Over the next week, Violet decided to work on adding more ambiance to her second floor while taking every opportunity she could get to try and sell merchandise to dungeon visitors. Unfortunately, that didn't amount to very many people. Avorn and Camellia came every night, which netted her 700 DP by itself and she was able to convince them to buy some soups and sweets for another 492 DP worth of [Items]. However, Violet got the distinct feeling they had felt bad about turning her down and had gone out of their way to collect some extra pine needles and such to trade with her.
Gregory had shown up every few days, but had seemed uncomfortable the one time Violet approached him, so she didn't end up selling him anything. He had been polite, but she just still couldn't quite handle his overly polite and somewhat fearful behavior towards her. Maybe that was more on her, though, as she couldn't help but worry she was going to scare people away, especially with how badly things had gone with David, who she had, at one time, hoped to have a positive relationship with.
While many of the tributes they had brought were repeats, Violet did manage to obtain some dried spearmint, a rusted bronze wood ax, and a bit of green ribbon. That had amounted to 82 DP, counting the repeats. Honestly, Gregory had been super apologetic about bringing a rusted, old tool the day she had tried to visit him. Violet was actually thrilled about getting a new type of metal as well as an axe for an item, but the whole thing had certainly left a sour taste in her mouth. She didn't want Gregory's family to go broke just so Henry could train in his dungeon. That just didn't align with her goals at all...
Elivyre had also visited a few times in the past week, but a few times she didn't have time to stay. Violet had given her the charity [Items] and then they promised to enjoy tea and talk the next time she visited. Since her friend had been so busy, she had chosen not to bother her about selling anything and to try to just enjoy her company when she was able to stay more than a few minutes. The Dungeon Diplomats who came with her helped with the tributes, so she was able to get a few more interesting [Items] including: some dried curly parsley, wild bergamot, and something the system referred to as almond applesauce. The last one was particularly interesting as Violet had never heard of such a dish, but she wasn't sure if it was a common medieval dish in her world or if it was actually something unique to this one.
There had also been one other group that visited the dungeon twice, but, somehow, she had missed them both times. Still, after their tributes, which were just repeats of what she had previously received, she ended up earning a total of 1,385 DP this week, which brought her total up to 5,660 dungeon points, since she hadn't researched anything this week.
Thanks to the small handful of visitors she had over the course of the week, there was plenty of mana to play around with. That was part of the reason she had increased her charity donations for the week, but the rest of it was spent on small upgrades in all of the second floor rooms. Unfortunately, all of the challenge rooms already had two pixies assigned to the spawner, which took up the full 100 MP limit. However, Violet still decided to go ahead and add twenty five fireflies to each of the rooms, regardless of whether they could be assigned to a spawner or not.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Violet tended to have a sour taste in her mouth whenever she had to assign living things to a dungeon room without there being a spawner for them to be connected to. However, insects were hardly the most sentient, even of the [Critter] options she had. It was unlikely that adventurers would go around killing them off either since they were neither edible nor were they a threat. They would just add a nice bit of ambiance as they flew around, faintly glowing in the shade of the trees.
In all of the forest [Monster] field rooms, Violet also decided to add grass, clover, creeping charlie, Alaska violets, fairy slippers, starflowers, and blue-eyed mary flowers. While there were other flowers that could grow in forest environments like common daisies or wild violets, those had already been used in other places and she didn't want her dungeon to get too repetitive. Besides, Violet knew quite well, thanks to Elivyre, that a good variety of plants spread throughout her floors would be good for drawing in adventurers. With so many different plants in the world, she might as well choose just a few options to decorate each of her floors with, if she used them at all.
All of the plants were fairly cheap as they ranged from 1 MP / 100 Square Units for things like grass to 2 MP / 100 Square Units for the flowers. That amounted to an average of 28 MP to apply everything to each of the [Monster] field rooms. As she wanted the challenge rooms to be a bit more customized, they only shared the grass, clover, and creeping charlie since that helped add a good bit of variation to the ground covering.
The hopscotch, mad tea party, capture the flag, lie detector, and treasure hunt challenge rooms got the same treatment as the [Monster] field rooms. However, the mystery falls room had some watercress, chickweed, and cattails, added while the flowers were skipped. The rainbow of roses, flower hunt, and fae circles challenge rooms utilized flowers as part of their challenges, so no additional flowers were added to those rooms to avoid confusing the adventurers too much.
As for the fairy retreat rest area and the castle ruins boss room, Violet wanted to be especially careful about what plants were added to them. Cattails, watercress, and chickweed were added around the moat area of the boss room while some extra oyster, red pine, and puffball mushrooms were added around the outskirts. As the boss [Monster] was a redcap myconid, she really wanted to emphasize the mushroom theme in the room, but also couldn't resist the pairing of the water-loving plants with the moat. The fairy retreat had some larger plants added around the outside of the main house including: some lavender, baldhip flowers, and sunflowers since it just seemed fitting to have some pretty flowers for a fairy house. For the main forest, though, things were kept simple with just ground coverings so that adventurers weren't tempted to wander around and spend too much time in the room.
It had been a rather busy week full of lots of small changes for the second floor, but Violet felt a lot more satisfied with things now. She was now confident that she'd be able to unlock the third floor at the beginning of spring and then hibernate until the adventurers arrived. With everything thoroughly taken care of on the second floor, she was confident that it was ready for adventurers.