Vertex had followed the Settlers to Plenarch, though there had been less overlap between their parties than Grig might have liked. He had been thrust into a position of leadership following Lola’s dramatic exit, and did his best to keep them together when Kell left. When Tilde joined, it had almost felt as though it was a death rattle, like they were teetering on the edge of a total collapse, but she had been just what they needed, a hard worker who knew how to keep pushing forward. The road had also been good for them, helping to keep focused on the task of dungeoneering. It was common wisdom that a dungeoneering party was in its element when it was traveling, rather than putting roots down in one little town or another. Especially without a travel itinerary, there was always the risk that someone would find a partner or otherwise get entangled with the local scene. When you were moving, there was always pressure to get your dungeons in.

This hadn’t been how it worked out for the Settlers, but Vertex had been going as high as a dungeon every three days. They had the assurance from Alfric that their deaths would be undone, but it turned out that they used that assurance only once over the course of fifty dungeons, and then, it hadn’t been for a fatality, only a maiming that would have taken weeks to fully recover from.

Once they had arrived in Plenarch, the Settlers had stopped doing dungeons altogether. They were tight-lipped about why, which was unusual. Grig didn’t push too hard, but he did talk with each of them individually, hoping that he could unearth something.

“We’re just taking a bit of a break,” said Alfric. “We’re going to get settled into Plenarch. We’re fine for money, there’s no rush.” But he seemed a bit sad about it.

“We’re taking a break,” said Isra. “Plenarch is going to be our home for a bit, and we’ve had some lucrative dungeons.”

“Just a little break,” shrugged Verity. “I’ve got the concert coming up, and after that, I wanted to find some way to keep doing music. We’ll have plenty to occupy us.”

Mizuki had rambled at length, Pinion had said it wasn’t really his place to speculate, and Hannah didn’t seem to know what was up, but in Grig’s opinion, three people giving very similar wordings without injecting much of their own view was suspicious. They had dropped the subject quickly.

There was also the matter of the woman Quinn, who they had picked up on the road. She almost immediately began living with them, which was weird. Quinn herself was a bit of an odd duck, often using turns of phrase or allusions that Grig didn’t quite understand. There was a tightness when Quinn was around, something off in the vibes of the room, as though people were avoiding a topic. It was uncomfortable to have an elephant in the room when you couldn’t see the elephant at all.

But for whatever was going on with the Settlers, Vertex was doing very well. Tilde had brought a bit of seriousness to their party that they’d been lacking, and privately, Grig thought that she shared a bit of Alfric’s energy. She wasn’t the leader of the party, but in any discussion she was ready to bring them back on track. Mardin loved to natter on and Josen loved to complain, but Tilde liked to talk about business, and she did it in a way that prevented them from spiraling off in other directions.

While they’d been on the road, Grig had stuck close to Verity, though he was trying not to annoy her. He was a dungeon bard, better with the effects than the music itself, and with a set number of songs that he used for different occasions. Verity was a song-writer and incomparable musician, a prodigy by any measure. If she wasn’t the best lute player in the world — and it was possible that she was — then she was at least part of the discussion. Her musical output was prodigious, her notebooks filled with new songs almost every day. This was possible, in part, because she had a keen ability to write a good song on the first attempt, improvising as she went. She didn’t need to spend hours revising and changing things. When she put in the time to retool a song, she could very easily take it from good to great.

Grig was in awe of her. He attended every one of her ‘road concerts’ that he could, and was delighted to be asked to join her on those small stages a handful of times. He felt as though he was learning more from talking about music with her than he ever had from his music tutors.

He had been following her progress with the dungeons with keen interest, and had spoken with her about it on more than a few occasions. She’d tried to describe her ‘method’ to him a few times, but while the metaphor was ‘a duet with the dungeons’, the nitty-gritty was far more difficult and complex, and it seemed as though the metaphor was getting in the way more than it was helping.

Bards fundamentally worked by enhancing certain aspects of people, multiplying strength, sight, and whatever else. They were more powerful as part of a party, because a party mingled people, just a bit. And when a party went into a dungeon, that mingling of selves was ‘read’ somehow, taken into account as part of the generation. It seemed to Grig as though it must work as a way of enhancing something internal to the party, but trying to maximize something that couldn’t be seen and was only poorly understood was a very tall order.

Grig had been working on learning Verity’s technique. He had listened to her ruminations on what she was doing and how it worked, and then tried his best to replicate it with his own understanding of dungeons and how they made what was inside them, and the chance for injecting something more into it. He had also spoken with Pinion at length, bending the scholar’s ear and getting long explanations about various theories.

Though he never expressed it out loud, his ambition was to be the second person to do what Verity was doing. He was a skilled bard, though not abnormally so, and a good dungeoneer, though he certainly wasn’t going to make it into the history books that way. Maybe Verity’s fame was kindling something in him, but it really did feel like he was uniquely placed. There were no other bards consulting with her, maybe no other bards who had a single clue that she was doing anything, let alone insight into how it was done.

“I’m trying to be the opposite of a plant,” Grig said to Mardin. “I’m hoping that being in her shade will help me grow.”

Obviously something had happened to make them take their break when they got to Plenarch, something much more than just deciding that there wasn’t any pressing need. Maybe it was the loss of Hannah, though to hear Marsh tell it, that had been a pretty amicable split, motivated more by her desire to start seriously preaching and helping communities again, and by a decided lack of calamitous dungeons that would require a dedicated cleric.

He had been stunned that they were taking a break while hot on the heels of repeated success with the dungeons. It just didn’t make sense. He resented Verity for it, if only a little bit. He resented it more when she kept changing the subject away from her work on the dungeons, especially since they had just pulled out fully docile riding creatures. He tried to have some respect for their privacy, but these people were his friends, and they were keeping something from him.

Grig checked, and Alfric had never written a dungeon report. Alfric always wrote a dungeon report, usually a long one that went into detail about not just what they had found but how they had adapted to it and what lessons could be taken from the experience.

He redoubled his efforts with the dungeons, independent of Verity, and tried to keep upbeat when he was around the Settlers. They still had their two party dinners from time to time, and no one else seemed to think that anything was particularly strange or weird, so he tried to keep upbeat. It was entirely possible that something bad had happened in their last dungeon, the one with the horses, and they simply didn’t want to talk about it.

At first, it was hard to say whether or not Grig was actually making any progress. Dungeons were inherently random, and any minor influence might have been mistaken for variance, or just the impact of different conditions within the hex. Dungeoneers were a superstitious lot, and Grig was trying to temper that impulse.

After the first month they’d been in Plenarch, twenty dungeons later, it was starting to become undeniable. The entads were better and more suited to them, the monsters weaker. There was still danger, still things that reared their heads and conditions that made the dungeons treacherous, but they were fighting dungeons well below what their elevation would have suggested.

“You’re doing it, aren’t you?” Tilde asked after one particularly easy dungeon. Josen had done almost all of the killing work, his mana stores not even halfway depleted by the end of it. Rather than putting him in a cantankerous mood, this had made Josen quite pleased with himself, especially since it meant that no one was at risk from Marsh’s flames.

“I don’t know,” said Grig. “It might just be variance.”

“No,” said Tilde. “Variance doesn’t swing that far ten dungeons in a row.”

They were alone, which was how Tilde seemed to prefer her conversations. She was more awkward in groups, even if they were groups of people she knew. They had rented a house in Plenarch and were using it as their base of operations, and the roof had a cozy little garden with benches tucked into it. Winter was on its way, and Grig was trying to enjoy what little time they had left. This far south, it got perilously cold, and he had been thinking about moving the team back north to Dondrian. On this particular day, it was brisk instead of chilly, with a bit of bite to the winds when they shifted just right.

“I think I’m doing it, yeah,” said Grig.

Tilde let out a breath. “Yeah.”

“I’m pushing as hard as I possibly can,” said Grig. “And I’m still not getting results anything like hers.”

“She’s not getting results,” said Tilde. “They’re not doing dungeons.”

“You know what I mean,” said Grig. “A hundred lutes, a full theater, horses.”

“She’s Chosen,” said Tilde with a shrug.

“Yeah, I know,” said Grig. “Of all the people to compare myself to, Verity Parson is probably the worst. She’s put on packed solo concerts in Dondrian, her voice and lute play in literally thousands of places around the world, and who knows what else. The number of actual attempts she made to get the results with dungeons that she’s gotten is astonishingly low. I think there’s a chance that the thing I’ll be known for, if I’m ever known for anything, is that at the age of eighteen I was doing dungeons with her — and not even with her, just alongside her party, sometimes, in a manner of speaking.”

“We’ve done twenty dungeons while they’ve been resting on their laurels,” said Tilde. “We’re working harder, and from what I know of our books, we’re liable to hit retirement in a hurry.”

“Retirement is complicated,” said Grig. “Taxation being what it is, you want bound entads that can provide almost indefinitely, and if I can do a fraction of what Verity can do, it means that once it gets out, there will be a seismic shift in what the whole world pulls from dungeons.”

“You’re selling yourself short,” said Tilde.

Grig looked out at the sea, which was just barely visible from his place on the rooftop. “Possibly.”

“Should I talk to Mardin?” asked Tilde. She frowned a bit and shifted in her spot. “I don’t really know why you’re down about this. The dungeon was a success. The entads were good. The frame is going to make every dungeon after this one about a hundred times easier.”

“The frame is good, yes,” said Grig. “I suppose it’s just sinking in that I’m having my influence on the dungeons. And I should be happy.” He looked over at Tilde. He was glad to not be talking to Mardin about this. Mardin liked to brush things off, and was actually a sort of terrible cleric if you needed to talk things through. The man could heal wounds like no one’s business, which was the main thing that dungeons required of him. “I’m not sure I want the world to change. I’m not sure I like this form of dungeoneering.”

“Dungeons without monsters,” said Tilde. “Hundreds of entads lining every wall. It’s like a dream.”

“We’re not there yet,” said Grig. “In another year, another hundred dungeons … maybe.”

Tilde frowned. “I can see things from your point of view,” she said. “You think we’d be losing something.”

“You go into the dungeons to make money,” said Grig. “You go there to get magic. But if it’s just like a trip to the store, what have you proven?” He turned to her. “Look, I know this is silly, but thank you for allowing me to indulge some silly thoughts.”

“There are many people who are romantic about dungeons,” said Tilde. “I’ve found it common among those who spent significant time in the Junior League. I think they must get it from older dungeoneers, those who continued on until that was all they ever knew. It’s sentimentality.”

“It makes it easier to face the horrors, I guess,” said Grig.

“You’re not thinking about quitting, are you?” asked Tilde.

Grig raised an eyebrow. “Quitting? Gods no. I’m well on my way to being the second-best dungeon bard in the world.” He gave her a goofy smile and decided that the time for sharing emotions was over.

Two more months passed, and still the Settlers weren’t doing dungeons. Grig knew better than to prod them too much, but the last time he’d seen Alfric, the phrase ‘maybe soon’ had been floated. They were still a party, at the very least, all living in the same house, which had acquired a few new rooms thanks to some entads that Alfric had bought.

Vertex had been on a tear through the dungeons, which definitely were easier, and with the entads they were pulling, all the logistical elements were easier as well.

The picture frame was almost comically large, three feet by nine and a half feet, but it was the single best dungeoneering item they had pulled from the dungeons thus far, and it wasn’t even bound. When set up, it created an extradimensional space that mimicked whatever could be seen through it, and all items were instantly transported inside. The number of such extradimensional spaces that could be created like this numbered a dozen dozen, more than anyone would ever need, and while someone still needed to step into the frame to take things out, it meant that entirely looting a room was just a matter of getting the frame in place.

A different entad stripped materials from the dungeons in one foot chunks. Normally that sort of thing wouldn’t be worth terribly much, sometimes not even the cost of transporting and selling it, but they had enough support to make it worth their while, and the blocks by themselves didn’t need to be worked to be useful.

On top of that, they were getting more than their fair share of travel entads, because Grig had been trying to get travel entads. That meant that it made sense to extend their stay in Plenarch pretty much indefinitely, especially since they’d started putting down roots: Mardin had a girlfriend he was calling ‘serious’, while Josen had been making friends at the local wizarding school. Grig eventually made the decision to buy the house they were renting outright.

Winter had come, but the house had an entad instead of heaters, one that kept it feeling like summer the whole year round. It had been a good get, particularly because it extended up to the rooftop, where they put in place some plants and an ectad watering system. While snow flew in the rest of the city, their house stuck up like a big green thumb, wonderfully out of place as the first snows blanketed everything.

It was during one of those snowfalls that everything clicked into place for Grig.

He’d started reading the newspapers twice a day, both morning and evening editions, which made him feel like a grown up. He didn’t quite read cover-to-cover, but he did at least skim the headlines and read through everything that might be relevant or interesting. He almost missed a tucked-away piece about new legislation regarding sentient beings pulled from the dungeons. It was framed as an expansion of protections for the bastlefolk and hedging against variance, but as soon as he read it, he knew the truth.

He went over to the house where the Settlers lived, Mizuki’s house, and tried to compose himself before knocking on the door. They didn’t live far from each other, but he’d failed to put on proper clothing for the weather, which was apparently a serious risk when you lived in a house that had balmy temperatures all year round. He was shivering slightly when Alfric answered the door.

“Oh, Grig,” said Alfric. “We weren’t expecting you. Is this a social call, or … ?”

“Business, kind of,” said Grig.

“Come in,” said Alfric.

They sat down in the living room, where Mizuki was curled up on the couch, covered in blankets in spite of the fact that there was a roaring fire in the fireplace.

“Hey Grig,” she said with a wave.

“Hello,” said Grig. “Where are the others? I was hoping to talk to Verity.”

“They’re shopping,” said Alfric. “Entad shopping, actually. We went yesterday too, but I guess they didn’t find what they wanted.”

“Quinn too?” asked Grig.

“Quinn too,” nodded Alfric. “We’re actually doing a dungeon soon, within the next day or two, and Quinn will be with us.” He said it with the casual air of a man who wanted nothing more than to drop that fact to anyone who would listen.

“You’re doing a dungeon again, after three months,” said Grig.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “It’s been far, far too long.”

“You never told me why you stopped,” said Grig.

“We just needed a break,” said Alfric. “Especially after all that time on the road.” He wasn’t a particularly good liar.

“Quinn came from a dungeon,” said Grig.

Alfric pursed his lips, but stayed silent.

“How’d you know?” asked Mizuki.

“The timing, mostly,” said Grig. “She’s weird sometimes, but I chalked that up to her being a foreigner. But you have a successful dungeon, then stop doing dungeons, and this woman starts living with you basically right after?” He shook his head. “It’s still not where my mind went. I thought … I don’t know, that there was something traumatic that you didn’t want to talk about.”

“We weren’t supposed to tell anyone,” said Alfric. “They didn’t want the secret getting out, not before they had some laws in place.”

“And now there are laws in place,” said Grig. “Verity can pull whole people from the dungeons.”

“Yes,” said Alfric.

“You don’t understand,” said Grig. “I’ve been using her technique. I was at risk of doing the same.”

Alfric blinked at him. “What do you mean, doing her technique?”

“I mean … easier dungeons, first elevation stuff that we plow through,” said Grig. “Better entads, more entads. It’s possible to pull people out? And no one thought to mention that to me? I’m absolutely not prepared for that.”

“Wait here,” said Alfric. He rushed out of the room.

“So,” said Mizuki when Alfric didn’t immediately return. “How’s things?”

“They’re … fine,” said Grig.

“Josen has been hanging around Rayedhcraft school,” said Mizuki. “I see him every now and then. He’s actually done some guest lecturing.”

“Yeah,” said Grig. “He’s not bothering people?”

Mizuki laughed. “Not at all. But from what I gather, they’re always the kind of conversations where you’re talking about wizard stuff and never once share anything else about yourself. Thoughts, feelings, emotions, that kind of thing stays out of it. I think it’s actually pretty common with wizards. They’ll swear up and down that they’re lifelong friends, but then they’ll say ‘oh, I never knew he had children’. This one girl I was really close with had a twin sister I never knew about until I thought I was seeing double at a party.”

It wasn’t a conversation that Grig was in the mood for, but thankfully Alfric returned, carrying a slender book.

“What is this?” asked Grig as Alfric handed the book over.

“It’s a guide,” said Alfric. “Provisional, naturally. It’s one of five copies, we’re kind of waiting for more people to get pulled from dungeons to make a proper print run of it, not just because of the secrecy, but so the advice is practical instead of theoretical.” Grig looked up from the table of contents and saw Alfric watching him.

“You … wrote a book on how to deal with it?” asked Grig.

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “With help from Quinn. I also spoke with a few well-regarded clerics, though I was careful not to let too much on.” He waited for a beat. “If you haven’t shared anything with us, I hope you’re also not sharing with other people. The law is now pretty clear on what needs to happen if you do come across a person in the dungeons, whether they look human or not, but it still might not be the best thing for just anyone to be able to do it, at least not right at once.”

“The rest of the party doesn’t even really know,” said Grig. “Tilde does, I guess, but she figured it out on her own. And I didn’t tell anyone about Quinn.”

“Better you don’t,” said Alfric. “She’d rather not be thought of as … an aberration.”

“No,” said Grig. He hadn’t even really considered that. “No, of course not.”

“Read the book,” said Alfric. “I think it should help prepare you, if you get to the point where you think it might happen.”

Grig gave a slow nod. “You’re so calm about this.”

“We’ve had time,” said Alfric. “And I’ve been running through scenarios. The most likely scenario, it seemed to me, was that someone we’d talked to would just do it, skipping over a bunch of steps. So this is better than expected, I guess. Also, you should talk to Verity.”

“I will,” said Grig. “You’ve all been so silent.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “We were trying not to create problems.”

“Are you going to try to create people?” asked Mizuki.

“I — what?” asked Grig.

“It’s technically legal,” said Alfric. “Or, not technically legal, fully legal without any technicalities, but from a practical standpoint, and possibly a moral one —”

“Sorry, I just read a newspaper article,” said Grig. “I don’t know all the details.”

“Wait here, I have a copy,” said Alfric, ducking out of the room again.

Mizuki waited for a moment. “Josen got an entad to fix his hair?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Grig. “I was trying for ten dungeons, trying to, I don’t know, weave it into the dungeon texture somehow, along with everything else.” Josen had started balding quite young, but his hair was no longer thinning, and he had lost just a bit of his surly edge.

“Cool,” said Mizuki. “Is there a polite way to tell him that his hairline is just like … a bit too far forward?”

“Mardin already tried the rude way,” said Grig. “Josen said that’s how he likes it, so I guess, I don’t know … no, there’s not really anything you could say.”

“He’s basically our friend,” said Mizuki. “And if he’s done this to himself, I think a good friend would —”

“Alright,” said Alfric, having returned from upstairs with a thick folder in hand. He pulled out a few sheets, looked them over, and handed them to Grig. “Here it is.”

“You have all this?” asked Grig.

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “You can keep that copy, I actually have others. If you pull people, it’s likely that they’ll want to know their legal standing. So you should keep that in mind. Maybe don’t hand them the laws right away, they’re not meant to be readable to someone without basic knowledge of the legal system, but —”

“I think I need to just sit down and think about this,” said Grig. “I mean, what this means, what it might mean that I might be a part of it. Talk to my party.”

“Of course,” said Alfric. “We’re not far. We’re going into a dungeon of our own soon, but I’m always free to talk.”

“Maybe tell them to keep their traps shut about it,” said Mizuki.

“Right,” said Grig.

“The assumption is that it’ll get out eventually,” said Alfric. “And the government’s general thinking is that this is a net benefit for Inter and probably good for the people who the dungeons will create, who otherwise wouldn’t, you know … exist. But there will probably be another reckoning later on, when it’s public. There will be newspapers, books, things like that, and a debate that hopefully won’t get too heated.”

“You’ve had so much time with this,” said Grig.

“Yes,” said Alfric. “And in spite of what will be Verity’s best efforts, there’s a chance that we’re going to have another person in the next dungeon. But I think we’ve made peace with that.”

Grig nodded slowly. “Thank you, for talking.”

“We’ll talk more,” said Alfric. “Sit with it. Talk to the others. Read some of the material.” He gestured at the book and the papers that were in Grig’s hands. “We need to have another two party dinner soon, maybe we can devote one just to talking about the cat that’s now out of the bag.”

Grig got out of there as soon as the pleasantries allowed, then read through the book in two sittings over the next day and a half. It was rather slender, and written in the dry tone that Alfric took to like catnip, but it was filled with information, advice, and speculation.

He didn’t know what to think, and talking with his party about it didn’t seem to be doing anything. Mardin didn’t think that it was all that big of a deal, Tilde had apparently figured the whole thing out and then never talked to anyone about it, and Josen was largely concerned with how it would impact their bottom line. Marsh was the most concerned of any of them, but once he learned that there were laws in place, he seemed content to defer to Grig.

The easiest thing to do was to keep doing dungeons.

Grig felt some trepidation going into the next dungeon, and the thought of someone minding their own business in the dungeon kept running through his mind. He had never asked to be the leader of Vertex, and had only picked up the mantle because it seemed like someone should. The moral questions of the dungeon seemed like they’d fallen to him too. And then the actual manipulations of the dungeons, that was entirely on his shoulders.

When he crossed the threshold, he put in everything he possibly could into the brief instant when the dungeon took on its form. He was praying to whatever gods would listen that he wouldn’t make a person, wouldn’t have to deal with more of a burden on his shoulders.

They walked across loamy soil, through wind-carved canyons, past a half-built castle nestled under a thick rock overhang.

In the end, the dungeon didn’t have the lone man minding his own business that Grig had been so worried about.

Instead, it had a village of thirty-seven.

They were pleasant people, not as human as Quinn was but close enough, but their mottled skin was later revealed to be a dye they used for ceremonial purposes. They didn’t share a language with Grig, but he had bought a translator at some expense, and eventually managed to get across to them something approaching the truth. The huge amount of magic that the party had on them hadn’t really been convincing — they kept using a word that didn’t translate to explain it all — but taking them to the edges of the dungeon did wonders.

It was an impossible number of people to hide, but at least all the laws were in place — laws and procedures that almost no one was acquainted with. The laws were new, and most people thought that they were a ‘just in case’ sort of thing that no one would actually need to worry about. The fact that Grig had the only translation entad for several hexes around also complicated matters.

“So let me get this straight,” said Mardin. “These people have come from the dungeon, and we have to give them pretty much all of the stuff we found there, including some rather nice entads?”

“Yes,” said Grig. “There are some limits to that, but —”

“Seems to me,” said Mardin. “Like we should not be doing dungeons that have people in them. Right?”

Grig stared at him for a moment, then went off to go do something else so he wouldn’t punch his friend in the face.

The whole ordeal was, to Grig’s chagrin, front page news, big bold letters that declared that dungeon immigrants had stepped out into the world. The story had apparently been ready to go for some time, he learned later, and had been written ahead of time in the same way that they wrote obituaries. It ran with a second story, this one also written ahead of time, which went into the details of how the law had been made with only a few people knowing that the law was being made in response to an event rather than in preparation for something that was thought to be hypothetical.

The mottled blue people that Grig had pulled from the dungeons became minor celebrities, especially when better translation entads became available for them. Vertex had managed to pull most of their village out with them, and they were given some land to build on, but it turned out they were modernists, very ready to have better houses with running water, tiled roofs, and soft beds.

The Settlers commiserated with Grig, and Quinn seemed pleased. Their own dungeon had gone splendidly, with a cornucopia of entads within it and no one to speak of, a success by any standard.

Immediately after, Grig wasn’t sure that he would ever do a dungeon again. Mardin was callous but correct: there wasn’t much upside to dungeons if they had people in them, not with the amount of time and effort it took to get them out. Much more pressing, at least for Grig, was the weight of responsibility he felt toward those created people, the ‘blues’ as the Plenarch newspapers were calling them.

“So,” asked Marsh after four days had passed. “When are we going again?”

“I don’t know if I can control it,” said Grig.

Marsh shrugged. “So don’t?”

“Don’t?” asked Grig.

“I mean, if you don’t try to control it, it’s just a regular dungeon, right?” asked Mardin. They were seated around their dining room table, having dinner together, which was something they’d never really done when Lola had been a part of the party: they had all eaten separately then, away from each other.

“Right,” said Grig, frowning. “It’ll be a jump in difficulty. We’ve done so many weak dungeons with great rewards, I’m not sure how it will go.”

“So then do control the dungeons,” said Tilde. “Right?”

“The dungeon people,” said Grig.

“Alright,” said Mardin with a grin. “Then don’t control the dungeons.”

Grig rolled his eyes. “By a vote, who would be willing to do another dungeon if it meant the risk of more people?” All four hands went up, save for his. He raised his hand slowly. It was easier to do that, with some unanimity. “I guess I’ll just have to get it under control. Verity seems to have done it. How hard can it be?”