Chapter One Hundred and Eighty-Two - Shopping With the Fishes

Shopping in Insmouth was a strange experience. Not the actual shopping, that part was fairly easy. It wasn’t shopping for fun, but for supplies, so it was more of a chore than a fun activity, but I still got to hang out with my best friends, so it was okay.

The thing that was weird were all the looks we got from the townspeople. They weren’t quite suspicious. It was something else. I guess in a town filled with fishfolk and little else, our band stood out a lot. We were strange.

Maybe that was it. Guarded curiosity as opposed to outright suspicion.

It took a few hours, and two return trips to the Beaver for us to gather up all the supplies we wanted. The locals had plenty of fish to sell, in all sorts of forms. Salted, pickled, and even some smoked fish which I got to taste to confirm it was yummy, tummy-aches aside.

They didn’t have wax paper, but they did have these big leaves from one of the local plants that worked well enough. Not much chicken though, and no beef or anything like that. We picked up a few sacks of veggies too, mostly turnips and onions.

Once everything was squared away, we kind of just toured the town. Insmouth was laid out in a sort of crescent-shape, with the bay in the middle. That meant that the town was essentially split with the docks in the middle.

I kinda expected there to be two districts, with the rich in one, and the poor in another, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Insmouth was a small enough town that there wasn’t much wealth to go around. Everyone was about as well off as their neighbour. Sure, some people seemed better off, but not by that big a margin. It was nice.

The houses were all made of wood, sometimes with stone foundations. A lot of them had steps leading up to their doors, maybe in case of flooding or something? I didn’t bother asking really.

It felt like being in a medieval town, only it was really clean.

“We should probably head over to the inn if we want to meet Howard today,” I said.

“I suppose,” Amaryllis said. “I don’t mind playing tourist, but there’s just not much to see here. Once you’ve looked at one hovel, you’ve seen them all.”

I huffed a ‘don’t be rude’ huff at Amaryllis.

“Stop doing that!” she said.

Giggling, I grabbed her by the talon, then I grabbed Awen’s hand too, because I could, and I tugged them after me towards the docks.

The only inn in town, the Frank Inn Stein, was a long, low building, with big bay windows at the front that looked into a lounge with a bunch of round tables surrounded by seats. The place looked to be nearly empty. A fire crackled away in the hearth by the corner, and the air smelled like freshly baked bread and frying fish.

A fishfolk woman behind the counter looked up and gave us a big fishy grin. “You must be the strangers I’ve heard so much about,” she said. “Welcome to the Frank Inn Stein, I’m July! How can I help ya?”

“Hello!” I said. “We’re here to talk with Howard?”

July nodded. “Ah, he’s out back. I can fetch him.”

“Does he own the place?” I asked.

“Howard? No, I’m the proprietor. Howard does work here on occasion. Good man, Howard. Helps a lot of folk. You can eye the menus if you want, I’ll be back in a blink.”

July waved toward some seats off to the side, then ducked back to behind a door that I guessed led to the kitchen.

“Alrighty then,” I said. The menus were painted onto a thin wooden slab with iron bindings around them. I carried one over to the table July had pointed out and sat, my friends taking the seats around me and leaving one open for Howard. “This is mostly just different ways of cooking fish,” I said after inspecting the list for a moment.

“They are a fishing village,” Amaryllis said.

“They’re a village of fishfolk, you’d think maybe they’d hesitate to eat fish,” I said.

“Have you ever eaten a mammal?” Bastion asked.

I blinked. “Alright, that’s fair. I wonder if they have salads. The fish in Needleford made my tummy just a bit queasy, like meat does.”

“Isn’t fish a kind of meat?” Awen asked.

I had no idea. “Maybe?”

“You’re both morons,” Amaryllis said.

“Well, if you’re not a moron, then do you know what fish is?”

“Obviously it’s just fish,” she said.

I eyed her suspiciously. That didn’t sound right at all. Before I could poke her about it, July returned, accompanied by Howard. “Hello everyone,” Howard said as he pulled out the spare seat and sat down. “Heard you were all over the town today. Enjoy yourselves?”

“It’s a very pretty town,” I said. “The people here look nice too.”

“They are,” he said. “Hope they didn’t give you any trouble. Some can be weird about strangers.”

“Nope, no trouble,” I said.

July grinned. “Will you folk be having anything to eat?” she asked.

I was a bit peckish, so I ordered a plateful of veggies and some fish, then my friends ordered a bit of this and that. Bastion even asked for a stein of the local brew, which reminded me. “What’s up with the inn’s name?”

“The name? Oh, the first owner, Frank, was a brewer. Passed away some years ago, and I bought the place. Kept the name when I turned it into an inn instead of just a bar.”

Orders taken, July went off to prepare things, leaving us with Howard to talk business.

“So,” he began. “Spoke to the smith, the harbourmaster, and a few others besides. See, this is a delicate matter.”

I sat up a bit. “Oh?”

He nodded. “You probably guessed by now, but we used to be human here. Local dungeon opened up, and with it we finally had a way to get past our first evolution. It’s a small dungeon, four floors now, but it stayed at three for a good long while. Easy too.”

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“And it allowed you to take a class that turned you into fishfolk,” I said.

“That’s right,” Howard said. “My dad did it, so did my grandparents. Some of the kids are fourth generation fishfolk now.”

“Alright,” I said. “That’s kinda neat.”

“It’s good for us. It means a higher level cap, and the skills we get from the Fishman class allow us to do all sorts of handy things. But there’s been a problem lately.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

Howard waggled his hands a bit. “It’s hard to say what exactly it is. None of us can tell, but most of us folk in Inmouth have been here for a right long time. We don’t have any academics or the like, and none of the texts we do have talk about it.”

“That’s not surprising,” Amaryllis muttered.

“A few months ago, our dungeon started acting strange. Not as many critters on the top floors, the puzzles were a little uncanny. Nothing too odd though. We thought maybe it was about to gain a floor. That would be inconvenient, but it happens.”

“Inconvenient?” I asked.

“You idiot,” Amaryllis said. “Did planting those ears take up too much brain space? Think from these villager’s point of view. They get to their tenth level, maybe by the time they're our age even. Then, unlike folk in a city, they want to keep on growing, so they need to visit a dungeon. The local dungeon. If it only has a few floors, they can do it in an afternoon. Once in their life. They can form strategies and ideas on how to tackle it. I bet you have a few that go down often?”

Howard nodded. “I’m one of them,” he said.

I eyed the fishman and muttered ‘inspect’ under my breath.

A Fishman Deep Diver, level 20.

“I go down maybe once a month, twice sometimes. Know the dungeon like the back of my hand,” he said. “I was one of the first to notice the changes.”

“Right,” Amaryllis said. “Now imagine if the locals suddenly need to deal with a dungeon that has a few more floors? That’ll increase the difficulty for all of them.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “That makes sense.”

Howard smiled, but his story paused as July returned with the food. It was only once we were all settled and eating that he continued. “So, the dungeon starts to act up. That’s when we noticed these things crawling up around the dungeon core.”

“You looked at the core?” Bastion asked.

“You saw roots?” I asked at the same time. Then I jumped.

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Bastion looked at me strangely.

Howard eyed us both. “We don’t poke at our core. We might be isolated and quiet folk, but we’re not dumb. But we did look. And yes, I guess you could call those things roots. The dungeon’s since gone weird. More dangerous in places, less in others. You seem to know about them?”

I nodded, even after noticing Amaryllis’ warning look. She might have thought I was an idiot, but I wasn’t stupid. “We’ve encountered them before. They’re called Evil Roots, and the World doesn’t like them.”

“And how would you know what the World does or doesn’t like?” Bastion asked.

“It told us, obviously,” I said before turning back to Howard. “Did you manage to break the root?”

“No. We tried a few things. But it’s close to the core. Do you know of a way to break it?”

“I think that Cleaning magic can do it, but it needs to be really strong. Other than that, I don’t know. Sorry.”

Howard sighed. “It was too much to ask. We do have one solution.”

“You do?” I asked.

Howard shifted in his seat. “There’s this item. An ancient font of power. It’s strong, and it’s dangerous. But it might be able to break the... you called it an Evil Root? It might be able to break it.”

“What is it? The font thing, I mean. And why haven’t you tried yet?”

“I don’t rightly know what it is. I just know that it’s a weapon. You heard about the fog here? It hides these nasty critters. Light will scare ‘em off a bit, but not as much as you’d want. They stay away from the shore though... mostly. This font? They won’t come within a league of it.”

“So it’s what you use to protect the town?”

Howard shook his head. “Not us. Another town. They have it in the middle of their town. No walls or anything, because they don’t need them. Nothing evil comes close.”

Amaryllis leaned forwards. “You want to use the thing they use to keep safe in order to save your own dungeon?”

“That’s the whole of it, yes,” Howard said.

“Won’t they be in danger while you use the font?” I asked.

“Only for a day or two. We’re honest folk, we’d return it.”

“Only if there’s anyone left to return it to,” Amaryllis snarked. “Though I admit that I’m curious about this font thing.”

Howard raised his hands in surrender. “We’re not desperate enough for anything wrong-headed. And if we were, then we’d find some solution that didn’t involve hurting our neighbours. We just want to ask them if they’d help us.”

“And where do we come in?” Bastion asked.

“Well, the problem is that Hopsalot is a couple of days' walk to the north. It’s not an easy place to reach, even for the hardiest of us. Two days there, then back. Even if we get the font, it might take a day or so to delve to the dungeon’s core. Then two days back to Hopsalot.”

I snapped my fingers as I got it. “You want to have us send a message over? Or go there and back with the Beaver Cleaver?”

Howard nodded. “If Insmouth had its own airship it wouldn’t be a problem. As it is... it’ll be dangerous no matter what. We can pay for the trip there and back. Mostly in supplies and trade goods, but we have a bit of gold.”

“I’ll have to talk to my friends and crew about it,” I said. “But I wouldn’t mind helping.”

***