She sighs. "Welcome to the Guild. I sincerely hope you'll do well here. Don't worry, you're the weirdest one to come in today but not this week. Goodbye, now."

Manager nods and turns away again.

(Abyssia is looking on worriedly. Elizabeth looks slightly annoyed.)

...heh.

Shaking her head, Ame resumes partyward and plops herself into the seat next to Abyssia.

"So."

"So," Bys agrees.

"I didn't think to warn you, sorry-in-a-shallow-way, you just kind of internalize that rule. Like you internalize wearing clothes and saying hello. Did I have to tell you that we say hello around here?" Elizabeth shakes her head. "Let's just move on."

Ame snickers. Zing, Elizabeth. Zing.

"Sure. You two learn anything while I was flustering random guild clerks and getting scolded for validating their horny?"

Is there a menu or is this just the get-drunk kind of bar. Ame's hungry.

There's a menu! It's a tad pricey but not ridiculous.

"Three different groups ignored my guns, assumed I was a frontliner tank, and offered me party slots. Fischer stereotypes. It's actually oddly cheering, it means people have heard of Fischers enough to have stereotypes about them! And five asked Elizabeth to come along, apparently battlefield healers are scarce here. Also, the dungeon is more than half slimes and kind of water themed otherwise. First floor boss is a group of Metal Slimes, second floor boss is a Binding Squid that I think you can just- Unheal, probably-"

Ame scans the menu for something filling but not overpriced, and orders.

"Probably. As for the slimes..."

Ame casually draws her gladius and stabs her shoulder slime with it, to see what happens.

The whole slime twitches and reports !!Damage!! to her mentally. Fluid leaks out around the edge of the cut but the 'skin' forms up around her weapon and sticks to it fairly hard. It doesn't immediately die and dismiss.

"Slimes are so godsdamned annoying to kill. Single hits don't work as well as you'd expect, especially stabbing. If you get the core they either die or stop doing things, but that's hard. Big slashes and things like Elizabeth's thorns do better. But if we're mostly fighting slimes I should honestly leave my guns behind and fight with the harpoon."

Ame has the slime try to cling to her sword and tests how much force it takes to dislodge, among other things. She doesn't want to try slashing the slime entirely in half while sitting at the bar, but gets the idea that this would only sort of kill it.

"Well," she says, "on the bright side, finally, a reason to use Magic Missile."

A clean bisection would probably do it actually, and even if not it would sure slow it down a lot, making it take time to reform.

"Hmm. My harpoon might be alright actually, the barbs would cause more damage to the skin coming out. We should try it outside later. That summoning ability's convenient for practice. Maybe you could sell that even, let people know what they're getting into down there."

Ame sheaths her gladius and pays careful attention to how fast her slime can heal itself without using its healing magic. Does its healing magic even work on itself, Ame has somehow never checked.

"That's true. I can summon a normal blue slime for us to practice on, and selling that as a service isn't a bad backup plan if for some reason we can't make money any other way. Do you know how big the ones in the dungeon are?"

"They vary. But on the first two floors apparently they don't get bigger than knee-high, and those are unusual."

"I can do knee-high. We can experiment. After lunch."

Lunch! (Abyssia is drinking beer. But only one.)

"How long should we stay? I do think we need to build up a good amount of coin... Money is always always useful, it gives us slack."

"That it does. And this seems like a decent place to, pause our journey, if we're going to do that."

Ame gets her food (a long skinny sandwich of some kind, which it turns out wasn't overpriced because it is 50% bread by weight but the bread itself is really good bread so Ame isn't complaining) and digs in.

"Possibility one, we stay until we have what we think is enough money to get to Saroshem without another pit stop. Two, we stay until we beat the dungeon. Three, we pretend like our travel time is conserved with regard to baseline walking speed and treat the next two and a half weeks as if we got them for free."

"I'm not sure it makes sense to save up for all the way to Saroshem... Or rather, for Rotula, since we decided to ask around at the nearest big city first. It's a long way, and lots of things can happen between now and then. Plus our earning potential might go up."

"Beating the dungeon isn't something to speak of so casually when it has nine floors already. Can't get too confident now. I like option three, but two and a half weeks might be a bit long, itself."

"We can treat thing three as a time limit on the other two. Or if we get bored. Whichever happens first. I don't want to waste time but I also don't want to act like we have more of a deadline than, you know, if this is important to do and is doable by us then treating it like it'll wait forever is dumb even if it will wait forever?"

"Bet we'll get bored. This place is growing but it's not quite there yet and getting entrenched here is the wrong kind of investment. I'm looking forward to finding out what's so important where we're heading, though."

"And once we get there, keeping the secret will probably be more trouble than it's worth."

Chew chew.

"It'll make sense when we get there," Ame promises, addressing both of them, because Abyssia is taking this even more on faith than Elizabeth, pitching her voice so it doesn't carry, holding her sandwich up as a guard against lip-reading. "But it's the sort of thing if I said it out loud, even if no one believed me we'd probably still be dead by midnight. And it doesn't affect anything strategic or personal. Not until - " Aggressive chewing. Swallow. "Not until we get there."

"I'm ready to take on faith that this is important and act as if the fate of the world is in the balance."

Bys says this with perfect seriousness.

Eyeroll. "Fine, fine. It should be interesting and maybe I'll find some lost lore along the way."

Smile.

"So anyway."

Ame finishes her sandwich and wipes her mouth.

"Let's go beat up my slime."

"And maybe attract a beefy meathead to take all the hits for us too."

The other two will follow her outside. 

Fire and lashing thorns prove reasonably effective against slime, though Elizabeth's holdout dagger very much does not. Abyssia barely even tries shooting it before giving up in disgust. Bullets are not very effective, though she mutters about getting enchantment work done. However, Bys's harpoon works somewhat better, with a tendency to either fling slimes around if it's stuck in them or rip large portions of the skin up and cause fluids to gush out on more glancing hits.

Ame tests the efficacy of full bisection. She almost manages to save the slime but it is down to her skill at manipulating the slime whether or not the slime dies. The blue slime is corrosive, but hopefully not to weapons?

Once she regenerates some mana, Ame also tests how effective Magic Missile is against a knee-high blue slime.