“It’s easy to preach self-reliance when you’ve got an easy life,” said Mardin. “I mean, he was always aware of how much easier things were for him, it wasn’t like he was actually preaching. Most of the time, anyway. But we were still getting the raw end of the deal, it felt like. We weren’t going into it for the glory, we were going because we could make a lot of money if we did enough dungeons, or even relatively few of them. It was money that we could use to pay for a better house for our parents or take vacations.”
“We’ve been at it for pretty much a year,” said Grig. “We’ve got fifty-four dungeons under our belts. Not to sound like I’m bragging, but we’ve already got enough to retire.”
“Not enough to retire,” said Mardin, rolling his eyes. “But we do have enough in the way of bound entads that if we keep the party together, we can set up shop in Dondrian and start a business that will let us coast forward.”
“And you got there because of what Lola could provide,” nodded Hannah.
“We might have gotten there with Alfric,” Grig said. “It would have taken longer, but the end point would be the same. And,” he looked at Mardin, “Alfric wasn’t like Lola, he wouldn’t have come here on a whim. A whim that, clearly, wasn’t a whim, because it was all in service of getting to Alfric.”
“Maybe,” said Mardin. “Not the kind of thing we should be saying without at least talking to her first.”
“She actually came and spoke with me,” said Mizuki. “I met her. She seemed like she was definitely here for him.”
“Not that you know for certain,” said Hannah with a sigh. “Grig, Mardin, it was nice to meet you, but we worry your noodles are gonna get cold.”
Mizuki turned to her. “I don’t think that I know enough,” she said. “About who Alfric really is, and whether we’re under threat from Lola. She was intense. Maybe I didn’t get that across as much as I should have.”
“She’s harmless,” said Mardin.
“Yeah, that’s a point of disagreement,” said Grig. “But if it’s the version of the day she’s going to keep, then yeah, she hasn’t ever done anything that would rise to the level of an actual crime.”
“See, that’s the kind of phrasing that really doesn’t help me,” said Mizuki. “Alfric was the same.” She pulled a chair from one of the other tables and sat down to join them without asking. “I need to know specifically what she did.”
When they didn’t seem to mind, or at least didn’t push her away, Hannah reluctantly grabbed a different chair and joined. Mizuki seemed intent on pushing things, and her friendliness was being turned into a bit of a weapon. Hannah wondered whether she even knew she was doing it.
“Well,” said Grig. He seemed, at last, to be thinking about how much to share.
“No one knows,” said Mardin. “It’s all rumors.”
The woman who was serving came over with their noodle bowls, and Hannah asked whether she could have a second. There was a brief pause as there was some rearrangement, with another table being brought over and seats being swapped. Hannah and Mizuki ended up sitting crosswise from each other, which felt a bit unusual once they were there but didn’t warrant correcting.
“Okay,” said Grig. “I’ll hold off on my noodles until Hannah gets hers, and then I can tell you about the rumors.”
“Appreciated,” nodded Hannah. “I’d rather get them more in-depth from Alfric, but if Mizuki is going to insist,” she said with a shrug.
“There were rumors about both of them,” said Grig as Mardin slurped his noodles. “But early on, it was mostly about her, saying… well, saying that she’d been off doing some social exploration in those undone days. The chronos have a reputation for being a bit fast, since they can live each day twice or more, and some of the rumors around Lola were about as bad as they came. Some of it was violence, some of it was relationships, and she got treated like—well, like an adult, by a lot of people, starting early on. That made it a bit hard for people to hang out with her.”
“Happened before our teens,” said Mardin between bites of noodles.
“Well, right,” said Grig. “Maybe when she was eleven or twelve. We didn’t know her then, and didn’t really know her until she was in the Junior League, and then only by reputation. I think she went to a nice school early on, then switched over to mostly having tutors.”
“And the rumors,” said Mizuki. “They were… that she’d killed people?”
Grig nodded. “In the undone days, yeah,” he said. He shrugged. “Like with a lot of rumors, it’s hard to know where they came from, and given they were undone days, it seems like Lola would have been the only one to know. Or maybe she levied threats against someone, telling them what she’d done to them, but those could easily have been lies. Hard to say. The other side of it was a bunch of rumors about her being with all kinds of guys, which—it’s even harder to know where those rumors came from, but I have an easier time believing it.”
“What does she say?” asked Hannah.
“Nothing,” said Grig. “She rolls her eyes and moves on. We don’t… really talk though.”
“Fifty dungeons and you don’t talk?” asked Hannah. Her order of noodles came, and she began to dig in.
“We talk business,” said Grig. “We don’t talk about how she felt about the rumors and whether they might be true. She, um, doesn’t really have compunctions about lying, and we’ve caught her doing that before. Not in that she was trying to screw us over, just… stuff that she’s said that wasn’t actually what happened. Her response was with all the undoing, she has a bit of trouble remembering what actually happened, but, eh. It’s a weak response.” He paused. “And she knows that’s what I’d say about her, but if you could refrain from just repeating it outright. We are going to want some information in exchange for this, you know that, right?”
“Fifty dungeons in a year?” asked Mizuki, ignoring the question. “That seems low, compared with what Alfric wanted.”
“It is,” said Grig. “We’ve had some setbacks. Lola is kind of in charge of the whole thing, which makes sense, given how much more information she has, and how she’s basically been bankrolling us, or was at the start, but… well, when Lola says that we tried a dungeon and failed at it, so we need to take a day off, it’s hard to know whether or not she’s telling the truth or just wants to spend the day doing other stuff. We can’t contradict her, and if we don’t have a reset in our pocket, we don’t want to risk actual death, so we’re kind of at her mercy.” He paused. “Again, she knows all that, and with her, I’m sure she’d have gotten that from me in one of the undone days, but—”
“He’s painting a bad picture of it,” said Mardin. “There are limits to what Oeyr can provide and reasons not to hit a bunch of dungeons in a single day, even though we do have a small team of porters and agents.”
Grig, at least, had the classic manner of a man who had all kinds of issues that were piling up and a deep need to spill them out to someone. It was something that Hannah had seen at the temple quite a few times, and her guess was that the issues he was raising were ones that he went over in his head on a near-daily basis. Mardin was more reserved.
“Porters?” asked Mizuki.
“People they pay to handle things for them,” said Hannah. “We’re sellin’ entads and ectads on our own, but at a certain point, you pay people to do that for you, a counterparty. You get someone who specializes in bastles, in the entad markets, and at the higher levels, you have your own ectad refinery. The biggest dungeoneerin’ teams have twenty or thirty people in their employ.”