This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

Verity turned her mind to the third dungeon. Dungeoneering was a bit like being a professional musician, in a sense, particularly in terms of both training and always looking forward to the next gig. ‘Playing’ in a group as well, when she thought about it, though that metaphor was a bit strained. The goal for Verity was to execute better, and that seemed to involve the magical side of musicality, which she had only reached the bottom rungs of.

Progressive melodies were the next obvious step, but easier, and perhaps more pressing, were party melodies. The magic of a party made everyone just a bit the same, melding their essence in chiefly magical ways, and if you knew the right techniques, you could draw on that enforced sameness. Bardic magic worked with what was there, but what was there, for a party, meant the entire party. Properly constructed, a party melody could multiply Alfric’s strength not just by his own strength, but by the strength of the entire party. Admittedly, he was the strongest of them by a wide margin, but their combined strength had to be at least double. The same went for almost everything else, though the uniqueness of their individual talents did them little favor.

And beyond that, there were more complicated party melodies, those that took the confusion of personhood to a greater extreme. Some entads worked only for a specific person, but in a party situation, it was possible to blur that line a bit. And because the party link persisted no matter the distance between members, it was also possible to sing a song that would affect someone on the other side of the world. The same was true for guilds but to a much lesser extent, and it was unheard of for a bard to be able to perform a proper guild melody before the age of thirty. A bard could heighten that confusion, though it was a matter of degree, and there were some obvious problems with attempting to maintain complex melodies, since at a certain point, trade-offs had to be considered.

So far, there seemed to not be all that much use for that kind of melding. Isra’s bow could probably be confused into working for someone else, but there was no reason to do that. Alfric’s dagger could, perhaps, take the entire team, but they already had a workaround for it. There was probably something on the horizon though, some entad that they would find in the next five dungeons, or the next ten, or however many they ended up doing.

Verity was slowly starting to come around to the idea that this might simply be what she did with a fair chunk of her life. Aside from the very end, the second dungeon had gone swimmingly. There was quite a bit to like about bardic music in a dungeon, as opposed to in an auditorium. In the dungeon, she was given free rein, and if anyone had been second-guessing her, they had wisely kept their comments to themselves. There was room to experiment with the magic, to try new things that might not entirely work.

Verity didn’t have her lute with her, but she began to make her way back to the house and sang herself a song as she did. It would have been easier with so-called standard lyrics, but she couldn’t resist the urge to make up her own.

“She runs to the leylines, and tacks to the wind, she screams through the forests, and I wish we were twinned,” Verity sang. “I’d strip off her clothes, and look at her bare, we’d tongue each other, and not have a care.” It was too lewd, and it felt like ‘tongue’ was both awkward and had too few syllables. Verity did like a good cheat, but ‘tuh-ung’ felt awful to say. ‘Finger’ had the right number of syllables, but it was so lewd that even just thinking it in her own mind left Verity blushing, let alone saying it out loud. She knew a fair number of bawdy songs, but there seemed to be relatively few of them about women, and she’d never actually performed one for an audience.

“Butterfly feeling, your touch is so healing,” Verity sang. But that felt too much like it might be about a cleric, and while Verity probably would have accepted a proposition from Hannah, they weren’t exactly on the same wavelength, or at least it didn’t feel like it. Of course, Verity had absolutely no idea what she was doing when it came to romance. She didn’t know how to give off signals or how to read signals. “My love I conceal, can’t wait to reveal.”

The bardic melody depended, in part, on holding the song in your head, and spinning up new lyrics definitely made things much harder. Still, it felt like she was getting to a party melody, though a simple one, increasing her own strength as though she were as strong as the five of them put together.

“Pinkish-red lips, gentle curved hips, tied-back blond hair, are you aware, of the nervousness running, through my spine and my veins? Do you think of my heart, and what it contains?” It was all rubbish, but it was a nice kind of rubbish at least, free and honest, found in the moment.

“Who is that song about?” asked a familiar voice from behind her.