Ollie had picked her out a pair of black linen trousers and several plain white shirts, all of which Jump-touch instantly rejected.

They had pondered that for a moment, disappeared into the back of the shop, and then several minutes later returned, with a bright red linen skirt, patterned with blue stripes, several pairs of trousers in garish colours, and a pile of shirts, decorated with tasteful pastel tones.

As they left the shop an hour later, Jump-touch was in love.

"How do they stop the colours bleeding into each other?" she questioned as they walked. The skirt she was wearing at the moment had once been white, but it looked like somebody had thrown paint at it, leaving streaks of red and blue all over it.

"They tie the cloth up with string and then dip it in the dye, a bit at a time" Ollie scratched the back of their neck. "I think this one was experimental. They made the whole lot a while back and then none of it would sell. The owner said they export it sometimes, but to where I have no idea."

Eim nodded vehemently, eyes wide as he looked at the clothing. "I get enough shit for my hair, I can't imagine it."

"It wouldn't sell because humans hate colours!" Jump-touch exclaimed, still admiring her new skirt, "look at it, it's beautiful. How can you not love this?"

She was probably a strange sight, she realised. A child, because that's what humans would think when they saw somebody half their size, with skin the wrong colour, hair done in the wrong way, wearing all the wrong colours.

She was also aware that she was getting looks; that she had been getting looks from the moment she left the braiders, but she didn't care. She wasn't human, she didn't have to fit in. She was here to help people get along, not to be one of them.

Oh. Shouldn't I be doing my job?

[Cultural Scholar]. She wasn't using her class at all, she wasn't even all that sure what it was for.

For talking to different people, duh.

Well, yeah, but how did you go about that? What difference did having it written on a sheet of paper really make?

Maybe when they got deeper into the dungeon, they would find Earth people, or kobolds, or…

"Shrike."

"Oh no," he groaned. "Yes?"

She blinked at him, "do people live in the dungeon?"

"No."

"But why not?"

He was giving her that look again. She knew that look, it was the Rat-tail special.

"Because the Stone isn't there," said Eim, and Shrike looked at him gratefully.

She chewed on the inside of her cheek, "but they could just dig some stairs up to it, or walk? It's not that far of a walk, you don't need the Stone every day."

Eim opened his mouth, thought about it, and then shut it again.

"Huh."

"Shrike," he said, "why don't people live in the dungeon?"

Shrike closed his eyes and covered his ears, or would have if he didn't have to keep one hand on the cane, "I don't know the answer to every question, and I have a headache, can you both please just..."

Eim kept looking at him, his eyes big, his face framed by his red hair, and the freckles covering his face making him look like dappled sunlight breaking through the canopy.

Shrike opened one eye, looked at him and closed them again for a moment, sighing loudly.

"People don't live in the dungeon because the dungeon rejects them. A few people camping in a place once or twice a month will remain stable almost forever. But a building, a village, a town or a city, those things will warp." He took a deep breath, "at first everything looks fine, but then monsters start to spawn in people's kitchens, or under their beds while they're asleep. They come up through the floors- And don't even talk to me about drainage. It's difficult to maintain sewers when the ground warps and shifts beneath your feet."

Jump-touch queried sewers. Interesting.

"Eventually the buildings start to break down. Bricks crumble, stone cracks, streets fall into the sewers, leaving gaping chasms where the road should be. People have tried, and none of the places they've tried it in remain."

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Eim stuck his hands in his pockets, looking around. After a moment he spoke, "I've heard the magic is leaking into the Resper sewers."

Shrike paused mid-step, before regaining himself. Ahead of them Yaris and Ollie both turned.

"Who from?" Yaris demanded, walking back. Her face was red, Jump-touch noticed, sun-touched.

"Don't spread it about," Eim looked up at the sky, "but I heard it from the guild-head. There was a meeting about it a couple of months ago. It's only the deepest levels so far, but…"

"But that means monsters will start spawning beneath the city." Shrike finished up for him.

"Is that a bad thing?" Jump-touch asked, and he glared at her, truly looking angry for a moment, before it drained out of his face, like water out of a ladle.

"Yes, Jump. Yes it is bad."

"But you all, you all have magic? Everyone has magic from the Stone, right? Won't that make the magic uh, thin or something? Won't everyone using magic to defeat the monsters make them all stronger?"

"Most people don't want to have to fight, Jump." Eim said, at the same time as Shrike started speaking.

"Most people are level two or three at most. It might be different in other places, but this is nowhere. We're practically a village, and have been for three hundred years now. Haven't you noticed half the houses on the outskirts are abandoned?"

Were they? She shook her head. She had no frame of reference for what busy looked like, or how you could tell apart abandoned versus inhabited. The city seemed plenty busy to her.

"The built-up part of the city used to go all the way to the walls," he watched the floor as he walked, tapping his cane. "We used to have multiple market districts. There were three bathhouses-" the others trotted to catch up. "But -" Shrike shook his head, "it's complicated history, stuff you wouldn't care about. All you need to know is that Resper has been fading for three hundred years, and the influx of refugees we got when the last city collapsed isn't nearly enough to keep us going."

Jump-touch frowned. She didn't really get it, and although she was trying, there didn't seem to be any doors in her mind she could push against to make it all make sense. Why would people leave? Three hundred years wasn't that long, and why did it matter how many people they had?

She tried to work it out.

"Humans have cities," she said in Given Tongue, ignoring the looks and using the word she'd made up when she was talking to the Stone.

"Human cities are full of people who use magic, which stops the feral magic from growing out of control."

That sounded right.

"Resper is a human city which doesn't have enough people to balance the magic."

That seemed to make sense, somewhat.

She switched back to Resper, "but there's so many people here!"

"It's complicated," Shrike said again. "Look, we'll explain it later when I've had some breakfast and we're out of the sun."

She let it go. He seemed very unhappy this morning.

I wonder what happens to the Stone if all the people move away.

Presumably, it would remain sitting there, and maybe the monsters and other peoples would be able to touch it and gain jobs. That would be nice.

The Stone would probably like that too, she thought. It had seemed so lonely and bored when she spoke with it.

****

"See," Shrike said, pointing at a cute little house with plants growing along the front, "this whole street is abandoned. Nobody lives here."

She tilted her head. The houses looked in good shape, to her eye. There were no holes in the slate roofs, and yes the shutters were still closed, but she had thought people were just sleeping in.

"How do you know?"

Eim looked at the houses, and then at her, "you can't tell nobody lives there?"

She shrugged, "the plants are nice? We didn't have many plants back home, it was too high up."

"The plants are nice, but they're also growing over the path, and almost over the shutters."

"I thought the people here just liked it like that. There's a street back in the- back home- where everyone has their homes plastered with different colours of clay, I thought it was like that?"

The 'street' was, in fact, most of the Lower Village, but she wasn't going to go into details.

Ollie walked up to one of the gates and pushed on it. "Look at this. The gate's so overgrown with plants that it won't open. If somebody was going through here regularly, then the gate would be able to open. Look, the shutters are jammed shut, and the plants on the path would be trampled down by coming and going, if anyone lived here."

"Oh."

Oh!

Something clicked in her brain, and around her the street swam into focus. It did look abandoned, he was right! There were cobbles missing in the road, and rust patterning the gates. Under the plant cover, the paint was starting to flake, and some of the shutters were even coming off their hinges. How had she not noticed before?

One of the houses further down was even missing roof tiles, and she could see a particularly ambitious tree poking its way out through the gap.

"Ohh," she looked about with new eyes. "I thought it looked nice."

Yaris sighed, hands on her lower back, "it is pretty, but it's also sad. They're going to knock this one down next year, if we keep shrinking."

It made sense, now that she thought about it. As the population shrank and houses emptied, people would naturally move closer to the centre. As it rose again, people would spread back out, like a puddle, shrinking and growing in sun and rain.

Shrike let out a breath, and spoke for the first time in a while, "so, that's why the guild wants me to get the detection skill. That's why they're pushing so hard. The sewers."

Eim nodded, silently pointing out a missing cobble to Shrike.

He was looking ahead, his mouth flat as he walked. Around them, the street was silent except for the sound of their passage and birdsong.

"I did get skills," Shrike said finally, and the others turned to him in surprise.

"Why di-"

"One for level two, and then it upgraded again at level three. I wasn't given a choice in them. The Stone just gave them to me. 'Congratulations on level two, con-grat-you-lations on level three. You have earnt two skills. Good luck.'"

He looked angry, she thought.

"Isn't that a good thing, to get skills?"

He glanced down at her, "normally, yes. But there are some skills you don't want."

"Cursed ones," Eim said quietly, and Shrike shrugged with one shoulder, not making eye contact. "I don't know if those truly exist, but-"

"Can this wait," Yaris said suddenly, "until we're safely underground? I appreciate your being honest, but here?"

He startled, before hurriedly looking around. "Oh, sure."

"Thank you," she sounded tired, despite it still being early morning. "Look, we're almost at the field, we should be at the bottom of the Spur in an hour, and an hour after that we should be heading in a direction no other registered team has taken in at least six months. Then you can get whatever this is out of your system."

He stared at her, and then away.

"Alright."