My birthday arrived. I knew that it did, because there was a [System] notification.

Your Age has increased to 25

You have been awarded 5 Ability Points

You have been awarded 2 Development Points

It was… a bit of a non-event really, just a reminder that I wasn’t done improving my Stats. Not that five points were going to go far, but I did have more points coming down the line from my later Levels.

It was also mildly interesting that it seemed to work off my actual age. I’d lost track, but some calculations suggested that this was my actual birthday, or pretty close to it, if I counted the number of days from when I’d left to my Earth birthdate.

Latorra had a different calendar, which didn’t seem to correspond at all to ours. Twelve months, each of thirty days, which divided easily into the 360 days of the year. It sounded like one of the calendars we’d used before we worked out how long the year was, but apparently, the year really was 360 days. There was no seasonal drift.

It seemed too perfect to be true, but on reflection, the Gods could have adjusted either the rotation of Ryvue or its distance from the Sun. It wasn’t like I had a timepiece from Earth that could tell me how long a local hour was. It felt about the same, but I wasn’t an atomic clock.

It turned out that birthdays weren’t as celebrated as they were back home. Maybe the fact that the [System] kept track of them meant there wasn’t the same need to recognise them. Or maybe it was just a less consumer-orientated society. I got some mild congratulations, a bit of teasing about being old now — which Cloridan joined in on, very hypocritically — but nothing else. We all had far too many other things to worry about.

“So what brings you all to my sitting room?” Mandel asked curiously. Normally it was just me coming to see him, but under the circumstances, I wasn’t willing to be here without the full group.

“Well…” I said cautiously, “I don’t suppose I’d be able to persuade you to step out of your Dungeon for a bit?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that that is a very suspicious request. Why?”

“We — I wanted to check if you were wearing a magic item that linked you to your Dungeon,” I admitted. Since he was probably not controlled, we had decided to go with an open approach. This dungeon wasn’t so advanced that we couldn’t escape if Marie took issue with our questions.

“I am actually wearing such a device, as it happens.” He raised his eyebrows again, as everyone on our side of the table tensed. “I constructed it when we started our little plan. If I had been separated from Marie by the Baron, I didn’t think she’d have been able to pretend that she was impaired.”

He grasped his left upper arm with his other hand, and something was released from under his clothes, slipping out of his sleeve. He set it down on the table. It was a silvery band, looked like —

[Identification]: - Silver-steel Control Link - Quality: Great - Properties: Enchantment (Link), Enchantment (Shape Metal)

— that. Oh great. It’s not a Dungeon Item though?

“The [Shape Metal] rune is so that it can fit snugly on my arm,” he explained off-handedly, “And the link goes to a small disk attached to her core. Is there a problem?” he continued, looking at our tense expressions.

“Well, the thing is,” I said awkwardly. “From what I can tell, that link can go either way… and we recently learned that Dungeon cores can control people who touch them.”

“Ah.” He looked concerned for a moment, and then became relaxed, even amused. “I assume you learned this the hard way. Should I worry about you being controlled by a Dungeon?”

“Only Kandis touched the core,” Felicia said insistently. “And she’s not controlled! We’d be able to tell.”

“Just what I’d expect a Thrall to say,” he pointed out with a smile.

“Thrall?” I asked.

“I believe that’s the correct term. It shows up in a few places in the Dungeon management notes. I wasn’t sure exactly what it referred to until now.”

He paused for a moment, looking thoughtful, while we tried to come up with something to say. “I suppose that means I can offer you some peace of mind — if you trust me, that is.”

“How so?” I asked, leaving the matter of trust aside for now.

“Well, Thralls and Monsters are treated much the same — most of where I see the word is in phrases like ‘affecting Thralls and Monsters.’ So I know that a Thrall entering a Dungeon will trigger a Dungeon Break, just like a Monster would.”

“I see…” I said thoughtfully. He would know if we were Thralls, so that was why he was mainly amused by our predicament. “Can you suppress a Dungeon Break?”

“Possibly. I’ve never had to try. But I would definitely know. And if it helps, I’m almost positive that my Dungeon has no motivation to cover up for another Dungeon’s actions.”

“So it comes back to whether we can trust you or not,” I sighed.

“You’ve obviously decided to grant me some trust, just from the fact that you’ve brought this to me,” Mandel pointed out gently.

“True,” I admitted. “It’s just very easy to get caught up in paranoia over this.”

“I imagine so. For my own part, I feel far removed from the possible machinations of foreign Dungeons. Having to deal with them must make for a less sanguine perspective. I have some questions though?”

“Oh?”

“What were the circumstances of the control? I never experienced any serious effort from Marie to take over my mind.”

“Well if your first contact was like you described, she wouldn’t have been operating on full power. The Core I touched was connected to its Dungeon.”

“Ah, yes, that would make a difference. The ‘mana construct’ as the [Status] calls it may spring from the Core, but it is orders of magnitude more powerful. I already keep Edele away from our Core, but I shall install additional precautions.”

“Good idea,” I said, and then hesitated. “Do you intend for Edele to succeed you?”

“I do, though that should still be some time away. I don’t want Marie to be left alone, so if Edele isn’t willing, I will have to see about… ending the Dungeon at some point.”

“If she removes the Core, the Dungeon will start to break down, but there might be time for her to take control and put it back,” I informed him. “If not, she’ll have to start again and build a Dungeon from scratch.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “I will make sure to tell her at some point. For now, I’m more concerned with her finding a nice boy and getting us some grandchildren.”

“A Dungeon dynasty,” I said, smiling at the idea.

“My original plan was for Marie and me to live out the rest of my life in isolation. But contact with the beast-kin has changed my thinking.”

“Are they delving regularly then?”

He nodded. “Apparently, Dungeons are rare in their territory, except at the edges. Something to do with how they channel their mana.”

“So you’re no longer a recluse…”

“I haven’t exactly become sociable. But the visitors are good for Edele — she needs to interact with people.”

“Beast-kin aren’t going to give you grand-children though,” Cloridan put in.

Mandel shrugged. “There are humans among the tribes. Not many, but I’ve asked some of the party leaders to see if they can direct any eligible bachelors our way.”

I cleared my throat, as this conversation was making me uncomfortable. “We were hoping to ask you some questions as well,” I said. “There’s supposed to be a Dungeon item that you can buy, that allows you to control monsters outside of the Dungeon.”

“Really? Let me see…” his eyes went unfocused as he looked at the air. “Ah, yes, I see. It’s called a Controller extension. Yes, it works on Thralls. Expensive.”

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“By default, it’s a collar,” he said thoughtfully. “But this sort of thing requires a certain amount of customisation when bought… different neck sizes and such. Yes, it can look like almost anything that encircles a neck or limb. So necklace, bracer, ring. It needs to touch the skin though.”

“That’s a fairly wide variety,” I said, dismayed.

“I wouldn’t let it concern you. You should be able to discern one through [Mana Sense]. A connection with such a long range should make quite a distinctive mana conduit.”

Oh of course. I felt pretty stupid. I needed to get in the habit of using [Mana Sense] to spot magic items and spells. Although from what I knew about concealing such things…

“Can Dungeon items conceal their mana use?” I asked.

“Well, there are runes for it… it’s not normally done, but it’s certainly possible,” he agreed. “You have Dispel Illusion, don’t you?”

“[Dispel Image], yeah.”

“That should work against most attempts to conceal via runes,” he said. “Dungeon enchantment is unsurpassed in complexity and technique, but it’s not normally all that strong in terms of Effect Totals. You should be able to overpower any concealing enchantments.”

“Huh. What’s the etiquette on casting that on someone without their permission?” I asked, looking around to add my team to that question.

“Well, if they can detect it, then it's a little like slapping a guy to see if he’s a werewolf,” Cloridan said. “Maybe you could explain you were just checking to see if they were being controlled by a murderous inhuman intelligence — but they might not take it well.”

I nodded like he was making sense, but internally, I had questions. What? They have werewolves here? I thought there was a strict separation between Monster and Human? I couldn’t ask those questions in front of Mandel though, so I held them in and made a note to ask them later.

“If you don’t have an illusion on you, is it detectable?” Felicia asked.

“You know when an illusion has been dispelled,” I told her. “But if you’re not the one who cast it…” I thought back to the raiders back in Anchorbury. They hadn’t reacted at all to losing their disguises. “No. You don’t feel anything.”

“Then it sounds like you have a working countermeasure,” Mandel suggested.

“What about [Enchantment]?” Kyle asked. “Are there runes that stop mind-control?”

“There is a rune that wards against it, and I even have it,” Mandel said proudly. “I should mention that I’ve only heard of it working on the more normal [Mental Magic]… but mind control is mind control, probably.”

“Yeah, I think I need to make that a higher priority,” I agreed. “But right now, we have more mundane security concerns.

“Ah yes, this vault of yours. Perhaps, if this goes well, I should become a client. It might make transactions easier.”

“We’re always happy to have new customers at the Bank of Talnier,” I said with my best smile.

“I’m sure. Now…” we started discussing security arrangements. I was going to be crafting some of the lesser wards, to save on costs, but we couldn’t afford to skimp on protection for the main vault. While it would be alarmed, of course, we’d be using a combination of high craftsmanship totals and magical reinforcement to try and ensure the vault was as impenetrable as possible.

Nothing was truly invulnerable, as the Baron’s vault had shown. What we could mainly hope for was to make it difficult enough that it couldn’t be broken into without a significant investment of time — or power.

It was expensive, but this was what some of the investor money was earmarked for. We’d have to get Mandel in to actually engrave the walls, so we scheduled a time for that.

Then we headed back, somewhat reassured by what he told us.

“I can’t believe I didn’t think about checking for Mana strings,” I said, once we’d landed and dismounted.

Cloridan looked like he was going to reply, but paused instead. He snorted with amusement and indicated with a nod that I should look behind me. “This should be interesting,” he said. “Want to take my arm?”

Looking over, I saw that Captain Hector was standing in the street, obviously waiting for me.