“A list!” giggled Mizuki.
“It goes next to my other lists,” said Alfric. “Like the list I use in the morning to figure out which sock goes on first.”
“Hey!” she said. “That was pretty good. Solid effort.”
Alfric gave her a grin.
“Well, I’ll come with you to see the clerics,” said Hannah. “And maybe look over the letter you’re sendin’, if you don’t mind.”
Alfric did mind, but he suppressed the urge to act on it. It was better to have someone look over what you’d written before you sent it, especially if you wanted to make a good impression. The local arm of the Adventurers’ League was important, because they could give him access to bigger, better keys depending on how their progress through the dungeons went. Furthermore, there would be a record on file of his accomplishments, which meant that if or when this party fell apart, he would have something to point to when he went looking to join up with other parties, though his sterling record in the Junior League didn’t seem to have counted for much.
“All right,” said Mizuki, clapping her hands. “Enough business. I am formally opening an invitation for all of you to live here for as long as this lasts, take it or leave it.”
“I already live here,” said Verity, raising a hand.
“Ay, I’ll take you up on it,” replied Hannah. “Though I may still go to the temple for a bath every now and then, so long as Lemmel keeps lettin’ me.”
“I have my own place,” said Isra.
“Well, yeah, just offering,” said Mizuki. “If you wanted to be with the party or anything, no big deal.”
“Does the offer extend to me?” asked Alfric.
Mizuki looked him up and down. “Why wouldn’t it?”
“Because he’s male,” said Verity, her voice quite flat.
“Well,” said Mizuki, “it doesn’t matter to me, so long as you’re not going to be, I don’t know. Doing stuff.” She gestured vaguely. “Male stuff.”
“If we need to make some ground rules,” Alfric began.
Mizuki sighed. “Just don’t be weird about it,” she said. “And if you’re not weird about it, I won’t be weird about it.”
Alfric nodded. “Verity, Hannah, is that acceptable to you?”
“Fine by me,” said Verity.
“So long as you aren’t weird, ay,” said Hannah with a grin.
Alfric rubbed his face for a moment. “I believe in being forthright, so I’ll say, now, that I have absolutely no intentions of ruining what is, on paper, a great dungeoneering party. No flirtation or romance of any kind, and to the extent we can avoid interpersonal problems, I want to do that. If we can do that with rules, great, we’ll make rules, but if it’s better to just have some mutual understanding, then great, we can do that instead. I care about the dungeons. The goal of this party is dungeons.”
“We hear you,” said Mizuki. “You can calm down.”
“I’m calm, I just—I don’t want to be preemptively accused of anything,” said Alfric. Familiar feelings were welling up, and he did his best to tamp them down.
“Didn’t mean to besmirch your honor,” said Hannah.
“It’s not the Red Ages,” said Verity. “We’re not going to treat you like a fox in the henhouse.”
“Wait,” said Mizuki, “do we just have a total ban on romance within the group?”
“It worries me that you’re asking that,” said Alfric.
She pointed a finger at him. “You’re the one who wanted to make sure that everything was clear. And Hannah is,” Hannah raised an eyebrow, “she’s a cleric of Garos, right?”
Hannah rolled her eyes. “Such a reputation we clerics have,” she said. “And I told you it was both, though none of you are my type, thank you very much.”
“Romance is inadvisable,” said Alfric. “I think we can leave it at that.”
But his mother hadn’t been quite so staunch about that. She had said, when the conversation came up at the dinner table, that you shouldn’t go into a dungeoneering party with the notion that there would be anything like a romance, but that with time, being close to the same group of people, it was natural for attraction to develop, and if it was mutual, and it wasn’t going away, then it could be a beautiful thing that would grow and flourish.
There was absolutely no way he was going to say that out loud.
Chapter 20 — Temple Politics
They got the party channel exactly seven days after the party had formed. Hannah was pleased, but she’d been in a number of parties before, and party chat always came with some problems.
It was an open question why the Editors had done as they’d done. The actual thought that went into the Editing was enormously complex, beyond the ken of a young cleric, but some of the effects that Editors of ages past had placed upon the world certainly had to be the result of whatever unknown limitations they were working under. The hexes were certainly one of those places where limitations seemed most obvious, because the positions of the warp points were, most of the time, somewhat inconvenient. Hannah knew, of course, that hexagons could be used to tile a plane, that was fundamental knowledge for any cleric of Garos, but the world wasn’t a plane, it was a globe, and the hexagons were imperfect (and there were, in theory, pentagons somewhere). Given that they couldn’t have perfection, it seemed to Hannah that they should have gone in the direction of Oeyr, and simply made the hexes around cities. The math of it was a bit beyond her, but it seemed like it would have been better. But no, the answer was probably that the Editors were working under some unknown constraints that explained why they’d done things as they did. Or, possibly, they’d made a mistake: that was true of the dungeons, probably, given how dangerous they were.
The party chat was a different thing altogether. It was, obviously, good to be able to have parties, which came with many benefits, and it was good to be able to talk to one another without needing to worry about how far apart you were. But the question that had literally kept Hannah up at night on multiple occasions was why there was no way to turn the thing off.
<Testing,> said Alfric. His voice reverberated in her head, and Hannah got a distinctly unpleasant sensation while watching his lips, which weren’t making any real sound. People always sounded different in the channel, which had something to do with the way it stole the words from your lips and made them available to others. From what Hannah had read, people sounded more like they sounded to themselves. Alfric’s voice was rich and mellow and still fairly deep.
<I hear you,> replied Hannah.
<Hello?> asked Isra, who was the only one who wasn’t in the house with them.
<Hi!> said Mizuki.
<We should establish some ground rules,> said Alfric. <I think the first is that we don’t use the channel for anything that can be said out loud.>
<Agreed,> replied Hannah. <Second rule is no talking while anyone is asleep.>
<Does that mean we can’t use it when someone is napping?> asked Mizuki. <What if we don’t know that they’re napping?>
<You can use the channel to say that you’ll want some peace and quiet,> said Alfric. <Unless there’s business, we’ll respect that. But I don’t think any of us take naps.>
Mizuki guiltily raised her hand.