This is feeling like the longest week of my life, and it’s only just started. Sure, I haven’t had all that many weeks since becoming a dungeon, but the point still stands. Everyone has been brought up to speed on the plan, too, but nobody has been able to come up with anything better.

Larx and the ratkin are taking a philosophical approach to what to do, and I’m just glad they’re not being yes men about it. They love a good debate, and while I usually like to hear philosophy discussed… I just can’t get into it right now. It also doesn’t help that they’ve been diving pretty hard into hypotheticals and have wandered pretty hard from the original topic. It’s good to know they mostly agree with the plan, and couldn’t come up with anything else.

The spiderkin are taking a more pragmatic approach with their own discussions. Norloke hates the idea of letting anyone starve, and Vernew seems offended at the very concept that dwellers wouldn’t be able to go out and explore and hunt on their own. Folarn was actually able to look at a diagram of the beachhead, and pointed out a few potential weaknesses. I think she’s just more used to thinking of assaulting in three dimensions than Leo is.

Leo, meanwhile, is shoring up the defenses as best he can without revealing himself. The skeletons are doing their best to keep any fish from getting inside the protected area, trying to keep Hullbreak from getting any other information. They’re also trying to figure out how to make something to help protect the merman, Yendo, just in case. I haven’t been able to think of anything that wouldn’t just look like a cell. I think our best bet is to let him wander around, if we can actually get him to come along, that is.

Elf Guy stops by for a more casual delve, and I can’t resist asking Teemo to get his advice. My Voice pops out of a shortcut near the gauntlet, where Tarl is waiting in line, and squeaks to get his attention.

“Oh, hey Teemo. How’re you doing?” he asks, and Teemo sighs. “That good, huh?”

“Heh, yeah. Just trying to get some last minute stuff together for Hullbreak, and wondering if you had any advice.”

Tarl grimaces at that, and takes a few seconds to formulate his reply. “Dungeon fights are delicate at the best of times. The Guild mostly sits back and tries to minimize collateral to delvers, so there’s not a lot of help I can give. Your stunt with Neverrest was, if not totally unprecedented, very rare. If it makes you feel any better, even if you subsume Hullbreak, the dwellers should be unharmed.”

Yeah… it doesn’t really make me feel any better, but Teemo thanks him and lets him do his thing.

Watching Thing and Queen finish the Axe keeps me distracted for the next couple days, at least. They even manage to get a basic air bubble enchantment on it and the hat. They do a few tests, and everything seems fine, so I call Slash to come collect his new stuff.

Thing and Queen seem a little disappointed that the pair of items don’t count as an artifact or something. We can all tell it’s more than a normal crafted thing, but don’t really have the time to try to figure out too much more. My earth elemental reverently dons the silk tophat and takes the guitar in hand. He gives it a strum, and I can feel him just basking in the sound, the juxtaposition of sweet harmony with the harsher sounds of an electric guitar.

I can actually hear music drifting back from him in the bond, as he just lets himself relish in finally having the instrument meant for him from the start. You’ve got a lot to live up to for your namesake, Slash, but I believe in you. Eventually, he gathers himself and heads to the tunnels to have some privacy to practice. I keep an ear on him, as the little snippets of songs help keep me from worrying myself in circles, at least for a bit.

It’s only a day away from the plan, now, and the scythemaws are almost all back where they’re supposed to be. I wonder if Slash’s practicing helped encourage them to go, or if they’re all just done with what they needed to do. Either way… I don’t even have scythemaws to try to distract my thoughts.

My decisions replay as night falls, time seeming somehow to stand still and yet also sprint ahead. Should I have tried just talking? Could it have worked? Maybe… but I didn’t have any way to actually talk when this started. I had Teemo, sure, but no water breathing potion. And no guarantee they’d listen to the Voice of a dungeon they don’t know much about. A new dungeon that subsumed Neverrest, even. While I doubt there was any love lost between the two, the cemetery wasn’t exactly a pushover. A new and powerful neighbor, a total unknown, wouldn’t exactly fill an apparent paranoid with trust.

Should I have pretended to be the devil Hullbreak knew, hoping it’d be taken better? It’s probably not the best way to build trust. But I couldn’t think of any other way to get Hullbreak some mana so it wouldn’t starve. An actual gift would probably be even more suspicious than a raid, weird as that seems. Someone paranoid expects an attack, and it’s almost a relief for them when it happens. A gift throws them off balance, disturbs the delicate house of cards that is their thought process.

At least, I think it does. I’m hardly a psychologist, or psychiatrist, or whatever. Maybe I’m just doing the whole thing wrong, and I should have just let Hullbreak starve and pick up the pieces after, somehow.

“You get a lot of crazy ideas, Boss, but that’s definitely one you wouldn’t follow through with,” speaks up my Voice, shaking me from my thoughts as he looks at my core.

What?

“Leaving Hullbreak to starve. You wouldn’t go through with that.”

But what if-

“What if what? If you did nothing, it’d slowly starve, and the dwellers would have to watch the whole time.” Teemo smirks. “You’re too much of a busy body to just watch something like that, Boss. You’re always poking your nose in and trying to help.”

I start to protest, but Teemo just talks over me.

“Like with the kids. If you were any other dungeon, they wouldn’t have been able to escape the basement, not with a Guardian there. Or like with Aranya and that scythemaw. Or with Neverrest and Yvonne. Or Leo. Or Violet. Or the scythemaws in general! Some have been messier than others, but I think you’ve done a good job.”

Maybe… but this one is shaping up to be even messier. Most of those were pretty simple.

Teemo snorts at that. “If you call those simple, I don’t want to know what you call complicated. Wait… I do know what you call complicated. It’s the kind of stuff that literally hurts my brain,” he says with a smirk, and I have to give him a chuckle. “There you go, Boss. The situation is serious, sure, but if you let your nerves get the better of you, it could actually get messy and complicated.”

…do you think the plan will work?

Teemo shrugs. “I dunno. I haven’t thought many of your plans would work, Boss, but I’ve been wrong plenty of times. As far as the fighting goes, I’m pretty confident in you, at least. Ragnar, Leo, and Folarn haven’t been able to find anything glaringly wrong with it.”

You think you can convince the merman to listen, to come with you?

My voice nods. “Yeah. From those reports, it sounded like he’s kinda desperate for anything to help Hullbreak. It’ll still be a risk, maybe he’ll scream and call that shark immediately, who knows? Maybe he’ll be able to talk Hullbreak down, or maybe it’ll finally fully snap. There’s a lot of stuff that could go wrong, but we’ve planned for that as much as we can. Now all we can do is hope it goes right.”

And if it doesn’t? Can we stop Hullbreak from hurting itself and its dwellers?

Teemo’s face softens as he smiles at me. “Do you think anyone else could?”

I stop in my mental tracks at the question, my worries derailing from the simple directness. After mulling it over, I’m still not happy with the situation, but that’s just life sometimes. Sometimes you’re the only one who can do it. You either do your best, or do nothing, and have to live with that. Sometimes you choose correctly, sometimes not, but you just have to try your best. I focus my attention back on Teemo and chuckle. I think you’re hanging out with Larx too much.

Teemo smirks at that. “Who else is going to help me get some mystique? Tiny? He’s got tons to spare, but I can’t go stealing his style!”