This Used To Be About Dungeons полностью

There was something poetic about it, Verity decided. It was a glorious garden, fallen from grace, and she was going to rehabilitate it. Perhaps it would be something grand and ornate, especially if she had Isra’s help, but perhaps it would simply be a garden. The parallels to her own life were, perhaps, a stretch, but she felt there was a song there, one that deserved a little bit more time than one simply made up on the spot. A garden of Kiromon delights, left to slowly deteriorate, but with new life breathed into it… Verity smiled and thought about the lyrics, her two great passions melding in her mind.

When they were leaving to go shop, Mizuki debated how much money to take. She had a small crock that she kept some spare rings in, but this was three thousand rings, high denominations that would only be used for larger purchases.

“I don’t like having this much money,” said Mizuki. “I feel like there’s a target on my back.”

“You’re a sorc,” said Hannah. “Seems to me the money is safer with you.”

Mizuki gave an uncomfortable shrug, meant as a ‘yes, but all the same’, and Hannah didn’t press her on it.

They walked together, and Mizuki was happy to have someone to talk to, even if the conversation dipped toward religion a bit too often for her tastes.

“It’s maybe one in ten who feel some attraction to their own gender,” said Hannah. “Half that again who think of it as somethin’ core to them, a fact about themselves rather than just a thing they do. And half that again if it’s only their own gender.”

“Those numbers come from… the census?” asked Mizuki.

Hannah laughed. “No, just some guesses by the church,” she said. “That sort of thing, the numbers, aren’t available at any level of governance, as the Editors didn’t see fit to include it. But you can see, of course, how there’d be problems bein’ in the minority like that, and part of what the Church of Garos does is to help with that. We’ve got a role in the community more than most of the clerics of other gods, ways that we help a specific sort of person. Especially in a place like this, you grow up havin’ these feelin’s that your parents never had, that your friends likely don’t have, and the Church of Garos is there to help you make sense of them and, on occasion, to play matchmaker, if that’s what’s needed.”

“Huh,” said Mizuki. Religion was really not her particular cup of tea. She went to the temple for a sermon every now and then but largely paid more attention to the people around her than to the clerics going on about… whatever. The temple was good for getting some community. She’d never known that Garos, or his church, played matchmaker, but then, why should she?

“And there are sermons and the like, when it’s one of the Garos months or our time in the weekly rotation,” said Hannah. “I’d prefer we focused a bit more on the bits that were more core to Garos, but it’s for the community, to let them know about the struggles of others, to let people know they have a home if it’s needed, and all that. But the church does have a reputation, and it overshadows Garos a bit, again, in my opinion. And it’s interestin’ that men lovin’ men and women lovin’ women isn’t mentioned in the Garam Ashar at all, aside from a few lines that you might interpret that way, if your head was already there. The gods, as a whole, don’t seem like they give a fig about gender. So far as we know, they don’t have gender, though of course you have been ascribin’ it.”

“I’ve never really gone to talk to the clerics,” said Mizuki. “So I guess I don’t know.”

“Gender is a human thing,” said Hannah. “Not godly at all. Now, people find their own meanin’ in what the gods say, what comes to us from revelations to the Chosen and the like, and I’d never begrudge them that, but still.”

Mizuki felt like Hannah did begrudge it, at least a little, but was worried that if she said something, Hannah would continue on with what felt, to Mizuki, like Hannah was toeing a line that wasn’t all that important to toe.

“It’s only been boys, for me,” said Mizuki.

“Ay, I appreciate a good man,” said Hannah.

“I meant romantically,” said Mizuki.

“Ay, me too,” said Hannah.

“Huh,” said Mizuki.

“Well, it’s caused problems for me, as you can understand,” said Hannah. “I like a more manly style of dress, and I’m a cleric of Garos, so of course people make their assumptions. And I know I don’t have a build like you or Verity do, slim and delicate, but that limits my options too.”

Mizuki didn’t think that she and Verity had the same build at all, namely because of the difference in height, but it was true that neither of them could be described as stocky. Verity had cheekbones.

“And the sorts of girls that go for me aren’t the sort of girls that I go for, more’s the shame,” Hannah continued.

“There’s a sort?” asked Mizuki.