“Okay. What do we know?” The frenetic punk paced soundlessly as she talked to herself. Masque and an as-of-yet unnamed salamander with yellow stripes slowly tracked her meandering path. She told herself she wasn’t talking to herself like a crazy person… ghost… thing. No, she had an audience!
“So I’m stuck in a puddle. I can summon animals like some really crappy Druid.” She paused and looked at the Salamanders. “No offense.” Yellow licked its eyeball. “I think I got the ability to make frogs when Masque ate one. I felt REALLY GOOD when they did, too. I obviously got something out of that.” She held up a finger. “And the mosquitoes too! Wait… Am I some kind of soggy swamp vampire?!” Masque rolled onto its back, staring at her upside down.
“Okay, no, that was dumb. The ravens said I was going to be a Dungeon? But since when is THIS a dungeon?!” She shouted that last part at the sky, and the puddle rippled again. “No cave! No walls! No rooms! Nothing!“ Lifting a fist to the sky, she shook it and ranted. “Just this STUPID. SMELLY. SWAMP!!”
Then she remembered the other thing Muninn had told her. Protect her core… She looked at the glow, willing to gamble that the radiant jasper was the object in question. Well, if she was going to pull that off, she needed to understand her surroundings better. What did she have to work with?
She flopped onto the muddy ground beside her amphibious companions with a grunt, but no other audible impact. Okay, she had to think of this like a game. New DM, new setting, she had to figure out the rules and resources at her disposal. With a smirk, she looked at Masque and quoted one of her favorite movies.
“I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”
—
Liv lay panting on the squishy mulch ‘beach’ of her puddle.
“S-skeeter!” She panted, feeling like someone had put her in a dehydrator to be mummified. Nothing happened. “Okay. That’s uh.. that’s… 25.” She whispered to yellow. Poor guy needed a real name. Masque had slid back into the water a few minutes before.
“I can summon 25 mosquitoes before I’m tapped.” That should give her a baseline to use. There was a familiar croaking noise, and Liv turned to look for her frog. The little brown hopper needed a name too.
She was overjoyed to see a slightly fatter green frog instead! She’d determined earlier that she got nothing from her Mosquitoes feeding off of her own critters, but outsiders seemed to bring her… whatever it was she needed. The green amphibian ate a few of the bugs as she slowly started to feel refreshed. It wasn’t much, but she could feel the trickle of energy coming from the swarm.
Yellow spotted the intruder and scrambled ineffectually in the mud in their haste to go after the frog. Flailing wildly and sending mud everywhere, the critter spun out cartoonishly, scaring away its prey. Liv sighed in disappointment.
“Right, that answers that. You’re Wile.” She chuckled as the newly named salamander flopped into the mud, defeated.
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It took most of an afternoon and a visit from some kind of crane-like bird, but eventually she had gotten enough energy back to feel like she could carry on with her experimentation. Summoning Wile had felt a lot harder than the mosquitoes, which made as much sense as anything here did, she supposed. She wanted to see if she could quantify that feeling somehow. She also wanted to see how much control she had.
“Salamander.” Another reddish amphibian appeared in front of her nose and then fell into the water. She could feel the hit to her… energy? She needed a term for that. “Salamander on that log!” She said, picturing one atop the roach nest. Roach coach? Yeah, she liked that better. Less creepy. Another hit to her energy and she felt a bit thirsty, but the Salamander arrived where she wanted. “Okay, how about physical attributes? Orange Salamander!” Liv felt guilty as she forgot to think of a location and the poor orange striped amphibian flailed through the air until it hit the water at her feet. “Sorry!” She cupped her hands before her.
“Uhh, female Salamander!” A muddy brown Salamander fizzled and popped into being in her cupped hands… And then promptly fell through them into the water below.
”Damnit!”
It was only then that the aspiring experimenter realized she had no way of figuring out if that one worked or not as she couldn’t tell the difference. “Crap.” She said in a slightly strained voice. Almost immediately she flinched, as she caught her slip. It was with an audible sigh of relief that she realized apparently ‘crap’ was not something she could summon into her hands with a word.
“Thank the gods…”
Watching it (her?) swim off into the water, she sat down and tried to keep her eyes open as she kept going.
—
In the end, she’d only gotten five. She’d done the same with frogs and gotten the same result, despite the size difference. Whatever the determining factor was in what it cost her to make these animals appear, it wasn’t mass. Complexity maybe? She was also pretty certain she’d hit some kind of limitation on her population.
She’d made five frogs, but the final two had just hopped off into the fog, and the mosquito population had taken an obvious hit. She’d been worried about the hit to her intake, but it turned out the frogs gave her a trickle of energy by eating passing dragonflies and something that looked like junebugs. Gods, she hated this swamp. It was an insectophobe’s nightmare.
She paced now at the head of her own private army of tiny amphibians.
“Right! So!” She started her bizarre Ted Talk. “Using the mosquito as a basic unit of measurement, we can quantify this weird, crappy super power.” She explained. A salamander turned away and slid into the water. Everyone’s a critic…
“So we’ve got approximately twenty five skeeter-points, henceforth to be known as SP. Each of you costs about five SP. Other creepy crawlies seem to cost one, just like the skeeters.” It had been hard to force herself to summon up the bugs, even for the sake of science, but she’d done so near her frogs just to make it as brief as possible. “I don’t know if there’s a bug limit, but it looks like any more than ten of you guys and the others just run off… Which means I have a cap on my SP generation, which is already susceptible to feast or famine as it is. I think I get some automatically, but it seems pretty slow. So if I’m going to ‘defend my core’ I’m probably going to need some more… intimidating creatures.” Her amphibians stared at her, one frog breaking the silence with a tiny croak.
“Right you are!” Liv chirped, pointing at it. “That means more complexity. More SP. I need to get access to more somehow, which means I need to find a way to raise that limit.” She stroked her chin, thinking.
“Maybe I need more space?” Liv examined the edges of the puddle she’d been stuck in for the past… Actually she wasn’t super sure how long. A couple days? If she walked right up to the fog she could see a handful of feet through the mist. Mostly just silhouettes and outlines. She didn’t know if she could ‘grow’, but if she was going to try then she wanted to pick the best direction. She also needed to make sure she knew the exact borders of her puddle in case the growth was tiny or slow enough to be difficult to track. She began carefully walking the boundaries while she waited for her SP to regenerate so she could begin Phase 2 ™.