Chapter 120 – The New Normal, pt 1

It was more or less exactly what Alfric had feared. If Verity and Isra had not actually broken up, they were, at least, on the rocks. After their return from Dondrian, the feeling of it had infested the household, and the two of them weren’t talking to each other except in brief sentences. It wasn’t angry, or even really curt, just like they had mutually decided to only exchange a handful of words each day. There wasn’t an extra bedroom in the house, so by some kind of twisted agreement between the two of them, Verity was living in the woods and Isra was in the bedroom they’d been sharing. Alfric wasn’t entirely sure how or why this arrangement had been made, and it seemed insane to him, because of all the things that could be said about Verity, no one would have said that she was suited to the woods.

Verity did come by the house, where she still nominally lived, in part because she didn’t know how to cook for herself. She would show up for lunch famished, then spend time reading in the living room, or tending to the garden, or playing her lute, then after dinner, retreat back to her forest home.

Isra was hardly any better. She was trying too hard to be sociable, and Alfric worried that it wasn’t healthy. Isra joined practically every club there was in Pucklechurch, all over the course of a week, and volunteered her time helping out at the school to pick up the slack for a teacher that had just gone into labor. After her first day helping with the six-year-olds, she had declared that she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, not seeming to realize that her magical powers were helping her along. She could watch the kids using bird helpers, and of course the children were fantastically entertained by the coterie of animals that came out of the woods. There was a frantic energy to the way that Isra was filling up her life with other things, and Alfric thought that sooner or later it was all going to come crumbling down.

“Okay,” said Mizuki. “What are we going to do about the girl situation?” She was sitting on his bed as he worked on composing a message to his guild. He wanted advice, and was trying to get it without divulging too much in the way of personal information. It was difficult work, made somewhat more difficult by the fact that Mizuki was there and trying to talk to him.

“Nothing,” said Alfric. “It’s not our place.”

“But I mean, they’re all broken up now, right?” asked Mizuki. “So are you thinking that we just let it blow over?”

“I don’t know if they are broken up,” said Alfric. “I asked Isra and her mood plummeted like a stone. She just said that they hadn’t really talked about it.”

“That’s so dumb,” said Mizuki. “It makes sense to not know if you’ve started dating someone, but to not know whether you’ve stopped?”

That gave Alfric pause. “Does it make sense to not know whether you’re dating someone?”

“Sure, happens all the time,” said Mizuki. “To lots of people.”

“Well, the longer it goes on, the more likely it is to be permanent,” said Alfric.

“Do we, like, want them to be together?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t think what we want is really relevant,” said Alfric. “I think, as their friends, what we want is for them to be happy, and hopefully they can find a way of being happy where we all stay friends.”

“I mean, that’s not a risk, is it?” asked Mizuki.

“I don’t know,” said Alfric. “I have experienced exactly one breakup, which lost me all my friends.”

“Well, I guess I have a lot of experience,” said Mizuki. “And yeah, not being friends anymore seems like something that happens.” She was swinging her feet, which didn’t quite touch the floor. “But I don’t know how we’d make that work, as a dungeoneering party.”

“We likely wouldn’t,” said Alfric.

Mizuki stared at him for a moment. “But what would that mean?”

“It would mean we’d have to find a new fifth,” said Alfric with a sigh. It had been almost a week since the falling out, and it seemed like Mizuki was just now coming to realize that this spelled trouble for their collective future.

“Well how would that even work?” asked Mizuki. “I mean — it wouldn’t, right? It took Vertex a couple of weeks to find someone, and I feel like they got pretty lucky to have Kell.”

“We’re definitely not at that point,” said Alfric. “And it is possible for people to work together without them being friends. I have an uncle whose party can’t stand each other, but they’re professionals when they’re in a dungeon. Outside it, they don’t really talk, and they’re certainly not friends.”

“That sounds awful,” said Mizuki. “Stuck in a dungeon for weeks at a time with people you don’t care for?”

Alfric had no reply to that. Vertex had gone fifty dungeons or so together while not being quite friends, and with Lola there. It did sound awful, and he had a much better understanding of the awfulness now than he’d had when he’d set out for Pucklechurch. It was the sort of thing you learned along the way, he supposed, but it was also the sort of thing that could get you stuck on in the process of learning.

“Most parties are very long term,” said Alfric. “You find your group and then you stick together, for better or worse, tied together by all kinds of things. You divvy up the entads that are won by blood, you have business interests together, community funds, you’ve hit all the same dungeons … it’s a lot to walk away from. And the people who do walk away are either damaged goods or painted with the same large brush. From what I’ve heard, it’s horrible.”

“It sounds horrible,” said Mizuki. “And I don’t think that’s a good way to talk about people. ‘Damaged goods’.”

“You know what I mean,” said Alfric. “A lot of people who got kicked out of a group got kicked out for a reason.”

“Like you got kicked out of a group?” asked Mizuki.

“No,” said Alfric. “But I spent a long time trying to find a group, and I found the skepticism understandable. They would ask me questions about why I got kicked out, and I would explain things to them, and … it was exactly the kind of story that I would expect to hear someone tell. There’s always another side to the story, and when your side is weighed so heavily in your own favor, people wonder. I knew that. It was frustrating, but I knew it. All I needed was for someone to give me a chance, but I really, really understand why they didn’t.”

“I hope we don’t have to deal with a new person,” said Mizuki. “I like Verity and Isra.”

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “It would hurt to lose either, and hurt double to lose both.”

“We should get them back together,” said Mizuki.

“That’s a terrible idea, but it’s so terrible that I want to hear your thoughts on how to do that,” said Alfric. He grinned at her, and she flashed a smile back.

“Alright,” she said. She stood up and put her hands in front of her, which she was presumably using to represent the two girls. “Idea one, we lock them in a room together. Now, I know what you’re thinking, we probably don’t need anymore ideas after that one, why has this amazing girl made a numbered list if we’re fine to stop at one? But this is something that I’ve learned from you: contingency planning.”

Alfric laughed. “You know, locking them in a room together might just end in disaster.”

“Yeah, but at least they’d talk,” said Mizuki. “How long could they realistically go without talking about their feelings? Five days?”

“We’re talking about two people who didn’t talk to each other when it was just a bit of mutual attraction,” said Alfric. “They could go until they both die of old age.” There was a brief moment when Alfric realized that what he’d said about mutual attraction could, in theory, apply to him and Mizuki, and he was worried that they would have to talk about it, but she moved on quickly. The same thought had obviously occurred to her though.

“Option two, we do a dungeon,” said Mizuki. “See, I think you’ll like this one, because we’re a dungeoneering party.”

“Ostensibly,” said Alfric.

“Well, we get them in a dungeon together, that’s kind of like locking them in a room,” said Mizuki. “And then they save each others’ lives, and they fall back in love.”

“I’m not sure that’s even the issue,” said Alfric. “I mean, I think they might still love each other, if it ever got that deep. There are certainly enough looks passing between them. But if the nature of their fight — their break — isn’t clear, then I don’t know if we could come up with any plan that would work.”

“Nah,” said Mizuki. “We just come up with enough plans, then do them all.”

“That’s not a terrible strategy,” said Alfric. “I mean, in the abstract, as it relates to the set of all plans. For this particular thing, yes, it’s a terrible idea.”

“Three,” said Mizuki, apparently not deterred. “We plan another trip. Right now, they’re apart, right, free to do their own things? But if we all went somewhere together, they would have to spend some time together.”

“I feel like these first three are all variations on trapping them in a room,” said Alfric. He grinned. “Trap them in a room, or trap them in a dungeon, or trap them in a foreign land.”

“Okay, so if you’re so smart, why don’t you come up with something?” asked Mizuki.

“I mean, it’s a bad idea all around,” said Alfric. “I’m criticizing the execution, but it’s the whole concept that’s bad. What we should really be doing is making ourselves available to talk with them, one on one, so we can figure out what happened, and so they can process it. Maybe Hannah is already doing that.”

“Alright, new plan,” said Mizuki. “What we do is we trap ourselves with them so they have to talk to us, and maybe that will help them work things out.”

“I do think that’s a legitimately good idea,” said Alfric. “Find time to be with them one on one, and hope that they start talking? Except Isra has busied herself, and Verity is off in the woods.”

“Alright, but what’s the trap going to be?” asked Mizuki. “No matter which way we go, we need a trap.”

It was increasingly clear that Mizuki was in a silly mood, and had come up to Alfric’s room because she wanted someone to be silly with. Alfric hesitated for a moment, then mentally set the guild message aside.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he said. “We dig a big hole.”

“Yes,” said Mizuki. There was a particular way her smiles always reached her eyes. “Love it.”

“Step two, we get stuck in the hole with them, one on one,” said Alfric. “Or stick them in together.”

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“At which point they warp out,” said Mizuki.

“Ah, see, that’s step three,” said Alfric. “We’re waiting for them at the warp, where we’ve used my woodworking skill to build a room. They’ll have warped into the second trap. It’s genius.”

“We’ll have to do it away from Pucklechurch then,” said Mizuki, trying and failing to give him a serious frown.

“Nah, once we explain things to the mayor, he’ll surely agree,” said Alfric. “Small price to pay, giving up the hex’s warp for the certainty that we could get our two girls back together.”

Mizuki grinned. “Alright, you start drawing up plans for the enclosure, I’ll start digging the pit. Do you think Verity will get suspicious when I use her shovel?”

Alfric snapped his fingers and pointed at Mizuki. “Nonchalant whistle. She falls for it every time.”

Mizuki giggled. It was incredibly gratifying. “Alright, I’m going to go work on my plans, I’ll leave you to it. Thanks for, ah, you know.”

“We’ll get through it,” said Alfric.

“Yeah, I know,” said Mizuki. She turned and left, and Alfric watched her go.

It took a moment for him to get his bearings back and return to the guild message he’d set aside. He looked at what he’d written there, then deleted it all and started over.

The intraparty romance I’ve mentioned before has led to what looks like a breakup. We currently have one member living outside the shared house, though she comes in for meals and is here for much of the day. We haven’t done a dungeon since this rough patch, and I was hoping that someone might have some advice on how to navigate the situation. How does a team move on from something like that? What’s the best approach to keep things professional when we’re doing dungeons?

He read it over a few times, as he always did with guild messages, and then sent it off. It wouldn’t reach anyone until the next day, and then he wouldn’t get responses back until the day after that, but there was a chance someone would have some actionable insight. In the meantime, he would be as much of a friend to both of them as he could be.