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While the delvers stepped out for lunch, Prime grabbed a quick fix of mana from absorbing more of the “soil enrichments” from the vulgar tubes. She formed the first bit of the second floor, and then switched her focus back into the core room to clean the tiles off the portal archway.
Her actions reset the puzzle, and she decided to redo the illusion attached to it.
The delvers still hadn’t returned by the time she was done with that. A quick flex of attention to see why and she saw that the slave’s overseer had cornered A’Ferun and was pushing for the opportunity to train some of his slaves in her dungeon.
In the end, A’Ferun required the overseer to indemnify them for any effects bringing the slaves into the dungeon might have, and to bear the responsibility if they provoked a dungeon break or the like.
«Did you prime the PLOT with our Plan B?» Prime asked Aide.
«Eh? Oh, maybe indirectly. What’s up?»
«A’Ferun’s trying to scare the overseer off from matching up too close with Plan A by requiring the slave traders to ‘bear responsibility’ if there’s a dungeon break related to the slaves.»
Aide chuckled and started to head back to their work.
Prime asked, «Hey, one last check on this, I promise, but we’re not going to need to move our core until there’s a portal to the second floor and at least one three by three room?»
«I am as sure as I can be, which is very good odds, but I’m not guaranteeing it,» Aide reiterated.
«All righty, then. I’ll avoid the three by threes and focus on not-quite full rooms before I set up the other side of the portal.»
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Rupear Big Nose lived up, or down as the case may be, to his sobriquet, both physically and figuratively. The slaver boss hasn’t been that thrilled at the ban on the sailors buying time with his “goods”, and though he hadn’t said it outright, his poking about inclined A’Ferun to think the man’s grump came more from losing the gossip channel than the few coins. He lived down to A’Ferun’s disgust when his response to finding out his slaves would have basic quarters, water for hygiene, and more than a single piss pot per pen — which held twenty slaves each — had been, “My hirelings ain’t got nothing to do with the shit them beasties’ll be spreading with that.”
A’Ferun didn’t care if the slaves threw shit at the slavers. He figured they deserved it, and he’d happily have the sailors clean up the ship after such a scene, though he lacked the right to prevent the slavers from beating their slaves within the limits proscribed by the common law of Lusfal.
Those common law protections were pretty to say, but their enforcement had a lot more to do with how willing the magistrates were to hear slaves in their courts. Essentially, rape, crippling, and excessive unearned punishments were prohibited by law. An owner was supposedly required to have a magistrate’s clerk witness any questionings for criminal acts, such as gross theft or violence against another slave, and that clerk was supposed to approve any punishments not deemed the province of the magistrate to dispense.
To be considered criminal rape when it came to slaves depended on the circumstances of enslavement. Felons and war captives had next to no protections, while children and debtors sold into slavery could not be forced into sexual servitude. Lusfal hadn’t been to war in a while, but all slaves brought in from foreign lands were assumed to be war captives.
A’Ferun didn’t particularly think of himself as a compassionate person, but he did consider himself moral. To strike when peace was a realistic option, to take without recompense, or to force a child not yet into adulthood to bear the burden of their parents’ mistakes all were acts he considered immoral.
The last made child slavery especially heinous in A’Ferun’s eyes. While there were no suckling infants or toddling babes among the slaves of Big Nose’s “goods”, there were children still androgynous with their youth. The thought of those children made A’Ferun want to punch the slaver boss in his fat nose.
Having the man accost them as soon as they left the ward room hadn’t done much for A’Ferun’s opinion.
Despite the lack of gossiping over sordid transactions, the despicable man had still heard of a dungeon awakening on the ship that was transporting his slaves. It didn’t take a genius to see the man thought this was a golden opportunity, and training his slaves was the least of it as he made his pitch through their lunch meal in the improvised dining room.
There were groups of people in this world that like to style themselves as “adventurers”. They were more like roving parties of mercenaries, but as most of the money these small groups could earn came from monster hunting — and there were always more monsters — the adventurers were mostly tolerated. A few tradesman guilds had even developed among them that helped to insulate the communities that such adventurers served from the adventurers themselves. Those guilds did more for the adventurers, too, providing mentorships, training, and information.
Dungeons were to adventurers what a field at harvest time was to a farmer, and the guilds had no problem paying large sums for any information that could make their members higher profits with less risk. If Rupear could provide enough new details about any dungeon, he could lose every slave the Light of Volmar was transporting and still make a worthy profit. A newly awakened dungeon in a unique location? If the guild he sold that information to could verify it, then he was already ahead the price of his slaves and transport.
It was an angle that A’Ferun hadn’t even begun to consider until Big Nose let slip his ties with the Pimarantan dungeon clearers, and suddenly, ensuring the slavers never made it to a scrying orb, let alone off the ship, seemed like the better option compared to letting them sell their information and endanger A’Ferun’s light.
Rupear Big Nose did at least pause when A’Ferun told him, “You would have to bear the responsibility for anything that happens after you bring your slaves into the dungeon, up to and including a dungeon break spewing monsters onto the ship.”
“We aren’t the only delvers, though, are we?” Big Nose countered.
“Did I stutter?” A’Ferun was ambivalent enough about the whole prospect to be unreasonable. “Also, unique loot must be turned over to the scholars for study.”
“For fair compensation,” Big Nose haggled.
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That was within the common law, so A’Ferun grimaced and conceded, “If they deem it necessary to keep the loot or if it is destroyed while in the scholar’s possession, yes. And I will be the arbiter of what is fair. Furthermore, the core room is off limits on penalty of immediate death. I will accompany your delve to ensure that. In fact, any attempt to enter a room I tell you is off limits will be mutiny. If I’m feeling generous, the mutineer will simply hug the main mast.”
Big Nose tried to weasel around that, but A’Ferun was quite happy for the slaver to never enter the dungeon to begin with. In the end, the man had to concede every legal, unreasonable burden A’Ferun put on him. A touch of spiteful ire showed through as Big Nose grudgingly signed the magical contracts with A’Ferun’s terms. That took well into the afternoon to settle, and the only concession Big Nose had wrangled his way into was getting to bring his slave crew in for the first delve the next day.
When A’Ferun informed the scholar mages of the development, Tully and Della pouted, but a side-eyed warning glare from Ep’hram silenced them.
Still, Ep’hram carefully did not ask A’Ferun’s reasons with the observation, “After seeing the imagery of the picture traps today, I am left to wonder at the wisdom of allowing slaves to delve this particular dungeon.”
The elf was proving insightful and discrete, so A’Ferun gave as much of an explanation as he intended to share to anyone. “They have accepted the responsibility of bearing the consequences of their intrusion, signed, and with copies held upon the Wave Breaker. I will be escorting them to limit the potential damage they might do, with the warning that failing to heed me is mutiny, and will earn a mutineer’s reward.”
There were still questions in Ep’hram’s gaze, but also a resignation that pushing for answers now would only earn A’Ferun’s ire.
A’Ferun retired to the original ward room, where he set to plotting how to handle the fall out of “losing” the slavers at sea.
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Prime brought Aide up to speed on the things she had spied upon, ending with the question, «Do we need to do the Bullet Time thing again?»
«I think, with how you’re handling the Layout skill, you might be able to get a 4D sigil to work. Test it with me?» Aide invited.
Prime suppressed an existential shiver of dread at the thought of the maths song that invitation brought to mind, but she put on her big girl panties and said, «Let’s give it a try.»
A gut twisting half hour later, Prime desperately wanted a body capable of puking just to relieve the nausea she felt. On the bright side, though, the first of their elemental traps was now replaced with a 4D variant and the pattern for an “Efficient Elemental Trap of Mental Clarity” had been added to her Construct options. It was fueled by ambient mana and had a System imposed restriction that the damage could not be life threatening, but it also would require the use of specific skills to disable it, and that only for a limited window of time.
«What is this?» she asked, mentally pointing to the trap name.
Aide, sounding just a bit like a smug prick to Prime’s bedraggled ears, said, «I knew you could lay in a 4D sigil, so this ‘test’ is one of the better versions of the chain breaker trap I came up with. Anyone going through it without being slave sealed will get shocked, worse if they’re wearing or carrying metal, and anyone with a slave seal will have the seal broken while looking like they’re getting shocked.»
«It’s as complicated as a lawyer’s prank on a pig, isn’t it? Why would you do that to me!?»
«Like I said, I knew you could do it. You’re making 4D structures when you use the Layout skill to make the tunnels and rooms inside this pocket dimension. The only reason you didn’t realize it is because you refused to believe you could.»
«Oh, get bent, you lousy waffler!» Prime growled, shutting herself into mediation to try to to ease the horrid sensations running through her soul.
When it was bearable to think again, she set about spawning in her defenders. This time, though, she didn’t limit her selections to those the scholars had already seen. A’Ferun and Kinser knew enough to support her. She had to scrape the vulgar tubes clean, along with drying out the bilge, to get enough mana, and she went back for the things that got dumped before the night watch began. Drying out the bilge got her sea water as a material, and with the cleaned out vulgar tubes, the kitchen scrapes from the galley and cleaning the dishes got her the pattern for plums, cabbage, and rice.
Sadly, her reach with the Absorb skill did not extend beyond her hull, but that was still enough mana to finish off her first floor and fill every room except the entrance with more formidable defenders. All of those defenders had the mana signature of the save seal impressed into their awareness with the understanding to avoid the sealed slaves as much as possible, but how well the mental command took was anyone’s guess.
But, making things more interesting, when Prime completed the extra large room just before their core room, Aide passed through a System announcement.
| You can now designate or create a core defender. This defender will grow with you, and must always occupy the room directly before the core room. New floors cannot be completed without a core defender room, and your core cannot be moved to a room that is not directly connected to the core defender’s room. All routes from your dungeon’s entrance must pass through the core defender’s room before connecting to the core room.
| Creating or designating a core defender will consume all of your maximum mana pool. The more mana spent, the better your core defender will be.
«I think we should hold off on this until we can reasonably expect we’ll have hostile delvers. What do you say?» Prime asked, momentarily putting aside that she had some revenge to take on her partner.
Pretending to be a sage, Aide pompously declared, «Patience and preparation are virtues that sometimes conflict.» They dropped the act before Prime could poke them and added in a more normal tone, «Put together an emergency Absorb pile to fill up our core’s reservoir and have us ready to drop down a floor at a moment’s notice, and I think that’s an acceptable risk for a great payoff.»
«Good points,» Prime said.
Several of her newly spawned defenders were ratlings: semi-bipedal rats capable of Common speech and the use of tools and weapons. They were about the size of dire rats when they moved on all four limbs, but without the scutes. Moving on their hind limbs, they were about chest high on a human. She gave them daggers that looked more like short swords at their stature, and imbued them all with shadow affinity during their creation. The changes to the respawn system had already taken place, because Prime could vaguely sense some foreign personality bits that hovered around their core body more by their movement away from the core and down the tether to their defenders, with significantly larger personality bits going to the low sapient defenders.
Weapons and magic were great things to have, but it was better when her defenders knew how to use them. Prime had received enough gnosis dumps to repackage her own prior lives’ knowledge of how to use daggers and manipulate shadows, and the ratlings were some of the first defenders that had the sapience to use that knowledge. She pushed her own crude imitation of a gnosis dump down the core tethers, gave the ratlings practice dummy crates and wooden daggers to play with, and then directed them to train their bodies to make use of the knowledge she had given them.
With the biggest rooms now open, she directed the ratlings — all six of them — to the core defender room, and gave them six shadow kraits for companions.
Prime went on to retouch some of the traps and move things around. The entrance room had also gotten expanded into the initially planned circle, and she put a pedestal in the center of the room to hold up the key. She added random images to the doors, a shepherd’s staff to the first left hand door, a shield to the second left door, an hourglass on the second right hand, and a crescent moon on the first right hand door.
While she was debating if and, if so, how she wanted to warn A’Ferun and Kinser of the moved traps and increased dangers, Aide spluttered, «What did you do!? We just leveled!»
«You have the notices,» Prime pointed out.
After a short pause, likely to collect themselves, Aide said, «Yes, alright. How did you get the ratlings to learn … Dagger Mastery, Swordcraft, Shadow Manipulation, and Shadow Strike?»
Pleasantly surprised, Prime confirmed, «They all learned those skills?»
«No. Four learned the Dagger Master skill and the other two the Swordcraft one. They did all learn Shadow Manipulation, and only one of the Dagger ratlings learned Shadow Strike. So, what did you do?»
Prime didn’t think it was all that much so she explained about the gnosis dump and order to train with the knowledge.
Aide was suspiciously silent after that, so she prompted, «What are you thinking?»
«I’m comparing XP gains, hold on.»
«Well, kick off the level up, then. And right now, if you can cut down on the maths noise from the Layout skill that would be good. I need to build up the second floor next.»
«Right. Good night.»