Chapter 27: Dungeons

It was decided that Jerome would be sent back to the Guild, along with the sleeping members of his party. The Guildmaster would personally debrief them later, once the paladin and his team had a little more time to absorb what had happened to them. Sev understood this to mean that the Guildmaster would stand in the corner of the room and stare at them under the full effects of her anti-perception Skills for a solid few hours, making sure that no one was reapplying any geases.

But she would also be making sure that they were okay, and understood the depths of what they had gotten themselves into. There was a good chance the team would split, she said, but the Guild would provide them with all the resources they needed to continue adventuring if they wanted to, including Guild-mandated therapy.

For that to work, though, Histre had to be separated from the party. Jerome had protested this a little, but it was a halfhearted sort of protest; remnants of the part of the geas that urged him to trust the angel, perhaps. Derivan's ability to partially circumvent the Guildmaster's skills came in useful here — he could warn them if the angel seemed to be using a skill of some sort.

These were all largely just precautions that they were taking because it made sense to take them. Jerome seemed genuinely apologetic for all that he'd done (and was getting moreso by the minute, as he processed more and more the extent of what the geas had done to him), and Histre seemed... appropriately chastised.

Mostly, this meant that the angel was floating listlessly around the room, like they weren't quite sure what to do with themselves.

"Are you... doing okay?" Sev asked after a moment, a little awkwardly. He'd never spoken to an angel before.

"Yes. No. I am between." Histre paused, like they were considering saying something more, but didn't continue.

"Do you know if Aurum is... upset?" Sev asked cautiously.

"He is calling me." The angel swirled, perhaps a little guiltily again. "...He has been calling on me for a while. But he needed protection. I did not go."

"Oh my god," Sev groaned.

"I think maybe you should answer that call," Max said, raising an eyebrow at the angel. Histre shifted, a little agitated, golden cylinders clanging haphazardly against one another.

"Jerome," the angel said in protest. "I failed him. He needs—"

"He doesn't," Max said, but she said it as gently as she could; her eyes searched as if to find a place where she could pat the angel on the shoulder, but she ended up settling for awkwardly patting a wing instead. "He'll be fine. The Guild will handle making sure he's okay. You made a mistake, and that's okay too. Come back when you understand us mortals a little bit more, and we'll throw you a party, okay?"

"Aurum might be calling you because he needs you," Sev added, quietly. At that, Histre froze.

"Tell Jerome. I am sorry," Histre said.

Max would later explain that what Histre performed then was a planeshift — the exact same kind that brought people from Earth over into Obreve, though those shifts often happened out in the wild, where few people were around to observe it. Angels and demons, it seemed, traveled in much the same way, except whatever kind of planeshift they were doing required vastly more energy.

Which was probably why it made all of them stagger backwards. Max — and to a lesser extent, Derivan — were the only ones that seemed relatively immune to the cracks in reality that slammed outwards; ripped into the air was pure and utter void, then an impossible, radiating light, then glittering gold —

And then Histre was gone.

Sev breathed out, slowly. Max just sighed.

"That's that for a while," she said softly. "Gods almost never send down angels like that. It takes too much energy, and calling them back takes almost as much. He won't be able to do that again anytime soon, and by that time..."

"He must've been desperate," Sev said quietly. "Probably still is."

"I feel bad for him," Max agreed. "But... it doesn't change the fact that he went around putting geases on people. And what Histre did here is one thing, but all the other individuals with some form of geas on them... It's going to take him a lot of time to win back any trust. And if you're right, he doesn't have much time left at all."

"People are dangerous, pressed into a corner," Sev mused quietly. "And I guess gods are people too, here."

"In light of all this..." Max frowned. "I'm tempted to get the Guildmaster to push for more Guild involvement in this dungeon. But you four might really be our best bet on finding out what's in there, and why Aurum was so interested."

"I think..." Sev paused, then groaned. "No, wait, you're right. All the gods are interested. That's why I was bombarded with all those clerics when I went to the temple — they're all worried about something. Why is this happening now?"

"That," Max said. "Is a good question. When you find out, please let the rest of us know, too."

"That's if we can," Sev muttered, glancing at his companions. All of them wore severe expressions. "Okay. First we get some rest, but then we need to finally get into that dungeon."

Everyone nodded. And then Derivan paused, a little awkwardly, and stared at his screen.

"So," he said. "It seems four was not the limit on my stats. I now have something called... Shift?"

Everyone groaned.

Shift, they decided, was something they'd have to figure out later. The dungeon was their main priority right now, and 'shift' was vague enough that there was very little they could do to test the stat; the obvious correlation was that it was related to whatever Histre had done to shift back between planes, but that was the limit of the guesses they had.

Derivan could not, for instance, shift himself between planes. Perhaps because the stat was so low, but Max seemed convinced that it wouldn't give him control of planeshifting in and of itself; that skill, she said, was completely outside the system.

But if the dungeon had answers, then maybe it would have answers for this, too. So it was decided that that would be their next destination.

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They immediately ran into a problem.

"The first delve team is already in the dungeon," the guard informed them. They'd approached the Elyran camp that was set up just outside the newly-formed dungeon, and stopped just before entering — good thing, too, since the errors when trying to enter a dungeon that already had people in it were... unpleasant. "It's closed until they're out."

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me," Misa groaned. "I want to get into this damn place already. Can't you get them out or something?"

"That's not my call," the guard said somewhat apologetically. To his credit, he seemed like he was being genuine. "You're gonna have to talk to the research lead. He's a bit further in camp. He's pretty friendly, though, so he might help you out?"

"He'd better," Misa grumbled, and the guard looked abruptly pretty worried, especially given the way she was fingering the mace on her belt. Sev snorted, leaning in to stage-whisper to him.

"Don't worry. She's just grumpy. She wouldn't actually hurt a fly," he said, winking. The guard swallowed once, watching Misa.

"Except that time she did hurt a fly," Vex mused to himself. "But it was a big one and it was trying to eat me. So I think that's fair."

"I do not think that is helping," Derivan commented, his voice tinged with amusement.

"Misa, leave the poor man alone and let's go find the guy he's talking about," Sev chuckled. She was putting on a bit of a show, he knew — she had a tendency to do that whenever the team was feeling low, leaning into an archetype so that the people that really knew her would smile, just a little bit. For all that she pretended at gruffness, she had a good head on her shoulders for understanding the people around her.

And so, when they turned to leave, Misa turned around and gave the guard a friendly wave. "Thanks for the help!" she called back.

The poor guard just blinked in confusion.

Thankfully, the way the research camp was set up, it didn't actually take very long for them to figure out who the research lead was. There was a massive control center set up in the middle of the camp, with stone structures jutting out of the ground to act as a physical back for [Scry] screens. On every screen were different angles of what Sev assumed was the delve team; four individuals, led by a human captain that seemed to specialize in melee. Five total.

"This... is a hell of a setup," he muttered. "Is this how Elyra does dungeon delves?"

"Elyra's interested in figuring out what makes dungeons tick, so they use a lot of analytical tools and spells to understand the inner workings of a dungeon," Vex answered. He seemed at least a little distracted, and his tail swung around anxiously. "Normally scrying spells have trouble penetrating into the dungeons in the first place — that's why we send scouts. But Elyra figured out a way to anchor scrying spells to their delvers, and now we've got this setup..."

The researchers were muttering to themselves about spatial compression and dungeon geometry. Below every scrying screen, Sev noticed, were knobs and dials that seemed related to...

... he had no idea. This was Vex's area of expertise. All he saw were knobs and dials, which he hadn't actually expected to see anywhere in this world to begin with.

"What is the point of the stone?" Derivan asked curiously.

"Light bleeds through the kind of illusory spells we use for this," Vex said with a shrug. "Actual full illusion spells are more costly. Stone is an easy cast-and-forget, and then cheap illusion spells let us see what's going on without expending too much mana."

"You sure know a lot about us!" Someone called down to them — had he heard them? He wasn't anywhere near them. The person in question was a lizardkin that wore glasses and what was clearly a labcoat, though why he was wearing a labcoat at all when everyone else was dressed in more practical field attire was a different question entirely. "Wanna come up here and introduce yourselves?"

"Uh," Sev said, staring at the platform that the lizardkin was standing on.

It was a giant, very tall stone platform.

With no steps.

"...Yes?" Sev tried.

The person who was obviously the research lead grinned at them, waved a hand, and — there was a vague feeling of consent, like a spell was asking to lift them up and he had to say yes. But he did, and evidently the rest of his teammates did too, because they all found themselves carried up onto the platform and deposited rather unceremoniously on the floor.

The researcher grinned at them. "I'm Kestel. Head of research. You're the adventuring team from the Guild, right? I hear one of the teams pulled back, but they didn't really tell us why."

"It's kind of complicated," Sev deadpanned.

"As long as we keep the food aid deals, we're not really worried about it," Kestel said with a shrug. Sev exchanged glances with the rest of his team; as far as he knew, the Guild was handling that now. The reveal that geases were involved had complicated things, but not as much as they'd expected; as much as people were angry about their geases, they were also grateful for them being removed. "We just started a delve, so there isn't actually much for you to do right now, but we can put you in for the next one. You wanna stick around and watch? We could always use some adventurer feedback, and this will give you a sense of what the dungeon is like before you go in."

"I'd rather be in the dungeon," Misa muttered, but her eyes were already tracking the images on the scrying screens.

Vex, Derivan, and Sev settled in to watch, too.

It wasn't long before they noticed something was wrong.

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