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This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 69, Undone II
🕑 Added 2022-01-17 16:27:03 +0000 UTC~~~~
They’d gone to Herson & Son first, mostly because it was close to the warp.
“Mizuki!” said Rolaj. “What are you doing here?”
“Business, not pleasure,” said Mizuki. “Just seeing whether you have anything in stock, and whether you have any leads on those entads I told you about.”
“I’ll go look at the stock,” said Alfric.
“It hasn’t been long since you’ve been here, we don’t have all that much turnover.” His eyes were still on Mizuki, and he had a goofy grin on his face. “It’s only been what, a week and a half? Two weeks?”
“Something like that,” said Mizuki.
“I’ll leave you to it,” said Alfric, moving away.
“Well, I did find one of the entads though,” said Rolaj. “I talked to my dad, who is part of a guild of sellers, and they take stolen goods pretty seriously, even with it being so long. I have a letter for you, transcribed from a guild message, but if you want my father to serve as an intermediary between the two of you, it would probably be best to have some kind of compensation for him? Just as a thought.” He had a sheepish look.
“That’s great!” said Mizuki. “Where was the entad? And which?”
“The bottle, sold in a shop far to the east, in a town on the shore of Lake Galia.” Rolaj looked around the shop, confirming that it was, in fact, empty except for them. “If you can watch the store for ten minutes, I can run home and get the letter for you?”
“Of course,” smiled Mizuki. Rolaj left, almost at a run, and Mizuki turned to Alfric. “So, what are we going to steal?”
“Not funny,” said Alfric.
Lake Galia was the last of the Proten Lakes, so far east that it wasn’t terribly far from the eastern border of Inter, which in turn meant that it was a narrow sea away from Tarbin. Alfric wondered whether that was a coincidence.
“It’s a little funny though, right?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, we’d never actually do that, even in an undone day, but … you know. Probably reminded you of Lola, I guess. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s fine,” said Alfric. He paused. “It’s actually not fine, but I don’t know if talking about it is going to help anything, because this will all be undone, and I don’t know what I could possibly say to you in order to make that kind of ‘joke’, if it is a joke, stop happening.”
“You think that if I had the power, I’d be more like … her?” asked Mizuki.
“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “No. You don’t really want to hurt people. But you would allow your impulsiveness to shine, and I think that would create some awkward situations for you, which would be made more awkward by the need to explain them to people.” He paused. “And I think you’d have trouble with disclosure.”
“Wait, why did you say I don’t ‘really’ want to hurt people?” asked Mizuki. “I don’t want to hurt people. Full stop.”
“I just think you see violence against people as … an option,” said Alfric, trying his best to be diplomatic.
“It is an option though, right?” asked Mizuki. “Just one that we agree not to use.”
“You can’t treat it like it’s an option,” said Alfric. “And I was just hedging. I don’t think that you want to hurt anyone.”
“There was that guy I burned,” said Mizuki. “I’ve also definitely punched people before. Also nearly deafened a guy.”
“You deafened someone?” asked Alfric.
“Only nearly,” said Mizuki. “He’d pushed me into the river, so I blasted a spell beside his head, and he had to go see a cleric because of the ringing in his ear. That was it, no big deal.”
It sounded like a big deal to Alfric, but he kept his mouth shut. He had never hurt anyone outside of training or the occasional duel, always with some kind of structure and with healing on hand, always with the understanding that this violence was controlled and not ‘real’. He imagined that it was different for Mizuki, for whom physical violence was unlikely to ever actually injure someone, simply due to her size. Spells were a different matter entirely though.
They waited in silence until Rolaj returned, each thinking their own thoughts.
“Okay,” said Rolaj when he came back, slightly out of breath. “Any customers?”
“Not a one,” said Mizuki.
“Early morning isn’t the best time for them,” he nodded. He held out the letter. “Here you go. There should be instructions for how to get in touch with the guy out by Lake Galia through the regular post too.”
Mizuki took it. “Thank you so much,” she said. “We’re going to crack the case, I’m sure of it.”
“Good luck,” he nodded. “There are still some feelers out on the other things, and I’ll let you know if I hear anything.” He gave her an awkward smile. “Did you get my most recent letter?”
“I did,” said Mizuki. “And I’ll write back, this trip was just kind of unexpected.”
“Do you have time while you’re here?” asked Rolaj. “I’m at the shop until fifth bell, but free after that, if you want to do something.”
“Sorry, can’t,” said Mizuki. “We’ve got things to do, so we’re in and out.”
“No problem,” he said, but he deflated slightly.
They left the shop and began walking to the edge of town, where Besc’s shop was.
“I have to say, I don’t really see the attraction,” said Alfric.
“Yeah,” said Mizuki.
“You … don’t see the attraction either?” asked Alfric.
“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “We’ve been doing the letters, and it’s been fine, but he likes to talk about his family and some sport thing that I don’t really care about.”
“Whereas you want to talk about … ?” Alfric asked.
Mizuki shrugged. “Magic, entads, gossip, I don’t know. I used to think that when you talked about dungeons, it was at least interesting because you had some obvious expertise and passion about it, even if I didn’t care all that much, but the stuff that Rolaj really cares about puts me to sleep, even with his enthusiasm. I don’t know if it’s because it’s by letter or what. He’s nice, and he likes me, he’s respectful and kind, but I don’t know, I think you’re right.”
“Right about what?” asked Alfric.
“That I should break things off with him,” said Mizuki.
“I didn’t say that,” said Alfric.
“Yeah, but you were thinking it,” sighed Mizuki.
“If I say that I don’t see the attraction, and you say ‘yeah’, then I do think that the relationship should probably be closed out,” said Alfric. “But I have no real experience with any of it, so I wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Oh, I’m real good at ignoring people,” said Mizuki, smiling at him. “But I won’t make a decision about Rolaj today, or send anything back about it. So it’s just idle talk, I guess. And there’s not that much to break off, we’re not really partnered, just mutually interested, except I’m feeling not all that interested anymore.”
Alfric nodded.
“Let’s say that Lola was out of the picture,” said Mizuki. “Drowned in a lake enough times that she didn’t come back. Or something like that, anyway. What kind of woman would you be looking for?”
Alfric thought about that for a moment. “If I didn’t have a new pact?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Mizuki. “If you could just pick out your ideal woman without having to worry about your duty or whatever.”
“You always have to worry about duty,” said Alfric. “If I’m going to have children, I need to worry about what their mother is going to be like. That’s still duty. And I have to worry about how I would help her and support her, which is also duty.”
“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “Though I have literally never once worried about any of that stuff.”
“I’d want someone who understands me and supports me,” said Alfric, ignoring what he hoped was just a jest. “Someone who I can lean on. We’d end up leaning on each other. I don’t know. It’s not really something that I’ve been able to give all that much thought.”
“Even with all the undone days?” asked Mizuki. “What do you think about when you’re making those trips by yourself?”
“Dungeons, mostly,” said Alfric.
Mizuki laughed. “Always dungeons.”
“I like dungeons,” said Alfric. “And my life, for the next decade at least, is primarily going to be about them, so … that makes sense, right? It’s the thing that I’m devoting myself to.”
“I guess,” said Mizuki. “Not to be rude, but I sometimes feel like you would do well to grab a hobby.”
“Dungeoneering includes a lot,” said Alfric. “It’s got enough depth and breadth that there’s always something to do, always something to learn. It encompasses other hobbies.”
“If we can get moving through the dungeons a bit faster, you’ll be happier?” asked Mizuki.
“I will,” said Alfric. “But I want to keep the party together for as long as possible. Isra’s bow is very good, and the longer I can keep her on the team, the better. And Verity is a very good bard who I caught at the right time. It’s a good team.”
“And me too,” said Mizuki.
“You too,” said Alfric. “To be honest, you were the biggest surprise.”
“Not Isra?” asked Mizuki.
“No,” said Alfric. “Or at least, the surprise of her was mostly not related to the dungeons themselves. Capable hunters are a dime a dozen, and her being a druid doesn’t substantially change that. I had thought to fill the team out with a wizard, but if you have enough magic going around, a sorcerer is better, in some circumstances. The big question was whether you’d actually be good in the role, and it turns out that you are.”
“I feel like I have a lot to learn,” said Mizuki. “An embarrassing amount, actually.”
Alfric shrugged. “Sorcerers are usually going through a personal journey, even in Dondrian. Maybe someday there will be a proper school, but sorcs show up too little for that, I think, and a school wouldn’t really work because you’d have all these sorcs sucking at the same teat.”
“There are probably more books to read,” said Mizuki.
“Or you could read the same book again,” said Alfric. “I do that sometimes, when I’m trying to learn from a book. Tutors are better, but I have no idea where we’d be able to find a sorc tutor for you, or what they would teach you, or how we could pay them.”
“You’ve given it thought?” asked Mizuki. “Because I need to get better?”
“You’re our best offense,” said Alfric. “Whatever we can do to get more power out of you is going to pay more dividends than basically anything else we might do, aside from maybe getting Verity to be more powerful.”
“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “For the future, could you front load your comments? I’m always a bit nervous about my position.”
“Why?” asked Alfric.
“Dunno,” shrugged Mizuki.
They got to Besc after not too much longer, and he gave them a hearty greeting before explaining that not all that much progress had been made on the growthstones.
“One exception,” he said, and went over to a small table and grabbed a disk as wide across as a dinner plate. “This is the first bit that I’ve gotten from that wood, a test just to make sure that all the processes were working proper, yours to keep if you’d like it, as I’m all done with it.”
Alfric took it in hand and looked at it, turning it over once or twice. It was dark brown and completely matte, heavier than it looked, and rough to the touch.
“Not much to see, kworma,” said Besc. He was smiling with his eyes. “I’ve given it a daylong test, enough to make sure it helps a plant to grow. Production on the rest is started, but it’ll take some time, just needed to make sure I wasn’t wasting tens of thousands of rings.”
“Good,” said Alfric. He started to remove his pack to put the growthstone in it, but Mizuki took it and slipped it into her bag instead. “Things have been going well here?”
“Well enough,” nodded Besc. “Always a bit nervous before the money comes in, if I’m honest, and I’m always honest.” He grinned at them. “Anything more you’re able to bring in, I’ll process it for you, just a matter of time.”
“Alfric?” came a voice from behind.
Alfric turned, wincing, but it was only Grig, and he was alone. The Vertex bard wasn’t in his adventuring clothes, and his instrument was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he had a preening sort of look with sharp cuts and bright colors, along with a necklace, bracelet, and two rings. It was more flamboyant than Alfric was used to.
“Grig,” nodded Alfric. “If Lola is around, I’d rather not see her.”
“She’s sick,” said Grig. “On her last day.” He looked nervous.
“I don’t believe it,” said Alfric. He said it almost on reflex.
“She’s sweating a lot, running a bit of a fever, threw up a few times,” said Grig. “And she’s got some bumps. She’s not moving much.”
“That does sound accurate,” said Alfric. It was perhaps on the worse end of the symptoms. “But I still don’t believe it, and even if I did believe it, there’s not anything I would do about it. She’ll be fine tomorrow.” He hesitated. “How is she on her last day?”
“Doesn’t really matter, right?” asked Mizuki. “Because it’s a ploy.”
“She’s not saying,” said Grig. “She just said that you two were coming to Liberfell today. She wants to talk. She … may have hinted that Mizuki killed her?”
“Why would I do that?” asked Mizuki. “Actually, why wouldn’t I do that?”
“What do you expect from me?” asked Alfric.
“I’m just letting you know,” said Grig. “She asked me to pass on a message, that’s all. This day is going to be undone by you, according to her, so … I don’t know. I thought that I would pass on the message.”
“Thank you,” said Alfric, keeping tight-lipped.
“Hey, did you know that Marsh and Hannah are a thing?” asked Mizuki.
Grig started. “Is that where he’s been sneaking off to?”
“Last night?” asked Mizuki.
“Every night since the dungeon escape,” said Grig.
“But … we weren’t around?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, if he was going to Pucklechurch, then we weren’t there.”
Grig shrugged. “Then I don’t know. He’s been gone, that’s all I know. He doesn’t answer the party chat, which is a bit rude, and doesn’t answer questions about where he’s been.”
“Things aren’t going well within your party,” said Alfric.
Grig laughed. “That’s one way of putting it. Another way would be that we’re on the verge of dissolving entirely, and not just because of Lola. There are too many reasons for us not to split, but it’s been rough. Josen keeps talking about having lost his arm, which I do understand, but you stand there listening to him complain about it while looking at him clearly having gotten his replacement, and … well, it’s party stuff.”
“The kind of thing that should be kept within the party,” said Alfric.
“Horrible advice, that,” said Grig, rolling his eyes. “We’re a tea kettle that’s getting ready to explode if it can’t vent some steam. Talking to the party would do nothing but increase the pressure.” He shrugged. “I think me and Mardin will stick together, but Marsh has always been in his own world, Lola is Lola, and Josen seems like he’s looking for an escape plan.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” asked Alfric.
“I don’t know,” said Grig. “We were friends, kind of, and I always liked you. I feel guilty, and now, kind of like a fool.”
“Did Lola tell you that she offered me her spot in the party?” asked Alfric. It was a bad question to ask, the kind that would lead to him having information that he wasn’t supposed to have, and disclosure to Grig would be difficult.
Grig’s eyes widened slightly. “No, she did not.” He paused. “Would you?”
“Mismatched elevation would be a problem,” said Alfric. He was very aware that Mizuki was standing there next to him, hanging on his words. “And team dynamics would also be cause for concern.”
“Elevation mismatch tends to go away,” said Grig. “Over time, anyway.”
“I know that,” said Alfric. “But we might face some brutal dungeons early on. And that would leave the issue of the team. I don’t have the entads that you do.”
Grig shook his head. “Well I don’t know. It feels like the answer to our prayers — or my prayers, anyway.” He sank slightly. “It’s a real mess.”
“It’s how adventuring parties die,” said Alfric. “Torn apart by internal forces, failures to adapt to outside forces, and once one person is gone, it’s hard to find a replacement, and that accelerates all the problems.”
“I kind of think we should go talk to Lola,” said Mizuki.
“Why?” asked Alfric.
“Because then we can see if she’s really sick or not,” said Mizuki. “And if she is, then she’s stuck with this day, isn’t she? And she can’t just undo it if she says something that she’s not supposed to say, or whatever. She’s vulnerable.”
“Unless she’s faking it, which seems likely,” said Alfric.
“Easy enough to test that, right?” asked Mizuki.
Alfric frowned. “By … killing her?” he asked.
“Wow,” said Mizuki. “You said it, not me. But yeah, that would work too. If you kill her and then still remember the day, that means that she wasn’t faking it. At most, she made herself sick by using up her days for some reason. But I don’t think she’s actually that devious.”
“She’s pretty devious,” said Grig.
“Nah,” said Mizuki. “I think she’s just bumbling around, acting like she’s got secret plots going on when she’s really just improvising everything and resetting when things don’t work out.”
“We’ll speak about it privately,” said Alfric. He turned to Grig. “No offense.”
“None taken, I guess,” said Grig. “You’re really resetting today?”
“I had planned to,” said Alfric. It was almost a necessity, given that Filera was spending five hours identifying items. He could, technically, get one of the other members of the team to go to her and tell her that the day wouldn’t be undone after all, but he only planned to do that if the circumstances were particularly dire.
“Lola’s lied to us about that,” said Grig. “Twice.”
“Ugh,” said Mizuki. “Said that she’d undo the day, then didn’t?”
Grig nodded. “She had excuses both times.” He was looking at Alfric. “I know we’re not friends anymore, but if I can give some unasked for advice, do whatever is in your power to put some distance between the two of you.”
“But you’re not going to take your own advice?” asked Alfric.
“I’ve got things to lose,” said Grig. He shrugged. “We’re in a tent set up on the south road, easy enough to find. Come if you want, or stay away if that’s better. And thanks for letting me vent, at least a little bit.”
“Of course,” said Alfric.
Grig turned and walked away, and Mizuki moved closer to Alfric as they watched him go.
“It really makes me glad that we have a functional party,” said Mizuki. “What a disaster.”
“I worry about what will happen with Lola if it falls apart,” said Alfric. “Right now she’s keeping up some pretense of being a dungeoneer. If she’s not even doing that, if there’s no one she at least needs to lie to, no one tracking her, no one talking to her over party chat, that might mean she escalates.”
“Hard to escalate more than a dungeon escape,” said Mizuki. “Or, not hard, but … hard to get away with something more extreme than that. Right?”
“Yes,” said Alfric. “Not that I think that would necessarily stop her. She likes pushing the limits, and it’s just a matter of where she thinks the limits are.”
“So do you want to go seek her out?” asked Mizuki.
“Not really,” said Alfric. “If you’re right about her improvising a lot, which I think you are, then I worry about what she might improvise for this situation, assuming she did run out of days.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think I killed her, let alone three times,” said Mizuki.
“All you would need is to kill her once,” said Alfric. “And then for her to go about the day in the same way in spite of that.”
“So are we going to talk to her?” asked Mizuki. “I can promise not to kill her, if that helps.”
“We’ll finish things up,” said Alfric. “And then … we’ll see if there’s anything to get out of it.”
~~~~
Mizuki hadn’t visited the League office in Liberfell before, and she seemed taken with the place.
“This is way better than a hotel,” she said.
“Worse accommodations,” said Alfric.
“Free though, right?” asked Mizuki.
“If you’re in a registered party and actively engaged in dungeoneering,” said Alfric. “Yes.”
“Can we summon that one woman that Hannah was talking about?” asked Mizuki.
“Priya?” asked Alfric. “Not unless we have actual business, which we don’t, or if we want to get yelled at for wasting her time.”
“Hannah said she was cool,” said Mizuki. “Yelling at people isn’t cool.”
“Maybe we wouldn’t get yelled at,” said Alfric. “But she wouldn’t appreciate it.”
Unlike last time, there were other people in the League office, and based on the look of them, they were dungeoneers, though not outfitted for an adventure. There were more women than men, which was a bit unusual, and more than five, which meant that either some of them weren’t dungeoneers, or perhaps that there were two parties. They’d looked over when Alfric and Mizuki came in, then gone back to their conversations, perhaps a little subdued.
“I’m mostly here to look at the logs,” said Alfric. “You can mingle, if you want.”
“Sure,” said Mizuki as Alfric grabbed the big book full of reports. She went to where the other presumed dungeoneers were and introduced herself as though it were nothing, and within a minute their conversation had resumed its rhythms with none of the uncertainty that it had before.
Alfric was looking for a few things in the log book. One of them was, of course, more news from Vertex, but the other was a better overview of the teams that were operating in the area, which he hadn’t had enough time for when he’d been in Liberfell last time. Beyond that, he wanted to read more deeply on their next targeted dungeons, the better to be able to prepare for them, though that wasn’t entirely possible given the nature of dungeons.
To his mild surprise, he found a dungeon report by the team that had been to Hie Point before them, with their report sitting next to his own. He read it with some interest, though it was sparse on details.
They were a fairly new team out of Tarchwood, though not quite so new as Alfric’s own team, and had been through a series of fairly brutal dungeons. Even if their reports hadn’t had marked with dates, Alfric thought that it would have been easy enough to see their trajectory just from the tone, and he almost imagined that he could put them in order. They hadn’t gotten lucky, not in any of their dungeons so far, and the poor returns and subpar entads were eating into their morale in a serious way. They had started out with rented entads, which ate through quite a bit of their funds, and eventually gave those up in favor of equipment that they’d bought for themselves, or which they’d pulled from the dungeons.
Alfric felt bad for them. Many people got into dungeoneering for the money, and you could make good money, but it wasn’t as simple as going into the dungeons and pulling out immense wealth, not normally. The general rule was that eighty percent of the wealth came from twenty percent of the items, and people tended to talk about their best finds rather than the runs of bad luck. Worse, being properly equipped was necessary for extracting value from a dungeon, not just in terms of fighting off the monsters, but in moving all of the things inside the dungeon out. This party had rented entads for that purpose, then never ended up using them, which was money down the drain. Then, when they decided to stop renting the entads, they ran into a good entad that they were physically incapable of pulling from the dungeon, much to their distress. They’d tried to take it apart into pieces, but that generally just broke an entad, depending on what you were taking off. The entad, worth perhaps a hundred thousand rings, had broken.
It was sad, but also not terribly relevant to his understanding of the dungeon landscape in the area. Part of why he couldn’t stop himself from reading was that it so clearly felt like those months after he’d lost Vertex, when he was desperately trying to get a party together and everything was going wrong. He could imagine the same string of dungeons for himself, bad luck was all it would take, even with resets, and eventually, his view on being a dungeoneer would sour.
He turned away from the sad story of that group and toward more fruitful areas of the logs. Vertex had apparently done a single dungeon in the week and a half since Alfric had been in Liberfell, the same one at Hie Point, and there they’d encountered a dungeon on a nearly forty-five degree slant. Lola had written the report, and been brief about it, but it was subdued, at least for her. They had gotten relatively little of note from the dungeons, with the highlights being a sword that was added to her collection and a storage entad that was to be sold. They hadn’t encountered anything that seemed partway civilized.
The rest of Alfric’s time with the book was spent looking at their potential next dungeons, and there didn’t seem to be anything in particular to do with the information within. Laver Marsh, to the northeast, had a tendency toward waterlogged dungeons, not completely flooded in most cases, but with a foot or two of water, which was quite unwelcome. That one, at least, was better to go to once they had better equipment to deal with it. Kirtle Point, to the northeast, was on the edge of the Fractalwoods, and apparently had some influence from them, with relatively high amounts of ectad materials that could be processed into floatstones and weightstones. It was, by Alfric’s reckoning, probably the best place for them to go if they wanted something relatively easy. He made a special note of where each dungeon entrance was located in relation to the warp point, because that would determine how much of a hike they would need to do before going into the dungeon.
Finally, hours after he’d sat down, he felt he’d gleaned as much as there was to glean. He had taken notes, but those notes would need to be memorized as best he could, because they wouldn’t go back in time with him. Still, he was getting some broader sense for the dungeons of the area, and while dungeons might produce anything, there were always trends.
When he went to go find Mizuki, she was still with the other dungeoneers, eating from a plate of meats and cheese that had been set out on the kitchenette table. Some of the faces were different, but she was still happily talking.
“I kid you not,” she said. “I hadn’t even known that you could knock out a bard like that, but I sucked the magic right out of her, and the beam was as thick around as a barrel. And that still didn’t kill this enormous house of a bear until our cleric rushed forward and doubled the damage.”
“It’s the closest we’ve come to dying,” said Alfric.
“Good time reading?” asked Mizuki around a mouthful of cheese.
Alfric nodded. “Probably not the most productive use of my time, but it gives me some confidence in what we’re tackling next.”
“Logs don’t seem to be much use,” said a boy about Alfric’s age, tall and powerfully built.
“They need to be read in aggregate,” said Alfric. “And they’re partly for the League, not the dungeoneers, not that the League’s efforts in improving extraction have amounted to much.”
“We don’t do them, personally,” said a light-skinned girl in light blue wizard’s robes. “Too much work, and if you’re trying to get the next League key, you’re better off just doing a lot of dungeons.”
“Mizuki said you only have three under your belt?” asked the tall guy. “But it seems like you’re nicely set up to do a lot more.”
“Only three so far,” nodded Alfric. There were other things that he needed to get done in the day, but it would be some time yet before Filera would be done with the entads, and the task list he’d set himself for Liberfell was getting quite short. He didn’t mind talking to these people, but with the day being undone, there wasn’t much of a point to it. He didn’t want to know too much about them in case they met again. A brief encounter wouldn’t need disclosure on his part, but something more in-depth would. “But we’re hoping to increase our rate, yes.”
“We’ve done twelve,” the wizard explained. “Oli’s group, Tantaru, has done fifteen,” she nodded to the tall guy. “We’ve been sort of traveling together, having a co-party rather than a counterparty, helping each other out.”
“It’s how they used to do it,” said Alfric. “There was a program a few decades ago where they’d get prospective parties out of the Junior League to all be part of the same collective support group, usually with a counterparty that serviced as many as twenty parties.”
“Why’d they stop doing that?” asked Mizuki.
Alfric shrugged. “Mostly because of all the coordination problems, but also because it was seen as faintly exploitative. You had to pay in. Nothing to stop someone from setting that up for themselves, but if you look at a League office like this one, with room to put up three parties, obviously there are some issues with, er, stripping the city clean. If it’s fifty parties, which I think was as many as there were in the peak, you really don’t have economies of scale, you have locusts that will strip bare everything that they have. And local vendors know that, so you either have to set up systems to support the horde, or get gouged because you’re bringing too much demand to bear on limited supply.”
“I think I read about that,” said the wizard. “Still seems like it might be nice, to have more support, even if they’re bleeding you. The Overguard system, right?”
Alfric hesitated, then nodded.
“Like the big dungeoneering family?” asked Mizuki. She was grinning slightly.
“Doesn’t that run down the dungeons?” asked a girl who hadn’t spoken yet. She was small, shorter than even Mizuki, and looked a bit young to be a dungeoneer. It wasn’t impossible for someone to lie about their age, but it meant depending on no one speaking with a censusmaster about them.
He hadn’t caught any of their names, and hoped that he could escape the conversation without having to give his own. Among dungeoneers, it was very likely that at least one of them would have heard about his family, even being as far from Dondrian as they were.
“At low elevation, no,” said Alfric. “The rule of thumb is that each party of a certain elevation will reduce mana charge by that percentage, so running through twenty-five parties of second elevation would mean a reduction in power by approximately half, which would still be likely to be well worth it. And it reduces the risk as well.” He shrugged. “Not really relevant now, because the system has been dead for a long time.”
“But it’s like you said,” the tall guy frowned. “No reason that we couldn’t just collectively work together for something like that. We’ve got two parties, Tantaru and the Larks, and with your team we’d have three. Without someone at the top skimming things, we could pool resources and all make out better. Form a guild, maybe?”
“We’d be interested in that,” said Mizuki.
“We might,” said Alfric. “There’s extra overhead from coordination, but — this really isn’t the best day for us to be talking about this, we should actually be on our way.”
Mizuki said her goodbyes, and they managed to extract themselves from the conversation after only ten more minutes of idle discussion and promises to talk later, especially about the idea of forming a small guild together. Alfric made no such promises, but Mizuki did, which was a point of some concern.
“You know you’re not going to be able to hold to that promise, right?” asked Alfric.
“Sure I can,” said Mizuki. “All you need to do is tell me to. Just give me an explanation and I’ll follow through on it.”
“I’d need to memorize names,” said Alfric.
Mizuki began naming and describing all the people present, and Alfric stopped her halfway through.
“That particular topic came up because of something that I had added,” said Alfric. “Once I undo this day, that sequence of events won’t have happened. Maybe they’ll be responsive to the suggestion of forming a guild of dungeoneers, but it will take some doing. If you’d like, I can commit to telling you about the Overguard system and some of its pitfalls, along with the costs of creating a guild, but I don’t know that it will seem like such a good idea to you.”
“Well, you tell me,” said Mizuki. “Where are we off to now?” she had been following him without asking.
“Lunch,” said Alfric. “Then to the bastlekeeper, just for a check-in while we’re here, and then … Lola, I think.”
Comments
fbt
Uh-oh. I still think going anywhere near Lola, for any reason, is a terrible, terrible idea. But, then, my view is colored by own experiences w/ specific crazy manipulators, and my own solutions. Other folks, other strokes. TFTC!
