When the mages left that night, Prime opened up her long room, the one that was supposed to be a hidden encounter room. After that, she began adding decor to the encounter rooms.
Needing mana to fuel her efforts, and faster than just double her ambient regeneration rate, Prime turned to the Absorb skill. Wildly inefficient it may be, but it certainly upheld the adage that “quantity has a quality all of its own”. Sadly, the bilge had been seeing next to no new prey for her hunting snekkies. Most of those critters must have been trapped down there during the weirdness of surviving the waves rushing to fill the sudden dearth of half a kilometer radius semi-sphere of ocean.
As she had the night before, Prime went hunting for materials in the ship’s Stores, Armory, and the sailors quarters.
What she had figured out so far was that she could only use her Absorb and Construct skills in rooms without any people in them, and Layout just failed, but it did it in the same way it failed when someone was on the first floor. Also, her Construct skill was oddly restricted. Defenders she could spawn, but not anything counted as Materials, Traps, or Resources by her skill. That also failed with the same feeling of having people on her floor, which got Prime wondering: if she got everyone off the ship, would she be able to change things around?
Regardless, for getting new patterns, she only had to make two cutlasses, three daggers, one set of bone dice, one hammock, various coins, and a few odds and ends of various cloths disappear. The nails for the ship’s carpenter were made of bronze, which also gave her bronze as a Material, like with the gold and bismuth of the core cage, as the coins gave her nickel and silver.
The personal effects were swiped from a sailor she watched bullying the slaves, stolen by her wharf rats because of there being too many comings and goings in the sailors’ quarters for her to absorb the items in situ. She was looking forward to his belly aching when he went to find his dice, coins, and dagger missing come the morning.
The night before, she had made off with a cask of flour, a small keg of beer, extra rope, a block of paper, a few vials of lampblack ink, along with wooden and quill pens. And “soil improvements.” The things she had patterns for gave her more mana than the ones whose patterns she hadn’t yet received. They still cost more to spawn than she got from absorbing them.
And she got far too much mana for her comfort for cleaning out the bilge and the vulgar tubes for the “soil improvements”. She refused to call the tubes shit holes, no matter how literal the name was and that the sailors called them such. They were properly labeled vulgar tubes.
Because of the sea folk settlements that usually grew under the waters of any decent sized port, ships coming into harbor had to close their vulgar tubes and refrain from letting anyone dispose of any waste — bodily excrement or otherwise — overboard while in the harbor. The sea folk put up warning buoys to give the ships time enough to see that done, and if the tubes weren’t closed, Harbor Masters generally imposed steep fines. No one liked having their homes defaced, and the sea folk were poised to take out the docks if it became too much of a pattern.
The inexperienced cadets acting as her ship’s officers never made sure the vulgar tubes were opened when they left the harbor. To give them some credit, that could be remedied as soon as someone noticed the effluvia levels getting too high.
Getting the pattern for “soil improvements” from the vulgar tubes made Prime feel a little off, but she set the thoughts aside.
With the deeper darkness that comes before the dawn shrouding her decks, Prime asked Aide, «How’s the chain breaker trap coming along?»
«Getting it down to just three dimensions is the hard part,» they said. «I deconstructed some of the patterns you’ve picked up over the last couple of nights looking for inspiration, but no luck on the sigil. I did get you coin blanks you can specify a Material for as a modifier, like with the affinities for defenders, and I broke the bronze into copper, tin, and zinc. Looks like the nails had brass cores, probably to stiffen them. Oh, and I got the System to accept bone as a dungeon material.»
Prime had to ask, «Like dungeon wood or dungeon stone? What makes those dungeon materials, anyway? Like, what’s the deal with that stuff?»
«This System treats them more like mana-formed ideals, and as long as they’re in our dungeon, soaking up the mana our core puts out, the PLOT won’t let them be broken. Dungeon materials, not just Resource Materials, have a strong Narrative element of being a hard nope for delvers trying to just smash their way to the core. The act a lot like the dungeon’s skeleton, which ties into another Narrative aspect: If you make things from dungeon materials and they get carried out of our aura, our core’s mana will get flushed out by the ambient mana of the world, and the dungeon materials will get brittle. The faster that happens, the more likely they are to turn into sparklely dust. And if our core body gets too badly damaged, there’s an autonomous reaction to jerk all of the core’s mana sunk into things like the walls and everything back to the core as a last ditch healing or defensive shield. That would collapse our dungeon. I’m not sure what would happen to anyone caught in our dungeon, but generally in older dungeons that have used their dungeon materials for structural reinforcement, there are immediate massive cave-ins.»
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The scholar mages were in paroxysms of delight. It was the find of an elf’s lifetime to discover a still-forming-yet-delvable dungeon, and no one they had consulted with via their scrying spells had heard of one that began with portals. Those were the province of the slumbering ancient dungeons, the ones guarded by fearsomely intelligent beasts like the dragons that plagued the skies. The treasure chest for clearing the rooms were also never seen in newly opened dungeons, though such things became commonplace in dungeons with ten or more floors.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Those two pieces of strangeness, along with the imagery of the unique puzzle traps — which were a common childhood curio among the upper echelons of Lusfal’s society — led the scholars to hypothesize that the core was a fragment from an old, old dungeon and that N’kieran had fused with it when her mage gift awakened under perilous circumstances.
Corbent, who was the best versed of the scholars present in the nuances of soul trackers, swore that the Lady desh Idahl’s soul could not have been fundamentally altered. If it were, he had reassured A’Ferun, the soul tracker would not work. That reassurance was followed up with the caution that her awareness might presently be dulled. She might even think that she was dreaming and behave according o the whimsies of dreams. In such a state, if some remnant of the original dungeon core’s intelligence remained, it might be able to unduly influence her.
A’Ferun heard that N’kieran might have been driven insane by what she had experienced.
By the end of the second days’ delve, the one thing that all the scholars emphatically agreed upon was that harming the dungeon core would harm what remained of A’Ferun’s light.
Upon hearing the details of their first delve, Goryven as the acting captain had strongly argued to let the lower leveled sailors in on the dungeon exploration to help them gain their levels more quickly. Kinser confessed that the monsters were too low of a tier for his own growth, though finding the secret doors and disarming the traps had been quite lucrative for his experience gains.
A’Ferun made sure that the sailors Goryven sent them understood that the consequence of even a drop in their professionalism would be an invitation to hug the main mast, if they made it out of the dungeon alive. The four young men took his warning seriously enough that Kinser felt the need to take charge of them as a buffer against A’Ferun’s strained temper.
With that second delve, they found the pit traps and those uniquely enacted elemental traps had only reset over night, but the defenders re-spawned during their lunch break. That was at least somewhat typical for a new dungeon. In older dungeons, the traps and defenders re-spawned in the empty rooms, leaving a team of cleaners to slog back and forth until the dungeon exhausted whatever it was that let them spawn their monsters.
The lack of the rat swarms that A’Ferun and Kinser has swept through without harm and the greater prevalence of the dire rats that had at least gotten in a few good licks was also a responsiveness seen mostly in older dungeons, and made A’Ferun nervous about what awaited them on this third day of delving and studying.
It was also their fifth day at sea. They had eight more to go by the both Captain desh Shalante and Goryven’s estimates until they reached the port city of Evanhold at the delta of the Meghar River. Then A’Ferun would need to hire a new crew to see the Light of Volmar brought down the Meghar to the capitol of Lus’Idahl, where he would need to explain his failure to reach N’kieran in time to save her from her fate. He had already sent word ahead; he was loyal to his Idahl, but some things needed to be spoken of in person.
Breakfast was served in a suite closer to the decks now that the ward room was the dungeon staging room, complete with sailors standing watch against any signs of a dungeon break. When it was finished and the sages had their gear together, the four sailors from the before had two more added to their number.
“Have they been warned about incurring my ire?” A’Ferun growled to the first four.
“Yes, Lord!” the group’s unofficial spokesman responded.
“Good.” He turned to sweep his gaze over the group. “Are you ready?”
“Yes, Lord.” “Yes, sa’desh.” “Quite!”
“Kinser, lead the way,” A’Ferun ordered.
When it was his turn to proceed, A’Ferun stumbled and choked, barely holding himself back from the curling in on himself as a sucker punch landed via his inner oracle.
| You have entered the Volmar Dungeon.
Ep’hram, seeming oblivious to A’Ferun’s distress, said, “Ah, the sailors must be telling tales for enough of a consensus to have arisen this quickly. It’s not the fastest record for the Akasha accepting a name for a dungeon, but it is close. Better yet, the confirmation that the dungeon begins after the portal, that’s good, even if it leaves us with a bit of a mystery for why the mana on the ship is elevated.”
“Has anyone tested if the hull has changed since the dungeon portal opened?” Tully asked, nervously smoothing his blue robes.
Della said, “Akasha still identifies the hull as reinforced lift wood, and as of this morning, we’re holding steady with 13 Bhams and an Urtho Null.”
There were the same number of dire rats today as yesterday, but less snakes and maybe more of the magic rats. Only one more room had been opened up from their original walk-through. This one differed from the others by being a dead end and also longer. It was empty for the moment, though in the rooms with monsters there were now crates and casks. Those were mostly empty distractions, but still the mages insisted every one be opened and examined. Thanks to that thoroughness, they found the occasional odd blank coin, mostly octagons in shape, but some circles, some squares, and a few hexagons. Each coin had a uniform sized circular hole in the center about as wide as a woman’s pinky. Mixed with the coin were lengths of rope and squares of canvas, petty things all, even the copper and tin coins. Most interesting about them all was that none of the group’s inner oracles warned about the items being “dungeon bound”, meaning they could be removed from the dungeon without fear of them crumbling to dust.
Then they reached the first of the picture doors, as the mages had begun calling them. The image had changed. Now it depicted a line of chained men, women, and children of all the mankind races being led to a crystal. N’kieran sat on top of the crystal with a basket overflowing with bread loaves. In the image, she was passing a loaf to the slave nearest her, but her gaze seemed to glare out from the illusion, as if she condemned the viewer for some great crime.
That condemnation pierced A’Ferun through the heart.
The other images had also changed, showing variations on that theme of being kind to slaves. Then they came to the last picture door before the core. No longer was it the strange superimposition of his light trapped in a crystal and holding off monsters. Instead, it showed A’Ferun and Kinser walking forward while leaving the mages and swordsmen behind as they came to the core room.
The scholars instantly fell to arguing about whether A’Ferun should follow what looked very much like a direct message from the dungeon core.
When he recovered from the shocked relief that she was speaking to him, as best as she could in her current state, A’Ferun didn’t need to think or debate.
“You will stay here until Kinser or I personally come to tell you otherwise,” he decreed and went to see what his light wanted of him.