Chapter 161: Por-tah-ble House
Through the gates of Kallid, a familiar white furred leonid, Jago Dahl, greeted the team from his position in the gate plaza where he had been waiting. While they stayed in Saggia, he had sent a message inviting the team to stay at his estate, since he was the one who had invited them. The team was ambivalent over the invitation—they had no interest in Jago’s son, but Jago hadn’t said anything further. Since it was Mona who had informed them of the issues his son faced, they accepted his hospitality.
“I didn’t know we’d receive such a warm welcome waiting for us the moment we landed.”
“Landed? From your sky boat, is it lassie? I saw that beauty approaching. Shame I can’t see it now.”
Nara smiled, “You should see it soon enough.”
Jago grinned, “Have you enjoyed your trip, lads and lassies? Kallid is something else, isn’t it?”
“Something cold,” Eufemia grumbled, voice blank and unenthusiastic.
“Eufemia you’re not even cold. You’re bronze rank. Freezing temperatures isn’t enough to make you feel cold.”
She snorted, “I still want a hot shower after that sparring. Unlike you two perpetually perfumed outworlders, I still sweat. So, let’s get a move on.”
The streets within the city were dry, free of the muck of transitioning seasons, maintained as usual by unseen but appreciated large scale arrays. While the city had a cobblestone appearance, the stones had the exactness that she had grown to expect from magic; making blocks by hand was a lot easier when you didn’t actually have to use your hands. They had been worn by weather and traffic, losing much of its magic-made perfection into something more lived-in and comforting.
The city was clean and neat, with buildings around four stories tall. Each building was built connected to the next, with rare alleyways and gaps to form blocks. Highly angled sloping roofs were built in warm colors of cinnamon, mahogany, maroon, orange, toffee, and cedar. Some of the buildings were painted with a smooth finish that covered the cobblestone exterior, bringing color into the natural winter greys. The city was a cross between a medieval cobblestone feel and a modern Nordic city feel, quaint yet well populated.
A gold ranker was a gold ranker even in a city far from this world’s center of civilization. The Dahl estate was built back towards the base of the mountain—the noble’s district nearest to Kallid’s castle. Jago, it turned out, was an actual noble in Kallid. While adventurers seemed to dislike accepting a title, there were reasons to, especially when one wanted to settle down, or wield some political power, which could be necessary in his role as a member of the Continental Congress. Gold rankers commanded a high level of respect in social situations beyond noble titles, so she could see why noble titles were regarded as a slight insult except for royalty, which were usually descended from diamond rankers. There was no bluer blood than the blood of diamonds.
It seemed that Sen had a biased view against noble titles, following his family’s pride and Sanshi’s turbulent history against ruling nobility. Nara hadn’t realized and would have to watch out for her team’s biases, especially when they followed her own.
“This is it,” Jago said. “Welcome to my home! This is my partner, Egil.”
Egil was a leonid as well—most leonids didn’t find other races attractive, and vice versa. His fur was the dirty beige-gold typical of actual lions and leonids as a whole, but unusual for the mostly snow-furred leonids of Kallid.
“It’s nice to meet you all. I have some food on the stove. We can warm and clean you all up. The baths are downstairs and heated.” He said, quickly gesturing to inside the house to indicate the general direction of the baths and the kitchens.
“I’ll set up my flask house outside, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course. We have rooms for you all, but I understand the comfort of your own home.”
“Oh no, we appreciate your hospitality. My team just has a lot of personal items stored in the flask.”
Nara left out back to materialize her flask. It shaped itself into a smaller, two-story attachment house, matching the style of Kallid with sloping roofs and stone architecture. It morphed itself seamlessly into the estate, with covered cobblestone corridors joining the cobblestone house and Jago’s estate house. The Dahl residence was on the small side for a gold ranker’s abode—Jago's preference for something cozier (although it was still large, and even included a smaller guest house out back). With a flask house for seven, his manor nearly doubled in size.
They ate an early dinner with the Dahls. Egil cooked up a feast of local cuisine—hearty stews and fresh bread with gamey meat, root vegetables and plenty of wine-based sauces, and paired with tankards of actual alcohol too, varying from mead, aquavit, vodka, beer, wine, and ciders. Whatever they wanted, the Dahls had. Roasted cheeses were plentiful—a cheese roaster sat tabletop in every house and Kallid, there to crisp and melt gooey goodness at every available opportunity. It was slathered on bread and topped with small, dried fruits and nuts for a sweet and savory blend. (The interesting thing about no universal animal milk product was that the variety of cheese varied greatly by region, with Kallid’s products utilizing ruig and riverskipper milk.)
Chrome hovered around Egil like a hummingbird to nectar when he had been preparing the food, constantly questioning what spices, techniques, and from what grocers and boulangeries they had purchased their foods. Sage was already making a mental list of what new foods they’d purchase the next day to satisfy Chrome’s culinary pursuits. Thanatos simply hovered and got in the way like a salivating black lab, hoovering up whatever crumbs fell before they even managed to grace the ground.
The rumored son, Theodore, was late to their admittedly early dinner. He spent most of his time at the forge in the city, smithing or repairing tools and weapons for the city folk and local adventurers. He stopped in the doorway, stunned by the sight of a long dining table filled with guests.
“We have guests?”
“I mentioned them last week, Theo,” Egil said chidingly. “Jago had invited some bronze rankers who are here for the mausoleum.”
“Did you.”
“It would help to pay attention next time,” Egil said, a bit of parental warning coming through.
He grunted, plopping himself next to Egil without another word.
Leonids ate ravenously; Massive pots and dishes were common household wares. A single leonid ate more food than Nara starving herself an entire day for an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ, and they ate that much food easily. The team’s burden on the food budget was dimes to their dollar, not that a food budget mattered much to a gold ranker.
Theodore wolfed down his food, stuffing stew and bread into his mouth at professional body builder speeds.
“I’m done,” he said curtly once he had finished, then promptly left the table.
He was unsociable, but Nara understood the unwillingness to socialize with friends your parents had brought over, often escaping to her room for the duration of their visit.
The team finished, thanking Egil and Jago for the scrumptious meal, and headed for the newly manifested nebula house.
******
Theodore stood outside staring at the entirely new building that had attached itself to his home.
“When in the bolo’s arsehole did this house have a second wing!?”
He turned to the adventurers who filtered around him, giving him a polite nod as they passed by.
“Wait a damn second, someone tell me what’s going on.”
Nara reluctantly stopped and decided to explain to the curmudgeon son what he hadn’t listened to the first time from his parents. “Your dad said you’re having guests. That’s the guests’ house.”
“We don’t have a guest house.”
Well, no, they did actually have a guest house out back, but this certainly wasn’t that.
Nara pointed to the nebula house, “It looks to me like you do have another guest house now. Does that answer your question?”
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“In Hero’s blazes, how does that answer my question? That doesn’t even remotely answer my question. And we don’t even need another guest house. We have plenty of spare rooms.”
“I don’t know why you’re so surprised at ‘there one moment, gone the next’ house when y’all have magic.”
“Nara, we’ve discussed this,” Aliyah called out, inadvertently eavesdropping as she passed. “That’s not how magic works.”
“It’s how my magic house works.”
Aliyah paused, thinking it over with a little too much consideration for something she lived daily in. “That’s true. It is how it works,” she said blankly, as if watching a little piece of her logic break off from her mind and fall to the ground in a puff of pretty, glittery dust. She shook her head sadly, and entered the house.
“You have a magic house,” Theodore said dumbly.
“Your house is magic too,” Nara said. “It’s just different types of magic. So, mine’s portable. Potato, po-tah-toe, portable, por-tah-ble. Eh, doesn’t flow.”
A portable house? Many sorts of portable houses did exist. He wasn’t that sort of craftsman, so it was entirely out of his field. Most were usually ships or boats, or some other sort of moving vehicle. Some could be stored in a storage space and removed. He’d also heard of a craftsman who made transforming and compact spherical orbs—perhaps they could make a pocket house. The matching stone finish to his own house pulled strands of information from his mind.
“...Is that a Cloud Flask construct?”
“What? No. It’s not a Cloud Flask. You can’t even buy those things on the market. How would I have gotten one?”
She wasn’t technically lying.
“It’s not?”
“It’s not,” Nara confirmed. “You just didn’t see me set it up.”
Theodore eyed her suspiciously. His craftsman’s intuition told him it was a Cloud Flask, but he couldn’t read her. He couldn’t read anyone on the team. He was forced to acknowledge that they all had honed their auras more than he had. If Jago had invited them, they were outstanding adventurers. Trying to one-up any of them in any combat skill would be a futile endeavor, especially since he had chosen the slow path, long ago.
Even their healer outclassed him. The most he could read from him was that he was human and had a Life Essence aura; A well-intentioned bloke at first aura sniff.
(John, since long ago, always disguised himself as a human, something no one thought to double check. Aside from his height, he was the most unassuming and unthreatening person in the party, an advantage that John subtly leveraged. Even gold rankers, upon sensing ‘human’ in his aura, looked no further. Why fool others about something so obvious?)
“Is that all, then?” Nara said. “I’m ready to turn in. It’s been a long day of traveling.”
“Did Jago ask you to come here?” Theodore suddenly asked.
Nara sensed faint aggression in his words, and knew he wasn’t just asking about the mausoleum, but she played dumb. Jago hadn’t sent for them either in the capacity Theodore insinuated either.
“Uh, yes? He invited us here. Did you miss that again? For the third time, bro? Are you really bronze rank? You might want to get yourself checked out at a healer clinic. Maybe you got one of those rare, mind impairing afflictions. Not so rare where I come from—lead in the pipes,” Nara said tapping her forehead, “You know what I mean.”
Nara shouldn’t antagonize him, but she’d never played well with rude, demanding folk. Too many people wanted answers and had not the proper patience to wait for them. Nara had experienced these people, intimately, and Theodore’s brusque questioning was getting on her nerves. She was tired from an (admittedly luxurious) day of travel and hadn’t the patience to obediently answer whatever questions her host’s difficult son had for her.
“We don’t use lead to make pipes,” Theodore snapped, irritable at being so goaded. “It poisonous. Everyone knows that.”
“It always throws me for a loop what magic figures out first, you know. I guess y’all would be able to tell with magic—see that you’re getting some sort of affliction over time when using lead. Anyway, get yourself checked out.”
“Quit calling me stupid, I’m not dumb, and I don’t have and gods-damn lead poisoning,” Theodore growled, mildly frustrated that he didn’t seem to be getting through to her.
“Something else then? Alzheimer’s? Brain-eating amoeba? Chronic short-term memory loss?”
“I don’t have any mental impairment affliction!”
“Good for you, dude. I’m glad you’re in good health. Have a good night!”
Theodore couldn’t get in another world before Nara had waved her departure, heading into the ‘definitely wasn’t there a day ago’ stone attachment house.
*****
Over breakfast, the team discussed the mausoleum with Egil, who wasn’t as busy with matters as Jago was. At gold rank, Jago was an important figure in Kallid. His investigations mainly concerned the movement of the Church of Undeath. The undeath activity in Kallid was higher than other regions. Although their lightless ice mitigated the days of darkness from perpetual overcast, Kallid was an ideal location for another undeath bastion on the western hemisphere. It was also separated from a body of water to Rona, mirroring Nekroz’s water separation from Rowan.
Jago had journeyed to Sanshi to catch the tail end of Undeath movements in the Sanshi region. His investigation had concluded that there was a high possibility that those aiding the Church of Undeath was The Advent. One of their methods to suborn a society was to foment unrest and destruction, then save the day with their miraculous magic and overwhelming power. They wanted willing comrades, not those who’d fight them tooth and nail for the millennia to come—even if cooperation was established through nefarious methods. After thousands of years and their subversions were revealed, the societies would be far too entwined to separate. All their misdeeds would be swept under the rug like any other government mishap.
“You’ll need a mausoleum guide and a mausoleum researcher,” Egil explained. “The researcher is assigned from the Magic Society, although you can exchange them out if you don’t get along. They’re relatively well-trained, since the mausoleum is dangerous. Since you’re a bronze rank party, they’ll stick an iron rank one on you since they keep the bronze rank researcher for the weaker parties. The mausoleum guide is the trickier requirement.”
“Why do we need a guide? It’s just some long dead diamond ranker’s treasure horde, isn’t it?” Eufemia asked. (Feigning ignorance for more information was a regular tactic of Eufemia’s and Nara doubted she hadn’t done her own research the moment she knew of their destination.)
Egil chuckled, “The mausoleum is labyrinthic. Utterly massive—You won’t see anything quite like it again. On top of its size, its equipped with traps.”
“Okay, so are we looting the damn place?” Eufemia asked, “Did that dead king or whatever want us to take his stuff? I don’t want to mess with a diamond ranker’s treasure chest.”
“The Einvaldi of Manistrengja didn’t want the treasures he gathered for his people to be easily taken by raiders and thieves,” Egil explained for them. “Those that passed the traps and challenges safely were deemed worthy of claiming the treasure of his passing.”
“One correction, Eufemia,” Encio said, “The diamond ranker didn’t die. They can’t die permanently.”
“From our records, the Einvaldi decided to leave the world. He’s still out there, somewhere in the cosmos, but he hasn’t returned, not for monster waves or anything else.”
“Looks like he got bored of the world after he completed his diamond ranker checklist. Start a country—check. Obtain a dragon’s horde of treasures—check. Set up an examination or trial for the little ones to loot—check. Leave behind a mysterious abandoned building or city—check,” Nara said. It sure seemed like he had gone through an Isekai protagonist’s to-do list.
“We don’t know that there was a diamond ranker in the cult of the Celestial Book,” Aliyah pointed out.
“You think they could set up a trial that produces awakening stones without a diamond ranker?” Nara asked. Her expression matched her incredulous question.
“I do think so,” Aliayah said. “Loot abilities produce awakening stones and essences at any rank. Some minor influence of a generated awakening stone towards its intended recipient is unheard of, but possible.”
Her Guide ability had picked out her essence set for her, and so had John’s Case Files for both him and Eufemia. A skilled aura user could read essences from an aura, or have an ability to do it for them, like John. It stands to reason a trial space could detect what essences an iron ranker had and create awakening stones accordingly.
“The mausoleum will not pick your awakening stones or artifacts for you, unlike Sanshi’s famous trial,” Egil said. “You have to do the picking yourself. The mausoleum is structed into sealed challenge rooms. The challenge rooms list restrictions on the outside of the room—how many may enter, time limit, rank, the type of challenge, and other specifications. Once the maximum number of challengers have entered the room, the room will seal itself until it is completed.”
“That’s dangerous,” said Sen as he evaluated their target. “If no one can interfere until the room opens, there’s a high risk of something going wrong, especially with restricted abilities.”
“It is, which is why you need a mausoleum guide—one you can trust—even if you can read the inscriptions outside each trial room. It is also why iron rankers are paired with higher rankers, or Kallid locals will challenge the mausoleum at bronze rank. Once you’ve completed the challenge, a pedestal will reveal a grow item or artifact, sealed in a crystal box. You place your plaque on the box, and the crystal will disappear, allowing access to the item.”
“How do you know if the item is good or not?” Eufemia said, “Growth items are supposed to be hard to pick out.”
“The pedestal will have magic display of the description and effects of the item within.”
“Huh. Like a museum, except you want to break the glass and take the priceless artifact.”
“If all challengers exit the room without taking the artifact, the room is resealed and inaccessible for many days. The artifact also changes location.”
“So if you don’t take it, it disappears.”
“We had some re-appearances of artifacts, but it is rare,” Egil said. “It can take decades for an artifact to appear again, or as short as a few days. If you trust your party members, and they happen upon an artifact that someone else may need, they can claim the artifact for you, then exchange the item for a plaque. A large group like yours raises the chances of claiming a suitable artifact for the entire team.”
“Until there’s only a few plaques remaining,” Sen said.
“That’s where you need trust. If you want the best chance to claim a suitable artifact for the last few members, you need to hand over your plaque to whomever is challenging the room for you. You can, of course, challenge every single room personally, but not every ability set is suited for every challenge—it could have fatal consequences.”
“…Is this really a reward?” Nara asked.
“It does sound like an awful lot of effort for a piece of equipment,” John agreed, as he typically avoided unnecessary risk. Was all this really worth some souped up sword?
“Some agree with you,” Egil agreed. “If you give up on your search, you can exchange your plaque at the adventure society for an impressive amount of money and materials. Even some Kallid-born adventurers give up the search.”
Citizens born of Kallid that passed the Adventure Society certification were all granted a plaque of their own—their birthright to claim a gift of the mausoleum. Many forwent the prize—either at the beginning or after years of futile searching and sought adventures beyond their remote hometown.
Egil glanced towards the city, towards the forge Theodore worked at, although no one of the party knew what drew his gaze.
“It’s easier to find a crafter that can make a growth weapon designed for you instead,” Egil said knowingly.
“I see,” said Sen, who knew of the Dahl family’s plight but spoke nothing of it.
It was those of Kallid themselves that best understood the advantages of a crafter over looting abilities or Kallid’s mausoleum. You could search forever for a growth weapon of a lost king’s legacy, or commission a crafter to make one for you, if they can—although Theodore was famous for it, even he could not consistently craft a growth weapon. They were rare, almost miraculous crafts that required the heights of concentration, inspiration, and expensive materials. Although Kallid’s adventurers may brown-nose and butter up to him, or try to harangue him into compliance, he just couldn’t do it on demand.