32)

[ Congratulations. You are now a Copper rank 2 Dungeon ]

[ You have acquired Evolution Rooms ]

[ You may now summon Researchers ]

[ You have acquired the Research Room ]

Well, I got quite a bit more this level. But I guess the system for Earth is still learning how much is too little or too much to give. I'm hoping to luck out and end up with it being too generous rather than too stingy before it settles down.

As much as so many new toys to play with is going to be fun. It's the twenty foot reach that's the real payoff.

Keeping each level eight feet tall with one foot of magical reinforced barrier between each floor, I can… Let me think. I can add two more floors to my dungeon.

I keep the Squirrel Rampage room, but I will have to move the spawning points of the squirrels to the base of the trees. With the trees being hollow the beasts can climb up to emerge from holes at the base of the fake tree branches. Most of the upper portions of the room around the edges will be out of my reach, but I don’t need that space for anything.

If I put myself in the middle of the second level, about half way between the floor and ceiling, I will have an area of forty feet across to work with. And I can still put a twenty foot across room down below.

Plus there will be a lot of space around everything for some very small rooms that will be inaccessible to adventurers. But will be large enough for all the special rooms I need to be within my reach for them to function.

I can also call up ten more kobolds now, or a bunch of animals and bugs instead.

But I only have until Monday morning to do everything, so I need to get started so I have as much time to regain magic points as I can so I have as much to work within the time I got.

So, first off, a small room in the middle with a core room about the side of a barrel cut in half to house the core right in the middle. Open on the top since I have to keep it accessible, but with a thirty foot open drop going down around it leaving it on top of a pillar surrounded by a pit.

Accessible doesn't have to mean easily accessible. I'm not worried about Iris or Molly doing anything to my core. But they haven't even seen it yet, so why not keep my physical existence a continuing secret for now?

I can always claim I'm just shy. After all, I don't have anything on.

Also. Cat. If it can get to me and figure out how to injure me, it will. That’s what cats do.

Since the stairs coming down end up five feet away from the wall I make a room opening off the left of the stairs towards the wall. The room will only be five feet long running between the outer wall and the steps, but I also drop the floor to fifteen feet deep except for a set of two slabs of stone that go across the pit, each one foot thick and wide.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

That will leave adventurers with a four and a half foot jump, a four foot jump, and another four and half one to get across. Not a major challenge, but it will give them some warning of what they might be up against in deeper layers.

On the off chance, someone wanders down here before coming back to work on this room. I fill in the bottom of the pit with ten feet of water. Then I seal the walls and floor to keep it from leaking out and create rungs in the wall to allow those who fall in to climb back out.

On the same side they came in on of course. No skipping the jumping challenge.

Then I decide to lower the water down to five feet deep. Some people can't swim or might burden themselves with an off balanced load. Which is part of what I’m hoping people will learn here.

I consider adding some blue ink from a pen of Iris’s to give people who fall in an additional penalty of dyeing in my dungeon. But considering how cold the water is going to get this far underground, I decide the cold is enough of a penalty.

On the other side, I leave a five foot deep landing before a one foot thick wall. The wall has a five foot tall door in it. On top of which there is an open gap a foot tall above an eight inch tall crenelated wall two inches thick for kobolds to hind behind. The door I create by hand within my core out of planks of wood and nails from the walls of Iris’ house along with hinges from her front door. Then I create it again in the dungeon with the magic of the core.

I have the door secured on the other side by a crossbar that is plainly visible through the gap between the door and its frame. Giving adventures the option to either use a narrow blade to lift the bar, break the door down, or climb over the wall to open it from the other side.

They should figure out that lifting the bar is the easiest option sooner or later. Probably more quickly than I would have. I would have ended up just trying to shoulder the door open until it broke while alerting everything in hearing.

For now, I don't put anything on the top of the wall. Once it gets routine, Envoy can make it interesting for them. I just need to figure out a ranged weapon for him.

Of course, the landing in front of the door is a little slewed since it has to follow the curve of the descending staircase and the outer limit of my reaches radius. As will all of the rooms I put on this floor.

Which annoys me. Round is awkward to fit things in. But I work with what I got. I can always remake the level at some point in the future.

Beyond the door, I continued my theme and make a small misshapened room about twenty feet across with a foot wide walkway around it near the ceiling that is part of the firing platform above the door. Another door sits on the far side. I set up a few benches and chairs made of cement to make them stand out from the red dirt walls with its mix of darker stones that started showing up this deep. Nothing all that useful, mostly hard but brittle stuff.

The benches and chairs should let adventures step up high enough to deal with anything up on the shelf that runs around the edges of the room a foot and eight inches short of the ceiling. For now, I just had a single squirrel spawning on the far end of the room for each adventurer that jumps their way across the gap. Ready to scurry over above the door to leap down on people from behind as they duck down to enter the room.

The opposite end of the room has a copy of Iris's front door with the hinges on the bottom so it can drop forward and down.

It takes a few tries to get it to work. And I have to fill in the holes from the door nob and the deadbolt. But I do leave the peephole in it, only with a thin piece of paper on the inside so that the light from the far side will let anyone looking in be able to read the message. "This might have been a trap."

Then I create two shower knobs hooked up to wires to pull two deadbolts open on the door so that they have to turn them both to allow the door to drop open. I set them far enough apart so that it will appear that it will take two people turning them at the same time to open the door. But since I have no clue how to make that work, and don’t have enough time to mess with it, anyone can just turn one and then walk over to the other.

Beyond that, I make a plain red forty foot long room that is fifteen feet wide and wraps around the corner... Which I don't have any immediate idea what to do with. Even if I did it was seven in the morning and I needed to wait for enough magic to create anything else.

By the time Molly arrives and the two of them prepare for another day of grinding my dungeon. I've will have enough magic to add another fifteen foot deep pit at the start of the room that can be crossed with the draw bridge. It will have five feet of water at the bottom and a ladder to get out of it. I will set the room to produce a kobold armed with two of the green plastic scalpel weapons and a raccoon for each adventurer who through the first door. I plan to have them emerge from a two four foot wide by two foot tall chamber about halfway across the room.

With the last of the magic I currently have, I add a thin layer of compressed material in the shape of a door that blends seamlessly with the rest of the wall a the bottom of the stairs. Anyone pressing on it hard enough to break up the dried up caulking holding it in place on the far side will find a small alcove in which I have left a copy of the round metal box decorated with pictures of cookies that Iris keeps her needles and thread in for some reason.

Instead of sewing supplies, it holds a stack of ten hundred dollar bills.

I wonder if Molly will ever think to double check for a secret door in that same spot?