Dusk falls, as it is want to do, while you ponder the second floor. The gentle splashing of the spring room keeping your thoughts calm. The largest issue is stone. To build a castle as Amanda has requested, you'll have to hollow out the largest single room you ever have – by far. And then you'll need to spend more stone to build up the walls and rooms. It would maybe be possible, given enough time messing with the build menu, to make an interconnecting series of rooms and passages that ape a castle...

But that might not be enough for the system to recognise it as such. Your mind drifts back to the most recent message from the mystery ghost in the system. What help had it given you that would now be stopping? Cutting corners might not be enough any more. And anyway, a few hundred extra stone to give Amanda exactly what she wants is really just a matter of time.

The kobolds take that moment to come back form their haul, dumping another set of stone into your inventory.

Not even my time.

Your resource inventory has been climbing steadily, the goblins continuing to bring in smooth, waxed wooden planks that have tripled your wood store over the course of the day and the kobolds taking longer to bring in smaller stone hauls. But both are climbing.

You're not sure why wood gathering has picked up so much.

Maybe I should ask them when they return?

The water continues to splash as you ponder her other ideas. Traps, and larger minions.

The traps are really just a matter of buying them. The trap table you placed in the workshop so long ago has plenty of options, even if you've barely given them a second thought. You've never found the poison element that so many needed, nor fire, but you have both wood aplenty and enough scrap and stone coming in that many of the more mundane options are now available to you. Spike traps, blades, swinging pendulums and mundane dart traps are all doable with scrap. Falling blocks, pit traps and hidden passages (Are they really traps?) all needed stone. Things like slipping stairs apparently need Sprockets and Widgets, but you're pretty sure they'll only need metal and some time at the trap table.

Larger minions however gives you pause. Empower Minion would have been your first guess, but that just let Sapphire breath fire. It certainly made her more dangerous, but she's still held back by her size. After that...

Evolve Minion was something you ignored the first time through your menu due to the cost. 300 fame per use. It was so far beyond you when you started out that it was laughable, more so than even Championing. And Championing is, frankly, broken.

Even if Evolving does let you create bigger, more powerful minions, it has it's own issues. You went from Drakeling to Drakelet. You're bigger, certainly, and more powerful. But your minions are Goblins, not Goblings; Kobolds, not Koblets. You have no idea if they even can evolve. And if they can... would they want to, if it meant moving up a floor? Of course you could do it without moving them up a floor, but City of the Dispirate specified when you were choosing the first floor specialisation that it required “high number of small monster races” and you have no idea what would happen if the first floor no longer passed the requirements for it's specialisation.

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Which really only leaves the new demons, or anyone else who shows up, as viable evolution paths. And do you really want to give a stranger that mush power?

You stay there, listening to the splash of water and the sigh of the wind and contemplating the future, for another ten minutes or so before the goblins come back. However, unlike before they are not laden with wooden planks.

Sand and Notch-ear are both pushing wooden wheels, bound in iron and as tall as they are. One-eye and Hammer bring up the rear. They too are carrying a pair of wheels, but theirs are connected by a long iron axle, part of the mechanism that attaches it to the underside of a carriage still dangling from the middle. They hit the floor with a metallic thud, before vanishing into your inventory.

Maybe I should have asked them the first time.

The gaggle of goblins chatter as they go to walk past you, headed to train or eat. You flare out a wingling, blocking their progress.

“Where have you been getting this wood?” You do your best to modulate your tone to curiosity, rather than the slight bubbling of angry tension that's building in your gut.

If they've been raiding caravan NPCs...

Sand steps toward you, her new axe sitting high on her back.

“Found it! Big wood...” she scratches her nose, looking down, and then makes some vague gestures in the air, “Thing. On path up mountain. Easier than forest wood and no one said no so...”

She trails off, a look of disquiet on her face. “Was... was that bad?”

You bring your wingling back in, considering her words.

“No one was there? Not even the first time?”

The goblins behind Sand shake their heads as she responds. “Nope. Not stupid.” She looks up at you again, half glaring, as if daring you to refute her. “Not followed either. We careful.”

You nod, slowly. “Very well. Thank you.”

The goblins meander past you, chatting in their guttural tongue, leaving you once more to your thoughts.

A gust of chill wind blows past, some of it caught in the entrance to your lair. It carries the scent of snow-melt, wood-sap. A hint of smoke or perhaps roasting meat. You turn away, shuddering. You pull open your menu and flick through the options as you head deeper into your lair, until you get to the Reinforced Door.

It will take all my scrap...

You place it in the entrance. One of the workers should have it up by the morning. The blueprint looks like it will take the form of double doors. That's fine by you.

The work groups are fully ensconced in Charlemagne's tavern when you pass it by. Firelight spills out into the corridor, accompanied by laughter and voices. You don't have the metal for another reinforced door but a regular one should be fine. You place one in the entrance and continue on. Through the great square room that holds the inexplicable pillar that you turned into a memorial for those lost, and into the grove.

The trees sway in a breeze that, if you close your eyes, you can pretend is real.