This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

“This flute has too many holes,” said Verity, turning it over. “And there would be no way for your fingers to effectively cover them.”

“Do you play the flute?” asked Mizuki, moving over to stand next to the bard.

“No,” replied Verity.

“And how many fingers do you have?” asked Mizuki.

“The usual amount,” replied Verity with a sigh of exasperation.

“I’m counting six on each hand, for what it’s worth,” said Mizuki.

Alfric looked and saw that this was true, at nearly the same moment that Verity seemed to notice. She shrieked and dropped the flute, which clattered on the ground, at which point her hands went back to having five fingers. She stared at her hands, keeping them in front of her, as though they were going to mutate at any moment.

“Entad effects usually aren’t permanent, for bodily effects,” said Alfric. “If there were one that gave you an extra finger on your hand for the rest of your life, it would be one of the really rare ones.”

“Neat,” said Mizuki, picking up the flute and giving it a twirl, the spoon she’d taken stuffed into a pant pocket. She held the flute in one hand and stared at her free hand, which had six fingers. She waved them back and forth, then clenched and unclenched them. “This is so weird. You can’t even feel it. It’s like I always had six fingers.” She squinted for a moment, and then she had seven fingers instead of six. “All right, time to see how many we can get out of this.” More and more fingers were added to her hands, until eventually she had ten fingers on each. It was altogether too many fingers, very noticeable when Alfric looked at her.

There was, of course, another point to entad testing in the dungeon, which was that it allowed them to have a bit of a ‘cooldown’. Alfric’s father had always said that when people went through something awful, it was best to give them something fun or interesting, some kind of distraction that would rip their mind from the awfulness. Entad testing was one of those things, and that it could be done in the dungeon would mean that perhaps the associations with blood and injury wouldn’t stick as much.

“I don’t like that one,” said Hannah, who was still holding the handkerchief to her cut arm but had come over to watch.

“Seems kind of useless,” said Mizuki, tossing the flute up into the air with her ten-fingered hand and then catching it with a hand that had gone back to normal.

“It’s gross,” said Verity. “But it might actually be useful for playing music.”

“You think with the extra fingers this flute makes some nice noises?” asked Mizuki, seeming skeptical.

“I wasn’t actually thinking about that,” replied Verity. “I was thinking that if you had the flute touching your skin, you could play the lute a bit easier. Here, let me test.”

He wanted the party to be happy, and from what he’d heard, a lot of people really enjoyed testing out new entads. Back in the big city, Alfric’s friends had taken a lot of joy in going into entad shops to look around at what was there, from the mundane to the exotic. Whatever entads weren’t bound to the party or to party members would probably be sent back to the city to be sold there, where they could fetch a better price, though Alfric would almost certainly be dealing with middlemen in Tarchwood or Liberfell.

While Verity played her lute using extra fingers, Alfric watched Isra. She was taking a more cautious approach to entad testing than the others, and despite the fact that she was holding the bone-white longbow and had plenty of arrows, she hadn’t actually fired it. The flowerpot entad was quite famous, particularly because it served as an object lesson in how things could unexpectedly go wrong, but he didn’t have a handle on how much Isra knew about the wider world, and perhaps saying outright that entad testing could hypothetically kill them all was a bit much. She was instead testing the string, feeling the parts of it, twisting and bending, looking it over… but not actually firing it.

Alfric decided that he would go over and talk to her if she’d still done nothing with it when they were getting ready to gather up the rest of the loot.

The bigger of the two books he’d brought up was completely blank, its thousand-odd pages containing not so much as a scrap of information. It didn’t have a title on the cover or on the spine, not that Alfric had really expected it would. Staring at the blank pages, Alfric thought about them as representations of something else, which was sometimes true for entads with multiple parts. A suit of entad armor with three jewels on the chest almost certainly had some ability that could be used three times in a day, or in a week, or could affect three objects, though of course that rule wasn’t a firm one, because almost no rules about entads were. He looked at the thousand pages, thinking about what they might mean or represent.