Summoning the Eighth Shiso

[Core Room]

Scarlet and Kinran took their leave of the Core Room.

"Right, on to number eight. If the Faculty of Engineering's only going to overlap, let's summon a pharmacist to assist Sapien-sensei. A medicinal herb in the Shiso family would mean…"

"Master, this is purely a personal hunch based on the patterns so far, but I suspect the next won't be the Faculty of Pharmacy but the Faculty of Letters. Setting you aside, this will make the eighth Shiso (Asura). A faculty not yet among the previous seven, plus a Shiso (Asura) whose summoning cost is strangely low, would mean…"

"Summoning cost?"

"A dungeon monster's summoning cost generally rises in proportion to its abilities and its rarity. There are exceptions."

"You mean the thing you see all the time in novels, where slimes are cheap and dragons are expensive."

"According to the Encyclopedia Dungeonica, a high-ability monster requires a great deal of dungeon energy to summon, and beyond that, merely existing consumes dungeon energy on top of food. Put plainly, the labor costs pile up."

"The dungeon energy doesn't look like it's especially gone down, though."

"Shiso (Asura) are, if I do say so myself, a fairly high-ability race, so our labor costs run high, and we're not the sort of monster you can normally summon seven or eight of, pop pop pop."

"Can't be helped, since this dungeon can't summon anything but Shiso (Asura) and bugs and small animals in the first place."

"To put it in company terms, it's a state where you can hire managers but can't hire part-timers, so this too is probably some kind of malfunction. Most likely, if you could have summoned the Minotaur or the Minowakka that were summonable at the very outset" (the Minowakka being the female of the Minotaur; wakka being the cow) "you'd have been able to hire, not the mythologically famous Asterios (an individual name), but a librarian, or a guard, an ordinary Ox-Head."

That is not so. Incidentally, to keep it all in Latin spelling, "Mīnōtaurus" is the closer form, and in Greek style the female would be "Minobous," but perhaps because that gets confused with "Minobōs," the gelded ox (bōs being Latin for the castrated ox), or perhaps because calling a cow-girl a "busu" (an ugly woman) is just too cruel, that whole area is left fudged.

"We'll know once we summon. Next is an herb… thyme, I think we'll go with."

"Thyme, that is, tachijakōsō, Thymus vulgaris."

The summoned Shiso (Asura) had near-black, deep green hair with a greenish metallic luster (structural color), and eyes of a black tinged faintly with pink. In appearance, a small-statured woman.

"I am called Thyme. Command me as you will."

At the moment of summoning she had no name, so the greeting was without emotion.

"Now then, the name. Tachijakōsō, bǎilǐxiāng… the etymology is… unknown, is it. Maybe I'll just go straight with the Latin, Thymus."

"The Latin 'Thymus' is a masculine noun, so it won't suit her appearance. In Italian and Portuguese as well, thyme is a masculine noun."

"Shiso (Asura) basically have no sex, and I've been slapdash about it all along anyway, so if it's fine, it's fine, but."

"In French too, thyme (le thym) is a masculine noun, but in the south of France tachijakōsō also goes by 'farigoule,' which is a feminine noun, so you could use that. Generally speaking, though, it refers to a liqueur steeped with thyme."

In French, rosemary and basil are masculine nouns as well; lavender, mint, and sage are feminine. Note that all of these plants are hermaphrodites.

"Let's do that. And if naming her Thyme made it impossible to summon any more later, that'd be a headache down the road."

"That constraint only applies to named monsters, though. If it isn't a dungeon monster, naming a dog 'Dog' causes nothing, and naming a human 'Tiger' or 'Bear' poses no problem either."

The Dungeon Core announced,

"Farigole-san, are you the Faculty of Pharmacy, or the Faculty of Letters?"

the Dungeon Master asked.

"… Um. The Faculty of Letters."

"Marie-san was right. But maybe we've finally managed to summon a genuine librarian."

"I'm sorry. I hold the curator's qualification at least, but as for the librarian, the setting is that the university has no such program of study to begin with."

"We'll think about the librarian later. The curator qualification is no problem. As a practical matter, this dungeon does run with rather a lot of unlicensed activity. In any case, for now I'd like you to push ahead with the upkeep of the dungeon's sphere of influence."