‘So now what?’ I watched the small elf, shivering in place and plainly in pain.

Well, she’d probably be doing more to herself if she was in danger, or she’d hit the wall of her medical kit and couldn’t do more. As it was, I really couldn’t help her any more and I couldn't easily communicate with her. However, she’d cleared up some of my earlier suspicions on dungeons with her words.

Ancient dungeon.

If I had to guess, she realized I was sentient and decided I was ancient, though I wasn't sure what all that would entail. For now I'd just need to figure out how to go about this. I couldn’t send her back to her ship, her suit a wreck and, even if I could seal it, she’d almost certainly scoot off the second she could. And while I didn't like the idea of a captive friend, it beat chatting up the spiders, and she could provide me with some more information than what I currently had.

For now, she was still injured, and badly, so I moved away from her and opened up a hole to access my hidden farm, likely the most comfortable place to be, given the excess moss coating the ground. I sent a command to one of my spiders, ordering it to shepherd the elf into the room as I set about constructing some simple furniture, a large stone chair and a platform to act as a bed, all coated in moss to provide something more comfortable than stone. I figured I could use silk later, if I figured out how to weave things or ordered my spiders to do it.

As the girl moved in, clutching her arms and casting constant looks at the spiders, she seemed to gape at my moss farm, the long tunnel with the occasional slime poking in and out of the many holes that lined the walls. I finished the furniture additions by adding in a desk then adding a short stack of general metal pages to the top, along with a sharpened stylus that might be able to mark the pages for a time. I considered trying paper but the effort seemed a bit pointless when I realized I couldn't make any sort of writing tool.

After making a stool for the desk I started to make marks on the first page, a rough comic showing stick figures sitting at desks as a teacher showed an alphabet, then the same picture converting the alphabet into a rough rendition of the elvish letters I'd seen on her medical readout. I had no real hopes of learning her language, it looked like the half mad scribbles of a toddler on a sugar binge, if a lot more elegant, but I was hoping the magic windows would fire up a patch for me.

For now, I moved to the bed and made a new sign, a simple metal panel with a cartoonish bone that was wrapped in bandages. She would do me no good if whatever was holding her bones together came undone. So, I waited for a bit, then had the spider hiss at her to get her moving.

Luckily she went to the bed first so I didn't have to encourage her to it. I knew my moss had healing properties, though with my luck she’d either have to eat it or do some alchemy stuff to get it to do anything. Hopefully some of the healing mojo seeped into her, or something like that, while she rested. Otherwise I'd have to wait a few days before I could let her do light duty at the desk.

With all those dismally slow ideas in min i decided to be a little proactive in my hunt for knowledge, she didn’t flap her arms to fly here, probably, so i decided to spawn in a slime to act as her guard, plopping the little wiggler down beside the new door. I made a new sign, annoyed that I'd coated everything in glowing plants, and made a picture of a pointy eared stick figure shouting at a circle, then below an oversized head in the action of turning.

‘Hopefully she understands that.’ I wasn’t sure I would but I couldn't do much more. I sent my spider guards, and everything else, back to work after giving my new slime his orders, ‘shout’ for me if she does anything other than stay on the bed and roll towards her, absorbing the moss, so she’d get the idea that she’s to stay put.

I planned to make my move to the spaceship but I remembered I had a shiny new, ish, suit just sitting out in my cavern. Along with the better part of a tweens party worth of sparkling glitter that was the damaged armor. I looked over the battlefield and beheld the chunky green parts that were my hoppers mixed in with the armor fragments, at least the slimes could beat any earth vacuum in a contest for cleanliness. I quickly spawned ten more slimes, figuring I'd use them soon on my little ship project, then set them to cleaning the area.

After respawning my fallen hoppers, and setting them to their tasks, I checked my inventory. Apparently the hopper chunks just counted as biomass, though I knew I had several different meat options, so I figured it was either dungeon shenanigans, or the fact that plasma puree didn’t really count as meat any more. Whatever the case, I had my answer on the armor. It was just general mineral.

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It took identifying some of the spare scraps my boys hadn’t sucked up but it just confirmed my suspicions, as I hadn't gotten any cool alloy in my inventory. I was surprised that the suits' hardpoints were made of some of the weakest stuff I had access to but, after checking her suit, it made sense. The suit had a lattice of framework inside the hardpoints, barely a millimeter of actual plate with the frame making up the bulk of the area. I’d seen enough car test footage to recognize a crush zone when I saw one so I guessed the hard points were cheap sacrificial zones to make sure big chunks of rock didn’t kill her outright. It was either a really clever way of keeping light on weight, while not being too squishy, or she just had some cheaper gear. It was probably why she wasn’t dead, the hit to her chest might well have completely caved her chest in.

A look at the soft part of the suit did reveal something interesting.

Unknown polymer weave.

Interesting but annoying and pointless, i know what the fuck a weave is you shithead. Well, not entirely pointless, it was polymer and that probably meant it was a plastic of some sort? Even touching it I could feel it was stiff but yielding, probably a pain to deal with but tough enough to take a hit without being mangled, the crushed sections had just scuffed it. My only real guess was that this was more of a Kevlar layer, meant to keep you from poking holes in your suit if you brushed up against something. It could also be something akin to a muscle layer, adding strength to the wearer. But that thought was probably brought on by far too much Halo enjoyment in my youth.

While my probing didn’t find much out, the suit seemed to be good to go so i wouldn’t disassemble it for bits, partly because i believed it would just store the whole thing like the helmet, and partly because it was a functional space suit and the only bit of modesty my elf currently had at hand. And as much as my sixteen year old self jumped with joy at the thought of a naked elf wandering my tunnels, I'd not be so cruel as to force that on her.

So, I hauled it into my inventory and dumped it onto her desk, which made me cringe as the clattering noise made her jump from her prone position on the bed, no doubt a painful action. So I apologized, for what good that would do, and moved up to the entrance.

Back out among the stars and dust I was faced with a curious conundrum, how to gain access to her ship. Firstly, I didn't have a clue where the darn thing was, seeing as my vision was limited by my inability to climb to the edge of my entrance crater. Secondly, how was I meant to cross several hundred feet of inaccessible lunar surface if I even knew where the ship was. It was a question I wasn't quite ready to answer, but I had a few ideas.

First was spawning a slime and having it carve a few channels that might extend my reach. I wasn’t sure if my slimes could endure a vacuum so it was time for some durability tests. I spawned a boy at my feet, dubbing him John, and watched as he instantly began roiling as if his interior was boiling. I tried to pull him back into my spawn inventory but I couldn't, a window informing me I couldn't affect forces currently being damaged or altered. And thus, Jonathan the brave perished in the noble pursuit of science.

Mourning my loss I considered trying my other spawns but dismissed the idea. As much fun as it might be to watch helpless spawns explode, freeze, or otherwise perish, I did feel some loss for my forces. The little bastards trusted me like a kind of general, and I didn't want to betray that trust, even for the little guys. As stupid as that might be in the future, they were mine, and if they fell it wouldn’t be because I just tossed them out into space to see which might float the furthest or explode the most spectacularly.

With that in mind, and also testing idea number two, I made a small gravestone for John, partly to play for time and come up with more ideas. I inscribed his name onto the, roughly, two foot tall slab and hauled it over to the edge of my ‘leash’ lifting it up and plunging it into the soft dusty terrain.

Danger:

Extending a dungeon's authority into the open will likely draw attention to you, and some nearby sentients may consider your actions as hostile.

I grinned at the message, pretty much telling me now what I needed to do. I dismissed the window and pressed the stone a bit more firmly into the ground before taking some more tentative steps out of the entrance. What I saw was breathtaking. I was standing about halfway up an enormous crater on the moon, my entrance jutting out into a soft slope that moved down towards an almost black crater, the color fading as the walls of the crater climbed higher.

I stared out at the crater walls and floor for a small while, just taking in the view, noticing boulders that dotted the crater and how uneven it all was, several spots seemed to be flat while others looked sheer. However, in my gazing, I didn't see anything resembling a ship, until I looked up. There, some thirty meters from my entrance, was a ship right out of a sixties comic. A conical design with three winglets at the back, perhaps the size of a city bus, and at the front was clearly a bridge area as darkened glass gleamed in the sunlight.

It made sense that it was so close, my elf hadn’t vanished for too long when I was building up my courage, but seeing it so close felt fantastic. For now, instead of making anything too permanent, I started to make a cobble path, stamping smooth round stones into the dust to keep extending my reach. I finally had an easy goal in front of me, and a tangible one at that. IT felt great.