Chương 154: Chapter 152: Dinner with the Maester

Gigi is not attacked in her bath. From what I can tell, she's kind of annoyed at El for interrupting. She wasn't in the bath for more than a few minutes before El came barging in to her room. I'm sure El didn't stay long, but I think we ruined the bath anyway. Maybe she can get another one after dinner. The dinner that Cellin serves us is relatively simple, but delicious. We have some kind of bird like creature that tastes like turkey, a huge portion of fruits, and more cheeses to taste. And, of course, more wine.

This wine tastes stronger than we had before, and I make sure just to sip my way through it. I stop a servant from refilling my glass every time I put it down. The fact that the servants are that attentive to refilling our wine makes me think that Cellin is trying to get us drunk. Maybe he's just trying to see what other information he can get from us. Greedy. Or maybe it's just the custom here to get really drunk. I notice that the servants also refill his glass every time he puts it down.

He doesn't seem bothered by it. I haven't gotten drunk since I came to this world. Really, I haven't ever been inspired to try. I'm not much of a drinker anyway. I just never saw the point in it. Partially that was because I had a really high tolerance to alcohol. When I was younger, it took a massive amount of alcohol to get me drunk. And that was expensive. I was a poor college student, so I rarely had the money to get the job done. And getting the job half done didn't really work for me.

I didn't have stages of drunk. I would be perfectly sober for a really long time, and then I would suddenly be drunk. I never got tipsy, never got a pleasant buzz going. It was all or nothing. I also never liked red wine. I mean, it isn't all that bad as far as taste is concerned, but I think I'm allergic to tanens. Or whatever it is in red wine. Whatever it may be, drinking red wine has always been for me like drinking caffeine is for regular people. I know I'm not going to sleep tonight.

Maybe I'll get a few hours, but not until very late or very early in the morning. Just as well. The food is very good. The meat is succulent and tasty, the fruit sweet and delicious. There's a lot of sugar in the fruit, and I wonder if that's because of the impact that sugar has on energy for flying. Like the way most birds like sugary things. Once again, the portions are massive. Once again, none of us mind. But I think we'd end up gaining a lot of weight if we kept eating like this on the regular.

We're getting more calories than we've been using lately. But the angel people take a lot of calories, probably so that they can fly. Or maybe it's just a sign of Cellin's wealth. I don't know. Cellin spends most of the meal talking to Ash, as she's seated right next to him. Gigi is seated on the other side. I'm not offended being seated a little ways away from our host, and I hope El isn't either. I don't think it really means anything. Someone had to be seated down the table.

And it's not like Cellin invited a bunch of other people to dine with us. It isn't a formal feast or anything. I think it's more of a simple meal. There's no one else that joins us. That alone seems kind of weird. I mean, does he have a spouse? Children? Are there advisors that he'd want us to meet, or maybe who he could have try to pry more information from us? It's weird that he is having a meal with just us, isn't it? I don't understand his motives. Maybe they'll become clearer in time.

I half listen to the conversations that he has with Ash and Gigi. He's very flattering, all smiles and pleasant words. He keeps asking them about their pasts, and about the continent that we came from. He seems particularly interested in Ash, and why she looks so different from the rest of us.

"Demon blood, you say?" he seems particularly interested in that, though not in the least bit violent or aggressive.

"That is fascinating. I know that demons still roam the world, as the legends say, but I didn't know that they could be as beautiful as you." Ash isn't taken in by the heavy handed flattery. I can tell. She gives a tight smile, one that doesn't show her teeth.

"Thank you, my lord," she says.

"There are still demons around, but I am just their cousin. I'm not one of them."

"Are not demons immortal?" he asks. Ash shakes her head.

"That they definitely are not," she says. Then she tells him the story of the demon cadre that we defeated, the one that was harassing traders near Marketplace. Cellin seems fascinated by the story. I focus on my food. I only drink the wine when my mouth gets dry, trying to get what moisture I can from the turkey instead. It's got plenty of it, and the meat pulls apart easily in my mouth. I don't really even need a knife to cut it; the edge of the fork does the job.

I pile more slices of the bird creature onto my plate. It seems important that the food he gave us comes from something with wings. Is that telling us that not all winged creatures are on the same side, is it mocking us for not having wings, or is it just a coincidence that I'm looking too closely at? This is why I hate politics. Everything has multiple meanings, except the things that don't.

If you pay attention to the wrong thing, you could end up going down the wrong line of thought and get totally screwed by the politicking around you. But if you take everything at face value, you're just begging to be manipulated and used. Everyone lies, but that doesn't mean you can figure out the truth by reversing their statements. It's not as black and white as all that. I really wish people would just say what they mean. Politicking is exhausting, even when it is fun. And right now, it's not particularly fun.

I put a grape in my mouth and try to zone back into the conversation at the head of the table. Ash has gone into detail about the battle, and the maester is hanging on every word. Ash talks a lot about the tactics of the battle, about how we used to have a wizard with us who helped with crowd control, and about how we fought them in small groups rather than trying to put our strength directly against all of theirs. I notice that she doesn't mention Mab's Rage or how much damage it does. That's wise of her, I think.

"You really are heroes," the maester says, shaking his head in awe.

"You went and you did this, saving the merchants of your city, just as part of a quest? As just something that you had to do?"

"We did it so that our friends could catch up," Ash says. That kind of puts a hole in her story; if we were waiting for our friends to catch up, then we wouldn't have had all of them there to go into the battle. But Cellin doesn't seem to notice the hole. Maybe he thinks that means we have more friends than just the wizard we're missing. That's actually pretty clever. Maybe it wasn't a mistake, it wasn't a hole in the story. Maybe it was there on purpose.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. Maybe Ash is good at politics. I go back to my food. I look across the table and see that El has pretty much cleaned her plate, and started looking around the room. She seems to be counting the servants. Maybe she's looking for the one that hid from us earlier. I take some time to look around. It takes me almost a full minute to find her. But there she is, standing against the wall behind the maester.

She's leaning against the wall with a casual grace, but I notice something that separates her from the other servants. Not only does she not have anything in her hands to serve with, but there's a tiny bit of something sticking out of her sleeve. I can only see it because of the way she's leaning against the wall, her shoulder bunching a little bit and raising her sleeve, but I can see it. It's definitely the pommel of something. Most likely a dagger. She is obviously more than a servant.?????????

Legendary Elite seraph blood, level 51. HP: 51, 000/51, 000. Yep. Definitely more than a servant. I need to keep my eye on that one. Especially because once I look away from her, she disappears again. I can only find her again because I know where she is. But any time I'm not paying attention to her, she disappears. She's never there in my peripheral vision. She must be using a spell to hide herself. She's almost certainly there to protect maester Cellin. But it's still disconcerting.

Cellin doesn't get as drunk as I was hoping. His voice never slurs, his nose never turns red, and his face never gets flushed. It makes me wonder if it's even possible to get drunk anymore. Is our alcohol tolerance based on our vigor? Mine is already 197. I know that El's is like 315. So maybe we could drink all we want and never get drunk. Or maybe it isn't based on one of our stats. It's something we may want to experiment with some time. When we're somewhere safe and have a lot of money to cover the tab.

After dinner, we all retire to our rooms. As I suspected, I can't sleep. I lay in the bed for a while, staring up at the ceiling and the little trapeze thing hanging from it. I locked my door, so I'm pretty sure I'll hear anyone coming in. But it doesn't look like I'm going to drift off any time soon. Should I check on the girls? Maybe one of them is awake too. Probably not El. She sleeps like a bear when she gets a good meal. Though she might have the same reaction I do to red wine.

If she does, she'll probably come to me at some point. Maybe she'll want sex to help her sleep. Or maybe Gigi will still be awake. Or Ash. I don't know. I don't want to go and wake anyone up if they are sleeping. That feels like a dick thing to do. We don't get to sleep in beds very often. I really should just enjoy it. I do remember from my days with really bad insomnia that sometimes you get a fair amount of rest just from lying still and letting your body relax as best it can.

You may not get much rest for your mind, but the body can recover at least a little bit. And maybe, as you try to focus on that relaxation, your body will follow. I could try meditating. I don't need to recover any mana or anything, but that doesn't mean that meditation won't be helpful. It might help me organize my thoughts. I close my eyes and try to focus on the energy in my body. I'm not sure what I'm trying to do, but I know that meditation only works when I focus on something.

I can't just let my thoughts wander around. They'll pick up on something bad, and I'll end up spiraling into a bad place. That's not a good way to spend a sleepless night. There are hidden messages in tonight's dinner. I'm sure of it. One of them is probably in the fact that we ate with the maester alone. There's no way he's the only one of rank in the castle. So why didn't he invite anyone else to join us? Why not round out the table with other guests, or with other people who live here? There has to be a reason.

Could it be as simple as that he doesn't trust us? He doesn't want to introduce us to anyone, for fear that we might wish his people harm? If we were kidnappers, we could at this point only try to kidnap him. Maybe he sees that as an acceptable risk, but doesn't want to risk his partner or children falling to the same fate. Or maybe he doesn't think that we deserve to meet other people yet.

Maybe when we come back from the quest, things will change, and we'll have a big banquet with other visiting nobles and extended family. Or maybe he wanted to poison us, and he didn't want anyone else to fall victim to the poisoning. He could have taken an antidote himself before the meal, or could have made sure that he wasn't served the same thing we were. Maybe the antidote was in the wine, and that's why he drank so much.

Or maybe he suspected us of poisoning him, and wanted to make sure that he could keep an eye on us without worrying about us poisoning someone else. There are so many possibilities, it makes my head hurt. I don't have enough information to go on. I push that though away. And I mean I literally push it away. I imagine it like there's a big stage, with detailed background painted on screens that I can literally push off stage to reveal the next set behind them. My thoughts have interesting set design.

The next thing that my focus leaps to is the dungeon itself. He said it was full of vile creatures. For some reason, that doesn't sound like undead. That sounds like monsters. I hope it's monsters. I'm better with monsters than I am with undead. Monsters bleed. How deep is the dungeon? How many people survive in there for more than a couple minutes? There might be a whole society down there, of people who were sent for execution and managed to survive.

They could have carved out a place for themselves and built a community of exiles down there. If that's the case, then the maester probably wants us to wipe them out. Would those people be considered innocent? They were all sentenced to execution, so they all must have done something. But that doesn't mean they did something bad. Maybe they were sent there as political prisoners. Maybe they were doing something that isn't wrong but is still against the law.

Like stealing a loaf of bread to feed their families, that kind of thing. But suppose their families don't like bread. Suppose they like cigarettes. Stealing bread probably isn't a capital crime. But it might be. We don't know. We have no idea what they send people to execution for. So we can't just kill them. The dungeon might have. Better to assume that the dungeon did. If there is a community there, we can deal with that when we get there. For now, assume that there isn't.

That the dungeon is just full of monsters. Probably monsters that are designed or evolved to live in the dungeon. Is there evolution in this world? Or are all monsters the result of intelligent – or not so intelligent – design? No way of knowing. Push that backdrop away and go back to the monsters. They're probably set up to live in a dungeon, whether through accident or design. That means that they'll be able to see in the dark. And it means that at least some of them will be ambush predators.

If they have to survive off the food that is being fed to them by the local aristocracy, then they probably don't have a steady source of food. So they would have to hunt in a way that wastes the least amount of energy possible. Hence, ambush predators. Unless there is food in there. Like mushrooms or something that will grow in the dark. They might hunt the other monsters in there, but I doubt that.

Too much hunting in a closed system like a dungeon will eventually result in there being only one or two types of monsters. The food chain won't survive if they hunt each other. So probably no predators that stalk anything. Mostly ambush predators and scavengers that survive off whatever they can find in the dungeon. That makes sense. That's probably what we'll run into.