Juniper is with me, and we’re… meditating on the concept of compartmentalization in a storeroom, like Estelle suggested. By which I mean Juniper is meditating and I’m poking my nose into every crate and barrel trying to identify their contents. Willow and Griffin show up to see what we’re up to.
“Did you find any cool treasures up here?” Griffin wonders, standing on tiptoe to peer into a barrel.
“Looks like it’s mostly just low level supplies and crafting materials on this floor,” I say. “That whole wall is just barrels of cider from last year.”
Bereft of the ability to go adventuring as often as they’d like, Griffin and Willow take heart in exploring the village. There’s plenty of wonders to be discovered here, after all. Plenty of crates full of rope and yarn. Verrrrry exciting.
“This is boring,” Griffin declares, and slinks away.
We’re at it for at least a week without manging to unlock anything yet, each day spent on a different floor of the central tower. One day, Griffin excitedly charges up the stairs to find us.
“Uncle Hawk is back!” Griffin exclaims.
We go downstairs to meet him and find Uncle Hawk in the village square along with his party. Rain is pouring down outside and I’m immediately soaked. Someone in the party clearly has a [Don’t Get Wet in Rain] or whatever skill up over them, and all the raindrops politely veer to the side and splash upon the bystanders instead.
I identify Uncle Hawk’s aura, and…
Uncle Hawk heads into the Hearth and his party splits off into the guest house, and crowds (or at least as much in the way of “crowds” as exists in the village) gather around to hear the tale of how they conquered Muckburrow. There’s a big celebration in the Hearth both for the subjugation of the hostile dungeon and to celebrate Uncle Hawk reaching Epic rank.
“The boss was Epic rank, and a tough one at that,” Uncle Hawk says. “I’ve never run across a goblin so strong before. He was probably just a Deed shy of Legendary. Maybe he was hoping subjugating our Hearth would push him through the bottleneck. If we hadn’t been on the verge of Epic ourselves, we probably wouldn’t have made it.”
We’re celebrating a ton of goblins dying. There were hundreds. These adventurers slaughtered their way through the goblin warrens like they were grinding monsters. They recruited a few Elite parties to help clear the “trash”, there were so many of them.
“It’ll be a good training ground for our mid-level adventurers now,” Uncle Hawk goes on. “The dungeon will up its spawn rates for Elite monsters in the swamp and fill the warrens with new Heroic monsters. No more hostile goblins making raids on the surface. We’ll do a full inspection once the new setup is in place before recommending it to anyone.”
I excuse myself from the party and go down to the core room. I pull a cushion out of my bag of holding and plop it down on the floor before sitting down.
[I don’t know,] I reply. [Corwen, what happens to the souls of those dead goblins? Why do most people not seem to have a Soul attribute over 0? Estelle said they do but can’t use it.]
Something isn’t right about all this. Why did Liz talk about reincarnators like they’re all Earthlings?
Corwen doesn’t answer immediately. I guess it’s still monitoring my brain activity to see if it can figure out why, exactly, I’m not thrilled about the idea of killing large numbers of sapient beings even if that really was the best option for the safety and wellbeing of me and my family. And yet, it’s not truly death if those souls continue, is it? I want to understand.
That’s fair, I suppose. It’s not like the system isn’t already giving me a framework to attain the ability to do so. I don’t really expect everyone to indulge my curiosity every time.
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But still. Would it have been possible to deal with Muckburrow peacefully? Would its core have even allowed that?
Corwen doesn’t answer that one at all. I guess it’s too much to ask to understand the thought processes of beings so alien to us. Even if they look different and have a completely different culture, the goblins and aranea and whatever else are out there are still biological organisms with their own basic needs. Aether cores are eternal and don’t need to eat, drink, sleep, breathe, or pee. I don’t know if my meat brain, even system-enhanced, can truly understand how an entity like that thinks.
I can practically feel [Self-Delusion] trying to protect me from Sanity damage, but I push it aside this time and don’t turn away. I could go back up to meditate under the ash tree… but no. This is the place I feel that I should do this.
Aether and vis flow through the core room, in and out, intermingling and smoothly switching from one to the other as thought they weren’t absolute opposites, life and death. I calm myself and breathe, feeling for the damage and trying to pull energy toward it. I keep a careful equilibrium to burning and regenerating Inspiration, as I am not looking at the sky and needing to use memories of comic book debates to recharge.
I keep at it well past when the aether core turns red, signalling 6 o’clock. I’m not hungry and don’t feel like partying right now. No one has bothered me, so I don’t stop. It’s not until the aether core turns dark and leaves me in blackness that I finally receive the message I’ve been waiting for.
And so my skill is a vocabulary word. I take that as my cue to leave the core room, though now that it’s dark I need to use Clairvoyance to find the ladder. I make sure to retrieve my pillow first. The rest of the trash in the core room has been absorbed, but I suppose Corwen isn’t so rude as to recycle something that someone is actively using.
The party is winding down when I return to the hearth, or at least some of my family members have gotten drunk and gone to pass out in their rooms. Anise didn’t quite make it back to her room and is slouched over in an armchair by the fire. She’s going to have such a crick in her neck later, at least for the five seconds before she heals it or drinks some tea.
I leave her be and go off to take care of my basic biological needs. Hopefully I will eventually get skills to not require those, but I’m not fussed about it at the moment. I’m getting a little exhausted from learning so many skills. I have, what, over a hundred by now? And still more to come? My character screen is already ridiculous.
With Muckburrow now forcefully pacified, Aunt Savannah deems it safe enough to let the kids out to play again and Meadow to come along. Uncle Falcon still escorts us to do another couple runs of the Hedge Maze, since he’s not busy at the moment. From there, we continue on to the cave entrance near Grubwick so the kids can see the place for the first time.
“Wooooow…” Griffin breathes as we step into the In-Between. “Look at this place!”
“Don’t wander off, Griffin,” Meadow says. “And be careful with the mushrooms, Willow. Here, if you want to collect some, look for these, but don’t take too long.”
She pulls out her art book and opens to a painting of mushrooms helpfully labeled Good Mushrooms. Willow takes it excitedly and goes to gather up some mushrooms into her pack. It doesn’t take long for her to become distracted from mushrooms when we come into view of Grubwick.
The tunnel winds downward into the huge cavern the goblin village rests in, gaps between stalactites providing a good view as we descend. The kids are in awe, but Uncle Falcon is highstrung and alert for dangers, his eyes and Enhanced Senses keeping watch in every direction.
Nothing bothers us on the way across the open cave, and the goblins welcome us into Grubwick. The goblins outside the warrens all speak Common by now and are happily able to converse with the children.
“I was wondering if you were going to come by,” Milo says. “I heard the news about Muckburrow. They’ve been hounding us for weeks hoping to kill me again before I reach my third birthday—naming day, that is—so thanks for the help.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “Did you get to pick another class?”
Milo nods. “I stayed Elite when I reincarnated but was reset to [Goblin Child]. And now I’m an [Apprentice Warlock] rather than just an Incantor. I had time to get Thaumaturgy up in addition to Incantation so I could get a dual-magic class.”
“I’m still trying to figure out why Muckburrow forced the issue so badly.”
“Testing us,” Milo says. “Always testing. There are many goblin villages still on the fence who have been doing skirmishes against the parties I’ve had delving the nearby dungeons. We usually come out on top but we’ve lost a fair few people. Maybe with a dungeon as strong as Muckburrow taken out of the equation, the others will think twice about crossing us.”
“It sounds sinister when you put it like that, but yes,” I say. “I’m planning on heading up to the hot springs with Rowan and my mom once the kids are done visiting here. I’m told they’re good for meditating on healing skills. Want to come?”
“Absolutely,” Milo says. “I haven’t gotten in nearly as much adventuring as I would have liked and now I got a fresh new apprentice class to help level up my skills.”
“Skills definitely level faster when you’re outside the Hearth, especially if it’s somewhere at least mildly dangerous. Do you know of any dungeons in the In-Between? Aside from the ones goblins have been living in, that is.”
“The closest one is the Bat Cave,” Milo says. “We use it for combat training but everyone hates it because it’s just bats, bats, more bats, big bats, small fast bats, fire-breathing bats…”
“Right, I think I’ll give a pass on that one for the moment,” I say.
“Ah, c’mon, it’ll be fun!” Anise says, inserting herself into the conversation. “You can work on your Striking (Stone Hurling) skill!”
“Are there any other dungeons around here that don’t involve hordes of small flying monsters?”
“The Mushroom Forest, but there’s a lot of Elites in there with Heroic bosses,” Milo says. “The cute, safe kiddie dungeons are all on the surface.”
“They planned to turn Muckburrow into a good place for Elites and Heroics to level, too,” I say. “At least I’ll have some good options once I get to that level. I have spent so much time learning enhancement skills and I am so very tired of meditating.”