A quick check of the infobox confirmed exactly what I expected: my current mana had gone down by one, but my capacity had gone up by one as well. I decided to go through the rest of the room options.
The hall option was exactly what I expected. The core room was...concerning.
> Core Room: Each Dungeon has one Core. If it breaks, the Dungeon dies.
It was pretty obvious that the room with the pillar was my core, and it was incredibly vulnerable. Starting from the staircase, it would only take a few minutes to get to me and break it.
And something had killed the city around me. Maybe it would come back and finish the job. Or maybe some wild cat looking for shelter for the sun would come inside and play around with the shiny gem on top of the pillar and break it. Or maybe for some would-be treasure hunter...
There were way too many possibilities for me to feel safe. The next entry provided a way to improve things. Apparently, I could move my core. It would cost more mana than I could hold right now, and my only option wasn’t any good, but there was a path available for me. And I leaped on it, as I always did.
First, I would need somewhere to move my core to that was further away. That would require a hallway. And that meant more experimentation.
Like the rooms, my hallway had dimensional requirements and couldn’t be placed on the surface. Unlike the rooms, I could build them off each other it seemed. Also unlike the rooms, no variance in height was allowed, except for a gentle slope up from my first room to anywhere else.
That was disappointing. It would have been nice to make anyone who wanted to get at my core have to climb a hill as long as I could make it.
What I could do, though, was make my hallway curve. I stretched it out as long as I could, making an uneven serpentine set of turns. It was sixty feet - the maximum - to walk from one end to the other, although it would be shorter as the crow flew, and as narrow as I could make it.
With that, I felt another, much larger surge of exertion. I was out of mana completely. A quick check of the infobox confirmed it.
Then I realized that I hadn’t checked the last entry in the Rooms category. When I turned my attention back to the infoxbox, the text for Shaping seemed just a little larger.
“Very funny,” I murmured, feeling just a tiny bit warm, as I opened it and glanced at the text. Luckily, it seemed to be a completely useless, purely aesthetic thing.
Now I had nothing to do but wait.
I decided I could use a change of scenery from stone, stone, and more stone, and headed up to the surface. The view there was depressing, but at least there was a little variety in the depression.
I noticed some life that I must have missed earlier - a few bits of moss, clinging to the underside of a half-broken statue.
I smiled, then realized (again) I didn’t have a body and wondered how I could smile. That thought led me from what I had planned to do - investigate my options for minions so I had a better deterrent than plain distance - onto a track that I probably would have preferred to avoid.
Namely all those gaps in my memory I hadn’t quite been thinking about. The first thing that had really alerted me to my lack of a corporeal form was the missing tug of an old wound, but I couldn’t remember any of the context for it - not the circumstances or even who inflicted it upon me.
And that seemed wrong. Surely if I’d had an injury severe enough to pain me for years later, it should be at least somewhat memorable? It was not like an item to add to your grocery list or a new acquaintance’s name.
The more I considered it, the more absences there were in my memory. Someone had gone through my life with a surgeon’s scalpel and cut out huge quantities of it. Names, faces, dates, details...so much was gone.
I had skills and knowledge, but no awareness of how I learned them. It was...unsettling, to realize what had been done to me. I should have been angry, but I wasn’t. This was so completely beyond me, more than me becoming a floating ball of nothingness that was apparently called a Dungeon, that I couldn’t react properly.
I stared at the moss, and then I began to scream. And scream. And scream. There was nothing to hear me, nothing to stop me. I howled for a very long time.
And then I fled back to my core room, exhausted. I just wanted to sleep.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option. So I hurled myself off the core and decided to see if my bubble had grown at all. A few attempts confirmed it hadn’t. I slowly drifted off my pedestal, frustrated and aimless.
I drifted through my two halls and two rooms, and then I returned to the surface. The sun was setting. Watching the play of colors across the sky was at least a little soothing - reds and yellows chased greens and blues, swirling together to make purples and oranges. Light reflected off drifting clouds and floating shapes.
I stared at it all, at the alien sunset, at the sky full of figures, until it was too dark to see any of them. And then I watched the stars come out.
There were so many of them, strewn across the deep blue sky in their thousands, only faintly obscured by a few distant patches of mist. There was no moon tonight, just the countless soft lights of the stars.
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No light pollution here, I supposed. It was soothing.
I watched the sky until the sun rose and I felt a surge of warm energy enter me. I had gotten my mana back.
All two points of it. This was going to take a painfully long time. Unless I could find a way to get more mana?
Once more, I opened up the infobox.
> Mana comes from the world around the Dungeon. The two main sources are passive income from the presence of life, and active income from combat.
Well, neither of those seemed to be great options for me. I was in the middle of a desolate, abandoned wasteland that had no apparent life, and that meant there probably wasn’t anyone I could fight. Plus I didn’t really want to hurt anyone just to give myself some mana.
Maybe I could help the moss spread somehow?
I dismissed it and headed over to the statue. It had been of a bunch of people, all raising their fists, wounded and battered but supporting each other. All of them had lost their heads, and had huge chunks of stone torn out of their bodies. They had been toppled from a nearby plinth, and most of the writing on that plinth had been scratched out. It’s a pity, I bet it would have been beautiful had it been intact and unweathered.
The moss had stretched along the underside of the toppled statues. Or maybe it was lichen? I wasn’t sure of the difference. It was a dark brown with white speckles, forming thick layers. From a couple of spots, tendrils with bublous ends hung down, swaying back and forth. Maybe they were seed pods?
I settled in to wait for a while. And I waited. And I waited. Watching moss grow wasn’t very exciting. After a while, I decided I should build some more. I still needed another room if I wanted to move my core.
I made another hallway on the end of the first one I made. The curves varied a little, but honestly, you couldn’t tell that they had been made separately. The stone melded together seamlessly, forming one unbroken path. At the end, I made another room, keeping it as narrow as I could but stretching it far back. The more space between my core and my entrance, the better.
This took perhaps fifteen minutes and left me feeling like I had just run a marathon.
And now I had nothing to do except watch moss grow some more. I returned to the surface and found the seed pods had burst, scattering some dark flecks across the ground under the statue. It seemed like it should have taken longer, but maybe this stuff was meant to be fast-growing? I remembered learning about plants that were adapted to go into devastated areas and grow really fast in them before competition could show up...
Maybe there would be some more of this stuff? That would be good. I wondered how much I would need to get extra mana income.
I began to hunt around the little bubble of space I could move in, starting at the end and slowly working my way in. There were what might have been tiny patches of moss or simply specks of darker dirt in a few places, but even more exciting was what I found sitting at the base of a tombstone.
There was a tiny sprig of grass, one I was certain hadn’t been there before!
After the dullness of the past while, the little splash of green was shockingly beautiful. I got as close to it as I dared.
It was small, just a single blade less than half an inch high, but it was definitely new. Were more plants growing around me? Why was it happening?
I had so many questions.
A quick glance at my infobox showed no change and provided no answers. Maybe I needed more? Never was my lack of hands more frustrating. Or my total lack of gardening knowledge.
I resigned myself to boredom. And more boredom. And more boredom.
I was literally watching grass grow.
Naturally, my attention began to wander. I stared up at the sky. It was a pale blue, like the shell of a robin’s egg. The sun drifted across it slowly, unobscured by any cloud except for a few weird dense ones.
Actually, looking closer, I think those are just floating rocks.
This place is weird. Decided the floating nothingness who possesses a few rooms and a hall. I really didn’t have the right to complain. This world was what it was, and I didn’t think I could change that. I had railed against so much before, but never the laws of physics.
I looked around some more and found nothing of interest, and I began to wonder about getting a minion. On the one hand, the upkeep would slow me down. It would take another three days for me to get the mana I needed without any changes. On the other, I was still far too vulnerable. Plus, having minions might give me something to do. Maybe I could send them on expeditions.
The thought of spending three days with absolutely nothing to do but keep watching the grass and the moss was what sealed it for me. Tomorrow, I would summon a minion.
I started looking through my options. All of them matched the Undead theme I apparently had pretty well.
> Basic Zombie: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. Slow and dumb, does little damage, durable.
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> Basic Skeleton: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. Dumb, fragile, does little damage, moderately quick.
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> Rotting Beast: 5 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. A lump of decaying flesh of indeterminate species. Slow and weak, has a nasty scent that disorients people in a small aura around it.
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> Crawling Claw: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. A reanimated hand without a body, Fragile and weak, but fairly fast.
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> Graveyard Bat: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep. Needs roost for shelter and rotting flesh for food. Undead. A bat glutted on corpses and rot, accustomed to death. Incredibly fragile and weak, but fast and can fly.
The only things I could summon tomorrow were the Crawling Claw and the Graveyard Bat. I thought the bat would be more useful, for scouting if nothing else. A new room and a bat were on the agenda tomorrow.
And now I just had to keep from going insane.
Far too much time spent counting bits of moss later, I was ready.
I dug out a room on the left side of my very long hall, all the way at the end, close to my core room. Maybe I could keep people guessing about which one it was in. For my second mana, I prepared to summon a Graveyard Bat.
The visual of it appeared in front of me: a large black bat, highlighted in red, with clawed legs and a drooling mouth full of tiny but sharp teeth. I could see and understand every detail of its biology.
It was actually really interesting, although for some reason I couldn’t find the sonar.
After playing with that for a few minutes and determining that this bat was sexless, I started to summon it...and I felt a sudden sense of horrible nausea. I tried to retch and vomit, but my lack of body worked against me. Instead, I screamed as my nonexistent stomach cramped and convulsed.
A new box of information appeared in front of me.
> Quote:
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> Needs: Certain minions have needs, such as food, shelter, entertainment, etc. If a need is not met, it’s upkeep doubles. If you can’t meet a minion’s needs, you can dismiss it for half its summoning cost.
The math was simple, the warning was clear. Even as I murmured “You couldn’t have said so in advance,” I decided to summon a Crawling Claw instead.
“Your name is Handsy,” I announced, as the highlighting turned green and then it solidified.
It was a pale and boney hand, cut off cleanly at the wrist. Immediately, Handsy began to run in circles. I watched it for a few minutes. There was something endearing about the way it scuttled about. It even tried to climb onto the walls a couple times.
I seized control of it and felt it’s body. Having even part of one again, even one as numbed as this, was weird, but I ignored the discomfort and began to head up towards my entrance.
To my surprise, the grass had grown to be at least a full inch, and a couple small stalks were sprouting nearby. The moss had grown nearly completely over the fallen statue, and several more patches had appeared. And most excitingly of all, there was an insect of some kind I spotted in one of the patches. A tiny little mite was sitting in the middle.
I decided to keep Handsy away from the new life for now, and sent it out to the edge of the bubble. I mentally took a deep breath, and sent it through. As soon as it started to cross the invisible boundary, the bits of it that went through began dissolving. I pulled it back.
“Well, at least you can do tricks for me, Handsy,” I announced, and watched as I made it run up a tombstone that had collapsed at an angle and then jump off.
“Parkour!”
Trying those tricks with Handsy kept me nicely entertained. I even managed to get him to do a wall run for a few seconds after leaping off the tombstone and doing a backflip.
Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to be able to learn from that. Every time I released him, he just resumed scuttling in a circle.
The sun set and rose as I kept practicing with Handsy, and then I checked my mana count.
My upkeep had gone up, but so had my income.
Looks like all the plants around me were paying off...