"What do you think, love? Do you think they'll like it?"
"Huh?"
Cedar asked, causing Violet to blush before dismissing his question.
"Oh, nothing, just talking to myself!"
Cedar looked at Violet with a bit of skepticism. This wasn't the first time he had heard her talking to someone who wasn't there. Yet she always seemed unwilling to clarify when asked. She just turned beet red and then tried to play it off as if it was nothing of importance.
Violet looked down at her drawings with an expression of concentration. She had been hoping to get more challenge rooms done on the first floor this week, but there simply hadn't been enough mana to do everything she wanted. Still, she really hoped the children, like Alice and Henry, would like the new puzzles and rewards she had implemented.
Since she had decided to go with a candy store theme for her tribute room, she ended up designing five challenge rooms with old-fashioned candies for their rewards. The only problem was that she had only had 199 MP left to spend for the week by the time she started working on them, so she had only gotten around to making three of them. Still, she was rather looking forward to implementing the other two sometime in the next few days.
The first room she had designed was a 3D slime-themed jigsaw puzzle. It was a bit of a recycled idea considering she already had a slime-themed jigsaw puzzle, but it still seemed like a fun idea. When she had first designed the other one, she had even caught some of them trying to stack the puzzle pieces that were meant to lay flat, as if it was a 3D puzzle instead. Now she would actually have one, which she was sure would result in just as much chaos and confusion as the first one had.
Of course, she couldn't just simply make it a 3D version of the first one, it was necessary to improve upon the first design! So, she had used blue dye on the wooden pieces so that the finished result could look like an emperor basic slime when complete. Although it would have been pretty neat to do an emperor rock slime, Violet worried that the grays and browns would end up looking too similar to the first design, so that idea had been quickly scrapped for a basic slime instead.
As for the reward in the room, this one had been based on the peanut butter "kisses" that used to be very rarely given out at Halloween when she was a kid. Some of the older folks enjoyed them and wanted to share their love of the candy by sharing them with the new generation. Apparently, many of the parents disapproved of it, though, as the wrappers tended to be harder to check for signs of tampering and the candies were often handmade. However, after Violet had expressed interest in the candy, her mother had brought her out to buy some from a specialty store nearby and she had fallen in love with the soft, chewy, and sweet candy.
Of course, there weren't actually any peanuts among the [Base Resources] cataloged in her system. That much hadn't changed at all since she had made the walnut fudge. However, it also seemed a bit boring to just do a walnut candy again, so Violet opted for making pecan "kisses" instead. It ended up costing 20 DP to research the pecan butter, 10 DP each to research black and orange wax paper for candy wrappers, and then 30 DP to research the pecan "kisses" themselves. Of course, as per usual, it also cost the same amount as it did to research the [Item] initially in order to set it as the reward for the challenge.
Still, even after the 50 MP and 100 DP to research and implement the 3D puzzle, the total costs for setting everything up were only 50 MP and 170 DP, which really wasn't that bad. Well, that was if she didn't consider the cost of building the rooms and connecting hallways, but, well, those were old costs anyway.
The next challenge she had set up was also a slime-themed puzzle, which really was starting to make her dungeon challenges on the first floor seem a bit repetitive. However, Violet didn't particularly care that much about how original everything was. She just wanted a variety of puzzles that could be completed safely by children and beginner adventurers alike while also maintaining a slime theme throughout most of the puzzles. Well, not every challenge had to involve slimes, some could just be inspired by children's games she had enjoyed while growing up, but it was still nice to make a good chunk of them slime-themed.
Of course, in order to space things out a bit, Violet alternated which of the challenge rooms had which puzzles. While she built all of the slime-themed ones first, she skipped one of the new 16-Units by 16-Units square rooms to leave space for other puzzles before making the next one. Since there was only one connecting hallway to lead from the koi pond to the last challenge room space, that meant one would have to slowly progress through the challenge rooms with a [Monster] field in between each. So, ideally one would do the slime-themed jigsaw puzzle, the hay meadow, a different challenge, and then the 3D slime-themed jigsaw puzzle. Then there would be the new dandelion meadow [Monster] field before another type of challenge room before the third slime-themed puzzle came into play.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
The third one ended up being a sliding image puzzle type. It was another flat puzzle, but the pieces couldn't be picked up and moved around. Instead one had to push the images around to unscramble them and make the final image. This one Violet had also made a colored version with green grass in the background and the same blue basic slime design as the 3D slime-themed jigsaw puzzle.
That one had cost her 50 MP and 180 DP to set up, which was a little bit more than the other puzzle, even despite taking fewer research steps to complete. There were really only two things to research. The initial puzzle, which had cost 50 MP and 100 DP and then the reward. This time Violet went with a rainbow lollipop reward, which sounded simple enough until one got into the finer details of what all was required to research it. In fact, it had cost four times the amount that the wild violet & honey lollipops had.
See, Violet wanted each color layer on the lollipop to have its own flavor. She had gone with raspberry, orange, blueberry, and blackberry for the red, orange, blue, and purple colors, but the rest had just been honey-flavored. She didn't want to ruin the lollipops by involving too many different flavors, but she felt the combination of those five worked well enough. Still, it had resulted in a total research cost of 40 DP, which had then been doubled so she could set the challenge reward as well.
The other three challenges Violet had in mind for building were a bit more complicated as she had to build them from individual pieces. So, she only ended up creating a pick-up sticks challenge, which was placed between the dandelion meadow and sliding slime puzzle rooms. Luckily, the sticks themselves were pretty cheap to research at a mere 6 DP, which was likely due to the simplicity of their design since they were just dyed wood. However, Violet remembered that pick-up sticks games always involve a minimum of thirty sticks to ensure there were enough for, at least, two players. So, she had to spend 90 MP just to create the minimum number of sticks needed.
It was quite interesting to see the giant sticks piled on top of one another in the middle of the room, especially with the rainbow of colors they came in. Of course, normally a game of pick-up sticks would also involve a stick for the player to wedge under the others. They'd have to remove one without any of the other sticks being jostled in the process. If they failed, it would be the other players turn. Once all of the sticks were safely collected, whoever had the most would end up winning the game.
For this version of the game, the objective was a bit different, though. Instead of being a competitive game, the challenge could be done single-player. Violet planned to make it so there was no minimum for the number of sticks that had to be picked up either with even just one being removed equalling a win. Since players would have to carefully remove a stick with their bare hands, despite the sticks being taller than them, it would already make for quite a difficult challenge.
While one might have concerns about how feasible it was for a child to even attempt the challenge, Violet had made sure to address this when she was building the game. The sticks were super lightweight to the extent that they could easily be snapped in half, even by a non-adventurer. So, while it would likely be difficult logistics-wise due to the size of the sticks, it was technically something that could be completed by anyone.
As for the prize for the challenge, Violet had to research white wax paper before combining it with eggs, sugar, vanilla, water, red dye, orange dye, yellow dye, green dye, blue dye, and purple dye to make candy buttons. There wasn't any flavoring to these and they reminded Violet of mini meringues to some extent, but they were still very much so a classic candy.
Violet hadn't exactly made candy buttons before, so this was her first time even really thinking about the ingredients they were made with. Instead, it was thanks to her enhanced memory from bonding with the dungeon that even allowed her to recall ingredient lists she had maybe glanced at once in her lifetime that allowed her to recreate such things. Really, this was far beyond just having a photographic memory as Violet didn't even have to have gotten a proper look at something before. She just had to think about the information she wanted to recall and flashes of memory would appear before the information she wanted slowly filtered into her mind.
It had been a bit difficult to get used to everything in the dungeon when she had first arrived. However, as the days went by, it became much easier. In fact, the dungeon system no longer caused her migraines when it needed to search her memory for information. It just had a notification appear and then quickly implemented whatever she was asked for. Perhaps, one day even that would no longer be necessary. Regardless of how strange it all was, it really didn't seem worthwhile to spend too much time dwelling on it.
There were much better things to think about like how she wanted to go about creating her next two challenge rooms. She would have to wait until she had the mana for them, but she already had plans to make a giant Jenga game and a wooden lock puzzle challenge. Since she still had 11,126 DP from her trades with David and everything else, even after all of her expenditures, she was pretty free to work on things as she liked. All she had to do was wait for the mana to come in so she could get to work.
The second floor could likely use some work as well, maybe some more [Traps] and more difficult challenges, but Violet just didn't feel as motivated to work on it. Who was even going to see the second floor when no one was even coming to look at the first floor? Maybe if she tried harder to make her first floor new and exciting again she would eventually have enough people interested in her dungeon to make it feel worthwhile to work on things again...