My new swarm of bees hovered around my core. Their buzzing was soothing, like hot cocoa after a long, cold day. I could feel their own happiness and contentment when I paid attention to them. I wanted them to stay that way, comfortable and content. It was time for research.

I pulled up a search bar in my Memories folder and input the word "bumblebee". Then I refined the search to exclude fiction. Once that was done, I started opening memories and skimming through them. In the earliest ones, I was very small, and my mother was pointing out a bumblebee and saying "look, Earl, that's a bee! It has a painful sting, so be careful." It looked like she said that every time we saw one while we were out. Her complaints later in my life that I never went outside seemed a lot more hypocritical now. There were a few memories from adolescence - a biology teacher talking about how mysterious it was that bumblebees could fly, having a very public panic attack in front of a girl I liked because one landed on my nose during lunch, that sort of thing. What I didn't find, even after opening every memory that my search parameters turned up, was any information on where bumblebees liked to live.

I looked back at my bees. Some of them had landed on my core to rest - the rest were sitting on my pedestal. I had no idea how to communicate with them, even though I felt like I should be able to. I tried thinking at them.

What would be comfortable for you? What kind of place do you want to live?

A few of my bees buzzed a little, but they felt more confused than anything. Maybe questions were too indirect.

Find the most comfortable place in the dungeon.

All twenty bees took off together, zipping up into the air and wobbling for a moment before flying off in every direction. They were focused, intent on following the order I'd given them. It got harder to tell how the swarm felt when they were spread out - each bee was investigating something different. They checked the rounded walls, the floor, the tunnel I was slowly digging that would lead to the next room in my dungeon once it was done. The ones that encountered my falling snow decoration didn't seem to like it very much, but they clung to the walls and crawled past it into the entryway and continued their investigation.

It took my bees more time than I would have thought to scrutinize every inch of my dungeon, but they eventually congregated in the pine needles near the entrance. As the swarm reassembled itself, bee by bee, I got a clearer sense of how they felt. They liked the pine needles. Maybe bumblebees liked to nest in leaf litter?

I opened their menu and saw a drop-down list next to "home". It had one option: pine needle decoration. I selected it, and something clicked into place. The swarm gained an ability, too: Spawn Queen. That sounded really useful. I activated it.

Select Compatible Impurities

Use insect impurities.

Upgrading Minion...

One of the bees transformed. She got bigger, fuzzier, bumblier.

Minion Upgraded.

1 Insect Impurity Refined to 0.5 Arthropod Impurities and 0.5 Life Impurities.

She immediately began to make wax, shaping it into a tiny bowl shape. The other bees buzzed off, congregating around the bait in my sticky trap. They didn't stick to the trap itself, and they made short work of the sweet nectar. Then they returned to the queen and began to spit the nectar back out, into the wax bowl, which she covered over with more wax and laid an egg on. Then she started work on another bowl.

Curious, I inspected the egg, and found that it had information for me.

Bumblebee Egg (Minion):

● Hatch Time: 1 Hour

● Association: Small Swarm

I focused on the swarm as a whole, to check its information.

Bumblebee, Small Swarm: 19/20 Bees; 1 Queen; 1/20 Eggs; 0/20 Larvae; 0/20 Pupae

● Upkeep: 1.5 Mana / Day (Food Source Present) ● Repair Cost: 0.5 Mana to Replace Queen

● Home: Pine Needle Decoration

● Food Nectar (Found); Pollen (Missing)

● Status: Content

Having a queen really made a difference. It looked like she was responsible for replacing any dead bees in my swarm, and would maintain a full swarm at every stage of bumblebee life, ready to grow up whenever the situation called for it. It would be bad if something came in and stepped on the nest.

I used a granite impurity to add some bumps to the walls in the entrance tunnel. Some of them were low and over the pine needles, the better to provide cover for my bees, but others were higher up or farther back, or both, to disguise their purpose (and to use the whole impurity, because I couldn't spend fractions of impurities for some reason).

There. That was much better. My bees were happy and safe, my entrance was guarded, and my core room felt empty and lonely with just my core in it. I didn't want to move my bees out of their comfortable home, and I didn't want pine needles in my core room, but it felt so bare now.

Open root. I need a distraction.

S://

Show folders.

Earl; Dungeon; Tools

Open Dungeon.

S://Dungeon/

Show folders.

Construction; Contracts; Custom; Minions; Resources; Templates; Traps; Treasure

Open custom.

S://Dungeon/Custom/

It was time to tweak my tools and work on upgrades. A wave of nausea washed over me. It was past time to work on upgrades. How many impurities can I hold right now?

Maximum Impurities: 52.7

Upgrade core.

Select compatible impurities.

I picked out three impurities that seemed like they could be refined a lot, then I focused hard on the details of impurity refinement. Were there advanced options I could use to make things turn out the way I wanted?

It turned out that there really were. Excellent. I tweaked a few things for this one upgrade session, then hit start and sat back to watch.

Upgrading Core...

Core Upgraded.

Maximum Impurities Upgraded From 52.7 to 53. Maximum Mana Upgraded From 527 to 530.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Refining Impurities...

.09 Dung Impurities Refined to 0.225 Life Impurities, 0.225 Soil Impurities, 0.225 Earth Impurities and 2.25 Dungeon Mana.

Oooh, tingly. Refining impurities into dungeon mana felt good. What else could I do with what I had? List impurities, complete only, rounded down.

● Earth Impurities - 10

● Soil Impurities - 7

● Feldspar Impurities - 6

● Quartz Impurities - 1

● Life Impurities - 13

● Plant Impurities -5

● Insect Impurities - 3

● Snow Spider Impurities - 1

● Spider Impurities - 1

● Maggot Impurities - 1

● Edelweiss Impurities - 1

● Pine Tree Impurities - 2

● Moss Impurities - 2

Create decoration template: soil using soil impurities.

Spend 1 Soil Impurities to Create Decoration Template: Soil? Y/N

Yes.

Creating Decoration Template...

Decoration Template: Soil Obtained

Refining Impurities...

1 Soil Impurities Refined to 0.5 Earth Impurities and 5 Dungeon Mana.

Oh, nice. Create a template using one edelweiss impurity.

Creating Minion Template...

Minion Template: Edelweiss Obtained

Refining Impurities...

1 Edelweiss Impurity Refined to 0.5 Plant Impurities and 0.5 Life Impurities

Oh, nice. I set about putting soil in the entrance tunnel and summoning some edelweiss minions into it. As I suspected, it turned out to be some kind of flower. My bumblebees quickly abandoned the nectar bait they'd been eating to investigate the flowers, and I felt their mood jump from content to happy.

---

Away and distant from the mountain range, over and past the foothills and the valleys, a great flatland sprawled, dotted with farmlands and villages, smeared with forests and rivers and roads, the Kingdom of Vassaria prospered. White towers loomed over the landscape, ever watchful. In one of those white towers, an acne-speckled apprentice watched a hovering crystal change from green to white for a moment.

He wrote it down, and the hour, and then forgot about it. He remembered, briefly, when it happened again two hours later, but only because he wrote that down on the same piece of parchment. At the end of the day, he gave the parchment to his master and went to bed.

The master of the tower understood what he was looking at, when he read through the report. He wrote his own report with glee, consolidating information from each of the three apprentices and their supervising wizards stationed on each of the seven levels of the tower. White meant pure mana, and pure mana meant a dungeon. A quick teleportation spell sent his consolidated report to the tower at Variswood. His duty done, the Tower Master began drafting a request that one of his tower's wizards inspect the new dungeon. It would have to wait for an official announcement of the dungeon, of course, but it never hurt to be ready.

---

My entrance was so much nicer with flowers and bees in it. My core room felt a bit bare in comparison.

I want to make a decoration.

As I'd expected, once I knew what I wanted to do and thought of it as a command, an editor appeared in my mind's eye: Decoration Template Designer. It looked a bit like the graphic design programs I'd made a point of avoiding. I knew where my talents lay, and I had always been better off paying someone else for their art. I closely inspected the tool in the hope that it would have some sort of shortcut I could use to get what I wanted - there was no way I'd be able to build anything good from scratch.

There! A drop-down list for selecting impurities. I had bumblebee impurities left, and I plugged one in.

A bumblebee appeared in the template designer. The 3D grid around it and scale key indicated that it would barely fit in my core room. I needed something smaller!

It was hours of trial and error before I figured out that I was using the wrong tool. Decorations were massive, unmovable. If I wanted to make knick-knacks to decorate my core room, then I needed to make a treasure template.

Open the treasure template designer.

---

Greyex was up a tree, weaving a basket out of the remains of the bird's nest he'd just raided. Baby birds went great in Belka's stew. She always boiled them until the flavor leaked out into the rest of the food and the bones were soft enough to crunch just right when chewed.

He wouldn't normally take all of the hatchlings, but he was unusually hungry the last couple of days. He didn't usually make a basket from a bird's nest, either, but someone had stolen all of his baskets last night, and he needed the container. It would be useful for foraging grubs later. He was so caught up in what he was doing, that he didn't notice the small crowd gathering around the base of the tree.

"And, throw!" Belka's voice, shouting, was his first sign that something was happening. The stone-tipped spear that whistled past his nose was his first sign that whatever was happening, he wasn't going to like it.

"You almost hit me!" Greyex shouted down. He also looked down, and saw what looked like a quarter of the village staring up at him with their teeth bared.

"Because Klud is useless!" Chief Dukkle shrieked. Even from halfway up a tree, Greyex could see that the chief's yellow eyes were blood-shot and maddened. His veins bulged grotesquely and spittle frothed around his fangs. "Give me a spear!"

Greyex thought fast and moved faster. He threw the half-finished basket at the gormless thug handing the chief a spear, hitting him in the face. Then, he reached into the leather bag tied to his loincloth, stood up, and threw all five dead hatchlings, one after another, into the chief's face. The first one caught him in the open mouth, the second hit an eye, and the next three took his balance so that he fell on his bottom, distracted, chewing the morsel between his teeth.

Next, Greyex scanned the small mob below him, calculating parabolic arcs and distances, and predicting movement.

"I'm not going in the stew pot!" he screamed, causing his target, a particularly fat fellow named Ick, to look up. Greyex took a leap more powerful than he'd ever taken in his life, and landed on his neighbor. Then he ran.

"After him!" Belka screamed. Greyex ran faster.

---

The treasure template editor handled a lot like the decoration template editor, but I was able to make things on a much smaller scale, which suited me just fine. I didn't want any massive imposing statues, I wanted tidy little statuettes to spruce up my room little. The bumblebee impurity worked just fine in the decoration template editor for creating a new template. Next, I needed to select a material of it to be made of. That was easy, too - there weren't all that many options.

I was a little surprised that "stone" and "earth" weren't compatible with the material slot, but it occurred to me that they might not be specific enough. I selected "feldspar". I had a lot of it, even if I didn't know what it was, exactly.

The bee in the preview window turned red-brown. That wasn't right - it was too boring, and not bee-like enough. A bit of fiddling with menus and search bars turned up a materials editor that could alter colors, among other things, but I knew better than to go down that rabbit hole while I was still a total newbie. I had all the time in the world to explore the advanced stuff.

The bee's stripes turned out to still be there, they were just the same color as the yellow parts. That was the first bit of good news. The second was that feldspar came in a whole bunch of different colors, including black and yellow, and there was a check box for toggling "gemstone quality". I switched it on, of course, and adjusted the stripes, legs, and antennae until they looked just right.

Scale came next. I thought hard on it, but eventually decided to make the figures life-sized. I saved my new template as Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize_01.

Saving Template...

Treasure Template Acquired: Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize_01!

Refining Impurities...

1 Bumblebee Impurities Refined to 0.5 Insect Impurities and 0.5 Arthropod Impurities.

1 Feldspar Impurities Refined to 0.5 Stone Impurities and 0.5 Earth Impurities.

Make treasure.

Select Treasure Template.

I picked my new template out of the drop-down list.

Select Compatible Impurities.

Stone and earth impurities were on the list. I selected a feldspar impurity because I could.

Select Treasure Location(s).

A map of my dungeon popped up, like when I placed my sticky trap or put a new decoration up. I had five little dots to work with, maybe because the treasure was so small. I arranged them around my core in a circle, on the pedestal, like the points of a pentagram.

Place Treasure? Y/N

Yes.

Creating Treasure...

Refining Impurities...

1 Feldspar Impurities Refined to 0.5 Stone Impurities and 0.5 Earth Impurities.

Five little bee figurines popped into existence around my core. I felt properly dressed, like I'd put on a pair of pants for the first time since I'd become a dungeon core.

---

In a dark stone tunnel, a small group hissed and whispered amongst themselves. Scaly hands tossed bone dice, and gleaming jewel-toned eyes watched the results carefully.

"You've rolled low, Taaku," the eldest clicked thoughtfully.

"Best two of three?" Taaku asked hopefully.

"No, no time," the eldest said calmly. "The master hungers, and you have the honor."

Taaku bowed, then stood and walked away. He took three turns in the winding tunnels of the warren toward the master's den, then rapidly took sixteen toward the entrance, until he was outside in the fresh air and starlight. He spared a single, sad glance back toward the only home he'd ever known, then slipped away down the mountain.

Someone else could break the master's fast. It was shameful, but he wanted to live.