Doyle shrugs, “I’m sure someone has figured out the secret and let someone else try it first. Though that doesn’t matter to either of us all that much. Now is there anything special we need to do for this oath or does it go into effect once we all agree to it?”
Ally laughs, “It would be a little unfair if just agreeing put into place a binding agreement like this.”
Moota nods, “Yeah, we need to all agree those terms are fair and then with some intent agree to the oath. Now to get it started, I agree to those terms.”
Doyle sighs, “That is still way too simple. Though I agree to the terms.”
Ally rolls her eyes, “It might seem easy, but that is because we have a god and a dungeon core in on this. Normal people need oath magic or some intense rituals going on for it to work. But yeah, I agree to the terms.”
In front of the three of them, a system screen pops up.
{Do you swear to keep the Oath?}
Doyle raises an eyebrow, “Short and sweet, though it gets the point across. [I swear to keep the oath.]”
Ally nods, “[I to swear to keep the oath.]”
Moota pokes the message, “Would it hurt the system to put up a summary of the oath? Meh, whatever. I’ve done this enough to know what to expect. [I swear to keep the oath.]”
And with that the screen fades away and a sense of some piece of their soul being locked down. Moota rolls her shoulders, “Yeah, never going to get used to that feeling. Now let’s get out of here so I can pass on the patterns.”
With her wanting to leave the meeting room, a system message pops up for Doyle asking if he would like to finish the meeting. Not having anything else to do here, he agrees to close out the meeting. The system doesn’t waste any time and everyone is thrown out, back to their bodies.
Back in his core, Doyle takes a moment to get situated. Having a body, even if only for a moment, threw him for a bit of a loop. Still, he recovers and selects the option to let Moota into the dungeon. Though he wondered what would happen if he had re-selected the safe meeting option again. Then the system interrupts him by asking where he wants her to be placed.
Outside of his dungeon, a portal opens up in the void and draws Moota in, depositing her next to a pregnant goat in Doyle’s second floor goat farm. Not seeing anyone around, she shrugs and sits down. The goat looks over at her and licks her hair. Not finding anything wrong or tasty, the goat goes back to munching on the grass.
While this is happening Doyle and Ally are a little stumped on what to do. The group they had been following was still on the third floor, and now Ally needed to get to the second floor. With how maze-like the floor is, it wouldn’t be a problem. She could go a side route to get out and once in the goat farm she would be safe.
Doyle shakes his core, ‘I need to put in some secret passageways so you can get around the floors even when busy.’
Ally nods, ‘Yeah, that is a common enough thing for dungeons to do. But now that I think about it, we don’t need to do any of that right now. Tell her to shrink down to my size and then teleport her to my room.’
Doyle’s core dims, ‘Wait, I can teleport people around?’
Ally shrugs, ‘Sure, you have portals. You just can’t set up new portals when an invader is on a floor. Because of your oath with Moota she no longer counts as an invader so we can portal her in.’
Doyle tilts to the side, ‘Why would the oath make her no longer be an invader? We didn’t swear to be friends or anything. Also, how would we put up a portal on this side?’
Ally waggles her finger, ‘Remember, while we didn’t say it, what was our intent behind the oath? It was to work together. Now, since it wasn’t said out loud, the oath won’t stop us from fighting. It will however prevent senseless violence. This means you will be safe as long as we don’t disagree enough to trigger a fight. As for setting up the portal on this side? You have more leeway in the core room. If someone was in the core room, it would limit you.’
Doyle nods, ‘Fair enough,’ and he turns his attention to Moota. ‘Hey Moota, if you shrink down to Ally’s size I will open a portal to her room.’
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Back in the goat farm, Moota is petting the goat when he interrupts her. With a shrug, she shrinks down and walks through the portal that opens up in front of her. On the other side is a stone room. The walls are stone, the decorations are stone, even the bed is stone.
Moota turns to Ally, “Isn’t that bed uncomfortable?”
Doyle dims, ‘Yeah, you said nothing about stuff being stone, now that I think about it. I put a pad on it but the bed is still stone.’
Ally shrugs, “Eh, I’m like a druid in their home forest. No matter how cold or hot. No matter how soft or hard. As long as I am in the dungeon, wherever I am is as comfortable to rest on as the fluffiest bed at the perfect temperature. Convenient as I can just laze around however I want and nothing will cramp up or go to sleep on me. I don’t even have to eat as the dungeon sustains me.”
Moota frowns, “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an actual bed to sleep on.”
Doyle agrees with her, ‘Not only should she have a proper bed, she will have one. Bam, there it is.’ And deconstructs the stone bed before replacing it with a wood and wool one, all without disturbing the padding on top.
Moota nods, “Much better. Now I can’t say much about your decorations. It looks like you haven’t been here long enough to get any knick knacks. I am sure with the various victories the two of you will decorate it with trophies and such.”
Ally crosses her arms and frowns, “Nice having a choice about it.”
Doyle laughs, ‘You had the choice when we got clothes in the database. Since you didn’t speak up on preferring it please just accept it. If what you said is true, this changes nothing. A proper bed will make me feel better, so even if it means nothing to you, can we do it for me?’
Ally throws her arms up, “Fine, whatever. It doesn’t even matter. I don’t know why you both are making such a fuss over it.”
Moota raises an eyebrow, “Because we care?”
Ally rolls her eyes, “Moving on then, we should figure out what Doyle’s message to the settlement should say. Cows showing up out of nowhere isn’t the most common thing, even with magic.”
Moota nods, “I want to hear how you plan to get them to let the cows worship me.”
Doyle laughs, ‘Honestly, it is stupid simple. We just tell them exactly what the benefits are for them worshiping a farm god as compared to the cows worshiping you. No tricks, no subterfuge, just the straight unvarnished truth. You increase milk production, bulls can sniff out rare herbs, and calves have growth protection along with disease protection. Oh, and of course the fact worshiping you increase the chance of the cows evolving and gaining sentience.’
‘I don’t think either of you realize how much video games penetrated my world’s culture and what that means. We have video games for everything. Dungeon crawling, empire founding, space exploration, and most important for this is the farming game. More specifically, there are several games that focus on raising monsters.’
‘There are people that spent thousands of hours raising slimes. You tell them that using a farming god’s blessing will lower the chance of the cows evolving and they will be yours. In fact, the only bit of annoyance that could come of this is they might harass you to connect them with other livestock based gods.’
Moota frowns, “That is odd. Even in the more advanced worlds, they don’t seem to go too hard on that sort of thing.”
Doyle sighs, ‘My world can’t be unique about this. That would just be silly with how big the universe is. Like, besides the more farming based games, we also have monster training games where the goal is to improve tamed monsters and get them to evolve. And now that I mention it, that seems like a more direct example. Even so, we have two different genres of video games that cover the subject.’
Ally shakes her head, “While monster taming is popular it goes in two directions. Either the army build or one to three soul bound monsters.”
Moota nods, “If a tamer is going for an army, they aren’t trying to improve the individual monster. Instead, they use the army to gain control of stronger monsters that they then add to their army. This style of taming is a noble’s pastime because the cost in food and the area to keep the monsters when not in use will skyrocket.”
“A pack of wolves is easy enough to take care of if you have a forest to keep them in. A pack of fire wolves needs either a fire attuned area or constant fires going. Even a noble won’t want one of those fire wolves to evolve into something like a raging fire wolf because the requirements ramp up from there. In fact, the reason nobles even bother with it is that the lower range of monsters are cheaper to raise then an actual army of the same level.”
Ally continues, “And the soul bound monsters? First is that the name is a bit of a misnomer. You can’t bind a sapient monster. What it refers to is binding the monster’s body with a wisp of your own soul. You do this by cursing the monster, then killing it. The body will disintegrate and enter the tamer’s body. From then on, the tamer can summon out an avatar of the monster. This is like how sapient monsters work in a dungeon except that because the only thing stored is the body, it can’t learn. While the body can improve and evolve, it is limited by the tamer’s own body.”
“The monster’s body stat total can’t be more than the tamer’s body stat total. While even the poor can use this method you tend to find bad knights using this method as it gives them the perfect mount. Perfect because no matter how many times it dies on them, they can just re-summon it. The real perfect mount is a sapient monster who can be a brother in arms with their own paths.”
“Anyone that can keep their mount alive will avoid this because the monster lack a mind. You can control it like a limb, but you miss out on even a normal horse’s ability to avoid troubles. It has its uses, but remember how I said they would have one to three bound monsters? The stat total limit is cumulative. So if someone had tens across the board, they could either have a monster with 30 points across their body stats or three with ten a piece. Now three isn’t a hard limit either, but for 99 percent of people their body can’t handle more.”