This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

It turned out okay. If Mizuki had been invited over to a friend’s house and been served the chicken and vegetables that Hannah made, well, Mizuki wouldn’t have complained. The seasoning wasn’t quite what Mizuki would have done, and the chicken was a bit overcooked while the vegetables were a bit undercooked.

Still, it tasted all the better because Mizuki hadn’t been the one to make it, and she felt grateful that people both inside the house and outside of it were watching out for her.

When Cynthia broke the news, Verity was surprised how much it stung. The Fig and Gristle had found itself a new bard, one who was taking up Verity’s old room. It was made all the more awkward by Verity being informed of this when she’d shown up with her lute in hand, ready to sing for the night. There was a part of her that had wondered, earlier, whether she would feel good about losing her job, but no, it was mostly just a sort of emptiness. She’d known that she wasn’t going to be at the Fig and Gristle forever, that was part of the reason she’d agreed to go dungeoneering in the first place, but to have that chapter of her life finally closed felt awkward and unwelcome.

Having nothing else to do with her night, Verity brought her lute in anyhow and ordered a plate of food, waiting for the new bard to start up. She did have some loyalty to the place, where she’d lived for what felt like quite a long time. The patrons had gotten used to her, and she to them. There were some she saw almost every night and groups that congregated on certain days of the week. She wondered whether they would even notice the difference or whether it would reflect poorly on her to have a replacement, but it was entirely possible that the new bard was actually good.

When the new bard took the small stage, the first thing Verity noticed was how shockingly young she was. Verity would have been surprised if the girl was older than fifteen. She played a lute, too, which made the evaluation all that much easier, and from the outset, as the lute was being tuned in preparation for playing, Verity could tell that the girl was, at the least, not conservatory-trained. Once the song actually started, Verity winced. It was acceptable quality, for a place like this, but Verity had instructors who would have beaten her if she’d played that poorly. The girl’s form was poor and strained, her tuning was slightly off, and she was doing a poor job of keeping the rhythm.

The magic was even worse. It was the kind of thing Verity had been doing since the age of nine, a weak tune that made the food taste better and lightened some emotion, but did both those things without any real power.

The girl had long blond hair tied back in a braid and a pleasant look to her, and for all that Verity could see every flaw in the music, the new bard seemed to be enjoying herself and the production of the music. The song sounded like an original, though in the eight months or so that Verity had been playing at the Fig and Gristle, she hadn’t been able to memorize the entirety of the local tunes, just the majority. The girl’s voice was nice and mellow, but it was nice in the way that raw clay was nice, something that needed to be worked and trained.

Verity ate her meal and listened, composing a critique in her head that she wasn’t unkind enough to ever actually share. When she was halfway through the meal, Verity’s mind began to wander from the music and the magic around her, turning to the more advanced problems of her own. As she saw it, the most major issue she faced in the dungeons was that of stamina, which in her opinion likely descended from the particulars of her training.

When a bard performed in a concert setting, it was usually full-tilt, as heavy as possible without regard for being able to continue on past the end of the piece. When a bard was in a dungeon, however, sustain was one of the most important things because it allowed more time to regroup between encounters and less of a need to rush. Holding the song and not having it drain her when there was no need for the effects, that was something that Verity had never really learned, because there had never been much need. What she needed was to be able to carry the magic down to its lowest level, barely a heartbeat of a tune and, ideally, to do that without needing too much of her focus. Then, when there was an actual fight, she could rouse the song into its full power and give the party what they needed to defeat whatever evil was in front of them. She knew that this was possible, but it was difficult, and learning it was more difficult because she had no one to talk to and learn from.