Chapter Eighteen

Despair, Astral Plane in the general vicinity of Earth, Day 119

  “This is less a repository than a library, librarians included,” Despair said to himself as he watched the finished ‘repository’ in action. They had all contributed initially, using large chunks of miasma and the abundant mana to create weak spirits that could piggyback on their connections to the dungeons, interacting with them at any and all hours as necessary in order to manage and share the dungeon’s patterns. Despair had spent days arguing for them to make lesser spirits, intelligent and sentient beings capable of learning to fulfill basic tasks, and finally won over building an automated system instead, despite the increased cost, largely because the time costs of such a construction could have gone into the years, but also because the spirits could adapt and learn and foster communication between dungeons with far more flexibility and growth than such a system ever could. As their spirits, Nature had made a life attribute sapling, Storm a serpentine fish of the water attribute, Sun a fire attribute lioness, and Despair’s had a skeletal form derived from its death attribute. With each of them created, and hooked into their links to the dungeons, the others were satisfied to leave it be, as far as they cared, if a dungeon wanted a pattern the spirits could negotiate the pattern from one of its holders.

  Despair hadn’t thought that was enough however, so while Sun and Nature left as soon as they had made their spirits and attached them to their links, he settled down to improve the system’s durability and usefulness by incorporating pattern storage crystals. As Storm stood around, chatting with the new spirits somewhat, Despair improved upon Three’s clever use of mana crystals by creating a dozen fist sized chunks of astral prism. The only difference between a mana crystal and an astral prism is that an astral prism uses a small amount of miasma alongside the mana making it up to synchronize the structure of the crystal with the astral plane. In the mortal plane, that synchronization would basically show itself as a dimensional instability that caused small amounts of mana to leak from the astral plane and through the crystal. Inside a dungeon, the crystal might produce some mana, but would prove to be largely inert and useless otherwise due to the dungeon’s own ability to draw mana from the astral plane, but in the astral plane itself, that synchronization served to drastically increase the durability and longevity of the crystal and any of its contents, making it useful for storing patterns and magical constructs.

  Eventually, Storm got tired of asking the young spirits questions and wandered off, leaving despair to continue making the prisms until there was a pile up to his knees, before he filled a few with simple patterns and beginning to train the four spirits how to store and read patterns from them. It took them only a few days to learn how to consistently read even detailed patterns from the prisms, but in the end it took over a month of tries, and quite a bit of miasma, training them to be adept at storing patterns by imprinting the patterns into the prisms. This was because while doing so, they also had to channel a small amount of mana and miasma in a very specific proportion so the crystal would grow and not run out of space or destabilize when many patterns were stored.

  Once they were adept at storing the patterns in the small prisms, however, he created a monolithic new one twice his size, about ten feet tall and a bit over four across, for them to load with the patterns. He watched them carefully to make sure they were doing it right, as a sort of final test. They were, and so he said goodbye and returned from his reverie, quickly opening up portals to observe the earth and continue working on their strategy. He looked at the areas outside all of the dungeons for the first time since he had started working on the repository, except his regular weekly check ins with Calypso, Europa, and Metis, and everything seemed to be going well, with mana concentrations increasing over wider areas. Unfortunately, it looked like Three was still behind, though that was somewhat to be expected given the exponential rate of growth of dungeons.

Stolen novel; please report.

  A few days later, while he was working, Nature ran over excited and happy, and shouted “Hey Despair, guess what? Three has some creatures now! Aren’t I great!”

  Surprised, Despair replied “That’s wonderful, Nature! How did it happen? Did you give Three back his miasma?” Despair asked, ignoring her self-aggrandizement and trying to understand what happened while he turned the portal he was currently using to observe over to look at Three.

  "How should I know!” she snapped, annoyed, “and my dungeons should want to give it to me! I’m not taking it!” she insisted, but despair was distracted by what he was seeing in the dungeon.

  Yes, Three had some bugs and rats in his dungeon, even some plant seeds, but everything past the first few rooms was dead at the moment, even Winterfang was in the first few rooms. The dungeon was glut with mana, probably to toxic levels, and Three didn’t appear to be conscious to manage it. “What’s wrong?” Nature asked, confused at the increasingly dark expression on Despair’s face.

  Furious, Despair snapped at her, “Why is he unconscious?” A dungeon would only fall unconscious as a result of significant trauma, mana deprivation, or an outside force, that being Nature. “What is going on with Three’s dungeon Nature?” he demanded.

  Nature pouted, but went pale as a look of realization crossed her eyes, her expression changing to one of guilt, remaining quiet and visibly closing in on herself, “Nature,” Despair sighed, quietly signaling for Sun and Storm to come over, “What happened to Three?” he asked, trying to be reasonable with her, but she made no move to respond, “Nature!” he yelled, startling her, “This isn’t just an ego trip! We can’t afford our dungeons being knocked unconscious, they have a very important role here. Are you listening to me?” frightened, she just nodded, and Despair forced himself to calm down and try to reassure her, “Nature, you’ve had an attitude for as long as I’ve known you, but this is just going too far… What is going on?”

  Nature eventually looked at him, a deep-seated frustration evident, “It’s, It’s-” she stuttered, trying to find the words, and just as Storm arrived, she burst out, “It’s you guys! It’s all your fault! What ‘become gods’? All I want is to be praised and worshipped! Why can’t I! Back there, nobody even knew me, so I went with you, but now you guys hate me too! My dungeons hate me! Nobody on earth knows me either, nothing has changed! I hate it!” she cried while running away.

  “Hey, what just happened?” Storm asked him, looking at the fleeing Nature.

  “Nature just showed that she’s not up for godhood,” Despair lamented, “Do you think you could, somehow, get her in a better mood? She put Three to sleep, and if it doesn’t wake up who knows what will happen…”

  “Ohhhh, boy…” Storm said, “you two have created quite a mess. I’ll see what I can do, maybe I’ll take her on a tour of Earth or something…”

  “That’s not such a-” good idea, Despair began, trying to stop her, but she was already gone before he could finish.

  “Hello, why did you need me to come over in such a hurry?” Sun asked, “I was busy observing some humans. Did you know that there are some very impressive ones? Some of them may even be suited to become my priestess... As a people they already almost worship beauty and war? Such a wonderful combination,” he said, clearly occupied with other things.

  “It’s a long story,” Despair said, deciding it would be better to tell Sun no matter the state he is in, and began to tell him.