So Dark and Mysterious

When Uta learnt that Jazz was interested in improving her abilities related to the Dark arts, she could barely contain herself (which is not hard to believe, considering her normally overflowing personality).

To stay thematic with the Dark and Mysterious theme of the endeavour, she made sure to send Jazz an anonymous letter. Print is rare in this world, so it ended up being a collage of hand-written Kanji from (hopefully discarded) tomes.

The letters are uneven, but not in an obviously careless manner. They are, in traditional Japanese fashion, placed with painstaking, obsessive care to give the illusion of carelessness to the casual observer, but to reveal themselves as carefully arranged according to specific rules of composition and balance.

The message starts by pointing out a date and time, (nighttime of course), and then continues with:

"meeT Me at tHe cORdoNeD oFF weLL At thE eDGe oF Town.
COme alOnE. maKE SuRe yoU arE noT FolLowEd.
DO NoT alERt ThE GuARdS. BriNG YouR WanD.

-- a fRienD."

The cordoned off well at the edge of town, the one so filled with slimes the Hunters' Guild is having trouble finding enough adventurers to clean it.

* * *

At the appointed date, time, and place, there a mysterious figure in a black cloak, her face hidden by a hood. Dark Spriggan wings poke out from the rear. She stands there, unmoving, lurking in the shadows.

You know, Jazz had only mentioned that she's exploring the mysteries of her darker powers to a few people. One is Estelle and this is definitely not her style. The second was Pela and this is *definitely* not her tyle.

The last was Uta. This is definitely ... well... it could be Uta's style. Uta's Utaing can take many forms, so it would make sense that tis is one of them.

Still, she shows up at the well in question, spots the DArk WSpriggan near the well, lurking in the shadows, and proceeds to makes her way quietly over to it herself. Wordlessly, she peers down into it, a soft pulse of light rippling across her body as she briefly illuminates. Light spots!

The mysterious Spriggan of Mystery leans forward, and ruins the careful pose and placement that was casting the hood's shadow just right to hide her face.

"Ooooh, pretty!", she exclaims, eyes glinting with excitement. "Do it again!"

"*AHEM*", Uta says, clearing her voice and pulling back at once, to resume the Shadowing Placement of Mystery. "I am glad you have followed my heed, Young Apprentice. I will be glad to help you grow on the Way of the Dark ARts. Be aware though, that it is a walk riddled with Unknowns, and there is no way to tell in advance what you will encounter, because, well, it's called Dark for a reason, otherwise it'd be the Way of the 'Illuminated With Stadium Lights' Arts."

She turns, and the hem of her cloak lifts and folds with a dramatic swish, then slowly straightens again as she makes her way towards the rope that descends into the well. "That is enough talking, young one. Let us not linger any longer."

'Stadium Lights' getes a roll of lambent, amber eyes from Jazz. She lets her hands rest at her sides and then wiggles her fingerws casuallyt, trying to force herself to relax. "Just so long as there's no Rule of Two, we're good." She reaches up, adjusts her hat on her head, sweeps her lengthy purple bangs out of her eyes and proceeds to follow Uta.

Because that's always gone so well in the past.

"No," the Mysterious Spriggan of Mystery states, "but just for you, we might introduce the Rule of Twee."

When the duo reaches the lower level, choirs of 'oohs' can be heard, and whisperings can be seen floating around in the air. The 'bloop bloop' of slimes is still distant.

The cloaked figure chants a misleading hymn, a piece in a major key but with a clever use of triad inversions that tricks the listener into the same ominous feeling one would get by a minor key instead.

Uta's staff glows luminous... but it's a strange kind of... /dark/ light. Kind of like the black light used for those psychedelic posters.

"Before I can teach you anything, I will need to assess your current level. Please show me what you can do."

Silently, there's an eyebrow up at Uta. Judging her. Silently judging her at her words. Then she rubs a hand down her face and turns towards those bloop-blooping slimes. She doesn't really want to kill them, but then, this needs to be resolved one way or the other.

... a little while later, Jazz is neck deep in slimes. She's not an exceptioinal warrior, and relying on her dark magics isn't going *well* for her.

"..damn it! Erf! Uta! A little help here! Augh! Uff!"

There is more of that devious chanting, and a certain signature Caduceus-shaped staff is directed at the whispering, a blast of Dark Light being shot at them, hosing them down in a Ghostbusters-like crackle of energy and shattering them to polygons. Much fluttering of a cape takes place.

"Rule one of the Dark Ways is... cretures fear the Dark. You must not fear the Dark. You must /become/ the Dark. Then creatures fear you."

The cloaked figure goes silent. Her expression shifts, but it's hard to tell with the shadows.

"...wait, that's /four/ rules," she says in confusion, one hand pulled up to be looked at, alternating between making the gestures for 'one' and 'four'.

"ANYWAY. That was your first lesson. Onwards," she urges, and leads Jazz in a room full of... tabby slimes.

"What do you make of this?"

"...that someone spent too much time in the designer trying to find a way to make these things cute," says Jazz, thoughtfully, to Uta. The tabby-cat slimes are eyehballed from a distance ahdn the she rolls on up to them. "I'd assume you want to capture them but I don't think we can do that reasoinably well, so I'm just going to bubble a bunch of them up to clear the way and funnel them into a single passageway so we can deal with them."

She cracks her knuckles and sets to work, presuming Uta doesn't stop her. The dirty look at her earlier words about 'the dark' just made her look cuter, anyway.

"Possibly. But you must remember a very important thing. Dark techniques are primarily about concealment. Ignorance is a form of concealment, and while many spells rely on harnessing such concealment for one's goal, there is a philosophical component of knowing where the boundary between knowledge and ignorance lies. Many Dark techniques hinge on this point, which is why Subtle Artes tend to be a favorite."

Uta says nothing about Jazz comment about the slimes, but merely does her best to avoid being involved with the ball of wet cat slimes. The olfactory implications of the phrase 'Ball of Wet Cat Slimes' should be enough to justify her reluctance to get in contact with it."The point of that discussion is... we don't /know/ if these slimes were created from scratch in CGI, or were mere shadows of an actually existing world, one we are now knee-deep into." Interesting remark to make in a sewer.

The next room is full of floating magical slimes. "I let the water ball slide because of expediency. But if you want to improve your skills in manipulating the Dark, you... you know, you have to use some dark spells." She waves her staff at what she's dubbed 'Slime Hogwarts' during a previous duty run. "Show me what you've got."

"... a bit more than knee-deep and I'm in stupid skirt," points out Jazz to Uta, dryly.

"Dark isn't JUST about being unseen. It's a lot of other things, I think. It's ... complicated. When I call something I can .. .you know, never mind. I just herded a a bunch of wet cat slimes into a secondary tunnel so we could get by them while wading thigh-deep in ... something I'd rather not think about." She pinches the bridge of her nose with her fingernails for a moment, then adds, "Don't worry. I will." She snaps her fingers towards the mage-hat slimes that they've born down on.

"Oh, god. These..."

...and then she's blasted bvy one of them. She barely has time to raise an obsidian-colored water bubble before it sends her against the wall with its impact. At least much of the blast was deflected. After that, horribly bloated corpses dressed in sailor's garbs begin to rise up around the mage-slimes, trying to grab onto them at Jazz's call to the oceans blackest waters.

"...as blackest night, coem to my aid," she coughs a few times, "oh my god that smells augh."

Uta... I mean... the Mysterious figure of Mystery says, "Of course it's not exactly like that. Did you listen to the part about deceiving and manipulating knowledge and ignorance, and things hidden from view?" She blinks. "Wait, uh, you did. You did! Congratulations. You passed your first test!"

She watches with interest and nods in approval at Jazz's technique.

"Oh, the substance we're knee deep in? This reminds me of a great expression. 'Stool sample'. We medical people have to deal with a lot of stuff people would rather not think about, and I'd have to say, I'm still amazed at how good we've been at coming up with fancy and professional ways to refer to them!"

She looks down at Jazz. "Aw, but that skirt looks so good on you. It does wonders for your adorableness." She looks down at herself, then at Jazz again, then back at herself. "...yeah, I'm not sure this will wash off. Hopefully it will."

The substance Jazz would rather not think of eventualy ends up covered in a reddish oily sheen, and soon the duo finds itself in a pool inside a chamber. The center is taken over by a red slime-like creature with liffle flames on it.

"That's a jelly. Fun fact, if you put a crown on it, it becomes a royal jelly." Uta raises her staff point-blank, and points it at the monster. "You know what to do!", she exclaims, and begins her singing.

"I am going to kick you in the shin as soon as my leg isn't being sucked into a horrible vortex of awful," is what Jazz says (cutely) to Uta. Her face scrunching up like that, alight with embaressment and frustration, does not help any, not even a little. Their arrival at the font of Red Jelly just makes her utter, "... like stumbling into a vat of schmucker's raspberry preserves..." Still accompanied by the whispery wisps, dark and bloated and visciages twisted with death, she's quick to sic them on the creature to gnaw and slash at it while she scurries to the side to let kelpy, black vines sprout from the water to grab hold of it, ichorous thorns digging in and tearinng at the poor ooze.

"You'll have to wait until we've both cleaned up, I think. Unless you want to go for a poison attack." Uta nods.

"...who's Schmucker?", Uta asks, confusion in her voice.

She grins in approval at Jazz's technique, and she herself begins chanting an ominous, oppressing tune...

...it's /that/ tune!

Coat swishing wildly, Uta seeps darkness, and soon she's a dark silhouette, silhouette which seeps darkness and purple, ethereal tendrils that surround her in a writhing sphere. Her eyes are narrowed, her staff pointed, and she shoots a jet of blackness at the jelly, jet which progressively sucks in and consumes the sphere.

Scary Nega-Uta is back!

The good news is that they're nearly done with the mission. The even better news is that this means they're a short ways away from using the sanitation system to get clean!

Jazz looks relieved once scary Nega-Uta finishes off the monster who's HP's she'd been steadily chipping away at with her magic for some time. "Hello, Slightly Darker Uta," she replies., thoughtful, to the persona's arrival. She doesn't otherwise coment on it. In fact, she's gotten kind of used to these reflective-Uta-Moments.

As they approach the next slime, however, and it's apparently covered in the faces of its victims, she lets out a sigh.

"Little Slime, Little Slime of Horrors," she sings under her breath.

And then she lashes out with vine and undead spirits, ripping free the faces of the victims and givinng them fresh 'life' to attack it in turn.

It's somewhat gruesome, but Jazz seems nonplussed.

Darker Uta low-growls back a greeting. In her own snarly way, she seems to have appreciated the greeting. Her existence does not last long, though: Dark Uta reverts to Regular Uta as the last bits of dark energy have been blasted out.

With the combined effort of both adventurers, Uta's part consisting in blasting the monster with sonic blasts, the final monster is defeated, and it drops... well, one single coin, it would seem.

The Mysterious Figure in a Dark Cloak simply says, "Take it."

Then, she waits.

"You have earned it. You have worked hard for this. You have learned important lessons, endured hardships, and came a long, long way since you have started your training."

There is more silence.

"Uh... just... just remind me. How long have I been training you, exactly? Asking for a friend."

We will not bore the reader with what happened next. Oh, except for one point... when the time to leave came, the Mysterious Figure of Mystery spun on her feet (making the coat swish dramatically again), and with her back turned to Jazz, she looked over her shoulder. "Goodbye, disciple. I have to go now. Take care of yourself, and... who knows. Maybe we'll cross paths once again, in the future."

And she disappears into the night.