After a minute of thinking over its options, it disregards the Evacuation and Relic Bunker themes. traps can be bypassed if one knows what to look for after all, and it doesn't really feel like caving in its own home as a defense method. Thus, it is left with a decision between the Military and Research Bunkers.
It's a tough choice, both options are rather nice sounding. Eventually, however, it settles on its choice for theme.
'Research Bunker please.'
The core intones its choice, reality solidifying around it as its kaleidoscope of shifting colors adjusts slightly, gray becoming a little more prominent on it. It doesn't really mind though. After all it's just a slight cosmetic change, for now anyway.
The dungeon goes back to its status screen, eager to see the restrictions gone from its page.
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[Unnamed Rainbow Dungeon Core]
Level: 1*
Floors: 2* (NO NEW FLOORS GRANTED UNTIL LEVEL COUNT MATCHES FLOOR COUNT)
Core attunement: Unknown
Dungeon Theme: Research Bunker
Mana: 2/20; Regen: 1/hour
Creatures: 0/2 (-50% Max Creature Count)
Special Creatures: 0/0
Boss Creatures: 0/0
Skills: Mana Generation (SPECIAL) (PASSIVE); Territory Manipulation; Domain Sight; Creation; Destruction; Absorption; Spatial Storage; Analysis
Titles: Herald of The System; Timekeeper
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Ah, well, that's a pain. Seems like it's intuition was right, it's getting fewer creatures to use. Oh well, time to get to work. This dungeon isn't gonna fix itself after all, and all of its skills are available for use.
With it's new theme, it gets to work using [Analysis] on every piece of debris left scattered around, watching the items decompose into little glowing motes of mana before that disappears as well and it absorbs just about everything of whatever item it analyzed. Broken chunks of concrete, frayed wire, smashed furniture, if it wasn't nailed down or apart of the structure, the core ate all the details it could of the item.
Honestly, despite the rather, well, for lack of a better term, utter state of disrepair and destruction, it can admire some of the craftsmanship it's seeing. Better than what it knows to be the more basic knowledge all dungeons are given when they are born. It thinks it's going to like this new reality it finds itself on, despite not really having existed in any others before being placed in this one.
After a few hours, it's already done cleaning up all the debris, shattered furniture, and decomposing corpses. The place is looking better already, now for the hard part: shoring up the walls and ceiling. First thing first, the caved-in room on the upper level. Getting all of its admittedly small mana pool and new-found knowledge of reinforced concrete ready, it starts rebuilding the ceiling. Already dried and set concrete and steel bars of rebar start to grow out of the edges of the hole, dirt shifting as it's either shoved out of the way or transmuted into concrete and steel. Unfortunately, it turns out making concrete is a lot more mana intensive than it thought at first, its entire pool drying up in minutes. Well, this is going to take a while.
Inches at a time, it slowly mends the collapsed room, having to stop every few minutes for its mana pool to fill back up before resuming the process. After a few cycles of this, it ponders over a better way to go about this. Spending a few hours thinking it over, finally it decides to simply just build the rebar reinforcements first, then add the concrete once all the steel has been laid.
When its pool has refilled and the dungeon puts this new plan to action, progress is much more noticeable, steel carving through the dirt and stone, creating a lattice grid. A few parts even connect to the far wall which has been buried and is partially collapsed as well. Its gem bobs in contentment, happy at seeing the much more visible progress. Another full mana pool later, and the rebar has been laid in full, ready for the concrete to be added and for the gaping wound in its dungeon to be fixed. The concrete is still going to be wicked expensive though. Huh, wicked... That's a new one, though it feels the word is fitting.
The following two weeks are spent slowly filling in the concrete, bit by bit encasing the steel rebar frame in a foot-thick layer of the special liquid stone. Finally, when the collapsed ceiling and wall are fully fixed, it sags in relief. Finally, it's all patched up and it can clear out the dirt and debris. After taking a moment, it starts removing all the earth that filled the room, as with the hole patched it doesn't need to worry about more pouring in. it may be magical but no newborn can support a mountain's worth of material.
Once all the dirt, rock, and debris finishes dissolving into little motes of mana, it takes a minute to appreciate the new space, the room having doubled in size, the new concrete having a distinctly more clean appearance than its surroundings. The floor is still partially cratered though so it's going to have to fix that too, alongside all the other slight structural weaknesses.
Carefully, the dungeon begins its most pressing fixes by dissolving the entire area of the floor that has been crushed. Then it moves to the floor below and shores up the ceiling, pushing the slightly bowing concrete back into place before fixing and reinforcing the damaged area. Once that's done, it packs in the thin dirt layer between floors back to what it should be, no more than half-a-foot thick. The dirt is just over a single mana, the material literally dirt-cheap compared to the reinforced concrete. Finally, it spends another couple days replacing the floor, restoring the room to its former 'glory' of being a bare room with nothing in it.
With the most pressing of the repairs complete, it moves on the more minor patches, filling in cracks and holes and replaces chunks that broke off the structure. This process is much faster, and once it's done, the core is proud of its progress, finally ready to begin the much larger scale changes, building it to fit its theme. After all, choosing its theme let The System implant in its mind just how things should look and be roughly arranged, and its eager to get to work.
Quickly, it gets to work with its first room, building a reception room with a wood desk, some steel chairs with thin cushions, and a rug. It's a rather cheap and simple design, but it gets the job done of a reception for now. It can't afford to spend too long on just the entrance before adding defenses after all.
Next up, a trap! It looks over what traps are available to it. One is a snapped live high-voltage wire, pretty noticeable, but also incredibly lethal if one is distracted or if the wire is laying in water. There's also ruptured pipes which can spew a liquid or gas either on an interval or set to a specific trigger, again, something useful to catch someone off guard. It's third option was rather insidious, however. Rigging a vent to burst open and release a dozen rats would be very effective at terrifying and distracted the weak-willed, and could easily cause someone to stumble or fall into another trap or a monster. Of course, the rats wont be particularly strong, just able to claw and bite and run around a bit before disappearing into whatever nearby nook or cranny, but it'll still see its uses most definitely.
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As a first trap, however, it decides to go simple, laying a live wire in a puddle about 3/4 as wide as the corridor, right behind the door. Just to make sure the water doesn't disappear too, it builds a water pipe across the ceiling and has it constantly leak to refill the puddle. There, that'll do as its first trap.
The corridor itself has some side rooms which will do nice for some extra set dressing, turning the small room on the left into a simple utility closet with some pipe valves and a junction box in place. These ones don't work yet though until it gets the broken generator working though. It's much more economical to have something else do the work after all and just use a little mana to keep it working rather than just use mana constantly to generate the electricity and water pressure.
Speaking of which, its next place to check is the generator room. There it looks over all the devices, wires, and machines for the first time, really absorbing the details, and figures its in over its head in fixing this stuff up. There is a lot of machinery here that it didn't eat up since it was still mostly in one piece, or looked like it, but peering inside the metal bodies reveals just how poor the state of them is in, with what it thinks was a battery stack just having a half-melted interior it can't even begin to decipher.
It figures it'd rather just cut its losses on that front, and dissolves what it presumes to have been a battery stack, letting The System decipher what it was supposed to be. Next, it moves onto the generator, the most intact machine present. It just needs to mend an axle and repair some gears, belts, and pistons before the diesel-powered machine is able to be turned over without sounding like its eating itself. Its fuel tank also still had enough diesel in it to let it learn how to make the fuel too so it wont run out. The diesel is still expensive though, just like the concrete.
Eager for its first floor to be coming together nicely, it moves to the large room and set up some bare office furniture, wood desks, bare steel chairs, some miscellaneous blank papers, and something new it was given. Waiting for its pool to refill, it summons an [Old Personal Computer System] at one of the desks, consuming half of its pool to create the delicate electronics on just the one object, and then hooking it up to the wiring in walls to power it, alongside some much cheaper to make lights in the rooms' ceiling and along the hall too.
It adjusts the wiring, getting fed up with some of the buried cables and just pulling it all out of the walls so it can work easier. Routing the main power line from the generator and to the junction box in the utility closet, it then networks out three sets of wires, one for the hall lights, one for the room lights, and one for the computer itself. Getting giddy, it spins up the generator, watching the bulbs brighten everywhere and the computer even flicker on before all the lights, the monitor, and the junction box itself explodes in a shower of sparks and shrapnel. Uh oh...
It's shocked by the sudden electrical explosions, and gets to work figuring what went wrong. It also snuffs the small fires out, it doesn't need fire in it right now and it's thankful it can willingly choose to not smell the effects. The shrapnel also gets cleaned up, it not needing the unnecessary mess right now.
Looking over, it can see the wires melted in several spots, the junction box is also partially melted, and the computer has been turned to worthless slag and will need to be fully replaced. It winces at that last part, remember how costly making it was. Thinking, it tries to ponder just what happened before stumbling across the answer in one of the other machines in the generator room that it didn't bother with at first, just glancing over it. Looking over it now, it realizes it's actually the remains of what probably used to be a rather robust transformer system. Obvious in hindsight consider the generator is absolutely massive. There's no way it can restore the device fully though, but it'll have to do something as without a transformer, the generator may just simply cause whatever it's hooked up to to blow up, admittedly not the worst outcome as it can still use the explosions, but it wont be able to control them as well so it wants to remedy that.
It dives in, looking over the scrap as best as it can to figure what it did before it dissolves the pile, clearing the space. It soon learns there was a lot more copper in it than it first appeared, probably from it rusting, and it knows transformers have a lot of copper in them so its sure it was right with it having used to be a transformer. Using its limited knowledge on the subject, it builds a basic but pretty decently large transformer, wrapping copper around a rod of pure iron 2 feet long, repeating the process, then attaching the two rods together using 3-foot rods to make a rough rectangle. Mounting the creation on the wall, the system rewards its efforts with the blueprint of a [Ramshackle Large Electrical Transformer].
Rude... but fitting.
It spends another day mending all the faults and damage from its previous experiment with electricity, then attaching the generator to the transformer before attaching that to the junction box. Now, time for the moment of truth. The generator spins up, bolts of electricity arc on the exposed transformer, and the lights turn on without blasting into pieces. Success!
As if the system has been watching it solely, its receives a notification.
'Congratulations! For creating a functional electrical grid, basic upkeep of electrical items, lights, and traps will be removed while the grid is functional and if connected to it! New trap options unlocked.'
Huh, it didn't even realize the things had an upkeep, then again nothing was on except for a single sparking wire so it's sure it can be excused for not noticing. Looking back on it, the one wire trap did require 1 mana every day, so it's still nice to be able to remove that requirement.
Looking over its new achievement, it spies the new options on its transformer and junction box.
'Junction Box: Rig to explode if tampered with? Will disable electrical supply to attached objects.'
'Ramshackle Large Electrical Transformer: Rig to explode violently if tampered with? Will disable electrical grid.'
Metaphorically shrugging, it enables both options, noting a new mark on them labelling them as trapped visible only to itself. There, now it's extra secure.
Moving on, it gets to work on pipes and the water pump, having a pair of pipes run down the length of the corridor hanging from the ceiling, and bringing them to the room where the water pump is. fixing the pump is much easier than the electrical system, simply replacing some gears, pistons, and valves, and fixing the pipes and attaching them to the small network, and a water tank, for now anyway. It'll figure out some kind of flooding trap later. It also hooks the pump up to the grid, letting it actually work when the time comes.
The system is pretty simple, water gets pumped out of the tank, goes down the length of the corridor, goes through the utility closet, then goes right back into the tank. It's just there more for atmosphere than anything else right now.
Finally, it's time for the ventilation system. Nothing fancy, just a simple network of ducts with the main duct hanging from the middle of the corridor ceiling, going through reception, then connecting to the already existing exterior vent access. Each room also has a single vent in it near the ceiling. There, now the air can move easier.
With the basics complete for the first floor, it finishes up, adding some more lights before hooking them into the grid, and building up the office some more, adding more furniture, some lockers in a corner, and finally building a barricade in the corridor so anyone entering has to entire the office from one side and exit through the other door to continue deeper. This room truly is shaping together nicely for a first proper encounter.
As it works, another welcome development occurs.
'First floor sufficiently built up! Lab rats will now passively spawn and roam the first floor.'
A large specimen of a rat appears and starts to simply scurry around, sticking to the shadows. It observes the little critter, noting how unhealthy it looks, with a sickly gait and glossed over eyes though rather ferocious looking teeth and claws. A good little denizen is what it is. Surely, they'll make for nice ambience, plus it doesn't need to feed them either so no loss in its mind with the rats' initial showing.
Anyway, no more distractions, time for the first abomination!