Kazue was frustrated. She did not like not having a body. There were a lot of very fun things about being a dungeon, and she loved the new trick of learning any language she was exposed to, though that turned out to be an old trick she hadn’t noticed when they were assimilating text, but she really, really missed the sensations of having a body.
Well, most of them. Her avatar was going to be experiencing the ones that neither of them liked. But that was part of living life. And while she could always communicate with Mordecai or any of the inhabitants, it didn’t feel the same as actually talking did. On top of that, she couldn’t talk to visitors at all. Imagine if her parents came by!
And she couldn’t even create illusions the way Mordecai was doing early on to show Moriko other parts of the dungeon, which required having her avatar to cast the spells. Her core could only do dungeon magic. Hmm. Actually, there was an idea in that.
She began experimenting with her idea in the War Room, where she had an illusion-creating dungeon feature to compare against. When Mordecai’s attention was drawn to her experiment, she was half expecting him to offer a comment or suggestion, but instead she just felt a sense of satisfaction and encouragement before his attention went back to the dungeon and checking up on their various visitors. Unless a group really needed special attention, they only needed to do spot checks, their inhabitants had everything under control.
Mostly.
The faeries were continuing to multiply and spread. And it wasn’t like it was their fault, it was Li’s influence. And they didn’t interact with their inhabitant capacity properly either, it was like an extra space just for the faeries was being created. And it itched.
Kazue adored the little ratling shard-of-a-god, but he was messing with the dungeon, and she had very mixed feelings about that part. Before, their dungeon didn’t do a lot of unexpected things, and everything worked pretty much how they were anticipated to work, though there had been occasional surprises.
Now? Well, he had somehow taught some of the dire rabbits how to shadow-jump and shadow-blend, and these abilities were beginning to spread to the bunkin and rabkin. And she was pretty certain she’d seen a shadowy faerie flicker by, and the fact that Kazue wasn’t sure about what she’d sensed was driving her a little nuts. Ever since she’d awoken as a dungeon Kazue had been very sure about everything she sensed in her territory, she’d just known anything she focused on.
And she hadn’t realized how thoroughly that awareness had become normal to her until that surety was broken.
But! Enough of that! Kazue banished those thoughts for the moment to turn back to her project. They already had a platform that could create an adjustable illusion, she just needed to customize that idea and add a few things. Plus there would be no external controls, it was for dungeon use only.
The final results were, well, satisfactory. It was more like having a puppet than an avatar, but at least she could create an illusion of herself, complete with voice and other sounds, over the platform, and could animate it to act and speak for her. There was no actual interaction and no sensation, the illusion could only really do things she told it to do. But, wait, there was that other spell, could she build that in too? Yes! She could set an illusion running with a set of basic instructions and responses programmed in. It would be obviously an automated illusion, but she was certain she could find a use for it.
“Good job. I was wondering what your solution to your frustration was going to be.”
If Kazue could have glared at Mordecai, she would have. “You knew that I could do something like this for a while, haven’t you?”
“Yes, but you needed to find a solution on your own. I was confident you would find an option that suited you.”
She wanted to be annoyed that he hadn’t helped earlier, but the way he phrased that, “What were some other possibilities?”
“You could have created a puppet of some sort that looked like you, something that would only animate when your will filled it. It might have been more avatar-like, but it would have still missed the mark. I think that would be less satisfying by being that much closer without actually being there. And the line between an animated construct and a full golem can be thin. If you crossed it, the same blessing that has made our other inhabitants into sentient creatures would have applied. How would you have felt about a look-alike golem?”
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Ick. Yeah, she was glad that she hadn’t gone that route. Even just the physical puppet idea started to feel creepy if she thought about it.
“But somewhere in between, you could have created more carved artwork, and enchanted it to animate much like your illusions, but a little more physical. That wouldn’t have had the risk of becoming a golem.”
Mm. Better, but she was still happier with her illusion. “And now that I think about it, I could have created a tiny version, and I still can I guess. I was thinking of creating a platform that was mobile too, but an automaton that complex will always run the risk of crossing that boundary, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so, but creating more of these will be something to do until we have filled out the population gaps and can start saving mana for our next zone.” ‘Floors’ didn’t feel it described things accurately anymore, so after some discussion, she and Mordecai had shifted to calling them zones.
Of course, she already had a project that was eating up some of their mana right now. She was expanding their entrance hall and shrine area, and was including almost all the gods she could find information on in all the books they’d received. There were even more gods than she’d realized from her studies at the temple. Though some of them got shrines that were just shy of being officially insulting, such as Dormire. “And what about your idea for a permanent arena?”
“I’d really like that to be outdoors, but since that isn’t an area most people are going to know is part of our territory, it wouldn’t make sense to have my avatar doing anything risky there. I could attach it to our private chambers, but I’m not sure how to make the aesthetics and feel of it work just yet. I don’t want to make everyone who reaches the bottom have to walk through it, but it feels lopsided to have it branch out. So I am still thinking about it.”
Even without growing deeper, there were still a lot of projects for them to work on. It wasn’t hard to stay busy, even if the lack of a body was occasionally irritating. She wanted to talk to the kobolds that Mordecai’s avatar was dining with, but she’d already realized that installing one of these platforms in their zone-zero wasn’t going to be a good idea so long as they were trying to maintain the illusion of having fewer zones than they really had.
A series of lights flashed from the ceiling near the platform showing her illusionary self. “Thank you Sarcomaag, I’m glad you like it.” Wait… with a mental sigh, Kazue focused her attention on examining the mushrooms growing on the ceiling in greater detail. There were several stalks with broad, thin fruiting bodies that had grown into a single surface, and upon that surface were a lot of tiny mushrooms that could glow different colors, borrowing and combining different methods from the other fungi growing throughout the dungeon, including some of the wild growth in the third path.
“That was the color and shapes language you and Klastoria worked out, isn’t it?” Which she’d have picked up automatically.
“Hmm, can you make words?”
There was a brief pause, then [Yes.]
Huh. That was kind of neat. “That’s awesome. You can talk to anyone anywhere in the dungeon with that. You should show that off to all the other bosses to start with, and then see who else you can get to talk with you.” Their giant mushroom boss was the least communicative inhabitant due to his nature, but this should help with that. “Don’t push yourself to talk to too many people at once though, go at your own pace.”
Sarcomaag flashed his acknowledgment, and then the square of mushrooms went dark as he shifted his attention elsewhere.
Kazue moved on to the next step of her project, which was simply going to be placement instead of making mobile platforms. This was fairly quick to set up, just skimming through the dungeon and marking off where she wanted the platforms to be placed, and letting the process automate itself as mana allowed. Really, it was still her doing it, but she had found that stuff like this didn’t really require her focused attention when it was just repetitive tasks.
Sweeping her attention through the dungeon did let her catch up on what Li was doing, down by the edge of the lake at the deepest zone of the dungeon. It seems their three einherjar ‘guests’ were amusing themselves by having a friendly sparring match with Li, one at a time of course, all while Li was playing verbal one-upmanship with the zuhra genie, each telling ever more outlandish stories to try and make the other laugh first. Oh, and he managed to pull out the occasional snack from somewhere to munch on. While sparring and talking.
She was beginning to develop a faint ability to sense the way probability warped around the small figure, but it took a lot of concentration and she found the traces of pure chaos to be deeply disturbing, though she could not have expressed exactly why, so Kazue had stopped trying to look that closely.
Li had proven himself pretty good at staying out of the way of the adventuring parties, though Kazue noted the exact way Mordecai had phrased the request. He’d made sure to couch it in the terms of everyone else is playing their own game inside the dungeon, and if Li played his games too close to their games, it might interfere with their games and make them less fun.
And Li was not the sort to want people to have less fun. And Mordecai was always willing to come up with more games for Li to play if the rest of the dungeon got too busy. Which was good, because he never seemed to sleep. Oh, one might find him asleep somewhere, but no one ever saw him go to sleep, and he’d be found in the most improbable places.
Kazue let her focus rest here for a little while and took the time to enjoy the absurd stories being swapped. Sleep might be a foreign concept to a core, but rest and relaxation were still good things to have.