This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

Sharing a bathroom with just one other person was, in comparison, a delight. The temple had two large tanks, one for hot water and the other for cold, put in place before it became clear that the temple was never going to have the twelve full-time clerics as originally planned. Even two clerics in the Church of Symmetry was one and a half clerics too many, but they’d been hoping that Hannah would replace Lemmel. She was the fourth in six years, and there would be a fifth, which she knew was a disappointment to the church, but one she was comfortable with.

Hannah ran the water through both pipes, mixing the hot and cold, and undressed as she allowed the bathtub to fill up to a line she’d marked out early on in her time at Pucklechurch. It was just the right point so that once she was in, the bathtub would be as full as it could be without running the risk of overflowing. She added in a sachet, one of several she kept in a small tin, this one rosemary and lavender. She’d often joked that she liked baths because she was making a tea of herself.

While bath time was Hannah’s most treasured of times, on this particular occasion, it wasn’t doing much to stop her mind from racing. Some of it was undeniably the excitement of the dungeon, not just the battles, but the newness and mystery of it, the entads, the henlings, the things to see and touch. The key was a good memento, but Hannah found herself wishing that she had taken more. Mostly, she wished that the not-dragon hadn’t destroyed so much of the room in the battle, because there were things of glass and wood that had been completely smashed as it spun and thrashed.

Her mind went to her new party members and what she knew about them, which admittedly wasn’t much. She found herself daydreaming about what the future might be like, how they would all fit with each other in six months’ time, all living together in Mizuki’s large house, eating meals together, and every so often, maybe two or three times a week, going down into the depths of a new dungeon together.

The daydreaming helped to calm her down and get her thoughts in order, and after an hour-long bath, which required several injections of hot water and a bit of draining to compensate, Hannah got out of the tub, brushed her teeth, and went to bed, falling asleep before her brain could perk back up again.

She woke early in the morning, as she usually did, and got dressed in a hurry, trying her best to pick something sensible for a day around the town. It was hard to know when or if they were going to another dungeon, but it certainly wasn’t going to be right away. She picked one of her heavier dresses, dark blue with white embroidery around the bust. She tended to like trousers, most of the time, but she’d found that trousers on a woman sometimes sent the wrong message, especially if you were a cleric of Garos.

Breakfast was a hard-boiled egg from the chiller and a fruit pastry that she kept in a small bag. Hannah’s mother had always made breakfast into a production, but Hannah had never seen the point. Breakfast was a meal to be enjoyed quick and cold.

She walked by Mizuki’s house twice, looking inside to see whether there were signs of life, which required going down the little path to it in a way that felt conspicuous. She didn’t want to knock on the door unless Mizuki was awake, but it was hard to tell, and someone like Mizuki, who didn’t have gainful employment, might wait until the third bell to rise. That left Hannah wandering back and forth, pretending to have business somewhere, which very quickly made her feel foolish. This was a prime example of what made a party channel so valuable, but it would be a while before they had it available to them.

Finally, after hemming and hawing about it, Hannah knocked sharply on the door not too long after first bell. She resolved to not knock too hard, or more than once, just in case Mizuki was sleeping, and if there was no response, she’d go back to the temple to twiddle her thumbs, and that would be that.

Mizuki did come to the door though, eventually. She was looking disheveled and had a robe clutched around her, and when she looked at Hannah, it was as though for the first time.

“Hannah?” she asked as she opened the door. “What is it?”

“Oh, sorry to bother,” said Hannah. “I’d only thought… well, that we’re party members now, and—with how things are, I’m not obliged to work at the temple anymore, so I have my day free, and was wonderin’ if you needed anythin’.”

“No,” said Mizuki, frowning. “But come in, come in, it’s cold out.”

“Well, I don’t particularly think so,” said Hannah. “But my family is from far to the south, ay? It’s the summers here that I can’t handle, those two weeks when it’s so hot that you feel like sittin’ in front of the chiller.”

“Shoes off,” said Mizuki as she disappeared into the house.