So, problem, the stupid strong adventurers left stupid amounts of mana behind. Normally I’d be delighted with more energy to use, but the main problem is that it’s way too much, it kind of feels like when you have way too much food. Also kind of like holding your breath? Weird dungeon analogies aside, I know I need to use all this excess energy up, but I don’t want to just work in a reactionary way. That’s pretty much all I’ve been doing, reacting based on what I have to work with, but I don’t want to get stuck in that way of thinking. My solution? Make something decidedly Earth-based.
First off, while I have the energy, I dump a big chunk of it to expand my floor, hidden behind my Core tree. Rather than making an adventureable space, I make the whole 50 foot cubed section into a whole bunch of small hexagonal spaces for efficiency, filling it with as much mycelium, worms, etc, essentially making a mana farm out of the creatures low on my food chain. It’s definitely not putting out as much as those adventurers, but I’d rather invest in constant, low-level mana production now instead of relying on the occasional intruder.
With that and some time repairing the damage from that last delve I feel less like I’m going to explode, but I still need to decide what to make with the rest of it all. So, what comes to mind when you think of an omnipresent entity looking over your every movement and action as you walk through their walls? That’s right, the Portal games! Obviously, I don’t have portals to travel through (yet), but I can really lean on the puzzle theme I’ve already got going. Time to get cracking!
First off, I dissolve the tree around my Core and start burrowing down into the stone, my larger roots dragging my smaller roots through the earth even as they dissolve the material into nothing. It’s a lot of digging, especially since I have to dig far enough down that my Pondscape zone doesn’t leak through, but eventually I have a really big rectangular space, lined through with a lattice structure of aluminum and steel for my roots to pass through to control the whole space. Oh yeah, fun fact, I just need an earthy material for my roots to live in! Stone, metal, crystal, they all work. I totally didn’t figure that out as I was putting my roots in the metal struts and how dare you for implying otherwise.
Anyways, the space is about the size of two school gyms mushed together, if I had to give a general estimate. Now I’m sure you’re thinking, mental diary in my head, ‘wow, what are you going to do with all that space?’ Well, I’m glad you asked! My plan right now is to replicate the construction arms from Portal, in order to create an area where I can build and alter rooms on command, even while intruders are inside of my dungeon. Just a few days ago I would have been stumped on how to do it since I’m not much of a robotics engineer, but two things have given me just what I need!...Maybe.
First is the ability to make things move. If I were to try and do this from scratch, I would have needed to recreate motors and wires and such just to get started. Not to say I’m against doing so later, but for now I need immediate results. The complex weave of enchantments and materials in the horse golem toy are perfect for creating motion without all the usual finicky problems with motorization and all that. With a bit of copy-pasting and enchantment surgery, I manage to extract just the ability to shift a material’s shape, which is how a golem generates its movement, rather than adding force to a static object.
On the floor in the middle of my new workspace, I create a mechanical arm made of aluminum. Well, ‘arm’ is a bit of a stretch, it’s pretty much just a sculpture of what a generic assembly line arm would look like at the moment. For now, it’s just bolted to the stone of the floor to keep it stable while I test it out. I start threading the basic movement enchantment through the arm, tweaking variables and shifting tones of information magic as I go, testing its movement and rebuilding the arm over and over every time it fails. At the same time as I experiment, I have a few different trains of thought monitoring the rest of my dungeon, while another starts looking into the air wisp creature and my new offerings.
Now that I have time to really look into it, the air wisp creature is somewhat of a marvel. Well, a marvel to me, objectively it’s kind of like a plant, but for magically attuned material. It’s mostly made of something similar to resin, a very simple polymer halfway between glucose and hard, biodegradable plastic. It mostly uses it as a kind of exoskeleton, while the inside is lined with what I can only describe as a pure magic equivalent to a hydrocarbon, using all the basic elements and Life magic, threaded together to create a cycle of mana that is self-stabilizing, not needing physical material to anchor itself.
It’s ‘organs’ are very alien too, even if you ignore the fact that they’re purely magical constructs. The wings seem to be less made to help with flight, with the creature being about as light as air on its own, and are more made to convert ambient mana into Air mana for it to feed off of. That air mana is cycled through its organs, along with small amounts of dust and whatever organic material might be floating in the air that gets caught up, so that it can create and fertilize its eggs. As it turns out, the wisp thing would have died in a few days after laying its eggs whether I absorbed it or not, so I feel a lot better about not waiting to see what else it could do. In order to move around, it uses what I can only describe as organic air spells built into its exoskeleton to push itself through the air.
The totem seems mostly inert, but it is made of a new type of tree, which I’m certainly happy to see. Unlike my ancient pine trees, which can live for a few hundred years in optimal conditions, this new tree type can apparently live for thousands of years, which is just crazy! I mean, there’s redwoods and stuff from earth, but that’s still a long time for a tree to live. From the preview of its gene sphere, it looks a lot like if you supersized an oak tree, with a massive, thick trunk and lots of strong branches that point out horizontally in groups every 5 feet or so. It also uses a lot of iron and copper to reinforce the lignin in its cell membranes, so I almost want to call it an ironwood tree. You know what, yeah, it’s an Ironwood tree now.
The orange dagger, however, completely baffles me. I was expecting maybe an iron dagger made completely of fire-attuned iron, but I got something completely different. I straight up didn’t recognize the metal, either its atomic form in my material mindspace or the crystal formations it makes internally when I summon an ingot of it. From what I can tell, it seems to be a natural fire mana attuner, when you put in magic you get a lot of heat, eventually reaching the point that the fire mana starts to transmute the air directly around it into a pseudo-plasma, a bit hotter than a wood fire, but not nearly as hot as true plasma would be. The dagger itself had a heat redirection enchantment on the handle and hilt, so that you didn’t end up roasting your hand when you put mana into it.
The realization that my robotic (well, not robotic, it’s a golem. Golemic? Golemic.) my golemic arm has finally reached a point that I’m comfortable with resounds throughout my consciousness, and other than a single fragment devoted to basic first floor observation, I focus fully on my bottom floor once more. The train of thought focused on experimentation had done some physical tweaks to the arm as well, and half-remembered pride fills me as I test its full range of motion.
Each joint in the arm is made completely from a ball of Water and Info-attuned iron, giving it a look similar to ferrofluid, despite still technically being solid. At the wrist section, there’s a ball of the pseudo-ferrofluid, upon which a thick aluminum disc with a quarter-sphere depression in it rests, which gives it plenty of range of movement. At the elbow, there’s another, larger sphere, but the ‘shoulder’ joint on the floor is only a half sphere of the metal, attached to an iron plate bolted into the stone. The actual lengths of arm are made of regular aluminum, though now the inside of both segments are semi-hollow, like my avian creature’s bones, in order to lighten them up some.
Rather than regular robotic clamping fingers, there’s simply four small half spheres of the joint metal. While testing the joints, I remember that these can extend when used, becoming kind of tentacle-y to form whatever shape they need to be. Thanks to the way that golemetic movement enchanting works, the whole thing is technically one piece, with the lengths of arm metal being designated as static sections, while the joints are considered dynamic sections, designed to move the static sections they are connected to across their surfaces.
Thankfully, the segment of my consciousness focused on designing the arm had the forethought to make it all mostly modular, which makes copy-pasting much easier for future projects. For now though, I need to figure out how to control this arm and many others while adventurers are inside of the dungeon. Thankfully, I have an idea. Moving my concentration back up to my Pondscape room, I’m delighted to see the wisp creature’s eggs hatching, smaller copies of it starting to populate the room. The tiny, almost Navi-looking creatures follow along my thickest roots, creating fresh air that helps the otherwise stale air move around, the sheer number of them allowing people to see the basic shape of my largest open-air roots.
With a basic willing of intent, the young wisps start flying in unison, creating a rough helix rotating in the air before going back to their normal behavior. Perfect! Looks like my hunch was right. My more advanced creatures were harder to give direct, specific orders to, since they all have emotions and feelings and a kind of mental...weight, I guess you could say. The wisps though, they only had the most basic of neural clusters, and they’re mana constructs, which make them even easier to manipulate. All I have to do now is figure out how to make them work in unison.
I spend most of the rest of the night split as much as I can, working on different iterations of gene-well, the mana equivalent of genes-manipulation for my wisp blueprint. Oddly enough, despite not being organic in the same way as the rest of my creatures, the air wisp and the new iterations still exist in the organics mindspace. After too many predicted failures to count, I finally manage to get a first prototype for what I want.
From a regular, living in the wild standpoint, this Organi-Golemic Core (or OGC, for short) wouldn’t last more than a few days. It’s about the size of a ping-pong ball, made of a thicker, more solid outer polymer, and with the wings turned into individual root-like stems. In mana sight, each stem looks like a feather, thanks to the way each stem either draws in ambient mana or brushes out Info mana. Most of the organs have been simplified down, focusing on extreme survivability and freeing up neural connections that would normally go to taking in sensory input and sending outputs to now non-existent air spells. Essentially, a semi-clear plastic ball covered in long, stiff roots, with magic goop in the middle. It doesn’t even have reproductive organs anymore, since I’d be spawning them on demand.
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Summoning it in the shoulder joint of the golemetic arm, however, things get interesting. Tying the outputs into the threads of movement enchantment, and with its inputs melded into the magibiological equivalent of an internet dish for intent, I send an order and hope for the best. For several long moments there are only slight twitches and jerks, and I almost sigh in disappointment, but finally, it moves. The arm rotates its joints, figuring out its ranges of motion, before following my order, holding up its ‘hand’ and making a four fingered thumbs up. All the dungeon creatures celebrate for a few minutes out of nowhere, sounds of all kinds echoing out into the world as they get caught up in my happiness.
I’m so psyched! I just straight up made a golem that can tell what I want! I mean, I have to be pretty direct with what I want it to do, but still! This way, I can change the layout of this floor on demand, even with adventurers on the floor, which will probably be quite the spook for them. Now I just need to make...like, 200 of them. Which will take a while considering how much mana those pseudo-ferrofluid balls cost. Shit. Well, if it’s going to be more than a night to design this next floor, I need to figure out how to make a proper staircase down to my second level.
...Wait, what? Why would I need to do that? Is this, no, hold on...Ok, let’s go through my thought process again. I am making a second floor, below my own. It will take more time than what I have left before morning to even set up the basics of the room, so I need to...make a reasonable staircase down? Wait, no, why? This is so frustrating, it’s like-imagine the blindspot in your eye, where if something like a dot ends up in it, your brain just covers up the dot like it doesn’t exist. Except instead of sensory input, it's a gap in your logical reasoning, which is much stranger to notice. Is this a dungeon instinct thing? I need to make a reasonable path to my Core, even if it potentially endangers me? That’s so stupid! Well, I guess there are stupid human instincts too from a logical standpoint, like ingroup-outgroup dynamics.
Fuck. Just, fine. I’m not willing to try and do surgery on my core without the barest understanding of how my internals work, so I can’t really do anything about these instincts, if it’s even something I could remove without damaging other bits of me. It sucks, but I’m just going to have to work with these instincts as best as I can. I’m going to have strong words with whoever put me in this thing, though!
For now, I set up a flat disk of metal and a long metal tube down to the second floor’s...floor. I add a very basic up-down golemetic enchantment, tied to a little podium with an up and down button, so that people can use it like an elevator. At the top of the elevator, right in front of the hole down to the second floor where my Core tree used to be, I put a generic sign made out of ironwood up and burned the shape of two hammers crossed over a clock into it with some fire mana. Hopefully that’s enough for whoever next comes in to get the picture. Hopefully I won’t have any more surprises like those super-adventurers for a while, I could use some time to actually get things running!
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
In her well-worn room, now with a fixed chair to rest in, Hilda finds herself scouring over a page of legalese, one of many piled up like little mountains on her desk. Despite the best efforts of her and Ezos, someone along the chain of information had let loose the fact that there was a dungeon nearby, which had obviously stirred up the hornets nest. Thankfully, not much in the way of specific information had been leaked to anyone who wasn’t required to know, but she still had plenty of angry and concerned letters to deal with from various merchants and the lesser, stupider nobility in the city.
To the dwarf’s not-so hidden relief, Ezos’s crystal lights up on her desk, and she draws her attention away from the densely worded paper in front of her. Any interruption from paperwork is a good interruption!
“Hilda, I have the leader of the Silver group sent to the dungeon on call. He has his preliminary report on the dungeon itself and a potential colonization assessment of the area. Should I have him go to recording, or would you like to take this live?”
“No no, I want to hear this live! It’s, er, important to have this kind of information as soon as possible, so that we can make proper adjustments.”
“...Yes, quite.”
If she could sweat, Hilda would be doing it, hearing the knowing tone in her assistants voice. After a few long moments though, the light of Ezos’s crystal shines brighter, coalescing into an image above the dwarf’s desk. The resolution starts off fuzzy, but quickly clears up, the image of an Ursine stooped over his communication crystal coming into view. He seems to realize that it’s turned on soon after, backing up some and sitting down, back against some kind of construct.
“Ah! Hello Guildmaster, Adrian reporting in, leader of the Silver-rank group Soul Sweetie.”
“Glad to hear from you, silver. Before we get to the meat of the matter, what can you tell us of the area immediately around the Dungeon?”
Hilda steeples her fingers, making sure not to let her internal rant show through. Why the heck did Ezos send Soul Sweetie?! I mean, they’re a great adventuring group, but...they’re more like a sledgehammer than a scalpel. They do have a lot of warding capabilities though. She can only hope that they haven’t caused an early floor creation thanks to their usual antics.
“Yes Ma’am! As we were told, the dungeon entrance is approximately 12 miles out from the edge of Witmore, though we’ll likely need to contract earth-moving mages in order to make and reinforce some kind of road down. If we didn’t have our all-terrain carriage it would have taken quite some time to get down the cliffside.”
Hilda hums and nods her head, writing down the details on a spare piece of parchment, more focused on getting the important things down instead of responding.
“The area itself mostly consists of large boulders with thick, deep cracks between them. Again, earth-moving mages would likely be for the best, to fuse them together and give a settlement a solid foundation. Thankfully, this close to the cliffside, there’s very little in the way of dangerous wildlife, though that might change once construction starts. I would recommend something similar to a mining and hunting town in composition.”
“Alright...and…there! I’ll make sure to adjust plans accordingly, thank you Adrian. Now, onto the Dungeon. What is your assessment of its type and difficulty? I’m assuming you fought its first Boss?”
The Ursine’s face scrunches up, making him almost look constipated, and immediately Hilda’s stomach drops out from under her. Before she can start thinking of worst-case scenarios, he continues on.
“The Dungeon is...very, very odd. I’m honestly not sure how to categorize it. I think… I think it might be some kind of hybrid?”
“Go on?” Well that isn’t incredibly horrifying to think about.
“Well, for one, it seems much more, I guess intelligent is the best way to put it. Obviously Dungeons are alive, but this one felt like it knew what we were. Despite it being the first floor, there’s three different themes, each in their own areas. Hell, it uses the pillar technique to make bigger rooms! And all of the wildlife-”
“Wildlife?”
“Yes! I mean, I know, logically, that they’re all monsters, but they don’t feel like monsters, they feel like they could walk right out and live on their own! And that’s a big indicator for an Artisian Dungeon, along with there not being any Warped, but they come in the numbers you’d expect to see in a regular Dungeon. Heck, there are these giant crustaceans in a water area in the middle of the Dungeon, and it’s using them as a deterrent to keep people from ignoring a puzzle! A puzzle! On the first floor!”
The ursine, who had slowly devolved into a rambling rant, takes a deep breath in and out, running a hand through the fur on his head. Hilda gives him a minute to calm down, before bringing up her main question, the one that had stuck in her mind the most from all he told her.
“This is all mildly concerning, yes...but why do you think that the Dungeon is full-on intelligent?”
The bearman looks off to the side and scratches his cheek sheepishly, which on a Silver can only make her shiver. That’s never a good sign.
“Sooo...I might have gotten a bit rage-y from all the unexplained differences stacked on top of each other, and while we were going down what seemed to be an alternate path, I smacked face-first into some kind of invisible, solid barrier. No idea what it was made of, but it wasn’t glass that’s for sure. But I could tell the Dungeon was laughing, all of the creatures were doing whatever equivalent they had, and the air-feel broadcasted it pretty openly. So I kind of...maybe used a full-wall breaker on the barrier and destroyed it.”
He gives her a sheepish grin, and all she can do is just. Breathe. This is why a more subtle team would have been better.
“If the dungeon develops the second floor early-”
“No, no! I didn’t see a Boss monster, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t even done with its first development cycle for the floor! If it does though, I’ll obviously take full responsibility. The main reason I bring it up is because of how the Dungeon’s monsters reacted.”
Hilda raises a brow, seeing the adventurer become much more serious all of a sudden. Apparently he’d actually gotten a bit spooked, hard to do even for an older dungeon.
“For one, even with all my skills, that barrier didn’t just dust itself like I expected, it turned into a more regular form of rubble. I didn’t think it was even possible for that to happen with something that’s clear without a very specific kind of invisibility enchantment. What really got to me was how the creatures reacted. I’m not sure if it was destroying the barrier, the debris killing a few smaller nearby creatures, or maybe both, but...I guess the best way to describe it is that they were intentionally trying to warn us off, without actually attacking. It was creepy as fuck, if I’m perfectly honest.”
She turns her head to the side, looking out the window to the city below. How in the hells was she supposed to explain this to everyone? Well, the mage guilds would be foaming at the mouth to study the Dungeon, so they could probably get some deals out of giving them protection while they worked. They’d have to find a Dungeon Worker willing to work on such an aberrant case, too, which would be a trial in and of itself. After some contemplation she sighs and turns back to the ursine.
“Alright, I’ll start organising things as best as I can on this end. Make sure to give the Dungeon a few days before diving again, it’s a baby Dungeon so Silver rank magic takes a while for it to consolidate. And don’t go destroying structures again! I don’t want it thinking it needs to add poison gas or something inside of them just to deter meatheads from muscling their way through its obstacles.”
The ursine flinches a little at the reprimand, but nods and gives a salute.
“Yes Guildmaster! I’ll get into contact with you again within the week.”
Hilda lets out an exhausted sigh as the image flickers away. Hopefully this Dungeon doesn’t end up making super-strong abominations or something else equally ridiculous to what it’s been doing already.
Halfway across the city, several stories below ground level, the same light screen flickers away in a room full of cloaked figures. One of them collapses into their seat, breathing heavily and chugging a mana potion while the other 5 in the room ruminate on what they’ve learned.
“Damnation, that assistant of hers is almost impossible to copy off of. I feel like you could cook an omelette on my head!”
Soft chuckles make their way around the table, before one of the other, shorter figures speaks up.
“So, what do we do now? We can’t sneak over there and steal the Core with Soul Sweetie camping right in front of it.”
The largest figure, with the most intimidating aura of the group speaks up next, silencing the murmurs of the others with a mere flex of his magic.
“It’s unfortunate that we can’t simply take it, but there are other ways to get our hands on the core. In a way, this gives us time to formulate a more cohesive plan. For now, we take our time to learn more, wait for the Silver group to be relieved of duty, and we make our move. To Ganora!”
“””””To Ganora!”””””