They both stare at her status. Ally’s race had changed and now with the addition of the word dungeon she was an Autumn Court Dungeon Fae. Along with that the section that had once said that Doyle was her companion now declared she was soulbond to him. They both glance over at his status that was still up. He was soulbond to her as well.
Ally sighs, ‘so what did you mean by relax?’ Doyle is about to answer when he notices something, ‘hey Ally, you're not talking anymore.’
She scoffs, ‘of course I am, how else would I be asking you to explain yourself!’ Doyle shakes his core, ‘no, I mean you're not talking aloud. Before you spoke words and now you send thoughts like I am.’
This gives Ally pause, “Testing” ‘testing’ “one, two, three.” She rubs her head and sighs, ‘well at least I can still speak aloud. It does however seem that when I am speaking to you, I use telepathy. Telepathy that I did not have before mind you.’
Doyle frowns or at least attempts to. Instead, his core floats a little lower. ‘That doesn’t seem right. Testing’ ‘testing.’ He shakes his core, ‘no we aren’t using telepathy. I was originally and still can but I think this is something different. It doesn’t feel different, in fact the only reason I know there is a difference is an instinctual thing from my dungeon side. We are speaking over the soulbond.’
His core floats back to its usual position, ‘what I meant by relaxation was until now it is as if I was tensing. Not physically but rather mentally. As I was combining cubes, there was these feelings of wrongness when I did something but not right. Whatever part of me is now dungeon was trying to guide me. It came to a head when I tried to distribute a smaller cubes mass throughout a bigger one. I felt that I knew on some level how to do it and was holding myself back.’
‘When I released my control all the little niggling problems fixed themselves. One of those things my dungeon instincts noticed was a problem with our bond. To my dungeon side then and now is the difference between someone having tied us together with a piece of rope and actually being one.’
They both fall into silence after Doyle finishes explaining. As he waits for Ally to say something he fiddles with the cubes, mushing them together and combining them with his walls. After he has taken care of half the cubes Ally finally gathers herself. She lifts off the floor and settles onto his core, sitting cross-legged.
‘Maybe’, Ally postulated, ‘this is how things are supposed to be. Your metaphor of being tied together is probably closer to reality than you realize. No system can create a soulbond, in fact no outside force can do that. Sure there is magic to mess with other people’s souls but a bond requires the involved parties to be in on it and do it to themselves.’
‘Maybe systems initiate a companionship to foster this potential bond as they cannot do it themselves. Who knows how many dungeon duos have been soulbond? This is something that we can not share with others. The only soulbonds that have been researched at all are those that sometimes forms between twins and never resulted in anything good.’
More silence and Doyle goes back to cleaning up the cubes but this time he finally notices something. There is a change in how he uses the skill. If he had to put it into words, he isn’t using a skill anymore. Instead, his use of territory control is like moving a body part were as before it was using a tool. A quick check shows that the skills level has not increased. Still at level four after his instincts had combined the cubes.
As a test he makes another cube and the same thing happens. His dungeon skills are a part of him now on some deeper level. It isn’t quite to the point of breathing but if before he had been writing with a pen or eating with chopsticks, now he was using his fingers. Soon though he is out of cubes and his walls are denser.
Ally notices this and continues her instructions. ‘Okay now that you have figured that out we can talk about making rooms. First thing is you will want your basic room to be bigger than your core room is right now. A core room will always match the size of the core. Yours is currently about a half meter across, yes the rest of the dimension runs on metric, and your current room is a meter and a half tall and four and a half meters to a side.’
‘The sides aren’t that bad of a size but the height is much too low. Now some dungeons can get away with it but humans will be your first customers as it where and we want them to come back. Plus you humans are about the average size of sapients in this dimension. There is something about the rules that make it efficient. Though you will want to make the ceiling height a smidge taller, an even three meters for a basic room, as some tank builds end up bigger with time. Not that there aren’t bigger sapients out there, dragons in particular have infested every known dimension. You, however will not have to worry about it as your starting point is earth.’
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
‘Anyway, I want you to set up three rooms. One that is three meters on every side, a room six meters to a side and three tall. Finally a veritable hall at 18 meters a side and of course three tall. There are uncountable ways to make rooms. You, however are starting from nothing, being in a void and all, so you might as well just use creation. Your current walls are very thin and you don’t want that. About half a meter is a decent width so create the new rooms with walls of that size and while you're at it extend the core walls as well. Also keep all the rooms sealed.’
‘As for where to make them you can’t create the rooms floating out in the void. They have to be attached to your structure, another thing easier to deal with for normal dungeons.’ Ally pauses for the barest of moments and Doyle take the chance to interrupt her, ‘I get it. Me being in the void is odd. You don’t need to point it out every time now. I’m not angry or anything but goodness gracious you have been saying it a lot.’
Ally holds up her hands defensively, ‘woah there, I just figured you might want to know about normal dungeons.’ Doyle tilts to the side, ‘really now? And you wouldn’t happen to just be very into dungeons? This totally isn’t you gushing on about a subject you love and you totally aren’t a dungeon nerd?’
Ally lowers her hands and settles to the floor. ‘Well I might be just a little bit of a nerd on the subject.’ Doyle tilts the other way, ‘no complaint from me. I’ve gotten way into things before as well. Plus you knowing so much about my new existence definitely won’t hurt. Just remember this is the tutorial, not the in-depth high level college class. Explain what I need to know now and we can talk about the deeper things later.’
She perks back up and smiles, ‘that seems reasonable enough. Anyway, as I was saying, everything needs to be connected. Even a vacuum counts but what is out there is void. Once you have made all three rooms fill them with air. Then use a dungeon rule or two so that they stay filled with breathable air and the walls fix themselves. We don’t want people suffocating in a normal room unless it’s a trap. Oh, and you might want to just start the rooms with their walls twice as dense. Later on you can improve it but that would be a nice starting point.’
Ally sits down on his core and lets Doyle get on with it at this point. He doesn’t start creating rooms right away though. First, he goes back to the grid. When messing around with its size he had tried to get it into measurements he was used to, inches and what not. While that didn’t work he now suspects that he knows why. One mental request for a meter grid later and it is proven, the system has metric built in. He can just imagine how some will respond to this. Avoiding the metric system was practically a cult.
Back on task he starts with the width of his core walls. After having how thin they were pointed out to him, he felt practically naked. Doyle begins by upping the density of his current walls to double the norm. One facade of pretty stone on the inner layer later and he pushes outwards. He isn’t quite able to create enough stone with one use of the skill but another gets him the desired half meter thick walls.
That done he moves onto the smallest room. He stops though as he considers later having to move rooms around to reorganize stuff. ‘Hey Ally, how hard is it to move rooms around later? Do I have to worry about placement at this point?’ she dismissively waves her hand, ‘won’t be a problem for a while. Territory control will let you slide rooms around each other easily enough. You just have to worry about trying to slide one room through another as for some reason that matters to a dungeon.’
Worries quashed he just makes the small room right off the side of his core room. Medium room goes in front of both and because of size restrictions of his territory he places the big room behind everything else. Rooms finished he is soon filling all of them with what the system calls the Earth standard air mix. This is even more convenient than he first assumed as it lets him just start creating it and the skill stops once it reaches the standard atmospheric pressure.
All that out of the way and he is onto the final task to complete the rooms. Using the only skill he hadn’t touched yet, dungeon rules. He activates the skill and nothing happens. Well not nothing, he can now see the rules in place on his core room, but nothing changes. Since he can see the rules already around though it gives him a starting point. Not the best as the deeper he looks at those pre-existing rules the more confused he gets.
In the end he gives up on those. It seems like he will need to level the skill up quite a bit to even come close to understanding what is happening there. Doyle does manage to catch a couple of ideas though and proceeds to the small room to experiment. First, he tries to keep it exactly as it is right now but his instincts stop him before it goes through. He dives into this repulsion further only to realize how stupid that would have been.
The rule wouldn’t have tried to keep things how they are. Rather it would have tried to put it in stasis, nary an atom moving. Doyle can sense this might be possible in the far future but definitely not now and it isn’t what he wanted anyway. Instead of proceeding to the next test though he tests the first one out more. It was taken literally, much too literally. So far the system had easily understood the meaning of what he wanted and not just the rules. This was the first time it felt like a genie’s wish or a monkey’s paw sort of situation.
‘What is different about it? I activated the skill and put my intent into the wish. Though that might be the problem. Not the fact it was a wish but rather while I had the intent my words didn’t match it. The system is powerful but clearly not omnipotent. It was like I was trying to make something blue with intent while telling it to make it red. The system probably just fell back on the literal meaning of my spoken words.’
To test his hypothesis, Doyle tried another rule, this time just for keeping the air fresh. In fact, that is all he asked, ‘keep the air fresh’. Unlike the first test it worked. He could even notice when focused on the room that it was not quite flowing as if being slowly circulated. This discovery soon led to all three new rooms being kept fresh and the walls sturdy and repaired.