The attitude in the group was subdued as they reached the grove where Ink-worm had been residing for the last week.

The plants were already starting to overtake the space in the centre, and tiny shoots were already popping up through the broken remains of their sketching area.

"You don't get it." Jump-touch was still refusing to switch the boon back on, despite begging from the others, "they-she's good, will protect the apples, and eat the slimes!"

Ink-worm didn't need to eat, but they enjoyed the process sometimes, and they both suspected that the slimes would taste sweet, like fruit. They were so brightly coloured, they had to taste good, right?

Their memory wasn't good, Jump-touch had learned that. Every time they- she hesitated to say died- they lost parts of their memory. A little more of their being, taken by the void. The taste of a favourite food, a treasured moment. They knew what they'd lost, but it was like... It had been hard to explain, and the two had spent a good amount of time working it out.

It was like all the emotion, all the colour, had been stripped from the memories. They could remember, but those memories were grey, boring.

Like they belonged to someone else.

"I want to make she-him-they good memories," Jump-touch insisted. "Dying sucks," she had learnt that word from Ollie, "he-they should have a safe place. We will make them-him-she a safe place."

"You don't have to do all the pronouns you can think of," Ollie said, hands behind their head as they stared at the grassy clearing. "You can just use it, or they, or he or she or whatever. I doubt it cares?"

"It is for animals that can't think, I know that!" Jump-touch shook her head, "not for people, and Ink-worm is a person."

"Ink-worm?"

"They lost their name, long ago, so they wanted a new one. I helped!"

"I see," muttered Yaris. "Why am I even surprised, at this point?"

Eim stepped further into the clearing, which was now anything but.

"Oh hey, I recognise a couple of these plants from the Garden," he reached down and touched a trailing vine. "This is one we use for reducing fevers. Useful stuff."

"Is it worth harvesting them?" Shrike limped over, interested, picking a leaf from the plant and inspecting it closely.

Eim shook his head. "They need special treatment, and sometimes skill use as they're picked. But I could enquire. If the uh, Ink-worm? If the worm is going to be living in the apple grove, then us being able to harvest medicinal herbs from there would be a real boon. It might even convince the guild not to send in the Twenties."

Yaris coughed loudly. "You're just going along with this? That we have taken an boss-level monster from Stone-knows how many levels down and situated it right next to the main entrance? You're fine with that?"

"It's not the main entrance, it's just the one we like to use." He shrugged, "plus, what choice do we have? What's done is done, and it's not like we can kill it ourselves now. May as well make the most of it, eh?"

Yaris stared at him. "It's a monster. Not just that, it's a boss monster!"

"Yeah, and now I guess it's our boss monster, we've named it and everything."

Eim nodded to Jump-touch, who nodded back, face firm. Ink-worm was a friend, they were not going to be killed as long as she could help it.

Yaris narrowed her eyes at him. "You don't believe that, do you? That-"

"It doesn't matter either way, I'm a receptionist, not a priest. Take it up with them."

She pursed her lips, but said nothing further, instead stomping over to look at the leaf Shrike had picked.

Jump-touch mostly managed to follow the conversation. They weren't going to kill Ink-worm, and were becoming okay with them living in the apple grove. That was good! She had been worried it would be more difficult than this.

What's a priest? She wondered, refusing to press the little button in the side of her brain which would switch the boon back on. She could ask later.

Hadn't My-he-kal mentioned something about priests? She wasn't sure any more. She would have to ask him, the next time she saw him. She hadn't ever had the chance to speak to him with anything other than gestures and guesswork.

"We need to move on, before this gets so overgrown we can't pass through it," Yaris pulled the conversation back on track, dropping the leaf on the ground.

She glanced at Jump-touch, "you were gone for so long that we almost gave up on you. If this happens again, you need to check in with us sometimes. What if we'd given up and just left you here?"

"I wasn't gone that long!"

She didn't actually know how long she'd been gone, talking to Ink-worm. She wasn't used to this human measurement of time in hours and minutes and seconds, and there was no tracking of the days, down here in the dungeon.

A pause. "Was it too long? The light here is weird. It makes it hard to tell."

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Shrike shook his head, "you were gone a day, maybe a little more. Did you not sleep?"

A whole day? That seemed far too long, she wasn't even sleepy.

"No sleep. Your time broken?"

He looked at her for a moment, trying to work out what she'd said.

"I wish you'd turn the boon back on. And no, our time is not broken, you were really gone that long. You didn't notice?"

She shook her head. It had felt like a few hours at most, and although she was hungry and a little tired, she felt fine.

"Huh," Shrike mused, "interesting. Maybe it's a class-thing. I've heard of a couple like that."

"Classes for the insane." Ollie nodded.

"Classes that send you insane, more like."

"The Stone only gives what you need." they intoned, it felt like a well-worn phrase.

Jump-touch shrugged, wading through the plants towards Shrike, keeping a look out for any she recognised.

She didn't know a lot of plants, only what grew in the Dip, and even then, only the ones they used for spices, but she was always willing to experiment. She missed spices deeply.

Salt! I was going to get salt! I can't believe we forgot to buy it!

She added it back onto her mental shopping list. Salt was the first step to making the boiled soup edible. After that, she wanted vegetables, and then fruit.

It couldn't be that expensive, right? Salt was the heart of cooking. She didn't know any kobolds who couldn't taste salt, it was universal.

With a wave, Yaris drew them across the clearing, and they started to move down the now rather overgrown path.

She nibbled on a few plants as she walked, until Eim tapped her lightly on the back of the head. "You don't know what you're eating, do you?"

She shook her head happily, "nope! This one tastes of tingles!"

He rolled his eyes. "Then you don't know if it's bad. Don't eat plants you haven't been able to something something first with a [Herbalist]."

That was probably what he was saying anyway. He didn't use as many difficult words as Shrike, but he still used some.

Humans, always making everything so complicated. She should teach them Given Tongue some time, get them speaking a real language.

"Do we have a [Herbalist]?"

"No," he paused, "but there's one who works for the guild."

"Mm, make them come here and try food for me then."

Eim stared at her for a long moment, before sighing, "you're too something for your own good sometimes. Please don't eat random plants, I'm not good at curing wordswordswords."

He went on for a while as she rolled her eyes at him, but she also stopped tasting the plants.

It was a shame, some of them had been nice, and her mouth was pleasantly numb now.

Hmm. Maybe he had a point.

****

As they travelled, Jump-touch discovered she could pick bunches of plants, send them to her Heart, and sort them back into types once they were there. As long as she had touched them, and knew roughly how many stems of each she had, it worked.

She had almost tripped twice though, it took a lot of focus.

I'll take all the air away again. The guild people said it wouldn't hurt the big box, so it should be fine?

"Why are you collectin' all those?"

"I want-" she searched for the word, "I want spicy? Makes mouth go oof when eat. But Eim said I can't eat now."

"Spices?" Ollie offered, and she nodded. That sounded right. They had been chatting about nothing for a while now, and she was trying to memorise the words she didn't know. Spices. That's what I want.

The process didn't make her head itch like talking to Ink-worm had, but that was okay. She had always been good at languages, even the kobolds had remarked on it, so she didn't need magical help to learn this. Plus, days of having a dictionary in her brain had already helped a lot.

The relief at having her thoughts be her own again was almost a physical thing.

"Big spices," she tried, "much, uh, mouth… hot? I want hot spices. The more the better."

The stuff they used in the village didn't really have names. She knew them as just 'the red fruit', 'blue spots', 'long red grass', that sort of thing. She tried a couple of them in Given Tongue anyway.

Yaris frowned, "I think sometimes the ones you can buy are dried by toasting, you mean like that?"

She shook her head, "not cooked, hot!" but she had no better way to explain it, and the conversation moved on.

"What do you think it is we're delivering?" Ollie kept half-turning, like they wanted to walk backwards, but the path was too dangerous to do so on for long. "Could it be something dangerous to the dungeon? Would the guild do that?"

"Unlikely," said Shrike. "The guild wants the dungeon controlled, and the magic leeched back a touch if possible, not destroyed. It spans the whole world, you couldn't even…"

He trailed off, thoughtful.

"It would just make a big hole, right? If it was a bomb or something." Eim mused, "people have been trying to 'beat' the dungeon for a thousand years now. To find the core, or the bottom. But the dungeon is bigger than the whole surface world, it has to be."

"There are people who theorise that it grows still deeper every year," Shrike said. "At this point I think if somebody did 'beat' it, then the whole world above would collapse. So much of the underground is hollowed out now."

"If the ground is hollow," Jump-touch butted in, guessing what that word meant from context, "then where does the ground go?"

Shrike thought about that for a moment, rolling his shoulders. "Nobody knows. Some people think it's converted into magic, or loot, or maybe, somewhere, new mountains spring up. People have theorised…"

She zoned out, letting the words move through her, even as she only understood half of them, absorbing the sound and cadence of the language. Shrike spoke so differently to the others. His accent was different, something she hadn't noticed with her boon active, and he used much bigger and more complicated words.

Yaris dropped letters and mashed her words together, unless she was in leader-mode. Ollie trailed through them, like they were hunting for something in the sentence, but could never quite find it, and Eim spoke very clearly and nicely, but with shorter words than Shrike.

How do I speak? She wondered. What accent did she have, when the boon was active? She must have one, everyone did, but what had the Stone picked for her?

"Do I have an… A way of speaking?"

"What? A what?" Shrike asked, interrupted.

"A way of speaking, like, like you use long words, and Eim speaks nicely, and Yaris makes letters go away."

"Why thank you," Eim looked a little confused, but not unhappy.

"Oh," said Shrike, "an accent. You-" he thought about it, looking around at the coppery vegetation, "with the boon on, you sometimes use long words I wouldn't expect somebody your age to use, but your accent is very clear, more like Eim's than the rest of us?"

"See, I forgive her the big words," Yaris said. "She's had them injected straight into her head. Now you, you had to steal them from books, so there is no forgiveness on my part there."

"I read a whole dictionary once," Shrike looked wistful, "it had some fantastic words in it. Did you know that…"

Whatever he was going on about, she probably didn't need to listen. At least he wasn't grumpy anymore about her asking questions. That seemed to be more of a morning thing.

She reached up and touched one of her hair ribbons. Eim had been nice lately too, and having her hair back how it was supposed to be was such a relief. Even though he obviously hadn't wanted her to have it done, for whatever weird human reasons he had.

Cultural, he'd said. Should be she more understanding, should she have her hair down like the others?

I should ask what's up with that.

But later. Her language skills were lacking a bit too much right now. Take their current conversation for example, they were either talking about what was for dinner tonight, or about some monster they'd all killed in the past, and what it had tasted like. Probably the second though, because she knew they were new to this whole Dungeon thing.

They didn't act new, though. What if they were lying to her?