It had been a bad dungeon. There was a term for a truly awful dungeon, one with horrible monsters and no loot, a selden dungeon, often with that word, selden, spoken like a curse. This wasn’t that bad, since they had the bows, the mallet, and maybe a few other things of worth, but it was bad, the worst they’d experienced so far. The fights had been too difficult, the tunnels too narrow, and the terrain unwieldy.
There was a good argument for resetting the day and doing it all over again, and it was the first real test of bad luck as a party. If he did reset, it would be a real test of their ability to handle that as a party. Lola’s reports of her own team had him a bit on edge, and he did wonder how his party would react to being told that the dungeon was a bust, or to knowing that they had an entire day with him that he now remembered and they did not.
Lola was on his mind much more than she should have been. A dungeon required focus and consideration. It wasn’t a time for idle thoughts about an ex. He’d had a dream about her the night before, one where they were kissing, and it had been pleasant until he’d woken up and a gross feeling had washed over him, lingering there.
Alfric stopped mid-stride, allowing his forward foot to hover in the air.
Alfric looked down, and could see nothing. He slowly moved his foot backward along the path it had already taken, then crouched down. He could only just barely see what she was talking about in the light of his lantern, and only from a certain angle.
She leaned down and cut through the tripwire with a knife, and a tiny section of the wall opened up almost immediately, revealing a small mechanism that fired an arrow directly into the opposing wall. It clattered to the ground, and she picked it up to look at it. The head was diamond-shaped and covered with a sticky-black oil.
He moved down the corridor with more caution, with Isra close behind him, trying to maintain as much focus on the dungeon itself as he could. Thinking about other things while in a dungeon was a good way to get killed — or at least to end up vomiting for six hours.
The corridor ended in another room, but before they could even enter it, a huge humanoid with missing teeth and a split nose launched itself at them. It was too large for the corridor though, and its shoulders couldn’t clear the doorframe, which left it frantically grasping at them and trying to wedge itself closer. The hand was almost as large as Alfric was, and if it could have grabbed him in its three-fingered grip, it likely would have been able to crush him. The giant was dungeon mad and constrained though, its head just barely through the door and arm fully extended, with Alfric beyond its reach.
Sometimes, you got lucky. It took some time to do safely, and Alfric was a little bit worried that the tunnel would collapse, but he very calmly pulled out his sword and began hacking away. He didn’t have enough power to slice through the fingers, but he cut them up enough that the creature was slamming its bloody fingers back and forth, articulation lost. It was still trying to squeeze itself further down the tunnel, or to grab Alfric.
Once time had slowed, as it did during the nightmarish rain of bats, Alfric waited until the hand had flopped to one side, then dashed forward with his sword. He arrived at the wrist just as the hand smashed into the wall. The cut needed to be deep, slitting the arteries open, and he did as well as he could before dashing back to safety, nearly getting clipped by a bloody finger.
From there, it was just a matter of waiting. Blood was spilling down onto the floor by the cupful, and the monster was slowing down, the slapping of its hand getting slower and more wild. Eventually, it slumped to the floor. There were a few exceptions, but dungeon madness didn’t typically allow for much in the way of cunning or stealth, so when the monster was still, Alfric moved forward and put his hand to its mouth to confirm that it had stopped breathing. The head and body blocked much of the doorway, but there was enough room to squeeze through.
Alfric paused then climbed back down the hair.
Alfric looked down. The cut up fingers had sprayed blood all over him, and where the wrist had bled, the blood was nearly an inch deep and spreading into the cracks. said Alfric.
Some time later, Alfric had them pop out of the stone, well-clear of the corpse. The room the humanoid had been in was hewn stone, large and imposing, with two doors off to either side, both of them thick wooden ones. That was a bit of a disappointment, that there was more to this dungeon: Alfric wanted to clean up, collect their meager winnings, and go.
From the other side, the monster could be seen in full. It had four small, stunted legs and spurs of bone sticking out from it at odd angles which had cut into the floor of the room. The creature was naked, and despite the generally human design, had nothing that suggested a life lived in the room, or an existence prior to being spawned by the dungeon. There was also nothing of note in the room itself, only refuse, largely in the form of rotting vegetables, which did little to help mask the smell of death and defecation.
Alfric had bought masks with herb pouches in Dondrian, but not brought them with, mostly because of space limitations, but also partly because they didn’t have the entad support to bring along absolutely everything that they might possibly want to have with them, and largely didn’t plan on lugging the book or stone around. Still, he cursed his lack of foresight.
He trudged on once it was clear there was nothing in the room worth taking. This dungeon had quite a few long tunnels connecting the rooms, which was good, as it helped to prevent an encounter with multiple monsters all piling into the same room. Alfric followed the left door first, being cautious in the corridor to check for traps, though that ended up being a waste of time. The corridor ended in a small room, little more than a closet, which had clothes that no human could wear without serious alterations. The fabric would be taken, since that was sensible, but they’d be lucky to get a handful of rings from it, and would be better off donating it to a quilting club or something similar.
Backtracking to the room where the giant still lay dead in the doorway, they then took the right path, and there, finally, they hit paydirt. It was a dining room, one with a large table and a number of chairs, and before each of those was a table setting. All of it looked normal enough, and a full set of dinnerware, along with all the silverware, would be worth hundreds, maybe more. The chairs could be sold too, especially as a set, and they were handsome pieces, beautifully carved and well-varnished.
Alfric readied his bident, grimacing. He was praying that the fight would be short, and that they could end this dungeon on a high note before extracting as much of the valuables as possible, the better to improve the chances of doing a second dungeon in the very near future. He’d needed this dungeon to be smooth and easy with good rewards, and this was the final room, the last chance to have something that would improve morale.
And now there was a monster in the dining room, and Alfric was very worried that it was going to wreck everything he was hoping to sell. His mind, unaccountably and unfortunately, took a turn toward Lola.
The creature lurched forward, knocking chairs aside, and Alfric stabbed it with his bident before even getting all that good a look at it. It was a small blue creature, as creatures went, not much bigger than a human, and it had scales all over, each of them oversized, none smaller than a handspan. The bident wasn’t useless against it, but it was having trouble finding purchase, which was becoming a running theme. Alfric focused on the threats, its fangs that were so long they pierced out through the bottom of its mouth, and its claws that seemed perfectly capable of slicing through flesh.
Alfric moved backward, and the creature followed after, whipping a tail behind it. Alfric winced as he heard something shatter, and did his best to pull it into the hallway where he could kill it.
Mizuki’s spell came as a complete surprise, unannounced. Alfric had thought that she’d scrape together time, if possible, but the texture of the aether was different in different parts of the dungeon. Instead, she went for growth, and it wasn’t on Alfric. Instead, the spell hit the creature, but only in the arm, expanding it to such a size that it wedged against the floor and ceiling of the corridor. There was a creaking, groaning sound as it tried to expand past its confinement, and Alfric worried about the stability of the stone walls, but it was the bone in the arm that gave way, snapping violently and shoving shards of bone out from under the scales.
The creature screeched and attempted to push forward, but it was incapable of moving with the arm as it was, and it was bleeding all over the place. Alfric backed up, not wanting to get covered in blood a second time, and waited to see what else it would take to kill the creature.
As it turned out, all it took was waiting. The blood kept pouring out of the break in the arm, slowing quickly, and the creature came to a stop in short order, slumping down.
She closed her eyes and let out a sigh, and Alfric felt the benefits of her song fade from him.
They had to wait for Mizuki’s spell to wear off so the oversized arm wouldn’t be blocking them, and then they moved back into the dining room. Two of the chairs had been smashed, but perhaps not beyond the ability of Hannah to repair. A few of the dishes had also been either broken or chipped, but these could be put back together as well, given that the pieces were all still next to each other.
said Alfric. It seemed a bit of an academic question, and he was surprised that she had asked it.
said Hannah.
said Mizuki.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
said Isra.
Isra shook her head.
Isra shrugged.
Mizuki squinted and walked around the large table, picking a few things up as she did, four in all. It was a good number, and brought their total for the dungeon to nine, which was respectable. Alfric followed behind her, grabbing up whatever she didn’t pick out. That some of these were entads and others not meant that they would be making the sets less even in numbers, but it was unavoidable, and as much as a nice set of henling dishes and silverware could go for, an entad could almost certainly fetch more. Most of what Alfric was grabbing looked mercifully normal. Sometimes you would get things like a plate with no lip, or a fork with a strange number of tines, or a spoon with holes through it, things that the dungeon had created that were off enough from normal that they were useless. Here, that didn’t seem to be a problem they would have to deal with.
Ceramics could, thankfully, be put into the stone, and since Alfric had brought it with them, he began loading up the garden with all the dishes. The silverware needed to be kept separate, since it was metal.
asked Mizuki.
The table was the biggest item, but eventually, through careful maneuvering, they were able to get it into the stone as well, accomplished by having everyone lift it up, then have them ‘drop’ it in sync. It took a few times, but eventually they got it. The silverware was put into a sack, and they began working their way backward through the dungeon, taking everything of value.
The tiles ended up taking the most work, but Mizuki was able to craft a spell that worked on the grout they’d been put in place with. This cracked about a tenth of the tiles, but Hannah was able to fix most of the cracks, and it saved them what would probably have been a few hours of labor that they didn’t have the proper tools for.
said Alfric.
This was, clearly, a morale issue, and more to the point, Alfric agreed. Testing out an entad and thinking about what it might do was fun, and taking them to a cleric of Qymmos to get a complete breakdown of their function was much less fun.
There was something unpleasant about coming out of a dungeon, something that Alfric didn’t like. The dungeons were exciting, and the real world, if it could be called that, was not. He wasn’t sure where this distinction in his mind came from, the way that the dungeons felt like a dream, but it had always been there. The dungeons were, in some sense, like an undone day, a place which was separated by a hard line from the rest of reality. Everything within the dungeon that wasn’t taken out would disappear and fade away, never to be experienced by another living soul, washed away like chalk on a sidewalk.
There was a sense of loss that came from exiting a dungeon, a sense that the dream was over and real life had to resume.
They went to a field that lay just beside the Fractalwoods, one that hadn’t been turned to cultivation. It wasn’t clear whether it was owned by anyone, but there were no houses nearby. Greater Plenarch had been settled fairly late, and there were many places like this, areas that were nominally held by the hex, or in some cases, the province. There was some talk that in another few hundred years everything would be settled and claimed, which was how it was in the area around Dondrian for many hexes, but so far, there were still meadows that weren’t being put to use by people.
Mizuki took the fork, while Alfric took the plate, and the other three took bows and Isra’s spare arrows. One of the bows bound to Hannah, the other to Verity, and the plate was bound to the party. Mizuki and Alfric were left with each other for company.
“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “The ‘weapons of war’ are bows, and those aren’t particularly interesting to me. We don’t need another bow. Who would use it?”
“I could use it, I guess,” said Mizuki. “Usually I just get the one spell in a room, unless we go long, so I could learn how to use a bow and then also shoot things after I’d done the spell.”
“You’re the best candidate, yes,” said Alfric. “But still not a very good candidate. I mean, you’re small.”
“Does that really matter?” asked Mizuki.
“Yes,” said Alfric. “You’d be better with a bow if you were taller — well, taller doesn’t really matter, longer and more muscular arms matter, but for a normal person, yes, that also means taller. And it would be better if you were a boy, you’d have more muscle to work with.”
“I thought women were better with bows?” said Mizuki, but she asked it like a question.
“Um,” said Alfric. “Why do you think that?”
“Dunno,” said Mizuki. “Is that not true?”
“There’s a strength difference between men and women,” said Alfric. “It’s a little less pronounced with a bow, depending on the application. If you need to drive an arrow through an animal’s thick hide, you need strength and a high draw. If what you need is the precision to hit a rabbit, it doesn’t really matter.”
“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “I guess. Do you wish I were a boy?”
Alfric thought about that for a moment.
“Wow, are you actually thinking about that?” asked Mizuki.
“Er, yes,” said Alfric. He looked over at her. His plate was still in his lap, and he was very aware that despite her enthusiasm for entad testing, they were mostly just sitting in a field talking. “You asked a question, I thought you wanted me to think about the answer.”
“I’m a sorc, I don’t need —” she waved her hand. “You know.”
“Extra height, extra muscle,” said Alfric. “Yeah. And the more we gear up, the less any of that will matter, and some of it will wash out entirely.” That was worth a quibble or two, but he had the sense that Mizuki didn’t like quibbles. “So to answer the question, no, I’ve never wished that anyone were physically different, and it’s a bit beside the point to talk about men and women when what we’re really talking about is height, weight, arm span, and things like that. It hasn’t once occurred to me to wish that you had a longer arm span.”
“Might simplify things,” said Mizuki.
“In what way?” asked Alfric, who was still thinking about arm span.
Mizuki gave him a look, then held up her fork. “Function follows form, right?” she asked. “So food is likely, or piercing something, or in that general vicinity?”
The meaning of the look was pretty clear, and Alfric was happy to have that conversation remain unspoken. That she had feelings for him, even if they were unclear or fleeting, was much more obvious after the undone day.
“Function and form are related to each other, usually,” said Alfric. “But sometimes you get a spear that bends in the middle, or a cup that works as a throwable weapon, or a flowerpot that shoots out a giant beam of energy.”
“Do you have rations in your pack?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, I know you must, but can I have some?”
“Sure,” said Alfric.
After that was sorted away, he spent some time playing with the plate. It didn’t give him any intuitive sense of itself, nor did it respond to all the most obvious mental commands he tried to give it, like the command to fill itself up with food. Entads could be tricky, and some were, in a practical sense, unusable without identification by a cleric of Qymmos. It was entirely possible that the activation method for the entad was something that would normally risk breaking it, or whose condition would just never be met.
“It’s a freezing fork,” said Mizuki, who had wrinkled her nose at the end. “Worthless.” She had speared a bit of meat, and it was, in fact, frozen. “Takes ages too.”
“We’ll sell it,” said Alfric. “Probably for not all that much.”
“Any clue on the plate?” asked Mizuki.
“Nothing so far,” said Alfric. He had begun putting food onto it and then pushing the food around, but that was accomplishing nothing but getting the plate dirty. “Could be it only works with certain kinds of foods. I’ll have Filera take a look.”
“Can I have the bowl then?” asked Mizuki.
“Sure,” said Alfric. He handed it over, and having little better to do, just looked around.
Isra and Verity were together, and Isra was showing Verity how to use the bow with what felt, to Alfric, like entirely too much touching to be practical. He didn’t know whether the two of them were an item or not, but they spent quite a bit of their time together, and it was clear that something was developing, even if it was with glacial slowness. If it could be a happy, healthy relationship, one that would help each of them provide support for the other … but it seemed like there was an equal chance that it would come violently crashing apart. There was nothing he could do though, short of trying to keep them away from each other, and he wasn’t about to do that. Maybe, if they did get together, he might offer them some advice, but he was hardly qualified to do that.
“It’s got some kind of reservoir,” said Mizuki, looking down at the bowl. She’d poured water from a waterskin into it, and was staring down at the bowl. She pointed into the bowl with a finger and touched the water line. “Do we have a drink that’s not water?”
“Sure,” said Alfric. “There’s a bottle of spirits.” The pack was beside him, and he dug around in it to pull out a small flask.
“Why?” asked Mizuki.
“Alcohol is good for disinfecting things,” said Alfric.
“Huh,” said Mizuki. She poured a splash of it into the bowl, then looked at the water line and frowned before taking a drink from the flask. She coughed and sputtered and made a face at Alfric. “Good gods, what is that?”
“To be a good disinfectant, it needs to be really strong,” said Alfric. “Sorry?”
“It’s fine,” said Mizuki, shaking her head. “Blegh, can you get me a chocolate to get the taste out?”
“Sure,” said Alfric. He dug around in the pack.
“I was really only doing that so I could taste what it was like,” said Mizuki. “Because the bowl … it’s putting the extra liquid somewhere, and I wanted to see whether it was all going to the same place, or if it was dividing them up or something.”
“Ah,” said Alfric, handing her a piece of chocolate.
Mizuki ate the chocolate, then tentatively took a sip from the bowl. “Yup, it’s watered down. Shoot. Far less useful. Right?”
“You have to think about who would want it,” said Alfric. “And some of that depends on things that we can’t test right now. If it can hold a lot of liquid, then it’s potentially a good storage entad, just not one that we’re going to be able to use. There’s a saying, for dungeoneers, that you can always imagine a more powerful version of an entad.”
“What do you mean?” asked Mizuki. “That we shouldn’t imagine it doesn’t have limits, because it probably does have limits?”
“Yes,” nodded Alfric. “It can be very tempting to think ‘oh, what if this bowl could hold an entire lake full of water, wouldn’t that be useful’, but generally speaking, you don’t see that sort of thing, or not often.”
“But you do occasionally see it,” said Mizuki.
“Yes,” said Alfric. “And if we have something like that, then we’ll sell it off for a good price, unless you can think of something that we could do with it to keep some of the money for ourselves.”
“Probably just a gallon or so,” said Mizuki. She looked up. “Oh, looks like Hannah has something fun.”
Hannah was using one of the bows, and rather than sending an arrow sailing through the air, she was picking up stones and pulling them back, lined up with the bowstring. For a normal bow, this shouldn’t have accomplished anything much except whacking the rock against the bow itself, or sending it a few feet in front of her. Instead, because of the magic of the bow, as soon as the rock was released, it transformed into an arrow, which sailed a good distance before landing. Hannah jogged over and picked it up, looking it over.
“Doesn’t actually seem that fun,” said Alfric.
“Hannah, fire the stone arrow!” shouted Mizuki. Hannah looked up, then nodded.
She drew back the stone arrow and loosed it, though she didn’t use her full draw. Instead of flying through the air like an arrow should have, it turned back into a rock and plopped to the ground not far in front of her.
“I think we can use this as a storage entad!” Hannah called. She had a smile on her face.
“It was a good dungeon,” said Mizuki. “Though you said we were going to get ectad materials.”
“I said it was likely,” said Alfric. “Dominant styling would have suggested it would be more likely. But with dungeons, you get what you get.”
“You’re not still thinking of undoing it, right?” asked Mizuki.
“No, not at all,” said Alfric. “I’ll be watching Hannah for brain damage, we’ll take her to the clerics to get checked over, and we’ll try to figure these entads out a bit more, but overall it was successful, I think. Not wildly so, but it was workaday dungeoneering.”
“And then we take a day off,” said Mizuki. “And then do it all over again.”
Perhaps it was wishful thinking on Alfric’s part, but he thought that she sounded eager about it.
When they returned to the house, with Hannah having been cleared by the clerics, Alfric had a moment of wariness, a sense of Lola lying in wait. There was no sign that she’d been to the house, or in the house while they were gone, but it was always a possibility. Mizuki had locked up, but they were locks that could be easily defeated by someone who had taken the time and effort to learn to pick a lock. And if Lola had been in the house, she could have done anything from stealing to poisoning. What she would do was unclear.
The Lola problem needed to be solved. It was too much stress and too much of a distraction.
He tried to put it out of his mind. He had no solution aside from waiting for Lola to make a mistake, but it was clear now that the problem was weighing on him, enough to be a liability. He tried, once more, to push it from his mind. There was, after all, work to do.