Zack was busy playing around with his various new monster patterns when he felt a familiar presence press against the boundaries of his influence. Not wanting to appear overly eager to welcome Alex back, he kept his focus on the monster wandering around his lab and waited until the kobold set foot into the dungeon proper. He immediately noted the absence of both the non-speaking mobs and Archie, but decided it was better to wait for Alex to explain everything rather than start freaking out. Just in case, though, he started pulling together enough mana to build his faithful rabbit a new body, just in case.
"Zack? I'm back," Alex called, stepping into the dungeon lobby.
With an effort of will, Zack spun up a new wisp just over Alex's head and moved it into view. "Hey buddy. Everything go according to plan?" The question was quick to the point but Zack desperately wanted to know if his favorite rabbit was alright.
"Yes and no. Right now, Archie's running damage control and helping Matt get his dungeon out of the air. He'll be a bit preoccupied for a couple days as the local adventurer's guild is going to want to scour the place for more monsters," Alex explained, rubbing his neck nervously.
At mention of Archie staying behind, Zack immediately relaxed. He'd known before sending them that Archie's prior encounter with Matt might lead the rabbit to be soft on the other core. "Wait, what do you mean get his dungeon out of the air?"
"It's a long story. Can we do this in my apartment, or one of your labs? My bruises have bruises and I really want to sit down…"
"Sure, bud. Hey, Glitch, can you open us a portal to lab seven?" At the request, a portal flickered into existence in front of Alex. Zack promptly dismissed his wisp and conjured a new one beyond the portal, along with a table and a chair.
By the time Alex stumbled through the portal, there was already a pot of tea and a medibold waiting for him. Alex nodded gratefully up at Zack's hovering green mana, and shuffled into his seat for the medibold to do its thing.
"So, tell me everything," Zack insisted.
Alex nodded and started walking Zack through the series of events leading up to his return. He mentioned how Matt's dungeon was flying, and how there were mobs running rampant throughout the structure. He talked about the copper tubes and how they were used to run mana throughout the structure. At mention of the dungeon fairy, though, Zack grew uncharacteristically silent.
"I brought the corpse back for you to examine, at least," Alex explained. He fumbled through his satchel while the medibold fussed over his injured legs, pumping them full of healing energy.
The thing Alex removed from his pack was long and slender, covered in burnished copper armour on the outside. Zack was a little grossed out when he removed its severed head and set it down on the table next to the corpse.
Zack started by absorbing the copper shell, magically peeling it away to reveal the body underneath. Its limbs were even more slender than its armour led him to believe, with an insectoid daintiness to its shape. It even appeared to have a mixture of exoskeleton and flesh, rather than be one or the other. Its face was fleshy in structure, while its body and limbs were not. He couldn't help but wonder if that inspired its need for armour, but decided that was a conversation best left for another day.
Now that it was fully exposed, Zack poked at the place in his mind where the Akashic System liked to sit. Immediately, his mind was filled with information about the creature before him.
[Dungeon Fairy]
[Level unknown, parasite, fairy]
[Dungeon fairies are creatures that feed off of cores. The stronger the core, the more power a fairy is able to gain. Dungeons and other similar core types provide additional bonuses, such as granting the fairy temporary use of mob spawning so long as they feed off it.]
[Warning: This creature was slain outside your area of influence. Due to the surplus of mana from another dungeon, you cannot at present absorb this creature to learn its pattern.]
Zack narrowed his wisp in consternation, before turning hsi attention back to Alex. "This thing… It feeds off cores," he growled.
"Yeah. When we found him, Matt was completely overrun by this thing," Alex explained, crossing his arms before remembering one of them was still healing. He let out a wince of pain, which immediately drew the medibold's attention to the injury. While it pressed its hands on his arm to heal it, Alex continued speaking. "Matt was basically relegated to a small consciousness within what was essentially the fairy's hive."
At the mention of hive, Zack quickly referenced his list of known core types. Hives were a little ways below dungeon cores, but they were present nontheless.
[Hive Cores]
[A core dedicated to the upkeep and protection of a singular entity. Cannot learn new patterns, but can spawn creatures adjacent to their entity.]
When Zack relayed that to Alex, the kobold frowned in confusion. When asked whether hive cores can fly, Zack shook his wisp to the negative.
"To my knowledge, the only cores that can take their building off the ground are sky palaces—wait, do you think that's what Matt is?"
"Is that really the only difference?" Alex asked.
Zack rolled his wisp through the air in thought. "The three types of major cores are dungeons, wild lands, and sky palaces. The idea is that these three core types are able to process large amounts of aether in their influence. Dungeons are largely underground and serve to filter aether in the earth. Wild lands are above ground and filter aether in the lower atmosphere. Sky palaces, on the other hand, are supposed to be airborn so they can clean aether normally beyond the reach of anyone else."
Alex nodded in understanding. "So that's what Matt is, one of these sky palaces?"
"It would explain why he's so big," Zack mumbled. "He would need a lot of mana to keep his dungeon—er, palace as it were—aloft. We definitely need to establish some kind of connection with him, in that case. He must be so confused…"
Alex tiled his head, but didn't argue with Zack on the matter. "I did manage to recover a lot of Glitch's broken shards. At least I hope they're Glitch's. I can't imagine adding a third consciousness to them would go over particularly well."
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
"Show me?"
At the request, Alex pulled the plastic baggy full of purple shards out of his satchel and set it on the table beside the fairy. Almost as if it were reaching towards them, the fairy's hand twitched. Both kobold and dungeon stared at the dead body worriedly for a moment, before Alex gently rolled it to the edge of the table.
"It's dead, right?" Alex asked, poking the corpse nervously.
"Yeah. I think that was just some kind of muscle spasm, maybe a reaction to the sudden presence of a core so nearby."
Alex swallowed but didn't ask further questions. Instead, he tapped the baggy filled with shards to draw Zack's attention to it. The wisp flitted down over the table to study the pieces, bobbing excitedly in approval.
"I think these are exactly what we need, though I'm not sure this is the right place for them," Zack explained. "I've been doing some thinking and talking with Glitch, and they think they might be able to create a portal to this thing if it was big and strong enough."
"Reyna—one of the adventurers we met—said something similar. Something about portal anchors," Alex explained.
"That's not the word Glitch used. They called it something more like… the other side of a bridge. They can't open the path if they don't know where to go, right? In the dungeon, that's easy. I've set up portal arches and helped them connect their mana to them."
"But another dungeon fifty miles away is a different story," Alex nodded and corssed his arms again.
"Why don't you leave them with me, for now? I have a couple ideas of how to build this, what did you call it? A portal anchor? I'll talk to Salazar, we might be able to pull something together that helps Glitch. If nothing else, maybe we can separate them again."
Alex nodded as the baggy was lifted into the air and carried out of the room by an invisible hand. To Zack's perspective, he could see the manifested hand of mana carrying his prize away. He needed to be carefuly with such precious cargo, after all. He couldn't just absorb the shards and spit them out somewhere else.
Actually, I probably could, Zack chuckled to himself as he deposted the shards in one of his many hidden treasure rooms. If the labs were studying rare finds, the treasure rooms were for hoarding them until he was ready to play with them.
At the thought of playing with magic, Zack's attention turned back to the dead fairy on the table. Alex was eyeing it too, though his brows were scrunched together.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Zack asked the kobold.
"That this thing is an existential threat to core kind?" Alex offered.
Zack was momentarily taken aback by the question, but managed to brush it off quickly enough. "I was thinking more that this gives me ideas for new mobs in the forest zone, but yeah, that too."
The pair stared quietly at the unmoving corpse for a period of several breaths, before Alex peered up at the wisp again. "What do you plan on doing with it?"
"I haven't figured that out yet. On the one hand, part of me wants to destroy it and pretend these things don't exist. Do you suppose saying there's no such thing as fairies will kill them, do you?"
"Doubtful."
"Damn. That always works in the stories."
Alex shrugged and shook his head. "We're not exactly in a story, Zack."
"You don't know that. For all you know, there's a devilishly handsome author penning our tale right this second."
"Zack," Alex said in a warning tone.
"Fiiiiiiiiine," Zack whined, rolling his wisp as he chuckled. "If there was an author, though, he definitely just left me out of the last four or so chapters, and I'd be justifiably upsed at—"
"Zack! Focus!"
"Right, sorry. To better answer your question, I would like to absorb it and add its data to my growing collection, but that's easier said than done. This thing is so stuffed full of mana that I can't properly touch it."
Alex blinked in surrpise, looking from the decapitated corpse then up to the wisp. "That all? You know I, like, use mana, right?"
Somewhere in the dungeon, Jean-Claude just smacked hisface in exasperation. "Yes. Of course I know that!" Zack insisted. "Ahem. Would you kindly draing the body of its excess mana so I can take a crack at learning its pattern?"
The kobold rolled his eyes but obliged the request. Zack watched eagerly as red and blue mana flowed out of the fairy's corpsed and into Alex's palm. As magic flowed between them, the body started twitching. It looked almost like the headless creature was having a seizure, which was an image Zack definitely didn't want added to his eidetic memory. He looked away and watched Alex's face instead, as the kobold clenched his jaw in focus.
When he was fully topped up, Alex quickly loosed a few quick strings of aether into the air for Zack to absorb, then went back to work draining the corpse. It took around five minutes of alternating between drawing magic out of the body and releasing excess power into the air before the fairy was at last in a state where Zack could safely absorb it.
Almost immediately, new information started flooding his mind. He reeled from the innundation of messages from the Akashic System, many of them warning him of the danger such a creature posed.
[Manavore]
[Passive, Magic, Parasite]
[This creature feeds off living mana in a core or other creature. Once drained to emptiness, the parasite will then begin to eat its victim's maximum potential mana. Overexposure to this effect will result in a permanent reduction to an entity's maximum mana.]
[Dominate Mind]
[Spell, Fairy, Mind]
[Dominate the mind of a creature with a weaker will than your own. The higher the difference in will, the longer you will have control over them.]
[Unseelie]
[Passive, Fairy]
[This creature generates a field of bad luck. Bad things are just more likely to happen to people when they're around. Allied creatures are immune to this effect.]
Zack had to shake off the sudden inundation of information, even as more of it started to pour into his mind. "Okay, so. Good news and bad news."
"There's good news?" Alex asked, cocking an eyebrow.
"The good news is I can use this pattern to create a mob without any of the preprogrammed abilities. The bad news is that some of these abilities are mondo bad."
"Since when do you say words like mondo?" Alex demanded.
"Other words just didn't feel significant enough! Bite me. Anyway, these things don't just feed on cores. They can dominate the minds of weaker creatures, too. They even have an ambient field of bad luck around them. I might actually give that one to Archie, it sounds funny."
"Maybe ask him first," Alex suggested.
"Yeah, he might not appreciate being given evil fairy powers," Zack admitted. "But yeah, digression aside, this thing is bad news, Alex."
"I just don't understand where it even came from. How have I never heard of dungeon fairies before?" The kobold asked. He gave his legs and arms one final test as the medibold stepped away, before hopping off the seat and walking around the room. Satisfied that his injuries were sufficiently healed, he nodded in approval and retook his place at the table.
"Just a hunch, but maybe you've never heard of them because there haven't been many dungeons around for the last five years?" Zack offered. "These things feed off mana, if their description is to be believed. Now that cores are starting to wake up and dungeons are becoming active, that means these fairies might become a lot more common, too."
Alex paled at the idea. "That can't be good. Zack, this thing had full control of Matt's dungeon powers. She could spawn mobs and command them fully!"
"It's less that she had control of his powers and more likely she had control of him, then dominated the minds of his mobs," Zack corrected. "But you're right. There's no way this is anything but bad news. I'm not sure what we can do about it right now, though. I want to wait for Archie to come back, and I want to consult with Iris before making any decisions. Assuming we can get a proper communication channel open with Matt, I'd like him included in the discussions as well."
"Makes sense. Should I alert the guild about these dungeon fairies, too?"
Zack to had to hold himself back to keep from blurting no. "Let's keep this information between you and me, for now. We'll need to inform them sooner or later, of course, but right now we're working with dangerously little information. Let me see what I can dredge up from the other cores, and maybe by prodding the Akashic System, and then we'll come to a decision. If what we theorized is correct, and the dungeon fairies are becoming more active because their prey of choice is more numerous, then we might need to move up the reveal of core sapience to sooner rather than later."