This Used to be About Dungeons, ch 170, Halls of Power

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Turns out I got sick with norovirus, which I also had three or four years ago. It was much less bad this time around, but I lost about a day on being sick, then another two days on recovery or something like it. I'm about back to normal now though, so hopefully there will be no further schedule disruptions.

Thanks for reading!

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Mizuki had the helm of flight. Realistically, she was the only one fast enough to catch up to the museum as it ran away from them. Still, the museum was fast, especially for a building, faster than their house was even at a full sprint. Even with her body drawn into its most aerodynamic form, toes pointed, hands slapped against her sides, she was barely keeping up with it.

Mizuki followed after. The tall, thin double doors they’d come out of swung open, and both the pedestals and all the miscellaneous things that had been sitting on them began spilling out, dozens of henlings ejected out the back. The shape of the museum was changing, growing angled, a funnel that led to the door.

<It’s throwing up,> said Mizuki. <Or pooping, I guess.> She was high above the trail of detritus.

<The dagger,> said Alfric. <I’m going in.>

The dagger was part of their standard kit, a pack of things that had been left at the very start of the dungeon, ideally to give them a way out. The dagger was keyed to Alfric, allowing him to teleport to it — once a day. They’d had it for a long time, since just after the first dungeon, but normally just used it for emergencies rather than fast travel.

With the way that the museum was racing down the hillside, uprooting trees and generally running amok, Mizuki thought that teleporting to the dagger was an absolutely horrible idea. Going into a building that might be seconds from collapsing wasn’t something that she would have done, at least not when she had a little bit of time to think about it. It was all rendered moot when Alfric came hurling out the door along with all the other stuff. He was flailing, trying to find something to grab onto, and he almost found purchase on the doorframe before falling ten feet to the ground and hitting it with a thud that made her wince. A birdcage, part of the museum display, landed on top of him.

<Stay with it,> he wheezed, which at least meant that he was alive.

Mizuki sailed after the museum as it tried to escape, trying to figure out how she was going to get it to stop. She was slightly slower than it, but she didn’t need to worry about terrain, and she was catching up when it stumbled, or where it needed to round a hill. It was smooth sailing through the air, and she more or less kept pace.

She was very conscious of how far they were going and how expansive the dungeon seemed to be. They hadn’t had the opportunity to push at the boundaries of one of Verity’s dungeons, but having them be miles across didn’t seem like it was out of the question. That wasn’t going to be a huge problem, but eventually the museum was going to run up against the boundary of this place, and Mizuki didn’t know what was going to happen then.

You could go up and out of a normal dungeon, at least according to Alfric. Muziki had never properly done it, only peeked a few times, but there was generally a ‘blank’ dungeon there, a flat, featureless expanse of land which sometimes continued on practically forever, and sometimes just stopped at an arbitrary wall. It was interesting to think about, but didn’t seem to be interesting to actually experience, so Mizuki had held off, not wanting the disappointment. Now, she was wishing that she had experimented more, so she’d not what to expect from a place like this. She also wished that she’d listened to Alfric a little more closely, but even he had found the ‘beyond the dungeon’ stuff to be boring.

She was only keeping up with the museum because it was knocking into things and plunging its feet into ponds or rivers every now and then before correcting its course. If it managed to get to the boundary of the dungeon, into the blank space, the ‘nothing’ that was sometimes not nothing, that might end up being a problem.

<Alfric, you okay?> asked Mizuki as she flew in closer to the museum. She wasn’t going to take for granted that the museum was just harmlessly running away and taking their exit with it. The legs were skinny, compared to how big the ‘body’ was, but she thought that a hit from one of them would probably end her.

<Fine,> said Alfric, though he was pretty clearly breathing heavily, at least as much as she could hear from his words.

<I’m going to cut the legs off, okay?> asked Mizuki.

There was a brief pause, and Mizuki spent the time extending her sword to its full length. She loved the sword dearly, and hoped that it would be up to the job. She was going to have to talk to Verity about making terrible things that were wet and squishy enough for the blade to go through with a whisper.

<Go, do it,> said Alfric. His tone was firm, supportive, not at all like he was indulging her in a bad idea, which made her feel better.

The museum seemed to sense her. Maybe it wasn’t alive in the conventional sense, it couldn’t have been if Isra hadn’t known it was there, but it also wasn’t a mechanical thing. Mizuki had been spending time with wizard stuff, which was all very regular and ordered, even when compared to entads, and she’d hoped that the building would be like that, despite its scrambling. Instead, it was reeling back from her, losing its footing again as it tried to escape her.

Mizuki swept in and sliced away at the nearest leg, and was pleased to see that the sword cut well, though there was a fluid that came with it, black as pitch, flowing freely, which she couldn’t figure out. It wasn’t blood, especially because it stopped coming out all at once after a few seconds, like a tap that had been slammed shut.

The museum had entered some marshlands, and it was hard to tell whether the missing limb was slowing it, because the high steps it was now taking were making it go at half the speed it had been before.

<Cut a leg,> said Mizuki, who had only belatedly remembered that she was supposed to be reporting. <The thing’s leg, the treasury or whatever, came off clean, and it’s in some marsh right now. I think I could fly in, but that seems crazy dangerous.>

<That’s our exit,> said Alfric. <We need it. Cut the rest of the legs off, we’ll catch up.>

<I’m tryin’ to be patient here, but what do you need from us, and what’s goin’ on?> asked Hannah. The party had been split when Mizuki had taken off, then split again when Alfric had used the dagger.

<These marshes aren’t going to last forever, only another two minutes,> said Mizuki. <I can go in now, or try attacking this thing more, bring down the building somewhere else. Not sure how deep the marsh is, but I don’t think we want the building flooded.>

<Go in,> said Alfric. <See if you could go out, but don’t leave the dungeon. I just want to know whether the exit is even intact.>

Mizuki pulled back from the walking museum, lined herself up, then swooped in through the wide-open back door.

The place was almost completely wrecked, and the walls had been sloped, funneling everything toward the back. Mizuki flew slowly, not wanting to hit anything, but the museum was still moving, and the helm’s flight was acting all weird. When the building turned, her helm didn’t turn with it, and it almost immediately made her sick in a way that nothing ever had before. She willed herself not to throw up and pushed on ahead, almost slamming into a wall when the museum suddenly changed direction. It was dark, as the overhead windows had shrunk down to pinpricks, which left Mizuki with only her tiny lantern light, worn as a necklace.

She slowed down even more when she reached the long hallway that had held all the statues, but the hallway was still there, even though the museum didn’t seem to have a matching protuberance.

The dungeon exit was still there, and she breathed a sigh of relief.

<Exit is still there,> said Mizuki. <Get in the chest and come to me. I’m going to hurl in a bit, if I don’t respond, that’s what I’m doing.>

<Getting in the chest now,> said Verity. <It’ll get to Alfric, we’ll pick him up, then to you. Be ready.>

It felt odd for Verity to be calling the shots rather than Hannah, and Mizuki wondered what was going on with the others. The chest rides were old hat by now, something they did so often that it was practically second nature, and they had policies and procedures for it, along with special little pieces of equipment, mostly some nice ladders that could be lowered down so that everyone had a place to put their hands and feet. It still wasn’t a good way to travel, but it was fast, and sometimes that was what mattered.

Mizuki waited, then waited some more, and finally, started moving toward the back of the museum. The chest would always go to the nearest person unless it had been told to stay put, and she worried that it would run under the museum rather than going through the door.

<Problem,> said Alfric as Mizuki reached the back door again.

The museum was moving around Mizuki, bumping into her, and it was strangely easier to navigate without flying, as there was no confusion between what the helm was doing and how the museum was bucking and jostling her.

When Mizuki looked out the door, holding on tight to the molding, she saw what the problem was — the museum must have given the chest a hard kick, or accidentally stepped on it. The chest was broken, cracked, and receding into the distance as Alfric climbed up out of it.

They had exited out of the forests, the marshland, and everything else identifiable. The museum off into the twilight realm of the dungeon, a perfectly flat expanse of brown. It wasn’t soil, rock, or anything else, it was something called ‘mund’, a useless substance that had no practical function. The museum had sped up, now free from obstruction, and was continuing along at a fast climb. Mizuki had thought that it had gotten less bouncy.

<We got kicked, I think,> said Alfric.

<How broken is it?> asked Mizuki.

<Cut the rest of the legs,> said Alfric. <The chest doesn’t matter unless we get out.>

Mizuki leaned out the door and tried to look at the legs. The one she’d cut was still missing, thankfully, but there were nine others. She didn’t know whether that was more or less than there had been when it started out, given that it was terribly difficult to count the legs of a moving creature. If she could just cut the legs, it would stop moving, which was a sound enough plan in theory. In practice, it was hard to tell how fast the thing was moving, and if she exited the back, she worried she’d be left behind.

Instead, Mizuki moved to the front of the museum, near the throat, or the neck, or whatever she was supposed to think about the hallway of statues as. This was tougher work than she’d thought it would be, mostly due to the movement of the museum and the fact that the helm wasn’t helping her, but she made it eventually.

<You’re way off in the distance,> said Alfric. <We might need to regroup.>

<No,> said Mizuki. She’d gotten to a corner near the front. <I think I’ve got this.>

She extended the sword all the way, a full nine feet, almost twice as long as she was tall. She swung the sword through the air with abandon, cutting the wall, until a giant chunk of stone dropped away, smacking down onto the mund with practically no sound at all. Mizuki leaned out the hole she’d made, and was pleased to see that she was just above the foremost leg, which was moving with a steady rhythm along the flat, featureless area.

Mizuki handled the sword carefully, lining it up with the legs, then at the last second, simply jumped out of the hole and flew alongside the galloping museum. The legs came off one by one as the museum raced ahead of her, a single sword stroke cutting through the bulk on one side, and when the second-to-last had fallen, spilling more of that black fluid, the whole thing began to tip to one side.

<Got it!> called Mizuki.

The museum had collapsed, and was barely holding together its shape. The intact legs were still kicking, as though they expected some movement to be possible. Mizuki circled in the air, looking to see whether more legs were regrowing, or if the museum had more tricks in store for them, but it seemed dead, or at least dead enough.

<We’re still with the chest,> said Alfric. He was far enough away that she couldn’t see him. <Stay with it, make sure that it doesn’t move.>

<Will do,> said Mizuki.

She landed on the mund, which let her sink into it a half inch or so. The museum was wiggling, just a bit, but not actually moving much. Maybe given a half hour it might manage to kick itself in a half circle, but Mizuki wasn’t too worried about that.

She was feeling pleased with herself, which was something that she had only rarely been in the past week. She’d never say it to Alfric, or in front of Alfric, or somewhere that it could get back to him, but dungeons were a place where reckless, bombastic displays of power were rewarded. Back in the real world, people would get mad at you for even something as simple as a harmless demonstration fireball at a party. Even some supposed friends had suggested that maybe it should have been done outside.

Here in the dungeon though, she could fly inside the belly of an unknown creature, or maybe a not-a-creature, cut off its legs, venture into the unknown dead region of the dungeon, and then feel good about it.

Waiting took some time. They had travel entads, but most of them were based on hexes, and they weren’t in a place that had hexes. She checked in every now and then to see whether they were okay, but they were just taking some time to walk.

<The chest seems fine,> said Alfric. <It just won’t close properly, which means that we can’t travel in it. It’s still walking, still holding things.>

<Good,> said Mizuki. <I miss you.> That was impulsive, and teasing, and she was left to imagine whether it was the right thing to say or not.

<We miss you too,> Hannah eventually said.

Mizuki took off her gloves and played with the mund. It was almost like mud, except that it wasn’t actually wet. It held together just a little bit, so you could form it into a ball, but as soon as you weren’t holding it, it would flatten out. Mund couldn’t hold a shape, couldn’t be made into bricks, and since it wasn’t actually soil, you couldn’t grow plants in it or anything like that. It was a nothing material, perfectly inert, not a trace of disturbance to the aether.

In fact, this whole area had so little magic that it was startling. Mizuki was used to leveling out the aether when she cast spells, but this was a pond with no ripples — or only the ripples that she had brought with her — and it was almost as though her magical vision had been taken from her, if only because there was nothing for her to see. It was creepy, isolated, and she decided that she liked it quite a bit, though she was sure that half an hour there would grate at her.

It took some time for the others to arrive, since they had to walk from where the chest had taken its hit. Eventually, Mizuki saw them on the horizon, which was a bit of a relief, and she flew to them, then floated alongside them.

<You know, I enjoyed this,> said Mizuki.

<Yeah?> asked Alfric. His feet sank into the mund a bit with every step, and it was making what should have been a light and easy walk into a trudge.

Mizuki would have offered to throw them into extradimensional space and then carry them to the exit, but they hadn’t suggested that, so she assumed that someone else had thought of that and decided against it. Certainly Alfric had wanted her to stay with the museum, keep an eye on it, but he wasn’t complaining that she was with them now.

<No offense, Verity, but I hope you never fully get the hang of it,> said Mizuki.

<If I squint, I can see what you mean,> said Verity.

<There are other ways to get your kicks,> said Hannah. <Take up a sport, for example.>

<Sports are terrible,> said Mizuki, almost by reflex. <Too many rules.>

<We could make up our own sport,> said Alfric. His eyes were on the museum. <Do you think it tossed the dagger on purpose?>

<It didn’t seem very smart,> said Mizuki. <But I guess it might have.>

<You’re asking whether the museum was deliberately constructed for that exact scenario?> asked Verity. <By my subconscious mind in the moment of dungeon creation, or something like that?>

<I don’t know,> said Alfric. <Just a thought. We’ll talk to Pinion, I guess, but I think this is exactly the sort of thing that he’s hoping to find out, rather than the kind of thing he would actually know.>

<Probably,> said Verity. She had her eyes on the museum too, which was still kicking. <I think I’ve found the dungeons most frightening when we haven’t been sure we could get out, but it’s a different kind of terror from enormous beasts. If it is self-sabotage, or a response to my thinking, that would be bad.>

<I was going to say that next time I should drive a piton into the wall and strap the dagger in place, so it can’t move,> said Alfric. <But if you know that’s a possibility, then perhaps it would be foiled. I’ve noticed, through the history of our time with the dungeons, that we rarely run into the same problem twice. Things that I’ve corrected for, made plans around, don’t seem to show up again.>

<Might be chance,> said Hannah.

<Might not be,> said Alfric with a nod.

<I’m sayin’ that we can’t lay it all on Verity,> said Hannah. <It’s influence, nothin’ more, at least so far as we know. It’s a few things here or there, a certain pattern when she wasn’t doin’ it on purpose, different patterns now that she’s forcin’ it, but you can’t just dip into the same well of explanation for everythin’, ay?>

<No, I know,> said Alfric. <It’s just … two steps forward, one step back. We could easily have lost the museum, or had the entrance collapse. In some sense it’s exciting that this dungeon could even do that, since I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an entrance that gets up and moves on its own. In another sense, the challenging of assumptions include some of the assumptions that make dungeons a safe place to be, which is less ideal.>

<’Less ideal’,> snorted Mizuki. <You know, I think we’re probably going to die one of these times.>

<Verity will get it under control,> said Alfric.

<I’m not sure I will,> said Verity. <This was me trying as hard as I could to pin everything in place, to make sure that we weren’t at risk. It’s possible I can patch the holes, but if there’s something responsive, or if it’s going to draw on my fears … if the dungeons are adversarial, then I don’t think I can make them truly safe.>

<I don’t think they are adversarial,> said Alfric. <Under normal conditions, the only adversarial part are the monsters, and they’re mostly just there.>

They had approached the museum, which was still on its side, still kicking into the mund, where it had dug itself a bit of a hole with the fruitless movements of its legs. It looked pathetic, as much as a building with legs could look pathetic.

<Is this what you felt?> Alfric asked Isra. <When you said there was something?>

<I don’t know,> said Isra. She squinted at the museum, as though that would help. <No, I don’t think so. It’s not alive. It’s also not dead. It’s hard to say. I think I might have been sensing the bodies.>

<The bodies?> asked Alfric.

<Maybe,> said Isra. <Dead things … I’ve never tried to move one, to speak with one.>

<You speak to clouds, to wind,> said Mizuki.

<It seems wrong, somehow,> said Isra. She was still staring at the museum. She held a hand out in front of her. “Still yourself,” she said.

The museum kept up its pointless kicking.

<I don’t think that thing is a creature,> she said. <It might have been the bodies.>

<We took a dozen of them,> said Alfric. <We can test once we’re out of the dungeon.>

<Is that … safe?> asked Verity.

<Why wouldn’t it be?> asked Alfric.

<I don’t know,> said Verity.

<No, I’m seriously asking, if there’s a reason to suspect that it would be less safe than taking a dead creature out, or a henling, or an entad, or anything else, then yes, we need to think about it and talk about it,> said Alfric. <The only reason to take them out is curiosity and research. We don’t need them.>

<They’re not alive,> said Isra. <They’re also not dead … I don’t think. But I might be able to fill them with my soul, make them … move.>

Verity looked disgusted by the notion, but Alfric looked curious.

<They don’t have muscles,> said Alfric.

<Then maybe not,> shrugged Isra.

<Do we take them, or not?> asked Alfric. <If the argument is that they’re creepy, then I agree, but don’t think that’s enough.>

<Let’s take them,> said Mizuki. <We can burn them if we don’t end up wanting them. Or we’ll build coffins to keep them in.>

<Yes,> said Hannah. <That would be much less creepy.>

<I don’t see a principled reason not to keep them, if that’s what you’re looking for,> said Verity. <And I do think the most likely scenario is that they’re simply creepy, nothing more.>

<Alright,> said Alfric. He strode toward the museum, slowing down as he neared it.

Mizuki hung back and looked at the chest more closely. It wasn’t quite a pet, but she was still worried about it. This wasn’t the first time it had been injured, since it had a corner chopped off in a prior dungeon, but some of the wood was splinted and broken on one end of it, and the hinges were bent. Entads could sometimes repair themselves as a very minor power, but the damage looked extensive, and not the sort of thing that Hannah was all that likely to be able to fix with just the power of Garos. So long as it had its magic, there was a good chance for a full recovery, but Mizuki still felt bad for the entad. There was such a thing as an entad doctor, though only in a large city like Plenarch.

<This dungeon was huge,> said Mizuki after she’d given the chest a pat. <Miles across, and not all featureless. We could have spent a week in here and still not seen it all.>

<We could have spent the whole day in the village,> said Alfric. <There were surely more entads there.>

<We’re gathering information,> said Verity. <Iterating on dungeon creation. We’re not here for exploitation. And given the surprises, the convention breaking surprises, I think it’s sensible to get out while we can.>

<Fair,> said Alfric. <Next time, we’ll have plans in place to avoid all this, and I’d like for us to make a proper go at exploitation.>

<Even with the danger?> asked Verity.

They had reached the mouth of the museum, or the butt, as Mizuki had been thinking of it. She wasn’t sure whether to share the point of view with the others, but it had definitely looked like the museum was pooping out stuff as it ran away. That included Alfric, who’d tumbled out of it in a way that would have seemed a lot more funny if he hadn’t been hurt.

<If we go for full extraction, we’ll get more information about the dungeon,> said Alfric. <We’ll come in with better travel entads next time, I’ll buy some to help us cross the large distances. Think of it this way, if we take out fifty entads, we’re not only making a lot of money, we’re getting a good sample that we can look at to see whether the entads we’ve been pulling are better, worse, or just different. If we break the rules of entads … that’s important.>

He was understating it. Entads had a lot of bounds to them, a lot of rules that constrained them, and breaking any of those rules outright might be either catastrophic or whatever the opposite of catastrophic was. Revolutionary, Mizuki supposed, but then again, her grandfather had always said that revolutions were never without their pain points.

The floor of the museum was off-kilter, so they move carefully, and then they needed a ladder to make it to the hallway, where they ended up stepping into and out of the alcoves that the statues had been in.

<On the plus side, nothing actually tried to kill us,> said Mizuki.

<I think the museum did,> said Alfric. <I don’t know how else you explain the condition the chest is in.>

<Maybe it didn’t know people were in there,> said Mizuki. <Maybe it was just trying to squash a bug, on reflex.>

<I’ll try to make sure we don’t run into something like this again,> said Verity. <No promises that I’ll succeed.>

The dungeon exit loomed large. It was still on its side, and Mizuki wondered how they would handle getting through, whether they’d experience a shift in gravity or something like that. It was unsettling to have a dungeon exit move like that. She wondered what they’d have done if the museum had gotten away from them, if she hadn’t been fast enough.

Alfric did the traditional double and triple checks to make sure that they were ready to leave, then waited to be the last one out.

Mizuki found herself unexpectedly nervous as she crossed over the threshold. One of the assumptions of the dungeons, one of the conventions, was that the dungeon exit spat you back out where you’d come in. If Verity could break dungeon conventions, there was a chance that she had inadvertently broken that convention too, that the exit would spit them into a different dungeon, or a different part of the same dungeon, or put them on the other side of the world, or —

But she was still in the middle of that thought when she saw Bib and Pinion, more or less where they’d been left, playing a game with a handful of marbles.

They’d made it out, as they always had before, except for the times they’d died.

Mizuki smiled to herself. There was entad testing ahead of them.