“There aren’t lakes in Kiromo though,” said Hannah.
“Well, no, it’s adapted,” said Mizuki. “And there are lakes, but they’re mostly on the inland section, what used to be Mien. Nothing like the Proten Lakes though. The flavor of lakeweed is different, but it’s close enough. Grandpa used to import bales of dried seaweed, which he sold to some of the other immigrants. It was a side business, I think. Now we mostly make do with what we get from the Proten and a few farms there.”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever had seaweed,” said Alfric. “What does it taste like?”
“A little fishy, which is why it goes well with fish,” said Mizuki. “It’s got a very green and, um, watery taste? Hannah made some bread to go with the meal, and it’s got some lakeweed in it too, so hopefully the flavor agrees with everyone. It’s not so much a ‘safe’ meal.”
“Safe in this context meaning something you’ve made before?” asked Verity.
“Um,” said Mizuki. “I’ve made it before but haven’t gotten feedback from anyone, and it’s not one of my staples. There are some recipes, like my stew, that I have down to a fine art, and each batch turns out more or less the same, depending only on the ingredients or what spin I’m putting on it. But there are other things where I don’t have a good feel for the cooking time, or the proportions, and it comes out different. This is one of those.”
“It’s a high-variance meal,” said Alfric. He grinned at her.
“Well,” said Mizuki. “Yes. But if you’re about to compare dungeoneering to cooking, no thank you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Alfric. “If you see some parallels, that’s on you.”
“Oh no,” said Mizuki, pressing a hand against her forehead. “He’s in my mind, making me think thoughts.” She made a pained face. “Variance minimization. Entad allocation. Attack tier pattern vectors.”
“See?” said Alfric. “I knew you were listening.”
“Did any of that mean anything?” asked Mizuki.
“Uh,” said Alfric. “Well, there’s not a lot that you can do to minimize variance. The focus is more on ensuring that you’re prepared for variance and you minimize the impact it has on your dungeon runs. That means bringing along plenty of equipment like axes, ropes, pitons, sacks, ladders, or whatever else.”
“We didn’t bring a ladder, did we?” asked Hannah.
“No, but we will for the third dungeon,” said Alfric. “It can fit in the stone, which can fit in the book, so it wouldn’t add all that much weight and serves as a form of insurance. I’m still hoping that we get a better storage entad, but the book and the stone together get us about ninety percent there. In terms of how the second dungeon went, I think we did fairly well on the entads, but they’re support entads that help with logistics rather than directly helping us do the dungeons.” Alfric hated to bring it up, but they really did need to do a postmortem, especially now that they had some space to breathe and time to independently think about things. It would have been better to do it the night of, or the night after that, but things had come up, and he’d been feeling off kilter. There was a bit of silence as he tried to weigh his words.
“Oh, the postmortem,” said Mizuki, unprompted. “You’d mentioned it, and I think we can do it tonight. After dinner works for me? I’m fairly sure that none of you have plans.”
“Works for me,” said Verity.
“Me too,” said Hannah.
“Mmm,” said Isra, in a way that seemed like assent.
“Verity?” asked Alfric. “You’re not playing at the Fig and Gristle tonight? We can work around that.”
Verity very briefly looked at Mizuki, who gave a minute shake of her head. “No,” she said. “I’m taking a night off from that and would have wanted to arrange it ahead of time anyhow.”
“What’s going on?” asked Alfric. He looked between them. Something was going on.
“Mizuki felt bad,” said Isra. “She was thinking of something to cheer you up and settled on either a postmortem or dungeon school. Or both.”
“I don’t know that I need cheering up,” said Alfric.
“From the Lola thing?” asked Mizuki.
“Ah,” said Alfric. “Yeah. Well, I really appreciate it. I’m not sure what dungeon school would be though.”
“You know,” said Mizuki. “Like, you just tell us all the things we need to know about what dungeons are like, or something.”
“The problem is that there’s a lot,” said Alfric. “But I’ll do my best to distill it down, and we can have something like a class on dungeons, if that’s what you want.”
“I want to be better at this dungeons thing,” said Mizuki. “And I thought it would make you happy to have a postmortem without feeling like it was a matter of pulling teeth to sit us all down for it or like you were the one pushing things. I figured that sometimes it must feel like you’re carrying the team forward, which seems like it would get exhausting. It would have been better if we could have just left it at that though, without you knowing that we’d set things up ahead of time.”
“Well, either way,” said Alfric, “I really do appreciate the gesture and the willingness. There’s a lot that people find boring, and yes, postmortems and training tend to be a part of that. But that can wait until after we’ve had dinner, and there are other things to talk about.”
“Like Verity’s cartier?” asked Mizuki.
“I’m hoping the subject has been exhausted,” said Verity.
“Or cooking,” said Alfric. “Or the garden, or other things.”
“Sounds great,” said Mizuki. “Fish is done, vegetables are too, and we’ve got bread with butter, so I think we’re ready to eat.”
Chapter 40 — Postmortem
Isra was envious of Mizuki’s cooking. The meals Isra had in Liberfell and at the Fig and Gristle had been quite good, but they had been prepared by someone whose job it was to do such things. A person who had devoted their life to cooking would naturally be a good cook, that was right and fair. But Mizuki hadn’t devoted her life to cooking, it was only something she did casually, and she still seemed to be so good at it, and at a young age. It made Isra feel like she had been missing something from her life, a skill that she had never developed when she’d been perfectly capable of doing so.
Worse, it was a skill that didn’t seem to come naturally to her like so many other things had, because the interplay of flavors largely didn’t involve the living world she was so in tune with. She could tell whether food was good to eat or not, whether it had toxins, but what it would taste like was much more difficult, and the ways that the taste would change when paired with other tastes or in the process of cooking was even more difficult. She’d faced challenges when smoking meats or making pickles until finally arriving at something she found satisfactory. Mizuki seemed to know everything there was to know. The envy did nothing to dull the taste of the food. If Mizuki was serious about giving cooking lessons, Isra was going to take them. She’d kept a close eye on the food preparation, but had no real idea how such simple procedures had turned the base ingredients into an actual meal.
“Okay,” said Alfric. “The postmortem won’t take long, I don’t think, it’s just a matter of going over what happened in the dungeon, what went right and what went wrong, and trying to figure out what we can learn from it. Overall, I think we did pretty well, except at the end.”
“Because of the risk?” asked Hannah. “Or the outcome?”