This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

“I might,” said Verity. “I’ll see how I feel in the morning, whether I have shaky nerves.” She sat in quiet contemplation for a moment. “I ate too much.”

“My fault,” said Mizuki. “I made too much.” She looked down at the plate. “I think this will probably be my breakfast tomorrow morning.” She looked at Verity. “Alfric said that in Dondrian they don’t eat breakfast?”

Verity nodded. “Technically we break our fast for lunch. Before then, it’s usually some kind of hot drink, though of late there’s been a surge in hot drinks that are basically soup, which, at the time I left, was causing a bit of a hubbub.” She sighed. “I do miss it, sometimes, but I also enjoy the simple life that I’ve built here. Playing at the Fig and Gristle, hiking out into the woods to practice, enjoying the peace and solitude, reading through whatever I can get from the library… It’s a very pleasant life, and I don’t know that I want it interrupted.”

“Well, you can go back to the quiet life, can’t you?” asked Mizuki. “Alfric will want to go through dungeons as quickly as we can, he seems like the sort, but if we did, say, one every two weeks, that wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”

“I suppose not,” said Verity. She smiled a bit. “I’m going to need to practice some of the group things. There are special elements only available to parties.”

“I think we all have some work and training to do,” said Mizuki, nodding. “There’s something in the interference pattern between you and Hannah that I know I can do more with.”

“For bards, there’s a progression technique,” said Verity. “Where you can strengthen someone with every minute that you can hold the song. But of course it gets harder and harder to keep going.” She grinned and leaned back slightly. “I could make you stronger than Alfric, even.” She looked a bit sheepish. “Assuming that I can actually manage to pull it off, that is.”

“Our party composition is really good,” said Mizuki, though this was an informed guess on her part. “I’m surprised and impressed that Alfric was able to put it together, though I imagine some of it was just dumb luck.” She got up from her seat and took her plate with her, sliding it into the chiller, then grabbed Verity’s plate and started on doing dishes. “Would you be a pal and go down into the wine cellar? It’s that door to the left. Something fruity.” She pointed using her shoulder.

Mizuki was almost finished with the dishes by the time Verity came back up. “Did you have trouble?” she asked.

“There were just so many,” said Verity. “I’m not very good at making choices.”

“Peach wine,” said Mizuki, taking the bottle and looking at the label. “Do you drink? Or is that not a thing people do in Dondrian? Otherwise, this bottle is for me. Sorry, I should have brought it up for dinner.”

Verity nodded. “I drink.” She watched as Mizuki filled up a glass. “You’re being very hospitable to someone you’ve only just met.”

“We’re party members,” said Mizuki with a shrug. “It’s been two years since I’ve been in a party with someone, and I think being in a new one is cause for celebration.” She realized this wasn’t quite what she’d said before. She hadn’t mentioned a brief party she’d done with the Pedder boys, before that whole thing had ended in disaster. Perhaps she should have, but it was the kind of thing that seemed like it would break the flow of conversation.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Verity after she’d taken a sip. “I’m being a terrible conversationalist. I completely dropped the thread from earlier. You were explaining about the house and your grandfather. How’d you end up… alone?” She hesitated on the word, like she was trying to think of some better way to say it.

“My mother was born here, fully Kiromon, but not actually a part of Kiromo, if that makes sense,” said Mizuki. “My father was actually a quarter Kiromon himself, though the other way around, someone from the area who visited Kiromo and brought back a baby and a wife, that baby being my other grandfather. There are a fair number of them—us—in the area. Anyway, my Kiromon grandfather eventually moved back to Kiromo and encouraged my mom and dad to do the same, because the situation there had changed, and Pucklechurch was a small town in more or less the middle of nowhere. I was seventeen when they were making plans to move, and… we couldn’t take the house with us, obviously, and most of the stuff was going to be sold off, because there are limits to what you can fit on a leycraft, and I barely spoke Kiro, and had a lot of friends.” She shrugged. “I do sometimes wonder what it would have been like if I had gone with them.”

“So you own this whole house?” asked Verity, raising an eyebrow.