Chapter 6: Chapter 6 – To Indulge A Boundless Curiosity

I had a thousand questions for my guide, and every question generated more. They called, for example, the smaller trees planted in the village redwoods, and the larger ones I’d seen in the forest titanwoods; the odd rings of sky I’d noticed in the Forest—formally the Southern Edgewood Dungeon Biome—was from focusing light with an almost literal magical lensing effect that hardened, heated, and dehydrated a small volume of wood to burn out pests and parasites.

If I’d made the unwise choice of putting my hand there, I might not have kept the hand.

“Kibosh is a Dungeon Village that’s built to the Standard Plan.” Kelly was sauntering down the road, having released my hand so that she could gesture more emphatically as she answered my latest question. “We’re built looking in, of course. We’ve got the dungeon and primary fortifications in the middle, and the Five Pillars around that: Hall of the Thousand, Delving Guild, Tower—of the Arcane, but nobody says that—which is also the Guild of Mages, Hall of Writ, and Guild of Crafts. The gates are at the four cardinals, and they have names for what’s in front of them; Tome in the south, Hammer in the north, Rise in the east for Levali’s refectory, Fall in the west for Thesha’s.”

“Hold up, hold up.” I stopped in the street, feeling the development of a burgeoning headache and rubbing my temples as though that were going to help. “Okay, most of those things you just said I can probably infer by context, at least sort of. But this is kind of a lot, and I’d rather you explain a bit more, instead of just listing. Starting with Writ, maybe? Magical language proficiency or no, there’s too many things it could mean.”

“Is that really—” I looked up; Kelly was stopped in the middle of the road, staring at me with… unhappiness? She shook her head as if to clear it, pressing her hands together in that gesture she’d shown me earlier, and then nodded briskly, good humor reasserting itself on her face. “Right, no, we need to prioritize, and that was the third last question before we move on! Okay. I know it’s a lot, and yes, all of this you’ll need to know eventually, but there’s something more urgent to talk about. Now. Do you trust me to do my job?”

I blinked at her a few times. “... yes?” I thought about it a bit more, then shrugged. “Other than not having much choice about it, yes. Nobody I’ve run into here seems incompetent, and you’ve been doing this a while, right?”

“Then trust me to know what I’m doing. Trust me when I say that there’s something we need to go over. Okay?” She sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than me, but I nodded anyway. “I’m not going to explain everything right away, because there’s too much to explain and I want to make sure you’re not late to the first seating. But, um. This should have been the very first thing. Technically, the Captain should have covered it, but I know she doesn’t. Do you know what a siren sounds like? The warning kind?”

“Yeah, actually.” It wasn’t the most pleasant of memories, and I acknowledged the recollections even as I let them flow through me and away. “I’m… familiar with them.”

“Good! Now, this is important. If you hear a warning siren, and you get an intrusive System message of any kind, no matter what it says? If you’re with me, you get to me, and get skin-to-skin contact.” She grabbed my hands, gently, startling me with her intensity. “I’ll teleport us both outside the walls. If you’re not, you run. Don’t grab anything that’ll slow you down, don’t slow down to grab anything. Run. On the skyroads if you’re close to one, on the ground otherwise. That’s your Breach Protocol, for if the dungeon decides to kill us all and the delvers are incompetent enough to let it try.” Her eyes bore into mine, utterly serious for once. “Do you understand, Sophie?”

I swallowed, my throat suddenly dry. “Yeah.”

“Can you tell me in your own words?”

“Intrusive notification plus a siren means a Breach. If you’re around, I grab your hands, you get us out of there; if you’re not, I bail, book it to the nearest gate. High, low, doesn’t matter.”

“Okay. Good.” She spun on her heels, but not before I saw a welter of emotions cross her face, upset and relief written in her expression and body language. “Just so you know, there’s no chance it’ll actually happen. The delvers here do their jobs and the dungeon hasn’t ever had a deviation. We do drills, once a year, but those don’t have the System message so there’s no risk of confusing them and we aren’t due for at least a season. So. Um. Okay. We can go back to the Village layout, while we keep moving.”

I picked up my pace to catch up with her, putting my hand at the small of her back. This was obviously something I’d have to dig into, if only to assuage an entire swathe of worrisome questions and fascinating implications, but this wasn’t the time and she probably wasn’t the person. “Tome, Hammer, Rise, and Fall.”

She took a deep breath, visibly relaxing. “Yeah! Um. Those are the four gates.” She slowed down a little as we walked, and I followed her, letting my hand fall. “We also call the sides of the village by the gate names; so where we are now is Tome, but we’re heading towards Rise. Usually, in the mornings, Tome is pretty busy with the littles all either running around out here or studying around the Library, and then after lunch they mostly stick to their quints. Or someone else’s quint, but that’s when everyone gardens.”

“Which explains the sounds, I guess.” I’d mostly tuned out the sounds of children sometime during the dumpling-eating process, but I was noticing them again, now that she’d mentioned them. They sounded… happy, a little wild in that way that children are at the best of times.

I’d often felt like you could tell a lot about how a society was structured by how their kids behaved, and thus far I was tentatively pleased with what I was hearing.

“The thing about Tome in the afternoons,” she continued, “is that it’s not really where anyone is. Most of the Guard's out patrolling, littles are all elsewhere, and folks studying aren’t all that loud. Now, Rise and Fall, there’s your shop-houses, and Hammer has the workshops and craft-houses, and those are loudest in the morning too, just ‘cause traditionally that’s when you do the hardest, biggest work, you know? Well, you don’t, I guess.”

“Yeah, I really don’t.” I shrugged. “I’d usually have done my work in the afternoons, if I’d had a choice. Not that I ever did; I’d say experiments were scheduled for other peoples’ convenience, not mine, if their lives hadn’t sucked even worse than mine. At least I didn’t get asked to work overtime, since they’d have to pay me for it; the postdocs were always putting in ten-hour days, and they weren’t even the worst of the lot.”

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“That’s…” Kelly had stopped in the road again, and she was staring at me with an expression of confusion on her face. “That seems short-sighted? You are human, right?”

“Oh, no, it’s totally short-sighted. Was short-sighted. And abusive, and exploitative.” I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling again that mental itch of knowing that there was more to be done than I could ever get done, that I was behind on my duties, always, no matter what. “Let’s not talk about that,” I said quietly, and Kelly nodded slowly. “Anyway,” I continued after a moment, trying to fill the sudden awkward silence, “how many of these quints are there? Am I going to be expected to garden? Because let me assure you, I have a black thumb. Plants that other people swore were indestructible and immortal died aplenty under my care.”

She snickered in that charmingly inelegant way of hers. “Even if you live in a quint, you don’t have to garden. How many are there?” She scratched the back of her head with one hand, scrunching up her face a little. “Most folks who like some distance wind up taking a shop-house instead of trying to live alone in a quint, but there’s a few. But mostly it’s kin to a quint, like they say, and we’ve got twelve of them with all five houses being lived in, and two of them are palmer quints—that’s when it’s not a family living in any of the five. Friends, usually, or cheerful strangers who don’t like too much distance.”

“And that’s with how many people again? A hundred and…”

Kelly shrugged. “I don’t know the exact number. More than a hundred seventy, less than a hundred eighty? Some of the herd-families don't stay in one town more than a season, they run the ring, they call it. Makes it hard to keep track, ‘cause it’s not the same ones every time. Four out’a the five full quints in Fall are herd-families, and two of the three partials.”

“That’s… fifty-five houses, plus, what, another fifteen? And that’s in Fall.” I studied the houses again. Each of them was about a thousand square feet, with the central vegetable garden being about another thousand, maybe a bit less than that of actual growing space since there were paths and places to sit and gather. Who knew how much produce that was when magic got involved? There was so much greenery here; it was only just starting to sink in how different the vibe was going to be, how I wouldn’t be going back to the stench of even the relatively nice city of San Francisco. And all of this space… “You said there’s another at least thirty-seven or so in Rise. A hundred and seven houses with less than twice that in people?”

“We’re a young village. Herders came here with the founding, but most others, like mine, came less than a hundred years ago. And folks like their space; even when you’re partnered, you might have your own house in the quint, least until you’ve littles to be minding together.”

“Every question answered,” I grumbled good-naturedly, “leaves me with several more. Alright. Lots of houses, people like a little space, it’s like living alone but not, fine. You mentioned shop-houses and craft-houses?”

“Fewer, those.” She started walking again, and as we came around a bend in the road and passed one more set of houses, I saw—properly; I’d been seeing bits of them, obviously—the first of the larger buildings. Each of the ones placed on the inside of the ring road had signs hanging out front, most blank; they were at least twice the footprint of the houses, with a second story that— “Folks live up top,” Kelly said, gesturing at the nearest of the shops, “and have their shop and maybe workshop at ground, storage in the basement; some folks also take a bit of the green for working space, but not all.”

“And across the road is the refectory?” It was a rhetorical question, given the smells of cooking and the first idle people I’d seen thus far lounging on benches outside the structure. “What’re the two side buildings?”

“Travelers’ house and stables.” She sounded pleased for some reason. “One in Rise, one in Fall. Hardly ever get anyone, mind, so mostly Fall stable gets used for sick or laboring shoats, or once in a long while one of the dogs. A few horses here, and what few outsiders we see.”

We walked in companionable silence for a bit, Kelly giving me some time to digest what she’d said so far. It gave me the opportunity to look more closely at the construction of the shops, which seemed to mirror the much larger refectory buildings, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t even appreciate how impressive it all was. Everything was made of smooth, amber stone with a bunch of veining and speckles on it; not smooth blocks of it mortared together, but entire walls of seamless stonework with subtle ornamental patterns.

I’d seen a fair few things in the past day, including the Goddess Artemis, so this wasn’t exactly the most magical sight, but it was almost… no, it was absolutely more impressive for its mundanity. This was magic not just put to the making of a quiet, small village’s houses, it was obviously a casual use of it. The road was, too, I realized; it looked like stone, but there was a little bit of give in it, just enough to make walking more comfortable, and it was some of the best footing I’d ever walked on.

“How much does one of these cost, anyway?” I didn’t know how to ask the question gracefully, so I just made myself break the silence with it, carefully not looking at her. “A place to stay in one of the… the quints, one of these shop-and-house combos, one of those craft-houses you were talking about? I have a little money—” I had a totally unknown amount of money, in fact— “but I have no idea what kind of situation I’m in, financially.”

“Right, that.” Her voice was… wry, mostly, and a little apologetic. “I mean, not that we wouldn’t have gotten around to this eventually, but there’s so much to tell you! Anyway, um. Well, obviously the stone team takes care of the structure, right, but if you want something special from Hammer, sometimes you’ll need to pay to queue-jump, or cover materials?

“And obviously there’s things you can only get on consignment, and that’s coin on your shoulders. If it’s for a business, well, you’ll be eligible for a loan, and that’s a whole thing we’ll talk about later, but it’s usually not a problem to get what you need. Nobody wants you to fail just ‘cause you don’t have the right equipment.”

“Okay, but how much does the stone team cost, that you said takes care of things? How much is…” I looked over at her, grimacing. “How much is the rent?”

She glanced back at me, face twisted in perplexion. “I’m sorry, Sophie, I don’t understand. What do you mean, how much is the rent?”

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