Hannah was obsessive by nature.
That was common among clerics, for the obvious reason that when the obsession was focused on a god it was easier to be ‘with’ them all the time, spending hour upon hour in prayer and study, deepening the connection, exploring the borders, and talking with others. It was hard to become an established cleric if you didn’t have a desire to live, breathe, and eat like one, and the first year in seminary was where most people washed out, since the schedule was grueling and the worship monotonous if you didn’t have the ability to throw your entire self at it.
Garos wasn’t Hannah’s only obsession though, not by a mile. She’d been obsessed with baking when she was in the seminary, enough that she’d been pulled aside and talked to about it, and she kept being drawn to the kitchen, time after time, especially when there was a new recipe to try, or ingredient to figure out, or some kind of occasion that demanded something special. The obsession with baking had waned, eventually, and she baked no more than four or five times a week now, but at her peak, it had been multiple times a day, one loaf of bread after the other, limited mostly by oven space. She’d imagined opening up a bakery, if being a cleric proved not to work for her.
Dungeons had been another obsession, especially in that first month, but the pace wasn’t fast enough to sustain her, and she chewed through all the meat on that bone so quickly that it didn’t seem like there was anything left. She’d put some of her energy into the book, which was at the intersection of two obsessions, but even that hadn’t been enough. She’d read dungeon reports, talked to other dungeoneers, and so on, but Alfric was the only one who had any real interest, and talking to him about dungeons was just about the worst thing you could talk to him about. There was just so little real discussion to be had, since he was an absolute authority and seemed to have covered every single angle within his own mind. It was the least fun, least engaging subject, at least when she was trying to have a back and forth.
Marsh was Hannah’s current obsession, and he seemed equally obsessed with her.
“You’re beautiful,” he said as he ran his fingers through her hair.
“You always say that,” she replied. She was running her fingers through his hair as well, though on his chest.
“It’s always true,” said Marsh.
“We should get dressed,” said Hannah.
“You always say that,” said Marsh.
“It’s always true,” she replied, leaning forward to kiss him on the nose.
There were warm and gooey feelings, butterflies in her stomach and an instant brightening of her day when she saw him. More and more, she was sharing those feelings with him. They felt odd to speak out loud, unnatural, maybe because they left her vulnerable in a way that she wasn’t used to. It was hard to do clerical analysis on herself though, and the practice was widely discouraged anyhow. It was hard to be objective about your own self, difficult to stand back from your emotions. Not impossible, but also not recommended, lest you think you understood yourself better than you truly did.
Most of their time was spent in a new entad that had bound to Marsh, a large ring that could be placed on the ground to make an extradimensional space. Once it had sat there a bit, you could climb down a long ladder to get to a small earthen den, which was almost as large as Hannah’s sizable bedroom. Marsh had slowly been stocking it, which was difficult given the narrow hole, but the way he figured it, the hoop and its room would be with him for the rest of his life. He’d asked her to come along to pick out a quilt, and she’d had some input, which meant that it felt like it was her quilt too, and her den too, and like it might be a part of her life forever. She had a section of the den that had a few of her things, like the holy book of Garos, a change of clothes, a bit of perfume that she’d picked up on a whim in Dondrian — definitely not her normal thing, but Marsh liked it — and a thin notebook to fill with thoughts when she had some spare time.
“We should do something today,” said Marsh as they emerged from the den. He always let her go first, though she suspected that he just liked looking at her butt.
“Entad testin’ today,” said Hannah. “I wasn’t there yesterday, and they ended up gettin’ drunk off a needle. Besides, there are a hundred lutes to get through, which’ll be no mean feat.”
“This is fair,” nodded Marsh. “I suppose I can go find something to do with myself.”
“I could ask if it’s alright to bring you,” Hannah offered. “Normally we take turns and make a thing of it, but with a hundred to get through, I imagine it’ll take most of the day.”
“No, I’ll go spend some time with the party,” said Marsh. “They already make fun of me for how much time I spend with you.”
“Aw,” said Hannah. “Do you need me to go bully them?”
Marsh laughed. “Just Josen,” he said. “And not because he’s said anything. To be honest, I think they tease me because they’re jealous, and they know I like it.”
“Ay,” said Hannah. “Well, then shall we go our separate ways? I had a good night, as always, but said I would be back after breakfast.”
He gave her a long kiss. “I’ll miss you every moment we’re apart.”
“You’re too mushy for your own good,” said Hannah. Even with the kiss done, their faces were close to each other, noses touching. “But I love you for it.”
“I love you too,” he breathed.
“Go, now, before I change my mind,” said Hannah.
Sometimes she did change her mind, and sometimes they would keep kissing for a bit, with their goodbye taking half a bell. This time he moved away, picking up his hoop and walking off, which was a slight disappointment. She watched him go nonetheless, and waited until he’d disappeared from view to make her own way home.
She had no idea what she was going to do once Vertex or the Settlers were ready to move on for greener pastures. In part, she was hoping that some entad they’d found would allow a solution.
When she got to the house, breakfast was in full swing, which meant she was a touch late. Still, there was plenty of food, and she could eat quickly when she needed to. Mizuki had taken some obvious influence from the brunch the day before, and there were mashed potato fritters with something that was similar to an egg souffle. Aside from those two, there was an enormous amount of fresh fruit, and Hannah ate what was left.
“Alright!” said Mizuki, slapping the table. “Lutes!”
“You’re fine from yesterday?” asked Verity.
“Right as rain, thank you,” Mizuki replied. “I was actually more or less fine when I went to sleep, I think. I’m off wine for a bit though. I can’t say the experience was all that pleasant.”
“We’re going to want to be careful,” said Alfric. “I think the alcoholic needle from yesterday was a good reminder that entad testing isn’t entirely safe, and here we’ll be playing a numbers game. We’ve had our incidents in the past.”
“If you’re talking about that time I turned into water, I was actually fine,” said Isra.
“Or the time you turned into stone,” said Mizuki. “You were also fine.”
“Most of the time, entad effects aren’t bad,” said Alfric. “And most of the time if they are, they’re reversible. But if someone dies, or gets too badly injured, or if there’s something we can’t undo, then it needs to get undone by me resetting the entire day. I don’t want to do that, and I doubt that any of you want me to do that.”
“We don’t,” said Mizuki. “We want entad testing.”
“I was thinking about putting in a limit of twenty lutes, just because of the numbers,” said Alfric.
“Boo,” said Mizuki. “Boo to that, a hundred lutes, twenty each, we can crank that out in a day and leave the rest for Filera.”
“Yeah,” smiled Alfric. “I thought you’d say that. So, let’s get to work.”
Technically speaking, they had already accounted for seven of the lutes, or near enough, those whose powers they had discovered simply through handling them. That left more or less ninety-three. The ‘more or less’ was because there had been some disagreement on how many lutes there actually were.
“I just don’t understand how we can all have gotten different numbers,” said Alfric. The mess in the living room had been cleaned up the night before, but the furniture had been set off to one side. The metal struts had been removed from the chest before breakfast and laid in a disused part of the backyard, leaving only the lutes. Hannah was feeling slightly guilty that she hadn’t helped with any of it, but Alfric cracked his knuckles and started handing out the entads.
The first one Hannah got had a long neck and three strings, with a big belly — she didn’t know the technical term, if there was one — and a sizeable hole in the center. The logical thing, with a magical lute, was that it would have some effect when the strings were plucked, but this one did nothing obvious, and they had discussed beforehand that not all of them would work that way. When repeated strumming produced nothing but off-notes of a variety that seemed to be filling the room, Hannah began looking the lute over and trying to think about the other likely methods to draw its magic out. Aside from the strings, there were pegs, and she tried twisting those to and fro, which likewise did nothing.
Verity was the first to figure hers out, which was announced to the group by Mizuki saying, “Neck! Neck!” Verity’s neck had, in fact, grown an extra foot, and as she stopped strumming her lute, it retracted back to normal.
“I declare this the Long-necked Lute,” said Verity with a happy smile. The neck of the lute was long.
“I was getting there,” said Mizuki. She raised an eyebrow in Alfric’s direction.
“There are labels with string,” said Alfric. “We want brief descriptions, conditions for activation, and whatever else you’ve noticed. Spend some time on limits, useful applications, et cetera. That will help when we sell them.”
“We’re going to saturate the lute market,” said Isra, who was still inspecting her slender red lute.
“We’ll have to spread them out,” said Mizuki. “Di-lute them, you might say.” She gave Alfric a thumbs up.
“I wouldn’t fret about it too much,” said Alfric, giving her a thumbs up back.
“Did you two prepare for this?” asked Verity.
“You can’t prove anything,” said Mizuki. “Now hush, I need to listen to the sweet music of this lute, I think I’ve got something.”
Hannah returned to her own lute. It was entirely possible that it had activated when she’d done something with it, she just hadn’t noticed, and not having much in the way of options, she tried again, paying more attention to her surroundings and keeping her ears open. Something like the Full Orchestral Lute would be almost impossible for Hannah to figure out, given that the only musical instrument she had any experience with was her voice.
It was when she tried singing a bit to go along with the strumming that she finally got it. The lute seemed to be able to build up its notes, and when she strummed correctly, they came back out, layered on top of each other. It was unimpressive, as effects went, but she could imagine that they would get at least the price of a lute out of it, and it might be worth something if it could be hooked up to a different entad that needed someone to say something. Mostly, it seemed minor, and she filled out a small card for it. That was one down, nineteen to go.
The room was filled with sounds, most of them mildly unpleasant. When someone figured a lute out, they would generally call it out, and the effect would be described for the party’s appreciation, sometimes with some additional testing if the boundaries of the lute’s power were unclear.
Alfric said that sometimes an entad’s powers were difficult to peg.
Mizuki replied that some of the entad’s powers would surely have strings attached.
And Verity had said, with a smile, that they must stay resolute.
Hannah’s second lute was more straightforward. It had a sensory effect, one which got stronger the longer she played, and plucking different strings changed which sense it would affect. There were limits on how long it could be played too, mostly because her senses would get so acute that they irritated her. Being able to hear everything happening outside was, in fact, quite annoying and made it difficult to focus, and the sensory overload of being able to see every single detail of the world was terrible. She did just enough that she could write out a description. She was pleased that she’d gone long enough to find that it had a hidden power, which was a particular note that allowed magic sight, if only for a time before it got too powerful. She named it the ‘Acute Lute’, which she felt good about.
She was working on her third lute when Alfric got injured. He’d tried to play a lute and cut his fingers on the strings, which were sharp as razors.
“That one was actually a mandolin,” said Verity as Hannah healed Alfric.
Isra was the slowest among them, cautious by nature, seeming to play only as a last resort. Mizuki was the fastest, which was at least in part because she had been preparing more than anyone else.
Hannah’s third lute increased strength so long as it was strummed, which seemed fairly worthless given that it needed two hands to play. It would be good for kicking, she supposed, and there might be a way to play it with only a single hand and have some giant weapon in the other, but she was very skeptical that it was a winner. Mizuki had been quick to label it the ‘Brute Lute’, and she grinned at Alfric. They had prepared, which Hannah thought was ridiculous but also somewhat funny.
Mizuki’s sixth was a good one, and could transport both items and willing people to an extradimensional space, needing only for her to look at them and strum the strings. It immediately became a partial replacement for the chest, given that the interior space was a half-dome a hundred feet across. Alfric immediately began making plans to place beds, first aid, and other things inside it, and they took a bit of a break to look around. It needed a lantern, since there was no internal light, and there were some worries that it wouldn’t have enough air, but that didn’t stop Mizuki from dubbing it (and the entad) ‘Lutopia’.
Most of the lutes weren’t very good, particularly because of the form they took. An entad that size, which you needed to carry, would never be as good as a simple ring, and if you needed to play it as well, that would severely limit how good it could possibly be. What they were looking for, mostly, were lutes that had some utility outside of dungeons, but these were in relatively short supply.
At some point Alfric and Mizuki pulled more lutes out of the chest, making sure that they were ready and available. This was partly so that Mizuki could check which of them were party bound and which were bound to a particular person. Binding was uncommon but not rare, and after some testing, largely by having people pick the lutes up and then put them down, Hannah was given three of the lutes. Isra had the most bound, at seven, but in total, perhaps a fifth of their total supply of lutes were individually bound, and another five were party bound. That was higher than Alfric had expected, and would cut into their ability to offload the lutes into entad shops.
“What am I going to do with seven lutes?” asked Isra.
“They’ll go into storage,” said Alfric. “Maybe one or two of them will be useful enough that you keep it handy, especially if we get a transportation lute.”
Alfric’s words proved prophetic, as it wasn’t more than ten minutes later that Isra strummed one of her lutes and disappeared.
“Does she not like entad testing?” asked Mizuki.
“I think most of these just aren’t her style,” said Verity. “Though I guess I never really asked.”
“If she didn’t like it, I’d understand,” said Hannah. “Havin’ to figure out new things, bein’ in the
dark, doesn’t seem like the sort of thing she’d particularly appreciate, ay?”
“Put that way, I guess,” said Verity. “Personally, I’m a bit over the lutes, though I still haven’t seen one that I want to take into a dungeon.”
There was a small pile of lutes, three so far, whose function hadn’t been figured out. All those would go to Filera in undone days. It wasn’t entirely clear how many of them would end up as unidentified, but some would only react to certain things that weren’t handy, or have some effect that you’d never think of in a million years, and at least one would probably need some specific word to be said. Hannah didn’t say it often, but praise Qymmos for making sense of the entads.
Her fourth lute grew fingernails and hair, and possibly did some other things, but the fact that her fingernails were growing made it difficult to actually play, and already her hands were feeling the strain of strumming so much.
“Don’t you have picks we could use?” asked Hannah.
“I play fingerstyle,” said Verity, holding up a hand. “It’s like having four picks.”
“Ay, but you have spare strings, more pegs, things like that, you don’t have a pick, just for a different style?” asked Hannah.
“No,” said Verity. “I had a collection of picks back home — back in Dondrian — but I didn’t bring them with me.”
Hannah took a moment to clip her nails and left her hair long for the time being. Long hair wasn’t a particularly strong boon, but it felt like they had run across it a few times.
She seemed eager to teach, and Hannah suspected that this was because it was Isra that she’d be teaching. The two of them were friends again, or at least it seemed that way, which was good … but Hannah had been talking with both of them in a clerical capacity, and knew there were still feelings there of one kind or another. She’d talked with both of them, and they’d agreed that it was better to be apart, at least for a time, while they ‘figured things out’. The other day Verity had finally admitted that she did find it annoying that Isra had started changing herself, and Hannah, Garos help her, was marking that as real progress.
Alfric strummed a lute, and everyone said “Ya”.
“What was that?” asked Mizuki.
Alfric strummed again, and everyone said “Ya. Ya ya!”
“Odd,” said Alfric, looking at the lute.
“I think that’s enough of that,” said Hannah.
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“It’s testing,” said Alfric. “Just a bit more?”
“If you m—” Hannah began. “Ya,” she said with the others. “Ya ya ya, yayaya, ya ya!”
“If this works on monsters …” said Alfric.
“They’ll still claw you to death,” said Hannah.
“I might still have Filera look at that one,” said Alfric. “Just in case there’s a catch.”
Isra returned, carrying the travel lute. Hannah had heard her coming, because there was another sensory lute that gave exceptional hearing. It was paired with an ability to remember sounds, and to release them through the lute when it was strummed, including the words that someone had sung, and Verity had stopped what she was doing to take a look at it.
“I like this one,” said Verity, strumming it in an easy way that made Hannah unexpectedly jealous. Verity was a professional, with no small amount of skill, and she highlighted the fumbling way that the rest of them tried to get the lutes to produce music. “You could include some extremely interesting sounds with it. Breaking glass, a raindrop — there are some good possibilities here.”
“Seems somewhat bad for dungeons,” said Alfric.
“Yes, but for everyday play?” asked Verity. “It could push music in directions that music has never been pushed before.”
The pile of identified lutes slowly grew. Most of them were curiosities, worthless under normal circumstances, but which could be sold as lutes, or which would end up collecting dust in an entad shop with a minor payout for the party. Hannah could already feel herself getting fatigued by the testing, and the discordant sounds of so many people doing their testing at once.
Mizuki blinked across the room with a strum of her lute, and gave a whoop. “It’s the scoot lute, finally!” she said.
“Finally?” asked Verity.
“You know what I mean,” said Mizuki. She strummed the lute again, and blinked back the way she’d come. “I’m going outside to test it.”
Hannah took a brief break to watch. The lute seemed to move her a set amount, only about five feet, which had seemed further when she was indoors. Each strum moved her though, and when she was going as fast as she could, she would rapidly blink across the yard and off into the trees. She was trying to see how fast she could go when she slammed face-first into a tree with a yelp.
Hannah rushed out to find Mizuki crying, lute held off to one side. Her nose was bleeding profusely, and her hands were shaking.
“Can you warp?” asked Hannah.
Mizuki nodded, but it took her a few times for her fingers to do the right motions. Hannah followed after.
They went to the temple together, though Mizuki probably didn’t need an escort, and given the amount of blood, she was seen right away. Nose wounds, like scalp wounds, always bled badly, making them seem more extreme than they were.
“And what was the cause of this?” asked Lin as he looked at Mizuki. “May I touch?”
Mizuki gave a pitiful nod. “Entad testing.”
Lin reached forward and touched her nose, which made Mizuki wince. “Hannah, if you’re here, can you make sure the bone is symmetrical? No sense having a crooked nose if it can be helped.”
Hannah placed a hand on Mizuki’s cheek and willed the broken bone to move back into place, which caused a gasp of pain, and then Lin applied the healing power of Oeyr, which sped the body’s natural (“emergent”) healing process up by an incredible degree. The bone was fused back together, and the places that were bleeding sealed themselves shut. Hannah had some training in how the healing of Oeyr worked, in part because a cleric of Garos was often called upon to work with them, but it still seemed wondrous to her.
“Perhaps be a bit more circumspect in your testing,” said Lin with a nod. “I know you’ve got Filera doing some identification for you.”
“I was just trying to scoot fast,” said Mizuki. She touched her nose. “Gah that hurt.”
“We’ve more than a hundred entads,” said Hannah. “It’s too much for Filera to take on.”
“Can I use the bathroom?” asked Mizuki. “I need to get some of this blood off.” It was on her hands, across her upper lip and chin, and had dripped down onto her outfit.
Hannah was, for a moment, left with Lin.
“The dungeoneering is going well then?” he asked. “A hundred entads seems quite a few.”
“It’s going oddly,” said Hannah. “There are some particulars of our circumstances.”
There was a bit of silence as he worked himself toward a different topic. “Lemmel is talking about retirement,” said Lin. “I don’t think he’s going to ask you to come back, but you should know that Pucklechurch might be without a cleric, at least for a bit, which would mean that it would fall to you.”
“Ah,” said Hannah. “I can’t say that I would prefer that.”
“The Church will send someone, I’m sure,” said Lin.
“Lemmel should be at least a decade away from retiring, if not more,” said Hannah.
“I’m only repeating what he’s said,” shrugged Lin. “It’s not uncommon to take a reduced role when you feel you can’t keep up with the work.”
“There’s not much work to keep up with,” said Hannah. “That’s a part of the reason I didn’t take to it.”
Lin shrugged. “I think it’s the emotional weight that can come with being a cleric,” he said. “From my experience, at least so far, it’s not the labor, nor the relationship with Oeyr, it’s dealing with people day in and day out, feeling empathy for them even when that’s not my natural inclination, paying attention to their problems, wanting to help them — it’s what gives me pause, when I think of this as my lifelong vocation.”
“Are you thinkin’ of retirement?” asked Hannah, raising an eyebrow.
“No, not at all,” said Lin. “But when with a cleric of Garos, it does feel like a good time for reflection.” He smiled at her. “More seriously, I think that being aware of our internal tensions is a good thing. I acknowledge that I have them, I work them over. And I do appreciate your talking with me, one cleric to another, even though you’re out of the temple.”
“You’re mighty welcome,” said Hannah. “And if Lemmel does retire, we should have some solution for me to be able to fill in for him, at least when it comes to healin’. I’ve made my peace with the church — mostly — but I don’t want people to go without.”
“It’s much appreciated,” nodded Lin.
“I’ll talk with Lemmel in the coming days,” said Hannah. “If he’s serious, I’ll want to make sure that it’s smooth. I am a dungeoneer now though, and not long for Pucklechurch, so it would be a stopgap, nothin’ more.”
Mizuki came out from the bathroom, looking worse for the wear. Her face was a bit puffy, and she’d gotten most of the blood off, but her clothes were wet and bloody.
“I think I under-estimated how much trouble breaking my nose would be,” said Mizuki.
“Bah,” said Hannah. “You’re out ten minutes or so, and need to do some washin’.”
“I guess,” said Mizuki. She touched her nose. “And you think this is something that would heal naturally?”
“Eventually,” said Hannah.
“That it would heal ‘naturally’ is why Oeyr helps at all,” said Lin.
“Because … there are some rules?” asked Mizuki. “And together, those rules … add to healing? Somehow?”
Lin nodded.
“Welp, thanks, let’s go,” said Mizuki. It looked, for a moment, like she’d been wanting to ask more, but her desire for entad testing seemed like it had won out over curiosity. So far as Hannah knew, Lin would likely be grateful: clerics of Oeyr didn’t actually know how many of their powers worked, only that they did work. They could tell you the weak point in a structure, but not exactly what set of tensions and materials defects led to those weak points.
They said their goodbyes, and Hannah insisted on the proper prayers to Oeyr, then headed off together back to the house.
“I should have taken the scoot lute,” said Mizuki. “I’d be back in a flash.”
“So soon after breakin’ your nose?” asked Hannah.
“See, but I already broke my nose,” said Mizuki. “So I know not to do it that way, to, uh, have a solid footing or whatever.”
“So you don’t know,” laughed Hannah. “And can’t rightly say what would need to go different next time.”
“Not doing it in the woods would be a start,” said Mizuki.
“It’s a terrible lute,” said Hannah. “I can’t imagine that it doesn’t get shelved or sold.”
“It’s bound to me, unfortunately,” said Mizuki with a sheepish smile. Her face was still somewhat puffy, unequally so. “But yes, I’ll shelve it, I think it’s just barely faster than the helm. I mean, you do the math, it’s five feet every time it’s strummed, let’s say five strums a second?”
Hannah waited for a moment. “Ah,” she said. “When I heard ‘you do the math’, I hadn’t realized you actually wanted me to do the math.”
“We can get Alfric to do the math,” said Mizuki with a nod.
“Five feet per second would be three and a half miles an hour,” said Hannah. “So, let’s say, seventeen miles an hour, if you could sustain.”
“Thanks,” said Mizuki. “I guess I need to check whether five strums a second is right.”
“I’d suggest you try it with a different lute,” said Hannah. “Best not to risk another broken nose.”
“Great idea,” nodded Mizuki.
They reached the house and found that everyone was taking a bit of a break.
“You waited for us!” said Mizuki.
“Not really,” said Alfric. “Look at this one, you’ll like it.” He plucked a string, and a glass sitting on a table slowly filled up with wine.
“I love it!” said Mizuki. “Infinite wine!”
“Probably not infinite,” said Alfric. “And if it is, praise Xuphin.”
“Praise Xuphin!” said Verity, who had a glass of wine, likely from a previous experiment.
“There’s more though,” said Alfric. “Each string is a different liquid.” He pointed at them. “Wine, milk, oil, water, and blood.”
“Blood?” asked Mizuki. “I guess there are a few things I could use that for, if it’s edible.”
“All fine, at least as far as I can tell,” said Isra. She had a glass of milk and took a moment to peer at it.
“How’s the nose?” asked Alfric.
“Fine, fine,” said Mizuki. “Lin fixed it. I’m hoping that’s the only injury we get though. But I’m not going to be happy until I have a lute in my hands.”
Testing resumed. There was something a bit frustrating about it, at least to Hannah, but mostly because you didn’t know that you could figure it out just by playing around. Some of them would remain mysteries until they went to Filera, which meant that when you struggled with a lute, you had to make judgment calls about when to call it quits.
Her sixth lute gave access to extradimensional space that was even better than the first one, this one through a portal that stayed open for as long as the lute was played. This one was a small house on a floating island, or what appeared to be an island, with the portal in a place of prominence. Hannah investigated the house. It had a single bedroom, a tiny kitchen with a wood-burning stove, and a bathroom whose pipes went down into the hard rock. She wondered what happened if it got full, or if it could get full. There was, overall, much less space within what was immediately dubbed Lutopia Two, but it was better space, and if Lutopia One was great for storage, Lutopia Two was ideal for a place to hide out. Hannah wasn’t entirely in love with the ‘island’ of floating rock, mostly because of the worry of what would happen if she fell off. It had a false sun that shone overhead, and blue sky in all directions, with a handful of clouds. The rock — the island — had lichen but no plant life, though there seemed to be no reason that plants couldn’t grow. The portal itself always appeared in the same place, on a dais outside the house.
“It’s amazing,” said Mizuki.
“It’s bound to me, otherwise I’d let you have it,” said Hannah. “Though it does mean that I may move out of my room.”
“Aw, really?” asked Mizuki. “You’d just be homeless?”
“It’s an entire entad home,” said Hannah. “So long as I’ve got the lute, I can sleep in my own bed. There’s enough room for the desk — or for my own desk, since I won’t be stealin’ yours.”
“Don’t you already have a house with Marsh?” asked Alfric.
“He’s a place I stay at, ay,” said Hannah. “With the lute, I could have a little addition to the den, if it came to that.”
Isra vanished again while the conversation was ongoing.
“Wait,” said Mizuki, standing still. “There’s something there, some joke.”
“Many-Bridges Lute,” said Hannah.
“It would make for a better pun if the lute had two bridges,” said Verity.
“I thought a bridge was like … part of a piece of music?” asked Mizuki.
“It’s that too,” said Verity. “It’s the thing the strings are stretched over, but it’s also the part of the music that links two pieces of a song together, or two songs to each other.”
“No, there’s a joke there,” said Mizuki. “I can taste it.”
“I think the jokes have run their course,” said Alfric.
“Unless you find a good rib-tickler,” said Verity. A beat passed. “The body of the lute is made up of pieces of wood that are called ribs. Trust me, that’s funny.”
They took a break for lunch, which was sandwiches. Mizuki had gone all out again, as she didn’t seem to be able to help herself, and these were made with some two day old bread, which Hannah felt slightly guilty about. The sandwiches were, in Mizuki’s words, ‘sloppy’, served with enough wetness in them that Hannah had to wash her hands afterwards. They were heavy on the pickled things, including some of the things they’d put up, and with so much pork that Hannah didn’t have any need to add in an egg. When their lunch was finished, they went back to the lute testing.
It was hard for Hannah to believe that she was supposed to be responsible for identifying nearly twenty lutes. She’d been hoping to be done early but had accounted for going late, and it was taking longer than expected, particularly because of the ‘stumpers’ whose function couldn’t be divined just from fiddling around with them. She did say ‘fiddling around’ when it occurred to her, which did get a brief smile from the others, but Verity felt compelled to point out that a fiddle was ‘bowed’ and only counted as a ‘bowed lute’ if you were being very generous, in which case you would also be counting instruments like a viol. That caused Mizuki to declare a lute that made cuts through the air ‘an instrument of viol-ence’.
The stack of ‘stumpers’ slowly built up, while the others were labeled and then put to one side. Hannah felt like she was contributing more than her fair share to the pile of stumpers, and suspected that she simply didn’t have the right mindset for entad testing, which was something she’d never considered before. Mizuki seemed good at entad testing because she had all kinds of stupid ideas about what to do with a lute, some of which actually turned out to work, like the lute that could be swung like a club, or the lute that could return to your hands when thrown. Alfric was good because he was meticulous, and Verity was good because she really knew her way around a lute and could coax out any power that depended upon music rather than just noise. It was hard to tell whether or not Isra was adept at finding the functions of her lutes, given she’d had to walk back twice, but Hannah was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Hannah was a competitive person, and lute testing turned out to be no exception. It was a somewhat negative aspect of her personality though, so she worked to curb it, to not care that Alfric was stacking up more lutes. Having fun, for a cleric, was often a matter of shutting down years of training the mind, both in terms of the ordered relationships of the world and the more chaotic relationships between people.
“Ha!” said Hannah when she had discovered the power of her tenth lute. “A good one, for a change.” The lute had clad her in armor, and it seemed as though it was changing depending on what she ‘played’. It would have been better in Verity’s hands, she was sure, but this was among the lutes that was bound to Hannah.
“I have a feeling when we’re done there’s going to be an absolute racket before every dungeon,” said Mizuki. “And I’m here for it.”
“Remains to be seen whether this can make good armor,” said Hannah. “I might have to have a workin’ knowledge of how to play a specific song.” She strummed the lute, putting her fingers in a different position on the neck of it, and the armor shifted from scales to bands. She really had no idea what she was doing, other than that fingers in different positions produced different … notes? She felt relatively certain that it wasn’t notes, that it was more about chords, but she didn’t have enough working knowledge of music to say for certain.
In the end, she had to peel the armor off, since she couldn’t figure out the right way to play the lute in order to dismiss it — if that was even an option. The pieces of metal turned to white mist as she pulled them away.
Alfric got a lute that could change its shape, becoming large enough to climb in or small enough to fit in a thimble. Verity got a lute that could make plants grow, though apparently not that often because it stopped working almost as soon as it started. Isra got a lute that made people burst into applause when she was finished, which she found hilarious. Mizuki got a lute that whispered instructions on how to play it more effectively, which she thought was both helpful and a bit creepy, in part because of the soft voice in her ear. Hannah had a lute that summoned a local farmer, who was bewildered to be standing in their living room with a hundred lutes around him, and they set that lute aside after he was sent on his way, not wanting to inconvenience more people.
They had fun with it, though there was some general agreement that a hundred lutes was too many, and that entad testing was best in small batches where they could reasonably take turns.
The jokes went from funny to not that funny to being funny again, mostly because of how much of a stretch they were.
Alfric got a talking lute that made observations of the features of the room, and seemed to be wrong roughly three-quarters of the time. Hannah was quickest on that one: she declared that it was actually a lyre.
Many of Verity’s ‘jokes’ needed explanations, but that was because she knew far, far more about lutes than any of them did. A lute that leaked black pitch from its body was a ‘setar’, apparently some variety of lute from deep in Tarbin. One lute conjured a small blue ball that could be remotely controlled, and Verity had said that the instrument was actually a ‘theorbo’, which again was some cousin to a ‘proper’ lute that no one had ever heard of. A lute that twisted spare fabric into a hat was a ‘torban’, which was apparently the real name of a lute from Central Inter, which could be read as a play on ‘turban’, a hat that Hannah had never heard of from Tarbin.
The funny part of this was always Verity trying to explain the jokes, which she did with increasing desperation. Her suggestion that they all take a break for a lesson on the history of the lute and its many varieties was only half-serious, and met with laughter.
It was sixth bell by the time they reached the end of the lutes.
“Alright,” said Alfric. “We’ve got a pile of eleven stumpers, which is more than we should have. We can either crack through them, or we can hold off.”
“I’m going to be honest,” said Verity. “If I have to see or hear another lute, I’m going to cry.”
“Did you at least get a good one for regular play?” asked Alfric.
“I’ll look through them,” said Verity. “There was one Isra uncovered that looked like it could be played without hands, which definitely appeals to me, since I’d be able to have a bow or some other weapon.”
“Or two lutes!” said Mizuki.
Verity glared at her.
“We’ve got three extradimensional lutes, counting Lutopia One and Lutopia Two,” said Alfric. “We’ve got at least two or three that we can use before combat. We have eight for travel, and two that might actually be good, shortening trip times and letting us get to further dungeons. I think overall, that’s a pretty good haul. We have another eleven to uncover, and some limits that Filera can find for us on the best of the best.”
“Are we doing more dungeons?” asked Verity. “We haven’t had the post mortem yet.”
“I’m still getting my thoughts in order,” said Alfric. “The dungeon report is complicated, and I’d like to get that off before we talk about how the dungeon went and our next steps.”
“Next steps meaning more dungeons though, right?” asked Mizuki.
Alfric hesitated. “I was thinking that it might make sense to try a dungeon without Verity,” said Alfric. He looked at her. “We can do it in an undone day, if that’s preferred, but I want to see whether the, ah, difficulty and overall weirdness of these past dungeons is actually because of you.”
“I see,” said Verity. Her lips were thin.
“Once we know for certain, we can talk about what comes next.”
“Meaning that you’re considering what this party would look like without me?” asked Verity.
“Frankly, yes,” said Alfric.
Hannah suppressed a groan. This was not a time to be frank. “The failures have taken a toll on Alfric,” said Hannah. “I think it’s important we all acknowledge that, as much as the Overguard Maneuver and overall heroics of the last dungeon were a victory for us as a party. If it’s to be three or four failed dungeons for every one we manage to get through, that’s a strain on him that very few people are equipped for, even trained chrononauts, even trained dungeoneers.”
“No, I understand,” said Verity. “I was just … I had fun, today, in spite of the sheer volume of lutes.”
“Heh,” said Mizuki.
“I want to try to get this under control,” said Verity. “Can we do that, before you abandon me?”
“No one’s talking about abandonin’ you,” said Hannah, which wasn’t strictly true. “The first step, if we want to figure it out, is as Alfric says, makin’ sure that it is you and not somethin’ else.”
Verity was tight-lipped. She said nothing, which was a bad sign.
“You can obviously still live here either way,” said Mizuki.
This, again, was not what Hannah would have elected for Mizuki to say. They’d had a pleasant day, they’d gotten a few good prizes from their dungeon, and what should have happened was that they save all this until later, ideally with Hannah having been brought into the loop. She’d known that Alfric was none too happy with the overly hard dungeons and had been gutted by the failed dungeons, but it was the first she was hearing that he was actually considering what their party might look like without Verity. It was all the wrong way for it to come out, in Hannah’s opinion.
“We’ll hold off on any of that,” said Hannah. She looked at Alfric. “We’ll talk to some people, get opinions on the most recent dungeon, talk to that researcher you spoke of, and maybe test what a dungeon looks like without a Chosen of Xuphin, but we’ll do nothin’ rash.” She turned to Verity. “We love you, you understand?”
“I do,” said Verity. She took in a breath, then looked at Mizuki. “Dinner?”
“Urgh, dinner,” said Mizuki. “I’ll get started on it, Isra, can you help?”
“Of course,” said Isra. She’d stayed silent while the group talked about Verity. Hannah thought that was a bad sign too.
Mizuki and Isra left for the kitchen, and Verity left for the garden. There was a spate of silence.
“Sorry,” said Alfric. “I’m just trying to consider options.”
“That’s something we do as a team,” said Hannah.
“Right,” said Alfric. “I know. It’s just …”
“Just what, ay?” asked Hannah.
“I do most of the work for the team,” said Alfric. “Planning, equipment, prep, that kind of thing. I do the training, the post mortems, the dungeon reports. And I’m the one who has to experience it when we die.”
“I can help with all but that last one,” said Hannah. “I’ve offered, on occasion.”
“I know,” said Alfric. He sighed. “I know.”
“Well, ay,” said Hannah. “I know you know. And I don’t think your ideas are bad, it’s just their delivery. You can talk to me about what you feel, and better that you do it before it gets aired in front of the group at the wrong moment.” She looked out the doors into the backyard, where Verity was examining the plants.
“Do I need to talk to her?” asked Alfric.
“Eventually,” said Hannah. “Right now, no. We’ll have dinner, you keep this on a simmer, we can talk about everythin’ during the proper time and place for it. At most, let her know she’s loved, that’s what she needs to hear, that it’s more than just dungeons, she’s a friend.”
“Alright,” said Alfric. He was looking at Verity too.
Dinner went well, and talk didn’t return to the dungeons, just to the lutes, and their plans for selling them in such a way that they could get the most. Mizuki talked about becoming a wizard, which was coming up, and Isra talked about the schoolchildren, whom she seemed to adore. Verity and Alfric were both a bit quiet, but not so much that their silence called attention to itself. When dinner was over, Verity left for the cabin, taking two of the lutes bound to her.
The next morning, Alfric woke them early, saying there had been two disappearances he’d been notified of on an undone day, and for a moment, Hannah had just assumed that it would be Verity. Instead, it was Kell and Lin.