Hannah nodded, and she was thankful that Mizuki seemed befuddled. Some people cared and thought that it was the ‘business of Garos’, to be confined within the church in one way or another, but it was a minority opinion throughout Inter, typically held by those more skeptical of religion. She’d met a few in the seminary that had come because their families thought that it was a matter of religion, but it was like tall people becoming clerics of Xuphin, or short ones clerics of Kesbin: a poor reason to become a cleric, and likely to result in a poor cleric if they had no real godly fire in them.
“And you care about the things close to you?” she asked.
“Isn’t that how everyone is?” asked Mizuki.
“Oh, not at all,” said Hannah. “Some people care the most about things far away from them.” She took another bite of the fermented vegetables, then the perfect example occurred to her. “Henlings!” she said around the mouth of food. “Some people obsess over them, collect them, things like that, spend their time and effort lookin’ at them, tryin’ to figure them out. Some of these people never stepped foot inside a dungeon. But it’s the same for everythin’ else, isn’t it, kittens and bobbins and what have you, they bring all this into their lives, make it their focus, but it’s not close to them, necessarily. So of course I wouldn’t be surprised if what you care about was far away from you, some distant thing that didn’t touch you personally, ay?” She returned to quickly eating her food. She had a bad habit of talking too much at mealtimes and lagging behind. Mizuki had very little left on her plate.
“Like you with Garos?” asked Mizuki. “Because he’s something you bring into your life, isn’t he?”
“Well,” said Hannah, swallowing a mouthful of venison. “This is amazin’, by the way.”
“Thanks!” said Mizuki, beaming. “The sobyu, yes or no?”
“Yes, I think,” replied Hannah. The taste wasn’t quite reminiscent of a pickled cucumber or the pickled cabbage she was used to, but there was a similarity there.
“In Kiromo they eat it with every meal,” said Mizuki. “I only do that in the winter, when there’s less that’s fresh.”
“Mmm,” said Hannah, gulping down an egg. She took up a cloth napkin and wiped her mouth, trying to remember decorum, which she’d never been too good at. “Well, as I was sayin’, with Garos, it’s not quite the same, is it? Because the nature of symmetry is all around us, isn’t it, and even if you don’t think much about Garos, you can’t escape him, just like you can’t escape Oeyr. All the more in Pucklechurch, where there’s this grand temple that looms over the town.”
“Is that for me?” asked a voice from the doorway into the kitchen. Verity was looking much worse for the wear, with rumpled clothes and disheveled hair. Her eyes were bleary and she blinked slowly, but her attention was fixed on the pan, which had a serving of food still in it, though Mizuki had closed the burner.
“Of course,” said Mizuki. “I didn’t know when you’d be up, but it should still be warm. Hope we didn’t wake you.”
“Mmm,” said Verity. She sat down at the counter, which was slightly crowded with three people. Hannah looked at the straightness of her back and the poise with which she picked up a fork and began eating tiny little bird bites of venison and egg. “Thank you, it’s very gracious of you.”
“Common courtesy,” replied Mizuki with a shrug. “How’d you sleep?”
“Like the dead,” said Verity. “I cannot say enough how much music takes it out of me.”
“Well,” said Hannah, “no cause to be singin’ today, I’d think, or for a few more days after, since it’ll take some time for Alfric and Isra to come back. There’s a question of what we’re doin’ with ourselves until then, I s’pose.”
“I was still planning to go to the Fig and Gristle,” said Verity. “I have a standing offer from Cynthia, and I’d like to keep from paying room and board for as long as possible.”
“Mmm,” said Mizuki. Hannah looked at her. The offer of a room had been made quickly, and Hannah was still mulling it over. She was wondering whether that same offer was going to be tossed to Verity and how many bedrooms this place had.
Verity dabbed at her mouth after another small bite. “And as I’ve said, I’m not entirely sold on dungeoneering.”
Hannah and Mizuki were both silent, but just for a moment, and then they began talking at the same time.
“I don’t think—” began Hannah.
“In terms of—” started Mizuki.
They looked at each other.
“Go ahead,” said Hannah.
“It’s not actually that dangerous,” said Mizuki. She looked at Hannah. “We talked about this last night some, but I think drink affects Verity more than me.”
“I remember,” nodded Verity. “And I said maybe, I recall.”
“There are all sorts of reasons to do it,” said Hannah. “You could get a higher elevation.”
“Frankly, elevation has always been a bit murky to me,” said Verity.
“It’s bunk,” said Mizuki. “Magic items—now, there’s something valuable and hard to get any other way unless you’re willing to shell out a lot of money, which you would also probably have to get by going into dungeons, unless you can score yourself a sweet gig playing music.”
“I probably could,” said Verity. “Though my skill has been rotting away here, and the people I was up against in the conservatory have probably blown past me. Not that my relationship to the profession hasn’t markedly improved.”
“You think elevation isn’t… true?” asked Hannah, looking at Mizuki. She wasn’t sure she could let that pass. “I don’t see how that could be.”
“I mean, it was all made up by the Editors long ago, right?” asked Mizuki. “At some point, hundreds of years ago or whatever, they decided they needed a number for every man, woman, and child on the planet, and they figured out a bunch of complicated rules that no one gets to see.”
“Is that all it is?” asked Verity. “I mean, I knew we had an elevation, but it was never really relevant to my life.”
“It’s a measure of power,” said Hannah. “And the exact metrics are secret, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.”
“They go up the more dungeons you do,” said Mizuki, frowning at Hannah. “How can you explain that?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Hannah. “Perhaps the people who go into the dungeon grow more powerful more quickly?” She wrinkled her nose. That didn’t seem quite right. The other obvious option was that dungeons changed a person, in either natural or unnatural ways. “Well, they never put too much effort into explainin’ it in the seminary.”
“Because no one knows,” said Mizuki. “But people use it for things anyway. It’s nuts.”
“Anyway,” said Verity, who clearly had no enthusiasm for the conversation.
“Right,” said Mizuki. “Anyway, at least one more dungeon?”
Verity nodded as she chewed, then cleared her mouth before answering. “At least one more. Probably.”
“Wonderful,” said Hannah, with real enthusiasm. “Let’s hope that Alfric is doin’ well with Isra, but I wouldn’t count on it, so we might have to find one of the others. Wouldn’t be bad to know who they were anyway, ay? If Verity’s out, we’d need to bring them in, and better to get them on board before we need them.”
“Others?” asked Verity. She had paused with a forkful of food in mid-air.
“He went to the censusmaster,” said Mizuki. “Found everyone of the right age and elevation and not in a party, and then I’d guess he weeded out people who weren’t going to be suitable. I can’t make any good guesses about who the alternates would be.” She shrugged. “Maybe one of the Pedder boys?” She didn’t seem pleased with that thought.