Mordecai swore as he shook his head to clear his thoughts in the wake of the sudden explosion. It didn't help that the flash and bang of it had left even his senses dazzled.
Nearby, Crios was dancing happily at his successful experiment. Fortunately, they weren't in Crios's normal zone right now, so there was no one who would get seriously hurt by that underwater explosion.
The crab zone boss of their second downward zone had been a little jealous that 'normal' crabs in their ocean zone were more powerful than he was, and Mordecai had been running a couple of experiments of his own to help alleviate the issue.
The first of those was fairly benign; he was simply trying to improve Crios's defenses in passive, non-magical ways that would still count as fair. Crios's carapace now included enough iron to make it somewhat harder to crack while maintaining the little bit of flexibility exoskeletons required. Mordecai had also been working on armored plating that would be externally strapped on, making it equipment.
This had only been going so well. Figuring out ways to strap metal plates onto a crab without hindering movement was complicated for the legs and head. Crios's main body was fairly straightforward, but most people only had a chance to attack his body if they had already damaged his legs.
The second thing Mordecai had been doing was to indulge Crios with the use of a bit of polymorphic magic. Battle-form spells were not terribly complicated to create if you understood the target form well enough. Once the spell was created, just using it didn't require the same knowledge, and self-only versions were simpler than spells that could target others. So Mordecai had created a single-use talisman that Crios could use to cast the spell on himself.
Crios had enjoyed the experience, but that had only been one variation of the metal-shelled crabs in the ocean zone and Crios wanted more. The back and forth on the topic had required a promise from Crios to only indulge himself once per reset and only if it was certain that his floor would not have any combat parties visiting before the next reset.
Mordecai's part of the bargain involved designing something new. There were potentially a lot of variations of metal-shelled crabs, far more than actually existed in the Azeria Dungeon, and Mordecai didn't want to end up needing to craft a new spell for each variation Crios wanted to try out.
While it was possible to craft a spell that could incorporate all the variations, selecting a variation required casting the spell yourself rather than using spell-charged items.
Instead, Mordecai had created an interface in the warrens that let Crios select different potential traits. This automated the process of generating a custom spell that was dispensed as another single-use talisman. Well, sort of automated. It was still his core that was doing the work, but it took up less of his attention.
Over time, Crios’ requests had led to Mordecai being able to significantly expand, refine, and modify the available possibilities. While continually modifying the interface was more work, it was also free variation testing that Mordecai didn't have to do himself.
Today's explosion was the result of Crios's experiments. He had been working on having stripes of different metal compounds positioned in specific locations, and the first thing those experiments had taught him was to specify that the stripes be thin if the metal in question wasn't strong.
With the right metallic stripes in the right locations, it was possible to grind off powders of burnable metals. Another shell modification allowed the creation of a 'pouch' of sorts near the tip of a claw, and a final modification allowed grinding two bits of different metal plates together inside of the pouch to ignite the metal powders in a sudden flash.
It was Mordecai's bad luck to be there when Crios had finally gotten the combination right. The most reactive metals could ignite in tiny puffs during the first grinding process, while less reactive metals were hard to set burning while underwater. But he had fine-tuned an alloy that worked.
Mordecai paused in his own experiments to ensure that this new form was still appropriate for the challenge their ocean level was supposed to present. Power alone became less reliable as a measure of fairness when a dungeon grew deep enough. Much like what Mordecai had done with his avatar, it was technically possible to create inhabitants that were good at everything simultaneously while not exceeding how much power a given zone could support and one had to develop a better sense for what was fair.
Creating an unfair challenge for normal delvers didn't always create immediate problems, but eventually, it would come back around to bite the dungeon. At a minimum, the inhabitant's mana cost would start to increase, reducing how many inhabitants they could support. Other backlash effects could include a compulsion to migrate the inhabitant to a stronger zone or a spontaneous change to a weaker version of the form. Mordecai had always considered these reactions to be similar to how other life forms developed stress reactions, but now he suspected it was a case of divine enforcement of a dungeon's constraining rules.
Once he felt certain that the innate rate limitation of the bright explosion could work with certain crab types to make a more balanced build, Mordecai formalized that variation as a possible evolution for some of the metal crab types that he'd found to be underperforming.
With that done, he turned his attention back to what he had been doing with his own form. While he had done some limited underwater work when setting up the airy water path, Mordecai had not extensively tested the underwater performance of his avatar.
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There were some minor issues, though only because he was being finicky about optimizing everything. For example, in his ambassador form, the scales on his arm were facing the wrong way for optimized swimming.
If the scales pointed toward his hands, which was less efficient for swimming, downward strikes were easily deflected, and those were more common than upward strikes. However, strikes coming from in front of him potentially had an angle to better attack his forearms.
If he reversed them, it was better for swimming and protected his forearms better, but his upper arms were less well protected. Also, it ran against the pattern of his body scales, so there was a line where the scales didn't mesh well.
In the end, Mordecai decided to have the scales run up his arms and to have the patterns meet at his shoulders. The meeting patterns created a bit of a weakness at his armpits, but with a little tweaking he could make the rest of the line overlap in a way that created a ridge that would help protect his neck, not unlike the ridges found on some pauldrons.
The difference in his swimming was small enough that it was not a deciding factor, it had simply drawn his attention to the direction of his arm scales and made him think about the possibilities.
Another thing he was working on was improving his senses. It was very hard to have acute senses that were not easily overloaded, but he was slowly enhancing them via constant small tweaks and adjustments. Mordecai's physical senses combined enough specialties that they surpassed the performance of any species he knew of, and his non-physical senses were extremely keen as well.
Crios's little experiment provided an accidental test for his sight, hearing, and bodily sensitivity to vibrations. Any one of these could be easily dealt with and compensated for, but when combined that way it was harder to process and filter everything quickly, leading to overloaded senses.
Testing other senses such as electrical sensors and detecting subtle changes in current were why Mordecai was currently only wearing a pair of short trousers. He still had to figure out how to best optimize clothing to not interfere with such senses while still be appropriately dressed.
Mordecai was determined to refine every form that his body could take before he awakened his invested avatar. He had a lot more time now than when he'd created this pattern for his avatar, and that was giving him some leeway with the invested avatar.
As it hadn't been awakened, it could still be edited. It was already taking up an unusually large portion of his core's memory, though that ratio had shrunk as the core had grown. Mordecai was slowly feeling confident enough in what he wanted or needed to start deleting some features of his secret form.
These changes would only affect his invested avatar right now, but that was the one that mattered.
His biggest concern with the existence of that monstrous form was the possibility of being forced to shift into it. That might seem a bit vain at first, but he was mostly thinking about how it would look to the public if he suddenly became an eldritch horror. He did not need to hand any more political or social weapons to his enemies.
Various spells and abilities specialized in revealing shape changers by forcing them to shift, and Mordecai was pretty certain that this was the form he would be forced to take in such a situation as it was the one least like all the others.
Therefore, it was Mordecai's goal to completely delete the secret form from his invested avatar.
While it was the 'source' for a lot of the abilities he was imbuing into his other forms, Mordecai was modifying that by the way he was incorporating the traits he wanted into his other forms.
It did help that he had a lot of 'base' forms to spread some abilities amongst. Kitsune, tanuki, and shifters all had at least two forms, and he had included other species as well who had more limited shape-changing, such as the merfolk bloodline that could shift between having legs for land and their swimming form.
Merfolk were a species Mordecai suspected was crafted; there were too many unrelated variations of fish, sharks, octopuses, and more for him to believe they could all be the same species unless they were designed with that variation.
He shook off that thought and focused back on his current testing. By taking advantage of the multitude of forms available to him, Mordecai could migrate everything he wanted to keep into other forms. This did mean his invested avatar had unusual forms; after all, bear shifters didn't usually have stony quills hidden in their hair that they could fire at enemies behind them.
This didn't come without a price, though it was one that mostly aligned with his goals anyway. For every feature that he incorporated into a base form to make it non-standard for its type, Mordecai had to completely unmake a feature of similar complexity or energy cost from the secret form without moving it.
Reshuffling a future avatar's features shouldn't require this normally, but there was a soft strain from its size. Each deletion created a little 'space' and allowed the pattern to briefly relax, and it was during that window of time that Mordecai could move components around and cut old links after new links were established.
While his plans made some of his choices easy, such as deleting crab-like claws, some were harder. Mordecai liked having redundancies, but he was having to trim down. Previously he'd had a fairly wide range of toxins available to him, now he had just over a dozen scattered across all his future avatar's forms.
The pattern of his invested avatar was slowly reducing in complexity and size, though it had no effect on his current one.
It made Mordecai a bit nervous; once he fully invested in this avatar, he wouldn't be able to edit it anymore. There was so much depending on his power and ability in the near future, but more than that he wouldn't be able to make a new avatar for decades and even then it would be hard to consider any new form to be anything other than limiting and constraining when compared to this one.
Of course, he could just wait until their core had enough power and space to duplicate the pattern, which would also mean having the ability to create a variant of it that was focused a little differently and required learning some new skills, but that could easily be a century away.
He tried not to think about that too much. He'd never had an avatar out for that long before; even when he was young, it usually only took two or three centuries before an avatar had achieved the readily reached limits of mortal skill and power. As he'd gotten older, his avatars had usually started off with a stronger base set of skills, quickening their progress to mastery of a particular style or ability that he had focused that avatar on.
Once Mordecai was satisfied that his four fully customized forms were operating as well as he could expect when underwater, it was time to head back up for dinner. Crios had already run out the duration of his spell and left for his home zone again. He was a little disappointed with how long it took to grind up enough metal powder to set off another flash again, but overall, he'd had fun.