This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

Grig nodded. “In the undone days, yeah,” he said. He shrugged. “Like with a lot of rumors, it’s hard to know where they came from, and given they were undone days, it seems like Lola would have been the only one to know. Or maybe she levied threats against someone, telling them what she’d done to them, but those could easily have been lies. Hard to say. The other side of it was a bunch of rumors about her being with all kinds of guys, which—it’s even harder to know where those rumors came from, but I have an easier time believing it.”

“What does she say?” asked Hannah.

“Nothing,” said Grig. “She rolls her eyes and moves on. We don’t… really talk though.”

“Fifty dungeons and you don’t talk?” asked Hannah. Her order of noodles came, and she began to dig in.

“We talk business,” said Grig. “We don’t talk about how she felt about the rumors and whether they might be true. She, um, doesn’t really have compunctions about lying, and we’ve caught her doing that before. Not in that she was trying to screw us over, just… stuff that she’s said that wasn’t actually what happened. Her response was with all the undoing, she has a bit of trouble remembering what actually happened, but, eh. It’s a weak response.” He paused. “And she knows that’s what I’d say about her, but if you could refrain from just repeating it outright. We are going to want some information in exchange for this, you know that, right?”

“Fifty dungeons in a year?” asked Mizuki, ignoring the question. “That seems low, compared with what Alfric wanted.”

“It is,” said Grig. “We’ve had some setbacks. Lola is kind of in charge of the whole thing, which makes sense, given how much more information she has, and how she’s basically been bankrolling us, or was at the start, but… well, when Lola says that we tried a dungeon and failed at it, so we need to take a day off, it’s hard to know whether or not she’s telling the truth or just wants to spend the day doing other stuff. We can’t contradict her, and if we don’t have a reset in our pocket, we don’t want to risk actual death, so we’re kind of at her mercy.” He paused. “Again, she knows all that, and with her, I’m sure she’d have gotten that from me in one of the undone days, but—”

“He’s painting a bad picture of it,” said Mardin. “There are limits to what Oeyr can provide and reasons not to hit a bunch of dungeons in a single day, even though we do have a small team of porters and agents.”

Grig, at least, had the classic manner of a man who had all kinds of issues that were piling up and a deep need to spill them out to someone. It was something that Hannah had seen at the temple quite a few times, and her guess was that the issues he was raising were ones that he went over in his head on a near-daily basis. Mardin was more reserved.

“Porters?” asked Mizuki.

“People they pay to handle things for them,” said Hannah. “We’re sellin’ entads and ectads on our own, but at a certain point, you pay people to do that for you, a counterparty. You get someone who specializes in bastles, in the entad markets, and at the higher levels, you have your own ectad refinery. The biggest dungeoneerin’ teams have twenty or thirty people in their employ.”

“More than that, depending on how much they want to keep in-house,” said Mardin. He seemed to be taking over talking as Grig ate. “And unfortunately for us, all that is under Lola’s control, and she’s… well, got her own things going on, as evidenced by us being in Liberfell as a way to be close to Alfric.”

“And him?” asked Mizuki. “What are the rumors about him?”

“The same, mostly,” said Mardin. “Though a lot of those rumors we got straight from Lola, and the ones we didn’t might have originated from her after their falling-out. I knew through the guilds that he was having a lot of problems finding a party, and some of that might have been from her poisoning people against him. I didn’t really take it that seriously, because it’s what happens when people have a bad breakup, but if we’re here because of him, that means that it’s suddenly party business.”

“Which isn’t great,” said Grig. “There’s a good chance we’ll be seeing more of you, and not just because dungeoneers working in the same area often cross paths.”

“Not that we’re not looking forward to it,” said Mardin, giving Hannah a smile. Hannah had dated a cleric of Oeyr, for a few short weeks, and while she’d been a lovely partner right up until the end, it wasn’t something that Hannah had any interest in repeating. There were too many philosophical differences.

“In the sense that you seem like fine people,” said Grig. “But in the sense that there’s probably some coming clash between Alfric and Lola, no, it’s been nice meeting you, but we don’t actually want to see you again.”

“Shame,” said Mizuki. “I’ve never met a dungeoneer before.”

“Absolute nonsense,” sighed Hannah. “You’ve met loads.”

“Retired dungeoneers,” said Mizuki. “They’re a different breed.”

“All the same,” said Hannah.