"You've all been in the dungeon before now?" Jump-touch asked. She had been mulling over the question for a while, going back and forth on whether or not she should ask or not, and if she'd like the answer.

"Shrike has," Ollie said, yawning and glancing at him. "He's level three, you know."

"I can answer for myself, thank you very much." Shrike tapped his cane on the ground. "And just because I'm level three, doesn't mean I have that much more experience than the rest of you."

Ollie stuck a tongue out at him and he sighed, but not in an annoyed way.

"Yeah," said Yaris, walking over. "I've been in before, but only once, uh, legally."

"You-" Eim started, and then shook his head, "I don't want to know."

She shrugged, "it's nothing like that. My ma tried to… Help me out by sending me to train with the Politeía for a while, down at the Old Ground, on Topaz Street. They said that if I was going to train properly, then I needed to see the inside of the dungeon at least once beforehand. They also thought it was good luck, and that I'd get a better class if I'd killed at least one monster before the Choosing."

"Superstition," muttered Shrike, and she nodded.

"Yeah, fat lot of good that did me, but it was a good experience. We went down via a cellar entrance somebody's grandpa dug back in the dark ages-"

Eim put his hands over his ears.

"-and they found a Grass Cat for me. They refused to trap it or help, but they did have a healer with them."

"A Grass Cat?" Jump-touch asked, mostly following.

"Exactly what it sounds like. A monster in the shape of a cat, but the body is made of grass. There's a core in the chest, a bit like like the Opal Stone, which keeps it together. If you don't remove it, the thing keeps reforming, but if you break it then the monster dies."

Jump-touch nodded, looking up at Yaris and thinking about that. She knew roughly what a cat was, a big animal with claws and fur, like Honey-sweet, and she thought it must have been scary to fight one without any magic to back you up. Yaris was very brave, sometimes.

And tall, she was so tall!

Around them, the copper was starting to fade into the normal reds and greens of trees about to drop their leaves, in preparation for the cold of summer.

A cold which would never come, in this ever-lit place.

"Anyway, they took me in a couple of times, and we killed a few Grass-Cats. I still go back on the weekends sometimes and train with them. It's been good."

"I didn't know that," said Eim. "I've never been down here before, but groups do training sessions in the yard sometimes, and I've been watching them since I was a kid. Plus my class seems to be really combat focused, it throws all sorts of things into my head. Just killing the slimes, each one was like a lesson in itself."

He stared forwards, "when we- when you were fighting the Peck Peck, it was shouting so much stuff at me I could barely move. It was all I could do to keep Jump safe. Reams and reams of information that I couldn't process at all."

"You should turn that off," Jump-touch nodded, "it's too much."

He gave her a tired look, "if I knew how, kid, I would, but I think it'll be good in the end. I just need to get used to it."

Yaris nodded, "it's not so bad for me, but I have years of training with the politeía. They warned me it would happen, and tried to teach me so that it wouldn't be so overwhelming. If you already know something, then the class won't shout at you about it any more."

"Useful," Shrike said. "It was pretty bad at first for me too, I never read up on… Any of this fighting stuff. I was supposed to be working in the workshop now, looking at cogs and dials, not traipsing through the Underground with a bad knee."

"I used to almost live down here, as a kid," Ollie mused, staring into the leaves above. "It's quite nostalgic to come back."

"That's cool," said Jump-touch, as the other three stopped walking, tripping over each other. "It's always warm down here, right?"

"Warm too," Ollie nodded, as Eim broke out coughing.

"You what?"

They looked back at him. "We had an entrance at the end of our road, only a little one, mind. The politeía came and sealed it oh, five years back now, but until then, I spent most of my free time down here."

"You never said!" Yaris almost fell over Eim, who was still choking. Behind them both, Shrike was grimacing, eyes shut and hands tight against his cane, as if he'd missed a step.

What's up with them?

"Is that bad?" Jump-touch asked Ollie, still staring at the other three, and they shrugged.

"People say it's dangerous, but as long as you're careful and stick to the copper areas, there's nothing much worse around than slimes. I rarely even saw those, if I'm being honest."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"What about the blue, and the greens! What about the Ink-worm!" Yaris took a step forward, forgot Eim was in front of her, and almost knocked him over. Behind them Shrike was staring into the middle distance, still gripping his walking stick.

Yaris blinked, looked down, and then started to help him up.

Ollie shrugged still walking forward. "They're easily avoided. You can always just climb a tree or something. They'll goop at you a bit, but they get tired soon enough."

Shrike still looked pained, but also thoughtful. "We're lucky the area is so open and safe here, that's one of the reasons Resper exists at all. In some cities, the area beneath is so dangerous you're not even allowed to go down into it without an escort until levels four or five.

"That sounds dumb." Eim allowed Yaris to help him up, rubbing his throat with his other hand. "How do they even get people to that level without sending them into the Dungeon?"

"Lots of training and specialised classes, I guess," Shrike frowned. "You know, I'm not sure at all."

"It'll be weird to leave," Ollie mused as the others started moving forward again. "When the city falls, and we all have to go elsewhere. That's gonna be weird."

"Have you been this far before?"

Ollie shook their head, "I never strayed far from our entrance, and never out of the copper."

Yaris suddenly exclaimed, "when we were nine, you appeared one day with an opal shard! You got that from down here? You said you found it lying in the grass!"

They nodded, "I did find it lying on the ground, just not where I told you. Bloody thing went right through the sole of my shoe."

"What did you both do with it?" Eim asked, curiosity heavy in his voice.

"We saved it, and then used it to buy most of the gear Jump is carrying around for us," Yaris said. "You should have told me, Ollie!"

"Huh," said Eim, as Ollie shrugged, "that explains a lot. There were some questions at the guild over who was funding you. We figured your mum had been saving up or something."

Yaris rolled her shoulders. "It was difficult, finding somebody who would trade for it without trying to rip us off, but we managed it.

"Then," she directed her voice at Jump, "there was a whole issue back at the guild. Shrike's party ditched him, and mine dumped me before we even got out. Idiots."

There was a bitter edge to her voice. Behind her, Shrike winced, but didn't look upset, just resigned.

As Yaris grumbled, Jump-touch resisted the urge to move away from her.

She's not going to attack you. And even if she did, what would you do?

Jump-touch stuck her hands in her pockets instead, trying to be nonchalant. They were opening up about their lives, should she talk about hers?

"A," she hesitated. "A [Warrior] from our- my village brought me to the Road," she said, trying to word it in ways they would understand. "He's soft and good, and he'll find me when my year is done, and I can go home."

She licked her lips, "my, uh, the person who looked after me? He'll be waiting too. And my brother. They're all waiting."

She refused to turn the boon back on, she would struggle through this, "I never had to fight at home, that was the, um, [Warrior]'s job."

The others nodded, seeming to be mostly following. Nice! She was acing this language-thing.

"That makes sense," Shrike said. "You're so small, if there's people there with dedicated [Warrior] classes, then there would be no need for you to fight. I guess they thought you might get a nice library job, or something similar?"

"I like talking to people," she stared ahead. The path was starting to widen out now, the leaves dead and brown around them, but in a more natural way than near the Spur. "The Stone saw I liked that, and so gave me this class. But I don't really understand why the skill. And I don't want to travel, I want to go home."

Shrike shrugged. "It's an odd one, for sure."

"People say the Stone has its reasons," said Ollie, "you'll just have to find out what they were."

To keep safe people who might have nowhere else to go, she thought to herself. But why would they have nowhere to go in the first place?

The world was so very big. There were no humans on the other side of the mountain, so that was always safe. And if somebody needed somewhere to stay, they could always go to the Village. Her people would take them in.

She kept pressing her mind against the walls of her Heart. If she ever did need to protect people, the space needed to be bigger. She would ask the Stone next time they spoke what she needed to do to make it so.

****

The first sign that something was wrong was a smell in the air.

"You smell that," Ollie said suddenly, nose up, "it smells like cooking. Think somebody's having dinner?"

"Could be there's another party down here," Yaris stood on her tiptoes, looking around. "There weren't any tags on the wall in the guild-" Jump-touch didn't know what this meant, "-but that doesn't mean there's not people down here. Idiots like you, wandering around as a child."

"Never this far in," Ollie said, still looking around. The path had widened out and the vegetation thinned out, until they were merely walking through thick, dead brush, rather than an impenetrable metalised mess. This area was more like a meadow, dying off after the first frost, than the jungle they had been in before.

"Smoke?" questioned Eim, "I don't smell it."

"Like barbecue," the word was unfamiliar, but Jump-touch could smell it now too. It was the smell of a cold night in the Valley, burning wood and leaves and charred meat.

"There's no, uh, wind?" she tried to find the right word, "wind? No wind here, so it could be from far."

"Please turn the boon back on," Shrike grimaced, "at least while we need you to be able to communicate."

He used such long words, how did he get his tongue around them all! He could have just said talk or speak. She wasn't too sure what the difference between-

"Jump," he spoke, and she rolled her eyes at him, nudging the button for the it in her mind and wincing as it rolled back in, clarifying and classifying and telling her exactly which words she kept getting wrong.

"Makes my brain itch," she grumbled, trying to bypass the overtaking of her words and failing. "I was trying to say that there's no wind here, the smell could be coming from ages away."

Eim shook his head, "the dungeon doesn't work like that. Wind generated dies after a smaller distance than you'd expect, and smells too. Something to do with the magic in the air."

"I always wondered about that," from Shrike, "the books never covered it. You'd think asphyxiation would be more of a problem."

Jump-touch glared at him. What sort of word was that?

Yaris had her sword in hand, holding it lightly off to the side as she scanned the brush, having a better vantage point than the rest of them.

Jump-touch eyed her, why the sword? Did she think it was people, or a monster? Were they going to fight other humans? "If it's people, do we fight them?"

"Not everyone down here is nice." Yaris said, cryptically.

What does that mean?

The group seemed to hunch together as they moved on, Jump-touch in the centre, Eim at the back, and Shrike and Ollie flanking either side. She tried not to feel claustrophobic, but why did everyone have to be so tall, she couldn't see anything. The grass and brush were snagging against her skirt and scratching her legs through the thin trousers she had on underneath.

The smell got stronger as they walked, until Yaris finally raised a hand.

"Over there," she whispered. "Something's not right."