《Hacking the Dungeon Core》 Chapter 01: The River of Souls
I drifted, aimless and uncontrolled, trying to figure out where I was and how I''d gotten here. I seemed to be floating in flowing water, if water was made of memories and emotions and leaked into the mind the way the smell of a Korean coworker''s microwaved lunch leaked into a break room. Nothing against any of my old coworkers, I''m sure that fish and kimchi was delicious (for them), it was just kind of pervasive, and it stuck around for hours. I think I''d been at home, mainlining energy drinks and junk food and working on one of my projects, when Harold had better step harder on the gas. This baby was coming, and if we didn''t get to the hospital soon, I was going to bite a hole in the car''s upholstery. I''d never been in this much pain before in my life, and if my fool husband thought I was going to sit still and be quiet through it, he had another think coming. What? No. I think I fell asleep at my computer? I definitely didn''t have a baby - I didn''t even have the equipment to have a baby! These alien memories were getting stronger, more pervasive. That one had felt way too real, the phantom pain of someone else''s contractions burned through me, but there was no way it could have been mine. I wasn''t a parent. Now, what had I been thinking about? Before I ended up here, I was walking through the forest, my footsteps soft and unhurried, my hunting rifle slung over my back. My mouth watered as I anticipated the outcome of a successful hunt - a new trophy for my wall, and more venison than my family could possibly eat by ourselves. Maybe we could trade some to the neighbor for some of her wild berry jam. No I wasn''t. I''d never even had venison, even if I suddenly knew what it tasted like. And I''d definitely never used a hunting rifle. This was ridiculous! I just wanted to remember what I''d been doing before I landed in this weird river! Computer! Red Bull! The screen got really fuzzy! It got hard to think! And then I was here. Was this just some messed up dream from falling asleep at my desk? It hurt. It hurt it hurt! I grit my teeth and held my breath against the pain, against the screams and curses that wanted to escape, and pushed hard with my arms and legs. Something gave. Oh, that was the footrest on the hospital wheelchair. Well. If they didn''t want me damaging hospital equipment, they shouldn''t make me wait so long to get into labor and delivery to get some pain relief! I know Harold made the right call, dropping me off then going to park the car, but I could really use some support here! I felt like I should have been shaking all over. There was no way I was dreaming. That was way too real - too painful. There was no way I could dream up what it felt like to be a woman in labor. Feeling panic rising, I tried to calm my breathing. I wasn''t breathing. I didn''t have a nose, a mouth, or lungs to breathe with. I panicked harder. I could feel water flowing around me, but I couldn''t move to swim in it. I didn''t have arms or legs. I tried to close my eyes, but I didn''t have those, either. I blew out the candles on the birthday cake with one breath, all six of them. My wish was going to come true! I needed to focus. I couldn''t breathe through the panic. I couldn''t tense and relax my muscles, because I didn''t have any. I couldn''t check my senses, because the only sense I had was touch, and the only thing I could feel was the current. I could barely string three thoughts together without getting interrupted by such a beautiful baby. I never thought I''d live to see my first great-grandchild. Other people''s memories. Focus, focus, what could I focus on? The only thing I''d ever been able to really focus on was computers, and if I didn''t have a body, I definitely didn''t have a computer. I really, really wanted a computer right now. Even if all I could do was sort files so they made more sense, I''d S://
What? What was that? Was that a directory? Was there anything in it?
Earl
...that''s my name. OK. Um. Open Earl? S://Earl/ This is weird. Am I hallucinating? Dreaming? Imagining myself as a computer so that I can have a computer wherever I go? What''s in Earl? Memories; Skills Is that all I am? Memories and skills? I guess, without a body, I''m just what I remember and what I know how to do. That''s really depressing. Jump. Jump. Jump. Trip. My friends laughed as I got back up. I steadied the jumprope and got ready to try again. ...I think maybe that was me? But why were my friends in dresses? I''d never hung out with girls as a kid. I''d always thought they had cooties. Oh. Because that wasn''t me, but it sure felt like it was me. Back to root. I have an idea. S:// Create folder: Not_Earl. Now, list folders. Earl; Not_Earl Perfect. Open Not_Earl. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. S://Not_Earl/ Create folder: Memories. Direct foreign memories to S://Not_Earl/Memories/. Please work. And, uh, take foreign memories and move to S://Not_Earl/Memories/. Please. That was such bad computer hygiene. If this were real, or I was using an actual computer, I''d have to jump through so many more hoops, but I think it worked. I felt better already, secure in the knowledge that I never wore a frilly dress and jumped rope with the other little girls, on account of never having been a little girl. Where were all these memories coming from? Were there any of my memories floating around? Send query: "list removed memories"? Y/N Um. Yes? Unable to locate list of removed memories. Memories removed: 3. Oh, that was not alright. I needed to change some settings or something, because I needed to not lose any more memories. Just because none of those had been important didn''t mean the next one to go wouldn''t be something I needed. Settings? Please? Oh, there they were. That was a lot of tabs, and a lot of details. Well, I had nothing better to do, so I started reading. Reading and adjusting. Adjusting and reading. It was dull and tedious, but I did it. And it worked. I enabled memory copying and disabled deletion when a memory was copied from me to the river, and I learned a few things, too.
First thing: I was dead. I was definitely dead. I had to review a few (dozen) memories to check facts, but the evidence pointed to stroking out at my computer and then not getting any help. Sure, I lived alone, but I was in my thirties! That''s not old enough to have to worry about having a stroke, right? Right? Oh. Wrong. According to a wikipedia entry I must have read late at night and then not remembered later, people could have strokes at any age. It was just more common in old folks.
I sat by the hospital bed, holding the cold, wrinkled hand. I wasn''t ready. I never would have been, I know, but I wasn''t ready. Ugh. Even though I knew that wasn''t my memory, it hit hard. I wondered if anyone was going to grieve for me. I hadn''t spoken to my parents in years, and it had been even longer since I''d heard from my sister, and that was just a letter telling me I was formally banned from attending her wedding. The only thing she might cry about was that I definitely hadn''t left her anything, not that I had much to leave behind. I didn''t have any friends outside of work, and my work friends barely counted. I only ever saw my landlord when my rent was late or I had to bully him into fixing something around the place. The second thing I learned going through my settings: reincarnation was a thing. People reincarnated after they died, animals reincarnated after they died, and memories and personalities were erased from the soul when that happened. This river I was in, the River of Memories, was part of that process. I turned off automatic deletion of memories and personalities. By changing the settings in my soul, I probably changed the way reincarnation is going to work for me, maybe forever (or until those settings get changed back). If I keep my memories in every life, will I go mad from it? Can I seal those memories after I''m reborn, so I can have a nice, normal life as a new person, and then remember myself later? Or maybe I can sort of watch from behind my own eyes and have multiple minds and personalities develop in my soul? That sounded messy, but still better than forgetting who I am. If "Earl" ceased to exist, I wouldn''t be me. I''d be someone else, and "Earl" would be dead. I didn''t want that - I couldn''t stand the thought. I''ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it, however many "me"s there are. As I thought about life and afterlife and the nature of the self, the river around me grew faster and more turbulent. What had been a gentle current became rough and choppy, and unseen forces created eddies that swirled me around in circles, up and down and around and around. It was dizzying, and the fragments of memory were disorienting. I ran-walked-crawled-swam through-past-over-around a road-a field-an olympic pool... Ugh. Something soft bumped against me, and foreign emotions flooded out of it panic fear confusion lost alone and then it was gone, swept away in the current. Or maybe I was swept away from it. Either way, I drifted into a calmer patch. Fragments of memories, barely impressions of experiences, continued to wash through me as I floated along. Sometimes, things bumped into me from the side, or from below, and inflicted their emotions on me. None of them seemed to be having a good time. In an attempt to distract myself from how awful the afterlife had turned out to be, I made a folder called "Tools" in root and built a little tracker program in it. It counted notices that the River was copying a memory, kept time in increments I labeled "seconds" based on how long it took me to think the words "one Mississippi" slowly, and logged which memory was copied and the time between copies. Now, if I wanted some idea of how long had passed, I could just check the tracker. Several bumps and a copied memory later, I realized that I''d forgotten something. I went back into my tracker and added "minutes" and "hours". That was better. Now I could track how long I''d been here. About fifteen hours after that cheerful thought, I went over a waterfall, bounced off of something hard under the "water", and bobbed back up. It was weird to realize after so long floating that there was a bottom and, apparently, a top to the water. I didn''t have long to bask in my new understanding of the world around me, though. Less than a minute after going over the falls, my world became pain. Something pierced through me - not like the pierced ears (and other things) from some of the memories I''d been forced to live, but all the way through. I''d been impaled. Then, I was jerked back by the - the thing that - it burned - it -
Junior Fisherman Burim had been having an incredibly boring, typical day, watching the River of Memories and occasionally throwing his harpoon at something or scooping small souls out of the water near the shore with his net, when he saw it. It wasn''t big enough to be a spirit fish, but it wasn''t small enough to be an ordinary soul, either. It was floating in the calm patch near the middle of the river, much too far out for his net.
Not too far for his harpoon, though.
Burim checked to make sure the harpoon''s rope was connected properly, both to the weapon and to his own wrist - it wouldn''t do to lose it. He hefted his fishing tool, took aim, and threw, just as hard as he could. There was a great splash, and both the harpoon and the large soul vanished beneath the surface of the river. Burim waited, but the unusual soul didn''t float back up. Excitement rose within him like the first rays of dawn after a long, cold night, and he began to reel in the harpoon and, he hoped, the large soul. Carefully, too fast and it might slip off the end, hand over hand, Burim pulled the rope in until he reached its end and found that the biggest, fattest soul he''d ever pulled from the river was impaled on his harpoon. It was bigger than his clenched fist, almost as large as both his hands together, and speared neatly through its middle. He propped it over an empty basket and carefully untied the rope from his harpoon before standing the weapon on its butt in the basket and sliding the soul, carefully, down and off, trying to do as little damage as possible to it. He''d have to let it sit a while to heal from being speared, but that was typical. Burim put a wicker lid on the basket and tied it shut with twine, then set it aside to wait for him to finish his fishing for the day. Maybe there would be a few other good catches for him before the collector came to fetch his catches. He glanced at the stack of empty baskets behind him and grimaced. Some decades, it felt like he''d never manage to fill them all up and be promoted to Fisherman. Chapter 02: The Processing Facility
I woke up disoriented. I hurt all over, and I felt heavy. I was - was I dry? I was out of the water, and I couldn''t move. I couldn''t see or hear or even smell anything. I could feel, though. Whatever I was laying on, it was hard and coarse and maybe woven? Was I in a basket? I still didn''t have a body, so I couldn''t do breathing exercises, but I could check on my little file tree. Open root! S:// Yeah, it was still there. List files. Earl; Not_Earl Open Earl. I decided to take a look at what had happened that led up to me being here now, instead of floating in the river, which was a lot more comfortable than this. S://Earl/ Open Memories. S://Earl/Memories/ Sort memory files by order of creation, with the most recent at the top. I reviewed the list of memories, and felt a surge of relief when I saw that my command had worked. There was a memory of waking up and realizing that I was in a basket, and there was a memory of being impaled, and there, in between, was a memory that I didn''t remember. I opened it. I was in so much pain. I could feel the barbs on whatever had run me through digging into me, ripping and tearing my (not flesh, I had no body) whatever I was made of. Something gripped me, warm and branching, and forced me further onto the thing, sliding the foreign object through me; I could feel every barb slipping smoothly up and out, followed by a smooth shaft that was almost a relief, though it was painful in its own way. And then, the foreign object was gone, and I fell onto something hard and unyielding. It was gritty, and the grit dug into me. Then, the warm thing was back, one-two-three-four branches there and another there and a plane between and - was that a giant hand? Or was it a normal sized hand, and I was just very small? The hand lifted me up, then let go, and I fell fell fell onto something hard and rough and ridged, but thankfully free of grit. A basket? So, I was impaled by something, pulled out of the river, and then chucked in a basket. Like a fish. Am I going to be cooked and eaten? The world shifted and moved upward. The basket was being lifted and moved, bumping and jostling as who, or what, ever held it stepped along the beach (or riverside?). I then learned that you don''t need a stomach to feel sick to your stomach, because the bumping and jostling sure had me sick to my nonexistent stomach. Just when I thought I was going to find out if you can throw up without a mouth, it all stopped with a thump. Well, I didn''t hear the thump, but I sure felt it. I''d been put down. It was just me and my memories, sitting in a basket with no way to look, listen, or move. Time to get a better look at what I had available to me. Open S://Earl S://Earl/
Open Memories
S://Earl/Memories
List folders No folders found List files ...oh wow, that was a lot of files. Right. It was all of my memories. Maybe there was a way to organize these better. Create folders representing years and sort memories by date into folders. ... ...... ......... Ow. What just happened? Oh, right, I was trying to organize my memories. Open Memories! S://Earl/Memories/ Show me memory files. ...no change, no folders. Messing with my own memories is probably what knocked me out and gave me this headache (for lack of a better word). Maybe I shouldn''t have tried to do that. Go up a level. S://Earl/ Show folders. Memories; Skills; Tools Show files. There was documentation. There was documentation in my soul. I lost track of time reading the documents. There were a few of them, and I needed a few tries to get through them. There were logs with summaries of past lives, which contained an alphanumeric identifier for what world I''d lived in, a brief description of species, and how long I''d lived. Apparently I''d once spent a thousand years as a tree, and then had all memory of it wiped to make way for a new life. There was even a summary of my life as Earl, which looked just like the other summaries. Wait a minute. If everything is wiped to make way for a new life, how come these logs are still here? Go up a level. S:// This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. Show files. There. There was a master copy of all of the logs, along with a short program that made the logs and copied them from root into the new life, along with a document explaining the purpose of that practice. The logs were meant to help determine the character of a new life. They represented my experiences, accumulated over multiple lifetimes. I''d never reincarnated as a true blank slate, there was always a hint of my past lives there, ready and waiting to influence my preferences and behavior.
No wonder I''d liked climbing trees so much as a kid.
Eventually, the basket I was in was picked up and moved again. This time, whoever was moving me was way less gentle. I was jostled, bounced, and even rolled from surface to surface. With a final jerk and a moment of weightlessness I crashed down and landed on the curved side of the container. Crash. Something had been dropped on top of my prison. And then something was dropped on top of that something. Silence. I waited, trying to ignore my rising anxiety, for something to happen. I didn''t have to wait long. Everything started to move again. I could feel my basket wobbling and rocking, bumping against other objects, as I was transported somewhere. It was a long trip. Long enough for me to get used to the rocking and bumping and bouncing. Long enough for me to get bored and start looking through my memories for something to do. I was re-watching a favorite movie from my childhood when the movement stopped. Wherever I was being taken, I''d arrived. My basket prison was picked up again and moved and put down again. Then, there was nothing for a while. I just sat there. I went back to my movie. I was interrupted again before I got to the finale, where the bad guy is redeemed through the power of friendship and violence. Something was touching me. It was warm and felt like a hand, but a different one than the one before. The hand squeezed me, hard, then another hand appeared and I was palpated and stretched and dangled uncomfortable and pricked with needles or pins or some other thing sharp thing, then put down on a hard, smooth surface that felt cold and unforgiving. Something was stabbed into me, bigger than the things from earlier but much smaller and smoother than the awful thing that had impaled me and started this series of events. A rush of something cold flooded out of the thing - an injection - and everything faded away. ------ I woke up sitting in a cool bowl with an itchy feeling in the back of my mind. Something was strange. What''s going on? Download in progress... Download? What? What''s downloading? Download in progress... Why does it itch? Folder Not_Earl deleted. Folder Not_Earl replaced with folder Dungeon. Download in progress... A wave of relief that I''d made Not_Earl washed over me. If I hadn''t, would I have been deleted? Time to look at the damage. Open root. S:// Show folders. Earl; Dungeon; Tools
Show files.
...the master copy of the log files is gone. The program that made the log files isn''t gone, but all the files it made is.
Open Earl. S://Earl/ Show files. My log files were still there in me, it''s just the master copy that was gone. I copied the log files and put them back where they belonged, loose in Root. It was sloppy, but I wasn''t going to mess with it. There, better. Download in progress... Go up a level. Open Dungeon. Error: download in progress. Oh. I had to wait for the paint to dry before I could find out what was going on. Fine. I narrowed my non-existent eyes and opened the memory of watching that movie as a little kid again. I was going to finish it, and then see how that download was going. Three movies later, the download finally finished. I noticed, not because I got a notification, but because I suddenly had more senses than just touch. Or, I still just had my sense of touch, but I could feel more than just what was touching me, as though I''d suddenly grown into more than just my soul. I was sitting in a shallow bowl, but I was also the bowl that I was sitting it, and the pedestal the bowl was attached to, and the floor and the walls and the ceiling, and I could tell that the room was about the size of a broom closet and that it was made of stone. I was made of stone. Open Dungeon. I needed to see what was going on here. S://Dungeon/ Show folders. Resources; Minions; Traps; Contracts; Treasure; Construction; Templates A pulse of energy washed through me. It tasted of dirt and rock and ice and trees. That was weirdly delicious. Reflexively, I stretched toward the "trees" taste, moving without moving. My sense of self expanded and I felt one of the stone walls wearing away, like licking a piece of candy until it began to deform and dissolve on the tongue. What in the world was going on here? Show files. ReadMe; Log Open ReadMe The ReadMe file in the Dungeon folder turned out to be a dense mass of technical jargon that I could barely understand. I was able to glean a few scraps of knowledge between the pulses of stone and soil and light fluffy snow that falls in the early morning before a clear day, which as an oddly specific flavor. I learned that I was now a "dungeon core", which was an artificial living filter made from a soul (there were a lot of details on what kind of soul and how it got changed, which were kind of horrifying, this was like that meme about waking up in a tub full of ice and missing a kidney, but real, and so much worse, like waking up in a back alley with a folder detailing all the brain surgery you went through without giving consent). I learned that dungeon cores filter something called "mana", removing contaminants from it and releasing pure mana back into the environment.
There were no details on what "mana" was, or what the contaminants were, or what the contaminants did to dungeon cores. Was I a disposable filter that would do a job for a while, and then be thrown away or destroyed? Would I eventually be poisoned by doing what I had no choice in doing? Open log. The log turned out to be full of time stamps and "impurities" collected. It started counting from the Dungeon download finishing and had an easily understandable time stamp based on hours, minutes, and seconds. It also counted the impurities in units smaller than one. 00:00:10 - 0.1 Stone Impurities Collected 00:00:10 - 0.08 Granite Impurities Collected 00:00:10 - 0.02 Quartz Impurities Collected 00:00:20 - 0.1 Soil Impurities Collected 00:00:20 - 0.1 Life Impurities Collected 00:00:30 - 0.01 Snow Impurities Collected 00:00:30 - 0.5 Tree Impurities Collected 00:00:40 - 0.1 Stone Impurities Collected 00:00:50 - 0.08 Granite Impurities Collected 00:00:50 - 0.02 Soil Impurities Collected It continued in the same vein. Please organize logs by day and begin new days at sunrise. I don''t want to have to slog through weeks worth of this to find something if I need to. Updating Log sorting algorithm... Log sorting algorithm updated I had no idea what was making these program changes for me, and it was probably me on some level, but it couldn''t hurt to be polite. I needed a moment to process. I focused on the pulses of energy, and the taste of the "impurities", instead of breathing. The pulses began to slow down, and I realized - this was how I breathed now. In, and out. Iiiiin, and ooouuuut.... I could meditate again. My therapist would be so proud. Chapter 03: The Beginning
As the wall receded, seemingly into nothing, I began to feel fuller and fuller, until I was almost painfully bloated. Just as I started to think that I couldn''t take anymore, a popup appeared. Upgrade Dungeon Core to expand Contaminant Storage? For the love of God yes. Select impurities. A full list of my collected impurities appeared. There were twenty-five slots, and all of them had a decimal number somewhere between zero and one. Most of them were under one, and some of them were... unpleasant. Will the impurities I use to expand storage have an effect on me? Show me some documentation here! ...several nauseating hours later, I was reasonably confident that I understood the document that popped up enough to be confident that, no matter what I spent on growing my core, it was going to be completely denatured. Select "dung" impurities. 0.5 Units of impurities selected. 1 Unit minimum required for upgrade. Select more impurities? Yeah, throw in a half unit of "granite". That one seems to build up pretty fast. 1 Unit of impurities selected. Upgrade dungeon core? Yes! Upgrading... The sense of relief was incredible. The bloating faded almost instantly. It didn''t go away entirely, but it felt like something had gone away, or been used, or - wait. I was a filter. That must be what it felt like when the filter filled up. And then, by upgrading, I was cleaning some of the crud out of myself. Upgrade complete. Maximum Impurity Storage increased to: 25.1. That wasn''t a very big upgrade. Can I even use storage under one unit? And what''s mana capacity for? Isn''t that the stuff I''m supposed to release into the environment? I opened the dungeon core documentation again. I had questions, and that was where the answers were most likely to be. It took long enough to find the answers to my questions that I had to use three more units of impurities to make room for more while I was reading. The information I wanted was spread across five different sections, and I ended up having to open something like a text document to take notes in while I worked it out. I learned that dungeons automatically take in impure mana and collect the impurities, that those impurities are used for construction and summoning within the dungeon, and that pure mana is released when the dungeon core uses mana. As for what I''m supposed to use mana for, it was really vague, but it seemed to mostly be maintenance related. Another queasy feeling overtook me. I rechecked my notes. It should be possible for me to refine impurities as I use them, essentially producing tainted mana then quickly reabsorbing it, to make my resources last longer and go farther.
Open core upgrade panel. Open advanced options.
I quickly scanned through my options. "Light Morning Snow" impurities didn''t look like they were going to happen very often, so those could go, but I wanted them refined, so I ticked the "refine" box. The other 97% of a unit can come from Earth impurities. Execute. Upgrading core... Refining impurities... Impurity storage increased by 1/10 unit. Storage is now 25.5 units of impurities. Light Morning Snow impurities refined to Snow impurities. Alright. I could work with that. That''s not bad at all. Maybe I could refine impurities enough that I could get double or triple duty out of most of them. I''d have to find out what refined how, which wasn''t in any of the stuff I''d read so far, but I could take notes on my own. So far, I''ve learned that "light morning snow" turned into "snow" when I refined it. I reviewed my surroundings. I had a room about the size of a broom closet, with my "core" on a pedestal in the center. Both room and pedestal were made of stone, maybe granite. I checked my memories for mentions of types of stone and determined that, yes, it was granite. One of the walls had a slowly growing concave dip in its center. As I "watched", a paper thin layer of stone evaporated into seemingly nothing and returned to me in a pulse that tasted strongly of "earth" and "stone" and "granite". Review impurity log. What did I just pull in? Earth Impurities: 0.10 Stone Impurities: 0.10 Granite Impurities: 0.10 Soil Impurities: 0.02 Ice Impurities: 0.02 Dung Impurities: 0.01 Hm. I didn''t need to know that last ingredient. I didn''t read nutrition facts too closely when I was alive (but I''m alive again) when I was human, and I concluded that I didn''t need to change that habit, now that I was a dungeon core. How many granite impurities do I have? Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work! Granite Impurities: 2.4 Use two granite impurities to expand dungeon core. Refine the impurities used to expand dungeon core. Upgrading core... Refining impurities... Impurity storage upgraded by 2/10 units. Storage is now 25.7 units of impurities. Granite impurities refined to Stone impurities, Quartz Impurities, Feldspar Impurities, and Mica Impurities. A sensation not unlike acid reflux washed over me. Either refining something into that many different things didn''t agree with me, or I somehow had too many impurities gumming me up.
Use dung impurities to upgrade dungeon core. Pull from stone impurities to bring impurities used to a full unit. Refine impurities. Change default to refine impurities. Upgrading ore... Refining Impurities... Impurity storage upgraded by 1/10 units. Storage is now 25.8 units of impurities. Dung impurities refined to Life and Soil impurities. Stone impurities refined to Earth impurities. That was better. The pressure, and reflux, faded away, leaving me merely uncomfortably full. I spent another two units of impurities and brought storage up to twenty-six. Then, I opened the Dungeon folder again, and started looking for whatever process had me digging like this without thinking about it, or really wanting to. It took some searching, and I had to stop a few times to turn impurities into core upgrades, but I eventually found it. Whoever programmed basic dungeon core behavior did a hack job and never patched it. Ugh. There were so many things I could be doing, automatically, that would make me so much more comfortable! I''d never been the best artist, but I was willing to give it a shot if it made my life better (and it never hurt to look nice). What did comfort and art have in common? Simple: I could store impurities outside of my core, if I turned them into something solid. Even better, I could automate core expansions. Open S://Dungeon/ S://Dungeon/ Make new folder: Custom. Open Custom. S://Dungeon/Custom/ It took a while, once I had a place to work, to build up the programs I wanted. They were quick and dirty, but they''d do the job, at least in the short term. The first program automatically turned units of granite impurity into core upgrades (while refining the impurities into quartz, feldspar, and mica). The second program took units of quartz impurities and turned each one into a decorative band around my pedestal. Each band would hold a single impurity and the program would leave a space the size of a single band between bands, repeating until the pedestal filled up. It wasn''t a scalable solution, but it bought me time. Next, I pulled the dungeon construction algorithm back up. It was set up to efficiently dig out of the ground, and then branch out and build defenses. There was even a process for moving the dungeon core, pedestal and all, to ensure that my most vulnerable part was always at the back of the dungeon. The way it was set to branch out was, to put it simply, awful. Indefensible. I''d played a few dungeon builders and tower defense games in my life, and I knew full well that the worst thing to do was make a single straight path to your weak point. A route that wiggled around was so much better for defense, and while I hadn''t looked at what kind of traps I could make yet, bends and twists had to be better for setting traps than straight lines that led right to the core. I put a pin in that thought and opened up my selection of traps. It wasn''t a very robust selection. I had sticky traps, which didn''t look like they''d hold anything bigger than a mouse, pitfall traps, which looked like they wouldn''t trigger for anything under about fifty pounds, and rockfall traps, which didn''t have a trigger. If I wanted to drop rocks on something, I''d have to set it up ahead of time, and then set it off myself. Forget that nonsense. I''d have to work out how to hook rock fall traps to some kind of trigger before I built any. I pulled up the projected map of what the dungeon will look like in the future. It was very stiff. I set the automatic algorithm to turn off once the dungeon breached the outside world and tweaked things until the map displayed the direction and strength of nearby sources of tainted mana. Unsurprisingly, things like "life" and "sunlight" and "snow" were coming from the direction the algorithm was digging, but I got more information about what to expect from labels like "evergreen tree" and "snow spider" and "bumblebee". I started making changes to where to dig and how to expand. Straight, uniform lines became curves and twists and pinches. I set the flat floor of the projected corridors to rise and fall unevenly, the better to trip the unwary without a trap. Not that I expected people to come in with swords and magic and clanking armor and try to shatter my dungeon core, killing me and leaving my soul to go who-knows-where after who-knows-who changed it so drastically, no, not at all. It''s just what always happened in tower defense games is all.
I considered pre-loading traps into the design, but a series of error messages eventually convinced me that I actually couldn''t do that without making some changes on a deeper level. I could toggle auto-trap placement on and let the "dungeon" part of me handle it, but I had a feeling that that would result in poorly placed traps. Worse, in predictably placed traps, which would be no good in protecting me from people who, I don''t know, made a living smashing dungeon cores? What was that saying - hope for the best, prepare for the worst? The best case scenario would be that dungeon cores have legal protections and all the rights of a citizen in whatever country they show up in. The worst case scenario would be, um... a legal and robust trade in pieces of broken dungeon cores, incentivizing people to come in here and try to kill me. I threw myself into designing twists and turns and ups and downs and false paths leading to dead-end rooms. At some point, I began to feel uncomfortably bloated again and added another instruction to my automated impurity storage: rings of feldspar in between the rings of quartz on my pedestal. The pressure eased off immediately, and I went back to designing a twisting labyrinth full of crossing paths. A dozen dead ends planned later, I zoomed the map out and considered the dense squiggle of tangled paths. It looked awful, and I deleted the whole thing. There was a reason I hadn''t worked in graphic design. I pulled up the default again, and planned out two rooms, circular, increasing in size, behind my current core room. A gently curved corridor leading from one to the other to the other. With the core moving algorithm active, I should be moved back as each room was completed, ultimately leaving two rooms between my dungeon core and the dungeon entrance. Satisfied, I closed the map planner and inspected the dungeon around me. Or, the dungeon that was me, however that worked. The tunnel leading toward the outside had grown a lot longer while I was working. I''d always been prone to loosing track of time when I was busy, but now that I didn''t have any biological functions to interrupt me with hunger or thirst or exhaustion - or the need to use the restroom - I could just go until I finished or something interrupted me. If I''d had a face, I would have grinned with it. Before I could find another project to work on, the tunnel finished and sunlight flooded into my dungeon. I couldn''t see it, exactly, but I could feel the light and taste the impurities it brought with it. I couldn''t sense anything past the entrance to my dungeon, which was annoying, but I might be able to sense potential invaders coming by the tainted mana they''d put out as they approached me. A snowflake drifted into my dungeon on the icy breeze, landed on the floor, and melted. Decoration template acquired: Snow. Chapter 04: The First Minion
I spent some time trying to find documentation about "decoration templates" but there wasn''t anything. Finally, I decided to just use it. I designated a section of entrance tunnel on my dungeon map and applied the "snow" template. Select 2 Units of Compatible Impurities There was a drop down list of compatible impurities. How helpful. I chose one "snow" and one "ice", and toggled the default when building decorations to refine impurities. Constructing... Refining impurities... Snow decoration complete! 1 Snow Impurity refined to 0.5 Ice Impurities and 0.5 Water Impurities. 1 Ice Impurity refined to 1 Water Impurity. I could feel the decoration. It tickled a little, like cold feathers. It felt kind of nice, and not just because the ticklish sensation was fun. It was such a relief to know that I could feel things other than pain, that even though I wasn''t made of flesh and blood anymore, I could still feel. I could feel the difference in the waves of mana coming in, too. They were larger, had more complex flavors, and were spaced farther apart. I flicked my map open to see what was out there. Trees, snow, ice, bugs and small animals, a couple of birds, dirt, mosses and lichens and stuff - there wasn''t any thing new out there, there was just more of what I''d already been picking up. I moved the snow decoration to the end of the entrance corridor, so that it obscured the room my core rested in. It felt a bit like drawing a privacy curtain shut, even though there was no one else in the house: comfortable, if a little redundant. Something was itching, though, at the back of my mind. It was like I''d drawn the shower curtain, but forgot to close the front door. Traps. I didn''t have any traps. I opened the map and toggled trap suggestions on. A couple of dots popped up near the entrance - sticky traps, baited with a sugary nectar. Each trap cost an impurity, and the bait also cost an impurity. I moved one of the dots flush against the wall, a few feet in, and removed the other. Build that. Select Compatible Impurities The drop down list had life impurities and spider silk impurities, and I didn''t have a whole unit of the latter. I used both. Constructing trap... Setting bait... Refining impurities... Trap Constructed: Sticky Trap. Treasure Placed: Sweet Nectar 1.6 Life Impurities not able to be refined. 0.4 Spider Web Impurities refined to: 0.3 Spider Impurities and 0.1 Construction Impurities. That felt a bit better. I focused in on the trap I''d placed to see if I could get any information out of it, like linked files or status or something.
Sticky Trap: 100%
¡ñ Upkeep: 1 dungeon mana per day
Interesting. Display dungeon mana. Dungeon Mana: 53/300 How much mana do I gain per day? Dungeon Mana Generation per Day: 46 (48 - 2) Minus two? Where was the other one - the bait. I inspected the sweet nectar to make sure. Sweet Nectar: 100% ¡ñ Upkeep: 1 dungeon mana per day ¡ñ Replacement: 15 dungeon mana OR 1 unit compatible impurity If that meant what I thought it did, then any time treasure was removed from the dungeon, it would come back. I might not want that with other treasures. A quick check with the intent to make changes opened a settings window for the sweet nectar, and I verified that I could change the speed at which it was replaced or delete it entirely once it was removed. I left the settings on the nectar alone. A sticky trap meant for bugs wouldn''t work nearly as well without bait. Outside, the wind picked up, and a smattering of snowflakes drifted into the dungeon. They vanished quickly when they reached the walls or the floor, leaving behind the memory of tiny, refreshing bits of cool water. A few pine needles tumbled in after the snow and melted into my granite with a tangy flavor. Decoration Template Unlocked: Pine Needle. Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. I spent a brief moment wondering if more decorations would feel nice before I opened my map and put pine needles along the entrance to my dungeon. When I got an error message about the decoration interfering with the trap, I added a small ledge about four inches up the wall and moved the sticky trap there. It took a few minutes for the ledge to dig out, then the trap and its bait vanished and reappeared (which cost me 40 dungeon mana, which seemed like a lot), and then the pine needle carpet popped into existence in a burst of pine tree and pine needle and plant impurities, which refined nicely into pine tree and plant and life impurities. The pine needles felt like somewhere between wearing cozy socks and drinking citrus water while being nothing like either of those things. Like if pine smell was a taste and socks were a blanket, and the socks were flavored and feet had taste buds, except a bit more alien than that, because I didn''t have feet, I had a floor. It was nice though. I even felt a little tired, like I''d worked hard and gotten something done. I relaxed into the cozy sensation of pine needles carpeting my entrance and pulled up memories from my past life. I deserved a treat. I plugged a few keywords into the search bar that popped up when I thought about wanting it: happy child funny. Oh, memories of playing with my grandma''s cat when I was two. That sounded nice. ...The cat memories were really nice, especially once I dialed the immersion down to let me stay aware of my actual surroundings while I relived the experience of gluing feathers and string to myself and running around in my (very sticky) pajamas until the cat tackled me to the ground. I''d just reached the part where my mother realized what had happened and was starting to scold me (while grandma laughed herself silly in the background) when something interrupted me. Intruder Alert! It felt gross and prickly, like someone stepping into my personal space and breathing on the back of my neck. My attention snapped to the intruder.
It was a bug.
Specifically, it was the fluffiest bee I''d ever seen. It actually wobbled in the air, bobbing and weaving, until it reached the sticky trap. The bait must have worked, because the fluff ball landed right on it and started drinking. It stepped wrong, though, and put a foot down on the trap. Abandoning the nectar, the bee began to struggle, buzzing its wings and flailing with its feet, making its situation worse and worse. It gave off a constant sweet taste, not like the sweetness of the trap and its bait, which faded into the background like the taste of the inside of my own mouth did when I was human, but a more immediate sweetness, like having a bite of meat with a honey based sauce in my mouth would have, if I''d ever eaten something like that. Even better, now that it was stuck in a trap, the bee didn''t feel prickly or gross anymore. Was this what I ate now? Oh gross. Somehow, I hadn''t connected "dungeon cores take in corrupted mana and release pure mana" with "dungeons eat live bugs". No, not just bugs. I had traps for bigger things, too. I opened my treasure templates and took a look. Iron ore couldn''t be bait for anything other than people. The corrupted mana streaming off of the trapped bee didn''t taste so sweet anymore. The world blurred in familiar pulses - even without a heart to race or lungs to hyperventilate, I was having a panic attack and disassociating. Everything around me wavered in time with the mana flowing in and out of my dungeon, and I lost track of time. Impurities came and, where the automation I''d set up allowed, went. Messages came and, unread, piled up to wait for my attention. At some point, the sugary sweet impurities from the bee stopped coming, but I barely noticed it. Eventually, I calmed down. The bee was gone, the trap was reset, and there was no longer any sunlight coming in through the dungeon entrance. I''d lost the rest of the day panicking, and I felt itchy again. I checked the updates I''d missed while I was freaking out. The Intruder has Died! Minion Template: Bumblebee Unlocked! It looked like I could summon bumblebees to live in my dungeon. Thank you for your sacrifice, fluffy bee, your legacy will be adorable. Now to figure out how to summon a minion. Open minions folder. S://Dungeon/Minions Show files. No files found. Show folders. No folders found. Go up a level. S://Dungeon/ Show folders. Construction; Contracts; Custom; Decorations; Minions; Resources; Templates; Traps; Treasure Open templates. Show files. No files found. Show folders.
Decorations; Materials; Minions; Traps; Treasure
Open minions. Show files.
Bumblebee Open bumblebee. Oh wow. That was an awful lot of four dimensional diagrams that made my (metaphorical) head spin just to think about. Just summon a bumblebee then. Select Swarm Size. I perused the drop down list for a few moments, and selected "small". Select Compatible Impurities. Unsurprisingly, I had bumblebee impurities to spend. The "small swarm" only needed one of them. Summoning Minions... Refining Impurities... Minions Summoned: Bumblebee (20) 1 Bumblebee Impurities Refined to: 1 Insect Impurities The bees popped into existence in my core room, mid air, buzzing and hovering. I inspected them to get more information. Bumblebees, Small Swarm: 20 Bees ¡ñ Upkeep: 2 mana per day ¡ñ Repair Cost: 0.1 mana per bee ¡ñ Home: Not Assigned ¡ñ Food: Nectar ¡ñ Status: Content --- Near the top of a mountain, not the same mountain where Earl''s dungeon had only just greeted the world with a surge of fresh mana, but in the same range, a great beast stirred in its slumber. Scales glinted under the dim light of banked fires and massive claws twitched, sending bits of treasure cascading down the great mound of gold upon which the creature rested. The low growl of its slow awakening sent a handful of comparatively tiny servants scurrying for the small tunnels that surrounded the great nesting chamber, leaving brushes and other tools behind in their hurry to escape. --- In a valley in the foothills near the mountains a village awoke. The inhabitants felt energized, refreshed, restless, and, most of all, hungry. Dozens of pairs of beady yellow eyes snapped open, claw-tipped fingers tossed aside various badly-toned hides their owners had been using as blankets, and long purple tongues licked razor-sharp teeth in anticipation. It was time to hunt. Chapter 05: The Dungeon Detected
My new swarm of bees hovered around my core. Their buzzing was soothing, like hot cocoa after a long, cold day. I could feel their own happiness and contentment when I paid attention to them. I wanted them to stay that way, comfortable and content. It was time for research. I pulled up a search bar in my Memories folder and input the word "bumblebee". Then I refined the search to exclude fiction. Once that was done, I started opening memories and skimming through them. In the earliest ones, I was very small, and my mother was pointing out a bumblebee and saying "look, Earl, that''s a bee! It has a painful sting, so be careful." It looked like she said that every time we saw one while we were out. Her complaints later in my life that I never went outside seemed a lot more hypocritical now. There were a few memories from adolescence - a biology teacher talking about how mysterious it was that bumblebees could fly, having a very public panic attack in front of a girl I liked because one landed on my nose during lunch, that sort of thing. What I didn''t find, even after opening every memory that my search parameters turned up, was any information on where bumblebees liked to live. I looked back at my bees. Some of them had landed on my core to rest - the rest were sitting on my pedestal. I had no idea how to communicate with them, even though I felt like I should be able to. I tried thinking at them. What would be comfortable for you? What kind of place do you want to live? A few of my bees buzzed a little, but they felt more confused than anything. Maybe questions were too indirect. Find the most comfortable place in the dungeon. All twenty bees took off together, zipping up into the air and wobbling for a moment before flying off in every direction. They were focused, intent on following the order I''d given them. It got harder to tell how the swarm felt when they were spread out - each bee was investigating something different. They checked the rounded walls, the floor, the tunnel I was slowly digging that would lead to the next room in my dungeon once it was done. The ones that encountered my falling snow decoration didn''t seem to like it very much, but they clung to the walls and crawled past it into the entryway and continued their investigation. It took my bees more time than I would have thought to scrutinize every inch of my dungeon, but they eventually congregated in the pine needles near the entrance. As the swarm reassembled itself, bee by bee, I got a clearer sense of how they felt. They liked the pine needles. Maybe bumblebees liked to nest in leaf litter? I opened their menu and saw a drop-down list next to "home". It had one option: pine needle decoration. I selected it, and something clicked into place. The swarm gained an ability, too: Spawn Queen. That sounded really useful. I activated it. Select Compatible Impurities Use insect impurities. Upgrading Minion... One of the bees transformed. She got bigger, fuzzier, bumblier. Minion Upgraded. 1 Insect Impurity Refined to 0.5 Arthropod Impurities and 0.5 Life Impurities. She immediately began to make wax, shaping it into a tiny bowl shape. The other bees buzzed off, congregating around the bait in my sticky trap. They didn''t stick to the trap itself, and they made short work of the sweet nectar. Then they returned to the queen and began to spit the nectar back out, into the wax bowl, which she covered over with more wax and laid an egg on. Then she started work on another bowl. Curious, I inspected the egg, and found that it had information for me.
Bumblebee Egg (Minion):
¡ñ Hatch Time: 1 Hour ¡ñ Association: Small Swarm I focused on the swarm as a whole, to check its information. Bumblebee, Small Swarm: 19/20 Bees; 1 Queen; 1/20 Eggs; 0/20 Larvae; 0/20 Pupae ¡ñ Upkeep: 1.5 Mana / Day (Food Source Present) ¡ñ Repair Cost: 0.5 Mana to Replace Queen ¡ñ Home: Pine Needle Decoration ¡ñ Food Nectar (Found); Pollen (Missing) ¡ñ Status: Content Having a queen really made a difference. It looked like she was responsible for replacing any dead bees in my swarm, and would maintain a full swarm at every stage of bumblebee life, ready to grow up whenever the situation called for it. It would be bad if something came in and stepped on the nest. I used a granite impurity to add some bumps to the walls in the entrance tunnel. Some of them were low and over the pine needles, the better to provide cover for my bees, but others were higher up or farther back, or both, to disguise their purpose (and to use the whole impurity, because I couldn''t spend fractions of impurities for some reason). There. That was much better. My bees were happy and safe, my entrance was guarded, and my core room felt empty and lonely with just my core in it. I didn''t want to move my bees out of their comfortable home, and I didn''t want pine needles in my core room, but it felt so bare now. Open root. I need a distraction. S:// Show folders. Earl; Dungeon; Tools Open Dungeon. S://Dungeon/ Show folders. Construction; Contracts; Custom; Minions; Resources; Templates; Traps; Treasure Open custom. S://Dungeon/Custom/ It was time to tweak my tools and work on upgrades. A wave of nausea washed over me. It was past time to work on upgrades. How many impurities can I hold right now? Maximum Impurities: 52.7 Upgrade core.
Select compatible impurities.
I picked out three impurities that seemed like they could be refined a lot, then I focused hard on the details of impurity refinement. Were there advanced options I could use to make things turn out the way I wanted? It turned out that there really were. Excellent. I tweaked a few things for this one upgrade session, then hit start and sat back to watch. Upgrading Core... Core Upgraded. Maximum Impurities Upgraded From 52.7 to 53. Maximum Mana Upgraded From 527 to 530. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Refining Impurities... .09 Dung Impurities Refined to 0.225 Life Impurities, 0.225 Soil Impurities, 0.225 Earth Impurities and 2.25 Dungeon Mana. Oooh, tingly. Refining impurities into dungeon mana felt good. What else could I do with what I had? List impurities, complete only, rounded down. ¡ñ Earth Impurities - 10 ¡ñ Soil Impurities - 7 ¡ñ Feldspar Impurities - 6 ¡ñ Quartz Impurities - 1 ¡ñ Life Impurities - 13 ¡ñ Plant Impurities -5 ¡ñ Insect Impurities - 3 ¡ñ Snow Spider Impurities - 1 ¡ñ Spider Impurities - 1 ¡ñ Maggot Impurities - 1 ¡ñ Edelweiss Impurities - 1 ¡ñ Pine Tree Impurities - 2 ¡ñ Moss Impurities - 2 Create decoration template: soil using soil impurities. Spend 1 Soil Impurities to Create Decoration Template: Soil? Y/N Yes. Creating Decoration Template... Decoration Template: Soil Obtained Refining Impurities... 1 Soil Impurities Refined to 0.5 Earth Impurities and 5 Dungeon Mana. Oh, nice. Create a template using one edelweiss impurity. Creating Minion Template... Minion Template: Edelweiss Obtained Refining Impurities...
1 Edelweiss Impurity Refined to 0.5 Plant Impurities and 0.5 Life Impurities
Oh, nice. I set about putting soil in the entrance tunnel and summoning some edelweiss minions into it. As I suspected, it turned out to be some kind of flower. My bumblebees quickly abandoned the nectar bait they''d been eating to investigate the flowers, and I felt their mood jump from content to happy. --- Away and distant from the mountain range, over and past the foothills and the valleys, a great flatland sprawled, dotted with farmlands and villages, smeared with forests and rivers and roads, the Kingdom of Vassaria prospered. White towers loomed over the landscape, ever watchful. In one of those white towers, an acne-speckled apprentice watched a hovering crystal change from green to white for a moment. He wrote it down, and the hour, and then forgot about it. He remembered, briefly, when it happened again two hours later, but only because he wrote that down on the same piece of parchment. At the end of the day, he gave the parchment to his master and went to bed. The master of the tower understood what he was looking at, when he read through the report. He wrote his own report with glee, consolidating information from each of the three apprentices and their supervising wizards stationed on each of the seven levels of the tower. White meant pure mana, and pure mana meant a dungeon. A quick teleportation spell sent his consolidated report to the tower at Variswood. His duty done, the Tower Master began drafting a request that one of his tower''s wizards inspect the new dungeon. It would have to wait for an official announcement of the dungeon, of course, but it never hurt to be ready. --- My entrance was so much nicer with flowers and bees in it. My core room felt a bit bare in comparison. I want to make a decoration. As I''d expected, once I knew what I wanted to do and thought of it as a command, an editor appeared in my mind''s eye: Decoration Template Designer. It looked a bit like the graphic design programs I''d made a point of avoiding. I knew where my talents lay, and I had always been better off paying someone else for their art. I closely inspected the tool in the hope that it would have some sort of shortcut I could use to get what I wanted - there was no way I''d be able to build anything good from scratch. There! A drop-down list for selecting impurities. I had bumblebee impurities left, and I plugged one in. A bumblebee appeared in the template designer. The 3D grid around it and scale key indicated that it would barely fit in my core room. I needed something smaller! It was hours of trial and error before I figured out that I was using the wrong tool. Decorations were massive, unmovable. If I wanted to make knick-knacks to decorate my core room, then I needed to make a treasure template. Open the treasure template designer. --- Greyex was up a tree, weaving a basket out of the remains of the bird''s nest he''d just raided. Baby birds went great in Belka''s stew. She always boiled them until the flavor leaked out into the rest of the food and the bones were soft enough to crunch just right when chewed. He wouldn''t normally take all of the hatchlings, but he was unusually hungry the last couple of days. He didn''t usually make a basket from a bird''s nest, either, but someone had stolen all of his baskets last night, and he needed the container. It would be useful for foraging grubs later. He was so caught up in what he was doing, that he didn''t notice the small crowd gathering around the base of the tree. "And, throw!" Belka''s voice, shouting, was his first sign that something was happening. The stone-tipped spear that whistled past his nose was his first sign that whatever was happening, he wasn''t going to like it.
"You almost hit me!" Greyex shouted down. He also looked down, and saw what looked like a quarter of the village staring up at him with their teeth bared.
"Because Klud is useless!" Chief Dukkle shrieked. Even from halfway up a tree, Greyex could see that the chief''s yellow eyes were blood-shot and maddened. His veins bulged grotesquely and spittle frothed around his fangs. "Give me a spear!" Greyex thought fast and moved faster. He threw the half-finished basket at the gormless thug handing the chief a spear, hitting him in the face. Then, he reached into the leather bag tied to his loincloth, stood up, and threw all five dead hatchlings, one after another, into the chief''s face. The first one caught him in the open mouth, the second hit an eye, and the next three took his balance so that he fell on his bottom, distracted, chewing the morsel between his teeth. Next, Greyex scanned the small mob below him, calculating parabolic arcs and distances, and predicting movement. "I''m not going in the stew pot!" he screamed, causing his target, a particularly fat fellow named Ick, to look up. Greyex took a leap more powerful than he''d ever taken in his life, and landed on his neighbor. Then he ran. "After him!" Belka screamed. Greyex ran faster. --- The treasure template editor handled a lot like the decoration template editor, but I was able to make things on a much smaller scale, which suited me just fine. I didn''t want any massive imposing statues, I wanted tidy little statuettes to spruce up my room little. The bumblebee impurity worked just fine in the decoration template editor for creating a new template. Next, I needed to select a material of it to be made of. That was easy, too - there weren''t all that many options. I was a little surprised that "stone" and "earth" weren''t compatible with the material slot, but it occurred to me that they might not be specific enough. I selected "feldspar". I had a lot of it, even if I didn''t know what it was, exactly. The bee in the preview window turned red-brown. That wasn''t right - it was too boring, and not bee-like enough. A bit of fiddling with menus and search bars turned up a materials editor that could alter colors, among other things, but I knew better than to go down that rabbit hole while I was still a total newbie. I had all the time in the world to explore the advanced stuff. The bee''s stripes turned out to still be there, they were just the same color as the yellow parts. That was the first bit of good news. The second was that feldspar came in a whole bunch of different colors, including black and yellow, and there was a check box for toggling "gemstone quality". I switched it on, of course, and adjusted the stripes, legs, and antennae until they looked just right. Scale came next. I thought hard on it, but eventually decided to make the figures life-sized. I saved my new template as Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize_01. Saving Template... Treasure Template Acquired: Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize_01! Refining Impurities... 1 Bumblebee Impurities Refined to 0.5 Insect Impurities and 0.5 Arthropod Impurities. 1 Feldspar Impurities Refined to 0.5 Stone Impurities and 0.5 Earth Impurities. Make treasure. Select Treasure Template. I picked my new template out of the drop-down list.
Select Compatible Impurities.
Stone and earth impurities were on the list. I selected a feldspar impurity because I could.
Select Treasure Location(s). A map of my dungeon popped up, like when I placed my sticky trap or put a new decoration up. I had five little dots to work with, maybe because the treasure was so small. I arranged them around my core in a circle, on the pedestal, like the points of a pentagram. Place Treasure? Y/N Yes. Creating Treasure... Refining Impurities... 1 Feldspar Impurities Refined to 0.5 Stone Impurities and 0.5 Earth Impurities. Five little bee figurines popped into existence around my core. I felt properly dressed, like I''d put on a pair of pants for the first time since I''d become a dungeon core. --- In a dark stone tunnel, a small group hissed and whispered amongst themselves. Scaly hands tossed bone dice, and gleaming jewel-toned eyes watched the results carefully. "You''ve rolled low, Taaku," the eldest clicked thoughtfully. "Best two of three?" Taaku asked hopefully. "No, no time," the eldest said calmly. "The master hungers, and you have the honor." Taaku bowed, then stood and walked away. He took three turns in the winding tunnels of the warren toward the master''s den, then rapidly took sixteen toward the entrance, until he was outside in the fresh air and starlight. He spared a single, sad glance back toward the only home he''d ever known, then slipped away down the mountain. Someone else could break the master''s fast. It was shameful, but he wanted to live. Chapter 06: The Bat
Intruder Alert! I barely needed the popup. Whatever had just come in, it itched. It itched something fierce, and it tasted like meat marinated in citrus. My attention snapped to the dungeon entrance, where my bees were engaged in battle. Whatever they were fighting, it was fast and maneuverable. The intruder swooped in and out of the swarm, and with each pass a bumblebee vanished. It wasn''t untouched, though - my swarm was giving as good as it got, it seemed. The enemy was slowing down and staggering in the air, dropping and working harder to lift itself back up again. I got a look at it. That had to be the fluffiest bat I''d ever seen. It was covered in welts and, as I watched, it misjudged its attack and one of my bumblebees managed to sting it in its eye. Another crawled into one of its ears, and that was the beginning of the end. It crashed to the ground and my remaining eight bumblebees swarmed over it, stinging again and again. The itchy feeling went away and I was left with only the warm, meaty flavor of what I had to assume were bat impurities. People ate bats, right? It was less gross than bees, and the meaty flavor was great. Minion Template Acquired: Mountain Bat. Oh. It was dead. The bat corpse sank into the stone floor and the citrus-meat flavor faded to a memory. I inspected my bumblebee swarm. Minion: Bumblebees, Small Swarm: 8/20 Bees; 1/1 Queen; 20/20 Eggs; 15/20 Larvae; 5/20 Pupae ¡ñ Bumblebee Queen Lays 1 Egg per 20 Minutes ¡ñ Maintenance: 3 Dungeon Mana per Day ¡ñ Home: Pine Needle Decoration ¡ñ Food: Edelweiss Nectar; Edelweiss Pollen ¡ñ Status: Angry It looked like something was still missing from my bumblebee''s lives. That, and I definitely needed more defense - I was down to less than half my forces after a bat came in and started snacking. Create minion: mountain bat. Select Compatible Impurities. I inspected the dropdown list and picked out a life impurity. Creating Minions... Refining Impurities... 1 Life Impurity Refined to 10 Dungeon Mana. I wasn''t sure if the burst of elation I felt was from impurities turning into mana or from summoning another minion. My bat was super fluffy looking. I took a look at its stats. Minion: Mountain Bat ¡ñ Maintenance: 5 Dungeon Mana per Day ¡ñ Home: Not Assigned ¡ñ Food: Not Assigned ¡ñ Status: Lonely
Lonely? Did it need to have other bats around to feel happy?
Find somewhere comfortable, I ordered it. The bat flew around squeaking, investigating the ceiling of the entrance tunnel before flying into my core room and poking around there, too. It kept looking for something on the ceiling, and it kept moving on without finding it. I took a closer look at the ceiling myself. It was completely smooth. Take a rest, I told my bat. It landed on the floor by my pedestal. I opened the dungeon map and focused on the ceilings. I wanted them to have texture - stalactites, cracks, bumps and grooves and things, maybe some little holes too. Once I was satisfied with the texture, and had changed the settings so that future rooms would be similar, I started the changes. Spend 7 Dungeon Mana to Complete Changes Immediately? Y/N I was reminded of pushy mobile games and the nightmare of micro transactions they enabled. No. It took a while for the texture to finish spreading across my ceilings, but when it finished, the mountain bat fluttered up and hung from the ceiling. It was still lonely, but I didn''t want to summon more bats until they had something to eat. Five mana per day seemed a bit expensive for one minion, even if it was almost as good as twenty bumblebees. I mentally highlighted a stretch of ceiling near the dungeon entrance and connected it to my bat. It flew to its newly assigned home, grabbed on, and fell asleep. It shivered a little while I watched, and I silently promised that I''d figure out the bat food situation as soon as I could, so I could summon it some company. My front hall was looking pretty good. I had bees (recovering), three decorations, flowers, and a bat. My core room had... me, the pedestal I was on (which had quartz rings going all the way up; I''d definitely used up that space), and five gemstone bumblebees sitting around me in a circle. It was kind of dull in here. I didn''t want any minions living in my core room, though. That felt like it would be wrong, like "toilet in the kitchen" wrong. Open Templates. S://Dungeon/Templates/ Open treasure. S://Dungeon/Templates/Treasure/ Show files. Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize; Coal; Iron_Ore; Sweet_Nectar Copy Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize. Select Compatible Impurities. So I needed to spend impurities any time I made a new template, even if it was just a copy of one I already had. I inspected the associated dropdown list and selected earth impurities. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.
Error! Insufficient Compatibility!
What. Maybe earth and insect? I plugged earth and insect impurities in.
Copying Treasure Template... Refining Impurities... Treasure Template Acquired: Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize_Copy! 1 Earth Impurity Refined to 10 Dungeon Mana. 1 Insect Impurity Refined to 0.5 Arthropod Impurities and 0.5 Invertebrate Impurities. I willed the template editor open and pulled up the copy. I played around with it for a while, tweaking colors, changing feldspar to quartz and back again. The yellow and black quartz bee looked great, but I ended up settling on a feldspar bumblebee with mica flecks all over it. Save. Saving Treasure Template... Select Compatible Impurities. The only thing in the dropdown was mica. I selected it. Saving Treasure Template... Template Saved. Refining Impurities... 1 Mica Impurity Refined to 0.5 Stone Impurity and 0.5 Earth Impurity. Rename Bumblebee_Feldspar_LifeSize_Copy to Bumblebee_FeldsparMica_LifeSize. I selected my newly renamed template and went to create. Use an earth impurity, and put them evenly spaced between the figurines on my pedestal. Creating Treasures... Refining Impurities... I mentally waved the log away and checked on my very real bees instead. There were a few more of them flying around collecting nectar and pollen, and the queen was busy laying more eggs. A giddy wash of energy flowed through me - that would be the earth impurity turning into dungeon mana - and I thought hard about how I could improve my dungeon further while I waited for the next room to be dug out. --- Taaku didn''t break into a run until after he''d passed the tree line. The sentries wouldn''t think anything of a lone hunter going out, but running out of the warrens would draw attention. Running once he was out of sight, though - that was just sensible. He was about a third of the way down the mountain, and starting to feel the fatigue of his flight, when a terrible roaring shook his lungs and his resolve. The master had realized that breakfast wasn''t going to come to it. "I''m sorry," he whispered, unsure if he was talking to himself or to those he''d left behind. "I''m so sorry." Sorry as he was, he didn''t slow down, even when his legs burned and he started to stumble over rocks and tree roots. By the time he reached the base of the mountain, he was covered in scrapes and bruises and was bleeding sluggishly from a gash on
one leg where a jagged boulder had torn some of his scales off. The sun was coming up and, panting for breath, Taaku slowed to a stealthy creep, sticking to the underbrush and trying his hardest to stay under the cover of the trees, hidden from the sky. --- Maybe my flowers had unmet needs. They were minions, even if they just sat there and made bee food. I should take care of them the same as the others. I inspected them. Minion: Edelweiss ¡ñ Plant Type ¡ñ Maintenance: 1.5 Mana per Day ¡ñ Soil Nutrition: A Little Low ¡ñ Light Level: Acceptable ¡ñ Water: Not Present It needed water and fertilizer. It was probably a bad idea to just constantly soak them - I felt like I remembered something about that being bad. I reviewed my memories and confirmed that. Too much water killed plants just as surely as too little water. These plants were dungeon minions, so too much or too little water wasn''t going to kill them, but it would cause them to need more dungeon mana to compensate to stay healthy. Now how was I going to manage an automated watering system? It wouldn''t be something that could be removed from the dungeon, so that meant it would have to be a decoration template. I opened the editor. Water meant water impurities, so I plugged one in. It gave me a pool of standing water. Make the water fall from the ceiling, I commanded. The preview changed to show a continuous rain shower. I rolled my non-existent eyes and got to work. --- The mob chasing after him lasted longer than Greyex had anticipated. Most of his neighbors had never seen the point in building their stamina to run faster or farther, but they gave it a good shot, even encumbered by their weapons and having to slow down to pick their spears back up after they repeatedly tried and failed to hit him as he zigged back and forth, ducking around trees and boulders. They finally gave up when his frantic flight flushed a few birds out of the bushes and a spear clipped one in a spray of blood and feathers. The pack of idiots fell on the frantically squawking animal, pushing and shoving to tear off the better bits and shove them into their gaping maws. Rather than stop running to give in to the urge to join in the feeding frenzy, Greyex kept running. He''d thought Belka was a friend. He''d been trying to figure out courting gifts. He''d been a fool. --- It took longer than I would have liked, but I managed to make a satisfactory watering system for the low, low cost of one water impurity to save the template and another one to put it in my front entryway. When the Edelweiss minions had the dry condition, the decoration would turn on and create a gentle mist that collected on the walls and trickled down, giving the entire entryway a thorough dampening. It would stay "on" for six hours, and then turn off again until triggered by the flowers getting thirsty. Naturally, it turned on immediately. I even had an idea about how to improve their soil quality while I was working on it. It was gross, but, well, sometimes gardening was gross. How many dung impurities do I have?
Dung Impurities: 1.29
Use a dung impurity to create treasure template: dung.
Creating... Treasure Template: Dung Acquired! Refining Impurities... 1 Dung Impurity Refined to 0.5 Soil Impurities and 0.5 Life Impurities. With a mental cringe, I placed a clump of dung on the soil decoration, between the flowers and the wall. I toggled the settings on it to stop repair over time and, instead, replace the "treasure" when the edelweiss reported low nutrition in their soil. Then I realized that I''d also hit upon the key to feeding my bat. First, I made more soil decorations so that the sides of the entrance tunnel were lined with them, and summoned edelweiss flowers into the gradually dampening soil. Next, I created more dungeon treasures, one for every three flowers or so, up against the wall where it wasn''t easy to see them. How many fly egg impurities do I have? Fly Egg Impurities: 1.03 It''ll do. Create minion template: fly. Error. No Compatible Impurities Found. Okay... create minion template: fly egg. Creating Template... Minion Template: Fly Egg Acquired! Refining Impurities... 1 Fly Egg Impurity Refined to 0.5 Fly Impurities and 0.5 Insect Egg Impurities! I targeted the dung "treasures" and summoned a dozen fly eggs onto each. Create Fly Swarm? Y/N Yes. Select Swarm Size. I picked the largest size. One thousand sounded like too many flies, but I wanted my bat to be able to eat, and flies sounded like bat food to me. Creating Swarm... Warning! Swarm Will Take 8 Days to Reach Full Size! Continue? Y/N Yes.
Creating Swarm...
Swarm Created.
I focused on my bat, and on my swarm of flies, and set the flies to be food for the bat. I also created a custom setting, to tell the bat not to eat flies if the swarm was at less than 25% adult capacity. Hopefully, that would be enough for my bat to feel full. If it wasn''t, I''d have to, ugh, make another swarm, or wait for some other insect to fly into my dungeon and die. Snow and pine needles blew in and melted into the floor, leaving me with the sensation of having licked a pine-flavored popsicle. --- A tired clerk opened the weekly report from Surveillance Tower 27 on the eastern edge of the kingdom. She skimmed its contents, stopped, and read it again, slowly. Then she rolled it back up, slid it into a high priority scroll case, and carried it upstairs to her manager''s office. "This is above my pay grade," she announced curtly, and slammed the scroll case on his desk. "You deal with it." Chapter 07: The First Mutation
The fly eggs all hatched at the same time, about a day after I summoned them. Minion Template Acquired: Maggot! Just what I wanted, thanks. My bumblebees'' numbers were back up, and the flowers looked a bit perkier now that they had water and fertilizer. I spent a few quartz and insect impurities to make "Treasure Template: Bumblebee_Quartz_LifeSize" and amused myself hiding little stone bees on the ground around my edelweiss plants. The tunnel to my next room finally finished, and the automated digging continued into the solid granite. I was bored, and watching movies in my memories didn''t sound appealing. I wanted to be doing something! I could make more treasure, but I didn''t feel like it - I felt like making new minions. I didn''t have food for more bats, but maybe I could set up another bumblebee nest. I put a new mat of pine needles down at the back of the entrance hall, under the bat''s "home" on the ceiling. Then, I selected my existing swarm. I picked out a worker, and focused in on her. Remove bee from swarm. Something immaterial clicked, and one of the bumblebee pupae hatched into a new adult. I assigned my new, lone, bee to the new pine needles. Upgrade to queen. Select Compatible Impurities. Use a life impurity. Upgrading Minion... Minion Upgraded! Bumblebee Has Become Bumblebee Queen! Refining Impurities... 1 Life Impurity Refined to 10 Dungeon Mana! Warning! Bumblebee Queen Has No Swarm! Create Swarm? Y/N Not yet. I wanted - no - needed to try something. I focused in on my new queen bee. Minion: Bumblebee Queen ¡ñ Swarm: None ¡ñ Home: Pine Needle Decoration ¡ñ Food: Edelweiss Nectar, Edelweiss Pollen ¡ñ Water: Available ¡ñ Condition: Lonely
Use an ice impurity to upgrade bumblebee queen. I hope this works - I need monsters, not ordinary bugs.
Warning! Mutation Is Unpredictable and Cannot Be Undone! Continue? Y/N
Yes. I crossed my imaginary fingers and watched my bee. Upgrading Minions... Refining Impurities... 1 Ice Impurity Refined to 0.5 Water Impurities and 5 Dungeon Mana. The bee began to glow a pale blue, then swelled and grew. She grew from about an inch long to a whopping three inches. When the light faded, her yellow fluff had turned glacier blue. Minion Mutated! Bumblebee Queen Has Become Icy Bumblebee Queen! Minion Template Unlocked: Icy Bumblebee Queen. Now I want to make a swarm for her. Select Swarm Size. Thirty bees. Creating Swarm... Medium-Small Icy Bumblebee Swarm Created. The icy bumblebee queen buzzed her way to the nearest flower and set about gorging herself. She left tiny frosty footprints on the petals where she landed and stepped. The flower''s stem bowed a bit under her weight, and she visited an awful lot of them before she returned to her home and started building. I watched, fascinated, as she made little bowls of wax and ice and filled them with pollen and nectar. She capped them with more wax and carefully laid an egg on each, until she had thirty little wax bowls and thirty little blue eggs. As she worked, she left more and more frost on the pine needles, until they were glued together into a cozy little bee cave of ice and pointy leaves. Much better. I decided to reward myself for making my first monster by re-living the first time I watched the Star Wars movies. That had been a marathon for the ages. --- Greyex ran until he could run no more - he ran right out of the valley and into the foothills. It took him a day and a night, and he thanked every higher power that he thought might give a shit about him that he hadn''t tripped over something and hurt himself. He dropped to the ground and wheezed until he got his breath back. He was really thirsty. He was hungry, too, but thirsty was definitely the bigger problem. Fortunately, the sun had come up while he was laying around and suffering, so he got to foraging. A good stick off the ground here, searching around while he s-l-o-w-l-y made his way up the hill and... there! Greyex found a nice, thick vine with waxy, swollen leaves. It wouldn''t taste good, but it probably wouldn''t make him sick, either. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. Very few things made him sick. He tore a length off the vine and bit into it, sucking greedily. Bitter juice flowed out and soaked his dry tongue. It was so good. He kept drinking until his vine segment was all chewed up, and then helped himself to another. It wouldn''t do anything for his hunger, but food could always wait longer than water. He kept going, following the vine up the hill, until his stomach couldn''t hold any more liquid.
Greyex straightened up and started to walk. The sturdy stick he''d found wasn''t long enough to help him keep his balance, but it turned out to be good for poking into likely looking holes to check for bugs to eat. Two hornets'' nests later, Greyex was no longer poking his stick into holes. In fact, he had lost the stick. He had also lost the hornets. He had also made it to the next hill, he''d run so fast. Maybe poking holes in trees wasn''t such a good idea. A sudden breeze fluttered his loincloth, bringing with it an unfamiliar chill. "Maybe," he said to himself, "I''d be better off finding a spot to hole up and lay some traps. I can turn rocks over if I need bugs." He did pick up a new stick though. A longer one. Just in case. --- Yeah, those were some good movies, and Taji had been the best college roommate in the world. I forgot to turn down the immersion. Alright, notifications, what''d I miss? Intruder Alert! Intruder Destroyed. Minion Template Acquired: Mountain Mouse! Intruder Alert! Treasure Template Acquired: Pine Twig! Intruder Destroyed. Minion Template Acquired: Pine Nut! Treasure Template Acquired: Pinecone! Warning! Pine Nuts From Treasure Pinecones Cannot Germinate Within the Dungeon! I put some pinecones in the pine needles. It seemed like the thing to do. A huge gust of wind blew a load of snow into the dungeon. Intruder Alert! I had no idea what just came in with that snow, but whatever it was, it wasn''t much of a threat if it could get blown around like that. The snow melted away where it touched the floor and walls, revealing... I actually didn''t get to see it, because it was immediately swarmed over by pissed off bumblebees. Decoration Template Acquired: Spiderweb! Intruder Destroyed. Minion Template Acquired: Snow Spider!
Intruder Destroyed. Minion Template Acquired: Ice Fly!
I didn''t feel any particular need to use any of my new templates. I checked on my next room instead. It was a little bigger. I inspected the hallway that connected my core room to the room under construction. It curved a little, but stayed mostly straight. The ceiling had the same texture I''d set up in the rest of the dungeon, so bats would be able to grip it just fine. I took a look at my "swarm of flies". The maggots had gotten a lot bigger. Gross. I turned my attention to my icy bumblebee. She was making more waxy pots - her eggs had started to hatch, so she was laying more. The icy bumblebee larvae were tiny, and they ate their pollen and nectar slurry ravenously. I checked my regular bumblebees. They were back up to twenty adult workers. I checked on my bat. It was still lonely, of course. I glanced at my mana generation. It was up to 60 per day, even with the new treasures and minions to support - must be the power of optimization. I summoned another mountain bat and set it to the same home as the first one. It grabbed onto the ceiling next to the other bat, and my first bat opened its wings and wrapped them around its new friend. I didn''t know they did that. It was so cute. I opened their information. Mountain Bats, Colony of: 2 Bats ¡ñ Maintenance: 7.5 Dungeon Mana per Day ¡ñ Home: Entrance Tunnel ¡ñ Food: Not Assigned ¡ñ Water: Available ¡ñ Home: Entrance Tunnel ¡ñ Status: A Bit Lonely That was less maintenance than I''d expected. Maybe having water around made a big difference for more than just plants - of course it did. Everything needed water, and anything my minions needed that they weren''t getting was supplemented with my dungeon mana. I checked on the future food of my bats. Flies, Large Swarm: 0/1000 Flies; 0/1000 Pupae; 10/1000 Maggots; 28/1000 Eggs ¡ñ Maintenance: 0 Dungeon Mana per Day ¡ñ Food: Dung Treasure ¡ñ Water: Available ¡ñ Home: Dung Treasure ¡ñ Status: Happy I felt like I should be a lot more grossed out by that than I was. Like, as a human-type person, that was gross. Flies were gross; poop was gross; flies on poop were extra gross. As a dungeon core-type person, I really wasn''t bothered. Flies were minions; poop was treasure; minions on treasure was just good sense. That it was a treasure that no human in their right mind would want to pick up and take home with them was immaterial. --- Taaku woke up uncomfortable. His scales itched where they''d been scratched and were healing, and his knees ached where they''d been bruised. Taaku woke up lonely. Usually, he woke up in a pile of friends or family (or, if he was really lucky, females), but tonight he was alone and cold, huddled under a bush. Taaku woke up thirsty. There didn''t seem to be any water here. He forced himself to his feet and stumbled forward. Water always went downhill, and so would he, until he found something he could drink.
---
I was so bored, I was watching maggots grow. They were growing really fast, making it at least a little interesting, like watching a time-lapse video, and the dung "treasure" they were on kept regenerating, which was also a little interesting, but still. I was watching maggots grow. I thought about decorating more, but I was happy with my core room, and I didn''t want to decorate anything behind my core room. That felt wrong. My core room should be the last, and best, thing in the dungeon. I checked on the next room. It was a little bigger than the last time I''d looked at it, but not by all that much. I opened the planned blueprint. Maybe I could make adjustments on that to pass the time. I added shelves to the unfinished room, and even more shelves to the third room after it. I could put decorations on those! Well, treasures, if I wanted to use the "official" term, since it was probably going to be more bumblebee statuettes. I put a few dips in the floor of my core room, on the blueprint, and adjusted their priority so that they wouldn''t be dug out until after I''d moved my core to the next room. Then I added an automated process to move my core, complete with pedestal, to the second room once it was finished, so I wouldn''t have to worry about making it happen myself. On second thought, I adjusted that so it would give me a popup prompt, so it wouldn''t catch me by surprise when it happened. Then, I lost myself in making plans and adjustments. A water feature here, a nook in the wall for something pretty there, a depression in the middle for soil and plants... and make the ceiling higher so I can have a small tree. Trees need light. Save plans, open decoration template designer. What impurities do I have that can produce light? An omnidirectional glow appeared in the previewer. So that''s what I''d get if I used a light impurity without any modifications. Any interest in the passage of time, or sense of boredom for that matter, that I may have had faded away insight of a puzzle to solve. I needed a light source that would make plant minions that weren''t right by the entrance happy, preferably one that mimicked a day-night cycle, in case my minions needed something like that to stay happy and healthy. I plugged in different combinations of impurities, tested various commands, and slid into the zone. This was going to be great. When I finished, it was going in my core room, and then everything would glitter in the light. Chapter 08: A New Friend
Greyex took a few minutes to sit down on a handy log and inspect the blisters on his feet. He hadn''t had blisters like this since he was little, but two days of walking over increasingly rough terrain had done a number on his callouses. His stomach clenched. Two days without anything more filling than a handful of live grubs had his insides twisting up in knots of hunger, but he couldn''t stop moving - even if the village had probably given him up for dead already and stopped looking for him, there were lots of things out here that wouldn''t hesitate to eat him if he got careless, and there wasn''t anything bigger than bugs he felt confident in his ability to catch and eat without backup. Once he was done poking at the painful bumps, he slid off the log and set about laboriously pushing it over. It rocked, then rocked back, and only excessive caution saved him from it rocking back onto his fingers, but finally, after far too long, it ripped free of the moss that had grown up its side and rolled over out of the depression that had formed around it. Greyex fell to his knees and began to search through the menagerie of bugs he''d uncovered. Without a bag to hold his finds in, he had no choice but to stuff the dirt-covered things into his mouth as they were, still wiggling, and do his best to chew them with his sharp teeth. Some of them, worms and grubs too small or wiggly to chew easily, he ended up swallowing whole and still moving. They were unpleasantly cold and mobile, and he wasn''t a fan of the slimy texture, either, but he was too hungry to be choosy. Eventually, everything that was good to eat had either been eaten or dug down into the moist soil, and everything that was left was either unfamiliar or gave him the runs. Greyex picked up an unfamiliar creepy-crawly and thought about it... but no. He didn''t have the luxury of risking illness right now. He dropped it and rose to his feet, then continued his journey. The sun was hot, and he was thirsty, especially after eating dirt and bits of rotting log along with his bugs. Walking hurt, but he forced himself onward, glancing this way and that, watching for danger, but also for -- There! He darted to the side and dropped to his knees next to a familiar vine. Thick leaves, thick, hairless stem, the color, the texture, the smell... Greyex grinned a pointy grin and took a bite. It tasted terrible, plants always did, but the bitter juice inside was harmless. With effort, he sucked at the plant and, when what was in his mouth stopped yielding any "water", he moved on to another section to suck dry. He drank and he drank, until his belly fairly sloshed with it, and then he drank some more. Then, he moved to an undamaged section of vine and bit off a length just barely short enough for him to carry, wrapped around himself, and tied the ends in knots to stop the water from escaping. Once he was satisfied that he had water for later, Greyex looped his treasure about his torso and over his shoulders, and went back to walking. Sooner or later, he''d find a way to survive long-term. He just had to keep his eyes open. Something crashed, too close for comfort, and he scrambled up a tree. Distantly, he noticed that some of his blisters popped on the rough bark, and his hands scraped and stung, but a bit of discomfort was irrelevant when it came to safety. Greyex''s eyes darted from tree to bush to shadow, searching for whatever had made that loud sound. Something moved, something big. He froze and waited. The... thing was five times his height and big enough otherwise that it could have sat on the chief''s hut and probably squashed it flat. If it had wandered through the village, that might have been the end of the village. Or it would have been the end of the thing. If there was one thing his people were good at, it was attacking in force to kill something bigger than they were. Greyex stayed perfectly still, only his eyes moving to track the. The thing. He wondered what it tasted like, then carefully tied that thought up with string and dropped it down a hole. It trampled a tree and smushed a bush and moved along. He watched it go, and decided to not go that way. He had no desire to catch up to that. Thing. Whatever it was. He waited until the crashing of its passing had faded into silence and the birds and bugs were making noise again. Once he was double sure it was gone, Greyex slowly climbed down from his tree and carefully walked over to the footprints it had left behind. Feeling a little numb, he lay down in one of them. Neither his heels nor the top of his head touched the edges of the depression. He spread his arms out, and his fingertips didn''t reach, either. That thing could just step on him and there''d be nothing left but a bloody smear, like swatting a bug.
He got to his feet, considered the monster''s trail, and set off away from it, at an angle. If he walked a little faster than before, or didn''t check as carefully for potential sources of food, well, it must be that his belly was full (of vine squeezings) and he was feeling better after a brief rest (up a tree, terrified).
--- Taaku woke when the air around him cooled. He stretched, winced, stretched again. His head hurt. His scales itched. He swished his tail, back and forth, and slowly realized that he was alone. Then he remembered why he was alone. He crawled out of the mass of tree roots he''d crammed himself into when the sun started to come up, staggered, and continued away from the mountain he''d called home his entire life. Downhill. He needed to go downhill. He focused on that thought - ''downhill''. Every time he slipped, downhill. When he tripped and fell, downhill. Until he got to the bottom, and everything was suddenly uphill. Taaku lay down for a bit, and thought. He was so thirsty, and water went down. He came to a conclusion. He got up, then skirted around the hill in front of him. He picked his way through tangled plants and over piles of stones, smelling for dampness and watching for animals small or weak enough for him to catch on his own. He wandered for the whole night, and didn''t find so much as a trickle. By the time the sun came up and he had to find a place to sleep the day away, he could barely think, and wasn''t sure if he was going up a hill or down one. Taaku had the terrible feeling that, without a miracle, he wasn''t going to last another night. Maybe it would rain. He crawled under one of the large trees, into a tiny cave of roots, and closed his eyes. Maybe he''d get to open them again. Maybe the afterlife wouldn''t be lonely. --- Greyex trudged up yet another hill. Spending the night up a tree, in case something came along while he was sleeping with a taste for flesh, hadn''t done his mood any favors. Finding another "drinkable" vine had, though, and he''d been able to make a (barely) usable bag out of the chewed up remains of the last one. He packed the holes in it with moss as he walked, then set about dropping edible bugs into it when and as he found them. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. "If I eat when I stop to rest, instead of stopping to eat when I find food, I can go farther," he reasoned out loud to himself. "And if I talk to myself," he continued, "I can pretend I''m not alone, and stay sane longer." He stopped to flip over a likely looking rock and scoop up a few juicy looking worms and a fat grub, then continued on his way. His stomach cramped a bit - days of drinking plant juice and hardly eating anything was taking its toll on him, but he could keep going. The crude bag bumped against his side with every step, reminding him that where there was stuff, he could make tools, and where he could make tools, he could (hopefully) survive. The bag was half full of squirming, writhing "food", and the water vine was still mostly intact, when the sun got low and Greyex started looking around for a place to sleep. He was debating the usability of some of the hollows he''d seen underneath the larger trees when he saw the foot. It was grey, scaled, and had wicked looking talons attached to the toes, all three of them. He picked up a nearby stick and gave it a poke. It twitched a couple of times and slowly withdrew into the hollow under the tree. When nothing came out and tried to eat him, Greyex crouched down and took a closer look. There was something - someone? - under there. Who (or what) ever it was had two feet, two legs, one long slinky tail, and a leather loincloth held up with a crudely braided belt. He reached in with the stick and gave the foot another poke. The person? under the tree hissed softly. "You don''t sound so good," Greyex said conversationally. His answer was an unintelligible hiss, and he gave the foot another poke. The other foot twitched, and the poked foot flinched. "I suppose you''d prefer if I tried to help you," Greyex went on, thinking out loud as much as he was talking to the prone figure under the tree. "Not that I know what you are, but with claws like that, you''re probably pretty mean when you''re feeling well." He grinned what he''d been told was a nasty little grin and gave the foot a jab with the stick. The tail flopped over weakly.
Greyex crawled partway into the root cave under the tree, firmly gripped the stranger''s ankles, and backed out on his knees, dragging his bag of "food" and water vine in the dust, mystery creature in tow. In the dying light of the sun, he got a better look at the thing. The scales were everywhere, and it had no hair. Its hands, and it did have hands, had four fingers, counting the thumb, all of which were tipped with the same wicked talons as its toes. The grayish scaled skin sagged and drooped, and near the fanged mouth it had begun to crack. He gave its cheek an experimental pinch and felt scales crackle and crack between his fingers. The indentations stayed where they were, pale and thin. Whatever this was, it was nearly dead from thirst. Greyex ran his fingertips over the water vine wrapped around his chest and shoulders. "It''s your lucky day, friend," he said softly through a pointy grin. "If this doesn''t kill you, you get to live." --- Taaku woke to a miracle. There was water in his mouth. Strange, bitter water with bits of stringy stuff in it, but water. He drank greedily and whined like a needy hatchling when it stopped, but then it came back, gushing and dripping, strange and stringy and exactly what he needed. After a wonderful eternity of water, water in his mouth, water running down his cheeks, cool and wet and oh thank everything he wasn''t going to die, he felt strong enough to open his eyes. He stared, for a long moment, into a large pair of hairy nostrils, and closed them again. "Ah," he said to himself, "this is a dream. I''m still dying." "Not a dream," a strangely mushy voice said from above and to the side. "Just a very, very strange day." "There is a goblin lap under my head," Taaku said firmly. "The goblin was feeding me plant water. That is not real." "Nah, it''s real," the goblin mushed with its weird squishy mouth. "But, funny thing is, you know what I am, friend, but I don''t know what you are." Taaku was a bit taken aback. Goblins and kobolds had been fighting for generations. For centuries. For a goblin to not know what he was, to not kill him where he lay, was unheard of. "I''m a kobold," he said before he could think better of it. "Hm." The goblin seemed lost in thought. While it considered that information, it bit a new hole in the plant and brought it to Taaku''s mouth, squeezing and releasing more of the strange water, which he eagerly drank down, even knowing where it came from. He was too thirsty to care. "Granny always said," the goblin said slowly, "that kobolds were terrible monsters that hunted in packs and ate goblins." Taaku was too busy drinking to reply. Distantly, he recalled that goblins didn''t taste very good. "The thing is, though," the goblin continued, "that in my experience, goblins are also terrible monsters that hunt in packs and eat goblins." It grinned down at Taaku, revealing a mouth full of teeth that made up for their lack of sharpness with sheer numbers. "And I don''t see your pack anywhere, so you and I, we can be friends, I think." Taaku choked on his plant water. The goblin waited. Taaku coughed and sputtered. The goblin waited. Taaku gasped for air. The goblin waited. "I could eat you," Taaku pointed out. "Then who would help you find water?" the goblin asked, unconcerned.
"You just taught me there''s water in plants," Taaku argued.
The goblin grinned. "Try it," it dared him. "Most plants are more full of poison than water."
"Why do you even want me?" Taaku finally asked, all of his confusion spilling out in a torrent of frustration. "Your kind eat everything in front of you, you don''t rescue people!" The goblin had the audacity to laugh in its weird, squishy voice. "Most of us don''t," it agreed. "Of course, most of us don''t know that there''s water in plants, or that you can make a bag out of nearly anything if you''re patient enough." It held up a bag that was. Made of plant. It was green and brown and half dry and a bit fuzzy. "What''s in the bag," Taaku was too confused to even ask a question properly. He wasn''t even sure he wanted to know what was in the bag. "Food," the goblin answered. "Want some?" It shook the bag a little for emphasis. It seemed about half full. "Yes!" This was humiliating. Asking a goblin for food, being rescued by a horrible stupid monster, loosing all sense of honor or community... maybe this was some sort of divine punishment for refusing to do his duty. The goblin reached into the weird plant bag and pulled out. Ugh. "Bugs aren''t food!" Taaku protested. The goblin put the wiggly bug in its mouth and worked its jaw, then swallowed. "You sure about that?" it asked. Taaku was sure, but. Maybe. Maybe eating bugs was part of his punishment for not dying like he was supposed to. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and felt like a hatchling asking to be fed. Something small and wiggly dropped in and he swallowed it. It hadn''t tasted like much, but it felt good to have something in his stomach again. "Well?" the goblin asked. Maybe it sounded amused or smug. He couldn''t tell. It was all mushy. "It. I guess it was food." Taaku curled his tail around his thighs. It was childish, but so was being fed by someone else. The goblin reached back into the bag and tossed another bug into its mouth, then offered Taaku the bag. Taaku, much to his increased shame, accidentally squished three of the squirmy things and didn''t get anything more than yuck on his claws. He licked them off anyway and curled his tail tighter. The goblin pulled out a bug and offered it, and he opened his mouth to be fed. Together, they finished what was in the bag, and then the rest of the chunky bitter water in the plant. Taaku tried, and failed, to get to his feet after the meal. He fell back to the ground and lay there on his back, hissing in frustration. "Sun''s down," the goblin said. "Time to sleep." "Sun''s down," Taaku countered, "time to get up." "...I was walking all day. You can''t even stand up." It stared toward him, eyes unfocused, pupils huge - oh. Oh. "You can''t see at night, can you?" Taaku asked slowly. "You can?" the goblin asked in return. Then, "of course you can. Nothing''s ever easy." With some effort, Taaku crawled closer to the weirdly soft thing and leaned against it. He''d killed goblins; he''d eaten goblins; he''d never noticed how soft and warm they were.
"We can sleep until morning," he allowed, "but you''re leading the way. The sun hurts my eyes."
"You can lead if we walk in the dark," the goblin slurred softly. "I can''t see anything in this." Then there was silence, but it was a silence punctuated by soft snoring and someone else''s heartbeat. Taaku put his head on the goblin''s chest and dozed, eyes half open. He still missed home. Chapter 09: A New Player
I lost track of time, fiddling with different impurities, checking the projected results, and then inspecting my minions'' needs to see if they matched. I wanted to save mana by giving plants deeper in my dungeon light, so they could photosynthesize. I couldn''t have it on all the time, though, because I had bats and bugs and things that probably wanted some darkness to sleep in. After way too much time spent on a single problem, I realized that I could use more than one impurity on a single template, and a whole new dimension of possibilities opened up. I synchronized the light decoration to the light coming in through the dungeon entrance, then tweaked it a bit until it mimicked the actual light levels outside, which were surprisingly easy to figure out with a little memory searching. I spent the impurities to save the template, then to create the decoration in my core room. My first thought was ''beautiful''. The bumblebee figurines sparkled and shone in the artificial sunlight, and my core on its pedestal almost seemed to glow with the way the light refracted inside it. I spent a long couple of hours admiring myself as the light source slid along the ceiling, its angle shifting to match the location of the sun in the sky outside, then mentally shook myself out of it. I had other things to do, like check on the tunnel to my second room! It was a bit deeper. Maybe a couple of feet. This was going to take a while. I opened the dungeon editor and played with the currently nonexistent second room. I tweaked the pedestal that was going to be in the center so that it wouldn''t look like the one I was on now, I added a depression around it so I could have a moat, things like that. Then I took another look at the automated programs I''d made before... they were already outdated, as compared to my impurity intake and use needs. It would take a while to update, especially by myself, but I didn''t have biological needs to get in the way anymore. Hobbyist programmer heaven. I turned off all of the current automated impurity spending and wrote an entirely new script, one that would spend any full impurities I collected past five of a kind on core expansion (so I could hold more impurities, obviously). I also turned off automated creation of quartz rings, for a couple of reasons - one, my pedestal was full; two, I might want the quartz for other things. And three, the granite spaces were bothering me. There was only one mica ring, toward the bottom, and it still left a gap. I reabsorbed the solid mica ring, then filled the remaining spaces with more quartz, covering up the rest of the granite and leaving my pedestal properly shiny. Then I opened the dungeon editor again and ensured that my next pedestal would be larger and more impressive than my current one - I added a step under it so it would be raised up a bit, made it taller, and put some claw shaped details around the top to sort of cradle the air around where my core would go. Then I turned my attention back to the first room, my current core room. It wasn''t going to be a core room once my new room was done, and it was going to need to look completely different. I spent the rest of the night and, judging by the shift in lighting from nearly nonexistent to red to orange to bright, a good piece of the next day queuing changes to take effect only after my core moved to its new home atop a new, richly decorated pedestal. It took more time than I expected to build in moving the home for my bats and shifting (rather, destroying and recreating) the falling snow decoration (and a home for my icy bumblebees), but I managed it by the time the sun went down. I thought about rewarding myself for a job well done by reliving some of my old memories, but then it occurred to me that the first room needed more work. ... ...... This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author''s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. ............. I didn''t surface again until past sunrise the next day. I made the right choice when I designed the lighting for my dungeon. My core room was bathed in the crisp light of day, and the gentle change from the dark of night through twilight hadn''t disturbed my focus at all. A gentle mist beaded on the walls in my entryway and dampened the petals of my edelweiss flowers, which were free of bumblebees for a change - the swarm seemed to not like getting their wings wet, and had taken to waiting for the "rain" that had fallen during the night to stop before they got breakfast. My mountain bats hadn''t settled down yet - they were still flitting about the hall, chasing one another and squeaking. Now that there were three of them, they weren''t lonely anymore, which was a bit of a relief.
A low hum from very near the entrance to my core room caught my attention. The icy bumblebees had woken up and were
starting their day. When droplets of mist landed on their wings, they froze immediately into tiny flecks of ice and the massive insects shook them off. The pine needle mat they were flying out of seemed different than I expected - I took a closer look at it. There was a bulge under the frost-covered floor cover that hadn''t been there before. As I watched, it raised up just a tiny bit higher. With a twist of will, I opened an information menu about it. Icy Bumblebee Nest I supposed that made a bit of sense. Only, not really. I''d been thinking of my icy bumblebees as just like regular bumblebees, but bigger and covered in frost, and my ordinary bumblebees didn''t make an elaborate nest. This mutation business was stranger than it looked at first glance. How exciting. What other changes would I see, when I mutated more minions? I checked on my new, under construction, core room. It was almost finished. Finally. There were so many things I wanted to try once I had more space. I watched, giddy with anticipation, as granite melted away to reveal more and more space. Finally, after what seemed like hours (but was more like thirty minutes) of watching, I got the popup I''d written. Move Core? Y/N YES~! The world went dark. I couldn''t feel my dungeon! I could barely feel a sense of movement, a hazy nausea that clashed with my understanding of myself as an inorganic organism with no digestive system, and the exhaustion that could only have come from my mana being spent on something by the fistful. My mind spun, I felt heavy and light in turns; it wasn''t painful, exactly, but it seemed like it should be. Then everything popped back into place, and my core was sitting pretty on the shiny new pedestal I''d designed. My new core room was dark, the only source of light was the hall leading to my old core room. I got to work fixing that. ... ...... Once I had the lighting in my new core room set up to my liking, I took a look around. The tunnel to the third (and final) room that I''d pre-designed hadn''t started yet. It looked like automated changes took effect from the front of the dungeon first and worked their way back. That was fine, I was in no hurry; I hadn''t even had anything other than animals come in yet, and any visitors I might find myself entertaining would have to come in through the entrance. My bats dropped a bit when they passed through the last of the falling snow between the entryway and the first room, but the decoration was already fading out, and they were soon in their new roost, squeaking softly and fluffing their wings. Falling snow appeared at the end of the hall leading to my new core room, just like I''d set up in planning. Depressions were forming in the floor where I''d decided to put flower beds, and it occurred to me that these flowers, too, would need to be watered and fertilized. I opened the dungeon editor and resolved to put my (weak, rusty) engineering skills to good use. It couldn''t be that hard to build an automated irrigation system in a magic cave that was, for all intents and purposes, my own body where I had total control of everything. --- Viscount Wilder rubbed the pad of his thumb over a carefully written letter that had not been addressed to him. It seemed Tower Master Twenty-Seven was a bit too ambitious for a man of his station. "Tenson," he said, neither speaking softly nor raising his voice. The Viscount did not jump or start in any way when his personal servant was, suddenly, behind him, as though he had been there all along. "Retrieve the files on adventuring teams. Which ones are available, which ones are competent, and which ones are... well." He smiled pleasantly.
"At once, master."
Tenson was gone as completely and quickly as he''d arrived. Chapter 10: The First Day Together
Greyex woke slowly and stretched languidly. He was surprisingly comfortable, and a tension that had been building ever since he''d had to run was relaxed, if not completely gone. He blinked a few times in the morning light, rolled over, and realized he''d spent the night cuddling with the... the thing... the kobold! He was cuddling with the kobold he''d found. He patted it a few times and then gave its skin an exploratory pinch. The kobold hissed softly, but didn''t move. "What was that for?" It''s voice crackled sharply on its ts and hissed its esses. "What wasss that for?" "I was checking how much more water you need. It''s a lot, by the way." Greyex patted the scaly hide under his hand in what he hoped was a soothing way. The kobold shifted a bit and hissed something indistinct. It was probably a question about water. "We drank it all," he said plainly. "We''ll have to go find more today." The kobold tried valiantly to get to its feet. It even managed it for, oh, five seconds before it started to list to the side and Greyex had to catch the poor thing. He slung its arm over his shoulders and wrapped his own about its upper back to support it, and they wobbled off together at a painfully slow rate. If something came and tried to eat them, he was going to have to leave his new companion behind. Rather than pursue that thought further, Greyex turned his attention to keeping them going away from the goblin village, the thing he''d seen, and the direction that had his companion tensing up if the turned toward it. When that got too easy to occupy his mind, he started to glance around for food, potential tools, water vines, or places that they could duck into to hide if something dangerous turned up. Before long, that didn''t take much effort, either, so he turned to conversation, rather than think about all the horrible ways he could still die out here. "So," he said slowly, "what are you doing all alone, if kobolds are supposed to hunt in packs." "Can''t go back," it hissed. "Ran away. Going back - I would die." "Same, same," Greyex nodded his head and guided them around a hole in the ground. "We go back the way I came, we''re gonna die; we go back the way you came, we''re gonna die. Got it." They were silent for a while, then, because the ground had gone rocky and loose. Together, they struggled down the hill, and together, they struggled up the next one, in the only direction that didn''t lead to a known danger, slipping and tripping and rising again. Greyex''s knees were bloody by the time they reached the top, and his companion had only escaped the same condition by having a tougher skin. At the top of the terrible mess of sharp rocks, there sat a boulder and a familiar looking plant. He leaned the kobold against the boulder and inspected the plant. The leaves, dark green and rubbery and shaped just right; the stems, correct; the smell, sweet and bitter, familiar. He pulled off a leaf and thoughtfully bit into it - it burst between his teeth, unpleasantly squishy like bad meat, and the bitter, filmy water inside flowed over his tongue while the stringy fibers within stuck to his teeth. Yes, this was the water vine. He bit off a length and dragged it to his companion. --- Taaku must have fallen asleep, because he woke up to water in his mouth and a sour smell in his nose. He drank the water. It was thick, and a bit stringy and chunky, like old blood, but water was water. He opened his eyes. It was the goblin again, with what was probably the same plant. Plant water was... it wasn''t as good as normal water, but water was water. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Taaku took the vine and bit into it. It was weirdly tough, both like and unlike meat, and the smell was sour and off-putting. The plant water rushed out as he bit again and again, burning its way down his throat unpleasantly. It was a bit less wonderful than it had been the first time, but it was still so, so good. It was all gone before he knew it, and another chunk of water plant was held out. He took it wordlessly and started biting again, while the goblin took the finished vine and did, uh, something to it that Taaku couldn''t even begin to guess at. Goblin magic, maybe? "You got a name?" it asked. "I can keep calling you ''kobold'', but that seems rude." "You''re not going to use your weird goblin magic to put a spell on me if I tell it to you, are you?" The goblin stared at him with its weird brown eyes with the off-putting round pupils. "I don''t know any magic," it lied. Taaku did his best to reason through his options. He owed the goblin his life. That might be enough for it to put a spell on him anyway, and it might decide to put a curse on him if he refused it. On the other hand, it could put a stronger curse on him if he gave it his name. ...maybe it only knew plant magic. "Taaku," he finally said. "I''m Greyex," the goblin said. It went back to fiddling with plant bits. Taaku bit more water plant and drank more plant water. Greyex twisted the thoroughly bitten vines around one another in a complicated pattern that Taaku couldn''t hope to understand. It seemed to be building the plants up and into something; a shape was slowly emerging. His eyelids grew heavy, and Taaku distantly felt his half finished water plant fall from his talons. He was asleep before it had finished sliding to the ground. --- Ssss-thump. Greyex glanced to the side. The kobold - Taaku - had fallen asleep and dropped its water vine. He glanced to the other side. The vine he''d harvested was growing lush and thick, sprawled out over the ground in a mass of leaves and stems, sluggishly oozing its water from the torn parts where he''d taken bits of it. "We can rest here," he decided out loud. "You sleep. I can sleep when I''m done." It took most of the rest of the day to finish the basket he''d started, and a big part of that was fetching more grass to weave in across the vines to shore it up. He put some roots in, too, that came up with the grass, and it looked solid enough, but Greyex wouldn''t know how actually good this basket was until it dried out. He put it down next to the - Taaku; he put it down next to Taaku anyway, then moved on to his next task before he could sleep. He rehydrated. Pulled more water vine, made a nasty face at it, and drank more of the sour, bitter, chunky vine water. Foul, but harmless. Then he gathered up some stones and shoved them into a rough semicircle around where Taaku was asleep, edges touching the boulder they''d rested in the shade of, and set about making some "shelter". He mostly gathered up grass and piled it up, sometimes over, sometimes under, but mostly on the stone circle he''d made. He also used some of the shorter chunks of gnawed on vine to loop things together and hold them in place. Over the course of the, to stretch the term, construction, he found enough bugs to fill up not only his bag but also the basket he''d made. It took the rest of the day, and the finished product was still better than most goblin dwellings, which was to say that it would need a stiff wind to knock it over. Greyex put a few finishing touches on the temporary house - a few handfuls of moss there, a bit of urine here - and it was ready. He tucked the bag and basket away inside, bugs and all, and cut a few more lengths of vine with his teeth in case they got thirsty.
He climbed into the little shelter through a hole he''d left for that purpose, pulled the vines in after himself, and then patched the hole shut with more grass he''d left nearby for just that purpose. The result was a shaded, slightly stuffy but overall cozy, little space. Greyex lay down and put his head on Taaku, then fell asleep to the sound of someone else''s heartbeat in his ear. ---- Meanwhile, back at the dungeon... I''d been working on this stupid irrigation problem for an entire day. When I copied the watering system from the entrance, it made the ceiling wet and slippery, and the bats suffered for it, like the beginnings of a migraine. When I set the "rain" to materialize lower down, it clumped up and dropped a thick sheet of water on the entire room, scattering maggots and crushing flower petals. That didn''t feel very good, either. I attached the water source to the wall, and it flowed like a fountain... and flooded the floor before it made its way to the flower beds. With everything soaked, I needed to take a break before I lost it and did something I''d regret. The worst part was that they all worked well in simulation. I hadn''t been so frustrated since I died. It was going to feel so good when I finally figured it out.