"This is ostensibly a chameleon cloak, do you know how those work."

"Not... off the top of my memory."

"Can you see if you can make it pass casual inspection as something you could've had in your bag to begin with?" She holds it out.

When Haroun arranges the cloak over his own shoulders, not draping it all the way around himself and keeping the hood drawn back, the cloak shifts to look like an ordinary-clothing cloak that perfectly matches the wear and style of the rest of his outfit.  He didn't send any mental commands for that, it just happened.

"Neato. Let's get out of here."

The two head back up the stairs.

It's not really their job to do assessments, but the guards aren't busy so they're willing to take a casual assessment about the massive quantity of low-quality drops.  Not counting Haroun's latest couple of drops, it's about 14 silver, they think.  Haroun's drops from slime-fighting bring up the total to 31 silver.  That's enough successful looting for Bella to get an E-rank tin guildplate once she gets back to town, and will net them 13 silver or so after tax.

One guard is writing down everything they brought out on a standard paper form.  The other guard says she needs to take a look in Bella's and Haroun's packs, and pat them down using the Frisking Skill, to check for any extra loot they're trying to sneak out.  Either of the two can ask for a guard of a different gender to perform the frisking, if they so prefer.

The friggin' VOID DRAGON already knows who she is so she isn't going to put up a fight about them peeking at her textbooks and such. She will talk fast if she has to. Yes she'd prefer a female guard.

The female guard gives a puzzled scrutiny to some of the objects in Bella's backpack, but none of them look like standard loot from this dungeon, so she lets it all pass.

Soon the two have picked up their horses from the corral nearby, and are riding back on their way to Relis.  Haroun is already tearing into more of the rations he brought with him.

Talking to the FRIGGIN' VOID DRAGON has harmed Bella's appetite but probably riding to town'll fix it. "Weird martial art skill?" she wonders after a few minutes.

Haroun pauses to chew and swallow so he can talk.  "There was one slime that drew out letters in slime on one corner of the floor, but they used big letters and there wasn't room to say much.  Just that it was a martial art developed by people who saw unity in all things and wished to leave a path.  I can level the Skill just by doing the exercises I was shown.  When I level I'll figure out more exercises.  Supposedly I'll get other capabilities just from leveling the martial arts part.  It didn't write anything else.  Did the void dragon seem impressive enough that I should actually bother?"

"The void dragon was impressive as fuck - uh, he wasn't boss of this dungeon, the slime that grabbed you was, the dragon was remotely controlling this dungeon to talk to me. I don't know if that implies your martial art will be especially great, though it does sound kind of cool."

"That sounds like somebody is trying to fool you.  You can't control dungeon cores, remotely or otherwise.  People have been trying since forever to Tame dungeon cores, get them to reproduce in a controlled way so they can be domesticated, bind them to human controllers, get human souls reincarnated into them, all kinds of crazy things.  One controllable dungeon core would upend the entire world economy."

"Well, it wasn't a human controller, it was a void dragon, and he didn't want to keep doing it too long. But I will ask if he's considered that mechanism of getting what he wants, I guess."

"I remain highly skeptical.  Consider that a warning from a native guide.  So what did this purported void dragon have to say, and why was it talking to you?  - Uh, I'll understand if you want to write things down in your notebook before you try to talk to me."

"I took some notes but I should fill them in before I forget stuff, yeah."

She does this.

When she's done she taps her pen on the notebook a few times. "Hey Haroun? What would you do if you were a summoned hero type thing to - somewhere, not here or somewhere very like here, to retain the fidelity of the analogy, but if a broadly comparable thing happened to you."

"It'd depend on the situation?  I have absolutely no idea what I'd do if I got summoned into your world, based only on what you've said so far."

"I think too many things about my world would have to be different for it to make sense for it to have a summoned hero-ish situation. Uh, suppose you got kicked in the head by a horse and the next thing you knew you were talking to a disembodied voice and it says it's putting you on Planet and you're supposed to save it. And then you are in a pine forest full of enormous pink fungus and the air smells weird and if you get too far away from the nearest tree it's kind of hard to breathe and you find a road and get picked up by a person who says they're a professional "terraformer" in a horseless carriage that goes fifty miles an hour, with a mask on to deal with the air, and who says they can take you to their capital, Gaia's Landing, which is very safe and defended by tame hivemind worms controlled by psychics but you'll have to be quick because this area is sometimes visited by terrorists from the religious fanatics next door. This is in case I'm not being clear cribbed from a game of a genre I actually like so as to give you an idea how out of your depth you get to start if you are a summoned hero."

"Yeah.  Some of that was a little hard for me to digest, but I'm guessing that's part of the point."

"Exactly. Anyway, you get to Gaia's Landing and the money is made of the symbolic guarantee of the ability to heat certain amounts of water and everybody eats various flavors of algae three meals a day and their immortal leader Lady Diedre Skye says the fungus is a person or possibly part of a person and there's a war on three fronts and alien artifacts all over the place and you have some abilities nobody around you has, plus the whole disembodied voice situation, and you're supposed to save Planet. That being the name of the planet. How do you even figure out what to do?"

"Find the biggest university I can and read lots and lots and lots of books."

"Cool, the biggest university is Academy Park and the Gaians are at war with them and the books are all on light-up screens but you can probably do that if you try, you can learn all kinds of stuff. War's still ongoing. Also the fungus seems angry. Keeps suddenly growing real fast and destroying stuff."

"If there's already something I can do about the fungus, I'd probably do that right away?  But if I can't turn it into a giant crater yet, I'd have to focus on getting stronger first."

"The locals know how to remove the fungus. It's slow and expensive and they're tying up most of their resources in the war but they can do it. Seems to make the remaining fungus angrier. By the way, the tame worm hivemind things are pretty nasty, they like to paralyze their opponents with nightmarish visions and then burrow into their skulls. The Gaians plant the fungus sometimes."

"Sounds like a confusing situation, yeah.  Hit up the libraries.  Pick one person who seems very knowledgeable and try trusting them.  Try a small-scale intervention to see what happens before I make any big craters."

"Mm-hm. Anyway, uh, the void dragon asked if I wanted to be a summoned hero or a demon lord."