This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

“Okay,” said the boy. He turned his bird around and sent it off down the trail again, this time without saying goodbye.

“You think you’ll be able to collect on that?” asked Hannah.

“No,” said Alfric. “But it doesn’t hurt to have a favor from a nosy little kid.”

“You like kids?” asked Mizuki, eyes brightening somewhat.

“I like them well enough,” said Alfric. “I was a mentor in the Junior League for a bit, when I was floundering.”

“I had thoughts of being a teacher,” said Mizuki. “But I wasn’t all that good in school, and to be a teacher you need to go off training for three years.”

“Three years isn’t so much,” said Hannah. “Not when you’re talkin’ about takin’ care of the little ones.”

“How long is seminary?” asked Mizuki.

“Five,” said Hannah. “Though you can do the final year as part of a placement, if you so desire. Most of it is just tryin’ to get the right mindset for Garos, which was never much of an issue for me.” She turned to Alfric. “Seems strange to me that you like children.”

“Why’s that?” asked Alfric.

“They’re just… not very serious creatures, it seems to me,” said Hannah.

“Depends on the kid,” said Alfric. “Some of them are very serious, and maybe that’s what I like: being the only person that sees that seriousness and being the only one who will indulge it. In the Junior League, as a mentor, I was always on the lookout for them, the serious ones, when I wasn’t trying to keep my brothers in line.”

“Brothers?” asked Mizuki. “I thought you were an only child?”

“Why would you think that?” asked Alfric.

“You never talk about them,” said Hannah. “And you have that kind of energy, I s’pose.”

“I’m not sure I know what that means,” said Alfric. “Mizuki, can you come scratch the back of my head, or would that be weird?”

“It would be weird, but I’d do it,” said Mizuki. She walked past the wardrobe and reached up to scratch Alfric’s head.

“Lower,” he said and then sighed with relief. “Honestly, I probably could have just carried this thing with one hand for a bit, but the more work we put into it, the more I worry that we’re going to drop it and make all that labor be for nothing. Thank you.”

“No problem,” said Mizuki. She stayed at the front with him, walking side by side. “So wait, how many siblings do you have?”

“Five,” said Alfric.

“There are five of you?” asked Mizuki.

“It would be six, if there are five siblings,” said Hannah.

“That’s even worse,” said Mizuki. “How did your mother have six children while also doing near-constant dungeons?”

“Entad solutions, I would guess,” said Hannah.

“Yes,” said Alfric, nodding. “My mom always said that if she’d had to go through a pregnancy herself, she probably wouldn’t have had children. So we were all technically decanted, not born.”

“Things of that nature are usually reserved for the church,” said Hannah, frowning a bit. Couples not being able to have ‘natural’ children was one of the serious issues, and while there were occasional entads that helped to deal with it, they were in perpetually short supply. The idea that someone had used one for convenience was, well… it seemed a bit selfish and contrary to the common good.

“My mom personally pulled six of those entads from the dungeons, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Alfric. “All were donated to the Church of Garos.”

“Ah,” said Hannah. “That does make it a bit better.”

“‘Decanted’,” said Mizuki. “What, like pulled out of a bottle?”

“Yep,” said Alfric.

“Weird,” said Mizuki.

“Yep,” said Alfric. “Anyway, about five years ago, Mom started slowing down. She went through a monthlong dungeon and came out with several tons of loot and a different perspective. She’s been much more, uh, motherly since then. With mixed results.”

“Well now I really want to meet her,” said Mizuki. “She sounds like a blast.”

“Honestly, and I know this sounds like boasting, it’s very possible she’s one of the most accomplished dungeoneers in human history,” said Alfric. “But records are pretty poor, and a lot of the very best have had the incentive to puff up their accomplishments. It’s very, very unlikely that anyone really did complete fifty thousand dungeons, but I guess you never know.”

“Fifty thousand does seem unlikely,” said Hannah.

“Stepping foot in fifty thousand seems doable with the right travel entads,” said Alfric. “Actually clearing them of monsters and taking everything of value… much less so.”

“Why would you want to just step foot in a dungeon and then walk away?” asked Mizuki.

“Bragging rights,” said Alfric. “Or maybe to catalog if you could do that safely through entads or mana constructs or something.”

“I guess,” said Mizuki.

“I tried to work out the math a while ago,” said Alfric, “and it left me skeptical. It’s more than two dungeons a day for fifty years or something like that. Possible, but you’d need pretty much inhuman endurance if you were doing a full clear.”

“You were lookin’ it up because of your own ambitions?” asked Hannah.