OK, what do responsible owners of giant skeletons do, that’s right, step one establish contact, step two, teach it not to crush houses or kill innocent families, or better yet, step two, do not crush my crystal lens, please oh please don’t break it, not now. OK, still on step one. I try to summon all my positivity and happy thoughts, it’s a child, an immature baby regardless of its propensity to cause great damages, and kids raised with threats and attacks on their self-confidence, always living in fear of the next reprimand, are more likely to be twitchy and break a crystal by mistake. Yes, that’s the reason, it has nothing at all to do with how shitty a thing that is to do to someone, nor anything to do with my own childhood. Nope, this is sheer pragmatism, I am a pragmatist, and I will pragmatically be the most loving and caring parent I can be to my newfound skeletal titan.
Fully reassured about my motives I summon back the positivity, hide my worries and speak to the soul more. “Why hello there little one, you’re alive now aren’t you, yes you are, yes you are!” OK, I have no idea what else to do, baby talk seems to be working since its soul mote is dancing around happily, but all I’m picking up from it is happy confusion as it revels in my attention and soaks up that black gas. I hope that’s not bad for it. I might be going about this wrong though, it’s not speaking in words, it’s speaking in thoughts. Naive and floaty thoughts about how comfortable the swirl of combating gasses about it feels or the strange change it sees happening below it as the stone is eroded by that clash, but thoughts, feelings, ideas, not words. Is this telepathy? In that case maybe I try focusing my thoughts on delicate, careful, the feeling of nervous self-control that someone gets when walking through a china shop. I focus on these thoughts for what would probably have been an hour if I was counting instead of thinking of how delicate the world is and how slowly and carefully you have to move through it. By now my skeletal titan seems to have slowly moved from giddy childish joy to having nerves wound up like a string. Bird poopies to the eye that was the opposite of what I meant to do. I switch to telling it what a good and kind and nice skeleton it is and how I know it would never hurt anyone. I tell it I love it and that it’s the best skeleton it could ever be, that I care for it and that everything will be okay as long as it does its best.
Crap, am I going in the wrong direction again? I worry that if I tell it I’m expecting too much that it might feel crushed under the weight of my expectations, but what am I supposed to do, tell it that it’s crap and that I expect nothing? By an old man’s hangnail and a stubbed toe, was parenting always this bloody hard? I give myself a moment to calm down, clock’s ticking, but somehow the notion that I keep ducking this up is stressing me out even more than the thought of hitting another danger stone. OK, calm down, calm down, what do we need to do. We need to tell the skeleton that it’s a skeleton and get it moving its limbs without breaking my lens.
“Ooh you’re such a pretty boy aren’t you, aren’t you! Just look at your pearly bones and long pointy ribs! All the skeleton girls are going to go wild for a handsome young man like you!” As I flatter and assure the skeleton I think strongly about what I’m seeing, trying to pass how I see it through the telepathy, trying to show it its body and get it to understand what it is without hurting its self-esteem and confidence. The soul mote dances happily. Based on the previous nervousness and this happiness, I think it’s understanding me. I try imagining its titanic form of bone pushing up off the ground with its hands to enter a sitting position. I do it a few times and see the skeleton slowly, carefully, push itself up. It rises to sit upright, and for a moment I think it’s done it, than it tilts too far, falling backwards with a hollow crash into the stone wall behind it. There’s no pain, not exactly, but it projects a sort of strain in its joints and the impact to its head. It’s weird seeing how skeletons experience injury. Interestingly some of the black gas slips into it again which seems to help as I coax it through regaining its balance and slowly sitting up in a kneeling position.
OK, do or die, whatever the interaction with the gasses and the skeleton, they aren’t dissolving it, so if the skeleton can hold up the crystal it won’t eat through the dirt. Stressing care and delicacy I coax it through cupping its bony hands to either side of the crystal and slowly bringing its hands together to cup up the little crystal before it. The skeleton itself is human in shape, and in relative terms I’d say the crystal itself would be as small as an eraser nub at the end of a pencil compared to it. Somehow seeing the skeletal claws so near to my lens makes me nervous so I change strategies making it splay all the fingers of one hand and slowly lower them under the crystal like some kind of slow motion claw game that lets you adjust the claw after it lowers. As it happens that is a handicap I very much need.
I watch as the manna field lifts off the stone along with the crystal, but it’s not quite enough. An eraser nub is about half a centimeter across which means my one hundred sphere length radius field stretches about one skeleton-titan-meter in diameter. “Ah yes, but what is that in skeleton-titan-equivalencies of King Henry’s precious little feet?“ I ask myself in mock reproach, entertained by the joke, but almost instinctively replying to myself “Just a bit over three.” I know conversion units, but that’s centimeters to inches so it would be too many steps to be worth getting it more precise. In any case that means this hole is not as wide as my skeleton is tall, but perhaps more importantly unless I risk it holding the precariously-gripped crystal above its head it cannot hold the crystal far enough from the ground without standing up.
Just as carefully I walk it through how to stand up and make extra sure that it’s careful with the crystal and knows not to drop it. Up, and up, and done, the field is suspended into the air encapsulating the skeleton from skull to just above the knees. It burns at the wall a bit along the way, but seems stable. Well, perhaps not stable, when the skeleton moved it some air slipped in and was quickly dissolved, but the skeleton is remarkably still allowing a stable boarder, that however causes a new instability, and I’m not sure if it’s good or bad. The black gas seeping out of the crystal is slowly building within the field. To repeat that, the black gas that corrodes any material it touches making it more dangerous than any chemical I’ve ever heard of before my presumed death or stasis is slowly building mass and pressure within a confined volume. Sure, the skeleton’s soul mote absorbs faint wisps of it from time to time, but not nearly as fast as it is made.
Another interesting thing of note is that the mote of soul seems to want to stay in that cloud, when they skeleton moved earlier, every time the mote of soul was left outside the field it would quickly slide through the bone to a part of the skeleton that was still within the field. I don’t know what that means. It could be the skeleton is stuck here, could be the field is like an umbilical cord to it, frankly monster baby-making is far far beyond my field of expertise. Knowing how the world is, some might claim expertise, but for me intentional ignorance is the way. Perhaps that’s why I’m not dwelling on it much. Instead I turn my attention to talk to the skeleton, to teach it concepts and meanings, to tell it about the world. Of course, I don’t know a whole lot about the world, but at least I can teach it how to talk right? Well, no vocal cords, but how to telepathically form its thoughts into words instead of just notions?
Well English is not the hardest language to learn but maybe not the easiest either given how often it contradicts its own rules. Sadly the only other language I know well enough to communicate with is German which might not have been better and admittedly only occurred to me partway through. Well like with its wonder at the world it’s learning does seem somewhat throttled relative to a human child, almost more like a pet, but its ability to communicate back still makes me think of it more like a child. It seems to grasp commands and strict logic a bit better than actual concepts, so maybe German would have been better, but changing languages partway could just as easily confuse it. I wonder what language this world uses; will I be the dumb skeleton learning new foreign words soon? I guess I’ll have to wait until I’m not buried in a giant pit in the ground before that particular uno reverse gets played on me.
Without any immediate threat we’ve idled away quite some time teaching and learning, I wasn’t even tempted to retreat into nihility lately, I guess this is what it means to be an educator to an impressionable young titan who happily nods along with whatever stupid things you say. I’ve decided to name my titan Jonathon, from now on he will be my personal aid, but one thing’s worrying me a bit. As the black gas built and built I gave it some thought and noticed that since it breaks down matter into the colorless gas which I adsorb as manna it’s probably fair to think of it as my digestive fluids, apparently it is what is referred to as my manna field, a large bubble of corrosive digestive gasses building towards a hard and clearly stated limit. I’m not sure what happens when that limit is reached, and I’ve decided that for now I don’t really want to know.
[Todd, The Dungeon of Death, Level 1]
[manna field 22/25]
[2/100 manna]
From the looks of that that means I should eat something soon, and I already have a good idea of what. Still in teaching mode I teach the skeleton to walk in a vary circle around the hole while being careful of tripping and extra careful not to drop the crystal. As he walks the black gas eats into the walls corroding the stone almost instantly into tufts of white gas which swirl around within it, but since Jonathon is not hunched over the walls are eaten out at approximately his knee height, so without stepping up it’s hardly enough stone to earn me a single point of manna.
[Todd, The Dungeon of Death, Level 1]
[manna field 21/25]
[3/100 manna]
It’s good to know that there’s an apparent or perhaps approximate one to one equivalency in conversion between the two numbers. After Johnathon has experience walking, I try teaching him to carefully, very carefully lower and raise the crystal in order to carve an inclined path to walk up out of the cavern. The manna field ticks down slowly as it consumes the stone. Up, up, the greyblack stone with white specks gives way to another stone with a dark reddish-orange hew like packed mud. That probably means we’re getting closer to the surface again right? In any case the field is weak again so Johnathon stops and I begin teaching him again. Interestingly it looks like Johnathon’s soul mote has grown a bit. Now it absorbs more black gas and releases more clear gas. I wonder if the point of dungeons isn’t to nurture and grow alongside the creatures we create. It seems like a positive feedback loop, or at least more positive than simply obliterating all of creation as I grow the field and consume more and more of the world around me.
That’s another thing, I meant around the crystal, but since it’s my only real connection to the outside world I’ve been beginning to conflate myself with the lens, teaching Johnathon that it is my body and stuff like that; thinking of the gasses as my own digestive gasses rather than the crystal’s. I mean, perhaps it’s fair to do so since the crystal has displayed no signs of consciousness despite having exhibited the same soul motes that allow Johnathon to speak with me, on the other hand Johnathon has only ever had one soul mote, and a growing one at that which is completely different from what the crystal has exhibited. Johnathon also seems completely unable to perceive the soul motes, he can barely even tell the gasses are swirling around through some kind of tactile sense that feels them flowing harmlessly through his bones, and he certainly doesn’t notice drinking them into his soul mote. Rather, he does and doesn’t, it seems that to him the experience is rather akin to what breathing was for me back before the police visited without knocking. To him it is a passive action that you won’t really notice doing. Maybe he needs to be outside the field to really feel it, but I’m nervous what effect that may have on him.
[Todd, The Dungeon of Death, Level 1]
[manna field 0/25]
[24/100 manna]
That’s the other thing that’s bugging me, should I try to reach 100 manna or should I create more skeletons? Danger stones suggest there’s allot of dangerous things in this world that I may need to defend myself against, but I don’t know which method would give me more defense against that kind of threat? Another consideration is that my field is rather small, it would be hard to fit allot of skeletons into it, and similarly teaching Johnathon is a full time job. For now I will stick with one skeleton, but I will plan to get more in the indeterminate future. On that note it makes me anxious thinking that if there are dangers deep below the ground, what about the dangers above the surface?
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One last thing to worry about before I get back to teaching, it feels awkward talking about it, but I wonder if it might be a health problem, you see there are specks and flakes of something in my swirling gas cloud. I’m not sure what that’s about, but it seems that when I eat matter that it doesn’t all quite digest, and some building up in my field is a little concerning. For now it’s a mild dusting at most, but it’s uncomfortable not having anyone to consult about alien health issues in another world. For the time being caution wins out over health though.
I have decided we will make our home in this level of rock, at least until I’ve taught Johnathon everything he needs to know to face life. Let’s see, I have to teach him to talk, to read, to write, to do mathematics, I have to teach him physics and chemistry and abstract philosophy and morality and I should also teach him theoretical findings in physics which boarder on philosophy since that will give him a broader worldview, oh and I should teach him about governance and religion and biology, I’ll put off that one but I’d like him to eventually learn what the organs he’s missing are meant to do, on the other hand I don’t want to hurt his self-confidence so I’ll put that off until he is old enough to understand.
As my field manna builds again I get Johnathon to make a flat corridor with several rooms, than I get him to make a pool in a side chamber and melt a hole up towards the surface above it. It isn’t enough to breach the surface, but it’s enough to reach the water table and give us some water and mud to burn, additionally due to the size of the hole, one skeleton-titan-meter, it shouldn’t get gummed up with a rock or clump of dirt like last time, probably.
It isn’t long with this easy life before I’ve reached a hundred manna; surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, it decants to form a soul mote within my crystalline orb. The soul mote floats about but reaching out to it with my thoughts does nothing, trying to connect it with Johnathon’s soul mote does nothing too, so it’s likely just an extension of the crystal’s function or perhaps it’s mine in a way. I’ve accepted the crystal as my body after all, so why wouldn’t its soul be my soul? It’s a frustrating outlook to adopt but admittedly a simple one.
Today something new happened, it’s our rainwater collection pool. There’s a faint winding hole overhead, a sinkhole has formed where the water regularly flows through the dirt down into our little pool. This shouldn’t be surprising to me, but somehow it is, all the more so because my pool is chirping at me. Various grubs and insects seem to have washed down into it with the last rainfall, and it’s my first time interacting with other living creatures.
What catches me most off guard however is the size of them, giant behemoth bugs! Who knew other worlds were so terrifying! Fortunately I have Johnathon the bone titan, before whom they are still only little bugs. Literally the size of bugs, wait, was I missing something? I look slowly from Johnathon to the bugs and back to Johnathon. Could it be, could it really be, is Johnathon normal human sized? Are these bugs normal bug size? Am I smaller than a marble? I’m simultaneously offended and horrified. Silver lining, silver lining, where’s my silver lining? Ha, I can finally join in on the jokes about being small and insufficient! Ha, take that world; you think you can get me that easily? Well perhaps now I really can be compensating for something, so take that!
What is it that I’m doing to compensate? Well that’s another uncomfortable truth of my situation that I’m gradually coming to accept. I am the dungeon of death, I create monsters with my will and manna, passively annihilate matter, and claim territory. Theoretically that makes me an organizational structure in and of myself; it means that I, through the nature of my existence, am by default an autocracy. I spent most of my life despising authoritarian forms of governance for their inefficiencies and failings, and yet by default it seems that I am myself the personification of that which I despise. Of course Johnathon’s different since I raised him like a child, but looking at the numbers if I were creating skeletons while teaching him I’d have tens by now and I haven’t even finished teaching one, it’s entirely impractical to devote so much attention to all of them, sooner or later I will be a tin pot dictator with unbridled centralized control and no need to answer to anyone. Even Johnathon never questions my orders and I’ve expressly asked him to, but at most he’ll give thought to make sure he’s following what I want rather than what I say, he has never once expressed his free will in opposition to me. It’s a bone chilling revelation that makes me feel pretty bad about myself.
Johnathon lowers the crystal into the pool and I once more watch as the sea of dark gas dissolves the water and mud into nothingness, but this time something’s different, something’s new, there’s not just mud and water here, there’s worms and insects, even a chirping grasshopper and two spiders, and unlike the water and mud, they do not dissolve. Rather they spin energetically to face me and charge full force. Genuinely frightened I call out through our mental link “No, Johnathon, kill them, don’t let them close!”
A giant claw scythes through a giant spider and three giant worms, the worms spill their guts without delay, bodily fluids and organs spilling out only to be melted away by the swirling black mist before they can touch back down. The spider on the other hand loses three legs and has its exoskeleton cut through on its main body, but continues to quiver and crawl, fighting through the pain to continue its approach. The giant skeletal claw returns, crushing the second spider into the hard stone without holding back, the claw ripping the wings from a ladybug as it passes. The wounded spider is slowly crawling closer as Johnathon does one last sweep of the advancing uninjured bugs before his claw pierces directly through the spider pinning it like a butterfly in someone’s collection. The spider lets loose a scream, shrill and terrible before lurching itself forwards through the sharpened skeletal claw before it falls to the ground, curling up dead. Sufficiently spooked I ask Johnathon to lift me higher as I anxiously look around at my cloud of gas. The first thing I see is that far more black gas has dispersed than is usual for the amount of matter consumed. Watching the last of the spider’s corpse dissolve, it’s apparent why. It seems dissolving the corpse facilitates a greater exchange of black to clear gas than dissolving matter does. Additionally I notice another oddity, the bugs had soul motes, not the grey soul motes of Johnathon and myself, but colored ones which floated freely in my manna aura, but they didn’t stop there, they seemed to fragment as the bugs carrying them died, a few bits went into Johnathon’s soul mote and the rest turned to the clear gas on its own, absorbed by my core without digestion. All in all I gained two manna points in excess of what my black gas digested from the confrontation.
Maybe this is how I was meant to do it from the start, digesting living things with their own soul motes, breaking them down. It’s been bothering me all along after all, if dungeons are meant to digest the world, to eat all the matter, why is there still a world to digest? Why isn’t all the matter already gone? Now it seems I have my answer, or at least part of it. I recall seeing the option to create soil, and while the gas exchange with Johnathon is insufficient to consume the gas I create, melting corpses may well produce more manna than the soil takes to make. Wait a moment, creatures were under manna but terrain was under manna aura, I might not even need to convert to create manna, but at least at present it seems it would be less optimal for my growth compared to the bountiful dirt and soil; a thought to be tested in the future. On the flip side works of fiction were horrifically vague about what would happen had the bugs reached me. Some say eternal servitude, others instant death, being eaten by them perhaps? That will not need to be tested.
If I’m going to experiment with hunting bugs I’ll want more skeletons, but I’ve been expressly avoiding that for now. In any case I have seven soul motes now; I should try to get ten first to see what happens before I divert my manna flow. Interestingly while watching the soul motes digest I’ve noticed that the black gas can be controlled to an extent so long as I don’t try to reabsorb it. I can push it to digest something faster or avoid something else for the time being. I worry that this might be a resource I’m meant to be managing, but since it does not digest them while they’re still alive, I’m not sure how useful it is.
Looking at the bit of sun passing through the sinkhole above we’ve concluded that I regain precisely one unit of manna field per day with a small portion of that going to Johnathon. Not having known all this time just further reinforces how much we’re guessing here and how important it is that we begin testing things. As we wait the last year it takes to put me to ten soul motes I’ve been diligently teaching Johnathon all that I know. Yup, that settles it, telepathy as a teaching aid is straight up broken, as far as I can tell Johnathon is a little slow mentally, likely on account of not having an actual brain. I mean he’s been getting faster as his soul mote grows, but he’s not a genius-mcspeedybrain, nevertheless he’s learned most of my collected knowledge and even some of my insights from prolonged contemplation at record speed, it’s like I‘m just pouring everything I know directly into his mind. When I teach him basic addition for example I share the memories and experiences of countless grueling practice sheets, sure it takes a while to form the idea in my mind and send it over, but there’s no way this isn’t cheating in some way. I wonder if everyone in this world is some kind of super geniuses with all the most brilliant minds in the world pouring their knowledge and experiences into the next generation. That would be wild wouldn’t it?
Lately Johnathon has been smitten with the idea of being a servant to me, and I’ve been trying my best to fight the idea down. What’s the point of blind loyalty, how are you meant to give me any decent ideas when you just blindly feed my ego? This is the path to ruin for most nations; can the nation of me really survive that kind of treatment? We’ve had many rounds of negotiations, I say strategist he says court eunuch, I say knight he says death soldier, I say lord he says serf. I mean, it’s not some sort of kink or misunderstanding, I can tell that much, after all we are literally reading each other’s minds with every conversation so there’s not much in missed nuance. He has some kind of instinct to serve as a dungeon monster, and intellectually he has managed to see past that, but it doesn’t feel right to him, moreover he’s holding some serious misplaced gratitude for me patiently teaching him all these years when we generally assume that skeletons are probably generally grunt mooks sent off to be redshirted and splatted almost uniformly, especially if I’m meant to be growing through wholesale slaughter and soul slurping rather than slowly digesting the world. In any case we eventually compromise on him being my butler, not an old medieval butler I insist, a modern free one who can make his own decisions and get a new boss if he wants one. He begrudgingly accepts this conditional, but insists he has no interest in leaving. That kind of makes sense since he grows purely by virtue of being near me, so perhaps it’s a symbiotic relationship that I’m overthinking, but it still has me generally concerned.
Additionally apparently Johnathon has been getting level up notifications all this while, mostly knowledge oriented skills with them from what he can tell, so maybe the system is for the world and not the crystal after all. He says he’s reached a level cap and while it tells him he can level up again it than tells him he cannot on account of my level being too low. I feel mixed about that, ashamed that I’m so much slower, guilty for holding him back, proud that my son, er, butler is such a success. Recently he’s gone through what sounds like a teenage rebellious phase and asked we stop the father son thing, it wasn’t all that long before we started the butler thing so I generally chalk that up to being part of his rebellion. Ah, kids. I think I was easier on my parents as a teen but probably harder on the average day so it probably balances out. How old is he, a few years? In any case I hope I can do well enough not to betray his trust.
Today is the day, ten soul motes! As expected they immediately begin tracing new patterns onto my crystalline form adding mass to it. Unfortunately they are rather fine and simplistic patterns it seems my real growing days are behind me, at this rate it may take tens of levels just to sit comfortably in Johnathon’s palm instead of between his fingers.
[Congratulations on reaching level 2]
[Detecting you have killed symbiont at every instance before symbiosis could be established]
[You have gained the ability Inhospitable]
OK, that sounds negative, when did I kill symbioses; Johnathon is right here. Whatever, both abilities I’ve gained so far have been somewhere between threatening and insulting, I probably shouldn’t worry about it. Uncontrolled, inhospitable, for all I know this is all just because I refuse to be enslaved. Let’s check my reserves.
[Todd, The Dungeon of Death, Level 2]
[manna field 0/25]
[0/100 manna]
It’s weird, the totals haven’t gone up but everything feels thicker, like there’s more of it. Additionally once I leveled up Johnathon got an evolution option. I didn’t see the slightest hint of a notification so apparently the monsters of a dungeon gain levels and evolve independently. Somehow I’m relieved to know that seeing as it means they can determine their own futures. On the other hand I’m more than a little suspicious that there are classes out there based around betrayal, and I’m going to be really sad one day when like most of the dictators in history I find myself laughing with friends one day and dead with them all cursing my name the next day. I make sure to emphasize again to Johnathon that he’s free to leave me and that I hope and pray it never comes to having to kill me to be free. Nevertheless he waves me off and tells me his evolution options; skeleton mage, skeleton brawler, skeleton scholar, and zombie.
Personally I think skeleton mage sounds best because magic, but Johnathon is much less impressed by magic than I am seeing as he’s always lived in a world with it. Instead he points out that with three options being skeleton variants and one being zombie it’s quite likely that this is an option between specializing on his racial path or advancing to a higher racial path. Together we agree that if that’s the case zombie is probably the better long term investment, and so he chose and rotting organs, skin, ligaments, and musculature grew in leaving him a putrid sight. Still, I can’t help but feel proud, proud that he made a suggestion that differed to my advice; that he thought past my own narrow minded judgments. I’d told him many times of the failings of centralized control, and that chief among them was an inability to hear other points of view or to be dissuaded. It seems he took that lamentation to heart and felt free to express his objections. Perhaps I’m not so doomed after all.