He was napping...maybe she? They couldn't tell yet.
But the nap, it was one of those deep dead naps after a long long day. First it was black and mute, then it was a little itchy while being cold and humid. Not the shivering cold, but a fall morning where you can dress in rags, see your breath and still be comfortable. Then the nap turned sunny and bright, like being at a cozy winter fire or a breezy summer stroll.
They basked in the feeling, wanting to stretch and absorb it into themselves. But they could not.
Eventually the heat faded and air pressed down on them, squirming all over and stirring as damp and cold set in. Eyes opened, seeing threw them the newly minted dungeon looked around through the eyes of a cat. A dungeon cat, a slightly bigger, slightly shrouded feline sheltered in the tunnels of a city sewer.
The core told the cat to go out and study, so when the cat left the core felt itself vulnerable to invasion, and so more cats were ordered retrieved. Soon some small army of critters swarmed back and forth in the tunnels and vents. Sure rats would me more applicable, turtles more funny, but felines can get close and study those walking above with neither scorn or refrain. They are the ideal 3rd party.
The ideal third party...
The thought hung in the mind of the core.
Normally defenses and traps were erected in a rough maze, putting friction on invaders and forcing them to persist as long as possible through some form of gauntlet. Monsters, armies and malice assembled against greed and growth, but what if there was nothing to be greedy for?
Cats of the dungeon all at once shivered as their master smiled so big it was a grin, and grinned bigger.
For two days the core spent all it could.
Cleaning up its hallway and entrance, inlaying all the brickwork and finery, paying attention to the common practice for the space it was trying to create. Once it was sure its space was clean and pristine it pushed its entrance to the surface and put up signs, to the city folk it'd look just like an underpass in construction. Stairs half finished, wood ramp, rope cordoning, most of the tunnel done already.
In the Dungeon layout it was something stupid, a room and hallway overlapping just so that a double back could be covered and the core room hidden under the stairs. It took a bit of kneading to make it go just right but the entrance to the core room was half covered in a drainage grate and the other half could be dug out.
The cats came and went and plans were drawn up, a lil simulacrum made so that the core could continually test without having to place the pieces. Eventually birds started wandering in to pick at food and the cats happily pounced on them, but eventually smarter birds landed, setting down shinys or food before flapping away.
Perhaps the core was not so concealed as originally thought.
A week of strange tribute passed before something more notable happened, humans arrived to mark the place in the night. Cats let them mark and watched them go but the core was interested, instead placing its own similar marking without absorbing the original. When the night set in for the city and no one was around the next expansion happened.
The entrance was reclassified to the hallway and at its end was another stairway, both stairways whole and complete. Instead of hiding the core under one a room immediately let out to the side, opening into a wide, under construction looking space with lots of wood planks covering rocky mud and wood pillars holding up the ceiling. Looking over the space filled the core with unease, there has to be something there something for...
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
There was a sloppy pair of clonks as the tribute cans were tossed into place, half filled with bird and cat scraps, a small glass cabinet took some round shinys and dispensed more whole leavings and the space felt complete. The core could once again sleep, this time hidden under a grate in the sectioned off room.
It slept and slept, not noticing how people passed by and through its safe room, not noticing its mana grow and leak, only when the humans arrived to deface the mark it placed did it do anything again.
---
Constable Heath Carrington was confined to desk with paperwork, he had been for the past decade and he wished he could actually sift through enough of it to get back to patrol work. One page of a hundred stuck out to him in his tide though, one about an underpass under construction blocking a corner. Benign and unsolvable as it was he dismissed it, but even as he sifted through reports of assault and murder it stuck to the back of his mind because he remembered no order for an underpass to be erected in that district.
A motion was presented, never passed.
The busy road carried supply trains to and from industrial and housing areas, markets for food and tools making this pair of streets the arteries of industry. People though, still needed to cross and the city counsel had yet to deign it worthy of spending money on, mostly because a lack of tax or toll to pay back costs rather than the problem effecting people's lives. No forty people were dead this month trying to cross, causing incalculable traffic jams from the commotion and near misses but no motion moved past the local district representatives proposing solutions.
Yet
There was an underpass, marked and started over the night, sat for a week, then finished.
No paperwork about it save for a single complaint of it blocking traffic flow. All it elicited was a brief flash of anger, that's the fking point, stick up into traffic and provide a place for it to go.
He sighed and wrote up and order for someone to check it out as a potential illicit market or den of some sort, getting back to his paperwork having relived the nagging feeling.
---
The Winking Cat was an establishment almost as old as the town, a mixture of good positioning and legal immunity made it the perfect place to take a load off during the workday or spend some coin after it. Once a tavern like many others it evolved and grew with the town and help of carefully calibrated bribes, not subject to the zoning laws that let it monopolize the intersection between home and work. She stayed in the family for generations and James Grand Luke V was following the tradition for the cousins and sons of the Luke line: tending the bar.
Juicy rumors and curious happenings crossed his ears all day and it was only by contract of a jeweler that he had a way of writing everything down, a lil punch key writer made with the steel for swords and armor, quiet as the night due to its rope and spring linkages. Between drinks and leaning probes into conversations he could find out nearly anything he wanted from anyone who sat in front of him, trouble being to properly ensure he wasn't leading anyone into the answers he wanted.
The past week and change had been interesting, an exciting buzz that set his typing fingers twitching. Word had it a new underpass was being built, rumors swirled about smugglers getting tired of running the busiest road in town or a construction crew pitching in after a friend or owner lost their daughter to the unending stampede, even whispers that it was one of those new generation dungeons like from Durance. While some alley cats were larger than normal a wildcat spotted on the outskirts easily explained away the bigger than average loafs.
By the time the underpass was open it was all anyone talked about, just a small corridor going down, across and back up. The intersection between the two busiest roads bypassed by a small tunnel, the tag of a local band of hooligans covered by a cat's eye tag.
Some note was made by utility workers that the large offshoot at the middle of the tunnel was likely a slight remodel to the local sewers but that was it.
Who's tag is a cat's eye, who dug and furnished the tunnel, why are the hand rails so strong, why is it so thin people can barely use the vending construct? Juicy questions that earned good theories and tidbits.
Even the waitresses were starting to sniff around for speculation and start up discussion, it earned them plenty of tips...both tips...
---
B- So...you did it with a cat?
S- I did it with a cat, I was curious what it'd do and besides the old tree is waning, that town needs one sooner than later
B- You made a dungeon out of a cat
S- Not before you fed it some 5th dimensional octopus
B- ...
S- Well?
B- It was hungry
S- Oh my god you as such a softy
B- Come off it
S- You are never living this down