This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

Alfric did mind, but he suppressed the urge to act on it. It was better to have someone look over what you’d written before you sent it, especially if you wanted to make a good impression. The local arm of the Adventurers’ League was important, because they could give him access to bigger, better keys depending on how their progress through the dungeons went. Furthermore, there would be a record on file of his accomplishments, which meant that if or when this party fell apart, he would have something to point to when he went looking to join up with other parties, though his sterling record in the Junior League didn’t seem to have counted for much.

“All right,” said Mizuki, clapping her hands. “Enough business. I am formally opening an invitation for all of you to live here for as long as this lasts, take it or leave it.”

“I already live here,” said Verity, raising a hand.

“Ay, I’ll take you up on it,” replied Hannah. “Though I may still go to the temple for a bath every now and then, so long as Lemmel keeps lettin’ me.”

“I have my own place,” said Isra.

“Well, yeah, just offering,” said Mizuki. “If you wanted to be with the party or anything, no big deal.”

“Does the offer extend to me?” asked Alfric.

Mizuki looked him up and down. “Why wouldn’t it?”

“Because he’s male,” said Verity, her voice quite flat.

“Well,” said Mizuki, “it doesn’t matter to me, so long as you’re not going to be, I don’t know. Doing stuff.” She gestured vaguely. “Male stuff.”

“If we need to make some ground rules,” Alfric began.

Mizuki sighed. “Just don’t be weird about it,” she said. “And if you’re not weird about it, I won’t be weird about it.”

Alfric nodded. “Verity, Hannah, is that acceptable to you?”

“Fine by me,” said Verity.

“So long as you aren’t weird, ay,” said Hannah with a grin.

Alfric rubbed his face for a moment. “I believe in being forthright, so I’ll say, now, that I have absolutely no intentions of ruining what is, on paper, a great dungeoneering party. No flirtation or romance of any kind, and to the extent we can avoid interpersonal problems, I want to do that. If we can do that with rules, great, we’ll make rules, but if it’s better to just have some mutual understanding, then great, we can do that instead. I care about the dungeons. The goal of this party is dungeons.”

“We hear you,” said Mizuki. “You can calm down.”

“I’m calm, I just—I don’t want to be preemptively accused of anything,” said Alfric. Familiar feelings were welling up, and he did his best to tamp them down.

“Didn’t mean to besmirch your honor,” said Hannah.

“It’s not the Red Ages,” said Verity. “We’re not going to treat you like a fox in the henhouse.”

“Wait,” said Mizuki, “do we just have a total ban on romance within the group?”

“It worries me that you’re asking that,” said Alfric.

She pointed a finger at him. “You’re the one who wanted to make sure that everything was clear. And Hannah is,” Hannah raised an eyebrow, “she’s a cleric of Garos, right?”

Hannah rolled her eyes. “Such a reputation we clerics have,” she said. “And I told you it was both, though none of you are my type, thank you very much.”

“Romance is inadvisable,” said Alfric. “I think we can leave it at that.”

But his mother hadn’t been quite so staunch about that. She had said, when the conversation came up at the dinner table, that you shouldn’t go into a dungeoneering party with the notion that there would be anything like a romance, but that with time, being close to the same group of people, it was natural for attraction to develop, and if it was mutual, and it wasn’t going away, then it could be a beautiful thing that would grow and flourish.

There was absolutely no way he was going to say that out loud.

They got the party channel exactly seven days after the party had formed. Hannah was pleased, but she’d been in a number of parties before, and party chat always came with some problems.