The mustached ogre was the embodiment of taciturn. He offered no personal details, didn’t ask any of his students a single question, and was generally antisocial. Rumor had it Crucible didn’t even live at the academy proper, but instead had a cabin deep in the heart of the Xiru Forest. No one had ever visited the cabin and survived.
Even worse, getting to their Fiendish Fabrication class took forever, since they had to walk to Crucible’s workshop from the closest dungeon, Bloodrock, up in the Heckish Hills of the World Forge Wastes. Probably hellish would’ve been better than heckish—it was like a pile of miniature Mount Dooms all clustered together.
Planning for that extra time was easy for Logan, Inga, and Treacle. In fact, the minotaur always showed up early for that class. Marko? He was forever late, which hurt them in the rankings. Tardiness was a surefire way to lose points for both their cohort and their clan.
Sitting there with Inga, a realization hit Logan like a hammer blow. Inga had said it herself: she liked the theory of dungeons. That made sense. She had the study skills and discipline to really explore the many different aspects of cultivation and how that could help them work on their dungeons. But, at the same time, she lacked focus. In a way, she was like a Swiss Army knife with a thousand attachments that could do everything, but none of them particularly well. Logan, on the other hand, was a meat cleaver—he could only do one thing at a time, but he excelled at that one thing.
However, out of the entire Terrible Twelfth, she was further along than any of them. If he wanted a committed partner without a partying problem or bovine depression, Inga would be the perfect match for him.
She was the answer he’d been looking for, but he suddenly grew nervous.
Inga saw it. “What’s wrong? Your energy just changed completely.”
He gulped and tried to hide it. “Nothing. I’m just... not used to sleeping in that extra hour. I’m fine.” He nodded his toadstool head.
“Would you like some of my honey apple tea?” she asked.
He would, but he’d like it a few weeks old, with a layer of bacteria slowly creeping across the top. He couldn’t say that, of course. Now that the idea had laid root, he had to ask her to join him. Instead he veered off on another subject. “I guess in our next Ethics of Murder class, Shadowcroft is going to talk about the morality of murdering evil before that evil bears fruit. It’s an old argument on my world about a certain fascist in central Europe.”
“And you say I have a non sequitur problem,” the moth woman tsked. “So, no tea then?”
“No tea for me.” Logan kicked himself. He couldn’t waste time. If Inga didn’t want to join up with him, he’d have to move on to Treacle. However much he liked Marko personally, the satyr had trouble taking anything seriously, and nothing was more serious than survival.
“Inga,” he started. When words failed him, he took in a deep breath. “Listen, you like theory, I like the application of theory. I’m a fungaloid, and I have this power that would allow us—”
She cut him off and let out a breath of relief. “Night Mother above, finally,” she sighed with an eyeroll. “If I had lost out to the sad minotaur, I would’ve been very distraught indeed. Yes, Logan, of course we’re going to use Symbiosis to join our cores together. I’ve been pondering on it since we found ourselves in the same cohort, but I didn’t want to pressure you in case you were going to go in a different direction with your dungeon build. On the off chance that you would ask, though, I’ve been trying to sign us up to get into the Tartarucha Cells, but I’m fearing it will be impossible. We simply don’t have the seniority. You know, if you haven’t picked fungi to domesticate, I have some very specific ideas on which mushrooms you should grow. Or must you have a dungeon to start growing them? The literature was unclear.”
The tornado of words left Logan’s head spinning. “What now? Literature who?”
Inga’s antennae were stretched out to their full length. Her wings shivered. “Immelda Menagerie Inkboon’s definitive work on guardian forms—The Eternal Monsters of Our Infinite Selves: Dungeon Cores, Magical Creatures, and the Many Protectors of the Tree of Souls.”
“That’s the title?” Logan asked uncertainly.
“Of volume one, yes.” Inga nodded enthusiastically. “There are eighteen volumes. Each has a unique title. It took a bit for me to find fungaloid, since it’s so seldom selected. You do realize there have only ever been thirteen fungaloids in recorded history across all the dungeon core academies, correct?”
He winced. “Yeah. Only six here. It’s at the bottom of the barrel.”
“Almost half come from Shadowcroft,” Inga said. “It’s because Shadowcroft, himself, has a more liberal view of what lesser creatures can do. Like everyone in the Terrible Twelfth. No other school would’ve ever taken us in at all, you know.” Her eyes, solid orbs of black, looked far away. She was having a moment.
Logan wanted to ask more about her history, but then those black eyes darted to his face. “Yes, and so, for you to use your Symbiosis ability, we’ll need a dungeon. I’ve been coming up with some options, though none are very good. We need to get into the Tartarucha Cells. But the question is how?” She tapped on her chin with a pale finger.
Logan slid off the bench. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
They left the common room and hiked up the steps. She flitted along with ease, while he felt like he was trying to summit Everest thanks to his stumpy legs. Finally, they slipped through the door into the shared room. Logan and Inga found Marko asleep, snoring like a woodchipper with his legs straight up the stone wall and the rest of him sprawled perpendicular to them on his bed. The place smelled like a teenage boy’s socks dipped in beer.
Inga’s hands went to her tiny nose. “Bless my beak, that is a terrible stench.”
“You get used to it,” Logan said with a halfhearted shrug. He didn’t mention that the bacteria in the room had a certain charm. She’d be shocked enough by the state of his own place.
He climbed the ladder and motioned for her to join him. They stood in his attic room, which now had pearl-colored mushrooms growing in most of the nooks and crannies of the ceiling in a bed of green moss. The place was chilly and dark, though a flickering fire burned in the stove. Logan’s human side still liked a little light and heat, though not too much. It would dry out his damp attic home.
“Do you need more light to see?” Logan asked.
“No, as an astral moth, I can see just fine.” She glanced around. “You went with the Opal Truffles. It’s a lure mushroom. An odd choice, especially since for the Winnowing, you don’t need a lure. You’d have been better to grow something far more aggressive.” She toed some slime leaking out from under his bed. “Oh yes, Mucal Film, a very good choice.”
“Thanks.” Logan went and touched the biggest mushroom growing near his bed. He’d watched it form over the past few days. “You’re right about the Truffles, but I think there’s another way they can help us. During our first lesson with Professor Hellgazer, she mentioned that she has a soft spot for some sort of truffle cream you can only get in Eritreus.”