20)

So the red books don’t go too much into the geology of Georgia, other than it being pretty diverse. I did find out I’m on top of a fault line, and then what a fault line is.

Why the Fell would you build a major city on top of a spot where earthquakes happen? I guess that's what happens without dwarven surveyors.

Lutherville is apparently too small of a city to even get a mention in the encyclopedia, let alone its own entry.

Iris ended up going into her bedroom. Where she pushed a dresser in front of her door and took a nap. I guess she had gotten a little stressed out. But where’s the trust?

It's not like I didn't approve. It was a good instinct for an adventurer.

After she woke up, she plunked down in front of what I had identified as a computer, which I had thought was just someone who did math. Here, it's a science version of a crystal ball, or at least that's the one part of it I understand. From the way the old woman acts it’s also some kind of store.

“Really? Britannica doesn't even make encyclopedias anymore? But that’s their whole thing? Guess the basement dweller will have to settle for this World book company. Now, where can I get him animal parts?”

She turned to look in the direction of her kitchen, got up, and went to the top of the stairs. "Hey Tark, did you try the cat food? It's all kinds of animals. And make some more, that stuff's expensive."

“Really?" I hadn't absorbed the cat food since I had no interest in feeding the little beast at first, and later I had real food for it. Absorbing the small containers got me samples of cow, pig, and salmon. Of the three I could only summon the fish at the moment but I was still able to add the others to my summoning list. Not sure what I was going to do with a fish, other than feed the cat, but it was something.

Meanwhile, I needed to get rid of some of my minions. Kobolds each took ten summoning slots out of the hundred I had. So a lot of insects and mice I had summoned just because I could had to go.

I kept the ant scouts due to them being cheap. But any non-scout ant's vision was so bad I couldn't use them for double duty. I kept the cockroaches for gatherers and some of the mice as they worked for things like the dungeon sign.

The squirrels I had assigned to the dungeon room didn't count toward my limit but were also out of my control. They lurked in their room until someone crossed the halfway point and then they attacked. I had no control over them and the only way for me to stop them was to dismiss them.

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I did keep a handful of other squirrels for running missions outside of the house while still being able to blend in.

That left me with enough summoning slots for five kobolds. But since my champion didn’t count toward my summoning limit, well, so long Murder mouse.

Hello, Kelvin the kobold champion.

I summoned him in the open space on the working floor below the basement and above the entry room of the dungeon. The fine blue fellow rose up out of the circle of light and saluted me as I chose him as my new champion.

The little fellow then begin to shake as he dropped to his knees and curled up. Before rising up in his now towering height of two feet and began doing a little foot stomping dance.

Then I resummoned Envoy from my dead list. He hesitated a bit before saluting, taking a moment to glare up at the ceiling for some reason. Since he has some experience in fighting now, I made him a warrior.

The next two don't have any names in particular, and I assigned them as builders. For the moment I decided to keep what summoning points I had left in reserve. Leaving them unspent will also bug me enough to figure out a good reason to use them.

While Iris was planning on braving the dungeon, she also wanted to heal up a bit from taking a fall that had been bad enough for her to have needed a healer. At least that's what she claimed. From the amount of exercises she was doing, and almost brutal ones at that, she seemed ready to me.

As for her shopping, it only took a day for the first package to arrive. A collection of dried meats called jerky that featured a large lizard, and a surprisingly large non-magical bird as well as several other fowls and some hooved mammals.

Iris tossed them down the steps, now fixated on the idea of "me" being in the basement only, and not in her house. I guess if it helps her sleep at night… "Tark. Here's some meats from a bunch of animals, except for the gators. I don't ever want to fight those."

Meanwhile, I had Kelvin picking the Spiced Gator jerky out of the trash where I had seen her pick something out of the package and toss it in. Like I was going to pass up having a twelve foot long lizard in my dungeon. “I told you that you got to take chances to level up Iris.”

I also had a package of insects encased in some squares of resin. They included some butterflies, a large wasp, as well as two scorpions. Also a crab and a seahorse for some reason.

Some of the birds from the feathers were new to me. The red books help identify the ones I could summon to get a good look at.

The various packages of plant seeds I received were almost entirely vegetables and flowers. But the cherry tree pit made me suspect that my host wasn’t putting in all that much effort in picking things out for a dungeon.

Since I didn’t have any place to plant any of the seeds. I instead absorbed them and “Planted” them in the space I stored the copies of everything else I had absorbed.

Inside the core, a garden awaited my wife. Full of exotic if not quite fantastic plants. As well as the animals that I had summoned and dismissed.

Which included quite a few that I had summoned and dismissed just so I could have them in my garden. That’s how I found out how noisy Peacocks are.

It helped to pass the time until Iris was finally ready to hit my dungeon.

But it turned out that Iris wasn’t the first one in the dungeon.

All the packages showing up on her porch from the Amazon had attacked attention.