Chapter 45.1 - A Utility Skill

This one will again feature 5 sub-chapters, however the chapter ended up running long, so they'll be split up into roughly 1.25k words each.

Enjoy!

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The sudden disturbance set the three of us on alert like a troop of meerkats sighting a hawk.  I say three because Lynnria was so blissed-out, she might as well have been enthralled to the heavenly chorus.  How could an insignificant tap against the door compete with that?

However, before we could decide what to do about it, a plain white card was slipped under the door.  All six of our eyes traced its movement without blinking and, when it stopped, we continued our staring for some seconds.  Waiting.  But nothing else happened.  If anyone was still on the other side of the door, they were either extraordinarily patient or had completed their task and left.

Jax was the first to move.   Unwrapping herself from my leg and without bothering to stand, she scurried over to the note.  There she paused to sniff at it suspiciously, consequently posing herself somewhere between a downward dog and a push-up.

I may have taken the opportunity to admire the view.  Briefly.

“There be a scent here,” she informed us after a moment.  “Familiar-like…”

“Could it be poisoned?” I asked.

Arx shook her head from her perch on my other leg.  “Nothing dangerous can invade a safe room.”

“We’ve been in here a while.  Maybe someone else wants to use it?” I said, half in jest.

“That can’t—” Arx began but quickly reconsidered.  “Hmm… normally, that can’t happen.  Each Mouth leads to its own separate Dungeon area, so we shouldn’t have anyone else in here unless that giant bird you were talking about got them.”

“I seen them other people,” Jax reminded us over her shoulder.  “Back where I were trapped.  Guards from the town.”

“Maybe the flood dragon missed them, and the thunderbird just showed up to pick off stragglers,” I hazarded.

That might have been a reasonable assumption under normal circumstances.  And it might have even been true for the former citizens of Raialie.  But not for us.  No, I was quite certain both of those Mouths had been meant to find me specifically.  Why else would the Demon Queen have sent me that angry command back in the stadium… and then politely invited me to dinner?

She’s going to be just as insane as the other two.  I just know it.

Arx sighed.  “I’m sorry, Master.  I’ve never been in the Dungeon with more than a dozen or so people at a time, and then we were all cooperating.  I haven’t had to consider a situation where people might need to compete for a safe room.”

“No one knows everything,” I assured her before turning back to the door.  “What does it smell like?”

Jax picked up the card and stood, still holding the corner to her nose with an expression of deep pondering.  “There be no describing it,” she announced finally.  “Closest I can figger be aliken to Ahnbe’s mark, but it ain’t Hers.  I dunno how I know that, but I do.”

I blinked a few times.  “You’re telling me that card smells like… like Her…”

“Fanny, aye.”  She chuckled.  “Yer sheathed to the hilt in one right now, Master.  What’s to be shamed of?”

I resisted the urge to glance down at the undulating sensations still massaging me and quickly attempted to stand.  However, with Arx clutching at my leg and—I discovered—Lynnria’s tail wrapped tightly about the other, that was easier said than done.

“One does not usually expect a smear of feminine discharge upon a item of polite correspondence,” I intoned gravely and, I hoped, an air of aloof indifference.  But I probably looked like an idiot.  “Anyway, what does it say?”

The words had scarcely left my mouth before I winced, remembering too late that she could not actually read.  However, to my surprise—and apparently Jax’s—she seemed to recognize at least some of the script.

“I ain’t sure,” she informed us, pointing a claw at the card, “but this word here be ‘toilet,’ or I be yer ma.”

Toilet?  That seemed… specific.

“Bring it here, Jax,” I said, then glanced down at Arx.  “Help me up, would you?”

“Yes, Dearest.”

*****

A few minutes later, the three of us were huddled together on the edge of the bed, puzzling over the bit of stationery.  The calligraphy we had found there was absolutely beautiful, but that was about all we could say about it.  The note had been written in a completely unfamiliar language.

Thanks to Arx, that list was far shorter than it had once been.  She was all but fluent in half a dozen and proficient enough in three others that she could usually tease out their basic gists.  And since binding her, those proficiencies had transferred to me.

This language she had never seen even in passing.  However, that was not to say the letter was completely unintelligible.  There were a few lodestones sprinkled about the text, which was the only reason we were still pouring over it.  Foremost among these were the salutation and the signature, which were the only items even using a familiar alphabet.  They read, respectively:

‘To the Triumphal Toilet Troop’ and ‘Xhinn.’

“How alliterative,” I observed dryly.

“Whate’er that means,” Jax retorted.  “I nay ken what kinda squint this Demon Queen be, but She’s sending one up the river with this one.”

Arx and I turned to look at her.

“…What?”

I could only sigh.  Being known as the Donum Clan was bad enough but, as Xhinn had just so adroitly demonstrated, the depths of my humiliation had veins yet unexplored.

The Toilet Troop?  Oh, please don’t let that catch on.  To say nothing of how demeaning it was, the name only worked because it was an in-joke.  Anyone else that heard it would just think we were a bunch of perverts…

…

As for the rest of the letter, it might as well have been written in Dwarven runes for all the sense I could make of it—save for a few little anomalies.  Eleven, to be precise.  And that just so happened to correspond to the exact number of Words in our lexicon.

Because of course, that is exactly what those anomalies were.

“I think…” I began, pointing them out, “the only reason this letter was written in this language was so we would notice these.”

Arx nodded slowly, following my logic.  “Could be.  I doubt they would have been all that obvious otherwise.  But that still doesn’t explain much.  Why bother forcing all eleven of our Words onto a note at all?  Especially when we can’t even read the rest.”

Jax shrugged indifferently.  “Just a tait of flirting, seems to me.  If yer the type what’s got a stick up yer arse.”

Arx growled low in her throat.  “Never mind how you arrived at that little deduction.  Why would the Demon Queen want to flirt with the Master?”

“She’s a goddess, ain’t She?  Who else’d She wanna flirt with?” my First replied.  As if that explained anything.  “‘Sides, what womenfolk do ye know of what smears their ownselves on letters fer the fun of it?”

“I would!”

“Only if it were fer the Master.”

“Obviously,” Arx agreed, then grit her teeth in defeat.  “‘Snails!”

Well… at least some of that seems reasonable.  Once you filtered out the absurd amounts of bias.