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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 76, Misgivings
🕑 Added 2022-02-07 16:52:44 +0000 UTCA few days ago I wrote the prologue to a (potential, untitled) dungeon core story, if you'd like, you can read that here. I don't know whether or not anything will be done with it, but as its own small piece of writing, I think it's fairly good.
Also, Worth the Candle: Book 1 is available for pre-order on Audible!
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Hannah did enjoy being fretted over by Alfric, though she was fairly confident that she did not, in fact, have a concussion. So far as she could tell, Alfric had never dealt with anyone having a concussion before, but he knew they were rather serious things, and was doing his best. There was a sweetness to Alfric, a way that he liked to take care of things and people. It wasn’t necessarily what she’d expected of him when she’d first met him, but it was nice.
They’d taken the dagger back to Pucklechurch, arriving at the temple, which was where they’d left it because that was where all the clerics were, just in case. At Alfric’s insistence, Hannah was checked over by both Filera and Lin, just to make sure there wasn’t some damage to her brain that she had missed. They had given her the all clear, and Alfric had said that it was good to have them check, which Hannah grudgingly agreed with. Those had always been her least favorite sorts when she’d been at the temple though, people coming in for what turned out to be nothing.
The rest of their day had been spent at the house, unloading whatever needed to be unloaded and cleaning up. The entads and henlings would be sold later on, likely with their next trip to Liberfell, but full identification would need to wait a few days. There had been nothing in the way of ectads, which sorely disappointed Alfric, who had been hoping for the material to make floatstones. Once all the work was done, it was time to rest and relax for everyone but Isra and Mizuki, who moved into the kitchen to start work on dinner. Alfric offered to help, but was shooed out by Mizuki, and ended up sitting on the couch next to Hannah, who’d just finished up with a shower.
“Still feeling okay?” asked Alfric.
“Fine,” said Hannah. “A bit of a headache, but it’s nothin’ I can’t manage.” She glanced toward the kitchen.
“I tried to help,” said Alfric. “And I offered to pay for dinner at one of the taverns.”
“She likes to cook,” said Hannah. She sighed. “So, how’d we do?”
“Frankly?” asked Alfric. “Pretty well, given the circumstances. Some very bad encounters there, I thought. The bats especially. But we were working well together, and it felt like some of the lessons had sunk in. There’s still a way to go, but … it was fairly good. We’ll do a post mortem and talk it over.”
“Mmm,” said Hannah. “Too much to heal, in my opinion, and yes, I do take that as a sign that things have gone wrong.”
“Are you … okay?” asked Alfric.
“I’m fine,” said Hannah. “A cleric can burn out, but it takes more than just correction of a few broken bones.” None of the breaks were all that bad either, no bones sticking out of flesh and no broken skin, which were quite hard to heal, especially if it needed to be done without setting things back in place.
“What is it like, to lose connection to your god?” asked Alfric.
“There’s a fraying,” said Hannah. “They often compare it to marriage, but I don’t have the expertise to say how true that is, having yet to experience marriage myself. You feel this love and connection, but then … oh, I don’t know, someone doesn’t do their share, or there’s a bit of snippiness, and you still love each other, you’re still partners, but it feels like there’s love lost, at least for a bit, until you’ve made it up to each other.”
“But it doesn’t go both ways,” said Alfric.
“It’s a metaphor, it’s not meant to be taken to every extreme,” said Hannah. “But in point of fact, it does go both ways. It very much is a relationship, albeit one that’s less tangible than others, with less in the way of communication. I can tell when it’s frayed, and I’m sure that Garos can tell as well, when the fraying comes from the other direction.”
“Does that happen?” asked Alfric.
“All the time,” nodded Hannah. “I do make concessions, ay? To practicality, sometimes, but also in other directions. Symmetry isn’t the only thing in my life, not by a long shot.”
“I suppose I can see why you find it irritating when Mizuki talks about running out of ‘juice’,” said Alfric.
“Oh, I can handle it just fine,” said Hannah. “If it helps her to understand, she can say ‘cleric juice’ all she wants.”
“You did well, by the way,” said Alfric.
“I got hit by quite a few bats,” said Hannah. “But I appreciate you sayin’ so. And you were right about pushin’ on, in the end. Also, it felt like you did half the work and Mizuki did the other half, though I wouldn’t want to undersell Verity’s contributions, and Isra got her share of arrows in.” Hannah felt a bit guilty for ranking her teammates.
“I’m not sure I handled the giant in the right way,” said Alfric. “It was dangerous to go for the wrist.” He sighed. “We can save some of this for the post mortem, which I’d like to put off until tomorrow, but I think there’s less to talk about this time.”
“Probably for the best that we don’t talk things to death,” said Hannah.
“Dinner in five!” called Mizuki from the kitchen.
“Smells lovely!” Hannah called back.
“This marks a historic occasion,” said Alfric. “It’s our first meal paid for out of the party fund.”
“Well, hurrah to that,” said Hannah.
She got up from the couch and stretched out. Symmetrical healing could do a lot, as could the minor bit of work that Lin had done from the power of Oeyr, but there was still a tiredness and soreness that came from having been beaten up and banged around. Hannah had taken more than her fair share of damage over the course of the dungeon, but the worst of it, in her opinion, was dropping down and breaking her ankle. It was a lesser injury, but there’d been so much lead up to it, looking down at the drop and knowing that it was far enough to hurt, knowing that it was coming, which made the whole thing feel so much more impactful. The impact of the break on her mind had been oversized. She did her best to shake it off.
Dinner was a large fish from the Proten Lakes, which Mizuki had apparently gotten the idea for from something that Alfric had said happened in an undone day. There it had been brought in express by Xy, but here it had come through a more delayed order placed through one of the town merchants, still fresh, but far cheaper. The fish was large enough that it had barely been able to fit into the oven, which hadn’t been helped by the fact that it had been stuffed with citrus, vegetables, and some kind of pork.
“We’re going to have lots of leftovers, unfortunately,” said Mizuki. “The fish is big enough to feed two full parties.”
Verity and Hannah had helped to set the table, and Alfric had helped with the final touches on the pan of roasted fingerling potatoes, which apparently meant crushing them prior to another round under intense heat. Mizuki had said that it was something about texture, and Hannah wasn’t entirely sure what the logic was, but they had ended up delicious, helped by butter, herbs, and salt.
“Why are leftovers bad?” asked Alfric.
“Depends on the food,” said Mizuki. “Sometimes, like with stew, I think leftovers are actually better, since the flavors have a chance to know each other and everything can set up and meld, but for fish, both the texture and flavor are just a bit wrong after a day in the chiller.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that,” said Alfric.
“Well, you probably didn’t grow up with leftovers all that much,” said Mizuki. “And also, you’re uncultured swine.”
Alfric laughed, and Mizuki smiled at him.
The best part, in Hannah’s opinion, was the fish’s skin, which had gotten crispy and could be eaten almost like a meat cracker, but all of it was good, and after a long dungeon that had come with its own challenges, a hearty meal was more than welcome. Hannah ate well, though she picked at the pork a bit. It felt to her like pork wasn’t a proper pairing with fish, not even as a stuffing, but she couldn’t justify that feeling in any way. It was delicious, just not proper.
There was wine with the food, a white wine pulled up from the cellar, which sometimes seemed to have wine in limitless supply.
“It’s all from my grandpa’s winery,” said Mizuki. “He sold the company to the workers when he moved, but one of the conditions was that every year, he would get a crate of their most recent batch. The crates get sent here, and he said that it was fine for me to drink it.” She shrugged. “If I ever did move to Kiromo, it’s not like I would take all of the wine with me.”
“You could,” said Alfric, sipping from his own glass of wine. “You’d just need the proper storage entads.”
“Well, I don’t really want to move to Kiromo,” said Mizuki. “But I would like to visit some time, if I could do it without having to spend a week traveling.”
“Shortest route is actually much shorter,” said Alfric. “It was one of the things I looked up while I was in Dondrian. You’d want to take a leycraft northeast, then take a portal into central Kiromo, then take a leycraft there to Kiro, where your family is.”
“You looked it up?” asked Mizuki.
“I did,” Alfric nodded. “Seemed like something that would be good to know. Of course, with the leycraft lines, you’d be paying quite a bit on both legs, and the portal charges a fee, mostly because you’re crossing national borders, and then on top of that, you’d be stuck until the reopening of the portal, meaning that you’d be in Kiromo for a month. And you’d have to plan around the portal opening in the first place.”
“But why did you look it up?” asked Mizuki.
“I don’t know, it seemed like something you might want to know at some point,” said Alfric.
“You could also pay more, perhaps a lot more, to just go there by entad,” said Verity. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin.
“There are trade-offs in terms of cost and speed,” nodded Alfric. “International travel, and even going from one side of Inter to the other, tends to be quite expensive if you want to do it quickly.”
“Unless you’re an Overguard?” asked Mizuki.
“Yes,” nodded Alfric. He hesitated. “And if you’re thinking that either of my parents could easily take ten minutes out of their day to whisk you to Kiromo, you’re not wrong.”
“But … they wouldn’t,” said Mizuki.
“It’s complicated,” said Alfric. “They might offer it as a gift, but if you came to them requesting it, that’s the sort of thing that gets a bit exploitative. In point of fact they do sell trips for people at quite high rates, but for you to come to them and ask for a discount because you’re friends with me … it would be awkward for everyone, and I think they’d be inclined to say no unless circumstances seemed to demand it.”
“I see,” said Mizuki. “Well to be clear, I haven’t asked them, and I won’t. We’ll just have to find our own extremely long ranged transport entads.”
“Yes,” nodded Alfric, seeming relieved. “And it’s likely we have another trip in our future, right?” He looked at Isra.
“I don’t know,” said Isra. “I do want to track down the entads taken from me, as well as the person who took them. I don’t think the party needs to come with.”
“Would you want us to?” asked Verity. “I would like to be with you, to help you if I could.”
Isra frowned. “That’s very nice of you.”
“You don’t really have anyone,” said Mizuki. “Besides us, I mean. People shouldn’t do hard things alone.” The phrasing there stuck with Hannah, and she tucked it away for later, because she was sure that someone would give her cause to use it, perhaps even Mizuki herself.
“I’ve been living alone for years,” said Isra, still frowning. “I can take care of myself.”
“If we came with you to the eastern edge of Inter, we’d get exposure to some new dungeons,” said Alfric. “And I’ve never been out that way.”
“I don’t want to be a bother,” said Isra.
“No bother,” said Mizuki.
“I don’t even know if I’m going to go,” said Isra. “I only got the letter yesterday.”
“If you need us to butt out, just say so,” said Hannah. “People wantin’ to help can be oppressive, especially if it’s help you don’t want.”
“It’s not that,” said Isra. “I just … haven’t done anything to earn your help.” She was still deep in her frown, which she hid with a sip of wine.
Verity reached over and held Isra’s hand. “We’ll drop it for now,” said Verity. “Just know that you have allies that are eager to help you slay your enemies.”
“Thank you,” said Isra. “I need time.”
For dessert, there was rolled ice cream, made on the chilling plates that were paired to the heating elements when they weren’t in use. It had bits of chocolate from Dondrian in it, along with other bits of caramel and cinnamon. Altogether it seemed a bit busy to Hannah, who preferred her desserts to have less going on, but she refrained from saying anything, because it was apparently the first thing that Isra had cooked by herself.
“It wasn’t really anything,” said Isra, after she’d received a round of adulation. “Iced cream seems like it would be difficult to do wrong.”
“You would be surprised,” said Mizuki.
“You gave me instructions,” said Isra.
“And again, you’d be surprised,” said Mizuki. “Some people screw things up by doing things wrong, others make substitutions or end up with scrambled eggs, or something like that.”
“There are eggs in this?” asked Verity around a mouthful of ice cream.
“How do you do it without eggs?” asked Mizuki, who seemed utterly baffled by the question.
“In Dondrian it’s cream, sugar, and flavoring,” said Alfric.
“This is more of a frozen custard then isn’t it?” asked Verity, looking down at the bowl.
“I guess,” said Mizuki.
“How do you know so many people who failed to make this?” asked Isra.
“Oh,” said Mizuki. “Um.” She hesitated with her Anyspoon halfway to her mouth. “We had some basic cooking lessons in school.”
“Ah,” said Isra. “And I would have gotten them, if I hadn’t been kept from school.”
“Well, I’ll give you all the lessons,” said Mizuki. “I mostly learned from my parents, not school, a lot of the lessons for life skills were pretty basic, mostly just so people would have some kind of foundation. Getting people ten percent of the way down the road, that kind of thing. With cooking, not everyone needs to learn how to cook.”
“I have no idea how to cook,” said Verity.
“Alfric either,” said Mizuki.
“I know how to make decent camp food,” said Alfric. “But all you need for that is some meat and some vegetables and to just cook them until they’re done.”
“I’m skeptical,” said Mizuki. “But I do look forward to going camping together sometime.” She finished the last of her ice cream, tilting the small bowl back to get the melted bits. “Hey, you know what Alfric told me?”
“What?” asked Hannah.
“Vertex is living in a big tent, but they don’t even have a tent that’s bigger on the inside,” said Mizuki.
“Gasp,” said Hannah.
“It’s still a nice tent,” said Alfric.
“There are limits to how nice a non-magical tent can be,” said Verity. “There’s a reason that people live in houses rather than tents.”
“Why is it bad to live in a tent?” asked Isra.
“Noise from outside and inclement weather,” said Alfric. “Plus a lack of windows. And toilet setups for tents are … well, usually you have to have an outhouse, or a pit that you go in if you’re a step less fancy. You can also kind of forget about a shower, though there are bathhouses in a city of decent size, and people who are serious about it will have a compact waterstone pack.”
“A what?” asked Hannah. Normally Alfric had a tendency to go on a little bit, and very often it wasn’t entirely interesting or relevant, but every now and then he said something that illuminated some part of the world she never knew existed.
“So, most waterstones are regulated through pressure,” said Alfric. “You put the waterstone in a tank, and at a certain level of pressure, it stops working. This is all through some stuff that I don’t understand about ectads, but it’s a fundamental thing with how waterstones are processed, and one of the reasons for all the rules of thumb like not swapping waterstones into tanks they weren’t meant for.”
“You can though,” said Mizuki.
“You can, yes,” said Alfric. “But you’re not supposed to, because you run the risk of the calibration being wrong and overflowing the tank, which ends with you flooding your house. Anyway, if you’re traveling, you really don’t want to be lugging a lot of water around, so what you do is get a waterstone and put it inside of a waterskin, making sure that it’s calibrated so it doesn’t burst the seams of the skin, and also that the waterskin can hold a bit of pressure. It’s not cheap, but it’s virtually endless water.”
“You’d need a quite strong stone to give you a shower,” said Hannah, frowning. “But you’re sayin’ that people have showers for themselves by turnin’ a waterskin upside down?”
“They could,” said Alfric. “But what’s more common is for them to have an oversized skin that can be expanded when they camp. The extra flaps are normally tied down, but at camp, they get untied, and there’s room for a lot more water, which means that the stone fills basically a few buckets worth of water, which is all you need for a shower. Not that you tend to need a shower unless you’re camping for more than a few days.”
“Have you gone camping a lot?” asked Mizkui.
“Oh, sure,” said Alfric. “I appreciate the wilderness. There aren’t really that many places left that are properly wild, but it’s good to get away from people for a bit and take a break from society, or as much as possible while still being part of a guild.”
“Pretend at bein’ master of your own destiny?” asked Hannah.
“Just so,” nodded Alfric. “But it doesn’t hold a candle to dungeoneering.”
After dinner, Hannah helped with the dishes, and once the dishes were done, she went to her room for a bit, leaving the door open a crack so the herb dragon could come in. Herby had the run of the house, with some minor instruction by Isra, and would occasionally come to sit next to or occasionally on top of someone. Isra had said that in the coming week, it would transition to eating herbs from the garden, and they were already talking about possibly building in some way for it to be able to go in and out of the house on its own. It was a wild creature, but under Isra’s direction, that didn’t matter so much, and they could treat it as essentially domesticated.
The creature that waddled into Hannah’s room was, unfortunately, the cat, Tabbins. He had taken a liking to Hannah, one which wasn’t entirely returned, not when he would plop himself down on her lap without caring that she was about to get up, or when he would wake her up in the morning by swishing his tail in her face. She had tried keeping the door closed, but then he would paw at it and mewl for her to open it, and she wasn’t heartless. She had been meaning to ask Isra if possibly the cat could be asked to be more considerate, but she hadn’t done it yet, mostly because she liked the cat’s affection.
Hannah sat down and made some notes about the dungeon, but her heart wasn’t really in it, and then Tabbins climbed up into her lap like he wanted to be petted, which took up a bit of her attention.
She didn’t know what she was thinking with the book. Even if she did finish it, and got some wortiers to make copies of it, or better, a publisher that made a good effort to release it far and wide, the most likely outcome would be deafening silence, or a small level of acknowledgement from her peers. There was a part of her that tended toward optimism at times, and she knew that was foolish, but there was precedent. On occasion, books about dungeon traversals did very well, though they tended to be written in a style to entertain, and some of the claims made within them were both questionable and impossible to check.
Hannah did eventually finish making her notes and drawing out a map of the dungeon, but she was less than satisfied with it. The project, when she’d first conceived of it, was to be to dungeons what Symmetrical Poetry had been to poems, a way of using Garos as a critical lens to engage with what the dungeons conjured up. For this dungeon though, there was less to examine. The most interesting had been the dining room, where all the places had been set, though not in an entirely symmetrical fashion, given that the utensils were placed with knives and forks on opposite sides of the plates. Everything else … well. Perhaps there was something to be said about gravity, or the tunnel where the floor became the ceiling, but it would take more thought, and it felt like attempting to make a tea from leaves that had already been used two or three times before.
Hannah thought about Marsh, but she’d told him that he shouldn’t contact her until the next day, their day off, and he was respecting that. This was good of him, but she was feeling a need for companionship and physical intimacy that, on reflection, wasn’t particularly healthy. A good bout of kissing would cheer her up, but it wasn’t a cure for malaise, and Marsh seemed like he might be having some different ideas about what it was they were doing together. An honest, open discussion about their relationship, if you could even call that, would almost certainly kill the last of her attraction to him, but there were no other prospects at the moment, and Hannah was starting to feel that perhaps she should just have that conversation and see whether they could continue on together in spite of her deep reservations.
They had the next day “off” and Hannah didn’t know what she was going to do with herself. She was going to pray and do what she could to repair the fraying, to center herself along the axes of symmetry and spend some time being in tune with Garos. It had been some time since she’d done any singing — she’d been in the choir at the seminary — and she wondered whether Verity would have any interest in making some music together. It seemed like a long shot, but Verity was sure to know all of the classic clerical songs.
Beyond that, there was also baking to be done, and Hannah settled on star bread. She got up off her butt to go look in the kitchen and see what all she would need to buy, which unfortunately meant dislodging the cat.
The most difficult thing about cooking in Pucklechurch as compared to the seminary in Plenarch, or better, her home in Cairbre, was that they didn’t have all the same ingredients. Sometimes they even claimed to have the same ingredients, but when the merchant said ‘cinnamon’ she meant something other than the cinnamon that Hannah was used to. Proper cinnamon quills were made from the dried inner bark of a tree, but the stuff sold in Pucklechurch as cinnamon was a leaf that had been dried and ground. The taste was fairly close, but they were two completely different plants, and they had different properties to them as well, with the leaf’s flavor a bit more pungent and working a little less well in breads. This distinction between cinnamon and ‘cinnamon’ was the sort of thing that made Hannah feel a bit of Qymmos.
The kitchen was short on eggs and flour, which was mostly due to Hannah’s baking, and she almost went out to get them before remembering that it was after dinner and the market and shops were likely closed. Star bread didn’t take much time, and there was really nothing that needed to be done, but that meant that Hannah was still left with that same listless feeling, which was not the kind of thing she should have been feeling after a successful dungeon run.
She was grateful when the marble in her pocket warmed up, even though Marsh was contacting her sooner than they’d agreed on. When she held in place and rolled down her sleeve to see him on her forearm, he had a serious set to his face.
“Lola is planning something,” he said. “I’m not sure what, but it’s set up for tomorrow. She’s planning an ambush in the morning, bringing our whole team to your house.”
“Are you plannin’ to fight us?” asked Hannah.
Marsh didn’t seem to find that funny. “She had a day of being time-sick,” said Marsh. “Ever since then, she’s been on a warpath. I don’t know what she’s planning, but she wants all of us there, and says that she’s got an announcement. I don’t think any of us want to go, but I’m letting you know ahead of time, because the next time you hear anything, it might be from her lips, and she might have done the day two or three times to be able to say just the right thing.”
“And does she know you’re sharing this with me?” asked Hannah.
“I keep my personal business separate from the party,” said Marsh. “They don’t know that you and I are — that we’ve been getting together. Not unless Lola got it out of me on an undone day, or not unless you’ve been blabbing to Mardin or Grig.”
“Mmm,” said Hannah. “My party knows. But that’s because we’re not dysfunctional.”
“Must be nice,” said Marsh. He gave her a thin smile. “Be careful. Stay safe.”
The image faded away without another word, and Hannah was left frowning at her forearm. She sat there for a moment, thinking, then went to go find the others. It seemed that they needed to prepare as best they could.
Comments
Gorexn
Great chapter, both this one and the dungeon core prologue! Really liked the dynamics in the worldbuilding. I saw a couple typos for the dungeon core: He did not here the fumbling attempts at nocking an arrow *did not hear the long-handled tools it had mad or stolen *had made or stolen
