“What I had been going for was something like Pinion had told me about where he’s from,” said Verity. “Tall mountains, wide lakes, lots of fir trees, stony beaches … and at the start, it seemed like it was good, but then it was more of a sea than lakes, individual islands rather than a mountain range, and the trees were wrong.”
Hannah was off with Marsh, or possibly working on her sermon for tomorrow, while Isra was still off hunting, or possibly just taking some time to herself. It was the four of them, in the living room, Alfric, Mizuki, Verity, and Pinion. Pinion’s ‘interviews’ had been mostly concluded.
“So it wasn’t actually that close?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, overall?”
“The ship was what I had wanted,” said Verity. “But I hadn’t known what it would actually do.”
“You didn’t have a plan for it?” asked Alfric. “A blueprint for what the entad would be?”
“Oh, I had lots of plans,” said Verity. “I wanted the ship to fly, so we could tie it to the house and drift along behind it. It was meant to be a second home for me, something like Hannah’s space, a place in the air. So that didn’t work out, obviously, it’s just hands.”
“Lady hands,” said Mizuki.
“Er, yes,” said Verity. “Lady hands. Do you think that’s relevant?”
“No,” said Mizuki. She folded her arms across her chest. “Or … maybe?”
“We can talk about the statues,” said Verity. It would be easier, with Isra gone, though that conversation would have to happen eventually.
“Do we need to talk about the statues?” asked Mizuki.
“I’m just saying that we can,” said Verity.
“I find them interesting,” said Pinion. “But they’re much, much less interesting than the fact that you conclusively did it. You have, for the first time in human history, altered the makeup of the dungeon, and you’ve done it through mental effort alone. That’s enough to get a whole team of researchers out here, and the funding for a long study.”
“There have been successful attempts at altering dungeon makeup,” said Alfric. “This isn’t the first. It’s just the first where pre-specification worked absent physical alteration.”
“I’m not sure how I’m going to phrase it, but yes,” said Pinion. “We don’t actually know whether it’s physical or mental or spiritual or aetheric yet.” He bit his lip. “In theory, this is the first direct glimpse we’ve ever had into how dungeons work.”
“This is what I was trying to communicate by letter,” said Alfric.
“It’s stunning,” Pinion nodded. “When is the next one?”
The party took it in turns to look around the table. In Verity’s opinion, the next dungeon couldn’t come soon enough, and if someone voiced their opinion that they should find a new dungeon and do it today, she probably would have agreed. Still, they had been put in danger thanks to her, and if they had stuck around, who knew what else they might have found? They were luckily faster than the statues, but if there were other booby traps, it couldn’t be guaranteed that they wouldn’t smack straight into something awful. In part, the decision to leave had been forced by the ship, but knowing that there was danger, it was still a good time to get going. The shifting dungeon and the poisonous dungeon had proven that these bespoke dungeons she was accidentally creating could get incredibly dangerous in a hurry.
“I have school,” said Mizuki, frowning a bit. “But I can take a day off, or we could do it tomorrow if that’s not too soon, or … after I get back some day?”
“We want to spend more time, not less,” said Alfric, frowning. “I think it was good to get out while we did, good that we didn’t actually suffer, and we got two good entads. Next dungeon, assuming that it’s not dangerous from the start, I’d like to fully map. It’ll be better information for Verity, not to mention Pinion.”
“That dungeon was huge though,” said Mizuki. “And we stole all the mana it had stored up. From what you’ve said before, it was like … like a dungeon created for a party of one hundredth elevation?”
“Not quite,” said Pinion. “The ‘percent per party elevation’ rule starts to break down at higher elevations, and it’s difficult to translate mana consumed into dungeon size. It’s one of those things that isn’t at all clear. And then there are the infinidungeons, which exist at the upper end of mana capture.” He shook his head.
“So Verity might be capable of making an infinidungeon?” asked Mizuki.
“Probably,” said Alfric. “Any one of the Dondrian hexes has so much captured mana that what gets generated is impossible to complete by any one team — impossible to fully map, even with very good mapping.” He glanced at Pinion. “That might be down to the specifics of the curves involved.”
“Curves?” asked Mizuki.
“Mathematical curves,” said Pinion. She was giving him a blank look. “Um, if you plot the numbers on a graph, most of the rules of thumb break down because they’re linear in some way — a line.”
“Imma stop you right there,” said Mizuki. “Math is not a good subject for me. Talking about curves and lines and plotting things on graphs isn’t going to work. I’ll just take your word that big dungeons in saturated hexes are different.”
“The point is that they’re not different,” said Pinion. “Or, not thought to be different. The differences are accounted for by basic rules, and those basic rules hold for all dungeons, at least in theory. That might not actually be true though, and dungeons in general are so variable that if there were exceptions, they would be difficult to spot.”
“This is making my head hurt,” said Mizuki. “I’m going to just trust all of you to figure it out and let me know where to point my fireballs.”
Pinion laughed. “Alright, well right now there’s very little we can figure out. I was going to start with some analysis of the components of Verity’s aims, give them some grading in terms of how successful she was in reaching those aims, and then move on from there.”
“I’m out,” said Mizuki, placing her hands flat on the table. “Hopefully Isra comes back soon and I can do some cooking, which I actually know how to do. I’ll be upstairs until then.” She slipped out of the living room seeming unconcerned with leaving them behind. She was normally a cheery person, but there wasn’t a trace of a smile on her face.
“Was it something I said?” asked Pinion.
“Nah,” said Alfric. “She’s just not having fun, and honestly, doesn’t really need to be here for a technical discussion. She’s smarter than she gives herself credit for, but especially when you start breaking out math, she gets overwhelmed and then gives up. She’ll be right as rain once she’s doing something in one of her domains of expertise.”
“Good,” said Pinion, who seemed to take that as fact.
Verity wasn’t so sure, and decided that she’d pay Mizuki a visit, or possibly offer some help with cooking, at least once they were done.
“Now then,” said Pinion, who had a notebook out. “We can dissect aims and then outcomes. One of the most clearly successful aims was to not have any creatures or people in the dungeon, which was accomplished flawlessly, at least insofar as we can tell. For everything else, we need to break down categories, and figure out some kind of rubric.”
“I … don’t really think that it’s like that,” said Verity. “It’s like a song, a song that’s sung in an instant. It’s not an imposition of will, it’s a duet, I guess, an understanding of the dungeon and what it can produce, and a prodding that gets it to make something that we agree on.” She frowned. She didn’t fully understand it, and would have been able to better avoid the pitfalls if she had, but there was something about the way Pinion was attempting to understand it that felt like the wrong approach. “I think, when we do this again, we’ll get different results, and I think it will be because it’s a different dungeon, almost by necessity.”
“Hmm,” said Pinion. “You think that next time you might have trouble excluding creatures?”
“I don’t know,” said Verity. “When I was on the precipice, I was trying to construct, in my head, a kind of time and place that might spring from the world around me, from the hex. We went in through a tunnel, so it seems natural that we went out through a tunnel, I suppose. I didn’t plan that, but it went through my head, the shape of it. Does that make sense?”
“Not particularly,” said Pinion. “We’ll attempt to unwrap it though, with time. I think for now, I’ll go work on my own way of seeing things, and then I can talk with you about the ways in which I’m wrong — which will be borne out by a second dungeon. I might have some thoughts for next time, things that I would like you to try in order for us to get some better understanding of what you’re doing, what you can do, and what we might try after that.”
“Alright,” said Verity. It felt good to have a plan in place, even if she still thought that Pinion didn’t have the right angle on it. To Verity, it had felt like a song, and while she knew that you could do the Qymmos thing on songs, she didn’t feel like it was often that helpful.
“Before we go our separate ways,” said Alfric. “I want to apologize. You said that you had a handle on it, and it turns out that you did. I should have been more supportive.”
Verity laughed. “To be honest, the idea that no one had any faith in me might have helped to spur me on. It’s possible that I got a good result purely out of spite.”
“Low level spite, right?” asked Alfric.
Verity grinned. “Yes, of course. I know you care, that you mean well, no apology necessary.”
Statues aside, it did feel good to have a success, and Verity was, overall, quite pleased with herself. The concert had gone well, the dungeon had gone well, and if she wasn’t as completely fine with Isra going off to be intimate with someone, that was relatively small potatoes.
Relatively.
Verity went upstairs, to where Mizuki was laying facedown on her bed. The door had been open, so Verity stepped in and shut it behind her.
“Hey,” said Mizuki without moving. “Isra back yet?”
“The dungeon wasn’t what you wanted,” said Verity. “And the post-dungeon wasn’t either.”
“I’d been looking forward to it,” said Mizuki. “And I didn’t even get to throw one fireball.”
“You did,” said Verity. She sat down on the bed, next to Mizuki. “It just splashed harmlessly against the statue.”
“Yeah, and it was awesome,” said Mizuki. “The only thing that would have made it more awesome would have been if it had worked. And did you see that thing where I snatched the sword back? Just flew in with hands reaching up for me?” She was still face down. “Badass.”
“Anything I can do?” asked Verity.
“Oh, I don’t know, I just don’t like feeling like I’m out of my depth,” said Mizuki. “Pinion … he’s fine, but he’s going on about all this stuff that Alfric is nodding along to, and I just feel like, ‘is this what dungeons are going to be now?’ Because I was kind of good at dungeons, I think, the old dungeons, and now I’m worried that they’re all going to be like that, and you’ll get the statue thing licked, pun not intended, and where does that leave me?”
Verity patted Mizuki on the back.
“Yes, more of that,” said Mizuki.
Verity continued to pat Mizuki on the back, then gradually moved to scratching her back instead.
“You’re doing well at Rayedhcraft?” asked Verity.
“Yup,” said Mizuki. “Just super.”
“Any progress with the magical rocks?” asked Verity.
“They’re called mana stones,” said Mizuki.
“I’m not sure I’ve ever once heard you call them that,” said Verity. She scratched a little harder, and Mizuki made a noise. “You’re fitting in though?”
“Hey, why don’t we do this more often?” asked Mizuki. “I like back scratches.”
“You’ve got the most going on,” said Verity. “Maybe even too much going on, since you insist on cooking so much.”
“Do you think that Alfric would scratch my back like this?” asked Mizuki.
“Absolutely,” said Verity. She pulled her hand back. “Do you want horrible dungeons with horrible monsters?”
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“Kind of,” said Mizuki. “I mean, you remember those bats that dived down from the ceiling at us? The ones that I dodged like I was the wind? That was such a rush.”
“It seems like a bad way to get your kicks,” said Verity. “A dangerous way to get your kicks. You’ve been like that for as long as I’ve known you though, blowing up things, going absurdly high into the air and then plummeting to the ground, which I don’t understand at all. Do you need more kicks in your life?”
“Maybe,” said Mizuki. There was a long pause. Mizuki still hadn’t risen from the bed. “Being a wizard is kind of boring, at least at the start.”
“You knew that, right?” asked Verity. “I mean, everyone said.”
“Yeah, I knew, it’s just,” Mizuki took a breath. “It’s booooring.”
Verity smiled. “Even more than practicing an instrument, I’m told.”
“I’m not going to quit, I just want to get to the good part,” said Mizuki. “The best part of being a sorc, at least for me, is seeing these things hanging in the air, bits of magic, not always different but different often enough, and you think to yourself ‘welp, I guess this is what I’m working with’.”
“Which is usually some form of fireball,” said Verity.
“Oh there’s like a dozen ways of making fireballs,” said Mizuki. “And sometimes they’re not proper fireballs, they’re something else that only looks like a fireball. It’s like cooking, in a way, there are lots of things you’d call a stew, or a sandwich, even if they’ve got totally different ingredients. It’s the thing that I like. And everything that I know about wizardry is that it’s like that, but you get to pick your own ingredients. One of the friend groups I have at wizarding school has these constant conversations about loadouts, reconfiguration, all that kind of thing, and even within wizardry, there’s some improvisation.”
“You have multiple friend groups there?” asked Verity.
“Sure,” said Mizuki. “The newbies, who I do the rock petting and stuff with, the researchers, who I met through sorc stuff, and then some older students who I met at a house party. None of them are close friends, but I don’t have classes all the time, and I need to be with someone.”
“Do you?” asked Verity.
“Finally,” said Mizuki, sitting up. She looked at Verity. “Don’t tell her I said ‘finally’, tell her I said something more complimentary. And … thanks for stopping by.”
“No problem,” said Verity. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“More back scratches,” said Mizuki. She beamed. “But later. Right now I need to find out what kind of meat I’m going to be cooking.”
Verity sat for a moment after Mizuki left, then went to her room for another bout of practice.
Maybe it was the talk about the dreary reality of grinding through practice, but Verity picked Beruchald to work on, one of the pieces she’d played at the large Dondrian concert series. She was out of practice with it, which happened frighteningly fast, but she picked it back up easily enough, and knew that the flaws wouldn’t be noticeable to the common audience. There was something that thrilled her about the idea of playing it at a run-down tavern in the middle of nowhere, but it was thrilling perhaps because of the reality that no one really had the training or education to understand it or its cultural importance. Verity didn’t particularly like Beruchald either, it just tickled her to imagine that music in such a different context.
When Isra came into the room, she was in only a towel, having come straight from the shower. Verity continued on as though this wasn’t incredibly distracting — but it was less distracting than it had been when they were dating each other, or before they were dating each other.
“It wasn’t a clean kill,” Isra explained. “Too much blood, too much dirt.”
Verity nodded, but brought the song to its natural conclusion before responding. By that time, Isra was half-dressed. Verity had been keeping her eyes at the middle distance, pretending that she couldn’t see anything of the dressing process. It didn’t ignite the same fire in her as before though, which was good but perhaps a little sad. Isra was doing nothing to entice though, and the actual process of dressing was not, by itself appealing except for the brief nudity involved.
“I’d like to talk, if you don’t mind,” said Verity.
Isra had just finished slipping into a dress that left her arms bare, and she sat on the bed on the other side of the room. “Alright.”
“It’s really not a big deal. The statues, they were … just things going on in my head that ideally you wouldn’t have to know about,” said Verity. “Not jealousy, or envy, or … maybe those things a little bit, unavoidable thoughts, the kind of thing that you’d have to have complete control of your own mind not to feel …” She pursed her lips. “We’re going to do more dungeons, and they’ll probably betray things that I would rather keep to myself, and I just don’t want it to be an issue.”
“I thought I would enjoy it more,” said Isra. “Hooking up.”
Verity shifted. “Oh?”
“I don’t know,” said Isra. “In the moment, it felt electric, but with you there was more … emotion. Connection. It’s hard to describe.”
“I’m unfortunately not in a position to give advice,” said Verity. She felt bad for Isra, and had no way of knowing how to make it better. “You now officially have more experience with women than I do.”
“Mmm,” said Isra. “I think maybe I just … won’t do that again.”
“Was she … she treated you well?” asked Verity, frowning slightly.
“Yes,” said Isra. “It wasn’t her, it was me. You know, I had liked flirting? I would flirt a lot when I went out for scouting. But I was out today, in a different village, and this cute boy walked up to me with that sort of swagger they do sometimes, and it felt … I don’t know. Different? I kept imagining what it would be like to be with him, and to just get up and leave the next day, as though it hadn’t happened.”
“Er,” said Verity. “And so you didn’t flirt?”
“I don’t really know,” said Isra. “There are different ways of flirting. I think I was flirting, just not that happy about it.”
“I think it might be better to talk to Hannah about this,” said Verity. “I want to help, if you’re feeling bad feelings, or if you’re confused, but … I’m not sure that I get it. It’s hard to put myself in your shoes, I guess. Sorry.”
“I understand that,” said Isra. “It would be hard to put myself in my own shoes. I just thought it would be different.” She didn’t seem sad, really, just a bit lost and confused. “I don’t know why it should be that way.”
Verity shrugged. “Who knows? There have been times I’ve wondered where my thoughts and emotions come from, and I never had all that good of an answer. Sometimes I dread practice, I would rather do anything else, and then five minutes in it’s perfectly fine. I know that it will be fine, but I still feel the dread, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. And for the small concert, I didn’t feel that dread, and I didn’t know why I shouldn’t be feeling the same. A performance is a performance whether it’s for fifty people or five thousand.”
“But it’s not,” said Isra. “It should be one thing, but it’s the other.” She pursed her lips.
“Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” said Verity. It felt perfunctory, because of course there was nothing that she could do, not when the problem was in Isra’s own head.
“I will,” said Isra with a sigh. “Why is life so difficult to figure out?”
“I wish I knew,” said Verity.
After another half hour of practice, Verity made her way downstairs, where the house was starting to smell good. Isra had bagged a deer and then also gathered entirely too much in the way of vegetables. The tubers she’d found were something called ‘slug yams’, which were slimy and gray until their skins were removed. Once that business was done, they were mostly just bog-standard yams, and Verity was assured that the taste would be just the same, maybe a tiny bit sweeter and more nutty. All the work was done by the time Verity came back down, though Mizuki had saved a single slug yam to show off, which was doing nothing to whet anyone’s appetite.
“So,” said Hannah, who’d emerged from her private room. “Everyone is comin’ to the sermon tomorrow? It’s been some time since I’ve done a proper one, and this’ll be before townsfolk, no one that I properly know save the other cleric.”
“Of course we’ll come,” said Mizuki, who’d just sat down on the couch. The venison roast and the yams needed time, but only time, so that meant a break from the cooking. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“Maybe you get enough of me at home,” said Hannah. “I can’t imagine I’ll say much that I haven’t said before.”
“Can we get a sneak peek?” asked Verity.
“And ruin it?” asked Hannah.
“I give sneak peeks all the time, does that ruin it?” asked Verity.
“Ruin, no,” said Hannah. “But I imagine it’s easier to hold your interest if you haven’t heard the whole rant beforehand, and the last thing I need is my friends lookin’ bored in the audience.”
“It might help to run through it,” said Verity.
“Nah,” said Hannah. “Marsh has heard it half a dozen times already, and I want to save my voice. But so long as you’re all comin’, that’s what I wanted to know.”
“And Vertex is eating with us today?” asked Verity.
“They’d better be,” said Mizuki. “The oven is basically full of food, if I’m not feeding a dozen people we’re going to be eating leftovers for the rest of our lives.”
“They’re doing okay?” asked Verity.
“Okay?” asked Alfric. “How do you mean?”
“With the new girl,” said Verity. “I don’t know, I haven’t spoken with them much, even though we’re ostensibly traveling together. I didn’t really talk to them much when Kell was in their party either.”
“Grig is holdin’ it together,” said Hannah. “And Marsh, of course, can do no wrong.”
“I talked with the new girl at our party,” said Mizuki. “She seemed nice, a bit shy maybe. I think she’s in it more for the dungeons than for anything else. And Vertex aren’t really … I mean, they’re not so much friends as they are people who spend most of their time together.”
“I think they’re friends,” said Alfric. “It’s just the way they are around each other is different. That’s all. I was noticing it last night.”
“Well, I’m glad we’re not them, that’s all,” said Mizuki.
“There’s probably a better way to phrase that,” said Verity.
“Story of my life,” said Mizuki. “I need to go check on the roast, and the dining room needs to be reconfigured for twelve.” She popped up from the couch.
“I’ll get on that,” said Alfric. Hannah went to go join him, and Isra went to go with Mizuki, either to check on the roast or to help get the sides ready.
“Can we talk for a bit?” Pinion asked Verity. He’d been jotting things down in his notebook while Tabbins sat in his lap, seeming not to pay any mind to the conversation that was going on around him.
“Certainly,” said Verity. She’d intended to just sit there, her practice for the day done.
“I was wondering how much you know about ship’s rigging,” he said.
“Er, nothing at all,” said Verity. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been on a sailing ship, though I have been on one without sails.”
“Well, I went to go look at the boat, and talked to Alfric, and it seems as though it’s functional,” said Pinion. “It got me to thinking, essentially focused on the question of how dungeons produce such things, and how the dungeon you helped nudge in one specific direction ended up being a product not just of you, but of things that you don’t know.”
“Ah,” said Verity. “Well, there were plenty of things that I know nothing about. I’ve done loom work, but I don’t think I could produce a design for a loom, let alone actually create one. There were aspects of the dungeon that the others pointed out that made me think ‘oh, I’d have never come up with that’.”
“Yet there was consistency, wasn’t there?” asked Pinion. “It’s one thing that’s notably lacking in dungeons. Everything was consistent, aside from the lack of people, and the lack of people accounts for some of the other lack of consistency, like the ship at a dock on an island with no one on it.”
“The statues?” asked Verity.
“Religious in nature, perhaps, a place of worship,” Pinion replied. “That is to say, it wasn’t random in the way that a monster made of necks sitting in a bathroom is random.”
“And … why would they have statues of those specific women?” asked Verity. “Why women? Why moving statues that wanted to kill us?”
“That, I don’t know,” said Pinion. “The theory that I’m going with is that ‘your’ dungeons are capable of exhibiting extraordinary coherence, perhaps even complete coherence, though it’s alternately possible that you’re providing a seed from which everything else is springing, and that coherency is only an illusion that comes from that.”
“Meaning?” asked Verity.
“Well, meaning that … let’s say that you provide keywords, ‘mountain’, ‘island’, or something like that,” said Pinion. “Let’s say, in fact, that there are dozens of these keywords, or key concepts, or something like that. If you create two separate things from that same cluster of concepts, they might look congruent with each other, linked or consistent, even though they’re only linked by their wellspring.”
“I’m still not sure I understand,” said Verity.
“Two songs, written with the same constraints,” said Pinion. “They might look like they were written by the same composer, or for the same purpose, but if they’re only following a pattern that’s been set, that might easily be a lie, and we might tease apart that lie, finding those places where it’s clear that they share only an origin, nothing more.”
“Hmm,” said Verity. “It would be easier with books. Two books, from different sections of the dungeon, which disagree on basic areas of history?”
“That would disprove some level of coherency, yes,” said Pinion. “Though we’d need to be very careful, because in the real world, books can and do disagree with each other.”
“I … suppose,” said Verity.
“The fundamental composition of a dungeon is a ‘room’,” said Pinion, who seemed quite excited. He was overall, a somewhat excitable man, which Verity thought was one of his better qualities. “So in the future, we can attempt to tease apart where or whether there still exist ‘room’ boundaries or whether that paradigm has been put to the wayside. But to do that, we need to not only map out the dungeon, but map out the henlings that have been pulled from the dungeon, and catalog the creatures and traps and what have you as well.”
“Alfric is going to love that,” said Verity. She gave Pinion a smile. “And I’ll do what I can. I think, from doing it the first time, it’ll be hard to create the separate pieces, to make a dungeon that’s not all of a single theme, that has sections, but … I suppose I don’t know.”
“We’re right at the beginning of this,” said Pinion, nodding. “I do want to see whether I can secure better equipment, entads that can give us feedback, or possibly see one of your dungeons on my own, if you could keep me safe.”
“Now that we might be able to arrange,” said Verity. She looked toward the other rooms, where the rest of the party was busy. “You know, I appreciate you being here.”
“Do you?” asked Pinion.
“It’s a good change of pace,” said Verity. “I think I resented your presence, before you actually came.”
“Ah?” asked Pinion.
“And it was a pleasant surprise, that’s all I’m saying,” said Verity. “Sorry if that was too much, I just … I think that it could have been bad. Thought that it could have been.”
“Well,” said Pinion. “Hopefully I can bear out as a useful resource while I’m here, before I make the journey back.”
The thought of him leaving hit Verity somehow, in an unpleasant way. He wasn’t a permanent addition, she knew that, but his small, bookish nature appealed to her. And he would be gone, relatively soon, moving back to his school, never to see them again. It made her preemptively sad, she realized. There was something about the idea of moving on that she didn’t like, whether it was herself or others. She’d left Dondrian, of course, but that had been a bad situation, and leaving a good situation, somewhere that suited you, felt wrong.
“I’m going to go see whether I can help with dinner, which I almost certainly can’t,” said Verity.
“Sounds good,” Pinion smiled. “I’ll be working on this, trying to find the best rubric for you to smash.”
She left, wondering why it felt so uncomfortable, but soon there was work for her to do, even if it was mostly just setting the table and making sure they were ready for guests.