With his most immediate concerns wrapped up or deferred, the only thing Kaldalis could do was go back to his sigh of relief. Panbu was still here, after a fashion, and it seemed like there had been no permanent losses, though he supposed it would be prudent to wait thirty minutes to see if any corpses still lingered.

Unfortunately, the upgrade was unsuccessful and a lot of the work he’d already done was ahead of him again, but he had to focus on the victory he had.

He’d learned a lot, though. For one thing, the NPCs represented a much larger proportion of the forces available than he’d thought. It had felt like he’d had an army when the fight started, but Garyung gave the truth to that lie when he’d arrived with everyone else. It was true that a handful of PCs had been running around Cotanaku and rallied with Garyung, but it wasn’t Garyung and his old raid team riding to the rescue on their own. It had been a tidal wave of reinforcements crushing the horde before them.

Kaldalis was grateful for Garyung’s arrival, but he still had to give the man an earful later. If he had arrived when the main raiding force were still present - and before the seal weapons had been distributed - it was possible that they still could have been overwhelmed. And even if they hadn’t, they may have suffered the losses that Kaldalis had sacrificed so much to avoid.

Despite the council’s words, he noticed that there was already work being done to restore things. Workers from Cotanaku and Panbu were patching up the defensive wall, repairing the parts that were broken, patching the holes, and replacing entire sections where it was dangerously unstable. He remembered that the salvage message included some ambiguously labeled ‘materials’ that were no doubt being employed here.

There was a chance that the right thing to do would be to stop them from working. He wondered if the workers were running up a bill that Garyung would have to pay. But the walls needed to be repaired first and foremost. If they left them as porous as they were now, a sudden Infernal Horde raid could wipe them out all over again, and that wasn’t the only risk. What if a pack of wallves wandered in, drawn by the smell of food once the mess hall was reassembled? What if a bunch of daemonraptors slipped in under cover of darkness to terrorize people in their beds?

Ultimately, the walls were not a negotiable element.

If Garyung was eating the cost, he was going to have to eat the cost. At the very least there weren’t any quests yet available to run up the tab on the adventurers’ side.

“Hey, Kal,” Myrin said cheerfully from his left. “What’s your schedule like?”

Kaldalis turned to see his friends approaching in a group. The quartet looked pretty happy with how things turned out. Balrim, Myrin, Reno, and Ess were all smiles. Even now as they walked towards him, people reached out and patted Ess on the shoulder, quickly offering thanks for her quick thinking on the Seal weapons.

“Why? What’s up?” Kaldalis asked, offering a wave.

“We saw whatever that all was,” Balrim explained, waving one clawed hand towards the salvaged town hall, and the other towards the building group of council members around Garyung. “Weren’t sure if you were going to be available.”

“Hard to say,” Kaldalis said with a grimace. “I definitely have some free time right now, since Garyung is going to handle the most immediate effects, but there’s no telling what the Zarans will demand. Maybe they want my head on a pike. Maybe they want me out of Panbu. Or maybe they want me at their beck and call for the next four years and eleven months. Who knows?”

“We were thinking of taking on the dungeon soon,” Myrin said, peering at Kaldalis with an appraising squint. “You seem like an okay tank, I guess. Wanna come?”

“Uh.” Kaldalis mimed counting the heads of the group. “I think you have bigger problems than finding an okay tank. It looks like there’s one too many DPS here. Ideal party size is four, remember?”

“Don’t worry about that,” Myrin said, waving dismissively. “Worry about getting some fucking gear!”

“I want to get my hands on a Seal bow for the next raid,” Balrim said, “and some charms to match. That’s going to involve spamming the dungeon a lot, since gear is entirely randomized.”

Kaldalis smiled thinly. “It doesn’t have to be.” He paused, but when no one rose to the bait of his mysterious statement, he rolled his eyes. “If we can get our charmcrafting leveled, we can force gear to be what we want, can’t we?”

“Bup bup bup!” Myrin said, stepping between the two of them and waving her arms. “None of that! No more grind bullshit! I see my precious dungeon run slipping away and I won’t stand for it!”

“You’re gonna need a step stool to stand tall enough to get in their way,” Reno snarked.

“Want me to get you a ladder so you can get off my back?” Balrim said to Myrin with a snort. He easily dodged the wide swing Myrin lobbed his way. “We’ll get to the dungeon eventually. But what if one of the bosses fucks us over?”

Kaldalis shrugged. “We already know that there’s an exit tunnel. What if the mechanic that can force us to leave is a heal that demands a Seal gear set?”

“Actually, that makes a lot of sense,” Ess said, scratching her chin. “You said that we were skipping over an Infernal Horde raid that took place after clearing the dungeon. That’s where we naturally were supposed to first encounter the Globins, right? Needing to prepare for a powerful healing effect to be able to complete the dungeon makes sense as natural progression.”

Myrin opened her mouth to disagree, but snapped it closed for a moment as her brow furrowed.

“Sorry,” Ess said quickly, “I just-”

“No, no,” Balrim interrupted her apology with a gesture. “Give her a minute. She’ll get there.”

“Fine,” Myrin muttered at last. “You’ve made your point. You crafters can have a little grind. As a treat.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question of what we’re gonna do with an extra body,” Kaldalis said. “No offense, I’ll run the dungeon however many times we need to get all of us through, and even a couple of extra runs for gear, but I’m not doing the mega-grind we did last time to get the entire fucking camp in. I don’t have it in me. Not again.”

Reno offered him a sympathetic smile. “If we’re taking the time to get crafting in, I’m sure we’ll have time to figure out a solution.”

“We need more friends,” Ess said, gesturing at the group. “If we can get another tank, another DPS, and another healer in our circle, we can just have two full parties.”

“We’ve been working with Martok a lot,” Balrim said, tapping his scaled chin with a claw. “But he might be a bit standoffish for this group.”

“I think he doesn’t like me,” Myrin said with a grimace. “I think I annoy him.”

Kaldalis flashed her a smirk. “How could that possibly be?”

“I don’t know, do you have any ideas?” Myrin asked, grinning broadly. “Do you? Do you? Do you? Do you? Do you? Do you?”

“Alright,” Balrim said, raising a hand to quiet her. “Martok can be on the maybe list.”

“Do you?” Myrin asked again, ignoring him. “Do you?”

“I liked Courbois, she seemed nice,” Ess offered, gesturing at the party list on the right side of their vision. A couple had cleared out, but Courbois was still there. “And Yosini was a good healer.”

“I don’t like his attitude,” Balrim muttered. “But I guess in this context, I’m not gonna be partied with him outside of crazy circumstances, huh?”

“I think it would be better if everyone gets along with everyone to minimize drama,” Reno said, putting an arm around Kaldalis and Balrim. “We’re looking to build a friend group, not a guild, right?”

Myrin burst out laughing at that.

Her cackling was infectious, and soon spread to the rest of the group. Balrim struggled for a minute to try and convey something about how all of their guildies watching the stream were likely having a meltdown in response to that, but the sentiment only made them laugh harder.

Kaldalis was the first to stop laughing, and he took the opportunity to look around to see if he could spot someone else he could nominate to the group. He had a high opinion of Aurigeant, and the group might get along with Dalgaard if he could find a way to bury the hatchet on his failure with them.

Instead, he spotted Garyung’ gathered group first. Obviously Garyung wasn’t a viable option to tack onto the group, since he was going to be permanently tethered to the expedition leader position, but unusually, the large Bhogad wasn’t who caught his eye. Cotanaku’s ship captain, Filomena, was on the periphery of the group, in discussion with a group of sailors. Presumably, the council was ignoring her input as usual, and so she was working on arrangements to get people ferried back to Cotanaku.

Near the front of that group was Heluna.

Seeing her made him feel warm and confused. She was fun, and he liked hanging out with her, but what was her intent? Was she romantically interested in him? She was an NPC. She was literally a computer program. However much she appeared to pass the Harkness Test - she was mature, intelligent, and capable of communication - she was lines of code in a server, right? And he liked her. But could an AI consent to a relationship?

She looked over and saw him, giving a little smile and wave before returning her attention to Filomena.

He had to figure out his feelings. If it weren’t for immersive VR, she’d be pixels on a screen. He wasn’t really thinking about this, right? He considered her a friend, and that wasn’t weird, but was he really thinking about trying to date a bunch of pixels?

Depending on what Garyung and the Zarans decided to do with his envoy position, the raincheck on dinner with her could be coming due very soon.

As Garyung and the Cotanaku council headed towards the town hall - and the meeting that would decide his next set of obligations - he needed to figure out an easy answer to a complicated ethical dilemma.

Or a drink. Kaldalis realized he would kill for a baijiu right now. He wondered, idly, how difficult it was to ferment liquor. Someone had to know, right?