That night, Violet was feeling especially inspired. She had been boredly reminiscing on her days in the modern world where she used to have plenty of entertainment. While she could now relive her favorite memories where she played her favorite video games or watched fun movies, that didn't mean that she wanted to spend all of her time here asleep. Still, it had reminded her of something useful to use for a challenge idea on the second floor.
While pixies were a type of fairy and most certainly not the same as other types of fairies, that didn't mean she couldn't interpret the concept more broadly. Besides, she used to love reading fairy tales of all sorts when she was a young girl. One of which covered the topic of changelings, which is essentially when a baby would be replaced and the original would be taken to the world of fairies.
Violet was pretty sure that the concept was meant to act as an explanation for things like colic in babies where they would constantly cry and scream. Having your baby be more fussy and difficult to care for than those your friends and family had raised was likely to be stressful. Since those in the history of her old world didn't have the sort of knowledge and medical care they did in modern day, it was likely the tale had originated from that. At least, that was Violet's theory.
Regardless, that was hardly the only fairy shenanigans she had read about. There was also the concept of fae [Traps] and fairy circles that one could find out in the wild. The latter was specifically a circle-shaped ring of mushrooms, which could be found in forests, grassy meadows, or other natural areas. Other times the circle might be made from stones, moss, or even just unnaturally tall grass. However, traditionally it was mushrooms.
As for fae [Traps], that was a bit more complicated. While both are considered to lead you to the world of the fae, forever dooming you to remain trapped there, or otherwise bring you harm, the fae [Trap] wasn't necessarily circular. It could be a set of stairs that lead to nowhere, an archway made from trees that bend unnaturally, or any other number of things. While Violet wasn't particularly superstitious, she still found the idea a fun one to play around with.
Before she could get started on her plans, Violet had to do some experimenting. She went to the first empty room, just past the blueberry forest room, and headed to the center of it. Then she experimented with trying to remove or even just move the trees around. Violet knew that the system could be particular about the room still being considered on theme, but it also tended to give her quite a bit of freedom. After a bit of work, Violet was able to remove many of the trees from the center of the room while moving the rest of them to the outer portion of the room, creating a nice little clearing.
Nodding, she looked around quite happy with it. She felt like she was in the middle of a dense forest that just so happened to have a small clearing in it. That was just right for what she needed, so she moved on to the next step. Normally, when Violet applied things like flowers to a room, she just added it as a blanket effect to the entire room. However, this time would be different.
Using snowdrop flowers, pinkish-orange starflowers, and blue-eyed mary flowers, she made three large, overlapping circles in the middle of the clearing. This only ran her 6 MP since she was covering such a small area with the flowers. In fact, the circles weren't even filled out, but formed more of a ring with no flowers inside or outside of the circle. Due to the way they were overlapping, they looked a lot like a venn-diagram, which was where the challenge was going to come in.
Violet planned to make it so that the adventurers each had to stand in the middle of one of each of the three circles. Then they would have to place an [Item] in the overlapping part that was related to both of the people in the primary circle. In the middle, they would have to have a fourth [Item] that connected all three of them. It wasn't until they successfully did so that the door to the room would unlock. Of course, Violet was perfectly aware that the adventurers could come to the room in smaller parties, but that could easily be fixed by instructing the two pixies she planned to assign to the room to participate.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
In fact, she kind of hoped that the adventurers would have to involve her pixies. It would be good for them to get to know more about them so that they'd be less likely to want to kill them off. It wasn't like all of the [Monsters] in her dungeon were threats to adventurers, even if the pixies didn't exactly like the people of this world either. Maybe that could be resolved a bit through this challenge as well. However, before she could worry about that, she would have to get some new pixies to assign to the room.
Spending 100 MP, Violet set up a new spawner in the room. Then she went ahead and spent the 100 MP required to complete the contract and summon two new pixies to her dungeon. However, she hadn't been expecting two rather elderly pixies to appear in her dungeon. They appeared to be a couple since the female one was clutching the male close to her with a worried expression on her face.
Violet frowned, hoping that this wasn't going to be a repeat of the last time something like this happened. She didn't particularly enjoy having Lily fear her and it had taken a lot of time to earn her trust. Of course, Violet didn't have anything against her [Monsters] being socially awkward, she just felt guilty and bad about herself when it happened. She didn't particularly like that feeling.
The elderly old man squeezed his companion's hand with a reassuring smile on his face before flying closer to Violet. When he spoke it was very slow and deliberate, but also reminded Violet of her own grandfather, which made her feel homesick. Still, he was quite friendly as he introduced himself.
"Hello, miss. Pardon our lack of manners, but time has taken its toll on us. I'm Hawthorn and this is my wife, Aster. We're very grateful for you accepting us into your dungeon."
Violet felt a bit more at ease, but she still couldn't help but ask
"I'm not bothering your wife, am I?"
The old woman laughed amusedly before replying
"Oh, no, dear. Rather, instead, we are more so worried that we might be a burden on you."
Violet tilted her head in confusion as she asked
"How could that be the case?"
Her husband patted his wife's hand again in reassurance before replying on their behalf.
"Well, we are quite elderly. I don't know how much use we could be to you. We wanted to join a dungeon so we could retire in peace without worrying about being bothered by those who stumble about in our home forest. However, we realize that might be a bit selfish of us. It's usually the youngsters who sign up for such opportunities."
Violet waved her hand to dismiss their worries as she reassured them.
"I'm not bothered by your age. I will say, though, I think I'll need to change my plans. I was initially looking for someone to help me out with the challenge in this room, but I think it would be better to come up with something more suitable for you all. Still, I hope you can relax here, for now. Since it's still winter, there shouldn't be many adventurers coming up to this floor and there are other pixies you can meet in the other rooms."
Hawthorn nodded, gratefully thanking Violet.
"Thank you, I'm sure we'll be fine. We're happy to help with the challenge here, but I also understand if you have something else in mind for us."