This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

The first step was arranging the party in a pentagon, which Hannah did in her mind, though perhaps if she had time later, she would make little symbols for each of them. A pentagon had rotational symmetry, but it also had flanking symmetry when a line was drawn intersecting one of the points. The obvious point to go through was Alfric, for two reasons. The first was that he was the leader of their group, something Hannah didn’t dispute even if she did think of herself as his deputy. The point around which the flanking should happen needed to be the most important of the points. The second reason was that he was male: both ‘halves’ of the pentagon would then contain half a male and two females, preserving gender symmetry and overall reflection.

This left the question of where each of the girls should go. There were three configurations, and Hannah ran through all of them in her mind, trying to find which one was best. Unfortunately, there were too many methods of division, and they kept giving different answers. Mizuki and Hannah were both clearly more outgoing, while Verity and Isra were less so. Verity and Hannah had more experience with the wider world and had come from larger cities, in a fashion, while Mizuki and Isra were (approximately) natives of Pucklechurch. There were two who used magic and one who was a cleric, with a fourth who had only a bow, which was no good at all. They couldn’t be easily divided by the darkness of their skin, or their hair, or their different sense of fashion. For the most part, Hannah didn’t know them well enough to make good judgments about their personalities or how they saw the world.

Eventually, because she didn’t want her morning prayer to be a waste, Hannah decided that it should be her and Verity on one side with Mizuki and Isra on the other, but she wasn’t sure about which spots each of them should take, and the whole thing felt like an exercise in frustration, because none of it sang to her sense of symmetry. Garos would look at the arrangement and not be pleased. She would pray again, perhaps picking a different person to be the center, and as she talked to them, she would try to tease out the ways in which they reflected each other. Unfortunately, she had yet to find a firm grasp.

Hannah therefore started the morning feeling a bit out of sorts. It happened from time to time, and while her ability to call on Garos was unaffected, she didn’t feel quite right with the world. The last time it had been when she focused too much on the wrong parts of her own body. While she was perfectly symmetricalized, there were limits to symmetricalization. The lungs could be symmetrical with each other, which required moving the heart to the center, but the heart was an awkward, asymmetric shape, and the guts snaked and twisted back and forth in a person’s belly, with various organs sitting in awkward spots without respect to symmetry. If she put herself in the wrong mindset, all she could focus on was the hideous imperfection. Worse than those failures of bilateral symmetry were the other symmetry failures of the body, the way that the legs and arms seemed to almost mirror each other, the way the hands and feet were clearly made from a similar map but far too different from each other. In the seminary, there had been classes on human anatomy, and Hannah had always cringed at seeing all these issues, something that she felt alone in because no one else seemed to mind. One day in the seminary, while looking through books in the library, she’d found a thick tome that went on about theoretical changes to the body that would bring it to greater levels of symmetry, which she had loved, mostly because it made her feel seen. But of course the first verse of the first section was, ‘Man is not of Garos alone’, a refrain that each of the six holy books had in common, a plea to unity that hadn’t always been heard.

As she walked from the Pucklechurch temple to Mizuki’s house, she tried to turn her thoughts away from imperfections, but there were times when that was difficult. On seeing Mizuki’s house though, Hannah’s mind lightened, because it was a house of immense and deliberate symmetry.