Ally rolls her eyes, ‘You’ve had more than enough time to think about what you want the floor to be.’
Doyle laughs, ‘True enough. Though I must admit I haven’t thought too deeply about it. I’m having a bit of a hard time judging my recent floors. How will the delvers react to my seventh floor? While the sixth floor has some nonsense to it, I started to warp space in a visible manner with the seventh floor.’
Ally nods, ‘Yeah, your world wasn’t exactly at the tech level needed to bend space without magic. Of course, even with that tech, you wouldn’t see such things just lying around. Magic takes those restrictions and tosses them out the window.
‘My advice? Go wild! Sure, people around here won’t be used to it, but that is a perfect reason to do just that. Other beings aren’t going to hold back so they might as well get used to it in your dungeon. While you aren’t going to hold back against them, you’re also not going to go full murder house on them.
‘After all, it won’t be too long before they start facing the most basic spatial warpers. There are just too many empty houses left around and too many deaths. You might even want to include something like that on the eighth floor.’
Doyle tilts to the side, ‘I’m going to guess this is something ghost related?’
Ally laughs, ‘If only it was that simple. Ghosts and other spectral undead are simply bodiless egos and or souls. The biggest difference between a haunted computer and a computer with an AI is ghost style entities are generally defined by being the remnants of a dead being. Though even that gets blurry when you get into mind uploads.’
Doyle dims for a moment and tilts forward, ‘But you were referring to undead hauntings, right?’
Ally nods, ‘I was, I can’t deny that. Though it is a little more complicated. Haunted houses tend not to be full on undead. Rather, the combination of an abandoned house and enough sapient dead in an area will imbue the house with powers. The house being abandoned is important because it needs the intent left behind by the previous sapient owner and a sapient death to provide that last bit of oomph to actualize it.
‘Not that you will see any in this town. That intent and oomph? That’s the stuff you eat so the fact your influence covers the town automatically clears it. You can, of course create something that mimics a haunted house, but it wouldn’t be the same.’
Doyle tilts back, ‘Interesting, but how does a crufty house warp space?’
Ally smiles, ‘And how is a sparkly crystal warping space in here? Though more seriously, it is the weight of the abandonment combined with the void left by a soul leaving the dimension. That last one is magnified by any feelings of resentment, of unfinished business, having been tortured, or if the being dying is on the younger side.
‘On a metaphysical level, those kinds of situations leave the soul’s shell more intact than not. The void left by the soul vanishing tends to just collapse that shell. This is the key point at which you find out if you get a full on undead spirit, haunted house, or some other phenomena.
‘A less intact shell will get dispersed as the void is filled with power coming in through the shell and then exploding outward. The other side of this is if the shell is intact enough to survive. If you end up with an intact shell that collapses in on itself, you get an undead. On the other hand, if the shell is sturdy enough to survive nothing replaces the soul and you end up with a metaphysical vacuum chamber.’
Doyle dims, ‘How would that cause a soul to become an undead or not?’
Ally sighs, ‘These things aren’t exact. The basic idea behind it is that when the shell collapses in on itself the cruft has a chance to act like a replacement for the soul. This creates one of the many non-physical undead. When the shell is sturdy enough to leave a void, the cruft lacks the interconnections to gain sentience.
‘The reason this causes, among other things, a haunted house, is that intent of abandonment. This leaves the cruft with an intent that will pull in those void filled shells. After a critical mass, those shells will begin to warp space. You can tell how many beings went into a haunted house by how many themes it has.’
Doyle nods, ‘I don’t really understand it, but I can see how things would work like that. Though that all depends on it being non-sapient.’
Ally shrugs, ‘While undead do have one of the highest rates of earned sapience next to mythical beasts, that doesn’t mean they pop up everywhere. Haunted houses in particular basically never gain sapience, as a core part of them is a lack of a soul. Oh, and a side note. This sort of thing doesn’t always result in what we would classify as an undead.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
‘A good example of this is a tsukumogami, which roughly translates to something along the line of kami of the tool. They’re inanimate objects that have been used for a long time and become self-aware, IE having gained a soul. Part of the hidden requirements for that is the tool had to have been haunted. Though all those sapient holy swords bristle at this. Mostly because the way they ended up haunted is through the death of a previous user.’
Doyle laughs at that, ‘I can totally see it. To admit that, admits they didn’t manage to do their job and connects them to the undead, if tangentially.’
Ally smiles, ‘Got it in one! Though now that I’ve given you an earful, do you have a plan now?’
Doyle nods, ‘I’ve played with a few things in the last couple floors. Stuff like portals and warped spaces. Well, I’m going to combine those two things. Besides that, though, the seventh floor had an abandoned cityscape feeling to it, sort of. For the eighth floor I’m going to hit it up even harder and set it inside a skyscraper, at least in theme.’
Ally claps, ‘That should be interesting. I’ll keep an eye on the town, so feel free to focus on that.’
This was easy enough for Doyle to do, especially since he had just thought of something quite clever for the rooms that would act as the edges. In fact, even before setting up anything else he takes a chance to make his plan a reality.
The idea was simple enough. Doyle wanted it to look like the floor was taking place inside a skyscraper that extended both up and down infinitely. Also, the skybox had to make it also looks like it was the only thing. Nice blue skies without a cloud to be seen, going outward without end.
A fun part with this is that even illusions would have a problem doing this. For most people, an illusion might be able to mimic it, but anyone with good enough eyesight would be able to see the end of the illusion. Doyle already has the solution to this though and since he didn’t plan on delvers to ever access the space, it would even be quite compact.
All he needed was two sections, a side piece and a corner. From there Doyle just put some portals in place so that it looped. So with deceptive ease, he brought the concept of an infinity mirror to a whole new level. The only problem remaining was the up and down, though even that was more a matter of him having not decided on how wide the skyscraper was going to be.
Doyle sits back and considers the amount of space available to him. At this point, he had more than enough. In fact, he had way more as his previous method of judging the size of his floor was ending up a slight bit flawed. Without portals keeping everything on a single plane and measuring it by how many small rooms squared could fit at the widest part worked. Besides that, the upper and lower hemisphere left more than enough room for farm space.
Now though? The eighth floor, by that standard, had a space which could fit 48 small rooms a side. That added up to a touch more than 2300 small rooms and yet the wasted space just on that slice of the floor was likely equal to half that, nevermind the area above and below. Doyle didn’t have infinite space, but there was a whole lot more of it than he had been considering.
He wasn’t completely to blame for this mental oversight and would likely continue to fall into it. No matter how much Doyle used to be human and how his dungeon type naturally provided more space than most others, there was that baseline instinct from being a core. The drive to make a naturally interconnected floor all on one 2d plane. In fact, if it wasn’t for the “strange” part in his racial subtype it would have likely taken him a lot longer to notice this.
All that aside, Doyle had more than enough space to set a skyscraper in. Not just a normal skyscraper either, but rather one many times wider than any pre-system skyscraper ever managed. The question he put to himself was if he wanted to do that.
‘No, I don’t think I do. While that would be interesting, it doesn’t fit the theme I want to make use of.’
Mind made up, Doyle begins his work. This floor was going to be abusing verticality and warped spaces with a touch of portals to connect it all together. So why bother with some kind of office space full of the dungeon equivalent to a cubicle? In fact, when he dug into his memories of the various skyscrapers, the ones used by the rich would have each floor be its own place. After all, if you’re rich, why would you want to share a floor with someone else?
So with that core idea, Doyle lays down the foundation. Of course, it was only a single floor and not even that deep all things considered so he decided to keep it somewhat constrained. Each room would be huge! And by this he meant that literally as he had way back at the start set a size for huge rooms. Not that he had used one since the second floor.
By using huge rooms, he automatically restricted how many he could have as each one was 12 small rooms to a side. Even then, whereas on the second floor he could only fit four at most, the eighth floor easily fit four to a side. That meant 16 in total on the main plane alone.
This number gave Doyle pause. He had already decided not to have the actual skyscraper of rooms be too tall and there was already enough to fit the second floor four times over. After a bit of time playing around with the fit, he makes a choice. By moving things around, he was able to fit 16 huge rooms with the catch being they were three times the height of a normal room, just like he had done on the second floor.
There was space to fit more rooms, but the height made it tricky fitting what was already there. Doyle saw a few places where he could squeeze out similar amounts of continuous space. That continuous part was important to him because while he had heavily abused portals on the sixth floor, he wanted to make sure that anyone capable of messing with that wouldn’t have an easy out on this floor.
Not that he was going to skimp on the portals either. Instead of just linking up the rooms wherever there was going to be a passage between them, Doyle just made the entire area between rooms one giant portal. That way, if someone manages to get through the dungeon stone, they would end up in the right place.
Doyle takes a mental step back and examines what he has done so far, frowns, and then dives back in real quick. He had forgotten to hook up the infinite sky room. A few more portals and the replacement of the stone walls with glass set up to look like a window fixes that.