One side of the sky had the reds and yellows of sunset while distant thunder rumbled in the other. Hans sat next to Galad on the tusk’s front porch. Uncle Ed said he couldn’t sit after another day driving a wagon. He stood in the yard with his arms crossed and with a slight backward lean.
“Getting Doorstop on board with something like that might be easier than you think,” Ed said. “He put us up in a nice tavern this trip, saying we shouldn’t have to camp all the time. We got to sharing some ale, and I think our friend is actually a tusk.”
“Huh,” Galad said. “Haven’t heard of that for a long time.”
“Heard of what?” Hans asked.
“In my parents’ generation, many of our brothers and sisters pulled their tusks or filed them down, believing it made them more human.”
“A lot?”
“Enough. Some tusks can pass for human that way. I saw it a lot when I was a kid. Haven’t heard of it for a while. ”
Hans was speechless. He did meet an adventurer who filed his tusks down, but he never considered wanting to be less orc and more human as the motivator.
“Not sure how much he’d want to talk about it,” Ed continued, “so I don’t plan to ask. Not like we’re telling him the whole truth either, but it makes me think he’d feel for the cause.”
Doorstop’s potential interest in charity goods was uplifting news, but they were a ways from acting on it. The apprentice program needed to ramp up, and the delivery wagons needed an escort. At some point, a poorly guarded wagon was too juicy of an opportunity for bandits to ignore.
Assigning a few Gomi adventurers would be the ideal solution, but they lacked Apprentices, and most of the Apprentices they had were tusks. At present, travel in the kingdom for tusks was not pleasant, so they weren’t an option for wagon duty.
“Any word about the war?”
“Not much,” Ed said, shrugging. “Will take a while for the news to get to this side of the kingdom when there is any. With Master Devontes going to the front, or at the front by now is probably more accurate, most people are talking like it’s already won.”
“What’s it like for tusks?” Galad asked.
Uncle Ed struggled to answer. “That’s hard for me to say, brother. People don’t cross the street when they see me coming, and hating tusks isn’t the kind of conversation you hear casually. What I can say is I haven’t seen any tusks this season. Not in towns. Not on the roads.”
“That’s answer enough for me.”
“Anything else I can do for you, gentlemen?” Ed asked. “Would like to see the boys as much as I can before the next run.”
“Of course, of course. Don’t let us keep you.” When Uncle Ed was on his way, Galad looked at the nearly dark sky, listening to the thunder. “Don’t work too hard, Guild Master.”
“What made you say that?” Hans asked. “And you’re one to talk.”
Galad laughed. “The advice is just as much for me, but I know you need it more. Look at this night.” He spread his arms wide. “We should remember to appreciate what we work for.”
Hans looked out over the Tribe farmlands. The sunset left just enough light that he could see the top edge of the treeline. The various cabins scattered across the wide field had lanterns lit on the inside, spilling yellow light out every window. The night was cool, but it was warm enough that some people had their windows open, and their voices carried in the still evening air. Down the way, back toward Gomi, a pair of silhouettes ambled home with a lantern between them.
“You just made me realize that adventurers leave this part out of their stories,” Hans said.
“How do you mean?”
“This kind of moment is one of the things I miss about taking jobs. We spent so many nights around a campfire, surrounded by views like this. But nobody mentions it.”
After thinking about it, Galad agreed that was true. He hadn’t heard an adventuring story that took the time to talk about a memorable vista or a beautiful flower.
“I know you’ve got a lot on your mind,” Galad said. “So maybe think more about the happy parts of the job instead for a bit?”
Shaking his head, Hans said, “The smarmy Diamond they sent to question me about Gret drudged up all of these memories, and damn it, after all that time, I’m just as angry about it right now as I was when he died. We ran together for something like twenty years, but my anger keeps me stuck at the end.”
Galad looked up at the stars. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an adventurer. The excitement, the thrills–I wanted to be the hero in a story. At this point in my life, give me a story about a night like these. No villains. No monsters. Just contentment. Yeah, there should be more stories like that. If you have any of those kinds of stories with Gret, I would be honored to listen.”
***
The new dormitory smelled like fresh sawdust. The beds, transplanted from the iron mines, looked out of place. Dwarven craftsmanship had a distinct intricacy to it, and this rare use of wood was no exception. Every edge was perfectly sanded with small touches like rounded posts or beveled headboards with perfectly repeating patterns of squares and triangles. Each bed was colored with a dark wood stain, a contrast to the pale raw wood on every other surface of the cabin.
With the dorm mostly complete, each adventurer could now have their own assigned bed. All of the Apprentices celebrated that development except for Buru and Chisel. Their height made them poor fits for beds built for dwarven proportions. They said they didn’t mind, but as soon as Hans saw the size discrepancy he asked the master carpenter to build them proper bed frames as soon as he was able.
Hans stood in the dormitory and addressed Tandis, her little girl, the Apprentices, and Luther’s new harvesting team. The husband and wife who first proposed the idea to Hans were with Luther, as was a father with a son who looked to be near Quentin’s age but one or two years younger, perhaps. He recognized their faces but didn’t know them personally. Several children didn’t take classes at the Guild after all.
“The harvesters will come in behind the adventurers. To start, they won’t go farther than the iron elementals. They’re already training, but the Regenerating Castle has too many places for a goblin to hide, so we can’t send anyone through unprepared.”
He went on to explain that two new sections of the dungeon would open soon. The first was a bayou where green slimes and poison goliath toads could be found. Then, once their training reached the appropriate point, they would add an ogre camp. The Apprentices could observe battles in the latter, but that part of the dungeon was meant to challenge Bel, Lee, and Becky, putting it far beyond what Hans would expect from the Apprentices.
With an influx of intelligent enemies, Hans shared that they would add security checkpoints at various intervals in the dungeon and secure them with Magic Lock, which would also be applied to the door at the entrance. Showing the Repel Possession tattoo Honronk designed would be the key for those locks, so only someone with the tattoo could go in or out.
“Hans,” Terry said, raising a hand. “What if we don’t have the tattoo?”
Until then, only tusks had the enchanted tattoo ward as the Blood magic it repelled targeted tusk heritage specifically. Uncle Ed got an unenchanted version of the tattoo to show solidarity with Kane and Gunther, but otherwise, no human or dwarf who called Gomi home had received the ink. For Magic Lock, only the design needed to match, so Hans hoped that would make the process easier on Honronk or allow someone else in town with tattoo experience to apply the designs to non-tusk canvases.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
“You and I are getting tattoos, buddy,” Hans said. “If you really don’t want to, though, I won’t make you or anyone get one. You’ll be with other adventurers who can open the doors for you. If you’re cut off and need to get to the surface though, not having the tattoo will lock you in until someone comes to help.”
“That sounds awful.”
“I agree.”
Terry sighed. “Sounds like I’m getting a tattoo.”
“I’m fine with it,” Quentin added.
Yotuli laughed. “Quentin is tougher than Terry, naturally.”
Terry threw one of the dorm pillows across the room at Yotuli before Hans calmed everyone again.
Last on Hans’ list of dungeon updates, mandrake elementals would begin to grow in the iron mines. Their presence, however, should not change the difficulty of that section. The Apprentices had more monsters to kill, sure, but mandrake elementals didn’t have natural armor protecting their bodies like the iron elementals did, and with harvesters helping with resource gathering, the Apprentices would be fresher than ever.
“The work aside, living options are changing too. Honronk was ahead of the curve on this, but you’re welcome to live at the dungeon–or in, I guess–permanently if you want. I didn’t offer that option sooner because it didn’t occur to me that anyone would want to. That’s my fault, so I’m correcting that now.”
He shared that each of the harvesters picked a location for their cabins already. Any of the adventurers were welcome to do the same if they desired, but continuing the usual routine of returning to town between shifts was perfectly fine too. That offer extended to Tandis as well, but as Hans guessed, she wanted to keep her home in Gomi to be closer to Roland and closer to other children for her daughter.
Other than curiosity about the new areas, no one had any questions, for Hans at least. Luther had several questions for Honronk, as did the Guild Master. All of those questions were about life as a dungeon resident.
Honronk’s answers were dull, but the fault wasn’t his unique way of communicating. Other than the unusual location, converting the foreman’s office to an apartment was as uneventful as any other move.
At Hans’ request, Honronk brought Luther and the Guild Master into the mines to show them the converted office. The last run ended recently, so no monsters were around to pose a threat.
The Guild Master stood in Honronk’s new home and found that he was jealous of the apartment. With most of the original furniture stacked outside the door, the foreman’s office was like a giant studio layout. Honronk put all of his necessities in one corner: a bed, bookshelves, and a desk. He relocated a few of the torches enchanted with Summon Light, building shades from pieces of scrap of wood to hide their glow if he wanted darkness for sleep. Otherwise, nothing else looked intentionally organized or decorated, just moved out of the way.
The space wasn’t Hans’ definition of cozy, not with Honronk’s tastes at least, but it was nicer than many of the swanky flats he had seen in Hoseki.
“What’s it like living down here?” Luther asked, looking at every corner and detail of the structure around him.
“Quiet,” Honronk answered.
“Does it get boring or lonely?”
“No.”
As Luther drifted into his own thoughts, Hans asked if Honronk had heard movement or monster activity around the times the dungeon was expected to regrow. He hadn’t. Every hour was as still and as quiet as the last. The more Hans learned about it, Honronk’s apartment in the dungeon was likely safer than any of the buildings on the surface. Gnolls lived in the forests, and trolls had come down from the mountains on occasion, making the dangers posed by either monster ever-present. They couldn’t predict or anticipate potential attacks on the surface to the degree they could down here.
Their curiosity satisfied, Honronk walked Luther and the Guild Master to the end of the iron mine entrance tunnel, leaving them to finish the brief journey to the dungeon exit on their own.
Halfway there, Luther asked, “There are resources to harvest with the Bone Goblins and then other stuff even deeper, right?”
Hans said that was true.
“If Honronk is okay with it, I’d like to spend a few nights in the mine dorms next to the foreman’s office. I’m pretty sure it will, but I’d like to see if living in a dungeon agrees with me.”
“If it does?”
“I’d propose locating me deeper in the dungeon. You need harvesters down there too, and if the dungeon is going to keep growing, so will the journey to the bottom and back. Having a harvester living down there is more efficient than hoofing it there and back every shift.”
Cutting in front of Luther, Hans stopped the tusk in the dungeon corridor, looking up slightly to meet Luther’s eyes. “Are you okay?” Before Luther could reply, Hans cut him off. “No, sorry. That’s not the right question.”
Because of course he’s not okay. He told me as much.
After struggling to find the right words, Hans said, “I knew this adventurer. We got to be good friends but we never shared a party. He came up at the same time as me, so we crossed paths a lot when neither of us were out on a job. Somewhere around Bronze, his party wiped.
“He was the only survivor. You’d expect that to change someone, right? He didn’t. We bullshitted about the same stuff in the same bars without missing a beat. A lot of adventurers end up killing themselves in situations like that. A party wipe is always horrific, but he wasn’t depressed or spiraling. He told the same kinds of dirty jokes he always did and never needed to talk about what he had been through.
“He joined another party, a group of people I knew as well, and after a few months on the job with him, they started to tell me strange stories. What they originally thought was simple boldness–like wanting to be the first in the door or over the wall–started to look like intentional recklessness. He wasn’t being heroic. He was giving the gods free shots at him if they were brave enough to take one.”
Luther nodded slowly but didn’t speak.
“The point is he started adventuring because he loved the challenges and the excitement. After the wipe, he kept adventuring because he wanted to die.”
“I don’t want to die, Hans,” Luther said, bluntly.
“I’m not saying you do,” Hans said. “It’s a Guild Master’s job to look out for their people, so I have to ask, why do you want to live that deep in a dungeon?”
The way Luther held eye contact without speaking reminded Hans of Galad. He did that too, leaving long pauses between big questions and their answers. Galad and Luther were being thoughtful, Hans believed, but the extended silence in the midst of a conversation could also be unnerving.
“I don’t want to die,” Luther repeated, “and I know that dungeons are dangerous. I’ve had my share of scraps and close calls like anyone else in Gomi, but the closest I ever came to death was in the middle of a peaceful town, where I was ‘safe.’”
Hans hadn’t thought about Luther’s experience that way. He stopped at bad people doing bad things and didn’t consider how much the setting contributed to the situation. The realization reminded him of townspeople who survived monster attacks. Sure, they lived, but evil had ransacked their homes, the one place they felt safe and in control. Fixing the windows and re-hanging the front door didn’t restore those feelings. In fact, many people left town entirely because they knew they could never see home in the same way, no matter how much they rebuilt and repainted.
“I want to live in the dungeon because I want to be as far from that world as I can get. Only Galad knows this, but I’ve been sleeping in the keg barn. Made myself a little camp deep in the stacks. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel better. Safer. Protected. Something like that.”
One of Hans’ quests sprang to mind.
Active Quest Build a rest area in the dungeon to improve adventurer recovery.
He originally pictured that rest area functioning like a hunting cabin. Most of the time, it would be empty and unused, but if a hunter needed shelter, the cabin was there. Many such cabins around the kingdom didn’t have locks, making them freely available to any traveler who needed a roof over their heads.
“How about this,” Hans began. “I’ll get this in motion. We need a deep dungeon shelter no matter what. I’ll get you a space of your own while I’m at it if you promise to keep thinking about if this is something you really want. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Quest Update: Build a rest area in the dungeon with space for Luther to live there full-time.
***
Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):
Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.
Mend the rift with Devon.
Using a pen name, complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."
Expand the dungeon with resource-specific monsters for each of Gomi’s major trades.
Decide whether or not to pursue silent walking and snow walking.
Suggest growing mandrake elementals to the dungeon core.
Apply a sigil-lock Magic Lock to dungeon doors.
Find a way for Gomi adventurers to benefit from their rightful ranks in the Adventurers’ Guild.
Build a rest area in the dungeon with space for Luther to live there full-time.
Secure a way to use surplus dungeon inventory for good.
Expand the dungeon using the ogre valley job as a blueprint.