by Simon Archer
“Mine lets me restore an undead slave as long as at least one of their cells remains so that they can serve me in perpetuity or until I grow tired of them.” Gobta grinned. “I find it hard to believe yours could be as good as mine.”
“Or mine,” Hudson said with almost manic glee. “It lets me better utilize my liege’s presence, so as long as I am near him, I become much stronger than I otherwise would.”
“Did you copy mine?” Queenie asked as she glanced sidelong at the Amorphie priest. “Because mine does that too.”
“Power twinsies!” Hudson said as he raised both hands like he just didn’t care. “Huzzah!”
“Huzzah,” Queenie replied with much less enthusiasm. “Though…” she turned her gaze on me. “I suppose that means that we’ll need to spend even more time with him.”
“I suppose it does.” Hudson beamed at me. “Won’t that be fun, master? Your two biggest fans now have an excuse to spend even more time with you.” He knocked his fist against Queenie’s, and then the two of them made their hands explode before going through a series of intricate gestures. “We even have a secret fist bump.”
“But it’s not yet ready for you to learn,” Queenie added quickly, her cheeks a bit flushed. “When it is, it will truly be a sight to behold, and all who see it will know how amazing you are, master. Assuming they are foolish enough not to realize the depths of your truly awesome greatness from seeing you in the first place.”
“Honestly, people like that aren’t even worth considering,” Hudson said with a snort. “Can you even imagine?”
“I cannot. That would truly be a cold and desolate life.” Queenie shivered.
“Yeah, mine doesn’t do that.” Jodie shook her head. “It lets me read a blueprint and then know how to make whatever it is without using a blueprint anymore.” When no one said anything, she sighed. “Normally, when you craft based off a blueprint, you need to use a new one every time, for each and every item you create… I don’t need to do that anymore.”
“That’s great, Jodie.” Melanie reached out to pat her on the shoulder, but Jodie shrugged it off.
“I don’t need your pity pat.” The redheaded catgirl sighed. “I’m going to go build something awesome. From a blueprint. Then I’m going to do it again. From memory.” With that, she turned and strode out of the room with a copy of both the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul tucked under one arm.
“I guess we’re reading both,” Veronica said as she watched her fellow catgirl go. “Darn.” She made an ‘aw shucks’ gesture before scooping up a copy of each and heading out herself.
“I shall begin reading immediately, my liege,” Hudson said as he held both books to his chest before turning his gaze to Queenie. “Would you like to join me in reading our liege’s most favorite books?”
“I would like that very much.” Queenie nodded. “But only if we can do it in a setting that provides ample treats. Something tells me that this activity requires steaming mugs of warmed chocolate and cake.”
“I think that’s a grand plan. Steamed chocolate drink it is,” Hudson said as he offered the Ant Queen his arm, and after she took it, the two of them skipped out of the room.
The others quickly followed suit, all taking copies of the book and disappearing themselves, and surprisingly, I couldn’t be more pleased. While I hadn’t intended for them to read both of the books, I couldn’t say it upset me since I’d picked out both books. I just hoped that everyone enjoyed them.
Now though, well, I’d have to find something else to do. Ever since I’d gotten back from the Amorphie world two days ago, I’d been in a weird sort of limbo. I was still too low level to do the next quest on the Bazaar world, and Melanie hadn’t finished engineering appropriate plant and animal life for us add to our new planet.
Which was why I’d spent my time training and catching up on all my favorite books. The thing was, I wasn’t really good at sitting still and reading. Perhaps it was because I’d read all the books by my favorite authors already, and none of them really produced content at a speed that could really contend with my need for it. That was why I’d come up with the idea of the book club so that I might be able to find more books to read from other cultures, but now that I’d distributed the books to my friends, I didn’t really have anything else to do until they finished them and suggested their own.
Sure, I could activate yet another training scenario and attack fictional bad guys, but at the same time, I wasn’t really inclined to do that either because while I could technically hone my skills in the training room, it didn’t actually let me gain experience or anything. Instead, it seemed more designed to help me theorycraft. After all, aside from reading, that’s what I’d spent the rest of my time doing.
“Maybe I’ll check out some movies,” I said to no one in particular because I knew how that would go. I’d spend the next two hours looking through the menus of various streaming sites to try to find something to watch and then probably settle on rewatching The Office.
“My liege, are you busy?” Gobta said suddenly, and I turned to find him in the doorway. He had a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide in one hand and had dogeared one of the pages.
“Not particularly,” I said as I nodded to the book in his hand. “You shouldn’t bend the pages to mark your spot like that. Like, use a bookmark or something.” I turned back to the table. “I think I left some on the table, actually.”
“In Hobgoblin culture, it is considered a dick move to comment on how people mark the pages of their books.” Gobta snorted before moving on. “Also, it should be ‘left them upon the table.’”
“Whatever, man.” I handed him a bookmark that featured a picture of a shirtless dude with an axe over one shoulder and a girl with daisy dukes and a pink top kneeling beside his leg. “Just use one.”
“Fine.” Gobta stopped, eyes widening as he looked at the bookmark. “What is this?”
“Great book about a guy from Texas.” I smirked.
“Does he have sex with all the girls?” Gobta asked as he slotted the bookmark into his book.
“Oh yeah,” I said with a laugh. “It was my next choice, actually, but I wasn’t sure how it would go over with the womenfolk.”
“Well, while I see that,” Gobta said with a shrug, “I don’t care. Sometimes men need manly entertainment where we do manly things.” He looked like he was going to say more on the topic but then decided against it.
“So, what did you want?” I asked as I looked the Hobgoblin King over.
“I was thinking that maybe I could take the dungeon core and put it into one of the planets.” He paused as if gauging my reaction as this wasn’t the first time he’d brought it up. “I spoke with Veronica, and Hades is, by far, our least hospitable planet. But you already know that.”
He was right, of course. Hades was the best planet to implant the core. It was an immense gas giant at the very edge of the system and had been named as such because we’d made a joke about how only the dead could possibly survive there. And even then, it’d be iffy.
“You know the problem with that,” I said with a sigh. “Even if I wanted to let you implant the dungeon core we got on Amorphie in Hades, we don’t know when the next gate will open, and we’ll be shunted away…” Or, at least, prior to Scenario K, that had been a problem. Now though… “Actually, maybe we should go do that.”
“See, while I know someone has to stay and monitor the dungeon in real-time, I think we should just take the time to do it now--” Gobta stopped mid-rant and stared at me. “You agree?”
“Well, yeah,” I said as I rubbed my neck. “See, I forgot to mention that I got a skill too. Mine lets you,” I gestured at the Hobgoblin King, “exist in a separate dimension from me. So, even if I have to go to another world, or even back here, you could stay on Hades and monitor the dungeon.”
“Well then, that is good to hear, my liege.” He smiled brightly at me, which was always kinda creepy. “I�
��ve always wanted to be a Dungeon Lord.”
“Actually, I think someone already used that title.” I smirked at him. “Better come up with something else.”
“How about Dungeon Master?” he offered, and when I shook my head, he sighed. “Well, I’m sure the proper title for the ruler of my divine dungeon will come to me.”
“Actually, I don’t think you can call it that either.” I put my arm around his shoulder as he headed toward the teleportation room. “Divine Dungeon, I mean. That’s a thing.”
“Well, I give up.” He threw up his hands. “‘Cause if every idea is taken, I don’t know what to call myself.”
“Well, the answer is obvious.” I clapped my hands together. “Dungeon King.”
“How the fuck is Dungeon King not taken?” His eyes widened, and a lightbulb practically appeared above his head as an idea struck him. “No, I know. Dungeon God!” Then he let out a laugh that resounded throughout the Halls of Research.
“It does have a nice ring to it.” I winked at him as we entered the teleportation room, and I started turning knobs, flicking switches, and pushing buttons. “Just make sure of one thing.”
“What is that, my liege?” he asked as the portal began to form.
“Make sure it’s fucking awesome.”
I’d have said more, but unfortunately, my body was rendered down to its composite atoms just then, and I was shunted to my own galaxy. Then, I had a few seconds of being completely overcome by what it felt like to be a god. First, all sorts of information hit me at once. Sights, smells, sounds. Quite literally, all information about pretty much everything in my immediate sphere of influence, which stretched farther than ever before, slammed into my senses, and it took more than a few nanoseconds to quite rightly process it, which I did by mostly ignoring it all.
Next came the overwhelming feeling of power. Like I could do pretty much anything as long as I sent my will and Aura to it.
I latched onto that power and projected my will outward until I’d focused upon Hades. It was an immense gas giant at the far end of the solar system, but that didn’t exactly make it special, especially since its mass was about ninety percent hydrogen. After all, my system was home to more than a couple of gas giants with similar compositions.
No, what made this planet special was its sheer size. It was easily twice as large as Zeus, which was the second biggest planet in my system. And because it was so far from the system’s star, it was not only perpetually shrouded in darkness, but it was cold as fuck at around negative two hundred forty degrees Celsius.
Just as a point of reference, the last “planet” in my system, a tiny little rock that Gobta and Queenie constantly argued about and which I’d dubbed Persephone because of its proximity to Hades, was around negative two hundred and fifty degrees Celsius.
And that was where our knowledge of the planet pretty much ended. After all, it hadn’t had anything we’d needed until now.
“Hold on to your butts,” I told Gobta right before I teleported us to Hades. Well, close to Hades anyway because the planet didn’t really have a surface, so I’d opted to put us a few miles beyond the edge of its massive atmosphere.
“The thing I like most about this planet is how dark it is.” Gobta smiled as we looked down on the planet.
“You know, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense, to be honest.” I narrowed my eyes at the planet because it did, in fact, look dark. “Like, the light should reflect off the gas in the atmosphere to give it a color like Zeus and the other gas giants.”
“Unless there is something so dense inside the planet that it keeps all of the light from escaping,” Veronica’s voice chimed in my ear, and I couldn’t help but smile. So, our resident geologist had noticed our trip and decided to spy on us. “After all, that’s how black holes work for the most part.”
“Fancy hearing you here,” I said with a laugh as I mulled over what she said. “Decided to keep tabs on me?”
“Of course.” I heard the grin in her voice. “I have the teleportation room set to ping me if you head to your system so we can do more surveys.”
I actually knew that, but I hadn’t thought about it. Veronica often liked me to do surveys to get more information on the planets in my system. The data fed through a device on my belt and beamed directly to her server back in the Halls of Research.
“Enough science,” Gobta roared as he inhaled sharply despite the lack of air in the space we currently occupied. “More dungeon bringing.” He rubbed his chin. “Hey, maybe that could work for a title.” He brightened. “I could be the Dungeon Bringer.”
“Again, no,” I shook my head, “but I like the idea. Besides, I still think Dungeon God is better.”
“Yeah, but you’re the god, not me.” He sighed. “I’ll keep thinking.”
“You do that,” I said as I reached out with my senses. Then I did a double-take. “Veronica, are you seeing this?”
“I am, Garrett…” She drew my name out as she spoke, and I could hear her clacking away at the keys on her keyboard. “That gravity is insane.”
I took a moment to do a quick calculation in my head because, crazily, in God Mode, I could do it faster than her. “The gravity there is over a hundred times stronger than it should be. The core would have to be incredibly dense to accomplish that.”
“Maybe not,” Veronica mused in a way that told me she was only kind of listening to me. “Maybe the core is just bigger than we thought.” She snapped her fingers a couple of times. “Like… we don’t actually have data on it. Maybe the core is just fucking huge.”
“Are you trying to tell me that Hades might be a normal planet wrapped in a gas giant?” I arched an eyebrow even though she couldn’t see it. “And wouldn’t our surveys have found that to be the case? I mean, we searched for metal and whatnot.”
“Well, my surveys don’t have a lot of data on Hades on account of how hard it is to scan.” Her statement hung in the air as I turned my attention to Gobta.
“Did you happen to survey it?” I asked as I looked at the Hobgoblin King.
“Both Queenie and I looked at the planet, but Scout did not find anything of interest, so we didn’t look further.” He shrugged.
“That seems fair, but it also feels off.” So, I did what I should have done before. I summoned Scout. The moment the ant popped into existence beside me, I turned to Gobta. “Tell me what you see when you harness his Scouting abilities.”
“My liege, I am not good at using his powers.” Gobta shuffled with annoyance. “That is more Queenie’s domain.”
“Right, I know that. Just humor me,” I said even as I directed Scout to target the planet, and unsurprisingly found nothing but hydrogen. Even when added to a godly level Auric Sense.
“I am getting nothing of note, my liege.” Gobta shrugged. “Am I supposed to see something?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I think Scout doesn’t have a high enough level to puncture whatever is going on here.” I gestured vaguely at the planet. “Hell, even I can’t see anything but hydrogen.”
“Me, either, Garrett,” Veronica agreed. “What do you want to do?”
“Check it out,” I said as I donned an imaginary explorer’s cap.
Then I used my godly powers to move myself down toward the planet. It was strange as hell, and as I got closer, the best way I could describe it was that it was like a roiling sea only made of dark storm clouds. They churned and surged before me as lightning crackled along the surface. Then, just to make sure there were no surprises before I went down further, I began to circle the planet.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Veronica chimed in my ear after I’d covered about half the circumference of the planet. “Those are not the typical storm clouds we associate with gas giants.”
“What do you mean?” I asked as I paused and looked around. They looked pretty much how I’d always seen storm clouds back on earth. “They seem normal to me.”
“Well, they are normal for a terre
strial planet like, I dunno, Ares.” There was a pause as Veronica gathered her thoughts. “See, on those kinds of planets, the star’s light can actually penetrate the atmosphere. Then it sort of charges up the particles at the top of the atmosphere. In layman’s terms, basically, the positively charged particles are lighter, and they move toward the top of a storm cloud while the negatively charged ones are heavier and move toward the bottom. Then, when the charge becomes too much, crack! We have an arc of electricity between the two charged areas of a cloud. Are you following?”
“Yeah, I think so.” I nodded. “The light charges the clouds, and that causes an imbalance which results in lightning. Makes sense.”
“Well, the next part is that energy still goes through the atmosphere and heats the planet which causes the planet’s temperature to stabilize, which is why we get lightning all over the planet.” Veronica waited as though that was supposed to mean something.
“Right… that looks like what is happening here,” I said as I continued my tour of the planet’s upper atmosphere.
“Exactly!” she said with such conviction that I hoped there was more coming. “But that doesn’t really happen on gas giants, especially when they are this far from a star. For example, if you went and looked at Zeus, you would find that the star’s rays actually just stabilize the temperature of the atmosphere. Only the poles of the planet receive a lot less light than the rest of the planet which is why most of the lightning and storms are concentrated around the poles.”
“Is that because the temperature difference is more pronounced around the poles?” I asked as I tried to understand. “That seems interesting, but not especially useful…”
“It means that there is something down there that is stabilizing the temperature of the planet so that the hot currents of air rising from the planet are more spread out.” She was more excited than ever now. “I think that this planet might be what you thought, a normal planet wrapped in a blanket of gas.”