All around the world, as people tried to adapt to sudden status screens and the knowledge that their little rock was so much smaller than they expected, the system was hard at work. In ancient ruins where mana collected and left stagnant, deep within the earth, in shipwrecks and reefs, tendrils of mana coalesced. In 51,000 locations around the globe, where no one could see, the tendrils danced and gave off light, system mana drawing impossibly complex runes and shaping the surrounding material into a dense crystalline matrix. The shape didn’t matter; some were cubic, others were cylindrical, and still others were completely spherical, each about 10 cm, and smooth down to the atomic structure. Even their colour didn’t matter, and yet the system designed each one with care, making sure that they were unique and seeded with a mind that could enjoy this life of solitude among their children.
This core, 40,111, was a pale golden green, like new leaves that had not yet reached maturity, shaped like two triangular pyramids that were turned 30 degrees from one another and smashed together, with the six medial points facing alternate directions. In a cavity within a dark, dusty tunnel with bits of debris floating and bobbing about around it, the core floated and waited, before a final spark of system mana brought it to life, light dancing and swirling within the many interlocking structures within the core, and even those shifted and changed, light flowing like some crystalline brain.
Its thoughts were confused at first, like waking up from a drugged sleep as it tried to adapt to the information implanted into it at birth. The core rotated and pulse brighter as its mind woke up further and further, trying to examine the world around it.
That’s when the dreaded pop-ups began.
New Document Available
Welcome to the system
Minimize
New Document Available
The basics of being a core
Minimize!
New Document Available Materials and you!
Minimize!!
New Document Available A guide to interior design
Minimize!!!
New Document Available Bellatrix's beautiful bestiary
Minimize!!!!
New Document Available Choosing a starting monster
Minimize!!!!!
New Document Available Themes r us
Minimize!!!!!!
New Document Available Pantheons and prayer
* * * * * *
The list seemed endless, like some sort of ad spam from a sketchy website: minimize, minimize, minimize! How was a girl supposed to think with these damn pop-ups filling her vision wherever she focused? And she tried to look away, mind you. As a core, eyes did not limit her. This entire cavity was hers, and she could see it from any angle, from her slowly spinning self to the tiniest bit of floating rock and dust around her. But every time she tried to Focus, to actually Look at something, the damn pop-ups would shift to cover the centre of her focus. She wasn’t even able to click them, just her instinct for using the system that was built into herself, allowing her to minimize them at will with no trouble.
And what were these new thoughts? What was a web browser and how did she know what spam was? For that matter, when did she decide she was a She? Even as she thought about it, new ideas were filling her head; nothing too detailed, knowledge basic to the entities native to this planet... Most of them seemed useful, but she wished whoever was deciding could spend a little more time filtering out what a core might require, especially these damn pop-ups!
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Sigh. There. Finally, almost everything was gone, and she had a moment to herself to just gaze about the room and relax, seeing how her glow illuminated the rock, leaving shadows and little nooks about the place. Actually, now that she could examine it in more detail, it seemed the rock was scored. There were lines in the material that were certainly not natural. It matched nothing in her 'memories’ but... Maybe something was mining here? The crevice she was in was only three times her own size, so whatever made the markings couldn’t have been big but... Well, there was a mention of ‘Black’ companies that would be heinous enough to make people dig like this, or maybe someone tried to escape along this way from something?
She tried adjusting her perspective about her cavity before giving up on that mystery. She could learn more as she figured it out herself. For now, she took a moment to adjust her 'HUD', as the memories wanted her to call it, shifting a pair of timers to the mid-right of her focus, her hit points and mana into a pair of bars on the top left, and finally, the various minimized pop-ups into a sidebar below the timers, with a toggle to shrink them to a single point if need be.
It took time to get each change to happen; it wasn’t like she could manually drag them, sending her thoughts to the system and willing the changes to occur until the HUD understood what she wanted and shifted to suit her needs. Even then, it wasn’t perfect. She had an inkling that there would be more screens, bars she would want to place, maps, and she would need to close this entire HUD on a dime if she wanted any kind of peace... And she knew she did. Honestly, existence for her at this point was strange. She knew, with no experience, her thoughts were like a teenager's; complex, liable to drift from one goal to the next, never having learned on her own. She had a feeling that there were rules she had to follow, some unbreakable, others that could be strained. But mostly she felt a hunger... For something. But... The timers seemed to be very long, and she didn’t feel at all rushed, so she took a deep breath, so to speak, and read.
Welcome to the System Held nothing of any real value, just explained how to adjust her HUD, which is called a system panel, and how to pull up her status, materials, monsters, and trap lists, and how to make more if she wanted. It came with diagrams, but she figured it would be pretty intuitive. The rest of the message told her about where she was: in a mountain range in a continent named North America... Right on the west coast, and how her knowledge was tailored to the area so she could understand the inhabitants and design things that wouldn’t be too out of place. Though who thought building some giant rusted hunk of metal wouldn't be out of place? And why would it have to be on fire or explode? She quickly moved to toss that message out in a nifty bin that appeared on her HUD when she thought she wouldn’t need it again.
She made use of the status information. Pulling up her designation, stats, skills, not that any of it made sense to her right now, ten across the board with skills like decomposition, creation, rules, storage, etc, but quickly she had to make an edit to the name. She'd be more than a number. She refused to be just a number. But what to call herself? She squinted her nonexistent eyes at the screen, focusing on the numbers and trying to twist them, to think of something else to call herself... Holli. The four looked kinda like a H and the ones like L's and I’s. Holli, the dungeon core. It didn’t have a bad ring to it, and if anyone complained, they could talk to the system about giving her a bad name to begin with.
The Basics of a Core That was much more useful. She had instincts about how to use herself, but being able to put a name to things was so much better. Mana. That’s what she was here for, and what she was hankering for, even now she drew some towards herself to snack on, black sluggish motes becoming vibrant and active as they passed through her core. Apparently, mana would build up in worlds with life, becoming stagnant and corrupted, and clogged with negative thoughts, harmful intents, and just emotions that refused to be cleansed by life so it could be use-able. They designed cores to feed on that very mana, removing it from invaders, monsters, and materials and replacing it with safe mana as rewards, airflow, and monsters. When the monsters died, mana would fill the killer and empower them. Well, that didn’t seem quite fair. Wouldn’t a killer killing her monsters be an invader? Why was she strengthening them in every way? And wasn’t she basically a filter with a side job of training people? They even encouraged her to build puzzles and traps to test them. Screw that! She just wanted to be left alone, to relax and play around at her own pace. There was the bit about the timer.
System notice
(cannot be disabled) To ensure quick development of the first wave of cores on the planet, all cores will only have 24 hours to decide their starting monster and theme, and 30 days to develop their first floor to a state where their entrance can open to invaders. Until that point, the system will protect the core from attack.
TIme remaining to choose: 23:15:36
Time remaining till opening: 719:15:36
That… That didn’t sound good at all.
"Okay, not the end of the world, just your life if you fail... Well, how hard could it be?" She asked herself, the core bobbing where it floated, spending mana to dig into her room, to expand her influence, and set up a proper core room as she explored the hallway. It was expensive, but she went slow at first, digging at a cubic metre a minute as her mana kept topping up. She followed the instructions in the pop-up to draw in more mana, splitting her mind on the tasks as a pedestal took shape underneath her. Materials were even piling up in her inventory. Not that she knew much about them, like what was Silicon? Carbon? She didn’t even have time to question those things, pulling up the catalogue of beginner monsters and themes, setting them side by side, and letting the GUI highlight options she was interested in and grey out incompatible ones when he focused on them. And she needed that. She wished she could just remove options altogether, but there might not be a way to get them back after all! But the lists were huge. Most of the options weren’t even in English, and she couldn’t select the themes based on them yet, though she could choose the monsters themselves.
Eventually, she made each produce an image, and that’s when the time really sank in. Her gaze fell on forests, crystal spires, cities, and crypts. Various themes and settings that she could use for her dungeon, getting lost in the beautiful flora and slowly narrowing her choice down to a jungle and locking in her choice of theme. It was just so much easier to narrow it down with only about a hundred fifty choices to choose from.
Why a jungle? Well, all the pretty flowers! Plus, the jungle theme would let her monsters have increased stealth and variability, at the cost of difficult terrain and a lack of traps... but she could make traps! There were flower traps and monsters, right? They were just so cute, and the bright birds and fruits and all the critters looked so sweet! Maybe not all of them. She was pointedly trying to forget the many arthropods with much toooooo many legs that she had seen in the catalogue, having pointedly removed them from her list altogether. Now she had a final choice... And the list had narrowed! With 100 items on a page originally and well over 10,000 pages, there was no way she could have gone through them all in 24 hours. Now she only had about a hundred pages to go. Sigh... Time to get to work Holli.
With passaging time, even hours, her core room took shape; her walls expanding, smoothening, bits of rock and dust floating around the ceiling before she quickly gobbled them up too. Pillars formed that connected to the ceiling with designs of vines and flowers as she imagined her jungle theme. Spouts and places for water, if she could find any, added as an afterthought, to trickle along the walls and pool on the ground. And finally, a path of stones. Overall, she had made the room spherical with a radius of 3 metres, knowing that her core would grow much larger as she levelled, with much of the bottom cutout filled with water, focusing on the tunnel and creating a hallway out of it... It was strange. The tunnel almost seemed to follow something, forming irregular shapes and switching back upon itself, going in a different direction. She found traces of other materials, platinum, lead, nickel, iron, and trace amounts of things the system wouldn’t identify for her. Beyond that, all she knew was that it was a stone... It's a very helpful system. She couldn’t even make it look the same; the stone she made was lighter and with none of the pores that the surrounding rock had.
When the path diverged, she kept her hallway going straight on a slight incline up, and let her influence go down that tiny little tunnel, finally settling on a faux lizard as her monster. It was a fuzzy monster about two feet tall at the shoulder, with flowers on its head, back, and the end of its tail to help it blend into the jungle undergrowth. An ambush predator, it hunted for meat, though it could also subsist on plants and fruits. It looked like an animal, but it was entirely a plant and could live off of light if it was in good condition. Hopefully, it will evolve into something good! Hmm? Did she pick it because it was cute again? Of course! But it had the advantage of not being native to the world she was in, and once she got many critters from the forests and the people, she could have a proper jungle theme! Sure, she would get a few things like squirrels and birds and vines and shrubs and trees, but they would be basic varieties, nothing that could evolve into something special!
Locking into her second choice, she felt a wash slide over her core, instructions to create soil, trees, plants, flowers, her monstrous race, and its food sources. It made her core vibrate; it was better than eating mana. She couldn’t describe the sensation if she wanted to of suddenly learning, becoming more with the selection firmly settling her into the system.
Suddenly, her core room shook. There was no sound, only the dust creating a cloud around her and down that winding tunnel as she tried to understand what was going on. Quickly she flooded her mana into expansion, pushing her influence down that mined out tunnel to figure out what was going on as the rumbles stopped, absorbing all the debris from the vibrations. It took time, but eventually her influence reached the end of that winding tunnel, spreading much faster without having to mine. But still she couldn't see the cause of it all... Was it a giant monster? Was it an explosion? Humans apparently had things called cars that explode all the time... Maybe that was it?
It took a few agonizing minutes for her mana to reach full again. But with a full 10, Holli could begin summoning a lizard right at the end of her tunnel, to gaze out through it and get her first glimpse of the outside world.
Mana coalesced. She could see it with her senses, particles of light taking form and shaping into a squat lizard with green mossy skin and vibrant golden eyes. On the end of its tail and horns were pink bell-shaped flowers she hoped gave off a lovely scent, the core praising her monster already as it opened its mouth... Only to choke and struggle and claw at the ground while the core stared through those eyes in awe and fear, the creature's body pushing off from the ground and spinning as it struggled.
*WARNING*WARNING*WARNING*WARNING*WARNING* The monster "Faux Lizard" cannot survive in a vacuum. Please provide an atmosphere if you do not wish the creature to suffocate.