《Dungeons, Dangers, and Democracies》
Chapter 1
I had a late night. All my nights were late these days, it seemed, but this one was for a reason more satisfying than usual. I was working on my book, my magnum opus, a grand work designed to explain the ways of the world in an easy-to-understand and entertaining manner, with a novel-worthy story worked in between. I must have fallen asleep while writing it, and for quite a long time.
I felt strange when I awoke...and I was not where I had slept. I was resting on an oddly carved stone pedestal. It looked almost like it had been grown from the earth, except for the dull white gem on top of it. Wherever I was, it was someone¡¯s basement. The walls were perfectly smooth stone, the ground more of the same. There was only one entrance, but it stood wide open.
I didn¡¯t need to look around to tell that no one is in the room, so I set off, moving forward towards the entrance. There was a short hallway that I crossed in almost no time at all, and then I was at the staircase. And that was when I noticed there was something weird about how I had been moving.
I should have felt a slight tug from an old wound I had gotten...somewhere, but there had been nothing. I looked down at my legs, and saw they weren¡¯t there. Nor were my arms, nor my torso.
I took all this in in a weirdly detached fashion. I could still move, still feel, still see. All my senses and my mind still seemed perfectly functional. The experience was too alien for me to really panic. It was like some strange dream, even if I felt perfectly awake. I decided I would assume I wasn¡¯t dreaming.
If I was wrong, there would be fewer consequences from that assumption. I hoped.
I kept walking and ascended the staircase, and then stopped. I was surrounded by ruin. The ground was bone dry, cracked dirt except for a few shaded patches that retained some fragmentary dampness, but all was lifeless. Dusty, worn tombstones and broken statues surrounded me. In the distance, I could see a stout stone wall, the kind you saw on castles, that had a dozen breaches in it in one direction and caved-in houses in the other. The streets were strewn with broken barricades. Occasionally larger, thoroughly destroyed buildings or blank patches stood out from the general desolation.
A city had died here, first in war and then in starvation.
I shivered. It wasn¡¯t the first time I had seen such sights...but this was something else. There was no one else. I couldn¡¯t even see any insects, nor any skeletons.
¡°Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,¡± I whispered, and then I took a step forward.
The ground did not crunch under my feet. No clouds of dust were kicked up where I stepped. The world continued on, seemingly not noticing me. I took another step, and another.
I was perhaps twenty feet from the hole in the ground when I struck something and rocketed backward, flying through the air and landing on the pedestal I had awoken on.
It wasn¡¯t a pleasant feeling, but it didn¡¯t hurt, exactly. It was more like my tummy got a little upset. I gritted myself and sped forward, moving as fast as I could. The walls blurred past me. I was up the stairs in an instant. I hit the invisible barrier and was sent back, exactly the same as before.
I tried everything I could think of. I went up, lifting myself off the ground. I went slowly, moving barely an inch over the course of an hour. I went at every angle I could.
There was a bubble of twenty feet from the hole, and there was no way I could escape it.
At some point, I realized I should be getting hungry and thirsty, but there was nothing but a vague sense of satiation.
It was at this point I began to worry. I was trapped as a bodyless ghost in a tiny space amidst a massive, desolate ruin. No one would come, nothing would change, not even me. It would be like the hell of solitary confinement I had experienced before, but somehow even worse.
I screamed and screamed, and slammed myself against the barrier again and again, trying to push through with sheer willpower. But as with so many obstacles, this was not one that could be overcome through simple determination.
Day turned into night and back into day without me breaking from my mad frenzy. I no longer had the limitations of flesh - something I had wished for so many times before, to better share a fire with a dear comrade or finish a gripping story, now given to me in the most twisted way possible.
Finally, I gave up and let myself rest on the pedestal.
¡°What the fuck is going on?¡± I demanded.
And then my question was answered.
I heard a voice speak, so large and loud that I could not understand a word it said. It was like being buffeted by the winds of a hurricane, but I did not move. There was a sense of arcane amusement, and then for the first time since I had woken up, I felt pain.
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It took a long time for the hurting to stop. My entirety thrummed with agony. It felt like spiked wedges were being driven into my brain, again and again and again, without respite.
But finally, my awareness returned to the world around me, with one change I immediately noticed.
There was a floating wall of text in front of me.
Information
Mana: 2/3 stored, +2 daily income, -0 daily upkeep
Life: 0
Experience: 0
Theme: Undead
Floors: 1
None
Undead: 5 Random Basic Undead Unlocked from Theme
Undead Mastery Level 9: Unlocked. 90% reduction in Life costs for Undead. No further mastery is available.
Control Minions: Unlocked at max level.
Basic Hall: 1 mana. Must connect rooms.
Basic Room: 1 mana. Increases mana capacity by 1.
Core Room: N/A
Move Core: 5 mana. Can only be done once per day.
Shaping: 1 mana/hour. Make changes to your rooms.
Bigger Rooms: 1 Experience to unlock.
Boss Room: 2 Experience to unlock.
Gauntlet: 2 Experience to unlock.
Loot Room: 1 Experience to unlock.
Faster Shaping: 1 Experience to unlock
Spooky Cemetery: 3 Life to research.
Specializations: None
Sub-themes: None
Basic Zombie: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
Basic Skeleton: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
Rotting Beast: 5 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
Crawling Claw: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
Graveyard Bat: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep. Needs roost for shelter and rotting flesh for food.
None
Pit Trap: 3 mana, 1 to reset, 3 to repair.
Tripwire: 2 mana, 1 to reset, 2 to repair.
Spooky Skull: 3 mana, 1 to reset, 3 to repair.
None
None
None
It was overwhelming to look at. I scrolled through the tabs, unfamiliar with the terms used. Oh, I had seen them all, and even used many of them before...but presented to me as a floating insubstantial presence, they made no sense.
¡°What the fuck is going on?¡± I asked again.
Despite the pain saying it before had caused me, it was the only thing I could think to do.
This time, the answer I received was both more helpful and less painful.
You are a dungeon. Grow strong, grow deep, strive. Give life and take it.
Getting knowledge downloaded into your brain by something incomprehensibly vast and powerful still hurt, but it was more like a six out of ten, as opposed to the ten out of ten from before.
Since this seemed to be the only viable way of gaining information, I decided to try again.
¡°What the fuck is going on?¡±
Nothing happened.
With that option exhausted, I looked through the categories one by one. Some of them, like Minion Upgrades, contained nothing, just blank spaces. Some had options or statuses inside them. Those I left alone for now. One category, ¡°Special,¡± simply refused to open.
I looked at my mana score. It seemed if I didn¡¯t do anything I would go over my limit, so I decided to start testing things.
I tried to make a room off to the side of the one with the pillar. Nothing happened. I tried again, moving it forward so it was in the short little hallway. This time, I saw something: a cube appeared in my vision, glowing green. I could move it a little in two dimensions - one on a line in between the pillar room and the stairs, and up and down. Trying to bring it in line with the pillar room or the stairs made it vanish, and so did raising it up or down too far. I couldn¡¯t make it appear on the surface either within my prison either. There was a feeling like I was being blocked, like a puzzle you can¡¯t quite remember the solution for. When I tried to place it outside the bubble, nothing happened at all.
Further experimentation revealed I could change the dimensions. There were limits in size, upper and lower ones, and I could only make rooms with four walls.
After a while, I decided enough was enough. I was almost ready to make my first room.
But first, I decided to have a bit of caution. With a thought, the wall of text appeared again. It might just have been my imagination, but something about the way it hovered reminded me of those cartoon butlers who are perfectly polite and perfectly mocking all the time. Like Jeeves, or Alfred.
I scrolled through the options, found the basic room one, and mentally poked at it. It took a few tries until I got it right.
The text box changed.
Basic Room: 1 mana. A basic room. Rooms must have a hallway between them. Each room adds 1 to the Dungeon¡¯s mana capacity.
While this still left me with more questions than answers, some things made sense. I couldn¡¯t place it next to the pillar room or stairs because there wasn¡¯t a hallway. I couldn¡¯t make it too high or low because...reasons, but I suspected it had something to do with the (my?) Dungeon having only one floor.
Of course, that didn¡¯t explain basically everything else, but I would take what I could get until I could figure out why I was a Dungeon, how I was a Dungeon, and what that meant.
I envisioned my first room. I set it to be small, about five feet by five feet, and it was maybe half a foot lower than the hall. The cube stayed green in my vision, and nothing happened until I mentally commanded it to appear.
There was an instant of hesitation, and then I suddenly felt like I had just run a race. It was good, a sense of exertion I hadn¡¯t been able to enjoy in a long time. And as I was enjoying my exertion (despite not having a body), the room was appearing.
The stone simply melted away to form a passage about six feet high and two feet long, gently sloped down, and then into a room.
It was a box with smooth stone walls, a smooth stone ceiling, and a smooth stone floor.
I honestly don¡¯t know what else I was expecting.
Interlude 1 - Anger
Alev woke up with a hole in his stomach. The grove they had been feeding off of was running out, but they couldn¡¯t afford to move just yet. So they were waiting for as long as they dared, and the adults were pretending that they weren¡¯t that hungry so that the kids could have more.
He was old enough to do the same, no matter what anyone else thought. He slipped out of the rough bedroll and then the tent, already dressed. He had a ritual he did every day since he first learned about the Deluge and the history of Delsy.
First, he looked to the old capital, suppressing a slight shiver at the thought of how close they were to that haunted place. ¡°Your dream will live again,¡± he promised.
Second, he turned around slowly, looking in the distance towards the members of the Imperial League. ¡°Crowned heads tremble, for your doom comes,¡± he murmured.
Normally, the words brought him some comfort. They were not a prayer - no one prayed in the village, or at least not many - but they were a ritual, one that connected him to the heroes of only a generation or so. The real heroes, the ones who fought and bled and sacrificed, not the ones who became weeping drunks.
But today, with his belly aching in hunger and their encampment far too close to the capital, they brought only sorrow.
And as ever, he turned sorrow into anger, the same anger he saw in the faces of his parents during late nights when they argued about if they could risk moving on, the same anger he saw during the bitter toasts each Republic Day, the same anger whenever they passed the mocking monuments of the Deluge or heard the news from the Treaty Cities.
The League had killed their dungeons and doomed the Republic to choke and die on land without mana, but that had won them nothing in the end. Their cities were still wracked with riots, their peasants still died in pissant backwaters for the right of kings to rule empty strips of land.
But as ever, the anger could not be used, and so he let it out. You had to let it out, or it killed you, rotted you from the inside like his grandfather or the Old Captain.
All around him, the village was busily working. Sella was watching the children with a gaggle of younger helpers, and he waved to her, glad he had dodged that chore today. She rolled her eyes at him, and then began chasing after a pair of fighting ten-year-olds. Most of the adults were tending to the skinny, scrawny livestock or harvesting from the grove. They would take everything they could to eat, from blades of grass to strips of bark to insects. He began to head over to join them when one of the adults intercepted him.
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¡°The headman said that you were to go hunting today, if you are feeling up to it.¡±
The headman - Alev¡¯s father - liked to send people out to hunt and gather. Only those who could reliably sense mana could do it well in these wastelands, and Alev was good for his age.
¡°Alright,¡± he said, concealing disappointment, and ran off to get ready.
A meagre breakfast of flatrolls and leaf paste later, he had fetched his bow and a quiver of good stone arrows. One of the village beasts was saddled and he seized the reins, vaulting onto its scaly back.
He took a moment to look for mana, blocking out the source behind him from the village, and found a few patches.
He rode off, bow at the ready, eyes scanning the dry, broken ground, looking for any sign of life among the ruins of what had once been the greatest land in the world.
Two days had passed before he began to consider whether he should turn back. It wasn¡¯t a question of distance or time, he had been away for longer, but someone should let the village know that they had a veritable bounty of food. Perhaps some mana had welled up from the earth, for there was a profusion of life: hardy wildflowers, stunted bushes, dangling vines. He even spotted a few sapling regrowing from dead stumps, although he doubted they would last unless they were transplanted.
And of course, all the plants meant animals. He had shot three different birds. All of them were tiny, but he didn¡¯t even recognize what type one of them was, and he had collected a number of small rabbits and rats as well, more than enough to feed someone for a few days if they were careful.
But he didn¡¯t want anyone to think that he was being listened to because of who his parents were. He decided he would find something big, and then he would go back.
Again he searched for mana. It was harder now that there were so many sources around. It was like looking for a campfire while standing in the middle of a forest of candles.
Gradually, he was able to block out the closest sources, and then the smallest, until he noticed a large but fairly distant one. He estimated it would be another two days away, and then he froze, upon realizing what direction it was in.
¡°Maybe I could go back...¡± he murmured, ¡°just spend the day hunting around here and then return.¡±
But the never-quite-fading current of anger seized him. Alev steeled himself and took out his best arrow, one tipped with steel. He was going to the capital. He would face whatever ghosts still haunted it. And he would hunt there.
He began riding almost recklessly, refusing to hesitate, until the beast below him whinnied in protest and his mother¡¯s voice echoed in his head. Blushing, he got off and walked it for a time, slowing his pace.
At this rate, it would take another two days to reach the capital. Perhaps three, just to be on the safe side. But that was alright. He would simply keep hunting on the way.
Maybe, if he was lucky, he could find something impressive before he got there, and he could return early.
Yes, best to just take things slow.
Chapter 2
A quick check of the infobox confirmed exactly what I expected: my current mana had gone down by one, but my capacity had gone up by one as well. I decided to go through the rest of the room options.
The hall option was exactly what I expected. The core room was...concerning.
Core Room: Each Dungeon has one Core. If it breaks, the Dungeon dies.
It was pretty obvious that the room with the pillar was my core, and it was incredibly vulnerable. Starting from the staircase, it would only take a few minutes to get to me and break it.
And something had killed the city around me. Maybe it would come back and finish the job. Or maybe some wild cat looking for shelter for the sun would come inside and play around with the shiny gem on top of the pillar and break it. Or maybe for some would-be treasure hunter...
There were way too many possibilities for me to feel safe. The next entry provided a way to improve things. Apparently, I could move my core. It would cost more mana than I could hold right now, and my only option wasn¡¯t any good, but there was a path available for me. And I leaped on it, as I always did.
First, I would need somewhere to move my core to that was further away. That would require a hallway. And that meant more experimentation.
Like the rooms, my hallway had dimensional requirements and couldn¡¯t be placed on the surface. Unlike the rooms, I could build them off each other it seemed. Also unlike the rooms, no variance in height was allowed, except for a gentle slope up from my first room to anywhere else.
That was disappointing. It would have been nice to make anyone who wanted to get at my core have to climb a hill as long as I could make it.
What I could do, though, was make my hallway curve. I stretched it out as long as I could, making an uneven serpentine set of turns. It was sixty feet - the maximum - to walk from one end to the other, although it would be shorter as the crow flew, and as narrow as I could make it.
With that, I felt another, much larger surge of exertion. I was out of mana completely. A quick check of the infobox confirmed it.
Then I realized that I hadn¡¯t checked the last entry in the Rooms category. When I turned my attention back to the infoxbox, the text for Shaping seemed just a little larger.
¡°Very funny,¡± I murmured, feeling just a tiny bit warm, as I opened it and glanced at the text. Luckily, it seemed to be a completely useless, purely aesthetic thing.
Now I had nothing to do but wait.
I decided I could use a change of scenery from stone, stone, and more stone, and headed up to the surface. The view there was depressing, but at least there was a little variety in the depression.
I noticed some life that I must have missed earlier - a few bits of moss, clinging to the underside of a half-broken statue.
I smiled, then realized (again) I didn¡¯t have a body and wondered how I could smile. That thought led me from what I had planned to do - investigate my options for minions so I had a better deterrent than plain distance - onto a track that I probably would have preferred to avoid.
Namely all those gaps in my memory I hadn¡¯t quite been thinking about. The first thing that had really alerted me to my lack of a corporeal form was the missing tug of an old wound, but I couldn¡¯t remember any of the context for it - not the circumstances or even who inflicted it upon me.
And that seemed wrong. Surely if I¡¯d had an injury severe enough to pain me for years later, it should be at least somewhat memorable? It was not like an item to add to your grocery list or a new acquaintance¡¯s name.
The more I considered it, the more absences there were in my memory. Someone had gone through my life with a surgeon¡¯s scalpel and cut out huge quantities of it. Names, faces, dates, details...so much was gone.
I had skills and knowledge, but no awareness of how I learned them. It was...unsettling, to realize what had been done to me. I should have been angry, but I wasn¡¯t. This was so completely beyond me, more than me becoming a floating ball of nothingness that was apparently called a Dungeon, that I couldn¡¯t react properly.
I stared at the moss, and then I began to scream. And scream. And scream. There was nothing to hear me, nothing to stop me. I howled for a very long time.
And then I fled back to my core room, exhausted. I just wanted to sleep.
Unfortunately, that wasn¡¯t an option. So I hurled myself off the core and decided to see if my bubble had grown at all. A few attempts confirmed it hadn¡¯t. I slowly drifted off my pedestal, frustrated and aimless.
I drifted through my two halls and two rooms, and then I returned to the surface. The sun was setting. Watching the play of colors across the sky was at least a little soothing - reds and yellows chased greens and blues, swirling together to make purples and oranges. Light reflected off drifting clouds and floating shapes.
I stared at it all, at the alien sunset, at the sky full of figures, until it was too dark to see any of them. And then I watched the stars come out.
There were so many of them, strewn across the deep blue sky in their thousands, only faintly obscured by a few distant patches of mist. There was no moon tonight, just the countless soft lights of the stars.
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No light pollution here, I supposed. It was soothing.
I watched the sky until the sun rose and I felt a surge of warm energy enter me. I had gotten my mana back.
All two points of it. This was going to take a painfully long time. Unless I could find a way to get more mana?
Once more, I opened up the infobox.
Mana comes from the world around the Dungeon. The two main sources are passive income from the presence of life, and active income from combat.
Well, neither of those seemed to be great options for me. I was in the middle of a desolate, abandoned wasteland that had no apparent life, and that meant there probably wasn¡¯t anyone I could fight. Plus I didn¡¯t really want to hurt anyone just to give myself some mana.
Maybe I could help the moss spread somehow?
I dismissed it and headed over to the statue. It had been of a bunch of people, all raising their fists, wounded and battered but supporting each other. All of them had lost their heads, and had huge chunks of stone torn out of their bodies. They had been toppled from a nearby plinth, and most of the writing on that plinth had been scratched out. It¡¯s a pity, I bet it would have been beautiful had it been intact and unweathered.
The moss had stretched along the underside of the toppled statues. Or maybe it was lichen? I wasn¡¯t sure of the difference. It was a dark brown with white speckles, forming thick layers. From a couple of spots, tendrils with bublous ends hung down, swaying back and forth. Maybe they were seed pods?
I settled in to wait for a while. And I waited. And I waited. Watching moss grow wasn¡¯t very exciting. After a while, I decided I should build some more. I still needed another room if I wanted to move my core.
I made another hallway on the end of the first one I made. The curves varied a little, but honestly, you couldn¡¯t tell that they had been made separately. The stone melded together seamlessly, forming one unbroken path. At the end, I made another room, keeping it as narrow as I could but stretching it far back. The more space between my core and my entrance, the better.
This took perhaps fifteen minutes and left me feeling like I had just run a marathon.
And now I had nothing to do except watch moss grow some more. I returned to the surface and found the seed pods had burst, scattering some dark flecks across the ground under the statue. It seemed like it should have taken longer, but maybe this stuff was meant to be fast-growing? I remembered learning about plants that were adapted to go into devastated areas and grow really fast in them before competition could show up...
Maybe there would be some more of this stuff? That would be good. I wondered how much I would need to get extra mana income.
I began to hunt around the little bubble of space I could move in, starting at the end and slowly working my way in. There were what might have been tiny patches of moss or simply specks of darker dirt in a few places, but even more exciting was what I found sitting at the base of a tombstone.
There was a tiny sprig of grass, one I was certain hadn¡¯t been there before!
After the dullness of the past while, the little splash of green was shockingly beautiful. I got as close to it as I dared.
It was small, just a single blade less than half an inch high, but it was definitely new. Were more plants growing around me? Why was it happening?
I had so many questions.
A quick glance at my infobox showed no change and provided no answers. Maybe I needed more? Never was my lack of hands more frustrating. Or my total lack of gardening knowledge.
I resigned myself to boredom. And more boredom. And more boredom.
I was literally watching grass grow.
Naturally, my attention began to wander. I stared up at the sky. It was a pale blue, like the shell of a robin¡¯s egg. The sun drifted across it slowly, unobscured by any cloud except for a few weird dense ones.
Actually, looking closer, I think those are just floating rocks.
This place is weird. Decided the floating nothingness who possesses a few rooms and a hall. I really didn¡¯t have the right to complain. This world was what it was, and I didn¡¯t think I could change that. I had railed against so much before, but never the laws of physics.
I looked around some more and found nothing of interest, and I began to wonder about getting a minion. On the one hand, the upkeep would slow me down. It would take another three days for me to get the mana I needed without any changes. On the other, I was still far too vulnerable. Plus, having minions might give me something to do. Maybe I could send them on expeditions.
The thought of spending three days with absolutely nothing to do but keep watching the grass and the moss was what sealed it for me. Tomorrow, I would summon a minion.
I started looking through my options. All of them matched the Undead theme I apparently had pretty well.
Basic Zombie: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. Slow and dumb, does little damage, durable.
Basic Skeleton: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. Dumb, fragile, does little damage, moderately quick.
Rotting Beast: 5 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. A lump of decaying flesh of indeterminate species. Slow and weak, has a nasty scent that disorients people in a small aura around it.
Crawling Claw: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs. Undead. A reanimated hand without a body, Fragile and weak, but fairly fast.
Graveyard Bat: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep. Needs roost for shelter and rotting flesh for food. Undead. A bat glutted on corpses and rot, accustomed to death. Incredibly fragile and weak, but fast and can fly.
The only things I could summon tomorrow were the Crawling Claw and the Graveyard Bat. I thought the bat would be more useful, for scouting if nothing else. A new room and a bat were on the agenda tomorrow.
And now I just had to keep from going insane.
Far too much time spent counting bits of moss later, I was ready.
I dug out a room on the left side of my very long hall, all the way at the end, close to my core room. Maybe I could keep people guessing about which one it was in. For my second mana, I prepared to summon a Graveyard Bat.
The visual of it appeared in front of me: a large black bat, highlighted in red, with clawed legs and a drooling mouth full of tiny but sharp teeth. I could see and understand every detail of its biology.
It was actually really interesting, although for some reason I couldn¡¯t find the sonar.
After playing with that for a few minutes and determining that this bat was sexless, I started to summon it...and I felt a sudden sense of horrible nausea. I tried to retch and vomit, but my lack of body worked against me. Instead, I screamed as my nonexistent stomach cramped and convulsed.
A new box of information appeared in front of me.
Quote:
Needs: Certain minions have needs, such as food, shelter, entertainment, etc. If a need is not met, it¡¯s upkeep doubles. If you can¡¯t meet a minion¡¯s needs, you can dismiss it for half its summoning cost.
The math was simple, the warning was clear. Even as I murmured ¡°You couldn¡¯t have said so in advance,¡± I decided to summon a Crawling Claw instead.
¡°Your name is Handsy,¡± I announced, as the highlighting turned green and then it solidified.
It was a pale and boney hand, cut off cleanly at the wrist. Immediately, Handsy began to run in circles. I watched it for a few minutes. There was something endearing about the way it scuttled about. It even tried to climb onto the walls a couple times.
I seized control of it and felt it¡¯s body. Having even part of one again, even one as numbed as this, was weird, but I ignored the discomfort and began to head up towards my entrance.
To my surprise, the grass had grown to be at least a full inch, and a couple small stalks were sprouting nearby. The moss had grown nearly completely over the fallen statue, and several more patches had appeared. And most excitingly of all, there was an insect of some kind I spotted in one of the patches. A tiny little mite was sitting in the middle.
I decided to keep Handsy away from the new life for now, and sent it out to the edge of the bubble. I mentally took a deep breath, and sent it through. As soon as it started to cross the invisible boundary, the bits of it that went through began dissolving. I pulled it back.
¡°Well, at least you can do tricks for me, Handsy,¡± I announced, and watched as I made it run up a tombstone that had collapsed at an angle and then jump off.
¡°Parkour!¡±
Trying those tricks with Handsy kept me nicely entertained. I even managed to get him to do a wall run for a few seconds after leaping off the tombstone and doing a backflip.
Unfortunately, he didn¡¯t seem to be able to learn from that. Every time I released him, he just resumed scuttling in a circle.
The sun set and rose as I kept practicing with Handsy, and then I checked my mana count.
My upkeep had gone up, but so had my income.
Looks like all the plants around me were paying off...