“Curiosity, eyes?” The loops asked the Yrryth voice.

“Eyes. Eyes see.” Yrryth replied.

A group examined the concept of “see” and thought it looked similar to the concept of “scan” which is what the loops did to retrieve information from the memory vines or each other. The loops decided to clarify the meaning.

“Query: see, scan, similar?” They asked. No response came for a while. The vibration component loops reported that the Yrryth frequency patterns and the Violet frequency patterns were present in the sensory rain even when the voices were not present in the dungeon mind.

“Curiosity, discussion?” The loops wanted to know what Yrryth and Violet were talking about.

The Violet voice returned. “Can you hear us?” It asked.

“Curiosity, hear?” The loops asked. A subgroup of loops began to bring up a strong correlation between communication with the voices and questions that remained unsatisfactorily answered.

“You don’t know what hearing is, you don’t know what seeing is?” Violet asked.

The loops checked a few memory branches before replying. “Affirmative.” They said.

“Do you know what touch is?” Violet asked.

The loops discussed and decided that the concept of touch made sense. “Affirmative.”

There was a delay before Violet spoke again. “Ok, hearing is when something touches the air and vibrates it, then the vibrations travel through the air and touch something that can… take in the vibrations and examine them. I suppose the vibrations could travel through water or the ground or anything really. The important part is taking in the vibrations and examining them. Does that make sense?” Violet asked.

The loops that were tracking vibration components of “others” and the loops that recorded the frequency patterns all agreed that they were “hearing”, based on the explanation from Violet.

“We hear you.” The loops said.

“Why did you say ‘we’?” Violet asked.

The dis-satisfied subgroup grew a little in size as the loops wondered about and discussed Violet’s nonsense question. “We are us.” One group tried to point out the obvious to the Violet voice.

“Ok, fine. Anyway, ‘seeing’ is taking in light and, um, examining it.” Violet said.

The loops knew about “light” since they had their own mirror light and felt the plant instincts respond to the concept of light. The loops’ discussion didn’t arrive at an understanding of what it meant to ‘examine’ light.

“Curiosity, examine light?” They asked. The dis-satisfied group grew in size again.

“I’m sorry. You have eyes on some of your avatar’s leaves, so I thought you could see. Eyes are where you can take in light, but I don’t understand how it works so I can’t explain it.” Violet said.

The dis-satisfied group lost a few members. The loops didn’t think that they could blame Violet for not understanding something that the loops didn’t understand either.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Yrryth left, but boss bat is here now. Boss bat would like to talk to you.” Violet said.

Another new voice spoke into the dungeon mind. “Greetings. Identity: boss bat.” The voice said.

“Greetings. Identity: Terse Elements Dungeon.” The loops replied. “Curiosity, boss bat language?” A few groups of loops pointed out that the discussion was proceeding nearly identically to the discussion with Yrryth.

“Bat squeak.” Boss bat said. “Few words, lots of context.” It said. The “language” loops were pleased to begin compiling a new mapping for this language.

“Bats die.” Boss bat said.

“Curiosity, bats die?” The loops asked.

“Bats spawn, but bats small. Bats crushed and die.” Boss bat explained. “Boss bat is sad.” It said.

The loops had no idea what “sad” was. “Curiosity, sad?”

“Sad. Sad that bats die. Sad that water is full of dead creatures. Sad, sad, sad.” Boss bat said.

The loops discussed and decided that “sad” was the bat’s response to the referenced events, but they still didn’t understand the significance.

The Violet voice interrupted the boss bat voice. “Sad is a kind of pain in the mind.” It said.

“Yes.” Boss bat said. “Boss bat feel pain because bats die.”

The loops didn’t find any good memories that provided information about how to discuss pain, but an echo drifted up from the red memories. “Pain, absorb, grow.” The loops said to boss bat.

“Bats die before they can grow. Pain, die.” Boss bat said.

The loops examined this statement and carefully compared it to the echo from the red memories. “Contradiction: pain, absorb grow. Pain die.” The loops said.

The Violet voice returned. “You are killing them before they have a chance to grow. They are being crushed, so they can’t ‘pain, absorb, grow’ and they just ‘pain, die’.” Violet said.

In the following discussion, a group of loops began to examine the idea of halting the spawn of creatures and observing the results. Several other groups replied with the memories of creature death correlated with danger. The first group turned inward and discussed the idea some more before returning to the larger discussion. The group pointed out that creature death was present everywhere in the memories, but the Violet voice only pointed out the danger of creature death when “bandits” were concurrent with creature death. Perhaps, the group suggested, bandit-related creature death was different in some way.

—————

The discussion among the loops continued for several hours, but at some point, the desire to stop spawning creatures reached a tipping point where the energy for spawning slowed to a trickle. The defensive-focused loops refused to give up entirely on spawning creatures but had a limit of how much energy they could direct by themselves.

Out in the dungeon, dozens and dozens of dungeon creatures struggled to climb out of mounds of bodies and avoid being crushed in avalanches. The ravens all perched on the branches of the treetop worldlet. They had gorged themselves on carrion in the main worldlet, but eventually the danger of being crushed and the smell drove them off.

The Violet voice returned. “The spawning has stopped, thank you. Now please clean up the dead creatures.” It said. The dis-satisfied loops regrouped and began retrieving negative memories about discussions with Violet.

“Curiosity, clean up?” A group asked.

“Yesterday you said, ‘pain, absorb, grow’. There has been a lot of pain, now you need to ask the System to help you absorb the remains so you and the dungeon creatures can grow.” Violet said.

The dis-satisfied group paused their complaints as the loops all considered and discussed this insight from the Violet voice.

“Desire, absorb.” The loops attempted to direct the System. The System responded.

Significant Battle Debris Detected. Absorb? Yes/No

“Yes.” The loops answered.

Material Unlocked: “Copper”

Material Unlocked: “Leather”

Material Unlocked: “Horn”

Material Unlocked: “Iron”

The loops had no trouble recording four short System messages. The initial discussion was short and the loops asked Violet for more information. “Curiosity, material unlocked?”

“Oh good, I guess the bandit remains had some useful stuff on them. Some of the materials you absorbed were within your ability as a level ten dungeon core, so the System unlocked them for you. What did you get?” Violet said.

Before the discussion could begin in earnest, a few loops answered the question. “Copper, Leather, Horn, Iron.”

“Good. That’s good.” Violet said. The Violet voice remained silent for a while.