> Quote:>Summon Monster [0 / 10 Monster Space Used]

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Ascribing the emotion of 'contempt' to a blank menu screen may have been a sign of madness, so I studiously didn't. It wasn't mocking me. Not even in an imagined sense. Just because things had gone awry without an immediately obvious cause didn’t mean I needed to create one and blaming what was likely little more than a mental prop was beneath me. That’s what I told myself, at least. Unfortunately, accepting this meant accepting there wasn’t anyone to blame for the moment, so the most I could do was sulk. I stewed in a general, undirected annoyance that mixed with my existing boredom to make an especially unpleasant cocktail. Sulking was stupid, I knew that, but I couldn’t help myself. If I’d had anyone to talk to, it would’ve likely manifested itself in terse words and mental snark.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, I didn’t.

After one of the least fruitful brainstorming sessions I’d ever experienced (top five, at least), Faryea conceded that she had no idea why I still had no options for monsters to summon. As an imp, she wasn't privvy to such things and, according to her boss, simply being near the graveyard should’ve been all that was needed to add the ‘Shambling Corpse’ to the list. It wasn't difficult to conclude that it was likely linked to the presence of holy mana, which, in turn, probably had something to do with the chapel, but neither of us could do more than speculate. I had little understanding of the mechanics behind mana in general and whatever Faryea knew didn’t seem to gel with what’d happened.

We’d had a bit of a difference in opinion on how to proceed from there.

“Wha-Why are you giving up so quickly? The boss said we need this done. It shouldn’t b-”

Look, if you want to go ferry the message over to her and ask what could be causing it, be my guest, but I’m not going to bother stumbling around blindly, trying to find a solution to a problem via blind guessing. Sure, maybe there's some manner of monster creation that I can access with what I currently have, but I'm not going to bother looking for it when my personal interfact only seems to react to things I have concrete knowledge of, and when it's also possible there simply isn't.

After an uncertain pause, she left without saying anything more. I could probably have made an effort to explain myself better, or ask where she was going, but I didn’t. There were any number of things she could be doing and I had a thousand and one things I could be doing, even if I’d have preferred to continue playing chess. That’d been at least twelve hours ago. Probably more. It was hard to keep track of the time, but the Chapel had gone from gloomy, to pitch black and back to gloomy again. While that wasn’t hard measurement of the passage of time by itself, for the length of a night was hardly consistent even back home, it was enough to back up my estimate.

Whatever contrivance usually allowed me to communicate with her seemed only able to broadcast the barest details across the distance she was at. Asking of her status, I could more or less discern '[-placate-]' and '[-apologise-]' from the tone of her response, but anything more complex was lost. Though I did check back a couple of times, I mostly accepted that whatever was keeping her wasn't cause for alarm (and really, was what she did with her time even necessarily my concern? She might've been titled 'minion', but I wasn't exactly going to enforce the meaning of such a thing). While bored and frustrated, at least I didn’t have to deal with being worried as well.

If I'd been allowed to keep busy throughout this time, I'd likely have been in far better spirits, but I'd been consistently stymied. As much as I’d have liked to have a fully functioning Venus Lighthouse filled with interconnected puzzles and traps, everything but the monsters in place, there was only so much I could do as things currently stood.

For one, I was still stuck with a maximum of fifty mana.

If I were able to directly siphon mana from the Mortuary to the task at hand, it would’ve been full steam ahead, but I couldn’t. To do anything, it had to pass through the bottleneck of my personal mana pool, which meant nearly every option I considered, researched and added to the ‘Enhance’ ended up discarded. To grow the pool, I needed warm bodies, either to consume or under my control. Permanently adding the chapel was naturally out, as were the majority of the more all-encompassing works. And, for the most part, it seemed most 'enhancements' needed to be done on a room-wide basis.

As a result, creating that cobblestone facade I'd considered earlier had to be done manually, detail by detail.

In some regards, it made me think of painting. Manual adjustments and enhancements, as I’d done with the entrance, consumed mana on an action to action basis, which meant every now and then I had to stop and refill my pool from the store, as one might with a paintbrush. Suffice to say, as someone who dropped visual arts as soon as I’d had the option, the process rapidly began to wear on my patience. Maybe half an hour of trying to redecorate the dungeon starting with the entrance saw me finish less than half a room, then give up. Though inexpensive in small bursts like the candles, trying to create something out of whole cloth over such a wide area taxed both my mana and patience. I'd do that once I could fire and forget.

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Unable to stand the unfinished adjustments, I scoured them away with an errant thought.

Having discarded that particular avenue, I instead decided to try for something more self-contained. A task I similarly gave up on swiftly, as I remembered my distinct lack of artistic talent. Amateurish flourishes and additions were similarly wiped away. Evidently, interior decoration was far more difficult without all the pre-built assets one might find in a base building game . Of all my initial efforts in improving the dungeon, the only thing I didn't erase was the vaguely humanoid statue hunched over the chessboard. Formed of the same, hard-packed soil as the dungeon walls, its thinker-like pose was vaguely amusing, even as it served no real purpose. Honestly, it just seemed appropriate.

After an amount of time wasted on idly milling around, uncertain of what next, I settled on spending time experimenting with my newly acquired materials. At first, I approached it in a casual, only half-interested manner. Unfortunately, far as I could tell, cataloguing the items hadn't added their constituent parts to my overall repetoir, just allowed me to recreate them. Or so I thought, at first. Replicating the exact objects was what was easiest, at only a mana per scrap and bucket (and likely only because I suspected I couldn't consume mana in fractions). With a little effort, on the other hand, I was able to manipulate things a little. Removing the bucket from the bucket of water was doable, though for some reason, the water sans bucket managed to cost more.

It only occurred to me afterwards that having Faryea pour out the water, then cataloguing it would've likely been easier.

The scrap metal was perhaps a little more interesting. At first, I was limited to a directly recreating the exact bits and pieces I'd been given, but a little focus allowed me to manipulate it slightly. First in combining the bits into one clump of jagged metal, then that same clump, but with the dirt and soot removed. A couple more passes through the creation and destruction cycle gave me a feel of what the material was as a whole. It ceased to be a single object and just became the contiguous idea of 'Pig Iron'. Less an object and more a feeling.

An idea struck me.

I repeated that process a few times, juggling the different feelings in my head; the state I dematerialised the object in, the feel of the metal, and the feel of what wasn't. Each time, I removed a little more of what I was pretty sure was impurities, and with time, I could sense a change in what I'd created.

The task ended with 'Wrought Iron' added to my personal mental...repetoir? Recipe list? Regardless, I felt a little (and likely inordinately) proud of myself for that.

Having spent some time actively manipulating materials on a smaller scale, it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't really done much with my newly acquired powers over fabrication. There was the candles, yes, but those had been duplications. I'd done a little manipulation of shapes with my decoration attempts, but nothing with any real detail. That seemed like as good a next goal as any.

A sword had been the first thing that'd popped into mind. Not exactly creative, but appropriate given the circumstances. As a proof of concept, it seemed like an easy enough task. I wasn't trying to craft anything particularly masterful. I could more or less envisage what it'd look like in my mind and I had the materials to make something that would at least technically qualify as one.

Unfortunately, my first attempts were...not the most encouraging.

The blocky cross shape that had been intended as a sword was good for little more than a school play prop and, once fully produced, I could no longer shape it. A second was just as bad, but inverted; a paper thin blade that snapped itself in half as it clattered to the floor. Over the dozen or so further tries I managed, progress was slow, inconsistent and disheartening. Adjustments were clumsy, and it was hard to tell what they'd result in before the creation was produced, after which it was too late. In the back of my mind, I remembered that, even I were able to make a sword that looked right, that was a far cry from making one that'd survive any sort of use.

On the other hand, progress was progress, and I had to remind myself that the goal wasn't 'make a sword', but 'figure out how much control you have over this sort of thing'.

Still, as time passed, I found my thoughts wandering to anything but the task at hand. Always a bad sign for me. Regardless of the progress I was making, the tedium was getting to me and I was honestly looking for something to distract me. In fact, I was almost pleased when Faryea finally struggled her way back to the dungeon, dragging the wolf carcass.