7:19 AM looking upon the chaos induced by the railgun destroying the palisade and cook fires of the kobold tribe in front of James’ dungeon.

I looked upon the state of the village in front of my entrance, and was satisfied that the railgun had delivered the impression I was looking for, however, the railgun itself seemed to need some work. Another minute or so of fire and there would have been enough heat to damage some of the timing circuits, I am going to have to look into a better cooling system for the coils in the near future. I had managed with some minor difficulty to avoid hitting any of the villagers directly, the only one that might have some hydrostatic shock damage was that giant humanoid, who I had fortunately knocked out with it’s own projectile. I would have to wait and see if they understood that part of my message.

Hopefully these lizard people get the hint and leave, if they don’t, I might have to see about doing so myself, I will not be monopolized. It would be annoying to have to move some of my core infrastructure, but possible, so long as I managed to extend and redirect my core elevator shaft and also adjust the fiber optic connections I intended to retain, if any. After having delivered my emphatic message to the lizard people I wasn’t really in the mood to continue testing my core CPU components, but I was also beginning to get annoyed with myself for not having audio video recording and playback capabilities, despite my working cameras. I figured that was probably the next relatively straightforward objective that wouldn’t require a full CPU, although, for higher efficiency, I was going to have to design and implement a file system for the cameras and their microphones to record to.

I had already implemented an analog audio recorder, and it was now waiting in the second prize area for someone to win. Although, what with this village issue, I am not sure if it the current iteration of that set of puzzle rooms will ever see use. I spent the next 12 accelerated hours planning then designing a fault tolerant file system and then the firmware for the modular solid state drive system that the camera input card would use to store the incoming feeds. The firmware software wasn’t terribly difficult to implement, the filesystem on the other hand took another 20 hours of labor to put together something that should work. I was going to have to do some serious testing later to verify if I had a good working system, I suspect however, this was merely the first of many iterations.

As I ended my filesystem design session, I took a look at the state of the village now that almost three hours had passed since I had destroyed their village palisade. To my dismay, there were no signs of them packing up to leave, and it seems I had managed to kill one of the lizard people as the body was laid out next to the remains of what had been their main cook fire. Based on the primitive finery they had adorned the body with, it was likely one of the elders, from the state of the body, it seems as though they had died of a heart attack, likely from fright. I was glad that this death did not occur within the influence of my core as I would have had to deal with the spiritual remains as well, and frankly I was not looking forward to experiencing what happened if I absorbed the energy of sentient just yet.

Well, the sooner I start looking for another viable entrance site, the sooner I will be able to put together another entrance. I decided to use 500 nanometer exploratory pinholes like I had used a few weeks back to expand upward from my entrance, only penetrating the surface of the ground every so often before continuing my extension of my exploratory pinholes below the surface. As of 10:45 AM I had extended my exploration to the summit of the lesser of the twin peaks of the mountain my core resided in, and took a good look around. To the east I had at least two, perhaps more sets of mountains in the range that I resided in, most of the peaks of those mountains were lower than the one I was now observing from, the highest in the range was just to my northeast and one set behind mine.

Looking at the beauty of the natural world around me, I mentally sigh, and think to myself, why hadn’t I done this before. The snow around the rocky outcrop I was observing from glistened in the morning sun, If I was still human this would be one heck of a black diamond to ski down, not that I was that good a skier back on Earth as I had only gone a few times prior to my unexpected translocation and transfiguration. Still, the view is incredible, to the southeast of the outcrop I was now observing from I saw the pair of griffin that had occasionally circled over the forest in front of my current dungeon entrance. They seemed to be stalking some mountain sheep from the air. If I wasn’t trying to get things done today, I would be content to just sit and watch for a while, it was just that peaceful from up here.

As I looked around, I considered what I was looking for in a place to setup a new entrance for my dungeon. I wanted the entrance to be accessible to people like the elf and wolf-beastkin that visited my dungeon prior to the lizard people. Despite the natural beauty of the eastern face of the mountain, that desire for the entrance to be accessible, precluded the use of the eastern face of the mountain. When the elf and the wolf-beastkin left my dungeon, they left from the southern edge of the clearing, the lizard people came in from the northern edge. As such, I will focus my search for a likely place to put an entrance on the southwestern side of the mountain, and south from my existing entrance. I looked to the south of my entrance and as I was considering a couple fairly open areas a cloud shifted, and I saw a glint of metal in what looked like a pocket canyon. I wonder if the elf and beastkin are on their way back, I think I will take a look, even if it isn’t them, it will at least be a diversion.

I was reasonably fortunate in that I didn’t have to excavate a completely new pinhole to that pocket canyon, as I already had my hydroelectric plant in that direction, and only needed to bore 400 meters worth of new pinhole. I struck air at the back of the canyon at 11:17 AM, it looks like the elf brought a few friends this time around. I don’t really think this is what I was looking for in an entrance, however, if I get my act together I might at least be able to start having a conversation. Teaching math and physics rewarding and all, but a conversation, well, that will be good for my soul, especially since it has been several months real-time since I have had an actual conversation.

I took a good look around the canyon from my vantage point a meter and a half from the pocket canyon floor at the very end of the canyon. I could see four distinctly different races among the people here, what looked like humans, elves, a tiger beastkin, and a pair of short wrinkly people with scraggly beards. I am not sure what race they are, but given the level of sophistication of their clothes, they are definitely technologically advanced, at least metallurgically. Their belt buckles and shirt buttons appeared to be brass, which was distinct from the wooden buckles and buttons used by the elves, I couldn’t tell what the humans were using but it definitely wasn’t wood.

From the looks of things, it seems as though the are preparing for a siege. Two of the elves had just done something to the outside of the wall and had just come back in, I don’t know what they did, but the mana in the air feels a bit strange, maybe one day I will know how they did that. For now though, I am going to carve out a cavity in the back wall, and place a four times larger than my usual display in the wall, fully protected by layers of diamond and graphene. Instead of trying to push a higher standard video picture to the display, I added a simple upscale driver to the display, in a row of three pixels, the middle pixel will be the average tone of the first and third pixel. Applying that methodology along both the x and y axis of the display allows for a simple upscale of the video input. The reason to do this of course was to have a 40 inch by 20 inch display with the same pixel density of my other screens, despite the fact that they were four times smaller at 20 by 10 inches.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Working in accelerated time, it was almost 9 hours of work getting the display in, and the supporting electronics. Not to mention the fiber optic input cable for the display, and the output fiber optic cable for the camera, I also ran both audio input and output through a separate dedicated fiber line. I took a quick break from my work, as I was almost done, my new large display hidden behind two centimeters of rock and a 1 centimeter air-gap at the back of the canyon, with fine lines at the edges sliced almost to the surface of the canyon. I looked at the people in the canyon, turns out they had captured three of the lizard people, and had just trussed them to stone poles in the camp in front of a banner with something drawn on it, and a lady elf was making her way to the back of the canyon where I was observing, I better withdraw for the moment I don’t want them to detect my presence just yet.

Since I didn’t want to be completely blind to what was going on in the pocket canyon, I poked out a camera angled down into the canyon, 12 meters above the ground. Inside the 48 inch by 32 inch cavity in which I have my large display, I put in a small mechanized hammer to knock out the thin sheet of stone covering the display. I also put into place a motorized 10 inch tall and 40 inch deep drawer under the display, so that I can trade with the people in the canyon, assuming I actually get that far in being able to understand them. Like my smaller displays, I included both microphones and speakers below the LCD, as soon as I can get that custom audio video stream recorder board to write to the filesystem I had designed the sooner I will be able to at least parrot back words that have been said to me. Additionally I should also be able to store whatever writing they choose to share with me, and hopefully start my own dictionary, which given my current lack of fluency would be most useful in the near future.

I decided that I would watch this new batch of people as they dealt with their captives and see what they would do, so as to not alarm everyone I watched from the camera I had placed above their encampment. It was 12:35 before the captive lizard people started to stir, not that they were able to move much given how they were tied to those stone posts. I had almost finished work on the filesystem writer for the capture board, and decided to work on testing and debugging whilst I was deciding when would be a good time to make an appropriate entrance. It took a little bit of fiddling with the driver code for the board before it started to work, I typo’d a couple of jump references in the assembly, and I was fortunate that this time I didn’t find any other errors before it started working. There were probably more than a dozen ways to make it more efficient, but those could wait until later.

I still needed to put together an output board that would allow me to replay recorded video along with the output from my text editor and EE drawing application, but that was going to require a fair bit of additional fiddling and possibly some additional design work. The elves and the wrinkled short people seemed to be having a discussion with the captives, and despite the fact I couldn’t understand either group, it was plain to me that the wrinkled short people were only able to partially understand the lizard peoples hissing, and didn’t speak it at all.

It turns out both the lizard people and I lucked out this time around, one of the captives seemed to be the leader of the trio that scouted my dungeon, heck the captives may even be the same group, but I find it hard to tell. Apparently after a fair bit of back and forth the elves untied the leader and handed him a writing utensil and a parchment. Now I said that both the lizard people and I lucked out because what I saw next would have made me dance if I could still do so. One of the older humans came forward and cast some sort of spell on the parchment, complete with obligatory hand waving, mumbled speech and a light show. After having done that the man then started talking to the others, and considering he was pointing to some of the words on the parchment, it looked like he was translating what was written. I was so happy, there was translation magic in this world, it may still take me months to learn the language, but I could now almost certainly make myself understood before then.

It was time to make an appearance, but first I decided that I should remove my influence from the small chamber with my new large display. As I did, the lady elf who had been sitting about 2 meters away from the wall where I put the display before she had arrived, twitched as though I had poked her with a sharp stick and turned to face the wall of the canyon, eyes wide in surprise. I triggered the hammer to knock out the stone cover of the display, and managed to see it start to fall before the lady elf managed to call out to the others in alarm. I changed my perspective to the camera in the display housing, and watched as the humans and elves brought the lizard person along with them as they gathered in front of the currently blank display. This time I think I should write something a little less inane than my last message.

So I typed out, “Welcome, good people, I see you have noticed my dispute with the members of the tribe camped out in front of the entrance that elf among you visited previously.” I figured that would set the fox among the chickens and decided to wait and see what they would do now, whilst I recorded everything, for both my future language learning and for posterity. There was quite a bit of discussion going on, even before the human magic user cast his spell to translate my words, obviously something about the way I was displaying text made them nervous, beyond the technology involved, probably whatever spooked the elf and wolf-beastkin and caused them to leave last time. Well, after the translation, one of them came forward and spoke for a bit, before writing on a parchment and having the wizard cast his spell again, presumably to translate whatever was written into words I could understand, unfortunately, that didn’t seem to work out, sigh.

At least we had one way translation, now I get to do the hard part, learn a language from scratch. So I typed out my woes, and displayed on a new line, “Unfortunately, the translation spell back to my language did not seem to work, so we are going to have to do this the hard way. One of you please write in large letters the following on a parchment, a copy of each letter in your alphabet, assuming you have one, the words yes and no, and the question words: who what, where, when, why, and how. When that is done, hold the parchment with the text facing this screen, and then say each letter in the alphabet, and then each word in a clear voice.” This was the beginning of my language lesson nightmare, at least I had an audio video record of everything so that I could review everything when I got playback from storage working, not having a fully functional computer and operating system was really hurting at this point. Fortunately, I at least was able to start piecing together the written language although it was very slow going what with the magic user having to cast their spell every few minutes, as I slowly expanded my written vocabulary, and recorded everything for the future. Most of the group wandered away after a few minutes of language lessons, although one older and somewhat stern looking elf stuck around. It was 3:15 PM before they called for a break in my language lesson, and the elder elf dragged the magic user back over to the captives, likely to continue the discussion that I had interrupted. Since they were going to give me some free time in my lessons, I needed to get back to work. I needed to either work on audio video playback, or go and work on completing a CPU, even if it isn’t my grandiose dream of CPU, I just needed something that could at least run a rudimentary operating system. My text editor and EE drawing application, just weren’t going to be flexible enough anymore.