Violet sat at his desk, sulking. He knew he shouldn’t be sulking–he should be celebrating that the bandits were gone. He couldn’t bring himself to feel good about the results. Out in the worldlets, dungeon creatures continued to spawn at alarming rates and he was certain that the dungeon didn’t differentiate between the worldlets where spawned creatures could survive in such numbers and where they would mostly die, like in the tunnels under the lava worldlet.
Violet felt like a monster. More creatures were dying than ever before and it was his fault.
The dungeon fairy looked over towards the dungeon core. It glowed very bright as it pulled immense amounts of mana from the void. Immense amounts of mana just to throw it away, ignorantly killing helpless creatures.
When Violet decided to be honest with himself, he found that his deepest reasons for feeling bad were far worse.
Violet hated that he had thought the dungeon was being mean to him, personally; that it was ignoring him because it didn’t care about him. He put his head down on his desk and ground his forehead into the wood. The dungeon hadn’t cared for a simple reason. It hadn’t know he was there. He had been trying to help captain a ship that had no rudder, no sails, and no crew. How many times had Violet come close to death because the dungeon was doing who-knows-what?
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The safety voice returned to the dungeon mind space. “Greetings.” The voice said. “Identity: Violet Danderpuff”
The loops perked up at the return of the voice. “Greetings.” They replied. This concept seemed unnecessary, but multiple loops checked the memories and confirmed that the voice had used it before. “Identity: Terse Elements Dungeon.”
A bit of confusion entered the loops’ discussion. The vibration component of the safety voice was using entirely different frequency patterns than it had before. Several groups of loops compared the relevant memories and confirmed it: the frequency patterns didn’t match at all. “Confusion.” The loops informed the voice.
“Curiosity, confusion?” The voice asked.
The loops read out the two different frequency patterns for the concept, “greetings”, then repeated, “Confusion.”
“Different languages” The voice said.
The loops did not understand the concept of language. They searched through memories for several minutes before collectively giving up and asking for more. “Curiosity, language.”
“Language: sounds, communication.”
The loops pushed for even more clarity. “Curiosity, sounds”.
The vibration component of the safety voice repeated a very common frequency pattern that the loops had recorded many times. The frequency pattern did not convey any known concept to the loops.
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“Curiosity, sounds.” The dungeon core said.
Violet sighed.