3:16 PM, just after the first language lesson given by the human wizard Alesandro, to James’ dungeon core.

The last few hours have been both enlightening and tedious as hell, back on Earth I was never very good at learning languages, as all I really new was a few dozen phrases in Spanish. My desire for extreme CPU performance right from the start will have to be set aside. I need a computer to help me leasing this new language as soon as possible, as the wizards translation spell had no effect. Well, I assume it had no effect, certainly not the one that was intended. Probably because I wasn’t watching via the presence of my consciousness, but via the camera in the display.

I looked over all the components that I had designed for the CPU and started putting aside the wider bit width components, and trimming the design back to something that looked like it was a souped up early 1990’s computer, the main difference being clock speed and the lack of certain dedicated areas for graphics processing and cryptography. I did keep a larger than needed byte code interpreter cache on the CPU die, simply to limit what I needed to redesign. An override to my cut-off switch and twenty hours of accelerated perception later, during which I did a fair amount of frantic fiddling, and I had a speedy franken-processor that would probably do for the moment. I knew for certain that I needed to redo almost the entire thing as soon as I got more than a few hours free.

During the last four hours allowed for by the override of my cut-off switch, I worked and re-worked, and re-worked a workable boot record and simplified shell. Even cooperative multitasking was barely workable, for one I cut as many corners as I could on the CPU itself, which was a single core 32 bit processor, with the only real modern-ish feature being an integrated FPU, which mirrored the 386 and 486 intel processors being an 80 bit floating point unit. I put in a simplified frame buffer display driver into the kernel, along with the same filesystem driver I had already put in place for the cameras.

The operating system, such as it was, was little more than those drivers, some memory allocation managers and a context switcher, totaling just over 5,000 byte code instructions. The first time I tried booting the system, it hard locked 47 instructions in, because I had stored an instruction in the wrong location. The only reason I had any clue what was going on, was because I had the program stack hooked into a diagnostic display, and I was stepping through the instructions. I had to step back into real time as 5PM rolled around, and I still wasn’t completely ready with the basic operating system kernel, let alone a workable shell. The group in the pocket canyon had been waiting on me for almost twenty minutes at this point, so I put my work on hold, and resigned myself to continue interacting with them using my hard coded text editing app, at least for the meantime.

Before I renewed my interactions with them, I took a quick look at the village of what I now know are kobolds. From the look of things about fifteen kobolds aren’t in the village despite how little time remains until sundown, I am not really sure whether or not that will mean trouble for me or the group in the canyon, but it is something to note. I turned on the screen in the canyon, showing a blank white display to them, and my language teacher and wizard Alesandro came up to the screen along with the group leader Felipe.

I wish that I had had enough time to put together a simple word lookup system, but unfortunately, that wasn’t in my cards at least not yet. My conversation with Felipe and Alesandro was significantly more cumbersome than I would have preferred, however, we did manage to get some important questions asked and answered. For my part, I wanted to know whether people such as themselves would indiscriminately attempt to destroy dungeon cores such as myself. Their response to that question was mildly disturbing but not an immediate concern, as they indicated that dungeon delving groups such as themselves only attempt to destroy dungeons and their cores if the dungeon has gone insane, or is of a particular bad type. Annoying lack of vocabulary on my part, well, at least I recorded the word and I will eventually figure it out from context.

They on the other hand wanted to know my name, my race, and most of all my origins. As they seemed to be upfront about things with me, I decided to reciprocate, at least mostly. I had no clue how magic works in this world, despite watching the human wizard Alesandro perform his translation spell for hours. I could sort of feel the magic he was using move, but it feels like I am trying to watch surgery in a dim room full of fog. As such, I was somewhat cautious, and told them my first name was James, skipping over my sir name entirely, and that I was human before I became a dungeon core. Regarding my origins, I was upfront about having come from a different world, but I remained vague about my life, beyond the fact that I had been a student, and that I had died at the age of 22 years and 4 months.

Their reaction to my origins was somewhat interesting, in some ways it looked like they had expected me to have come from a different world, but were surprised that I was a student. I probably gave away the fact that I was from a different world, when I asked how many days there were in a year, in my first language and vocabulary lesson. After that they asked me what I knew about magic, and frankly I was a bit stumped how to answer that question without compromising my ability to defend myself. I was confident that I could baffle them with science, but magic and its capabilities, especially in this world, were completely outside my realm of experience. Thus, after a few moments thought, I gave them the ambiguous answer, that I knew less about magic than I would like.

This answer was both true, and at least somewhat misleading, in that it implied I knew some magic. I suppose if you considered what I could do with matter manipulation, transmutation, and creation, magic, then I knew some, but definitely not anything like what Alesandro had been doing repeatedly for hours this afternoon. If they were lying to me regarding their intentions however, my only true defense, I suspect would be inaccessibility. After they answered a few more general knowledge questions, they finally got around to asking me an important question, what did I intend to do with myself now that I am a dungeon core. That was an interesting and fairly tough question, what did I want to do with myself, as I didn’t know myself, I asked them for a break so as to give them a more well though out answer, saying that I would let them know my answer in the morning.

It was just after sundown when we adjourned for the night, 6:27 PM, frankly, I had both a lot to do, and a lot to think about. I looked over the group before I started my work for the night, and they appeared somewhat tense, the kobold captives, looked to be reasonably well treated, despite being tied up. Their tension, made me wonder if indeed the defenses the group had put in place that morning were actually going to be needed, I guess I would just have to wait and see. I kept the camera recording everything, whilst I bumped my perception back up to maximum acceleration, I had a ton and a half of programming to do, in byte code nonetheless, I wish I had some medication for the pain of a migraine, sigh, another downside to being a dungeon core.

I dove back into my nascent operating system code and started adding a few features to the basic shell, and the kernel itself. One of the early libraries that I managed to hack together was a standard input/output library, after several hours of back and forth tweaks, step by step process checking, a plenitude of errors I managed to replace the shell as the program initially launched by the kernel, with a limited terminal controller, that had a vague resemblance to a Linux terminal console. The shell, I also tweaked and upgraded to include a few additional built-in functions, including some filesystem manipulation and traversal commands, and a simplified list command. Having completed that over the course of fifty accelerated hours of essentially non-stop work, my mind ached, it was now 11:30 PM, and the night sky over the mountains was clear and bright, concentrating on nothing except the scenery for twenty minutes after all that work was quite relaxing and peaceful.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Unfortunately, I had basically been avoiding the tough question that Felipe had posed to me, what did I want to do now with my new-ish non-human life. I knew that I wanted to build a satellite network, with both up and downward cameras, for mapping the world and for exploring the wonders of space. I also wanted the satellites to have communication network capability allowing me to bring the modern convenience of radio and even the cellphone to this world. However, those dreams are a fair bit out of my current reach, what did I want to do that could be a real and tangible benefit to the people. My core, despite the capabilities it had, only allowed me the reach to cover more than a 25 kilometer radius from my core, at least at this point in my growth. I certainly hadn’t leveraged all of that potential at this point either, that is likely a side effect of my indecisiveness regarding what I truly wanted to do with myself.

I did have a few somewhat vague and unfinished thoughts, as I was located in a mountain range, one thought I had was that I should build a pair of tunnels connecting the far sides of the range might stimulate intra-continental trade, another was to create an underground trade city, associated with the tunnels from the previous idea. The trap and puzzle based dungeon that I had put together, I felt was more of an exploration of my capabilities, a couple of the things I truly didn’t want to happen were the location of my core, and the monopolization of access to what I would build here in the mountains. Those last two things, now that I examined those thoughts seemed to be further evidence of dungeon instincts, the first of those two items I could sort of rationalize away as to be a mildly paranoid desire for the safety of my core, the latter, that I had trouble rationalizing away.

I had been enjoying the scenery and ruminating over that posed question for almost 45 minutes now, as it was 12:14 AM, maybe I should ask Felipe’s group what they would like me to be, for now, it was time to get back to work. I had fifty one hours of work that I could do before dawn, I really do wish I had some Advil or Tylenol. Coding like I have been doing is both really hard, and annoying as hell, not to mention I am not all that great at it, at least compared to my classmates back at Stanford. I really should have started this before the kobolds showed up, this is what I get for trying to shoot for the moon before getting a grip on powered flight. I took a look at the underlying code and hardware I had put together for my text editor, and my EE drawing applications, and started translating the text editor first, as I needed an additional kernel driver to handle the mouse input for the EE application.

Dawn was starting to brighten the sky at 5:56 AM when I finally managed to get a dumbed down byte code version of my favorite Linux text editor, vi, written. It didn’t have all the nice macros of modern vi, but at least it had insert and cursor mode, and a prompt for the write file command. Considering it took almost forty hours of work, with another ten of debugging, I was reasonably happy with the functionality for now. It wouldn’t be too much further in the future before I could deprecate my hard-coded editor. The next bit of code on my agenda will be the mouse driver that I needed for my EE drawing application. Once that is done I can remove my currently kludgy editing hardware, and leverage the equally kludgy CPU that I threw together so as to have something flexible enough to allow me work on a translation application and database. Once I get some time on my figurative hands again I will definitely see if I can’t bring that hardware up to snuff.

I noticed the female elf Serena, I think her name was, stir out of her bedroll, and glance over at my display. If I was still human I would have probably had a case of cat on tongue around her, as she was a fair bit better than average looking woman and frankly I was never the most forward of people. I decided that unless she approached the screen I wouldn’t let on that I was watching, frankly from an intelligence gathering perspective it was probably best to not remind them that I was listening to everyone. It wasn’t but a few short minutes before the rest of the group awoke, themselves and gathered together for a cold breakfast. One of the elves, who wore a pair of swords on his waist took what looked like some dried jerky over to the kobold prisoners, who swallowed the offered meat as though they hadn’t eaten in days, instead of just a few hours.

Felipe, Alesandro, and one of the gnomes, Rhys maybe, approached the kobolds again after they had finished their food. From what little I could make out of Felipe’s conversation with Rhys and Alesandro, it seemed as though they were trying to get the kobolds to agree to not attack them, and maybe something about access to my dungeon. It was hard to tell, even with the sensitivity on the microphone set to maximum, they were just that bit too far away. Not to mention I could barely understand one word in fifteen, talk about frustrating. I had lazed around for quite a bit, and it was now 6:37AM, as it didn’t seem as though Felipe and Alesandro would come by to talk for a bit, I decided I would look and see what was going on at the kobold village, before starting work on the mouse driver I needed.

Turns out it was probably a good thing I took a look over at the village, more than half of the remaining adults had spears in their hands and they looked as thought they would be heading out towards the canyon where Felipe’s group was staying. Given the distance, it probably wouldn’t take the kobolds more than two to three hours before they arrived at the outer defenses for the canyon, yeah, if I didn’t want to be dealing with kobolds all day, I should probably let Felipe’s group know. A quick tone, followed by the powering up of the display and two words on the screen, soon got the camp moving as if I had poured ice down their shirts, what two words, kobolds coming.

Despite not really wanting to scare off Felipe’s group, I got started on copying my railgun chamber, if I am lucky, I may actually be able to finish it off before the kobolds arrive, although it will definitely be close. I had at most 33 hours of accelerated time before the kobolds arrived, so I didn’t waste any of that. I started by placing the railgun cavity just below where I had my overview camera, in the canyon, which was 12 meters above the canyon floor. Instead of laying out the room flat I placed the room at a 20 degree incline towards the canyon floor, this would allow the railgun to cover more of the canyon whilst depressed, if their defenses were breached. Other than that singular difference, I laid out the room, the railgun and the batteries in the same configuration as the one I had constructed over my original opening.

Whilst I was busy with that, the group had all armored up, metal and hard boiled leather, greaves and van braces, bows, spears and swords. The gnomes had draped bags filled with something or other about themselves, and if I didn’t know better, I would have said that they looked like out of place World War One grenadiers with a vaguely steampunk set of armor apiece. The tiger beast-kin had laid out a chalk powder circle and hexagram on the ground around him, along with a variety of, what I assume were reagents of some kind. He didn’t seem to be worried about anything at the moment and seemed to be resting before the coming conflict, in some ways, it almost appeared like a zen state of mind.

Despite all the rest of the groups preparations, Felipe and Alesandro continued their negotiation with the leader of the kobold captives. I am not sure what they will be able to agree to before the other kobolds arrive, but they certainly hadn’t given up yet. It was 8:47AM when I first saw signs of kobolds outside the canyon, and despite my efforts, I hadn’t managed to build up enough ammunition for this new railgun, at this moment, I barely had enough for 30 seconds worth of sustained fire. Depending on how much or how little the kobolds may have been intimidated by the railguns previous performance, that may not be anywhere near enough, I am going to keep on working until the defenses are breached, if they are, hopefully I should have enough ammunition by then.