alexanderwales
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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 74, Off Tempo
🕑 Added 2022-01-31 16:51:36 +0000 UTC(My decision to go down to two chapters a week was immediately vindicated, as the power supply in my computer died while I was in the middle of writing. I am now using a janky setup with my backup laptop, and grateful that I'm not staring down a deadline that I can just barely make. As always, thanks for the support.)
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Holding a song was like being a bird soaring through the sky, attempting to hold her wings steady and drop as little as possible. She had loved to watch the seabirds that flocked by the docks of Dondrian on days when there was a little wind. They would seem to hover in the air, riding unseen currents, staying almost still. It was what she thought about when she tried to slow the song down to very near its breaking point.
Holding a song was something that she’d practiced quite a bit in the last week. There was a feeling to it, a steadiness, like a tiny gossamer thread that could bear almost no weight but was nevertheless taut. She had improved massively since first attempting it, but it was like that for most things, where putting in an enormous amount of time and effort got you most of the way there. Beyond that, there were probably tricks and secrets that she would have to learn from others, and incremental improvements that would come with time and practice.
Verity was proud of having gone what felt like a half hour in the tunnel, laying on her back and occasionally giving the lute a lazy strum. It was the sort of thing that would have been too difficult to manage just a few days ago. The skill wasn’t really applicable anywhere but the dungeons, of course, but it still gave her a sense of progress that she hadn’t had with her musical abilities in many years.
There was no way around the pool of water in the bat room, so they had to remove their boots, hike up their pants and skirts, wade across, and then dry off and put everything back on again. It was a pain, and slowed them down considerably, and worse, they would have to do it again on the way back. Beyond that, Alfric had left their more heavy or unwieldy things in the dungeon’s foyer, and would have to go back for them if the rooms beyond the pool required them. Mizuki had actually offered to make the trip, if it was necessary, and Alfric had thanked her for that but said it would be a lot easier for him.
The rain of bats had rattled Verity. It was the first time she’d thrown up from sheer stress and visceral reaction since her very first public concert, and like then, it was thankfully gone when the moment of terror had passed. Alfric having chocolate and mints on hand made everything better, not just because it got the taste from her mouth, but because he had planned ahead of time, and made sure she knew that it was okay. He hadn’t even said ‘hey, sometimes people throw up, it’s alright’, but it was clear from his preparation and immediate response. There was no judgment. When she’d thrown up after her first concert, her mother hadn’t been nearly so understanding.
Once they had their boots back on, they got battle ready and moved to the doorway, this one without an actual door. So far they hadn’t had to choose a direction besides going left in the first room, and it felt odd and somewhat claustrophobic to have everything be all in a line, but Alfric said nothing about it, so Verity kept her mouth shut.
The next cell was, for a change, a civilized place, and quite thankfully, seemed devoid of monsters, though they stayed on guard until they could declare it cleared. It was a workshop, one that was rather full of things, though Verity couldn’t name most of them. The primary thing it seemed set up to make was some strange piece of — possibly — clothing that was too small to be a hat and too large to be a shoe. It was shaped leather that seemed like it was designed for some kind of alien species, and had all kinds of embellishments and adornments which looked like they’d been made by the many tools that were sitting around.
The room had no conventional door, but a hatch in the floor off to one side, which they studiously avoided.
<Two entads,> said Mizuki, who had spotted them first, which was no particular surprise. <Er … both bows.> She held them up. One was blood-red and shiny, so large that it was taller than her, and the other was caramel-colored wood that was sanded matte. <Do we need two bows?>
<No,> said Alfric. <We could do with selling them though.>
<This hammer too,> said Mizuki, picking up a mallet from one of the benches. She swung it twice and frowned at it. <Save it for later though, I guess.>
<And we’ll pack up what we can from the room,> said Alfric. He was looking around at the implements, most of them wood. <Henlings, mostly, valuable in that they’re odd. I don’t see much that any craftsman would actually use, but I suppose I don’t know.>
<These leather cap things aren’t anything, right?> asked Mizuki poking one of them with a finger like she thought it would bite.
<No, they’re nothing,> said Alfric. <And we should get going while the song is on.>
<I’m holding it,> said Verity. It was difficult to talk, and she could feel the song warble when she did, especially when she didn’t keep the yawningly-slow beat in the immediacy of her mind.
<Down we go then,> said Alfric. He went to the hatch and put an ear up to it. <Breaching now.> He didn’t say it like a question, but he gave people time to object, or to get into place.
Verity brought the song out of its slumber, the gossamer thread turning to a cable of steel. She added purpose to it slowly, layering in effects, and by the time Alfric had dropped down the hole, barely using the ladder, she had lent him strength and resilience. She was at the back of the pack, as usual, crafting her song without being able to see the recipients, ideally the last to be in the way of harm. If she was attacked, there was nothing she could do.
Hannah dropped down after Alfric, her plate armor offering her at least some protection, and Mizuki, far less equipped to take a hit, went down after with very little hesitation on her part. If she could cast spells through the party, there didn’t seem to be any need for her to put herself in harm’s way, but Alfric had apparently hit his head on the ceiling, so perhaps she wanted clearance. There was clearly a fight going on down there, with swipes and grunts that could be heard through the floorboards, and the occasional sound of metal hitting something. Isra slipped down the hole, leaving Verity alone, and there was really nothing for it but to give them as much support as she could without seeing them.
Her song was about weathering a storm, perhaps because of the rain of enormous bats, or because sitting in the workshop made her feel like being a little kid again. The weather in Dondrian was relatively mild and tightly controlled, but every now and then there was a thunderstorm that came through and rattled the windows. The winds would howl and the trees would creak, and there was absolutely nothing you could do but sit there, hope for the best, and put your faith in others.
The rains came down,
To wash away,
The bloody streets,
And slaughtered prey.
Verity didn’t think all that much about the lyrics, or where they were coming from, or what meaning they might have. They were morose, certainly, and not her best work. There was nothing that she’d want to put in a real song, not one that she was going to polish up and show to other people. She just went on, allowing the melody and the lyrics to flow from her.
After a few verses, the sounds of fighting died down, and the only thing that could be heard was scuffling. For a brief, heart-rending moment, Verity worried that they were all dead.
<Clear,> said Alfric. <Healing please.>
<Nice,> said Mizuki.
Verity breathed a sigh of relief, and put the song into its holding pattern before climbing down the ladder. It was further than she’d thought, almost twenty feet, a somewhat frightening height, but she continued on, because throwing up had been embarrassing enough, and being scared of getting down a ladder wouldn’t do.
The walls of the room were made of glass and looked out onto a wilderness area which surrounded it like they were the last spoonful of soup in the bottom of a bowl. There were several furry corpses, filling the place with the smell of blood, a sensation that was becoming quite familiar. It was a room within a room, and somewhat confusing given that they’d descended into it, but none of the geography was strictly impossible, only surprising and unintuitive. Verity’s mind tried to make sense of it, and she nearly lost the song, so she stopped thinking about it.
<Wait,> said Mizuki, who was looking out the glass. <So if we’d broken through the wall of the workshop, we’d have … come out the side of a cliff?>
<Possibly with some rock in the way,> said Alfric. <It’s a bit irrelevant. There are monsters in the grotto though, and lots of plants. No clear door.> He peered at the plants. <Gravity slopes here, I think, bowl-like.>
<Just clear windows,> said Mizuki. She pressed a finger against one of them. <Are we breaking the glass?>
<This doesn’t make any sense,> said Hannah, pressing a hand against the glass. <It’s a glass room inside a grotto with access through a ladder? There’s a workshop above us that, from what I can see, is encased in rock?>
<Dungeons don’t need to make sense,> said Alfric.
<This aggressively doesn’t make sense,> said Hannah. <This whole dungeon.>
<Kind of crap loot, too,> said Mizuki.
Verity held the song, and almost risked speaking, but she felt the chord wobble, so instead she stayed silent. In another month, she was certain she could get to the point where she could speak freely, at least if she did so with a good cadence, but she wasn’t there yet. She pushed the song faster, so she wouldn’t lose it.
<I think we’re breaking through,> said Alfric, frowning at the glass. <Otherwise it’s not a full clear.>
<Is there even anything out there?> asked Hannah. <Seems like a jungle, to be frank.>
<Two creatures,> said Isra. <Big ones. Not as large as the bear, but —> she pointed at what seemed to be random spots in the grotto, effectively on the wall given the uncomfortable slope of gravity. <There and there.>
<Do you have advice on how to handle them?> asked Alfric.
Isra frowned, then rubbed her forehead. <No.>
<Don’t push it,> said Alfric. He was gentle about it, but also seemed worried. From what Verity knew, the wrongness of the dungeons could get to a druid, their connection with the creatures working against them. <Okay, breaking the wall then, everyone be careful.>
<Do you want to be fast or big?> asked Mizuki.
Alfric hesitated. <Big,> he said. <Wait until I’m out of the tank.>
<Will do,> said Mizuki.
Verity picked the song back up to full strength and Alfric readied himself. He thrust at the glass wall with his bident and it cracked with little resistance, with the pieces of glass falling down from the entirety of the frame. He waited there, watching for one of the creatures, then cautiously stepped through the glass with his boots protecting him from the shards, bident held forward and shield at the ready.
They were slow, rumbling creatures, at least to start, but they picked up steam as they went, crashing through the underbrush and knocking aside small trees. They were visible, at first, mostly from the movement of the brush. Alfric moved in closer, though it was difficult to see them through the foliage, and when the first one appeared, moving fast for something so large, he darted close to it, using his magical boots to close the distance. Verity directed all the song’s power to him, multiplying his strength, and Mizuki’s spell hit him at nearly the same moment, almost throwing him off-balance.
The creature appeared through the oversized leaves, huge and imposing, long tusks on either side of a wide jaw. The skin was red and cracked like dried mud, the eyes big and watery, thick legs to support its bulk and a vapor coming off it like steam or smoke. Alfric dashed forward as soon as the creature was close, bident out in front of him, but his first strike glanced off the side of the creature, and it rushed him down. He was barely able to get his shield up in time, and it knocked him back. Alfric’s second thrust with the bident stuck down into the cracks in its skin, and then the flesh exploded outward, causing the creature to tip slightly to the side.
They fought, the two of them, an enlarged Alfric with his magical bident against a fat creature with surprising strength and heft. It was bleeding heavily from the first blast, but did manage to hit Alfric in the side of his leg with a fast-moving tusk. They circled each other, with Alfric trying to guide it away from the party and also trying to stab it with his enlarged bident again.
The second creature was slower to arrive, but larger, and seemingly more angry. As soon as it appeared, charging through the underbrush, Isra was there, having followed an arrow, and she went for its eyes before darting back following another arrow. She reappeared next to them, breathing hard.
There was very little that anyone could do. Alfric had gotten what magic Mizuki could provide, and Isra’s arrows were doing very little. Hannah had her hammer, but she didn’t have the benefit of size that Alfric had, and it was hard to imagine that her hitting the huge beast in its rump would do anything but earn her its wrath. She had doubled a wound, but it hadn’t been in a deep enough or vital enough place.
Alfric fought, a man made giant by Mizuki’s spell and strong by Verity’s song. He was taking hits, and there were limits to how much armor could protect a person. A tusk struck him in an unarmored spot just above his hip, and blood flowed freely from the wound, then the blind creature stomped on his foot, which caused him to howl in pain. Still he held fast with his shield and got in the strikes where he could, though only one in every four was able to pierce their thick hide.
Eventually, the first creature to come forward began to slow. Soon it was only breathing heavily and swaying, the blasts that Alfric had created through its flesh causing it to lose function. Another doubling from Hannah put it out of consideration as a threat. Alfric turned his attention to the blind one, the one which had stomped on his foot and tried to bowl him over, and he circled it carefully, taking care not to make noise. He lined up his strike with deliberate calm and drove the bident in as hard as he could, sinking it deep into flesh. The explosion was audible from outside, a whumpfing sound, and this one, carefully placed, was enough to kill the creature outright.
Alfric slumped to the ground, breathing hard, and Hannah rushed to him.
<I said not too many more hard hits,> she said as she tended to his wounds. <We’ve more dungeon left, and it won’t do for you to die, not after we’ve put in all this work.>
<I’m fine,> said Alfric. <Just exhausted. I’m supposed to be good against the big things.>
<Mizuki, how long does that spell last?> asked Hannah. She looked like a child standing next to Alfric. He was some fifteen feet tall.
<I have no idea, why?> asked Mizuki.
<Because it makes it harder to heal him,> said Hannah. <Can you stop it? Cancel it?>
<Uh,> said Mizuki. <No, I don’t think so, can’t you — I mean, you can still save him, right?>
<I’m bleeding, not dying,> said Alfric. He reached down to touch the wound above his hip, then winced and looked at his bloody hand. <I think it’s surface, just a bleeder, that’s all..>
<And two broken bones in the foot. You’re riding the high of battle,> said Hannah. <That’s the best time to patch someone up, before they realize how hurt they actually are.>
<I’m familiar, and I’m compensating for my own — oh, there it goes.> Alfric began to shrink back down, and as soon as he did, Hannah had worked her miracles, stopping the flow of blood and presumably fixing his broken bones. A few moments after that, she had gotten the dents out of his armor.
<I’m reachin’ my limit, ay?> said Hannah. <I can take the strain of maybe another serious injury, but not much more than that, so don’t two of you go gettin’ hurt at once, or there’ll be trouble.>
<We need to check for doors,> said Alfric. He moved to get to his feet, then failed to rise and instead slumped down. <I’m crashing.>
<Blood loss?> asked Hannah.
<No,> said Alfric. <Just too much battle for one day and a brain that’s frazzled by all the action. I might need a moment, or maybe a few moments, but we do need to check for doors, just in case more monsters want to join the party.>
<I’ll look,> said Mizuki. She seemed worried about Alfric, and was clutching at the edge of her shirt.
<Better that I look,> said Isra. <Or we can look together.>
The wild area, the grotto, was fairly large, and the two of them set off together, attempting to follow the edge. Verity watched them go, wanting to take part, but she was less well-equipped for it, and there was nothing she could do to help them except to give them a song.
It wasn’t really a grotto, that was just the word that Alfric had grabbed to refer to it with. Verity had noticed that a lot with the dungeons, the way they all gravitated toward words of convenience even when they manifestly didn’t apply. The ‘bats’ were too big, missing their heads, with worms on their chests and no legs to speak of, similar to actual bats only really in that they flew with leathery wings, but that word ‘bat’, once it was used, became the common term. It was something she was going to have to think about, if she was going to be serious about writing songs, especially if the idea of Songs from a Dungeon was to be executed on. She would have to be careful what she called things, lest people get the wrong impression about what a dungeon was like.
Hannah and Alfric were having a conversation outside the party channel, and Verity gravitated toward them. The song was still going, low and slow, just a trickle.
“I’m not sure it’s safe to go on,” said Hannah. “We’ll come out of this with three entads if there’s nothing in this room, plus some henlings. That’s enough, I’d think.”
“Enough for it to be a success?” asked Alfric. “I’m not sure that it is.”
“I don’t want you to burn yourself out on resetting subpar dungeons,” said Hannah. “And I also don’t want to press on when it’s not safe to do so just because you think we need more from this place to justify our time.”
“Not just our time,” said Alfric. “Dungeons are, on the individual level, a non-renewable resource. Each one we do, we need to go further afield. Weren’t you the one that wanted to go after the bear?”
“And you told me that it was too much,” said Hannah. “You brought it up in the post mortem.”
“We had enough then,” said Alfric. “The bear was an extra risk on top of an already successful dungeon. Here, we’re talking about making up for what’s likely been a subpar dungeon. The bows aren’t as bad as other weapons, since they can be used for hunting in the way that a sword can’t, though it will depend on their abilities, which are unknown. Still, three entads and some henlings, some tiles that we can sell to a supply store, if we can pick them up, no ectad materials so far — I’m on the verge of wanting to reset, though I’d ask the party first.”
“If it’s between a reset and pushin’ on, I s’pose I’d favor the push,” said Hannah. She was in full plate, face obscured, but Verity could tell she was frowning.
“How much left do we have?” asked Verity. She could feel the song wobble as she asked, and straightened it out as the words were out of her mouth.
“Unknown at this point,” said Alfric. “Five fights so far, we might only have a room or two. That we know of, at least one room off the main branching point.” He looked over to the underbrush. <Isra, check-in please.>
<We found an entad,> said Isra. <No doors. We’re halfway around the room. Lots of plants. We might want to take samples.> She had brought home a growthstone from Besc in Liberfell, and they’d had some discussion about what it would be used for, eventually deciding that it would be used for contained growth of dungeon samples, just to see whether they might be able to grow something profitable.
<Good, thank you,> said Alfric.
<Just wanted to make sure we weren’t getting into trouble?> asked Mizuki.
<I just wanted to know what kind of trouble,> smiled Alfric.
“Well, I s’pose I’ll defer to you,” said Hannah. “But I’m serious about not havin’ much more healin’ left to give, and we’ll have to have this conversation as a group, just so everyone knows that we’re on the same page. We’ve suffered through the dungeon, more than normal.”
Privately, Verity agreed. The rain of bats had produced a gutteral terror in her in a way that nothing so far had, above and beyond charging beasts and piles of ooze. The casual — even enthusiastic — disregard the creatures had shown for their own lives was shocking. Perhaps one of the reasons that Alfric wanted to press on was to find something worthwhile whose value they could bask in, something that would help morale to bounce back to normal, but she couldn’t imagine what it would possibly be.
<We found a little campsite,> said Mizuki. <Ashes still a bit warm, but there’s no sign of any people or whatever. No not-people. Two entads, and … okay, it’s weird, so I’ll just say it — they’re bows.>
<Two bows?> asked Alfric.
<Yes,> said Mizuki. <Which is super weird. That’s five entads, four of them bows.>
<It happens,> said Alfric. <Not often, but it does happen, just because of how the probabilities shake out. Sometimes you get seeming repeats of monsters or entads. Bring them back, along with everything of value, if you can.>
<Will do,> said Mizuki.
<No doors?> asked Alfric.
<No, and we don’t expect to find any,> said Mizuki. <Not much of the perimeter left to search.>
When Mizuki and Isra returned carrying the goods, they all had a discussion on the pros and cons of doing more of the dungeon. It was really a question of the available healing more than anything else, and Alfric’s argument that they should continue on was, if not persuasive, then at least persuasive enough. It was possible there was only one room left, back on the other leg of the dungeon they’d yet to explore, which didn’t seem so bad, and wasn’t even guaranteed to have a fight.
Verity held her song throughout the entire discussion. It wasn’t necessary, but this was a form of practice, and she was taking some pride in doing two things at once. Holding the song down so it had no effect and didn’t drain her but could nevertheless be wakened was very helpful, in this context, and there was something enticing about it, an area that was new and fresh.
Eventually, as the conversation dragged, Verity grew listless and bored, and pulled out a small notebook she’d brought with to begin writing down lyrics and pieces of song. There was nothing terribly good about it, but she did want a foundation to work from, an understanding of how and why her custom songs didn’t work. Writing in time with the silent song was helpful for both endeavors.
Eventually, and perhaps due to Verity having visibly checked out of the conversation, they got going, ready to finish the dungeon and hoping that there wasn’t too much left.
