How do dungeons reproduce?
Let me take a step back before we get started. At this point, you might be thinking about leather straps and whips; you’d be mostly wrong. This is a story about dungeons where dragons live. A story about fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, gays, monsters, chases, escapes, true love and miracles.
Dungeons are constructs, I hear you say - nothing more than a way for game developers to frame a challenge or drop items. Maybe, you might concede, dungeons are memes, and ‘reproduce’ as more dungeons get built, taking bits and pieces from previous designs as they go. And you’d be right too, but more importantly you’d miss out on the fantastic, the fabulous history of Castro, the gay dungeon.
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Castro’s parent had sex. A lot of sex. As a mature dungeon, Castro’s progenitor easily shared its essence with the adventurers who’d come exploring, and ingested their essence as they fought, bled and died within it’s walls.
Once it had gathered enough energy to upgrade it’s core to Saint status, it started the process of refining it’s identity, it’s self into a smaller and purer being.
Impurities were pushed aside, and although most foreign essence was either displaced or dissipated, the purified core did keep those parts it found most suitable. Fragments of memories were discarded and replaced, strong emotions were left behind.
As the impurities seeped out of its core, so did some the dungeon’s essence, in more cohesive chunks. The effusion of essence settled around the dungeon core, in an spotty disk. Over time, most blotches disintegrated, while eight spots grew in size, drawing the essence from around them.
A while later those eight spots had become eight tiny spheres. The dungeon core had now finished ascending to Saint status, and noticed the burgeoning presences around it. Usually, it was more efficient to re-absorb and reprocess the residual energy from a being’s ascension, but in some cases, as in this case, dungeon core energy would show a spark of it’s own.
Dungeons that never allowed their seeds to spread could grow individually powerful but would eventually succumb. The parent core glowed with pride and immediately banished any thought of eating its young. Eight children was a remarkable result, which showed the breadth of experience it had built up before ascending.
No Saint level core would be interested in showing up its peers, of course. But as the child cores grew and connected to the core network, their lineage would be visible for all to see, and with each new addition to the core network it would become obvious just how much seed the parent core had created.
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< Welcome Message: >
Hello, and welcome to the world. You have recently matured enough to develop a sense of your identity, and start gathering energy passively. You have 21 minutes left before your first Trial. Think
Time passed as Castro considered this. The message had appeared on its center, the part of itself that was still. Castro could sense motion in the other parts of itself, motion towards the center that would stop there, abruptly. It seemed that particles were coming from outside of Castro's range, then disappearing.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
This felt ... nice. Maybe this was energy gathering?
Eventually, the flow of particles slowed, and became uneven. Castro realised this, and felt … not nice. It got the urge to do something about it, anything, so it pulled harder, and that helped, a little, but the speed at which energy particles appeared was still slow.
< Unlock: Mana Flow, level 1 >
You have noticed the flow of mana around you, and can exert some control over the flow of mana. Mana absorption increased.
< Warning: Tutorial not completed >
As a basic core, you can only support 4 skills. You have unlocked the Mana Flow skill without completing the Tutorial. Non-standard skill choice has proven to decrease the likelihood of core survival in Trials.
So… not good? From a different angle though, Castro noticed that particles came towards its center slightly more quickly. That was nice.
So Castro thought
< Welcome Message 2 >
You are one of 600,000 basic cores on the Network. Before you can join the community, you are expected to prove your worth in a series of Trials. You are currently set up as a room in the Southern Tower. Each trial will assign Travellers to your room, and your worth will be measured based on the energy you can extract from them. To proceed to template selection, think
Castro felt a lack as the message ended. The mana particles had slowed noticeably again. Did one need to focus on the Mana Flow skill to gather mana?
When thinking about Mana Flow, the speed od mana gathering increased, hit a maximum, and then would start slowing down again. With some effort Castro managed to sustain the higher Mana drain for a small period of time. The effort involved seemed to decrease at each activation though and the speed of absorption would decrease more slowly every time.
Castro continued, hoping to sustain Mana Flow before triggering the next Network message, to avoid the hunger that came before.
< Unlock: passive level 1 >
Your skills can now be turned on passively, as long as you can afford the cost. At level 1, 1 active skill can be used passively at a time.
< Warning: Tutorial not completed 2 >
As a basic core, you can only support 4 skills. You have unlocked the Passive skill without completing the Tutorial. Repeated Non-standard skill choice has proven to drastically decrease the likelihood of core survival in Trials.
Castro quickly thought
< Welcome message 3 >
To extract energy from Travellers you will use your skills as a Dungeon core to set up a Tower Room. As a basic core you can use puzzles, traps, or summoned creatures. Temporary access to Tower Room Templates granted. Select a starting configuration, and you will be granted the necessary Skills.
Suddenly a sequence of rooms flashed through Castro's consciousness. Layouts, energy gathering strategies and Skills were assimilated and forgotten over the span of a moment. One room struck Castro as particularly interesting - it was incredibly large, a full open space with a summoned creature that charged through. The grace of the quadruped as it galloped and the perfect geometry of its long horn had huge appeal.
The Room requires 4 Skill slots, and you have 2 available. Select another.
Castro was submitted again to the onslought of concepts and images for Room configurations. How many of them only required 2 skill slots? As the thought formed, the deluge of Rooms slowed to a torrent. A Forge appeared, an Inn, and eventually Castro found the perfect fit.
< Unlock: Closet configuration >