It’s a bit odd, suddenly becoming aware of yourself. Or perhaps, it’d be more accurate to say that she became aware once more? It’s all a bit… foggy, if she’s entirely honest, but she remembers being in the hospital. Why had she been there? A pain in her chest, she couldn’t get enough breath no matter what she did. Her kids and grandkids, holding her hand, tears in their eyes, her letting them know that it would be okay…
Well, it’s probably fair to say that she died. Goodness! 87 years and her heart is what finally gives out on her. Such a generic way to go, too. Still, she’d lived a good life and accepted death, so what exactly was going on now? It felt like she had a body, but it’s strange, almost kind of static, maybe? And there’s this strange clarity to her thoughts, it’s an odd thing that’s only noticeable in hindsight, but being old had really messed with her ability to think. She feels like a spry 20 year old all over again!
Finally focusing on what she can see, it’s, well, not what she’s used to. She can ‘see’ everything around her all at once, full 360 vision, except that she can also kind of feel-taste everything she sees too, all at once. It’s overwhelming, but not painful like she’d expect from sensory overload, just a lot to get used to. After some unaccounted for amount of time, she starts to adjust to it all, and she can finally get an actual sense for her surroundings.
She’s in some kind of perfectly cubed space, made of polished granite, the grayish kind with sparkly bits running through. Directly in the middle of the room is a small light blue marble, just kind of… floating there, and there’s a moment of realization where she thinks to herself ‘oh, that’s me.’ Before she can ruminate on that further, a floating video game screen like the ones she played with her grandkids pops up, stuck in front of her-well, not her eyes, but her central point of awareness.
Name: N/a
Facets:
* Seed: Providence
Banding: 1 (3/1000 FP)
Stats:
* Mohs: 1
* Tenacity: Sectile
* Refraction: 10
* Conductance: 10
* Flux: 10
Resources:
* FP: 100%
* Personal Upkeep, 50%
* Banding Compression, 50%
Structures:
[Generic Customizable Structure Library], [Lucky Structure Library], [Protective Structure Library]
Traps:
[Generic Customizable Trap Library], [Lucky Trap Library], [Protective Trap Library]
Mobs:
[Random Mob Template; Redeem Mob Boss Now], [Random Lucky Mob Template; Redeem Mob Boss Now], [Random Protective Mob Template; Redeem Mob Boss Now]
Critters:
[Random Critter Library; Redeem Library Now], [Random Lucky Critter Library; Redeem Library Now], [Random Protective Critter Library; Redeem Library Now]
Ah, well… that’s quite a bit to take in. Now, she’s not exactly the most experienced when it comes to games, but she’s pretty certain that she’s never seen anything like this screen before. Facets and Mohs and Refraction, that all makes it sound gem-like, which would make sense if she’s currently a crystal thing, so she supposes that makes sense. Other than that it all seems like a bunch of nonsense at the moment.
As she takes the time to look over it all and try to take in the details though, she feels a sense of growing anxiety. It’s almost like she can’t breathe, despite the fact she hasn’t needed to breathe at all for the last few minutes, and considering how she died similarly, she’d say that she can be forgiven for panicking a little. Like a newborn foal kicking out as they try to walk, something in her mind switches on and she starts to carve into one of the sides of the cube she’s in, about door-sized and angled up. The soft grumble and grind of the stone as it disappears helps soothe that anxiety in her ‘chest’, though that breathlessness continues to slowly grow stronger.
A quick glance at her screen shows that the split up percentage bar is different now, 12% taken from ‘Banding Compression’ and turned into ‘Dungeon Modeling’. No idea how important the banding thing is, but personal upkeep seems like the more important of the two, and as she watches the percentage of her energy stuff used for upkeep starts to slowly climb. She’s not sure why it’s in percentages instead of flat numbers, but whatever, she gets the point, and a bit of a mental nudge reroutes the rest of the Banding Compression energy to making her door, which notably increases the speed at which she’s chewing through the stone.
With no lungs to gasp with, no mouth to scream, all she can do is watch her new hallway grow as her consciousness slowly starts to fade. Well, despite the instinctual panic that’s set in, on an intellectual level she was prepared for death before this odd new life, so there’s two options. Either this was a strange exception and after this she’ll be off to heaven, hell, oblivion or whatever else you go when you die, and she’s back at square one. On the other hand, she’ll just continue to cycle through lives like this, either with her memories or not if it was an exception here, full reincarnation-style, and there’s nothing to worry about! She is a bit disappointed she didn’t get to do more… in this life…
Just as she feels her consciousness beginning to fade, she cracks through into open air, and a rush of wind blows through her new corridor, the old air in her room practically running out the door while fresh air from outside storms in like a SWAT team. The air whistles and howls in its fury, but honestly she’s just happy to still be alive, her mind clearing with only a bit of a headache to show for her ordeal. Hooray, she survived her first five minutes! Pfft.
Oddly enough, she can’t actually see outside her new entrance, her sight/feel/taste sense abruptly ends right at the border, and it’s only with the light’s appearance at her doorstep that she realizes how dark her space is. Light in general is a bit weird with her new senses, since she could already see more in darkness than she ever could with light when she was human. Light kind of… adds fullness? Contrast? There’s not really a good term she can think of that properly describes what it does, but she can definitely tell where it is and isn’t. There’s the direct light on the floor of her entrance, and then diffuse light bouncing down her hallway until it eventually fades to darkness once more.
Well now! Things seem to have calmed down a bit, and she can feel the constant breeze of moving air inside of her like some kind of continuous breath, so she finally feels safe enough to take a minute to herself. It’s quite important to allow yourself to destress, after all! She supposes that some decorating would be nice, and it’s clear that she can change things inside of her personal space, now, so why not? Puttering around in her personal screen, she eventually figures out that if she kind of flexes her intent at specific buttons, it’s pretty easy to pull up more information on them, and she does just that for the Structure section.
Generic Customizable Structure Library:
The Generic Customizable Structure Library is the most basic structure library, holding basic structure models like torches, doors, basic furniture, etc. With these basic modeling pieces, it should be much easier for you to create some generic Structures in your dungeon, which can benefit your mobs, adventurers, and even yourself if you’re smart about it!
Lucky Structure Library:
The Lucky Structure Library is a luck-based library of somewhat magical models, such as randomized walls, tile sets that change between different patterns, and even reward chests and other such things. Add a little bit of chance to your Dungeon to spice up your adventurer’s lives!
Protective Structure Library:
The Protective Structure Library is a library of mixed physical and magical models, specialized in providing defensive options to a dungeon. Provided models include sharpened stakes, destructible walls, magical barriers of several kinds, and much more!
Other than the explanatory blurbs, each button brings up some kind of mix between a minecraft crafting table and an online shop. Each Library has seemingly endless potential ‘models’ to use and place, but the vast majority of them are grayed out. A bit of fiddling and looking around shows that they’re sorted by some filters, currently by items that would take less than 30 minutes to generate using 10% of her FP. Notably, the Generic Library has much more available under that filter, which makes sense since most of it is stuff she could probably make on her own if she knew how to make different materials.
A bit of work and she figures out how to route some FP to more Dungeon Modeling, both cutting and building this time, and with a non-panicked mind she can tell that there’s kind of a mental framework of where those are happening, like cubes and curves of green and red in her mind’s eye. With that and nothing but time on her hands, she sets to making her little slice of the world into something more comfortable.
First things first, layout! There’s something inherently uncomfortable with the idea of moving her crystal above the height of her entrance, or with the idea of letting any natural light touch her crystal at all, so that’s unfortunately out of the question. Instead she decides to go with more of a cozy hobbit-hole feel. The slope leading from her entrance to the original cube becomes a set of stairs, and she keeps them perfectly even and straight. It’s hard to get a reference of how big things are except in reference to each other, no exact measurements, so she just has to hope for now that everything is person sized and not wildly over or undersized. Oh well!
While the stairs are cutting themselves out of the smooth plane of the hallway floor, she starts to set up a kind of mental queue as she starts planning it all out, each addition or subtraction of stone a slightly different shade in her mind’s eye. The starting room-previously her little core room-is expanded out into an oval, the stairway leading down into it from one of the longer sides, which she’ll consider southward for lack of a better means of orientation. She also raises the floor just a bit everywhere except for a square of space right at the end of the stairs, a bit of a mudroom area for people to leave their shoes. She won’t be tolerating any tracked mud and dirt, no sir!
Branching off from the… Foyer, yes that seems like a good enough name. Branching off from there, she sets up three more doorways, two slightly offset towards the north but still on the smaller sides of the room, as well as one directly to the left of the stairway. That one will become a storage room, a short hallway digging far enough back towards the entrance that the storage room doesn’t have to compete for space with the stairs above it.
The northwest doorway will lead to a living room, she’ll call it The Den, kind of bean-shaped from a top-down view and wrapping around the Foyer from the north and down to the west. The northeast doorway does something similar, but that room-the Kitchen-has more traditional angular walls, like a square with a curved bit cut out of its southwest corner where it meets with the Foyer. Another room will be attached to the north wall of the Kitchen, a small dining room, which will have its own doorway on its west side to connect with a nice big Library, twice as large as the next biggest room. She’d always wanted a big library!
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The Library also connects to the Den, being ‘above’ it from a top-down view, as well as a west and north doorway of its own, one leading to a Bathroom and the other to the Master Bedroom. Back to the Kitchen, she adds another doorway on the east wall, creating a little Boiler Room, even if she’s not quite sure how to make it work in her current circumstances. Of course, at the moment she’s still only got the soon-to-be Foyer and the stairs, since it takes a while to properly cut through stuff when she isn’t using all of her available power to fuel the modeling. For now, she supposes that it might be prudent to experiment with the model libraries she apparently can use, since the only thing she can create at the moment is granite.
First thing she wants is some nice floorboards, though unfortunately spawning one in shows that they’re much lower quality than she hoped. They aren’t rotten or anything, but they are cut amateurishly and without any kind of sealant, which makes the chances of them splintering much higher. Still, she’ll work with what she has, and right now that means queuing up the boards to manifest snug against the stone stairs, in the mudroom, as well as in the Foyer, Den, Library, Dining Room, and the Master Bedroom. Meanwhile, the Storage Room, Boiler Room, Kitchen and Bathroom all get groutless tiles of a white, shinier stone that kind of looks like marble, for lack of anything better.
It’s actually a good thing that she’d queued up the actual digging stuff first, since materializing wood seems to take longer than the stone. That said, she’s going to have a warm little home darnit, which means that she doesn’t stop at just the flooring! A bit of experimentation in the Foyer helps her figure out how to get the familiar hip-ish height bump on the walls, she thinks it’s called a chair rail? Either way, she uses that as a delineating line, with wide planks of wood below it stuck together on the walls with the use of little pegs and holes, pinning each board to its neighbors. Above the chair rails is just the slightly sparkling stone, for lack of better ideas at the moment.
Another fun thing is that once she has a working section, she’s able to copy that ‘model’ into her generic library, and then she can just copy-paste the pieces and modify them as needed to fit into different fiddly areas like the corners. That same chair rail/lower side plank design is used in the Foyer along with most of the rooms, the only exceptions being the Boiler Room and the Storage Room. The only other big thing she can think of when it comes to the big design aspects would be some windows, but unfortunately she’s underground so natural light isn’t exactly available.
It takes a while of her browsing her libraries-conveniently allowing her queue to chug through her orders so far, at least most of the rooms themselves-but she eventually finds what might work as artificial windows. Generic Structures allows her to create torches, both ‘consumable’ and ‘everburn’ types, though the everburn ones have a constant FP drain attached to them, kind of like her personal maintenance, but much smaller. If she combines that with the glass from a ‘fancy door’ model (not actually all that fancy, it just has fogged glass panes), then she might be able to get some false windows!
A quick mock-up helps her confirm her suspicions, a stone box stuffed full of everburn torches with a glass front gives off a nice, warm, if somewhat flickering light, and costs only a fraction of a percent of FP in upkeep. Removing that only takes a moment, and she starts to design a fancy hobbit window template. Starting with a nice big circle of glass, she fits in some thick, curved planks that go over the top and sweep out, leaving two little triangle-y bits on the bottom to fill in the gap. Placed directly on top of the chair rail, she thinks that it works quite well, and with them dotted throughout the rooms with enough wall space, it helps to brighten up the space quite well.
There are the Boiler and Storage Rooms, but in those cases she just makes a ceiling-attached lamp thing, glass panes bound in wood with more Everburn inside. All told, the everburn torches only take up 1.8% of her FP, which she’d say is a fair trade for the nice vibe the lighting gives to the whole home. After that there’s just the furniture to put in, slapping a door on the entrance itself-left open for air flow, of course-and moving her crystal to the Master Bedroom. Thankfully adding in the windows on her queue took enough time for all of the room shells to finish up, so it’s a simple effort of will for her crystal body to glide on over to the Master Bedroom.
Somewhat weary of all the creating and modeling, she decides to just go with the base generic furniture options for now, creaky chairs and lumpy sofas, so on and so forth, really just placeholders for when she has the mental energy to make some better attempts. Instead, she decides to take a bit of a break and redeem those ‘mob’ and ‘critter’ prizes shown on her screen. She remembers that mobs are what monsters and such are called, which might be unfortunate, but critters are often quite cute!
Although she initially wants to go straight for the critters, there's… something, not quite an instinct but more than a hunch, but it gives her some anxiety about the idea of selecting one of her critter library rewards without having her Mobs sorted out first. It feels almost more like instinctively pulling her hand away from a hot pan rather than like she can’t breathe, so it’s probably not like doing so will kill her, but she decides that this new body probably knows what it’s on about, and goes ahead with the Mob rewards, pressing each one in the order of her screen.
Each Mob-apparently randomly placed through the floor-fizzles into existence as three different balls of light and power, slowly growing as their priority in her queue are kicked up to the front. It takes a while for them to…gestate, she supposes, time which is spent perusing her library options again to learn more of what’s available, but eventually each energy ball softly pops open. The first, the random Mob, manifests in the Bathroom, and it’s honestly quite an odd duck.
They can be described as humanoid in the most vague, generic sense, a torso, two arms and legs, plus a head. However, their limbs are long and almost spider-like, each with one more joint than normal, the same with their fingers and toes, an extra joint that adds to the off feeling. The grey flesh of their body is almost shrink-wrapped over their bones, leading up to a human-ish head, all the structure but with no face. Instead, there’s an almost cartoonish smiley face, just two solid black vertical lines for eyes and a curved one for a smile, looking more like it was painted on than anything.
The remnant human part of her mind logically feels like they should be uncanny and horrifying to see, but all she can feel is a warm, fuzzy feeling, the same kind of thing she felt whenever her grandkids came over for the holidays. How odd, she muses, yet oddly human in itself, that she should so quickly latch onto someone literally made from her own hand. The being-a Doppleganger, a little screen floating above it says-looks around for a moment, before glancing at the mirror in the Bathroom and freezing.
The mirror was one of the only bits of furniture other than the windows and walls that she put some proper focus on, remembering that silver-backed glass was used back in the day. She replaced it with flat and shiny iron taken and remodeled from a generic tankard model, so the reflection is still rough and fuzzy, but it still works well enough, and the Doppleganger seems absolutely taken aback. When they walk over to properly stand in front of it-an absurd thing to see, with the way its multi-jointed legs fold-they just kind of…stand there, tilting their head back and forth, gently moving the flesh on their face with their hands.
With them occupied, she moves her main point of focus to the Den, where there has always been a cat in a box. With nothing different, she feels a moment of deja-vu before moving on to the last-wait, no, that’s not right is it? She refocuses on the cat laying at the floor of the unused fireplace, which is not there and never has been, because it’s always been lounging on one of the sofas, hasn’t it? No, wait, that’s not right either! Huffing in her mind, she focuses on her screen instead, which thankfully shows each of the ‘mob bosses’ as their own buttons she can bring up more info with now.
Lucky Mob Template: [Cheshire Cat]
[Cheshire Cat] Mob Boss: Lv. 5 Schrodinger’s Cat?
Description:
A cat that cannot exist, must exist, will always exist and never has. A thought experiment brought to life/death by its very nature, Schrodinger’s Cat specializes in hunting down ghostly echoes, Earwyrms, The Senseless, and other such creatures that rely on not being perceived or being out-of-phase with reality, thanks to the Schrodinger’s Cat’s ability to negate these abilities.
Well, that’s… odd and slightly ominous, at least the description of the kind of things her new cat apparently hunts, but they’re still a cat and she loves them, so she’ll try her best to accommodate their apparent non-existence. With a bit of work to make up the models and a mental tug to drag them to the front of her building queue, she manages to make up a food and water bowl-both also derived from the tankard generic model-with the name Millie on their sides, placing them down next to the fireplace. Although, there is a distinct lack of water or anything edible in her libraries, so she’ll just have to hope there’s magic going on and she doesn’t need to somehow get food from outside.
And finally, there’s the third Mob Boss, which appears in the Boiler Room. Popping into existence partly above the mock-up boiler (basically a hollow metal barrel), a small creature latches onto it with what she would call cat-like reflexes if not for the actual cat in the home. Blinking in surprise, they look around the room before focusing on the mockup, and to her surprise, the goblin-like creature manages to slip into it by squeezing between the bars put into the door on its side, crazy considering the bar gaps are most definitely smaller than its head.
There’s some clunking and banging inside, before they let out some dissatisfied noise and squeeze back out, climbing over the dull metal like a gecko and dropping to the ground. The little screen over their head calls them-or rather, her-a ‘Gremlin Matron’, and seeing her somehow manage to pop the boiler’s door off with just a little fiddling, she can see why they have the name! She mutters to herself something about how tricky it was to get that door to work right, and to her surprise, the Matron looks around sheepishly before snapping the door back onto its hinges.
‘Wait… can you hear me?’
The Matron’s ear flicks and she looks around, but slowly she nods. Giddy, she laughs and-well, she can’t hug her, but she can kind of push warm feelings at her which feels a bit similar on her end. The Matron doesn’t seem to mind though, giggling and chattering in something that kind of sounds like a language, but not one that she understands.
‘This is great! Wonderful to meet you dearie, I suppose you could say that I’m your mother, but with circumstances as they are, just call me what you're comfortable with! Anything I can do for you to make things more comfortable?’
The Matron hums, scampering about the Boiler Room, which is relatively bare at the moment, before opening the door to look out at the Kitchen. She grimaces at the brighter lighting from the windows, grumbling a bit before blowing a raspberry and retreating back into the dimmer light of the Boiler Room. It’s pretty empty, and the Matron starts to speak and gesture, but there’s a pretty big language barrier going on, and miming things out can only go so far. After a few minutes of trying to figure out what she’s saying, she decides to just pull up a few planks of wood and a sharp dagger, dropping them right next to the Gremlin.
‘Do you think you could carve out what you want dear? That might be easier.’
The Matron lets out a little ‘oooh!’, sounding almost exactly like a particular blue alien from a children’s movie. It doesn’t take long for her to figure out how to scratch out some symbols that help her get her requests across. First off is what she can only describe as little cubbies, sized to fit her and many others (at least that’s what the carvings imply), which isn’t too hard to whip up, she just cuts them into the wall opposite the boiler mockup, with little doors for her and 19 to spare.
After that is apparently a random assortment of parts. Literally, just a pile of gears, bolts, hinges and metal plates, anything metal or metal-adjacent that moves or can be used to make something that moves. A bit odd, sure, but with the way the Matron practically swan dives into the pile like a gold-loving duck, well she’s just happy that her kid is happy! The last big thing that they seem insistent on is… some kind of pot? The generic model one she manifests is rejected, with the Matron insisting on a much bigger one, so she takes a minute to think over things in the room a bit more.
The boiler mockup gets dissolved, and in its place she makes something a bit like a hybrid between a boiler and a giant cooking pot. There’s the main chamber in the back of the nook the boiler’s placed in, but the base extends forward into the room, allowing for a larger fire, which will also allow the built-in divot in the extended base to act like a cooking pot, just one that could fit almost a dozen Gremlins inside, which seems to satisfy the Matron’s request. With cubbies, junk and a big pot, she seems quite happy, even when she has to inform her that there’s not much in terms of food or water to cook with. She’s simply waved off, the Matron settling in to fiddle with the junk pile.
Chuckling, she moves back to her first child, the Doppleganger, and finds them examining their mouth. Objectively, it should be a disturbing thing to see, the ‘smile’ basically peeling open more like a flap of flesh than anything, taking the eye markings with it, leaving a cavernous black hole in their head lined with many rows of teeth, like a shark. Despite that, all she can feel is… perhaps the best word is the intent behind the action, all she sees is one of her kids poking at their mouth, exploring it like a toddler would after seeing their reflection for the first time. It’s adorable, quite honestly!
‘Hello, dear! Is there anything I can do for you, anything that you want?’
Their mouth slaps back down to show their smiley face once again, though without ever producing a sound. They ponder for a few moments, one clawed finger tapping against their crescent grin, before looking back to their reflection. With some hesitation, they place a hand against the mirror, and there’s such a potent sense of longing, in their posture, it almost breaks her sweet old heart!
‘Hmm, how about…yes, how about a Dressing Room? There’s some space between here and the Master Bedroom, I’m sure I could make a new space for clothes and mirrors, once I figure out how to make some clothes I could give you some things to try?’
For the first time, the Doppleganger’s smile actually feels like what it shows, and they tap their fingers against the stone sink counter happily, even if they still produce no sound. Happy that she’d managed to peg her child’s request so easily, it didn't take long to cut a new room out behind the Bathroom and besides the Master Bedroom. Feeling quite clever, she makes two hidden entrances, one behind a bookcase in the bedroom, and the other a squished tunnel thing, hidden behind the bathroom mirror like you were opening a medicine cabinet.
The Dressing Room itself is given a smaller version of one of the circular window lights, placed higher on one of the walls and just above a big wardrobe, which fills in the space alongside some foldable privacy walls and a vanity desk, all older, rickety pieces like what seems to be the norm for the off-the-shelf Generic Models. Once she has the time and energy she’ll redo them by hand as best she can, maybe add in a mannequin or two, but for now she focuses on adding in some free-standing, double sided mirrors for the Doppelganger to examine.
A quick word is all it takes for them to open the medicine cabinet window, and with uncanny, inhuman movements they crawl through the squished tunnel and into the Dressing Room. Even if it’s not up to her standards quite yet, they seem quite satisfied, and that’s all that she can hope for, isn’t it? She leaves her first child to their peace and quiet, but as she’s about to move her focus to her cat that she never made, a tingle goes up her spine-well, metaphorically, at least. Like a rock rolling downhill, her central focus is directed to her entrance, where she’s just in time to see someone step inside her space.