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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 123, The Sea and the Breeze
🕑 Added 2022-07-27 15:40:42 +0000 UTC~~~~
Mi-zu-ki and Ver-ity!
When they’re to-gether there’s lots of glee!
Stick a-round and you will see!
Today might be the day they climb a tree!
“Wow,” said Verity. “That was something.”
“I worked on it all last night,” said Mizuki. She beamed at Verity.
“Can I — I mean, you’re joking, right?” asked Verity. “I’m going to feel bad if you’re not, but —”
“Yes, yes, it’s a joke,” said Mizuki.
Verity took a breath. “Because if you wanted help writing songs —”
“It’s bad on purpose,” said Mizuki. “And therefore beyond criticism.”
“Ah,” said Verity. “You know, I should try that sometime. Next time there’s a major concert in Dondrian I’ve been forced into, I’ll give it a shot.”
“Okay, so how would you do it, if you had to do a song about us, for real?” asked Mizuki. “We are, after all, the original pair." By this she meant they were the first two to be recruited by Alfric. "Which is why I’m glad we’re doing this.”
“That I don’t know,” said Verity. “Give me some time to think. Maybe a compare and contrast, or casting us as two opposite things, the breeze and a sea, or something like that.” She hummed slightly to herself, a tune coming as if from nowhere. “I’ll work on it later, hard to do that and talk.”
They were Having A Day together, which meant a trip to Liberfell, a walk, a picnic, and a bit of shopping to ‘get Mizuki some fashionable clothes’. Mizuki didn’t particularly think she needed fashionable clothes — her clothes suited her well, and had felt fashionable enough —, but it was something for them to do together. They were going for a walk through a park together, along a trail that Mizuki had gone on with Isra before. The chest trundled after them, five feet behind, and when they needed to take a break, it made a convenient bench.
“So, Isra was spying on you with some birds, she said,” remarked Mizuki. It had been three days since then.
They had been scheduled for a dungeon the day before, but in the morning Alfric had called it off, because they’d apparently failed again. He seemed shaken by it. It had been a total party wipe that time, with no time for him to process before he woke up in bed, having not actually been bisected by a lancing beam of fire — or having undone it, if you wanted to be technical about it. Worse, they’d gone through seven rooms of a difficult dungeon before that point, all of which seemed to be weighing on Alfric.
Mizuki had wanted to spend time with him, to comfort him, to let him tell her about all the stuff he was feeling rather than the mechanics of the dungeon, what abilities the monsters had, the party formation, drills, response patterns, and all that other stuff he liked to go on about. Instead, Alfric had scheduled himself a trip to Plenarch, and Mizuki, for lack of something productive, had invited Verity to go to Liberfell. Mizuki did not like the cabin arrangement, as much as Verity had declared herself to be a solitary creature.
“She did spy, yes,” said Verity. “To be honest, I felt relieved.”
Mizuki made a face. “Not how I’d feel.”
“I’d thought that it was just over,” said Verity. “And it turns out that it’s not, not completely. She still cares. She still wants to be friends. We can stop avoiding each other.”
“Yeah, but now we’ve got to be looking over our shoulders,” said Mizuki. “Now we can’t trust birds. I used to like birds.”
Verity shrugged. “I’d made peace with the idea that she might be watching, at least when I went out. I guess I don’t feel the same way. I do care for her, immensely, which might color my view.” She sighed. “And like I said, I was mostly happy that it wasn’t as dire as I’d thought.”
“You still sit on opposite sides of the table,” said Mizuki. “Never on the same couch.” Mizuki hadn’t noticed that herself, it was Alfric who’d remarked on it, but once he’d said something, it was hard to unsee. They were at least in the same room together, but they were usually across from each other.
“Well,” said Verity. “Yes. Because if we were together, it might feel like, oh, I don’t know. Like it was old times.” She didn’t elaborate. Mizuki wondered if it was the right place to ask a question.
“I get it,” Mizuki said instead. She had kept her distance from more than a few people in her time.
“I’m sorry about the dungeons, by the way,” said Verity as she stepped over the root of a tree. It was right on the path, and had been rubbed shiny from the no doubt hundreds of people who had stepped on it over the years.
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “Don’t be. I mean, it might not even be you. Who knows why dungeons are the way they are?”
“It probably is me,” said Verity. “I’ve been trying to be happier, more at peace, but that’s a struggle. It’s especially a struggle when I think I might infect the next dungeon with something.”
“I talk with Vertex a lot,” said Mizuki. “They don’t seem like they have a cakewalk of it.”
“Mmm,” said Verity. “I guess I haven’t talked to other dungeoneers or read dungeon reports, so I don’t know for certain.”
“Nah, no one but Alfric reads dungeon reports,” said Mizuki. “I just know about them because Alfric talks about them a lot.”
“You’re good friends,” said Verity. Her voice was studiously neural.
“Well, yeah,” said Mizuki. “I think we just vibe really well.” She paused. “You know, I spend a lot of undone days with him, which maybe helped him learn how to navigate me.”
“In what sense?” asked Verity. “Do you … need navigating?”
There was something about the way she said ‘in what sense’ that struck Mizuki. A normal person would have just said ‘what do you mean’. Maybe that wasn’t true, or it was Mizuki picking up on things that weren’t there.
“Yeah, I need navigating sometimes,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “I am a river with many rapids.”
“Hmm,” said Verity. She was quiet for what felt like a while, and Mizuki kept her mouth shut, not wanting to interrupt. She knew she had a way of filling the air with noise. “I don’t think anything rhymes with ‘rapids’.”
“That’s what you were thinking about?” asked Mizuki.
“I thought it was a good line,” said Verity. “Now, not every line has to rhyme, but it’s what I like in a song. There’s a feeling of knowing what’s coming.” She lifted her chin and sang.
I am a river with many rapids
A flowing stream of cerulean dreams
Won’t you raft down me
with paddles out-stretched
And mind the danger
of death
It was a short and sweet song, with a wandering melody, and Mizuki actually quite liked it.
“I’ve always admired your voice,” said Mizuki. “And your lyrics.”
“Thank you,” said Verity. “That one was horrible.”
“I mean, if I’m the river, then the song is saying, um,” said Mizuki. “That I want people to paddle down me, meaning partner with me or whatever, but they need to be careful, and might die?”
“Something like that,” said Verity. “But it wasn’t about you, it was about what the metaphor evokes. And I think it’s likely true for myself.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “I guess I don’t even know what your rapids are.”
“Oh, lots of things, I think,” said Verity. “A tendency toward melancholy, a bit of completely unnecessary self-sacrifice, a compressing of emotion until it becomes crystalized into a weapon of sharp edges … I could likely go on, but I’ve lately come to the realization that I wasn’t raised correctly, and I think that’s the source of most of my problems. You know, for a time I felt like I was doing pretty well, but then my mother came back into the picture and laid bare that I might actually have some growing to do.”
“Did she?” asked Mizuk. “You think if your mom hadn’t come back, you’d still be having problems?”
“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I think part of the problem with Isra was that she started changing, and I didn’t like that change.”
“Why?” asked Mizuki.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Verity. “Why does a person like anything?”
“Heard,” said Mizuki, nodding.
They were almost out of the woods, which would bring them to the park. Mizuki had made a lunch for them, and the walk — hike, if they were being generous — had built up an appetite. Mizuki had acquired some of those little stacking tin pots, and while Verity was setting out a blanket, Mizuki was making sure that the ectad plates had kept everything warm or hot, as the conditions required. They had rice, pork, roasted veggies taken right from the garden, a cold soup, and some chilled fruit.
“So why are we doing this?” asked Verity as she sat down. “Not that I mind.”
“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “I was thinking about how maybe you’ve been making the dungeons worse than they need to be, and I was thinking that maybe it would help to, I don’t know, have your friend be more of a friend. Because we are friends, but the number of times we’ve ever done something together, just the two of us, has been, um … not a lot.”
“So you’re soothing me out of self-interest?” asked Verity.
“I’m —” Mizuki began.
“That was a joke,” said Verity. “Sorry. It was a mean one. A high society one, maybe.”
“It’s true though,” said Mizuki. She set all the tins down on the blanket and then handed Verity a set of silverware. They had little metal plates, and both began piling them up. “If we weren’t dying in the dungeons, I would probably never have thought to do this.”
“It’s true, that’s why it’s mean, and that’s why you’d make that kind of joke,” said Verity. “It would be better if it flowed like velvet though. I was never terribly good at the barbs.”
“That’s a good thing,” said Mizuki. “But no, seriously, I was thinking to myself, if Verity’s not spending time with Isra, then who’s she spending time with? I like Hannah, but she’s wrapped up with Marsh, and if you try to talk to her, sometimes you get the cleric treatment.”
“She does that to you too?” asked Verity.
“Yeah, but I kind of like it in a way I feel like you don’t,” said Mizuki.
“I do kind of like it,” said Verity.
“Huh,” said Mizuki. She hadn’t expected that. If it was true, then that didn’t explain how little time Verity seemed to spend taking Hannah’s counsel. Maybe it was like when Mizuki got the cleric treatment: she would agree with the thrust of it, but not want to follow through, which made her feel bad. “Well, and then your other option would be Alfric, and he’s great, but I feel like you’re both too Dondrian to have fun together.”
“And what does that mean?” asked Verity with a happy little laugh.
“You know,” said Mizuki. “You’re rich, you’re trained, you’ve got rules and stuff, there’s decorum. I feel like if we left the two of you in a room, it would be polite, inoffensive conversation, as one does when one is with a peer of one’s own standing.”
“Yeesh,” said Verity, which might have been because of the snooty accent Mizuki was putting on. “I’ve been in Pucklechurch a year, I can hang with the locals.”
“Well then the point stands, because he’s not a local,” said Mizuki.
“And you get along well with him,” said Verity. She had one eyebrow very slightly raised.
“Hey now,” said Mizuki. “You keep that eyebrow down.”
Verity grinned and raised the eyebrow higher, until eventually she was leering at Mizuki.
“Look, is Alfric handsome?” asked Mizuki as Verity ate. “Yes. Is he capable? Also yes. Does his family own an awesome dog? I mean, you’ve seen it, why am I asking you?”
“Lots of good points,” said Verity.
“Honestly, it’s almost all good points, with Alfric,” said Mizuki. “But does he make me weak in the knees?”
“Does he?” asked Verity.
“It’s not that simple,” said Mizuki. She felt like she’d been trapped by her own question. She ate some food, as though she could ignore following up, but Verity was also eating, and it really did feel to Mizuki like she was the one who was supposed to be talking. “Sometimes, I guess? He’s training shirtless in the backyard and my brain is like ‘hey big boy, why don’t you get your reps in up here?’ But I don’t wake up in the morning thinking about him, I don’t have sleepless nights tossing and turning, none of the usual stuff.”
“That’s the usual stuff?” asked Verity as she popped a grape into her mouth.
“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “Yeah?”
“When you’re interested in someone, they consume your thoughts like that?” asked Verity.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “Definitely not like that with Alfric though. Just occasionally it’ll be like ‘sure would be nice to’ and then you can fill in the blanks. But I guess also even if I were, you know, consumed with this obsessive crush, which I’m not, I also would just keep it to myself. Which is what I’m doing now.”
“Yourself, and me, and who else?” asked Verity.
“Kell,” Mizuki admitted. “Plus a letter to my oldest younger sister. Which was mostly about other things.”
“Do you think he’s not interested, or do you think it would go sour?” asked Verity.
“Both,” said Mizuki. “And not to circle this back on you, but I think you and Isra having a falling out was very informative. And I think I would do less well than you’re doing?”
“I feel like I’m doing awfully,” said Verity. “So thank you for the kind words.”
“I think you’re doing okay,” said Mizuki.
“I’m still going to take that as a compliment,” Verity smiled.
“I think this break up, or just break, really could have threatened to tear the party apart,” said Mizuki. “I mean I care about the party a lot, I have no idea what I would do if it all just evaporated, and it seems like it could just evaporate. That’s what keeps me up at night.” It was at least part of why she’d asked Verity out.
Verity reached over and placed her hand on Mizuki’s. “I’m sorry. I think when Isra and I got together, we weren’t thinking too far in the future.”
Mizuki patted her hand back, then withdrew it. “See, I think if it had been rock solid, it would have been fine, and maybe it felt rock solid. If you were just a happy married couple — or if it had been going that direction — then, you know, we’d have all been happy for you and stuff.”
“So you’re saying that we shouldn’t get back together until it’s for life?” asked Verity. She let out a breath. “I don’t know about that.”
“I mean, isn’t the plan that you get back together?” asked Mizuki.
“I have no idea,” sighed Verity. “Maybe.”
“Is that going to work, if Isra comes home with some girl on her arm?” asked Mizuki. “Or guy?”
Verity’s mouth became a frown. “I don’t know. I’d feel devastated, I think. Even just imagining it.” She shuddered. “Isra, inviting some strange man into our house, to sit and eat dinner with us like Marsh does, watching her hold hands with him —” She turned away.
“Yeah, see, this is the kind of thing that’s making the dungeons go crazy,” said Mizuki. “At least, in my opinion. That’s the kind of thing that, I don’t know if it’s better to talk about —”
“It’s not,” said Verity. There was a trace of bitterness in her voice. “Now there are thoughts in my head, and it’s going to take them days to leave.”
“Sorry,” said Mizuki. “But I mean … Isra is trying to find herself, it’s something that she might do, right? You were her first ever partner. She knows basically nothing about the world, ‘fast learner’ or not.”
“But,” said Verity. “We both grew up sheltered? She was my first proper girlfriend too. I feel like she gets so much slack. And me, people think that I should somehow know better, that I should be the mature one.”
“People meaning?” asked Mizuki.
“Hannah and Alfric,” said Verity. “I talked to Clemency the other day, not really about Isra, but the topic came up, and — you’ve probably heard it, how people say that she had a tough life, how she was basically on her own for five years, and before that had a father who knew the woods but wasn’t all that forthright about the world. She just thought everyone else was weird about their druid powers. And it’s true. It’s all true. But then I feel like people see that, and then they don’t see that I was more or less forced into spending the better part of my childhood with a lute in my hands, maneuvered by a mother that never loved me, sheltered in my own way. I don’t think that our situations are equivalent, but … the way Alfric talks to me, it’s like he expects me to be a fully functional adult who knows what she’s doing, and when he talks about Isra, it’s like she’s a child who has just wandered out of the woods.”
It was the most that Verity had ever said, and Mizuki was struck by just how much the politeness and reserve had slipped.
“It’s just how you look,” said Mizuki. “People see you with good posture and this calm expression and they think ‘oh man, that girl has it all together’. It’s because they haven’t seen how you keep your room.”
Verity rolled her eyes, but there was a smile there too. “You know, maybe you have a point. I could walk with a slouch and people would have lower expectations.”
“I’m four years older than you and people cut me a ton of slack,” said Mizuki. “They just say ‘oh, that’s Mizuki, of course she’s terrible’.”
Verity laughed. “You’re not that bad, it just seems to be the boys.”
“No, it’s money too, and housekeeping, and a bunch of other stuff,” said Mizuki. “Magic too.”
“Well I’ve never thought you’re a screw up,” said Verity. “Not like I am.”
“Eh, that’s too harsh,” said Mizuki. “I’d say that you need to figure some things out, but who doesn’t?”
“I ran away from a successful career as a musician in Dondrain,” said Verity. “Then came back for three concerts and canceled the last two. The magnitude of that is just … hard to think about sometimes.”
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “The visibility, that’s what it is, not the, you know, gravity? It’s not what you did, it’s that people were watching. Think of it like this, there’s an apprentice butcher, right, he’s been learning the cuts, putting in the work, is actually really good, but when he’s ready to take the reins, he says ‘actually, I just don’t want to do this for the rest of my life’. And then he goes and becomes a traveling merchant or something, I don’t know. The point being, you wouldn’t think that guy was a screw up, right?”
“Huh,” said Verity. “It was the thousand eyes on me, rather than the content of the decisions.”
“Right,” said Mizuki. “Or maybe not right, I don’t know what I’m talking about. But abandoning something that made you feel bad is noble, not something to be ashamed of.”
“Well, that’s sweet of you to say,” said Verity.
“I’m quite sweet,” said Mizuki. “Speaking of, did you want dessert?” They had eaten most of the food, leaving behind just enough to be a snack later on.
“Do we have dessert?” asked Verity, perking up.
“We have, in a special little decanter, a sweetened, spiced, milk drink,” said Mizuki. “With chocolate lumps.”
“And what are those?” asked Verity.
“Little bits of chocolate,” said Mizuki. “Half-melted, I think, if I did it right, sort of like the pulp in a citrus juice.”
“And you’ve never made this before?” asked Verity.
“I made a tester,” said Mizuki. “With some of the chocolate I brought back from Dondrian. It was good, and I’m hoping this one is good too.”
The chest made for the perfect picnic basket, really, especially since it could carry so much, and they drank from fancy fluted glasses that Mizuki had brought along because they felt, to her, like high society things. She had only in the last month learned that different glasses were used for different things for a purpose, but had done some taste-testing and found the difference so small she questioned whether it was actually there. Fluted glasses for milk were fine.
“This is amazing,” said Verity after a sip. “Do you think that I could learn how to make this?”
“Of course,” said Mizuki. “I can teach you tonight, if you think it’s good.”
“I don’t know about the chocolate chunks,” said Verity. “But the flavors are to die for.”
When they were finished, they packed up, then got on to the second part of their trip together, which Mizuki was looking forward to much less than the hike. There were a few clothing stores in Liberfell, but only one of them with nicer things, and that was where they went first.
It took some time, with a combination of Verity picking things out for Mizuki to try and Mizuki picking out her own things. What she really wanted, now that she had some money in her pocket, was a new dress she could have as her ‘temple best’.
“It should be, I don’t know,” said Mizuki, looking at herself in a full-length mirror. She touched her chest. “Flattering.”
“Halterneck or shift,” said Verity. “A halterneck leaves the back exposed, and you’ve got a nice back, while a shift … a shift isn’t flattering, really, but it’s not flattering on anyone, and with a small chest, you look disproportionately good.”
“I don’t know what those things are,” said Mizuki.
“A halterneck has a strap that goes around the neck,” said Verity. “Like this one.” She held a dress up. “A shift is where the fabric falls in something like a column, sometimes with darts beneath the bust to give it some shape. If you form fit and nip it at the waist instead, then it’s a sheath dress. Which I think you’d also look good in.”
“I see,” said Mizuki. She didn’t really see. It felt like she was reading from her wizard book again.
“Needlework is one of the ‘womanly arts’,” said Verity. “Useless stuff that I was taught because oh, I don’t know, it’s expected. If I’d made a mistake and confused a slip dress from a sheath dress, it would have reflected poorly on my mother.”
“Needlework includes fashion stuff?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I can patch things up, and I could probably sew a dress if I had to. I did it once, when I was fourteen, took a few days and looked terrible.”
“The type of ‘needlework’ I was expected to learn had almost nothing to do with actual needles,” said Verity. “I can stitch, but most of it was knowing fabrics, knowing cuts, knowing body shape and how to deal with it, seeing the fashions come and go over the seasons, things like that. And most of that is to show off. I never took to it like gardening though.”
“We should have someone in the group who makes clothes,” said Mizuki. “We’ve basically got all the bases covered, you and Isra for forage, gardening, and hunting, Hannah for baking, me for cooking, Alfric for … dungeons. Or woodworking, I guess, but I’m not sure how serious he is about that, it feels like what he does to channel dungeon energy. If we had clothes covered we’d be on our way to a fully self-sufficient house.”
“This is true,” said Verity. “It would take a lot of practice for me to get something that I was happy with.”
“Perfectionism, that’s your problem,” said Mizuki. “I would for sure take a good-enough dress from you.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” said Verity. “I wish there were a workroom in the house, it’s the only thing I think it’s lacking.”
“I feel like we’re going to find some entad solution,” said Mizuki. “Alfric’s family has loads of doors.”
It took some time, but eventually they settled on two new dresses for Mizuki, which weren’t all that expensive given the wealth they’d been building up. In the days since Verity’s last big concert, Alfric had finally found a buyer for all the cleaning stone they’d pulled from the last dungeon — the last dungeon not including the failed dungeons — and it had been a decent amount of rings, though nothing like selling off the theater. One dress was a new ‘temple best’ for Mizuki, ‘boat neck’ with a cut that Verity thought was reminiscent of the culottes that Mizuki wore a lot. The idea, as Verity had expressed it, was that it would look like Mizuki was wearing the same thing as usual, just more dressed up, and thus preserve her ‘personal style’.
The other dress was a bit more of a lark, and Mizuki didn’t know when she’d end up wearing it. It was halterneck, exposing quite a bit of Mizuki’s shoulders and back, so much so that she’d bought a scarf to go with it. She had felt a bit awkward in it, like a gremlin, until Verity had given her a brief posture lesson. With a straight back, elongated neck, and her head held high, Mizuki actually looked really good, rather than like someone who regularly stomped through the marsh.
Verity bought nothing. She had a collection of dresses already and seemed to want no more of them. Mizuki didn’t press it, but a part of her felt like Verity would have been better off getting a fresh outfit that wasn’t something her mother had picked for her. It didn’t feel like the time or place to mention it though.
They took the trunk back to Pucklechurch, climbing in and then closing it, only to open it up at the house, where Hannah was working on her book. They hadn’t quite known whether they’d get Hannah or Isra — the chest would run on its little clawed feet to whoever was closer — and Verity seemed relieved that it was Hannah.
“There’s a package at the door,” said Hannah. “For Verity, from her father.”
Verity deflated only slightly, then caught herself and kept a serene expression. She seemed to do it without really thinking about it. That was just normal for her, hiding her true emotions, which Mizuki found sad. It was the kind of thing that had been trained.
Mizuki was always happy to get a delivery. Most mail went to the local post office, rather than coming right to the house, with exceptions for things with priority, and those were a rarity until Verity had moved in. There was something somewhat less special about getting packages for Verity, but Mizuki had gotten used to the slight disappointment that almost anything that came to their doorstep was for Verity. The one time it hadn’t been, it had been left there directly by Alfric’s mom, which Mizuki was secretly hoping would happen again soon. It was a secret hope that she’d shared with Alfric, Hannah, Isra, and Verity.
“There’s a letter,” said Verity as she stared at the package, making no move to pick up the package or the letter that was tied in place on top of it.
“Father is better than mother though, right?” asked Mizuki. The package was the size of a bread box. She leaned over to look at the neat penmanship.
“Can I ask something very cowardly?” asked Verity.
“Absolutely,” said Mizuki. “But I might make Alfric do it.”
“No, it’s — I want you to read the letter,” said Verity. “Maybe you could just give me the gist of it. Break the news more gently than my father would.”
“Oh, that I could do,” said Mizuki. She paused. “If only I knew how to read.”
Verity laughed at that, and Mizuki smiled, then picked up the letter. Neither of them had touched the package itself. A quick trip into the house for the letter opener later, and Mizuki was reading the remarkably precise handwriting.
Dearest Daughter,
We haven’t spoken much since all this business began, for which I blame myself. You were always your mother’s domain, in so many ways, and I left you to her, which it seems might not have worked out for the best for any of us. I cannot say that I would have done anything better in her place, only that my deficiencies would likely have shown through in different ways.
Your mother does love you. She can be harsh and exacting, not just with you, but with everyone in her life. She fails, often, at showing her love, but it truly is there. I’ve spent much of my little free time this past week speaking with her, and to hear her tell it, she was always worried that if she showed you all the love she felt for you, it would spoil you rotten. While your mother feels love for the both of us in our small family, she has never been good at showing it, perhaps because of her own less than ideal upbringing, raised largely by servants. She told me of the fights you’ve had, obviously, but I would like to hear your side of the story before I weigh in on the matter. I do wish you’d spoken to me before you left Dondrian last, but as I’ve said, you have been your mother’s domain for so long, and the fight was apparently so bad, that I understand it.
If you’re following custom, you’ll have opened this letter before the package, but I know you’re not such a big believer in custom these days. What’s inside is the product of my life’s work. The machine that I spent so long building with my team finally works, and it worked well enough that I was able to use it, on stage, at the fourth concert you weren’t able to attend. We had captured only one of the songs from the third concert, the final one, which is as I’d have wanted it, because your song was the crown of that concert, and filled me with no small amount of pride.
The device will play the song. It has played the song, for a theater with more than a thousand people. The response was fairly good, muted, I think, by the fact that people thought that it was the work of an entad. After it was finished though, I had dozens of inquiries, and the shop now has its first proper order, for a hundred of the devices, though we have little capacity to actually accomplish that as yet.
I’ll be settling the seizure only partly contested, and near an agreement with the workers even now. My nose is bloodied from that whole business, I have to say, but the ectad device will have nothing of the same problems, and promises to make us far more than we had ever made from the business of fish.
This does not quite mean that you’re off the hook in terms of family obligations. For the device to make music, a song must be captured, after which it can be played a few dozen times for each ectad disc. Now, I could certainly hire someone, but I already have one of the most proficient and accomplished young lutists as my daughter, and one who is familiar with a wide range of difficult classical pieces, as well as her own songs — assuming that The Brave Knight Gave was not the first you’ve written, and won’t be the last. You should consider this an offer of employment, taking no more than a few days of your time each month. For your efforts I would pay you a flat fee, as much as I hope to give to other artists, in time. Your mother offered you little for your concert performances, as I understand it, and while that made sense in a time of dire straits, it makes no sense now, when good fortune is on the horizon.
Let me know as soon as you can. Until I hear from you, I’ll assume that you’d prefer to be kept at a remove from your mother.
I love you with all my heart,
Your father
“Um,” said Mizuki after she’d read through. “So, the upshot is that he loves you and sent you a gift to try to get you to do some music for him. He talks about your mom some, which I don’t think you’d want to read. There’s sort of an apology, if you squint.”
“Ah,” said Verity. “That … doesn’t sound too bad?”
“I guess,” said Mizuki. “I mean, sure.” She was worried that she was describing it wrong. If her own father had written her a letter like that, she would have felt a bit sour about it. It would have felt like he was taking a side in the fight, the wrong side. How hard was it to tell your teenage daughter her mother was overbearing and that you were getting a separation? But she had never met Verity’s father, so Mizuki kept her mouth shut.
They brought the package into the house and set it on the dining room table. It was the work of a few seconds to get the thing unwrapped, and then a full half hour before they had it working. The instructions were confusing, and Mizuki suggested that they report on that when they sent a letter back. The ‘disc’ that apparently made the whole thing make music screeched when it was removed from its velvet container, and didn’t stop until it had been properly positioned against a hammer on a hinge that shut it up. For a bit they were worried that the device had been damaged in transit, or that they had screwed something up when trying to get it to work, but then with a blast of trumpets it was working, playing Verity’s song.
“Wow,” said Verity once the song was finished.
“Yeah,” said Mizuki. “It sounded like you were right here playing.”
“I don’t know how I feel about this,” said Verity. She was looking at the device. “How do we get this to play again?”
That took another ten minutes, and they listened to the song again.
“There are imperfections,” said Verity. “Some from when I was actually playing it, but others that I don’t think were. Nothing like a missed note, but it’s … off. Inferior.” She let out a breath. “Which is a relief, really.”
“Are you going to do it, do you think?” asked Mizuki. “Go get your songs captured for your dad?”
“I don’t know,” said Verity. “I think I might. It feels odd that people could listen to my music whenever they wanted to. It would feel odd even if it were the music of the masters. A performance frozen in time … that does sound like something an entad should do, but if they’re able to produce these machines, enough of them that they could send this prototype here, enough that people could have them in their homes, I don’t know what to think.”
“Seems good to me,” said Mizuki. “I like your songs.”
“Thank you,” said Verity.
“And then if you left, I could still hear them,” said Mizuki.
“Oh,” said Verity. She looked over at Mizuki. “Well, you should know I’m not leaving.”
Mizuki smiled. “Not even if I become a powerful wizard that puts your bardic magic to shame?”
“No,” said Verity, shaking her head and grinning. “Not even then.”
“And … not if things with Isra don’t eventually paper over?” asked Mizuki. She hadn’t wanted to ask, but it had felt like the natural question. It was most of the reason for their trip.
“No,” said Verity, as seriousness settled on her shoulders. “No, when we leave Pucklechurch, I hope that it will be as a team, all together.”
Comments
fbt
well, it *is* in the title, after all, whether it happens here or in some epilogue or somewhere in between. :) I thought it was a really good chapter, particularly in showing a lot of Verity's inner journey via a wide range of mechanisms, often a bit (or a lot; Mizuke made a good foil) indirect; it wasn't just told to us, it was shown. Also, I often want to strangle Mizuki, but she was good here.
Tristan A
Uh oh, the skipping of the last dungeon has got me worried. It feels like we might be moving into the "used to be about dungeons" part. Especially thinking about how seeing his team die might affect Alfric. He's experienced himself dying before but I wonder what the toll of seeing his friends die does to him. Also it seems like if the group is accepting that Verity can affect dungeons on a much higher level that Alfric should be pushing them all to train more. With as much free time as they have it feels like they should be doing a lot more to prep. Doesn't even have to be crazy. Runs in the morning, maybe 2-3 times a week just basic instruction on different forms of combat and weapons. Although in reality I get the feeling that this story is going to end with them stopping dungeons and finding other pursuits in life. Anyways thank you for the chapter!
loved it. A very wholesome chapter, reminded me of the one when Mizuki and Hannah met Vertex
