Priya disappeared with a puff of air, and Alfric looked at the book for
a moment, then pressed the circle marked ‘Reporter’. The list changed
again, this time growing much longer, bleeding onto the next page. It
didn’t take Alfric all that long to find Lola’s name, and he flipped to
the start of her entries.
“Goin’ right to it?” asked Hannah. “No pretense of lookin’ elsewhere?”
“No,” said Alfric. “In theory, they could all walk through that door at
any moment. And if Lola submitted reports already, my guess is that she
did it with the intention that I would read them.”
“Why are you reading them if you don’t want to talk to her or any of
them?” asked Verity. “It seems to me like you want a clean break.”
Alfric paused and thought about that. “They were my party,” he said.
“They were… what I had wanted, what I’d thought I had. I want to see how
they’re doing. I want to know.”
“You want to know whether your plan would have worked?” asked Hannah.
“I guess,” said Alfric. He looked down at the page. The words weren’t
rendered in Lola’s handwriting, but as he started reading, he could tell
that it was her voice.
“We’ll leave you to it,” said Hannah with a sigh. “Verity, would you
like to tour this place?”
“Of course,” said Verity. “It will be interesting to see how normal
people do things.”
Alfric ignored them. He was already engrossed.
<p>Chapter 36 — E7 Report</p>Party:
Lola Underhill—alienist, chrononaut, E7
Josen Park—wizard, E7
Grig Tinsmith—bard, E7
Mardin Longshore—cleric of Oeyr, E7
Marsh—warlock, Pyro (delayed service), E7
My favorite tutor when I was growing up was my math teacher, who spent
a month of our time talking about variance. Variance is important for
chrononauts, part of our bread and butter, but I was deep in the guts of
the Junior League at the time (mostly because of a boy), and it’s even
more important for dungeoneers. The upshot from that tutor’s lesson was
that luck doesn’t exist, and a cold streak doesn’t mean that you’ll keep
being cold.
Still, we’re on a cold streak.
At the end of the Pate’s Knob dungeon, Marsh blasted a monster with a
jet of fire hot enough to melt rock and destroy anything of value that
was behind the creature. We’d been in the dungeon for hours, and he was
getting irritated and tired. It was a dumb thing to do, and he knew it.
The bad luck for us was that the monster wasn’t just immune to fire, but
fed on it. It grew to three times its size and flicked one of its six
spindly tendrils out and absolutely destroyed Josen’s left arm. Most of
his shoulder went missing with the arm, some of his mage stuff got
obliterated, and he lost four entads in the process. Mardin grabbed him
by the collar and hefted him out, which left the three of us to face the
thing down, and Marsh was useless unless we wanted someone else to lose
an arm, or worse. Really, Josen could have died pretty easily. Any of us
could have. We did manage to kill the thing and get almost nothing for
it, but it was just me, alone, with Grig backing me up on vocals.
