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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 100, Universal Truths
🕑 Added 2022-05-02 18:05:51 +0000 UTC~~~~
Mizuki felt proud of the garden stone and what they’d made of the place. She had been Alfric’s carpentry assistant, which she continued to insist was a totally real thing, and she’d helped him move things around, though her strength was no match for his. Still, she had put in a huge amount of work, partly to make up for the fact that she hadn’t helped with the theater at all, and the garden was essentially a second home for them now. She was going to have a whole kitchen in there eventually, and if there hadn’t been the whole kidnapping thing, she might have spent some time flying around the city and picking up a bunch of stuff for it. It made more sense to just wait and grab a bunch of henlings from a dungeon the next time they came across a vaguely kitchen-like room, but she was impatient. Alfric had been a little overbearing in how much he went on about the need to clean things that were going to be used in cooking, and ideally having them be checked over by a cleric of Qymmos, which seemed like it was a little overly cautious given that they had Isra. Still, there was apparently a risk of something like lead, which was apparently not good for the constitution, even in very small amounts.
Mizuki showed the space off to Pek, who seemed somewhat listless and frustrated, and as nice as the garden stone had become, there wasn’t all that much to it. The trip to the mountain would take some time, and that left her alone with someone she didn’t really know how to handle.
“Are you holding up okay?” asked Mizuki. “I know she was your sister.”
“She wasn’t, not really,” said Pek. “She’s the same species, that’s all, it’s just that there are only two of us.” He paused for a moment. “When I was little, I thought we would get married.”
“Oh,” said Mizuki. “And … that didn’t work out?”
“There was never any real spark of attraction,” said Pek. “It would have to be like a chrononaut pact, loveless and businesslike, only for furthering the species, and there are lots of reasons not to do that. A community of new bastlefolk would be seen as a threat to some people.”
“What, really?” asked Mizuki. “More than just two people would be?”
Pek nodded. “People have problems with just two as well, but if we were a family, a community, it might be seen differently. Those first babies that Penelope talks about, those thirty-seven, if they had all grown to maturity, it might actually have caused some problems for the cause, especially if they were better than humans in some way.”
“Better?” asked Mizuki. “Like, stronger?”
“Stronger, smarter, faster, with magical powers, that kind of thing,” said Pek. “The dwodo live longer than humans, and some people resent them for that. The feil were decimated by attacks on their sovereign hexes during the Red Ages, and there are still songs about them that declare them to be monstrous in some way or another.”
Mizuki knew exactly what songs he was talking about, though she’d never taken them all that seriously. ‘Feili claws and widened jaws’, the kind of thing that was used to scare people. But the feil were kind of scary, at least in her opinion, from what she knew about them, and the dwodo and their moving mountains were much more quaint and harmless, so long as the moving mountains stayed in the water and didn’t come up on land where they weren’t expected.
“And are you?” asked Mizuki. “Better than a human somehow?”
“We have a magic of our own,” said Pek. “Nothing too good though.”
“Can I see?” asked Mizuki. “I’m a sorc, it’s professional curiosity.” She loved being able to use that line.
Pek frowned. “Just a moment.” He fiddled with his ring, and the disguise fell, leaving his normal appearance, with stones embedded in his face. He took one of these out, leaving an unpleasant wet hole, then fiddled with the ring again, returning him to normal — or not normal, but human. “Here.”
Mizuki took the stone. It was warm to the touch, but not at all wet like she’d expected it to be. She turned it over, feeling its somewhat irregular shape. It was giving off an aetheric scent all by itself, something of binding, which meant that the magic itself might be animation of some sort. There was something else in there too, a minor note, a mood of disconnection that would correspond to connection. Disconnection was hard to work with for a sorc, and Mizuki didn’t have all that much experience with it — there weren’t all that many things that were susceptible to it, with the only notable one being bound entads, which could be temporarily disrupted.
“It’s … some kind of telekinetic rock?” asked Mizuki.
“Set it on the ground,” said Pek.
Mizuki did, and after a moment, the stone sprang to life, cracks that had been invisible widening open to make tiny little legs that splayed out. The faint excess it had been putting off blossomed into a veritable torrent of disturbance, one of the most outsized impacts on the aether that Mizuki had ever seen. The little stone creature moved around as Pek moved his hand, marching forward and backward.
“Super neat,” said Mizuki.
“It doesn’t do anything,” said Pek.
“It’s still neat,” said Mizuki. “I would love a minor power like that.”
“There are entads that do the same,” shrugged Pek. “There’s no practical use for it.”
“Still,” said Mizuki. “It’s neat. Sometimes, when it comes to magic, that’s enough, isn’t it?” Pek nodded slowly. “And it’s unique. You’re the only one in the world that can do it. That’s worth something too, it’s what I love about entads.”
“Not unique,” said Pek softly. “Kali can do it too. She doesn’t, but she can. If she’s still alive.”
“If she’s in trouble, we’ll save her,” said Mizuki. “I’d never bet against Alfric.” She almost said that Alfric was a good detective, but she didn’t actually know whether that was true. He knew a lot about a lot of things, but that didn’t necessarily mean that he was good at figuring things out. All Mizuki really knew about detectives came from detective stories, and she hadn’t read many detective books, which she had little interest in.
Alfric appeared next to the stone and told them that they’d arrived, and in short order, Mizuki was swarmed with dwodo children, which was her first introduction to them. She was surprised by how cute they were, and with their eyes in awkward places, they were even more adorable, reminding her of some of the terrible drawings her younger sisters had done. Mizuki had always liked kids, and she played with the dwodo kids, who wanted to touch her hair — they were bald — and pluck out her eyeballs. The hair wasn’t too much of a problem, but she wanted very much to keep her eyeballs in her head, and stopped bending down for them when one of them accidentally scratched her. Maybe they weren’t trying to pluck out her eyes and only wanted to see and feel these new things, but she still didn’t want her eyes damaged by childrens’ fingers.
But eventually they were following the old guy with seven eyes, which marked him as someone important. Mizuki wasn’t sure how important, but he was a big deal, she was pretty sure, maybe equivalent to a cleric or something. She also had no idea how many people lived on the moving mountain, and so far as she knew, it might be the same population as either Pucklechurch, with around a thousand, or Liberfell, with maybe fifteen thousand. Or more, perhaps, because the moving mountains were supposed to be riddled with tunnels and caves.
As they made their way down the mountain, Mizuki was struck by how much masonry there was. There were reddish stone bricks almost everywhere, paving all of the paths, even the ones that seemed to go to homes. Wood was nowhere to be seen except in the few trees they passed by. They didn’t seem to use wood in the construction of any of their buildings. And these were stone, carved or quarried, making everything look like it was a part of a large castle. She had an urge to take the helmet from Alfric and go up into the sky to see what this place looked like from above, but he seemed slightly annoyed with her, so she did her best to be on good behavior.
They walked for what seemed like a long way, and Mizuki took in the sights. It was much more ordered than Pucklechurch or even Plenarch, and it felt like every inch of the mountain’s back had been planned out, at least designed to look like it had been planned. For ground cover there was clover with tiny leaves and a nice smell, and while there was a fair amount of terraced farmland, there were also so many parks that it seemed a bit ridiculous. It was possible she was wrong about what she was seeing though. She had no idea what the dwodo ate, and was excited to find out, but the things she thought were parks might have been more farmland or something.
They came to a place that felt like a small temple to Mizuki, a domed building with a sextet of chairs set at angles to each other around a stonework design in the middle where the rocks had either been painted or dyed. There was no door, just a doorway, which felt a little weird. The dome had little holes in the top to let in light, and Mizuki was faintly surprised to realize that there weren’t proper lights anywhere to be seen. She supposed that dwodo didn’t really do dungeons as much as humans did, given that they spent most of their lives on their mountains, but surely they’d have been able to trade for lightstones? She didn’t know, and decided to add it to the list of questions she would have for Alfric later on.
The older dwodo sat in one of the chairs and waited for them to get settled. Maybe this was a small meeting room, rather than a temple, but the six chairs were suggestive. Then there was a round of introductions, which went a bit long in Mizuki’s opinion, partly because of the way that their host, Wolin, had introduced himself.
“Wolin, clade of Dowo, born of the Eel Mound, Seven-Eyed Envoy,” had led Alfric to be “Alfric, clade of Overguard, born of the Dondrian Hex, Two-Eyed Adventurer,” and Pek to be “Pek, cladeless, born of a far east dungeon, Two-Eyed Chandler,” which had given both Mizuki and Wolin cause for some silence. Then Mizuki had realized that it was her turn, and she flubbed it a bit, in part because she wasn’t entirely sure what a clade was except that Alfric had used his last name as his clade. It sounds like ‘clan’, and Mizuki wasn’t entirely sure what a clan was either, other than maybe the same as a big family or a gang or something. Alfric talked about chrononaut clans, and had never really explained what a clan was, though Mizuki had also never sought clarification.
“You do not come here on behalf of Plenarch,” said Wolin. Mizuki wasn’t sure which of his eyes to look at, but settled on the center one. She had a thousand questions for him, most of which didn’t involve the disappearance of Kali, and she did her best to focus on the matter at hand, which meant shutting up.
“No,” said Alfric. “The most recent disappearance happened less than twelve hours ago, a girl named Kali, who is the sister to Pek.”
“Help me,” said Wolin. “Twelve hours is … ?”
“Sometimes last night,” said Alfric. “Probably not long after sunset, we think. Have you seen her? Or has anyone landed on your mountain in the last half day or so? Reached you by boat?”
Wolin shook his head. “No one at all. I said before that you are the first in two days, since the mountain began its journey south.”
“No one?” Alfric pressed. Wolin shook his head. “Are there visitors right now, people who are maybe traveling with the dwodo, or staying at an inn?”
“There is a dormitory for the foreign two-eyes on the lower level of the mountain,” nodded Wolin. “You are welcome to stay there, but are not allowed to wander in the upper levels, nor within the interior.”
“You’ve been close to Plenarch for almost a month,” said Pek. “Have you had disappearances of your own?”
Wolin was silent for a moment. “We are free to leave,” he finally said. “We do not track each other like those in your lands. But dwodo do not wander like humans do. We wander in different ways”
“You’d notice if someone was gone though, right?” asked Mizuki. “If someone just suddenly stopped showing up to temple days in my village, and we went to check in and their home was empty —”
“That would be their own affair,” said Wolin. His voice was firm.
Mizuki stared at him. “Seriously? If someone didn’t show up to the knitting circle, no one would go to their house to see whether they were okay? And if no one showed up for a week, you’d just shrug and say hey, it happens?”
“It is our way,” replied Wolin. “If there is a contract it may be different, but there is no contract in most cases.”
Mizuki looked to Alfric to see whether this was as weird as she thought it was. He gave a slight shake of his head, and she shut her lips tight, but it seemed insane to her, and the fact that sometimes people ran into problems was exactly why. If one of the dwodo lived alone and died in their bed, how would anyone find out? If what other people did wasn’t any of your business, and you really believed that with your heart and soul, and your whole village believed that — how did anything function? Mizuki had depended upon the kindness of the other people in the village when her family had moved away. If she’d been living on the moving mountain, apparently she’d have been left to fend for herself unless she’d gone to request aid from other people, and maybe not even then.
“You have nothing like a census,” said Alfric slowly. “Is there some way we can verify the population ourselves?”
Wolin pursed his lips, which made him look curiously human. “I know humans have the concept of privacy.”
“We could ask people,” said Alfric. “Take a survey? Talk to people and see if they’ve noticed anyone missing?”
Wolin nodded slowly. “It would be possible. Most do not speak Inter.”
“I speak enough to get by,” said Alfric.
Alfric was frankly pretty amazing. Mizuki wondered whether he spoke the feili language as well, and guessed that he did, though she didn’t really understand why that would be. It was good to know more than one language, she thought, and she could more or less speak Kiromo a little, though wouldn’t want to be put to the test. But if you were going to go through the trouble of learning languages, why the feili and dwodo languages? Maybe at some point in his life he’d meant to do something with them, or maybe he’d just been fascinated by them.
“We will not stop you from speaking,” said Wolin.
Alfric nodded. “We won’t be here longer than a day.”
“And was there someone?” asked Mizuki. “Someone who you noticed wasn’t really around anymore, and you decided that it wasn’t any of your business?”
Wolin paused. “The guard from Plenarch came to ask and our response was the same. If someone does not want to be here, they are free to go.”
“Right, but do you have a list of names?” asked Mizuki. “Or dates, at least, to see whether this all lines up? Because people have gone missing in Plenarch, and I get that you might want to protect people from nosy neighbors or whatnot, but surely if they’re getting attacked by a dragon that’s something worth stopping, right?”
Wolin frowned. His hesitance was hard to figure out, and Mizuki started thinking up all kinds of wild theories to explain it. Maybe he was an important guy saving face, or maybe dwodo were just like this.
“Three,” said Wolin. “All in the past week.”
Alfric let out a breath. “We need to know details, then we need to get those details over to the guard in Plenarch. We need to know whether any of them spoke Inter, whether they’d been in Plenarch, what they did — all kinds of things.”
“I cannot say,” replied Wolin. “We do not know if they left or were taken. If they have left, they are owed their anonymity.”
“My sister is missing,” said Pek. “All I want is to find her, to know whether she’s okay.” With more background, Mizuki felt even worse for him. It was bad enough to think of one of her sisters going missing, but if her sisters had been the only other people like her in the entire world, that would have been so much worse.
“Just general stuff would be fine,” said Mizuki. “Keep it as anonymous as you can. We won’t tell anyone else, or go track them down, or snoop around.”
Wolin gazed at her with his seven eyes. They sat on his face oddly, held there without proper eyelids or eyelashes or really any of the necessary muscles to make them look like human eyeballs. The skin on the eyeball-area was maybe stretchy or something, because it would sometimes pinch around an eyeball in place of blinking. It was bizarre to look at, and Mizuki wondered whether the effect was better or worse with a dwodo who had even more eyeballs.
“All spoke Inter,” said Wolin. “All were acquainted with foreign lands. They might have been in Plenarch when we were in range of their boats, or when we were briefly inside the hex to be warped. They could be in Plenarch at the moment.”
“If we had names, we could check with our censusmaster,” said Alfric. Mizuki wanted to ask whether dwodo would show up on the human census, but she supposed that they did. Maybe the census wasn’t divided like that, though she’d just naturally assumed that it was.
“We do not use names in the same way,” said Wolin. “I could not give you names that the census would show. And you said that you would tell no one.”
Alfric gave a sigh of exasperation. “Then we won’t. If we could have the professions anyway? It might be part of a pattern.”
Wolin spent some time blinking in thought. “A mason, a botanist, and a groundskeeper.”
“Thank you,” said Alfric. “We’ll do our best to keep the information to ourselves and not impinge further.”
Wolin nodded. “There are other matters to attend to today,” he said. “You are free to move about the common areas. If you enter into homes without being told you can, you will be expelled.” He stood up and gave them what Mizuki interpreted as a small salute, done with the hand unfolding under his nose, and then the dwodo was on his way.
“I don’t know if that was helpful,” said Pek.
“It was information,” said Alfric.
“We’ll get him on the next time through the day,” said Mizuki. She stood up from her chair and stretched.
“No,” said Alfric. “If I redo the day, I’ll stick to what you told him. We agreed not to snoop or spread the information too far, that was the price he gave for us, and it’s one I intend to abide by.”
Mizuki stared at him. “How are we going to solve the case then?”
“Most likely we’re not,” said Alfric. “We’re just going to hand information over to the authorities in Plenarch and hope that it helps in some way. That the dwodo were also experiencing disappearances … that’s something, and it might be something that they don’t know in Plenarch. The professions are also a little suspect, aren’t they?”
“Skilled trades,” said Pek. “But Kali didn’t have a skilled trade.”
“Most of those who were taken from Plenarch had higher status due to their skills, the stability of a vocation, something like that,” said Alfric. “Kali didn’t have any of that, but it might be meaningful. If someone is stealing people, then … I don’t know. Maybe they’re doing it for their labor?”
“Slavery?” asked Pek.
“I don’t know,” said Alfric.
“We’re really done here?” asked Mizuki. “We’re just … going home?”
“We can go to the dormitory that Wolin mentioned,” said Alfric. “Asking around there would probably be fine, so long as we don’t reveal too much of what we’ve already learned.”
“Let’s go then,” said Pek.
They made their way down the moving mountain, with Alfric occasionally asking directions from whatever dwodo came close by. He rose into the air with the help of the helmet and surveyed the area, identifying a likely building that was near to a dock that was currently folded up.
“So why did you learn dwodo?” asked Mizuki as they continued down.
“They don’t have chrononauts,” said Alfric. “There’s only our small clan, and we’re human, obviously, so if one of the dwodo mounds wants to have our services on demand, they can pay us fairly handsomely in order to have us live there, if they don’t want it remote. And if they do want it remote, I would still want to know the language for the purpose of trade.”
“But knowing you, you wanted to live on one of these mounds,” said Mizuki. “Even though they don’t have dungeons.”
“It’s a different way of life,” said Alfric. “The dwodo mounds usually pick their paths so they pass by different cities, never in one place for too long, eating different foods with every passing month … and they have a different kind of culture, a way of doing things that you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in human lands. I wouldn’t have wanted to stay on a mound for too long, but I did entertain being employed on one for a few years, which would have helped sharpen my understanding of the language and given me what I thought would be a nicely rounded experience.” He shrugged. “Dungeons are better places to explore though, better places to find new things. If we keep on for long enough, we’re bound to find an entad that allows us to go wherever we want, whenever we want, like what my parents have.”
“Have you ever found something like me in a dungeon?” asked Pek.
Alfric paused in their downward journey. “No,” he said. “Or … if we did, they were dungeon mad. Nothing that was obviously based on the human design. Humanoid, maybe.”
“I don’t think I could ever go into a dungeon,” said Pek.
“Meaning it wouldn’t work?” asked Mizuki. “Or that you’d just, um, have qualms?”
“Knowing I came from there,” said Pek. He raised an eyebrow in her direction. “Whatever the Editors did to determine what’s a person, I count just the same. I can go into dungeons, I count on the census.”
“Any chance that Kali would have gone into a dungeon?” asked Alfric.
“She had just broken up with her boyfriend,” said Pek. “That was all. Girls don’t normally go into dungeons just because of a bad breakup. Do they?”
“Sometimes,” said Mizuki. “Seems a bit dramatic to me though. The census doesn’t cover people who are down in dungeons?”
“How do you not know this?” asked Alfric.
“I dunno,” said Mizuki. “It was just never really that relevant. So a person who goes into a dungeon just … disappears?”
“Yes,” said Alfric.
That gave Mizuki some pause. She had thought … well, she wasn’t sure what she’d thought, but it hadn’t been that. It seemed like a natural consequence of all the things that Alfric had talked about before, the barrier between the dungeons and the real world, but the fact that not even the census would touch you in a dungeon made her feel a bit queasy, and made the dungeons feel all that much more creepy.
The moving mountain was a nice place, and even the slight bit of movement was eventually pretty nice beneath her feet. Alfric had said that some people got sick from it, in the same way that some people got sea sick, but Mizuki had no problem with it. The environment was also pretty nice, with all of the greenery and masonry making good for a walk. In her opinion, big cities could have done well with more of this kind of thing, especially Dondrian, which she felt was lacking in parks. The more they walked though, the more she was struck by how similar all the stonework was.
“Where do all the stones come from?” asked Mizuki after they’d passed the tenth house with the same large reddish stones.
“From the mountain itself,” said Alfric.
“Aren’t they worried about running out?” asked Mizuki.
“They have the opposite problem,” said Alfric. “Left to its own devices, it will grow until it slows down and then stops. They chip off pieces of the mountain to keep it moving, huge chunks every now and then, normally out in an ocean. Only some of it goes into houses and temples and things like that.” He pointed down the mountain. “That’s the dormitory, I think.”
Mizuki had always thought of dormitories as being squat buildings, but the building that Alfric had pointed out was tall and thin, with the stones laid out to make a cylinder. Like many of the buildings they’d passed by, there was something very deliberate about it all, and there were plants growing from almost every balcony, making it look like a vase full of flowers.
“Pretty,” said Mizuki. “They treat their guests well.”
“There are caves and passageways carved into these mountains,” said Alfric. “Those are usually the sacred places, the most coveted. From what I could see, this is the only building above two stories on the mountain, and I don’t really think it’s a compliment.”
“Ah,” said Mizuki.
“I don’t really understand why someone would move here,” said Pek. “To a place where nothing is made for them, where they would be an eternal outsider.”
Alfric pursed his lips and they continued on.
Mizuki understood what Pek was saying. He wasn’t talking about the dwodo and the humans that chose to live on the moving mountain, he was talking about his own situation. Being bastlefolk, living with the humans, that wasn’t the sort of life he would have chosen for himself if he’d ever had the option.
“My grandfather moved his whole family to Inter,” said Mizuki. “They didn’t speak the language too well and took some time to adjust, but Inter is pretty welcoming, and the town adjusted to them, and … sometimes what’s comfortable to people is only comfortable, or it’s comfortable in a bad way. So some people probably came here because they didn’t feel like their home, wherever that was, really suited them. Staying with the humans was the worse option. At least here, if they’re treated like outsiders, it’s for a reason.”
“I suppose,” said Pek.
“That’s universal though, feeling like you don’t belong,” said Mizuki. “Everyone gets it now and then, a feeling like this place just wasn’t made for them.” She had no idea whether that was true, but it was the sort of thing Hannah often said, a particularly clerical outlook that declared everyone to be more alike than they were different, casting all struggles as universal.
Mizuki was worried that Pek would say, ‘Actually, I’m literally not human, and some people struggle to think of me as a person, so my struggle isn’t universal, it’s one that’s loosely shared by only a dozen people in the entire world, and is nothing at all like your own struggles as someone who felt a little out of step’. But he didn’t say any of that, and had a quiet, contemplative look that suggested that he wasn’t thinking it either.
Whatever the case, Mizuki was pretty sure that she knew what kind of people they’d find in the tower: a bunch of weirdos.
