This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

Isra was envious of Mizuki’s cooking. The meals Isra had in Liberfell and at the Fig and Gristle had been quite good, but they had been prepared by someone whose job it was to do such things. A person who had devoted their life to cooking would naturally be a good cook, that was right and fair. But Mizuki hadn’t devoted her life to cooking, it was only something she did casually, and she still seemed to be so good at it, and at a young age. It made Isra feel like she had been missing something from her life, a skill that she had never developed when she’d been perfectly capable of doing so.

Worse, it was a skill that didn’t seem to come naturally to her like so many other things had, because the interplay of flavors largely didn’t involve the living world she was so in tune with. She could tell whether food was good to eat or not, whether it had toxins, but what it would taste like was much more difficult, and the ways that the taste would change when paired with other tastes or in the process of cooking was even more difficult. She’d faced challenges when smoking meats or making pickles until finally arriving at something she found satisfactory. Mizuki seemed to know everything there was to know. The envy did nothing to dull the taste of the food. If Mizuki was serious about giving cooking lessons, Isra was going to take them. She’d kept a close eye on the food preparation, but had no real idea how such simple procedures had turned the base ingredients into an actual meal.

“Okay,” said Alfric. “The postmortem won’t take long, I don’t think, it’s just a matter of going over what happened in the dungeon, what went right and what went wrong, and trying to figure out what we can learn from it. Overall, I think we did pretty well, except at the end.”

“Because of the risk?” asked Hannah. “Or the outcome?”

“Both,” said Alfric. “But we’re going to go through room by room in chronological order, give brief thoughts on what we saw and how we responded to it and what we might do differently next time. Mostly doing this is just a way of running the dungeon a second or third time in our minds, which means that we milk the dungeon for experience much more efficiently.”

What followed was quite a bit of talking. Isra stayed silent for most of it. It was interesting to get different perspectives on what happened, but her own part in the dungeons was relatively straightforward. If there was something to shoot, she shot it, using the slowed time from the bow to get as many shots off as possible, then using it a second time to retreat if necessary. In every fight, her contribution had been roughly the same, with the outcome being different largely because the monsters had their own biologies and defenses.

“So was this because I missed?” asked Mizuki, when they were discussing the giant man covered in mussels.

“Did you miss?” asked Alfric. “You blew the arm off.”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t trying to,” said Mizuki. “I was just lobbing the fireball at him and hoping it would kill him.”

“Is that something to work on for later?” asked Alfric. “Aim? So far as I can recall, you didn’t have a single miss through the whole dungeon, so I don’t have any actual complaints.”

“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. She shrugged. “Has it been working?”

“You had the majority of kills,” said Hannah. “But we’ve been facin’ what seems like more than our fair share of the big, slow-movin’ beasties, and those are what you’re best at.” She shrugged.

“We can’t really tell you what to do or how to do it,” said Alfric. “We’re not sorcs. Part of a postmortem is for you to reflect on what you’ve been doing and whether doing things differently would have been better. I have no complaints and no advice.” He hesitated. “Aside from, perhaps, not doing everything all at once?”

“Um,” said Mizuki, who seemed quite confused. “Meaning?”

“You work off aetheric imbalance, right?” asked Alfric. “So in theory, rather than doing a single giant fireball, you could do two smaller ones? Mostly I was thinking about the deer we fought and how a single large attack is less effective against multiple targets.”

“Hmm,” said Mizuki. She held out a hand and wiggled her fingers, and a series of pings, almost in unison, came up from the glasses of wine and water that were sitting around the table. “Like that?”

“I don’t know what you just did,” said Alfric.

“Applied force to all of the glasses?” asked Mizuki. “You heard the pings, right?”

Alfric gave a helpless shrug. “I did, but… yes, if you can do that in the dungeon with lethal force, it would be great. It was one of the only problems we ran into with the deer fight.”

“We… didn’t fight any deer,” said Mizuki.

“The black things,” said Isra. “With large heads. They had legs like deer.”

“Oh, those,” said Mizuki. “Right, I didn’t think of them as deer at all, more like a big black version of the long-legged skinks. I hated those.”

“Well, we’ll get to them,” said Alfric. “Does anyone have any more on the mussel man encounter?”