Vertex went in first, as they’d discussed the last time, and the Settlers followed after. As before, they had Bib and Pinion waiting outside, though technically speaking there was nothing for Bib to do, and he’d have been free to run off about the countryside, as was his way.

Hannah hadn’t told the others yet, but it was very possible that this was going to be the last dungeon she did. She’d been sending letters across Greater Plenarch and had even rejoined the guild, and she was feeling the itch to go get some of those things done rather than spending too much time cooped up in her entad. Marsh was quite supportive, even if it meant that they would be geographically separated from each other for a bit, though he also seemed to think that they’d find some entad solution for that. It had worked well enough when there were two hexes between them, but she thought it would work better when they could return to the same home at night.

There was a piece of Hannah that worried this was part of a long pattern that was hard to see. She’d itched to get out of the seminary and into actual clerical work, itched to get out of the temple and go do dungeons, and was now itching to speak with people again in the clerical way. Looking at herself from what she hoped was an objective point of view, it seemed possible that she would just never be satisfied no matter where she landed, that she was setting herself up for a life of flitting from one thing to another, never bringing anything to proper completion. It was too early to say for sure whether this was a true pattern, and she didn’t know whether it would even necessarily be a problem. She’d resolved to keep a watchful eye on it though.

The dungeon was by a river, in a nicely scenic location, which dungeon entrances often weren’t. It was in a hex that had only a small town, and one that was fairly far from the dungeon entrance. They hadn’t selected it at random: it had been picked because Verity had some sense that she would be able to make something she wanted to make there. As before, she hadn’t told them what it was she wanted to make, but they’d decided to be a bit less strict about it this time, in part because it was annoying to talk around the lack of information, and potentially deadly.

The dungeon opened up into a small room, which seemed, to Hannah, like such a common dungeon feature that there must have been a bias towards it. It was white and gold, though almost assuredly not actual gold, as it didn’t have the luster and dungeons weren’t supposed to make real gold. Double doors stood before them, fifteen feet tall and narrow enough that even with both open they’d have to go one at a time.

The lute that would start playing for danger wasn’t playing.

said Alfric.

said Verity.

said Alfric.

said Verity.

When everyone was ready, Alfric opened the door.

There was a long hallway filled with alcoves, and in each of them, a statue.

said Mizuki.

asked Alfric.

said Mizuki.

The statues were all female, and most of them were nudes. There was an enormous variety of poses, clothing, facial features, expressions, and ethnicities, though that was harder to tell without skin color. The stone used for the statues came in wide varieties, pinks, blacks, whites, grays, and a few that were the green of jade.

said Mizuki, shaking her head.

said Verity. She was gazing at the statues.

Isra agreed.

said Mizuki.

said Verity.

said Alfric.

said Verity. She was frowning somewhat.

said Alfric. He gave a glance at Hannah.

said Mizuki.

They began transitioning the statues into the lute-space, which went surprisingly quickly given how heavy the stone was. None of the statues showed any signs of moving, and eventually the strumming to get them in was going quite quickly. There were forty of the statues in total, each with its own base to allow for poses that would otherwise tip the things over, and the party talked about each of them as they went into storage.

said Mizuki.

said Verity.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric.

A white marble statue in a silk robe that clung to her and left nothing to the imagination was whisked away, and they moved on to the next, this one a nude.

said Mizuki as she looked the statue up and down. The stone was a mixture of colors, black and white going through it without respect to the geometry of the body. One hand was outstretching, pointing, and she had a faint smile on her face.

asked Hannah.

said Mizuki, peering closer.

said Alfric, who was standing back somewhat.

asked Mizuki, narrowing her eyes at the statue’s face.

said Alfric.

Mizuki turned to look at Verity.

said Verity.

said Mizuki.

Verity shrugged.

Mizuki said with a sigh.

Among the statues they collected there were none others that so much as suggested a resemblance to anyone they knew, though the range of body types and ethnicities meant that you could stretch it a bit, if you wanted to. By the time they finished, Verity had a theory.

said Verity, frowning a bit. There were now empty alcoves on either side of the hallway.

asked Mizuki.

said Hannah.

asked Alfric.

said Verity.

said Hannah.

said Verity.

asked Mizuki.

said Alfric. There was a touch of annoyance in his voice.

said Mizuki.

said Verity.

said Mizuki. She had gone up to the next door, which wasn’t how they did things. Alfric had said that they were supposed to treat these dungeons as proper dungeons, with all that entailed, and Mizuki going forward to inspect doors wasn’t a part of that. Alfric said nothing though, and Hannah held her tongue.

asked Isra.

said Mizuki. She was staring at the door, which was the same white and gold, though with a relief on it. There were skulls at the bottom, which trees were growing out of.

said Alfric. He moved to the front and made sure that everyone was in place, then pushed the door open.

They were faced with a long, sunlit room with a few hundred pedestals, all lined up in rows. Each was affixed with a small label, made in brass. The place had a nice, rich glow to it, helped by the dark hardwood floors that reflected the light back warmer. The sunlight was coming in from holes in the roof high above them, a grid of windows on the ceiling that made spots of light in exactly the places where the pedestals weren’t.

asked Alfric. Each of the pedestals had something on top of it, the objects seemingly random, tools, implements, books, pieces of art, tchotchkes and knick-knacks, each of them with a label.

said Verity. She was beaming. Her eyes were moving over the entads, quickly hopping from one to another.

said Mizuki.

Verity turned to her. she asked.

said Mizuki. She looked sheepish.

said Verity. She frowned. Her bright mood on coming into the room had suddenly been swept away.

said Alfric. He placed a hand on Verity’s shoulder.

said Verity. She sighed and looked up.

said Alfric.

They moved through the room, somewhat slowly, following Alfric’s lead. It did feel a little bit ridiculous that his sword was drawn, but there was a chance that something might happen. Of all the things they thought the lute might not immediately warn them of, poison was the one that Hannah was most worried about. They had been poisoned once before. The second problem that they might not be warned of was, of course, shifting rooms, which they’d also encountered before. Especially if the things Verity was trying to avoid could seep in sideways, there was some cause for concern.

said Mizuki as she read one of the plaques. She was standing next to one of the pedestals, peering down at the plaque beneath a tea kettle.

said Alfric. He had picked it up and was looking at it.

said Hannah. She turned to Verity.

said Verity.

asked Hannah, arching an eyebrow.

said Verity.

said Isra.

said Alfric.

Mizuki was the one who went for the three entads, which were spread out across the room. Among them was a salt shaker, a small silver spoon that Mizuki seemed enthused about, and an ice pick that came with a sheathe. Each had their own description, but Alfric was adamant that they do no testing of the entads, since if the plaques were wrong, they might be in some real trouble.

They didn’t end up taking all the henlings, just twenty or so for the sake of comparison, and particularly those that looked valuable. Alfric had said that if the other doors had nothing, they might grab the rest on the way out.

He still seemed to be stuck on the idea of stripping everything out of the dungeons that they could, but to Hannah’s way of thinking, that wasn’t very sensible in the long-term. If Verity was able to get this under control, the group wouldn’t want to spend most of their time ‘stripping’ dungeons, which was something that a lot of dungeoneering groups did if they were trying to minimize their risks. Going in with a crowbar wasn’t a good use of time when you could get entads with no risk of combat, and they’d had their fill of removing valuable bits when they’d taken most of the theater.

Hannah wasn’t sure how the party would get on without her. She was going to stay in the house for as long as possible, but this new era would surely mean changes. Hannah had always been Alfric’s second in command, right from the start, supporting him when it came to getting the party in order. There was a good chance that Hannah would keep doing dungeons so long as they were being dripped out over the course of many days, but if she eventually devoted her efforts elsewhere, Alfric would have to manage everything all on his own. He could easily handle all the logistics, but the personal matters were something else entirely, the easiest place where he might let himself — and the others — down.

Marsh was of the opinion that people didn’t actually need her as much as she thought they did. He was gentle about expressing that opinion, but it had still stung a bit. Of course, Marsh was also nearly blind to the total dysfunction within his own party, which he considered to have been resolved with the removal of Lola, but he had a point, and Hannah had spent some time pondering it. That pondering hadn’t actually led anywhere.

When they opened the doors at the end of the ‘museum’ room, Hannah had expected that they would find another room of some kind. Instead, they were met with sunlight and the smell of the sea. Thick, worn cobblestones went in front of the building they’d been in, and there was a village beyond the fountain that sat directly in front of the building. Any question about the scale of the dungeon was almost immediately answered, as they had an expansive view, and the village they were around seemed fairly large. Ships were in the harbor, and large, puffy animals floated in the sky with small pellets dangling down beneath them, almost like dandelion seeds.

shouted Mizuki.

said Alfric. His sword was drawn, but it took him a moment to see what Mizuki had seen, which was a woman slumped over on a balcony. She had long black hair and a dress with silver stripes, and wasn’t moving at all.

said Verity.

said Alfric. It was good he’d said that, because Mizuki was clearly itching to go.

Hannah held back, waiting, mostly to defend the others if some kind of danger reared its ugly head. The lute would warn them if there was anything like dungeon madness, but it wouldn’t immediately start up if there was a trap or some other kind of danger they were walking straight into. This had something to do with what the lute actually considered to be ‘danger’, with intent counting for a lot, and something that didn’t have intent, like poison, counting for a lot less.

Hannah glanced at the building they’d come out of, the ‘museum’. It was sitting on the top of the hill, in a place of prominence in the village, but it was so large that it looked a bit ridiculous in this context, and the lack of windows was decidedly odd. The exterior had murals on it, wide ones that were sparse on details, depicting an island village which was presumably this one. Yet all the things inside the museum had been random entads with no mention on their plaques of where they had come from.

said Alfric. He had gone up a stairwell and was inspecting the slumped over woman. He lifted up one arm and then set it back down. He straightened up.

said Verity.

said Alfric. He was up on the balcony, close enough for them to watch him. He poked at the body gingerly, with as much finesse as possible with a dagger. Hannah frowned, hoping that he was right that it wasn’t actually a person, because desecration of a humanlike corpse was … not strictly wrong, but made her feel ill at ease, even if these were in some sense dungeon creations.

asked Verity.

said Alfric.

asked Mizuki.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Alfric.

said Hannah.

said Isra.

said Verity.

said Alfric.

asked Verity.

said Alfric. He had made a second cut in the body, and was using his fingers to open it wider, tearing through the skin like it was paper.

said Hannah.

said Verity. She let out a sigh.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

asked Verity.

said Mizuki with a shrug.

said Isra.

said Alfric.

said Hannah.

asked Alfric.

said Verity.

They regrouped and Alfric took a moment to look down the streets around them. They were high up on the hill, which seemed, from this vantage, to actually be part of a peninsula. Alfric considered carefully, then had them set off in what was, according to the position of the sun, probably east, not that cardinal directions needed to be followed here.

They saw more of the bodies as they went, all of them dead, or sleeping, or just having been created in the positions they had ended up in. Hannah didn’t have the same curiosity as Alfric did, and mostly stayed with Isra and Verity as Alfric and Mizuki went into the houses and shops. All of the bodies she saw were just people in the midst of their daily life, as though this village had been going about a normal day when something had swept through and killed absolutely everything in it with a swiftness and silence that nothing in the world could ever have matched. A man’s body lay dead, hands still clutching a bundle of flowers. It was like he’d been walking down the street and just … stopped living. That the bodies weighed five pounds, that they were shells only painted to look like bodies, wasn’t entirely comforting. Hannah had always found something mildly creepy about dolls, and that was what these were, at least approximately.

said Isra. They were waiting outside while Alfric and Mizuki went into another house.

said Verity.

asked Isra.

said Verity.

asked Isra.

said Alfric. He was inside the house, but his voice was clear through the party channel. It was sometimes easy to forget that the party channel extended a conversation to people that were out of earshot.

said Mizuki.

said Verity.

asked Alfric.

There was a bit of silence after that. Verity had a frown on her face. Hannah had no idea what to say, because she wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t murder. And if they did find something alive within the dungeon, something that was approximately a person, it seemed as though they would have no choice but to pull it out and hand it over to the government. Creating entads was one thing, but creating life was something else entirely. And given the scale of the village, creating that much life was a real concern. Three hundred people uprooted from a life they thought they had been leading was a far, far more thorny problem than the bastlefolk had ever been.

said Mizuki.

said Hannah.

said Mizuki.

said Hannah.

said Alfric.

said Mizuki.

said Isra.

said Verity.

said Mizuki.

said Hannah.

There was a brief pause, and Mizuki might have been having a conversation with Alfric inside the house. It was hard to tell.

said Alfric.

said Hannah with a sigh. It was clear that Verity wanted out, and she thought it best not to press the girl too much, especially with all the unsettling questions that were being raised. Verity was good with death and violence, but this was something else, something that felt like a violation of an innocent place.

They moved, as a group, back up the street, past all the houses that Alfric and Mizuki had gone into.

said Mizuki.

said Verity.

asked Alfric.

said Verity with a sigh.

said Alfric.

said Isra.

asked Verity.

said Isra.

said Verity.

said Mizuki.

said Verity. She chewed her lip.

As they approached the museum, Hannah began to feel a bit of relief. They’d made it through the dungeon, and the unsettling feeling had amounted to nothing. They were clearly going to have to talk about it afterward, but she had a feeling that it would all end with them throwing up their hands and saying that it was weird, rather than having a moral or existential crisis about the whole thing. Hannah was feeling a bit pleased with the party for having been respectful of each other, even if it was clear that Mizuki was far less affected by the dolls than Verity was. It boded well for the future.

They were a block away from the museum when the ground began to shake. Hannah had heard of earthquakes, but never experienced one, and they all froze in place on the road, trying to keep their balance as the ground shifted.

The museum was moving more than anything else. The large building lurched from side to side, unnaturally, then rose from the ground, pulling long legs out of the stone foundation. It looked like a massive spider for just a moment, but then it began to move, and it was much more like a centipede, its steps sinuous and quick. It charged off down the hill, toward the peninsula, having emerged from the rock.

cried Alfric.