“We still need to write a letter to them,” said Alfric. “I can do it, but if you want input, which I think you do, you need to stop putting it off.”
“Fine, fine,” said Verity. “You are obviously and annoyingly right.” She gave him a limp smile.
“It looks like we’re done here, then,” said Alfric. “Thank you all for participating, I hope it was painless and productive. We’ll probably do this after every dungeon.”
“There was one more thing,” said Isra.
“Yes?” asked Alfric. He seemed genuinely surprised that she had something to add, probably because she preferred to remain silent for most of it, watching the others.
“I just wanted to say… there’s a wrongness to the dungeons,” said Isra. “The animals and plants can’t be felt as much. Nothing listens to me very well. I’m sorry that I missed as much as I did, and I will try to do better.”
“It’s fine,” said Alfric. “You were recruited for this team because I’d heard good things about your ability as a hunter. There’s something we call dungeon madness, which just means that about ninety-nine out of a hundred animals will attack you. We don’t know why it happens or how to stop it, and I really don’t expect you to be the one to crack it, because while druids are rare, and druids who go into dungeons are even more rare, they’re not so rare that someone else hasn’t already tried whatever you might think of. Just in case you were thinking about beating your head on the problem.”
“I was,” said Isra. She had been cautioned about opening herself up too much, but she was still exploring what it meant to be a druid, and it seemed that some experimentation was in order.
“Wait,” said Mizuki. “Chickens don’t attack people.”
“Dungeon madness is first generation only,” said Alfric. “It doesn’t affect eggs, or the extremely young if it’s not an egg. In dog equivalents, you’d need to be pulling out a two-day-old puppy. Everything else though, you’re looking at taking care of something that will be trying its best to kill you. It’s still sometimes worth it to take the adults though, if you can extract a breeding pair. There are setups where you can take care of the animals without interacting with them. I don’t think we’ll do that, but with Isra, it’s a bit tempting.” He turned to look at Isra. “We can talk about it more later, if you’d like, but I don’t want to bore anyone, and this has gone on long enough already. Too much talking.”
“Later,” nodded Isra. Again, she had a comfortable feeling. It was nice that Alfric understood her. “I do also need some help with the guild things, if you can.”
“Of course,” said Alfric. “I’d forgotten all about that. You’re connected with experts, so perhaps they can help you.”
The dinner over and the postmortem finished, they all went their separate ways, though Isra found herself staying around the house, not quite wanting to leave and return to her empty house. She went through the garden beds in the back and looked at the work Verity had done, peering deeply at the plants to divine their secrets and make guesses about what a person might have planted them for.
Halfway through, Verity came out to practice and played a song, one laced with magic that undid hidden knots of anxiety, and by the time it was finished, it seemed too dark for a walk through the woods. The bed at Mizuki’s house in the shared room with Verity was becoming, it seemed, familiar.
Before she went to bed though, Isra pulled Hannah aside. “Can we talk for a bit?”
“Of course. Did you need help with the guild?”
“Yes,” Isra said, though that wasn’t the primary thing she’d wanted. Alfric had already offered.
They went to Hannah’s room together, where there was a little desk, and Hannah pulled the chair out for Isra, taking the bed for herself.
“Now, the thing about guilds is that it’s mostly a matter of how you think into it,” said Hannah. “Think to open up the forum, try that now.”
Isra did. She’d done it once before, when she’d had a dim awareness that it was there, in the morning, but she’d done little else with it. “Done,” she said.
“Now you should see a few messages there,” said Hannah. “A message comes with a header, which is what it’s about, a name, which is who sent it, a date, which is when it became a part of the guild logs, and then the message itself.”
“There’s only one message,” said Isra, frowning. It appeared in her mind’s eye and had all the features that Hannah had talked about. It was listed as being from Dom.
“Oh,” said Hannah. “Well, it’s possible they do a regular purge, that’s not too uncommon. Anyone who posts a message can delete it, and if everyone agrees, the log can be kept somewhat clean. There’s no real need to do it, but some do. And you could open it?”
“Yes,” said Isra. All this took was another thought. “The message is short.” It, too, appeared in her mind’s eye.
“Well, the only real things left to know are how to make a message and how to reply to someone,” said Hannah. “You just sort of… talk into it, if that makes sense, but it’s not like the party channel, where it uses your voice. There’s transcription to words, and if you think at it, you can alter it down to the letter, though few people do that. In some guilds you’ll see people make pictures out of letters, but it’s a bit frowned upon.”
“Okay,” said Isra. The phrase ‘pictures out of letters’ didn’t make sense to her, but it didn’t seem like something she’d do by mistake.
“Why don’t you try to reply to the welcome message?” asked Hannah. “And just tell me what you said, so I can make sure it’s good.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Isra.
“Oh, somethin’ simple,” said Hannah. “Just, ‘Thank you for inviting me to the guild, it’s my first time, so let me know if you have any rules that need to be followed’.”
Isra put down that, more or less, and repeated it back exactly to Hannah. The message seemed to hang there in her mind, even when she wasn’t paying attention to it, and as soon as she returned her attention to it, there it was, in full, each letter capable of being moved.
“Now, to send, it’s just a bit of a push, more focused intent than anything else you’ve been doin’,” said Hannah. “You don’t need a header for a reply, though some people put that in, and your name and the date, those are just a natural part of it.”
“It knows my name,” said Isra, who could see it in her mind’s eye.
“Same as the census does. Have you sent it?”
Isra pushed with her mind, and the message slotted itself into place.
“Now, you should know that no one will be able to see it until tomorrow,” said Hannah. “It happens sometime in the middle of the night. If there’s another reply to that same message, they’ll be in the order they were put in, and the same goes for any new message.”
“You’re talking about mechanics,” said Isra. “But I don’t know what I should be doing with it.”
“Oh, ay,” said Hannah. “But most of that will depend on the guild. The best thing to do, in my opinion, is to just watch how things go. See what they say and how they say it, and follow their lead, whether they go short and terse or write long essays back and forth.”
“There might be hidden rules,” said Isra.
“Well, almost certainly,” said Hannah. “And ways of doin’ things that are unique to them, or just the way things have always been done. Maddening, probably.” She shrugged. “Watch the headers, some guilds use abbreviations, and watch how messages end, sometimes people use that to say who they expect to hear from. Remember that anyone can see and respond and that you can’t see messages from others that are in queue. It’s quite annoyin’ to get three identical responses to someone on the same topic.”