Communal

The mandatory fan-service episode.

SynopsisEdit

Juniper, Amaryllis, and Fenn enter the public bathhouse, a building with an ugly exterior and a beautiful, colorful interior. Juniper contrasts his experience of the place with the communal showers in his high school—the high school showers were gender-segregated and gave no privacy, while the bathhouse of Barren Jewel has all genders together in one large pool, with attendants there to provide towels. Juniper marvels at the variety of mortal species in the bathhouse, and Fenn reminds him that it is rude to stare. Juniper switches to staring at Fenn's intricate keloid scars. Juniper calls them pretty, and Fenn calls them non-functional.

Juniper's train of thought is interrupted by the sight of the naked Amaryllis making her way into the water. In stark contrast to the mundane nakedness of families and peoples' bodies far from peak physical condition, Amaryllis represents the second most erotic sight Juniper has ever seen, the most erotic sight only alluded to by Juniper as something a girlfriend did back on Earth. Juniper tried to get his mind back on track by focusing on the task of washing his body and by reminding himself that Amaryllis is not putting on a show for him. Fenn, also naked, hands Juniper some soap on a rope and smirks when he glances at her body.

Fenn suddenly yanks Juniper and Amaryllis away from the water as fighting breaks out in the baths. Juniper looks back and sees great displays of magic power, such as red light blasting through a crowd and time appearing to flow backwards. Fenn tells the others to get their things and meet outside, and Juniper runs to the changing room, meeting three men with weapons and a bath attendant with a slit throat. Juniper, thinking fast, punches one of the men in the face with his crimson fist, scoring a Critical hit and a new affliction, Broken Bone. With this, he sees the notification: Risen Bile member defeated!

Juniper picks up the dead Risen Bile man's sword and rushes the other two men, who had occupied themselves with killing others who had come to the changing rooms. He engages one of the men in combat while the other stays at the doorway, dodging the man's inexpert attacks, and eventually thrusting his sword into the base of the man's neck. For the second time, Juniper sees the notification: Risen Bile member defeated!

Juniper runs out of the bathhouse naked and bleeding, leaving his clothes behind, and Fenn and Amaryllis come out of the bathhouse in their robes. Fenn throws Juniper a towel she had been holding. They walk back to their hotel room. Juniper asks what that was all about, but neither Fenn nor Amaryllis know. Amaryllis thinks that they were after a few particular people, but were also killing indiscriminately. Amaryllis remarks that they were lucky to escape, but Fenn replies that they were unlucky because it happened at all. Juniper interrupts the discussion to request healing for his broken bone, and Amaryllis tries teaching him about blood magic healing to get the injury fixed quickly and at no cost. In the meantime, Fenn gets food.

Juniper tries for about ten minutes to mentally approach blood magic healing in a way that would deliver him a game layer notification. He asks if luck is real, and Amaryllis asks if he has attention problems, bringing up his shirking of watch duty back in the Risen Lands. Juniper replies that he doesn't, that he just expected learning the skill to be easier given how computer and tabletop games work. Amaryllis says that it would be good to have Juniper's character sheet drawn out on paper, and Juniper is annoyed by her trying to have a say over his power when he doesn't trust her enough for that.

Amaryllis asks Juniper to define luck to gauge his understanding. She explains the two phenomena that comprise elf luck, which are that events randomly happen in favor of elves without an obvious causal mechanism, and that elves sometimes have sudden intuitions about the best action to take. The latter prompts Juniper to say that Fenn had begun bringing them out of the bathhouse before the fighting started, and Amaryllis says that as a half-elf, Fenn has some measure of that luck. Amaryllis mentions that myths such as dice rolling hot and superstitions such as spitting in a fountain for good luck have no relation to luck.

Juniper thinks that the attack in the bathhouse is the sort of contrived event that would happen in a game, except that the attack had nothing to do with the party. He is uneasy about the event hovering between being completely pointless, and being too unlikely to be a coincidence. Juniper resumes his attempt to heal his bone, and Fenn comes back with a fried street animal. Fenn explains that the bathhouse attack was due to a group calling themselves the Risen Bile and that the city guard are out and about. While she was out, Fenn had picked up some bones, correctly assuming that Juniper wouldn't have learned blood magic healing. Amaryllis thinks Juniper won't learn bone magic healing either, but Juniper attempts anyway. Juniper asks what the animal was, and Fenn responds that it is a gunzel, an animal popular because it eats rotten manna, or Barren bread. Amaryllis tells Juniper the words of power to summon the Barren bread and milk, immediately resulting in Juniper's discovery of Alvion’s Flesh and Alvion’s Blood.

Fenn is surprised that the princess, Amaryllis, would have ever tried the magical food and drink of Barren Jewel. Amaryllis had done so in order to understand the people in poverty that she might have ended up governing. Juniper asks about the gunzel's life, and Fenn says that the creatures are farmed by the street food vendors, caged and fed the cheapest possible food. Juniper imagines the life of a gunzel, thinking about the animal's will to live despite its environment. With this in mind, Juniper manages to unlock the skill of Bone Magic, which also brings the achievement of Sticks and Stones and the discovery of the first bone magic spell, Physical Tapping.

Featured charactersEdit

• Juniper Smith
• Amaryllis Penndraig
• Fenn Greenglass
• Magus Bormann (mentioned only)

QuotesEdit

“See, I say that it’s rude to stare, and what do you do?”
“They’re very pretty.”

—Fenn scolds Juniper in the bathhouse.

“Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

—Fenn, to a buck-naked Juniper.

“I think hiding that key in a tattoo was just about the smartest thing anyone has ever done.”

—Fenn is mostly right.

“Okay. Just … feel the healing. Promise you won’t be upset with me if I get this right away?”
“Why would I be?”
“Nevermind.”

—Juniper receives healing instruction from Amaryllis.

“Elves are lucky. If you bet against them in a coin toss, you’ll lose nine times out of ten. If you try to shoot them, the bullets will miss more often than they should, though still within the realm of what’s strictly possible. Half of this comes from changes in the world around them that they have no obvious mechanism to meaningfully affect, while the other half comes from their own actions which they undertake for reasons which aren’t always clear to them.”

—Amaryllis exposits on elf luck.

“I’m surprised that a princess would have ever tried Barren milk.”
“I once thought it important to know what the poorest of the poor ate and drank. It’s helpful in the context of public policy to understand the reality of the people you’re governing. Barren milk and Barren bread are foundational foods for the poor, and even the middle classes sometimes use them to stretch their budgets.”

—Fenn asks Amaryllis a sincere question, for once.

“I’m going to need some more bones.”

—Juniper prepares for a training montage.

NotesEdit

Continuity notesEdit

• Juniper mentions briefly having had a girlfriend back on Earth. Though later developments shed different light on his words here, he's certainly talking about Tiff.

Real-world referencesEdit

• Juniper mentions Metacarpal bones, but notes that the word sounds "too much like a pokemon" to be right.
• The superstitions and myths on Aerb around luck are very similar to the existing ones on Earth.
• The word to summon Barren bread is “Besoneth”, and the word to summon Barren milk is “Ilimoneth”. In Elvish, "Besoneth" means "bread-giver". Likewise, "Ilim" means "milk", so "Ilimoneth" could be said to mean "milk-giver".
• Juniper thinks of factory farming when Fenn explains the farming of gunzels.
• Much like how "worth the candle" is a shortening of a longer idiom, so too is the achievement Sticks and Stones ("may break my bones, but words will never harm me").