Kemy leaned on her staff as a surge came to her. The overflowing feeling of pulling in power was a sensation she had only experienced a few times in her life.
"Hey, are you okay?" came the reassuring hand of Delem, her group leader.
"I've been called," she explained and the confused stare she got back reminded Kemy that not everyone had a literal divine calling as a life. The others of the Scarlet Moon gathered around her in concern. The towering figure of Gonga, the most openly concerned, still had old tanned patches of his face from the 'unfortunate' explosion in the Mushroom Grove.
"A divine mission? Do gods pay in divine gold?" Aneya asked, her crimson hair bright in the setting light as she gently stroked Kemy's head with a worried look.
"I would never!" Kemy said in horror at the idea of serving her goddess a receipt for a job. The mere idea made her spine tingle unpleasantly from guilt.
"What's the mission?" Delem asked, trying to keep Aneya from mugging Kemy's goddess.
"Um... she wants me to explore the Fourth Floor of the Dungeon," she explained and there were some mild confused looks between the members but nothing that suggested anger.
"That was already a plan if we stayed," Delem said with a reassuring smile and Kemy shifted, unable to look them in the face. Still, she couldn't lie to them.
"She sent me a vision of the people she wants me to travel with for this mission," she said slowly.
"Welp, you tried religion and it didn't pan out. Come with me and I shall show you a life of atheism," Aneya declared and Kemy squeaked as the woman pulled her towards the bar.
"How can you be an atheist? Gods are real," Gongo asked curiously and Aneya waved that off.
"I believe in them. I just don't believe in their ability to be positive to us mortals, so same thing," the archer said candidly.
"I'm not sure that's true-" Delem tried to interject.
"Even Durence has to have some form of women's bar. Male waiters to serve us on hands and knees. Their shirts optional-" Aneya began and Kemy pulled away, unable to even hold such an image.
The waiters would be cold! Their knees would hurt!
They would develop bad knees in old age!
"I'm sorry," she said to the group with the growing urge to cry and Delem merely smiled.
"You don't need to feel bad for having a different way of life. We can even make it a game," he said and Aneya turned, looking interested now as Gonga lit up.
"The Dungeon has mirrored versions. We can race to the fourth floor! Us and whatever team you need to help! That way we can be waiting at the end to welcome you," he teased and Kemy began to feel the guilt in her chest ease up and relief fill her.
Aneya came up to her and put hands on Kemy's shoulders.
"You are a Crimson Moon. Make them feel lucky to have you or I will," she said. Kemy didn't know what that meant exactly and she was too worried to ask for clarification so she just nodded seriously.
"So, who is your fated team?" Delem asked but Kemy didn't know their names. She just had a vision of a golden crown circling over the guildhall, a blinding smile, and a flopping orange tongue. There was one more but when she thought back to her she broke out in cold sweat as a massive burning eye in the sky zoomed in on her with alien-like curiosity.
It could only belong to someone her goddess saw as equal but opposed.
A person of truth, but not the same kind Kemy enjoyed.
Someone who would be a challenge to recruit.
---
Yattina stared at her office as paperwork continued to reproduce like amorphous slimes. Every second a new pile just appeared needing signatures or stamps, or reviews, or checks, or approval, or more. She rubbed her enchanted eye, trying to see if Delta installed a hidden laser beam spell that would let her set it all on fire.
"It's not so bad," Yattina told herself as she grabbed a sheet.
"Request for leave due to a local banker biting them? Denied! Ludicrous claim until I see the bite marks," Yattina said and stamped it.
She grabbed another.
"Request for more meat imports. Large number of vegetarians are claiming the local flora is eating them first," she read and decided it would be fine to get some more company-produced 'meat'(?) brought through the portal. Durence was making vegetarians work for their lifestyle it seemed.
Okay! Yattina was on a roll now!
She grabbed the next sheet and then came away with ten or so. 'Samples' improperly sealed had broken, creating a gum-like mess that consumed a dozen reports in one go.
She managed to rescue half a report detailing the mud samples of the first floor. Trying to hold back a naughty word or twenty, she reached for more paperwork. The pile she reached for turned out to be a series of requests to be transferred to somewhere else. Anywhere else.
"In the process of fairness, I'll approve 30% of these and call it a day," she decided and pushed the pile to one side.
Caline had submitted a report for a possible unique uniform for those stationed in Durence and submitted he would foot most of the bill in an attempt to foster closer relations to locals. He drew potential new badges for approval.
Yattina could see the merits and perhaps the effort on Caline's part to do something productive about morale. Yattina declined it for now since there was little point letting officers move to another site only to order a bulk set of new uniforms.
Cohesion and routine would be set first so those who stayed would feel the uniform was actually a touching gesture. It would help make Caline's idea more impactful down the road!
"You seem busy," came a nervous tone and she looked up to see Gentle.
"Busy would imply a period of time when I wasn't," she joked but the boy looked oddly uncertain about something.
"Come, tell me what's wrong," she insisted and he tried to shut the office door but paper had become wedged in the frame and it was all Yattina could do to prevent it from flooding into the hall. Gentle sat down on what he, and Yattina, thought was the other chair in the room but turned out to be an unstable pile of paperwork.
Where had the actual chair gone? Yattine was beginning to suspect the paperwork had eaten it.
"I think something is wrong with me," he said slowly and Yattina leaned back.
"Ah well, I've never been shy about the biological process from child to adult but you might have issues. Let me get the graphs," she said and stood up as Gentle spluttered.
"No! I mean... bad, weird. Like something is very wrong," he tried to explain. Yattina tried to look at him with her eye but it was hard to get a direct look at him. Gentle was naturally the type to avoid trouble and drama so his own aura was slippery as well.
She didn't peer too hard at the truth of the matter. Gentle was a comrade, not a subject.
"I think something is haunting me or others in the woods," he said and Yattina frowned as she leaned against her desk.
"You're referring to the assaulted victim, Silver, of the adventurer group we're hosting?" she asked and Gentle frowned then nodded.
"One of the Silver-Ones," Gentle agreed and then looked at his hands.
"I feel watched, like sometimes I should be alone, I'm not," he said with a shiver.
"Silver, the Silver-One, was left alive despite the events that occurred. It stole the dungeon-essence from his body. You should be fine unless you have something to share?" she asked and Gentle fidgeted.
"I'm sick sometimes in my life and I think my father might have used frowned upon means to help me. Sometimes I feel weak and cough up different metal flecks. Sometimes silver ones," he said and then looked down at his hands again.
"What if the thing that attacked that man was drawn here because of me?" he asked with worry.
"Many beings feed off mana, with a hunger for dungeon items in particular. Vampires are known to hugely prefer people who spend large amounts of time inside a dungeon. If they're a contract? Vampires can even go feral if they're still young. In fact, I heard of a fascinating paper documenting a splinter line of vampires that only feed off wizards and-" Yattina tried to assure the young man but paused when she saw he was still down.
"Gentle," she began and she waited until he looked up at her.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
"If you are an intended target, neither you or the other man are at fault. In these cases, victims can't be blamed for what their monsters do. You aren't the one who lured it here. It followed you here. You didn't put others in danger, it chose to attack someone less protected," she said and he stared at her.
"What if someone dies because it's here?" he asked and Yattina pursed her lips, not quite sure how to tell Gentle that she was far more worried about this monster if it tried to attack one of the locals.
Before she could say anything, a beeping noise came from her pockets and she fished around in it, brushing past spare pens, paperclips, pieces of string, ear plugs, and something that felt like ox hair. Under all that came an old device she hadn't seen activate in years but she always carried around.
It was an old shard of glass that was wrapped with old frayed rope on one end to allow Yattina to hold it. The shard of glass hummed in a slow manner, slowly gaining speed with each moment. Each beep made more blood drain out of Yattina's face.
"What's that?" Gentle asked, his concerns pushed aside for sheer curiosity.
"It's my Dei-monitor. Organized religion is coming," she whispered and began shoving some of her theoretical work out of a drawer, putting the more alarming and controversial papers on the surface.
Her works on 'The human identity: How we fit symbolically and biologically with other races' and 'Gods: Super Gas Aliens or Daydreams gone wild?' were particularly heretical and likely to chase off any nosey crazy person.
"What's wrong with religious people?" Gentle asked, looking alarmed at her sudden flurry of activity.
"Normally? Nothing! Fantastic people who I can trust to follow their own moral code as otherwise their patron will literally ground them. But when my Dei-Monitor goes off? It means a god has woven a connection to me for a reason. A meeting or mission or, worst, a prophecy! Save me from the woes of tomorrow and angst," Yattina waved her hands, knocking over a pile of reports on the dungeon bees, most of the pages stained with honey.
"Prophecies? Like seeing the future? Something you can't avoid?!" Gentle said in both alarm and delight and Yattina should have known the young teen would still have romantic ideas about the word.
"Yes but no! No one can have visions of the future! It literally doesn't exist! Time magic, for example, only works on the present and the past. It's one thing to put a sphere of time into a subspace where it lags behind causing a visible 'stop' effect, but the future? The sheer chaos of a single person, no matter how boring they are, cannot be accounted for more than a few minutes! Gods just say it's a prophecy to make it feel important" Yattina lectured, looking around to make sure there were no sudden leaks of holy water from the walls.
"So, no one is going to travel from the future with warnings?" Gentle asked slowly.
"No, but you could theoretically travel back to the past if you had twenty gods strapped to a battery or a massive power source, but that's because you're the present, not the future," Yattina said.
"So, if I go back, I'm from the future?" Gentle tried to follow.
"No, no. You're in the present. Even if you travel back in time, it's the past. You're from the present. To those in the past, it would be the future but they're just echoes in chrono-space. Imprints of history that people can poke and prod. It's not truly going back in the past because no matter what you do, the past cannot be changed because the past is gone," Yattina lectured and Gentle put his head in his hands, looking lost.
"What was I doing?" Yattina muttered to herself as there came a soft knock on her door.
"Excuse me, I'm looking for Commander Yattina?" a polite young woman asked, looking mildly radiant as if there was a higher power just out of sight. There was a long pause as the girl looked at Yattina and Gentle as they stared back silently.
Yattina grabbed a piece of paper from her desk and held it up.
"Behold! Heretical science! Mildly harmless science that challenges your lifestyle!" she said and waved the paper at the girl who blinked.
"Bacon, lettuce, coffee x5, eye polish," the girl read confused and Yattina turned the paper around to see it was a shopping list she made the other day.
"My name is Kemy and I've come here hoping to help someone enter the Dungeon soon because my goddess-" Kemy began and Yattina held up a hand.
"I will listen to your words but I have a condition," she warned and this made Kemy blink.
"Hello," Gentle waved, just happy to be involved.
"I can do whatever it takes to make you comfortable," Kemy promised and Yattina began to smile.
"How lovely," Yattina said and went to fetch her condition.
Ten minutes later, all three of them sat in chairs in the paper filled room, holding cups of warm coffee. The silence was awkward as Gentle shifted.
"How do I drink in this?" he asked through the fitted helmet that obscured his entire head except a dark visor. Yattina had given him a blue theme, letting the anti-god suit nestle against Gentle's body which Yattina had decorated with a microscope symbol.
Her own suit was a deep red, decorated with a pen.
"You don't. The coffee is to be polite. The Anti-God suits are completely sealed aside from tiny air ports which take time to sort the air of any divine power. In these suits, nothing short of personal attention from a saint will affect us. Well, I hope so. I haven't tested them yet," she admitted.
"Why am I in one? I like my goddess," Kemy said with a slight whine in her deep pink suit. Her suit had a pencil on it.
"I need data on a faithful wearing the suit and I like things to match. Plus, Gentle and I would look strange if you didn't join in," Yattina said calmly.
"Fine, but we still need to go to the Adventurer's Guild to collect Deo, Grim, and someone else," Kemy insisted and held up her staff which wasn't Yattina's style at all.
"Your goddess is of the truth? Ah I see, 'waving in one's face'. I delight in the symbology," she praised and Kemy tilted her helmeted head. Expressions were hard to read but the body was telling.
"Why don't you like gods? Do you not... believe?" Kemy asked and despite her best efforts, her tone still held incredulity.
"Oh no. I very much do believe, but I can believe in kings, emperors, and lords too, doesn't mean I will bend to them on some expected idea of service. I find gods have inadvertently altered a lot of our natural laws and it's aggravating to shift through what is artificial and what is natural," she explained.
"Like what?" Gentle asked as Yattina stood up.
"Magic users as a whole. There is a recorded time when people as a whole didn't have magic then suddenly they did. It was different from their natural gifts or vast strength. Turns out a god was involved," Yattina explained.
"I learned that sometimes gods bring technology advances to their followers, creating technology schisms from village to village. Sometimes their power could influence people and change them. Some would allow them to breathe under water or become able to see in the dark. Sometimes, I think I've found a trail of scientific marvel only to trace it so far back and it turns out 'a god did it'," Yattina continued as she collected a few things for this sudden journey.
Between a dungeon trip and paperwork, she'd take the trip.
"So you don't like gods 'cause they ruin your fun?" Gentle said and Yattina gave him a look.
"That's what I just said," she said with a huff.
"Oh... that's oddly both better and stranger," Kemy admitted softly.
"I can't go into the dungeon. I have shift duty," Gentle said quickly and took the helmet off.
"Deo or Grim can have this one," he offered but Yattina nodded her head to the nearby closet.
"There's another suit in there. Wear it to be safe. It's not yet dyed and the material is a little glossy so you'll blend in with the Fairplay aesthetic," she joked.
"Can I take the suit off?" Kemy asked politely.
"No, you'll leak god cooties all over my office," Yattina said quickly, not wanting her newest subject to escape her experiment.
"That's a lie," Kemy said firmly. Yattina tried not to twitch.
Kemy was going to get 'liar liar pants on holy fire' stitched on her suit before long.