“Something on your mind?” Isra asked Verity.
“Hmm?” asked Verity. “No, nothing much, just the concerts. If I let them be out of my mind, I’m worried that I won’t be able to perform up to standards. It’s an interesting thing, how your mind can keep working on music even when it’s not playing, though I think the same could probably be said for most things. If you thought about cooking every waking hour of the day, you’d be a better cook for it, I’d bet.”
“I’m not sure we should do a dungeon today,” said Isra. “Not if you’re worried about the concerts.”
“We’re doing a dungeon because I’m worried,” said Verity. “I’m treating it as a break from the stress, as a fun thing to do, even if it’s not always a fun thing to do. Besides, we’re dungeoneers.”
“Anything you’re looking for?” asked Isra.
“By definition it would be pretty stupid to look for anything specific,” said Verity.
“I’m looking for a plate that says the name of your food when you load it up,” said Mizuki. She gave Verity a smile, then turned to Grig. “Do you have anything like that?”
“We have a sword that says the name of the body part you’ve struck,” said Grig. “Which is surprisingly close, all things considered.”
“I’ll pass,” said Mizuki. “What do you have in cookware?”
“I’m warning you now, we’re not parting with anything that makes food,” said Grig. “They’re too valuable. But could I interest you in a chef’s knife that will make consistent cuts?”
“Ooo,” said Mizuki. “You definitely could. Do you have a carrot I could borrow to test it?”
“A … carrot?” asked Grig.
“I love this guy,” laughed Mizuki.
The room had been a workshop before, Grig had explained, and they were renting it just in the short term, since it was relatively cheap. They would have to move everything out in about three months, when someone else was due to take possession of the place, but in the meantime, they had somewhere to store all their things. There were shelves all around, and some of the vestiges of the old workshop could be seen, mostly in some hastily covered holes in the floor and areas that were clearly marked out for something or the other.
“I’m also surprised that you don’t have this all in extradimensional space,” said Alfric.
“Oh, well, we do have a few storage entads,” said Grig. He had handed the knife to Mizuki for inspection, apparently not thinking that this was a dangerous thing to do, and she immediately started stabbing the air. “But they all come with their own drawbacks, and the Unspeakable took our best one, which was a little room that rearranged things.”
“A room?” asked Alfric.
“Oh, you’d have loved it,” said Grig. “It was like a little bowl.” He made a shape with his hands. “You accessed it through a tall shield, and had to stoop to get in, but you could throw stuff in there and it would fly up onto the wall, and then once you were in, you could rearrange things just by thinking about where they should go.” He sighed. “Gone now, unfortunately. We could attempt litigation to get it back, but … well, I don’t expect that to work, and it’s not that big of a deal.”
“Sorry,” said Alfric.
“We’ll find a replacement,” said Grig. “Hopefully soon, so we can empty this place out. We were lucky that we could dump it all here. Hey, if you do find a really good storage entad, let me know, we might be able to negotiate something.”
“We have three,” said Alfric. “Though like yours, they’re all limited in their own ways, and I wouldn’t want to have any of them as long-term storage.”
“Is this mirror on offer?” asked Isra, touching it briefly. It was a large one, full length, and she could see herself from head to toe. She looked good, she thought, though she was partially in her dungeoneering gear.
“It’s terrible,” said Grig. “You can travel through it, but it links up with the nearest mirror, which usually isn’t far away, and usually isn’t big enough to get through.”
“Travel entads are usually good,” said Isra, touching the wood frame of the mirror. It was set in a stand, in a way that she hadn’t ever seen before. “On a ship, perhaps?”
“Range is limited to two hexes,” said Grig. “And it’ll link up with any mirror, even a little hand mirror, just based on whatever is close. If you want it, it’s yours, it’s definitely what I would consider a trifle.”
“I’ll keep looking,” said Isra.
“I think I have mine,” said Hannah from across the room. She was holding up a small tube of lipstick, which she’d clearly already applied to her lips. “Watch and be amazed.”
She blew a kiss toward Marsh, and a red mark floated through the air until it struck him on the cheek, where the imprint of her lips remained.
“Wow that’s useless,” said Mizuki.
“How much lipstick is in there?” asked Alfric.
“Infinite,” said Marsh. “It keeps making more.”
“Better used as a crayon than lipstick,” said Grig. “You can mark your path in a dungeon or something. It’s not high quality lipstick.”
“Well, I’m takin’ it,” said Hannah. “Though not so we have a fancy lipstick pencil.”
“Sure,” said Grig. “That’s one down.”
“Nah, I’m taking the knife,” said Mizuki. “That’s two. Though it’s mostly because of the style, it’ll go nicely with the stuff that’s already in the house.”
“Alfric?” asked Grig. He pulled a knife from a nearby shelf. “Can I interest you in a throwing dagger that returns to your hand?” He whipped it at a far wall with a flourish and held out his hand without looking. The small knife returned to his palm with a satisfying smacking sound.
“Throwing knives are horribly overrated,” said Alfric.
“You always said that,” said Grig, grinning. “But this one has a marvelous property, which is that it comes back to you just before it hits something, meaning that you can practice with it all you like and not have to worry about it getting dull.” He grinned and flipped the knife around. “Want to try it?”
“So it’s useless?” asked Isra.
“Useless is in the eye of the beholder,” said Alfric. He threw the knife, hard, toward the wall and held his hand out to catch it when it returned. “Works on people?” he asked.
“Yes, if you mean that it doesn’t actually cut people,” said Grig. “You could throw it at me and it would bounce back to your hand at the moment it was about to hit me.”
Alfric flipped the knife around and looked at Grig.
“Do me!” called Mizuki. She moved off to some distance away and stood with her arms out.
Alfric raised the knife for a throw, then lowered it and narrowed his eyes at her. “Alright, fine.”
He threw the knife as hard as he could, and as soon as it touched Mizuki, she doubled over, crying out in pain. Alfric caught the knife, then calmly walked over to where she was screaming on the floor and nudged her with the toe of his boot.
“You’re getting predictable,” he said.
“Merrr,” said Mizuki, flopping onto her back. “I’m dying, can’t you see?” Alfric’s face didn’t change expression. “It’s such a good gag. You can’t turn down a gag like that when you see one Alfric, I hope that’s the lesson you take from this.”
Alfric went back to Grig and handed over the knife. “I’m looking for something a little more practical.”
“Trifles, remember?” asked Grig.
“There are still useful trifles,” said Alfric. “Minor conveniences, minor boons, things like that.”
“I’m not entirely clear why we’re owed these trifles,” said Isra.
“It was part of the chrononaut contingency deal,” said Alfric. “Mostly thrown in. But hopefully this won’t take all that much longer, because we’re still doing a dungeon later today.”
“Verity and I will go look around,” said Isra. “We won’t be much longer.”
Isra veered over to some other things that were sitting around, these from what seemed like it had been a short-lived labeling project. Given that Vertex had been under their new management for a few weeks now, and that they hadn’t really been running dungeons during most of that time, it seemed to Isra that they could have made much more headway on their inventory issue. Being generous, she supposed they were working on getting new members, and it seemed as though the various individuals that made up Vertex were putting in wildly different amounts of work, with Marsh in particular spending most of his time with Hannah.
“That was cute,” said Verity. “Seeing Hannah blow a kiss.”
Isra wasn’t sure how to respond to that. She was happy that Hannah seemed to have found a good mate, but she didn’t find the display of affection to be particularly cute. She wasn’t sure you were supposed to look at the flirting and courtship of others and think highly of it. It wasn’t particularly something that animals did, looking at the courtships which they weren’t participants in, not in the same way that Verity was implying.
Isra had learned, by this point, that when she was attempting to compare human and animal behavior, that was a sign that she’d gotten badly off track and was floundering in her lack of knowledge.
“Do you wish I did that?” asked Isra.
“Blew me kisses using a magic item?” asked Verity. She laughed. “It’s quite specific.”
Isra didn’t know whether that was an attempt to brush off the question or a sign that her question didn’t make any sense, so she let it lie and tried to focus on reading through the entads.
There were so many things. A brush that changed the colors of things without paint. A bracelet let you spit your teeth out at high speed. A chemise let you walk on your hands. A metal pear which could be juggled even if you didn’t know how to juggle. A set of bowls that were so slippery that nothing could stick to them and they could only be held by gripping them tightly in your hands. A fancy pen that disassembled itself. A blanket that piled other blankets on top of it when you were cold. A wide-brimmed hat that made you two feet shorter, with most of the height taken from the legs. A cup that would shatter whenever it was touched and rebuilt itself when someone sang. A clock that indicated the cycles of the moons. A black choker that could adjust the texture of your skin. A lamp that acted as the only light source in twenty feet when it was on. A plate that could hover three inches off the table. A chair that could rotate beneath you, moving at your will. A dagger that vibrated when it got wet.
There was a lot of stuff, and nothing in particular grabbed Isra’s attention. This was in contrast to Mizuki, who changed her mind a dozen times in the course of moving through the warehouse, always finding something new that she thought was the best thing ever. The descriptions of these things came from either the sporadic bits of paper that were tied to them — some overflowing with information, others so sparse they needed interpretation — or from Grig and Marsh explaining what they could.
“We should own an entad shop,” said Mizuki. “Then we could do this all day.”
“Weren’t you dating someone who owned an entad shop?” asked Grig.
“We don’t talk about that,” said Mizuki. “Ugh, now I feel bad.”
“Traditionally it’s a bad idea to move into entad sales,” said Alfric. “At least, when you’re at the end of your career as a dungeoneer. You accumulate all this random junk, you know that you need to sell it, you decide that you don’t want the entad dealer to take a cut, then you open up your own store and it fails within the year.”
“Why?” asked Isra.
“Eh, a combination of things,” said Grig. “You start with this inventory, and a lot of it is like this,” he gestured broadly at the room, “not really very good, and you have an attachment to it, because you, I don’t know, fought a giant slime for it with your best friends a few years ago. And the things you need in order to be an entad seller are a broad knowledge of the market, connections to dungeoneers and other sellers, good ability to sell things to people, and all kinds of other things.” He looked over at Alfric. “We talked about this once, didn’t we?”
“We did,” said Alfric. He turned to Isra. “The only thing that being a dungeoneer gets you is maybe some contacts, maybe some experience selling entads, and a bit of starting inventory. But it’s not enough, not on its own.”
“Then why do they do it?” asked Isra. “These retired dungeoneers.”
“That’s more complicated,” said Alfric.
“Probably when you decide that you’re out of the game, you want to keep a foot in,” said Hannah. “You think ‘welp, I’ve spent my whole life doin’ this thing, I should keep on doin’ it, I can’t give up all this knowledge, don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not a dungeoneer’, and then you run into the problem that there aren’t really all that many things a retired dungeoneer can do that will keep them in the community, doin’ the same things. You can help out with Junior League, I’m sure, or the League itself, but I’d be quite surprised if there were enough jobs for all the dungeoneers who’ve had their fill of the actual dungeons.”
“Isn’t the point of doing all the dungeons that you can just … coast?” asked Verity.
“Sure, sure,” said Hannah. “But then I imagine you’ve been doin’ it for five or ten years or so, or more, and you don’t really understand what it is to stick around in one place, to be a normal person who doesn’t kill monsters, and you want to be a part of the world. You get caught in your patterns and don’t know how to let go.”
“So you start an entad business that fails,” said Alfric. He shrugged.
“There’s a Kesbin sermon,” said Hannah. “Lettin’ go, freein’ yourself from old things, old emotions, old patterns, old memories.”
This appealed to Isra, in a way she thought she wouldn’t have been able to articulate if she’d been put on the spot.
Isra hadn’t been to her house in four days. When she’d returned from Plenarch, she’d brought all her new clothes into the room she sometimes shared with Verity, along with all the makeup and other things. All of her dungeoneering things were likewise at the house. And most of her clothes she’d worn before, those of the Tarbin style, were now reserved for dungeoneering. Since they were going to a dungeon later in the day, Isra was wearing those old clothes, and she was surprised by how restrictive they felt compared to the dresses she’d worn almost every day since Plenarch.
Eventually she would sever that connection entirely. She would keep a few things, and do her best to honor her father and the mother she never met, but the cabin in the woods would be given its funeral, maybe within the next month, and she would move the last of her things out of it, either to Mizuki’s house or some kind of long-term storage. But even storage felt like the wrong thing to do, like it was locking those things away solely for their sentimental value, rather than because she might ever have a use for them. Someday she might have children, but she couldn’t imagine trying to explain to a child all the memories she’d had of her father, and how those memories seemed to still reside in a chair or a table that they’d used when eating meals.
Verity needed to cast off her past too, and Isra wished that she knew how to help with that. Verity had tried to leave, and been successful right up until the point where her family wanted her back. Even without financial ruin, they’d have sent someone like Alfric again, and again, until they had established contact, and from there it seemed likely that Verity wouldn’t be able to withstand the onslaught.
The problem, really, was that Verity did love her mother, at least in some sense of the word. It wasn’t as simple as telling the woman to go pound sand. The problem was, it needed to come to a head at some point, or Verity would be stuck in the same pattern of being miserable while serving her mother’s interests. The concerts were making enormous sums of money, at least so far as Isra could tell, but Isra didn’t for one moment think that it would ever be enough. For those sorts of people, you could simply never have enough money, because the money wasn’t being used for things, not really, it was being used to show off how much money you had.
There was something that Verity found attractive in Isra, something beyond the shared attraction and a certain quietness they both liked to indulge in. Verity liked that Isra was wild. When they were together, Isra had no problem being wild for Verity, turning bestial if that was what Verity most responded to. It was something that Verity liked — yearned for, even — being free from the strictures of polite society. Yet Verity did so little to buck those conventions herself, and Isra didn’t quite understand it, except through the lens of having always done things in a certain way and needing to break the pattern. If there were changes, they were coming slowly, a bit of salty language here and there, or a touch of bad manners, and none of this rebellion was directed where it actually needed to be directed, which was at Verity’s own mother.
Isra tried to have faith that everything would work out, that she and Verity would grow together. It was difficult though, because she worried they would like each other less as they grew. The things they liked about each other seemed to be the things they didn’t like about themselves. If Verity stripped off the veneer of civilization and became a howling wolf of a woman, Isra wasn’t sure that she would still feel the same attraction. She’d fallen in love with Verity, graceful and poised, always with the right thing to say, always demure and charming. There was nothing to say that she wouldn’t love the other Verity, but it wasn’t a guarantee.
“I think I’ll take this one,” said Verity, holding up an hourglass. She had been carrying it around for a bit while she looked for something better.
“I don’t think you told me what that one did,” said Isra.
“It gives a half hour of sleep, once a day, as though you’d napped,” said Verity. “You need to be in bed for it to work, but that’s not a big deal.”
“Will Grig let us have that?” asked Isra.
“He seems annoyed,” said Verity, looking across the room. “My guess is he wants us to get out and will settle for something more than a vaguely defined trifle. What do you have?”
“It’s a scarf,” said Isra. She held it up. It was a thin material, pink silk, and it moved around her hand like a snake twisting itself to stay in place. “It can move around and tie itself to me.” She let it go, and by way of demonstration, it slithered up her arm and to her hair, which it wrapped itself around to tie the curls back in a ponytail. “Quite fetching, I think.”
“It is nice,” Verity admitted.
“What?” asked Isra.
“You don’t want something more practical?” asked Verity.
Isra gave a little laugh. “It’s for me, not for Alfric.”
“True,” Verity smiled.
It took Mizuki the longest of all of them to pick something out, and eventually she settled on the knife that she’d started the whole thing with, which she had been assured would work even if she was cutting as quickly as humanly possible. Alfric eventually settled on a gilded brooch that would affix to his chest and translate all his clothes, armor, tools, and weapons into a cohesive style. Unfortunately, it was always the same style, and that style was, generously, a matter of taste.
“I don’t think it’s hideous,” said Verity. “Just … not you.”
The brooch turned fabric white with gold trim, and turned metal into gold with embossing and engraving of a floral style, with occasional flourishes of animals, so much that it was almost difficult to look at. Isra found the filigree to be a bit much, but it was cohesive, from his boots to his shirt, and even including the weapon at his hip.
“I don’t understand why you’d want it,” said Hannah. “I agree it’s not you.”
“It’s a good look,” said Alfric, looking down at himself. “Like something a prince would wear. Besides, one of the things entads are notorious for is having their style not match, and this way I won’t need to go through the massively expensive process of entad alteration. I do want to see what it looks like with thimble armor, but I don’t want to spend the time right now. We have a dungeon, after all.”
“I think it looks nice,” said Mizuki. She tugged at a bright white sleeve. “Very knight in shining armor.”
“Then we’re all done here?” asked Grig, looking around. “Everyone has what they want, we can close out this chapter of our lives?”
“I think so,” nodded Alfric. “It took less time than I’d thought it would.”
“It took more time than I thought I would, but I guess I wasn’t doing too much else today, aside from some music practice.” He glanced at Verity. “I heard your concert went well, congratulations.”
“How’d you hear?” asked Verity.
“It was in the paper,” said Grig. “The local one, the Liberfell Gazette. I guess because they consider you a local or something. Selling out the Ellusifé is no mean feat.” It was the sort of thing that Verity didn’t like to hear, because she’d had nothing to do with ticket sales. “I, uh, sometimes forget that we’re in nominally the same profession, at roughly the same age, and you’re just —” he raised his hand way above his head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it weird, but I just, uh, wonder about it sometimes.”
“If you can find your way to Dondrian, I can get you a ticket,” said Verity. “As a friend.”
“Oh,” said Grig. “That would be wonderful.”
“We hear the songs a lot,” said Mizuki. “So if you wanted to, you could just come by the house.”
“That too,” nodded Verity.
“Well, that would be great,” said Grig. “We could jam together, if — if you do that?”
“I do,” said Verity. “Sometimes.” So far as Isra knew, and so far as she could decipher ‘jam together’, this bordered on being a lie, because the only person that Verity had played with was Clemency, and then only briefly. The replacement bard at the Fig and Gristle had come over only twice, both times briefly, and they’d played together for only one of those times. Still, perhaps Verity was being aspirational. Isra liked that. Verity didn’t ‘jam’ with people, but she wanted to be the sort of person who did.
They left the makeshift warehouse after that, and it had gotten late enough that it was time for lunch. Isra had hoped that they would get noodles, which she’d had before, but Mizuki was keen to go to something called a ‘meat house’, and seemed to have a stronger opinion on it than anyone else.
The Mete Hus was a relatively large place, as restaurants went, dominated by a grill in the middle with heat that could be felt even from far away. A husband and wife couple tended to the grill, flipping over pieces of meat, mopping them with sauces, and piling things onto plates that were taken over to the tables. There were a few pots of things bubbling at different parts of the fire, but the focus seemed to be entirely on the meats, which made sense given the name of the place.
“Just remember that we don’t want to eat too much,” said Alfric. “You don’t want to be fighting while hungry, but you also don’t want to be fighting after stuffing yourself.”
“Meat platter it is,” said Hannah.
“I’m serious,” said Alfric. “We can go for a walk after this, but we’re doing a dungeon in short order, and I’d prefer for everyone to be in fighting shape.”
“I’m not entirely sure what a meat house is,” said Isra. “Other than that they have a lot of meat?”
“They do basically just meat,” said Mizuki. “There’s some rice and beans for sides, a bit of bread with butter if you want it, some roasted veggies, but it’s almost entirely about the meat, which they’re just really, really good at cooking. And this place is supposed to be one of the best, though the only time I went was when I was younger, and I don’t really remember it that well.”
Their waiter came with menus, which were placed down on the table without much further comment, after which he left. It struck Isra as rude, but he didn’t seem to care all that much, and she felt like the only one who was off-put by it. Her experience eating places was incredibly limited.
“How do they have so much variety?” asked Alfric.
“Entad,” said Mizuki. “Not for making things, but for storing them, I think. Since they can store meat indefinitely without it rotting or getting freezer burn, they can have literally anything ready and on hand for cooking.” She was looking down the menu. “I actually might get the platter.”
“To share?” asked Hannah.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Mizuki. “I wish there were a restaurant where I could order one bite of everything on the menu.”
“They have that in Dondrian,” said Verity. “It’s a Chelxic style.”
“And no one told me?” asked Mizuki.
“It’s not my preferred method of eating,” said Verity. “But it does have its advantages.”
“Seems like a pain in the butt to cook,” said Hannah. “Though I suppose I don’t know what goes on in a commercial kitchen.”
“They sell lizzo meat here,” said Isra, looking at the menu. “I wasn’t aware it was edible.”
“Is it poisonous?” asked Mizuki.
“No,” said Isra. “This isn’t a druid thing, I had thought there was a reason people didn’t eat it, something about the meat that made it … tough.”
“It’s a temperature thing, I think,” said Alfric. “You need it really hot in order to properly cook the meat, more than most kitchens can even get to, but then you need it also to be in a pretty specific range of temperatures.”
“Does it taste great or something?” asked Mizuki.
“Not to my knowledge,” said Alfric. “Though I’ve never had it.”
“Even with all those food entads you have at your house?” asked Hannah.
“I didn’t try every single meat under the sun,” said Alfric with a shrug.
“Welp, we’re splitting the meat platter,” said Mizuki. “It says it’s enough meat for two.”
“I think you’re sayin’ the word ‘meat’ too much,” said Hannah.
“I agree, actually,” said Isra. “I’m much more about the eating than the speaking.”
It took some time for their waiter to come back, carrying a tray with glasses of water for all of them, and they had been ready to order for quite some time. Hannah and Mizuki were splitting something called a meat platter, Alfric was getting a plate of chicken thighs with some sides, Isra was having blackened fish, and Isra had eventually settled on a selection of pork prepared in different ways.
“I don’t understand why dungeon meat isn’t more popular,” said Isra as she drank some water and waited for the food. Her stomach was rumbling.
“Sure you do,” Mizuki. “Didn’t we talk about this before?”
“It takes time and practice to figure meat out,” said Alfric. “To figure anything out. Even if you pull something almost like a pig out of a dungeon, you’re probably going to have to try a few times to get it right.”
“I swear we talked about this,” said Mizuki.
“Are we never going to eat that bear meat?” asked Isra. “If we’re not, that’s fine, but I want to know.”
“We had a bit,” said Mizuki. “It’s just … not something I know how to cook well, and inflicting cooking experiments on people is, uh, something that I only want to do when I think I have a good idea.”
“If I’d known it would go to waste, I wouldn’t have harvested it,” said Isra. “I’ll have to sell it. That and the goat ribs.”
“We’d need an army to eat all those goat ribs,” said Mizuki.
“I do think there’s something to be said for dungeon meats,” said Alfric. “The problem is selling them, really. But … to really do that, we would want to be selling them ourselves, but then we’d need to open a restaurant, ideally, and I don’t really see that working out without a lot of entad assistance. And we’d be competing against restaurants with their own entads, many of which would be just flatly outclassing us.”
“Grim,” said Mizuki.
“You’re a good cook,” said Alfric. “But you, cooking with dungeon meats, or with dungeon plants too, would be —”
“I don’t want to be a professional,” said Mizuki. “And if we do ever get to the point where we’re like your aunt, where we can just spit out custom meals for everyone, then I think I’ll still cook.”
“Well alright, good,” said Alfric. “Then we’re not running a dungeon meat shop.”
“Do such things exist?” asked Isra.
“In Dondrian, I think,” said Alfric. “But it’s solely for the novelty, and being for the novelty means that there are some hard limits on how big the business can ever get.”
Isra couldn’t help but find that slightly disappointing, but it wasn’t as though she’d actually wanted to open up a dungeon meat shop. Money was much less of a concern now, and she knew that among the things she needed to stop holding onto was the idea that she needed to earn money for a sense of security or some nebulous future. If she wanted to go to Tarbin, she had the money to do that already, and she’d been able to spend freely when buying new clothes and getting a makeover. The plans for making more money from dungeon meat had been borne of desires that didn’t really apply all that much anymore, and which would apply less and less as they did more dungeons.
When the food finally came, Isra was famished, but that helped to make everything taste better. She was, perhaps, in the mood of Kesbin, because she ruminated on that as they all ate their food. Kesbin was the God of Fasting, though she didn’t think there was all that much textual support for the practice within the Keserbin.
“This is so good,” said Mizuki. “I wish I could cook like this.”
“You’re already amazin’,” said Hannah as she used her teeth to pull meat from a bone. “Though I do agree we could send you off for an apprenticeship at this place.”
“It’s the heat,” said Alfric. He had eaten quickly, then slowed down once more than half his food was gone. “Careful control of heat is the hallmark of this sort of thing, and it’s incredibly difficult to get right, mostly because you can’t see or feel the heat.”
“Not without an entad,” said Verity.
“You’re blind,” said Isra. She considered that. “That’s interesting.”
“You’re really not blind when it comes to heat,” said Mizuki. “I mean really not blind. You hold your hand out and you can know how hot a thing is, because you know that from some distance away it’s, you know, some certain temperature. And you can see what the food is doing when it’s cooking, which is literally using your eyeballs. And you know from experience.”
“You don’t think it’s mostly experience?” asked Alfric.
“Did you want some fish?” Verity asked Isra.
“Yes, please,” Isra replied. She put some of her pork onto Verity’s plate without asking, a chunk of belly and a single long rib. The ‘blackened’ fish was apparently not cooked too long, as Isra had assumed, but rather smothered in herbs.
Everything was delicious, though the sides were somewhat lacking, which had been expected. Isra was still learning how to cook, though she could make a few basic meals with some supervision, and she wondered what it would take for her to be able to cook pork like this. Probably an entad, if she was being honest with herself, especially if Mizuki continued to cook the vast majority of their meals.
Eventually the meal was finished, with Alfric helping to finish off the meat platter, which turned out to be far too big for just two people. The food was paid for from the party fund, which was had so much money in it that they could have eaten at the meat house twice a day for a year, or something like that.
“We’re still good for the dungeon, right?” asked Alfric.
“GIve me a bit,” said Mizuki. “I was trying my best not to overeat, but it was just so much meat.”
“We should have done noodles,” said Alfric.
“I liked it,” said Verity. “It was a good change of pace.”
They ended up sitting in a park for a bit and playing a game of Alfric’s own design, done with a cheap deck of cards that he had tucked away in the chest. By the third round, Mizuki had her energy back, and they were ready to go.
Personally, Isra might have been fine if they didn’t do the dungeon at all. She wasn’t entirely clear what they were getting from it, aside from more money, which they didn’t really need. There was a chance that they would find some marvelous new entad that would improve their storage situation, or allow them to freely travel to the cities of the world, but it seemed unlikely.
They were going into the dungeon, it seemed, because this was just the sort of thing they did. Isra wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
