After a good night’s rest, Alex gets up ready to actually get some System-y stuff done. After a light breakfast, he looks up the ad in the local news again, making sure that he’ll have everything he needs before he goes. The Dungeon in question popped up near the south end of the city, near one of the local movie theaters. More specifically it formed in someone’s backyard, and they don’t want something that dangerous right next to where they sleep. As such, they’re asking people online to come and help, since they had already asked the police and they’d simply said to wait while things got under control.
He’d already PM’d the requestee a little last night, and gotten the go ahead to come over today. Turns out he’s going to have some backup, thankfully, since a good few others had responded to the request for help as well. If he had to guess, most people were more interested in getting items from the Dungeon than helping an old woman out, but if it gets the job done it gets the job done.
Seeing his little golem crew climbing up his desk, Scout already trying to climb onto his computer screen to see what he’s reading, he gathers them up to give them a talk. “Alright guys, I know you aren’t going to like what I have to say, but I’m not taking you with me today.” Immediately they look like they’re going to riot, the sounds of whirring motors, squeaking wood, splashing fluid and clinking gemstone coming from the group as they give their own adorable little protests.
“Hey, hey! Calm down guys!” Alex waves his hands in a mild panic. He should have known he’d be weak to them being upset, they’re just too cute even when they’re mad. “Look, I know that you all love it when I take you out with me, and everyone at work love you...maybe a little too much.” There was very nearly an incident when Ms. Morrison didn’t want to give Actress back. “But where I’m going is dangerous! I don’t want to end up losing you guys...”
After explaining the situation-and maybe giving his own version of puppydog eyes, but you’d never get him to admit it-they seem to calm down, doing their own versions of pouting but otherwise seeming to have taken the news well. He leaves them be to cool down while he packs up everything he’ll need, not noticing as they start speaking with each other…
First thing he does is figure out what he’s going to wear, then what equipment he’s going to bring, and try to make a few quick things and maybe try to make a spell or something. Luckily, the meet-up isn’t supposed to be until 3 in the afternoon, and it’ll only take about 45 minutes to drive there thanks to there not being much traffic on weekends.
Although he can’t do much for his clothes, since you can’t exactly carve runes into cloth-he might be able to sow them in but he doesn’t have the time to try it out-he instead focuses on his work boots, belt, and backpack. For his boots he doesn’t try anything too fancy, even though he has ideas of seven-league-boots and other such things flit through his mind, but he’ll stay with functional and easy to make for now.
First he puts several repeating runewords for resistance and strength along the edge of his boots thick rubber heels. On the bottom of the boots, in the gap where the front and the heel of the boot is, he carves a runeword for silence into the rubber, banking on it not taking as much stress and wear compared to the rest of the boot bottom. For the leather of the boots, he puts two simple durability and toughness runewords into the sides, thanks to a mix of that strange System instinct and a building theory he has.
Activating the runewords is a bit iffy, the rubber holds up fine but the leather nearly starts singing with how hot it gets, even without that much in terms of actual runework. If there wasn’t so much more leather material to hold the enchantment it probably would have, which he thinks proves his forming theory.
The level of complexity of a ‘material’ interferes with how much mana it can handle moving through it. Wood and leather are made of irregularly spaced cells, which are themselves very complex, as well as numerous connective tissues to keep it together, which makes them poor conductors. Metal and crystal have few elements in them, and are semi-regularly spaced and ordered, which makes them great mana conductors. Rubber is in the middle, being made of long-polymer chains that are tangled together, which gives them some internal complexity, but not so much that they run the risk of catching on fire.
Keeping all this in mind, Alex moves on to his belt. Using his ‘draw it first’ trick to make very small runewords, he focuses on runewords for protection, resistance, and strength, all Shape Metal’d onto the backs of the rounded studs of the belt where they face the wearer. For his backpack there wasn’t much to be done, but he did have some nice metal zippers to use. Each of the zippers got their own tiny runeword for sealing, but only on one side and only one runeword, not wanting to risk more on such small pieces of metal.
Going to wipe some sweat from his brow, Alex stops when he realizes that he doesn’t sweat anymore. Huh, he kind of wonders if he’s cold blooded. It’s summer right now, so he’ll have to wait and see. For now he turns to Lucy, who seems to be speaking with the Golem Squad, but cuts off whatever she was typing and comes over when he calls for her. “Hey Lucy, could you give me a quick appraisal for these?”
Hmm? Oh! Yeah, sure thing. Here you go.
Boots of Durability & Silence (Runed): Average
These durable boots have been enhanced beyond their natural state with the use of runes, as well as given a minor muffling effect that quiets footfalls.
Belt of Minor Augmentation (Runed): Average
Several small runewords have been strategically placed in this belt, slightly increasing the wearer’s strength and physical resistance, as well as giving a small amount of magical protection.
Minor Sealable Backpack (Runed): Average
This backpack has been given small runic enhancements that make it harder to unzip its openings unless it comes from a recognized user. The current recognized user is it’s creator.
Oh, good news! You got 2 General Achievements! You’ve got Runic Tailor and Runic Armorer, the first one is because you enhanced a wearable item with runes, and the second is because you enhanced an item meant for protecting the user, and belts apparently fit under that description? I might need to call that in, actually…
“Oh, cool. Since they’re general ones, I’m assuming it’s just the related Class?” Lucy seems to shake away her thoughts-how she can be so expressive as just a blue box he’ll never know-and gives a little nod.
Yep! You’ve been getting a lot of runic stuff, though it’s kind of obvious why, are you planning on specializing in it?
“Eh, it’s definitely turning into one of my main shticks but I want to do more than just runes for sure. I’ll be incorporating them into plenty of other projects as well, once I get around to looking into other things. I’ll probably start looking into some of the other things I got from Artificer after the Dungeon.” She gives what he assumes is the equivalent of a shrug, floating back over to the squad while he continues getting prepped.
With his clothes as prepared as they’re going to get, he moves on to other things he’ll be bringing. His wand will obviously be useful, but he’ll keep it out for now since he wants to experiment a bit later on. Thinking about it further, he should probably treat this as a general-purpose survival bag, huh? If these Dungeons are supposed to be a kind of portal into an entirely new place, then the Dungeon could take them anywhere.
With that in mind, he packs accordingly. If you set his backpack on its bottom, there would be two large storage spaces going all the way up the back, one in front of the other. In front of them, and the very back, is another space that’s half the size of the other two, centered closer to the bottom of the backpack. Along with them are two side spaces, but one of them is a stretchy fishnet thing for holding water bottles and the like. There are a few other bits and bobs that it comes with, but those are the main features.
In the smaller front space he puts medical supplies from his bathroom, including a small bottle of iodine, some gauze, various bandaids, etc. In the middle large space, he puts various oddly shaped objects he’ll want to take, like his largest wrench and a battery powered drill(because hey, you never know when you might need to drill a monster in the skull). In the back space he put various bits and pieces of flat wood and metal, both to act as a smooth surface so he doesn’t mess up his back and for use when needed in the Dungeon itself. In the netted side space he puts his thermos, which he’ll fill with ice water before he leaves, and in the other one he puts some small snacks.
As satisfied with his packing as he’s going to get without actually going out and buying stuff specifically for it, Alex takes a glance at the time and sees he’s still got a good 4 hours left until he actually has to go. Making an early lunch so he doesn’t accidentally skip over it, he gets around to trying to create a spell. Thankfully he has two spells to work off of as a starting point, which will hopefully help quite a bit.
As he sits down, wand in hand, Alex goes over what he’s learned about spells from what he got from the System-given skills. First, you need to visualize, then you need to focus your intent on that visualization, and finally you need to do something that expresses that intent and visualization in the real world, like words or movements. Theoretically, you could remove those words and movements completely, but those likely increase the mana cost or the chance of the spell failing, or something else along those lines.
Deciding to work with what he knows, he decides to use his Mold Metal spell as a base. Using it on a random screw, he takes his time while casting, feeling out how everything works and what happens at each step. It takes a few tries, but he does notice something odd that jumps out at him once he notices it. In his Mana Pool, he can feel-see-hear a slightly metallic, silvery, scraping sound coming from somewhere inside of his mana, leaking out into his Mana Pool and getting pulled along into the spell. Setting the wand down to put his full focus on what’s going on, he takes the metaphorical dive.
Just to be clear, Alex’s Mana Pool is not necessarily an actual pool-or lake for that matter-but is instead a flexible mental construct that kind of just becomes whatever representation of his mana it needs to be at the moment. Sometimes it looks more like a giant glowing energy crystal, other times it looks like a giant vat of glowing slime, but right now it does in fact represent itself as a mid-sized lake. Once he looks ‘below the surface’ as it were, he’s able to follow where the trail of slightly more silvery mana is coming from.
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The closer he gets to the source, the stronger the trail of metal essence becomes, turning into a thick cloud of the stuff until Alex is feeling, tasting, breathing and being metal. The opaque fog of metal mana eventually fades until it becomes clear, showing an interesting sight.
The...lakebed, for lack of a better term, in this area has become a cornucopia of metals. Iron and titanium coral reefs, aluminum foil seaweed reaching for the surface, jellyfish with mercury middles and copper wire tentacles. Fish of every species and size, made out of every metal on the periodic table, and even a few that he actually doesn’t recognize. Now that he’s found this place, it’s immediately become much more recognizable and distinct in his mind, though still obviously apart of his Mana Pool. He can tell that this must be the mental representation of his Metal Affinity Ability, though it’s quite intense. It’s almost like that first time he found his Mana Pool.
Coming back to the real world, Alex is a bit shaken, but not nearly gasping for breath like he was when he found his Mana Pool. Curious about how this could affect his spells, he picked his wand back up and cast Mold Metal on his now mangled screw. This time around, knowing exactly where the...Metal Mana? That’s pretty much what it is, so yeah, he’ll call it that. Knowing where the metal mana is coming from, he actively pushes more of it into the spell, hoping for some kind of reaction.
Luckily enough, there is. The screw bends to his will much easier than before, even though he only manages to change what was a 5:95 ratio of metal mana and normal mana to a 20:80 ratio. It’s so easy he manages to warp it back into something close to its original shape, threads and all. The downside is that the Metal Affinity area of his Mana Pool is much smaller comparatively to the rest of his Mana Pool, so even only using 15 percent more metal mana wipes out a whole swath of aluminum foil seaweed and a bismuth scaled catfish. Thankfully some of his regular mana starts flooding into the empty space and seems to shift into more metal mana quite rapidly, which is good.
This is a very good thing though, because he has one other affinity along with metal, Fire Affinity. Even though he doesn’t have any fire-based spells to draw some of that fire mana out, now he knows what to look for. With an excited grin he puts his wand back down and dives into his mind once again.
It takes a while of searching, though he isn’t sure how long it really takes without a clock, but he does eventually find a whiff of smoky-red-crackling fire mana. He nearly loses it in the lake of himself around him, but after another minute of feeling around he catches onto it again, following it back to the source.
Much like with the metal mana, the sensation gets more and more intense until it completely covers him, and suddenly clears away to show another new environment. There are hydrothermal vents spewing out smoky, greasy fire, king crabs made of gray, burning coals, and little embers floating around in the non-existent tides, like little glowing plankton. It definitely has the feel of a cool but creepy ocean bed, with glowing fire replacing bioluminescence. The area is smaller than the Metal Affinity area though, maybe because he hasn’t used it as much?
Coming back to the real world once more, Alex takes a few deep breaths, simply calming down from two weird experiences one after another. He can feel that fire mana in his Mana Pool too now, and from an ‘outside’ perspective he can really feel the difference in size between the two of them. It must work like a muscle, spending those mana types encourages the affinity pools to grow so they can keep up.
But, back to work. Now that he has a direct connection with his Fire Affinity, he feels much more confident in making a fire spell, but he doesn’t want any ordinary fireball, or that [Burn] spell the scorpion girl Natasha used. Instead, he wants to make something that maximizes the usefulness of being able to conjure fire at will, and takes advantage of its effects. For this he’ll actually have to move outside, since he doesn’t want to catch his house on fire.
Moving out into his backyard, he takes a couple of pieces of scrap wood and places them in a pile in the grass, keeping away from anything that may catch on fire on accident. Then, he practices each part of his planned spell separately before he even thinks about bringing them together. For visualization, he pictured a sticky, glue-like gel, sticking to things and catching on fire, being very hard to put out. (He also looked up what the chemical ingredients to napalm were, which he’s pretty sure put him on a watchlist.)
For the intent, he practiced just bringing out fire mana to practice with, slowly working on changing the intent in it to focus on something else. Fire mana by default doesn’t seem to have any particular purpose, just using itself as fuel until it burns out. Instead, he practices making it so that the fire mana becomes hungry and greedy, wanting to burn as long as it can by using as little of itself as possible, eating up physical materials to last longer.
For the physical spell components, Alex decided to use a basic jabbing motion with his wand for minimal splashing and collateral damage, and for the words he came up with this;
“Made in a time long past,
This flame is meant to last,
The terror of a once great war,
[Napalm Splash]”
Once he had rehearsed each of the separate spell components multiple times and felt relatively comfortable with them, he finally started trying to cast the spell in full. The first few times were...disappointing, but he could feel his mana and fire mana going through his wand, it was almost working, he just needed more practice to get everything timed right and given enough concentration. On one try he’d focus too much on visualization, the next he focused too much on intent, it was a bit of a mess really. Every few attempts he would get a little spurt of flame out the end of his wand, which showed he was getting closer.
Eventually, the spell seems to just snap together in his mind, and a thin jet of what looks to him like liquid fire hits the pile of wood scrap he set up, instantly setting it aflame. Just as described, it doesn’t stop burning for a solid 20 minutes, and that’s only because the wood had turned into char and the mana went back to using itself as fuel. All the while Alex just laughed somewhat maniacally at his infinite power-ehem, versatile and useful, if very dangerous spell.
Taking a moment to check the time, if Alex were drinking anything at that moment he would have done a spit-take. “Ah shit, I’ve got to go!” After making sure that the impromptu fireplace was properly doused and not a danger to the rest of the yard, he rushed back inside to fill up his water bottle and place it and his wand in his backpack, zipping up the pockets and slinging it on his back. He heads for the door, only having time to yell an unreturned goodbye to his little golems, assuming they’re still just pouting.
45 minutes later, Alex pulls his car in to park at the movie theater, turning it off and making his way over to the address provided by the woman he PM’d. She’s an elderly woman from what he was told, named Gertrude Hendelton, and was worried that the children in the neighborhood might get hurt in the Dungeon. As such, when he finally found the house in question-thankfully on time-he was not expecting the person he saw when he opened the door.
The simplest way to describe her would be a youthful, stereotypically beautiful elf woman, but dressed in the kind of clothes you’d expect to see on your grandmother. Slippers, stockings, a long skirt, a loose knitted wool sweater, and an over-the-shoulders shawl. She’s even got those glasses with the chain connecting the arms to make it a necklace! Once she sees Alex, she gives him a warm smile, opening the door wider and beckoning him inside the house.
“Ohh, you must be Alex, yes? Here to help with the whole Dungeon business? It’s so nice to meet you in person!” Despite having the youthful voice you’d expect from a lively elf, you can hear the age in her words, just like the kind of slightly creaky voice you’d expect from a grandma. Honestly the whole paradox is throwing him for a loop, blinking dumbly as he follows her through the house.
“So, uh...not to be rude, but-” she gives off something between a girlish giggle and an elderly titter, giving him an amused look. “How do I look so young? Bartholomew helped me figure out how to get a Race with the Extended Life Ability, and I put it into A-Tier. Turns out that combined with my new elven race, it means that being 96 in human years is like being a young adult in elven years. I haven’t felt this young in ages!”
Taking that in, Alex’s mind flies through other potential Ability changes that people may have gotten. Maybe abilities that increase physical attributes? What about mental ones? Before he can get too deep into his own mind though, Gertrude leads him to a sliding glass door. “Now why don’t you make yourself comfortable out in the backyard, get to know the others that came around? I’ve put out cookies and lemonade for everyone to enjoy as well, so take your time!”
Humming to herself as she moves back into the house, Alex is left to enter the backyard on his own. There’s five people already here, and with him that makes six, which means they’re just waiting on one more person. There’s a large pool off to one side of the backyard, as well as a small garden on the other side full of various flowers, but the main point of attention is the massive banana tree growing smack dab in the middle of the yard, a section of the bark from ground level to about a head higher than himself shimmering like a curtain of water. Next to it, there’s a table covered in several different types of cookies and a large pitcher of lemonade, with the aforementioned group surrounding it.
Walking up to the group, he catches their attention with a wave and a hello, the group turning towards him to look him over as he does the same. There are three women and two men in the group so far, with the women consisting of a plant woman, probably some kind of ent or dryad, a normal human-looking woman, and some kind of arachnaea woman, like a spider centaur. Although the spider half seems to be smaller and slimmer than he would have thought. The men consist of a guy who looks mostly human, if not for the fact that his uncovered feet are hands, and he has a monkey tail sticking out of the back of his pants, as well as someone he could only describe as a triton from D&D.
“Hey, nice to meet you! I’m Stacy!” The spider girl is the first to speak, seeming quite bubbly and excitable even at first glance. Seeing the pseudo-hydraulic motions of her spider legs is somewhat fascinating, since the movements are much more exaggerated on a much larger scale, but he manages to shake her hand and introduce himself when prompted rather than look like an idiot. “Oh, uh, nice to meet you. I’m Alex.”
While still shaking his hand, Stacy uses her other one-er, other three hands to gesture to the others and name them as she goes. Seeing four arms on something that already has eight legs has also thrown him for a loop. “Great! That’s Emily-” She gestures to the plant woman. “-Drake ironic, I know-” She points to the triton, giving a stage whisper about the irony and earning a few chuckles. “-Becca-” She singles out the human looking woman, who has a lazy grin on her face. “-And Dave!” Dave gives a salute when mentioned, but otherwise doesn’t react.
When Stacy moves to let go of his hand and move back to her spot around the table, she accidentally nearly tugs his arm out of its socket, which makes her give a little squeak and blush before their hands suddenly stop sticking to each other. “Whoop! Sorry about that, I’ve got some litteral sticky fingers!” Alex waves away her apologies, just happy to see that they hopefully have a pretty decently spread party.
Looking around, he doesn't see their seventh around, he was sure he would have been the last one here. “So, where’s our seventh? Are they not here yet?” Becca answers that, getting a bit grumpy at the mention of their seventh teammate. “They aren’t coming, had a family emergency or something.” Alex blinks a little at that, but simply shrugs his shoulders. “Well, that’s alright, right? We’ve still got 6 people, and it’s not like it’s the first day of the System or anything.”
“True, even in just a week I’ve been able to do a lot.” Drake speaks up, his voice having a hissing undertone to his voice. Stacy, seeing that everyone is on board, does a little hop and pumps her fist in the air, excited to get to it. “Alright! First, what can everyone do? Better to know what kind of loadout we’ve got here. I’m kind of a weird tank-assassin hybrid.” Everyone speaks up in turn, explaining a little about their abilities and what role they can take for the team.
Becca is a mage, specifically she focuses on air spells as a kind of crowd control. Emily is a nature-based healer, though she has an ability or two that can protect her at least for a little bit in close-combat. Drake is a warrior, using a machete as a pseudo-shortsword. Dave is a martial artist, helped along by having technically 4 hands and a prehensile tail to work with. And Alex, obviously, is a basic utility caster with a single heavy-damage spell.
After a good half an hour of planning, strategizing, and eating some really good cookies, the party lets Gertrude know that they’re going in. Before stepping through, everyone connects their screens so that the Dungeon will consider them a ‘party’, and suddenly there’s a lot more colored squares around. There isn’t much time to pay attention to them though, since everyone is already stepping inside the banana tree. With a deep, fortifying breath, Alex steps through too.