You know, find mana crystals and magical reagents and monster parts, teleport them back in batches to home, and then desperately hope we can find a Return Station before the ever-increasing Cadence catches up to us and we get totally swarmed with shit we can’t deal with. So, just the usual.

Nathan paused for a moment, processing the words that had just been said, as though there had been a span of frozen time between when they’d been spoken and when he’d gotten the opportunity to reply. “Oh,” he said in relief after a moment, “it’s turn-based.” He frowned. “Well, basically. Kind of? I mean, if I’m getting the language’s social context cues right, the Cadence is a rate at which you have to open doors and there’s no benefit to opening them faster?”

“It’s contested—”

“Completely right—”

Honeydew and Tanya looked at each other for a moment. Then the former forgot her embarrassment, blurting out: “I’m right and you know it. It’s contested! The accelerationist school has enough evidence that we can’t just dismiss them.”

“It’s all circumstantial bullshit and you know it!” Tanya retorted with the air of someone engaging in a long-trodden circular argumentation-rut. “Of the five Three-Dees, three aren’t worth wiping my ass with!”

“And the other two are—”

“If you call them as righteous as your tits in front of the ace guy you just basically climbed like the backyard tree, I’m gonna spank your ass cherry red tonight and then dump you onto the floor to sleep there.”

“You—” Honeydew stopped herself just in time, took a deep breath, and nodded with a shadow of the grace she’d exhibited in the first moments when Nathan had been summoned, a long couple of minutes before. “Two of the hypothesized Delta Derivative Doorlaws were disproven. One of them was correct in spirit, one is proven true but has been rendered irrelevant, and one remains a matter of open consideration.”

“Fair,” Tanya said with a wide smirk.

“If it’s not too personal a question,” Nathan asked distractedly, “are you two in a relationship?”

The two women paused for a moment, staring at him with near-identical baffled expressions on their faces. “Yes,” one or the other of them said eventually while Nathan traced a swirling script on a doorjamb with a hovering finger. “We’re in a relationship.”

“I thought so,” he muttered triumphantly. “I just… got that impression. Thank you, sorry if that was a rude question.”

“It wasn’t a rude… you know what, let’s just move on.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Great!” Nathan’s finger paused at the end of a line of swirling text. “And there shall be,” he read slowly, “a great spear thrust into her—oh! It’s a dick joke. I get it. But also it’s a set of instructions? Every time we open a door, a wave of monsters might or might not spawn?”

“Pretty much,” agreed Tanya. “And then we kill ‘em all, turn ‘em into mana-paste, and bring the paste plus any random useful shit to Central, and the merchants take it from there. People can’t travel to Topside, not once they’ve gone Downside, but stuff can go one Layer up, so there’s this big complicated mess of bullshit that doesn’t matter and in the end we get pretty decent cryma for it. Plus, you know, all of the different magical powerups and refinements and upgrades.”

“That all seems reasonable. But the question is, if it’s never actually been represented by crystallized mana, why is it called cryma? Why not just call it ember, since the core of it is flecks of whatever flame-of-memory is?”

“The real question is,” Honeydew muttered indelicately to her partner, “why is he still being affected by my charm spell if he’s, you know…”

“Oh, no, I’m just always like this,” Nathan responded absently. “I’m just really distracted by the writing here, which might be why I seem a bit out of it. What language was that you were using just now, anyway?”

“How the fuck?”

“He’s a Millionborn, Tanya.” Honeydew’s sigh was fit to launch fleets of armed Weavecraft capable of traversing a thousand Layers without resupply. “How awkward. Can’t be charmed, can’t be seduced, and he speaks even the secret language that nobody but us knows. Do we kill him, or do we try to get along?”

“I vote for getting along, for the record,” Nathan interjected.

“Kill him,” Tanya retorted. “We don’t need complications, he doesn’t know how to fight well enough, and he’ll raise the Cadence more than the two of us can deal with.”

“I guess I’ll vote to get along,” the sorceress finished with a sigh. “Nobody else can read the dead languages. It’s worth the risk.”

“Tie’s broken, then,” the swordswoman agreed. “No hard feelings, I hope, friend?”

Nathan turned to stare at her quizzically, raising one eyebrow and holding her gaze until she looked away. “Some hard feelings,” he demurred. “But I won’t kill you over it.”

“Alright, enough flirting,” she huffed. “What’s the door say, anyway?”

“Trap room in front of us, and swarm room on the right. Left is described as good, though. Elite room with tailored rewards? The script isn’t entirely clear.”

“Math me, love?” Tanya’s eyes flickered over to her partner. “Tailored elite, that’s probably a Type Seven.”

“Second stage in a decent-grade level-shard, so that brings it up to… seventeen and a half kiloLaums of density total,” Honeydew said after a moment’s thought. “Enough for a drake or a rektian, but not enough for a titanspawn or a wisp of Mister Friendly.”

“Urgh, that would be… even for three of us, right? What’s our margin?”

“Solid. We’d need to be over twenty kL and have four of us for an Elite room to have a chance at being a shrouded Champion.”

“Great.” Tanya’s hands drifted to her weapons and a wicked gleam entered her eyes. “I’m bored of talking. Let’s kill something.”