“Yes,” said Isra. She didn’t elaborate further. “I don’t think they’re dangerous or hatching soon.”
“They were in a nest up in one of the trees,” said Mizuki. “That means that it’s a bird of some kind, I think, but there was no sign of any actual animal.” Looking now, Hannah could see the scratches from Mizuki’s climb. “But if we don’t know what they need, or if Isra thinks that they’ll hatch into something bad, then at least we can have an omelet.”
Alfric sighed. “We’re really just not equipped for dungeon eggs.”
“You really think that eggs breathe somehow?” asked Mizuki, holding one of the eggs up. She was holding the other two in one hand, and Hannah thought that of the whole party, Mizuki was perhaps the one she trusted least with eggs.
“When you smoke an egg, the smoke goes through the shell,” said Isra. “They do need to breathe.”
“Sorry,” said Hannah, “when you smoke an egg?”
“A hard-boiled egg,” said Isra. She had her arms crossed and dropped them a bit. “Smoked, for flavor.”
“That sounds delicious,” said Hannah. “Absolutely delicious.”
“I will make one for you sometime,” said Isra, nodding. She walked over to Mizuki and touched each of the eggs in turn. “It’s hard to tell what creature these are. All the same sort, I think. Not particularly dangerous though. None have the same,” she shook her head, “the same anger of the dungeon monsters.”
“Eggs, and very young animals, tend to work out better that way,” said Alfric. “We can transport these eggs to Liberfell, if they’re not going to hatch in the next day or so, and we can get an incubator there, but then we’ll have to bring it all back to Pucklechurch with us, unless we can sell the eggs. We’ll want to get it all handled today though.”
“And we’ve this wardrobe,” said Hannah, giving it a skeptical eye. “I suppose, Alfric, that you and I are to be the ones to carry it six miles through uneven woodland trails?”
“Of course, if you’re up for it,” he said with a smile. He seemed to have a deep affection for that wardrobe. “But there’s a chance that we can use it to skip straight to Liberfell. Six notches on the dial, and I’m hopeful that means six cardinal directions. A wardrobe is big enough to step into.”
He kept up his good cheer as they all ate some of Isra’s pickles. They were a touch sour and a touch salty for Hannah’s taste, but there were so many herbs and other things packed in with them that the flavor was hard to beat.
And once their break was done, and Isra was cradling the three eggs, they left the dungeon, off to Liberfell.
Chapter 26 — Liberfell
There was a language to entads, though Alfric spoke it only poorly. They were unique, always, but there were commonalities to them, some of that just because they drew from the hexes, which had commonalities of their own. There were effects you’d expect to find on boots rather than knives, or chairs rather than towels. Chairs were for sitting and knives were for stabbing, and function typically followed form. But beyond all that, there was commonality of definitions, a shared understanding the entads had of what was what.
The example that Alfric had been taught involved rabbits. Let’s say that there was an entad wand that made rabbits explode when you pointed the wand at them and said a word. Well, rabbit was just a word that people attached to a concept, and there were loads of different breeds of rabbit, along with strange creatures that were only a bit like a rabbit. The dungeons could produce all kinds of things, and they pulled on what was in a hex, so given the prevalence of rabbits, it wasn’t uncommon for dungeons to spawn something similar to them or a monster that might take the same general shape. What, then, counted as a rabbit? Well, it didn’t really matter, since nothing in the world hinged on rabbits in any way, but the point was that entads would always give you the same answer, even if they’d been pulled from dungeons on opposite sides of the world. A wand that exploded rabbits would affect all the same things as a wand that made rabbits double in size. There were thick tomes, which Alfric had never read in full, which went into the minutiae of all these ‘entad definitions’, the most important of which weren’t about what entads considered to be a snake or a rabbit. No, the truly important bits were underlying principles like what a portal was, what an extradimensional space was, what a memory was, what an emotion was. There were hundreds of concepts like that, and Alfric knew most of it, through lessons from his parents, from tutors, or simply from reading. There was, still, an enormous variance between entads, what they could do, and how they could do it, but the commonalities were invaluable to any adventurer or merchant looking for a quick identification without having to pay a cleric of Qymmos.
Hexes were a concept that entads ‘understood’ quite well, which made sense, because early Editors had plastered the concept over the known world to lay the groundwork for warp points and dungeons and all manner of other things.
He was not, therefore, particularly surprised when the wardrobe, once carried outside the dungeon, began to work as he’d predicted. Six was an auspicious number, after all, and travel entads never worked inside the dungeons unless they were like his boots, local in nature. Still, he was particularly pleased that it allowed travel of any kind and, beyond that, that it hadn’t immediately bonded to any of them. When the door was closed, the dial could be turned, and once it was, the door would open up to elsewhere. It didn’t take particularly much tinkering with it to figure out the orientation of the dial, not with Isra looking through and making judgments about the hexes that could be seen beyond. Not fifteen minutes after Alfric had removed it from the dungeon, he could look through the wardrobe to either the Liberfell or Pucklechurch hexes, though every time the dial moved, it seemed to show a different (and possibly random) part of the hex it was pointed at.
“Very, very, very good,” said Alfric, nodding.
“Can you get back if you go through?” asked Mizuki, peering through the wardrobe’s open doors at the grassland beyond. Isra seemed to know, just from looking, what direction that was from them, even though she’d never been in most of those hexes.
“We’ll have to test,” said Alfric.
“But we could get stranded, yes?” asked Mizuki.
“If you go through, you can just use the warp,” said Alfric, shrugging. “So you’d be stranded in the sense that you’d be in Liberfell without having to walk six or seven miles, yes.”
“But we’ve no reason to think the wardrobe itself can make the trip, ay?” asked Hannah.
“This is true,” said Alfric. He looked the wardrobe over. “My guess is that it’s one-way travel to the hex of your choice. We don’t know how repeatable it is, whether it might have daily limits on use or weight or some other parameter… This will almost certainly have to be looked over by a cleric of Qymmos, because each test sends us a minimum of six miles away.”
“Less than that, I’d think,” said Hannah. “Take it to the hex border, fiddle with the dial, and try to end up with the portal in view, ay? In theory, you have a hundred feet to walk from wardrobe to portal.”
“Right,” said Alfric, feeling slightly embarrassed at the correction. “So, I think what we’ll do, if we are all planning to end up in Liberfell, is to have Isra and Mizuki go through, talk with us over party chat about what it was like, then warp into town. Then Hannah and I can carry the wardrobe to the hex edge with Verity’s help, and hopefully we can warp it in.” He was somewhat unsure of this part, but it seemed like the only way to deal with it.