Hannah nodded, then took the goggles off. “Seems a bit pointless, at least for me,” said Hannah. “It shows the body, which is good, but I can know all that just from touchin’ a person, and what I care about is what’s hurt, not what’s been changed by another cleric.”
“We’ll mark it as a dud,” said Alfric, nodding. “But it’s probably of use to someone, somewhere.”
“Can we smuggle entads out in the book?” asked Mizuki. “To get them not to bind?”
“If you could get around binding, we would do it,” said Alfric. “It’s always better to have something unbound.”
“Unless you think someone is going to try to steal it,” said Verity.
“Yes, right,” said Alfric. “It’s
“Me?” asked Mizuki, as she improbably climbed down from the staff. “You besmirch my honor.”
“If you don’t care, you don’t care,” said Alfric. “And it doesn’t matter; we’re following protocol for entads. The most you can do is send someone out with an entad you want them to bind to, and even that doesn’t work the vast majority of the time, because it can bind across the party link.”
“And if you break the party while you’re in the dungeon?” asked Verity, whose head was cocked to the side.
“The dungeon created itself for the party, in a manner of speaking,” said Alfric. “Even if we broke the party, so long as we’re here, we’re all linked to it.”
“Well, I’d like to take the staff out,” said Mizuki. “If no one minds. I was thinking on the way in that I wanted a walking stick, and the universe has provided for me.”
“I’ll be carrying the wardrobe,” said Alfric. “But mostly because I’m the only one that can lift it. I don’t think we should spend too much time on picking out who carries what entad, not when most of them don’t seem like they have personal interest for us.”
Hannah nodded, then looked at the rope. “What does that one do?”
“Shifts itself,” said Alfric. “It’s hard to explain. When you’re holding it, there’s a feeling of it sliding under your finger, but the ends don’t move when it does that. I feel like it might be good for climbing, but I think it would complicate knotwork, so I’m unsure.”
“And the rock?” asked Alfric.
“Oh, I did that one,” said Verity. “It lets you go to a garden.” The rock was one they almost certainly would have missed if it weren’t for Mizuki.
“A garden?” asked Alfric.
“Like an imaginary garden?” Verity went on. “I asked Isra, and she didn’t see me move. It was like a mental thing. An imaginary garden.” She shrugged.
“Mental effects are very rare,” said Alfric, frowning. He moved over to the rock, which was pale, with lots of holes, and weighed so much Hannah felt fortunate that it would probably fit inside the book. Alfric touched the rock, and then looked around not seeming to see them. Then he pulled away from it. “Odd.”
“It was an imaginary garden, right?” asked Verity. “Interesting, but not useful.”
“Wait,” said Alfric. He reached down and touched the rock again, and this time he moved while he was touching it, using his other hand to pluck something from just above the ground. When he released the stone, a yellow flower appeared between his fingertips. “Not imaginary,” he said, looking at the flower. “Still not useful, but far more interesting. We’ll test the limits before we sell it.” He paused, then looked over at the wardrobe. “Wait.”
“Test it first,” said Hannah. “See if you can bring a stone in, then see if you can bring it back out.”
“I will, I will,” said Alfric. “But if we can use the garden as an extradimensional space, that’s a substantial upgrade from the book.”
A round of somewhat disappointing testing followed. Rocks could be dropped into the garden, and so could flowers, but not entads and not anything metal. The garden was the same every time, a sunny space with lots of flowers and plants in a little meadow that seemed to recede into the distance faster than it should have. It was Isra who had the best ideas for poking at the edges of the entad’s ability, and while they couldn’t get any other entad ‘inside’ of it, they did have some luck with other organic things, even those that hadn’t come from the garden in the first place.
“We could put one of the trees in there,” said Alfric. He seemed quite excited by the prospect. “Right?”
“I don’t think so,” said Isra. “It would be too big.” They’d all had their chance with the stone, and Isra had spent considerable time with it.
“A person is organic,” said Mizuki. “Do you think you could put a person in it?”
“Do you want to try?” asked Alfric.
“Obviously we would try an animal first,” said Hannah.
“Right, of course,” he said with a nod. “But if we
“I’m not going naked, thank you very much,” said Mizuki.
“I wasn’t,” said Alfric, before stopping himself. He looked at Mizuki. “Will you ever stop giving me guff?”
