Dungeon Calamity

by Dakota Krout

  I began talking to my current favorite sentient Mob. Bob was a Goblin Shaman with infernal and wind affinities.

  Bob looked up as soon as he heard my voice, then slid to his knees in supplication, almost like prayer. “Great One, we live to serve! What can we do to further your goals? I cannot express my thanks that you have begun speaking to me in intelligible words again!”

  I ignored the subtle reminder that I hadn’t been myself recently. Looking him over, I was still impressed how the changes I had wrought in the Goblins had altered their bodies so much. For instance, now there was hardly a hint of the speech impediment that had plagued their race for so long.

  “As always, we live to die for you.” Bob nodded heartily, his happy tone contrasting to the dark words.

  My curiosity derailed my gift giving by a bit.

  “Ah, yes! Aspen is believed to enhance our abilities to communicate with the spiritual world. It offers greater protection and control over the spirits I must face if I want to direct them.” Bob explained instantly. At the start of our relationship, he had been a bit more hesitant to give up the secrets of his race. That had quickly changed. I suppose that seeing a being unendingly resurrect fallen members of your tribe would be a good incentive to open up a little.

  I stopped talking as the staff appeared in front of him. He was nearly dancing with glee as he reverently picked up the staff and channeled a bit of infernal Essence into it. A bolt of purest darkness shot from the orb, impacting a passing Goblin and making it scream and collapse.

  Bob looked at the Goblin in shock. “Oops. So… it launches arrows of Essence.”

  I looked at the weakly convulsing Goblin on the floor.

  I took a moment and restored the Goblin, who scampered off with a sharp look at the sheepish Shaman.

  “I… we will put it to good use, Great Spirit.> Bob was one of the few Goblins that could work with the alternate versions of himself without getting weirded out. It was always amusing to watch twelve versions of Bob arguing.

  I focused more Essence into the tendril of influence I was extending downward.

  “Wait!” Bob cried out loudly, even for him. What? Bob had never stopped me from moving on to other things before.

 

  He took a deep breath. “Great one, we are forever in your debt, and we could never hope to repay the lavish gifts you have given us....”

  I waited for his request to leave. It made sense; they had been fixed, and who wouldn’t want to explore the world? I had likely scared them off with my bout of insanity.

  “There are a few of us who miss certain aspects of our life outside, and while we are happy to eat the food you provide, we hoped that…” Here it comes, more people leaving me. “You would be willing to allow other things to live and grow in here.”

  My voice may have come out a bit strongly, as he cowered a bit. Can’t he recognize excitement?

  Bob fell to his knees again. “I am so sorry to have bothered you with such a request! I am ashamed and-”

  I consoled him cheerfully.

  He glanced up hopefully. “Ah… we had hoped to make this place more like the outdoors. Plants, flowers, small animals such as birds… maybe some things we can hunt without being hunted in return.”

  I cajoled him. Hearing that you weren’t going to be alone forever can really put you into a good mood.

  “Well, the thing most missed… and you can say no, really, I don’t know the scope of your abilities, and-” Bob babbled away, wringing his hands.

 

  “Yes! Sorry! The thing most missed is the feeling of wind. It can get a bit... stuffy down here.” Bob finally finished. “The animals are mainly for background noise; we have had a few days where my people can’t seem to take the silence. They tend to tear their ears open when it lasts too long.”

  My mind wandered away as I was considering how to make a breeze, so I didn’t hear his thanks. I redoubled my digging efforts and poured more earthen Essence into my deepening depression. To clarify, not the mental state. I mean depression as a ‘hole’. Tunnel. No, wait. If it is vertical it is a shaft. I pumped Essence in an attempt to enlarge my shaft. Um... that still sounds wrong for some reason.

  There was a good reason for my apparent waste of Essence. No, not waste- use. Brilliant use of Essence. Not a waste. I should kill something to clear my mind. To my point, a copy of a Dwarven memory stone I had ‘acquired’ from Dale recently had come with some very interesting information. The Dwarves had allowed some of their theories to be available to the outside world, thinking that the knowledge could never benefit a race outside of their own.

  You see, Dwarves were the only known race that had dug through the earth so deeply that they had found a point where rock ceased to be solid, where the heat and pressure of the world above liquefied everything below. They had never found a way to go beyond this point but noted that this was certainly how volcanoes gained their deadly payload. To me–beyond the obvious benefit of turning my mountain into an active volcano–the fact of the matter was that the Dwarves used the heat and molten metals they found to create wondrous weaponry and formulate deadly traps. I would find a way to do the same.

  It was possible that the Dwarves also ignored a huge benefit in the form of cultivation. Maybe they didn’t understand the various benefits, but most likely they did and simply chose not to share with others. Magma was a massive source of various combinations of earth and fire Essence. At least those types, maybe more. They could make a fortune guiding people to the unceasing Essence generation of the deeps. Then again, lava cultivators tended to congregate around active volcanoes, which was very dangerous for obvious reasons. I’m sure this led to an unstable group of people, thrill-seekers, warriors, and such. Maybe the Dwarves just didn’t want guests that could turn on them? I could understand that.

  I collected my thoughts and focused on the outcome I wanted. If I could tunnel to the depth where the world turned liquid, I need never fear my tunnels being sealed off for I could use the loose Essence of the earth to generate enough power to surpass what slowly drifted into here. I also had a river that flowed through my levels. If I could find a way to generate wind, I would have everything I needed to be a self-sufficient elemental dungeon. Bob, with his request for fresh air, may have actually helped me more than he knew. Celestial and infernal Essence were still an issue, but I could work on that. Later. After I finished my current project.

  ~ Chapter Three ~

  Looking at my dungeon, I took a deep ‘breath’ and got back to work. To help keep my mind focused, I had created a plethora of totally sane schemes!
I had my Mobs warring every day. Not only against adventurers but against each other. The creatures that fought and survived had their memories stored in Delta memory stones and were becoming more confident and powerful by the day. To clarify, not all of them were strong enough to have their own Core yet, but I was able to imbue their memories into them, similar to the Goblins below.

  Allowing them to retain their memories and be granted a healthy body upon death pushed my Mobs to remove their various inhibitions. This process quickly forced them to become more vicious and territorial, even when they had started as passive creatures. For example, now even the Bashers didn’t need my guidance to attack when people came too close! The territorial aspect was something that I had been forcing upon them by keeping creatures bunched together, only sending them after dungeoneers when they got within range. Now, I am happy to report, the Mobs did that work themselves! Not needing to dictate every movement left me free to ignore them in favor of working on more important things.

  While I was pleased by the progress of my life forms, as my mind returned to my project… I scowled. I hated being interrupted, especially when Minya interrupted with her inane attempts to force me into self-reflection! Bah. I refocused on my walls, little by little chipping away the heavy, dense granite and other various minerals and exchanging them for a new type of stone. I had found this material during my downward digging, nearly two miles straight down. It was porous and very light… pumice! That’s the word I was thinking of. Since I was absorbing more dense material, replacing it with pumice had the fringe benefit of giving me a net return of total Essence. That is, I was gaining Essence faster than I was using it while creating my walls.

  I could shape the pores in the new stone walls, creating fractals of smaller and smaller Runes. Since it was still a strong-ish material–being rock–I could grow it in Runic formations easily, sacrificing the density of the old material without damaging the structural integrity of the walls. This stone could be integral to the next phase of my plans, but there was plenty to do before I even thought about achieving that lofty goal!

  I paused my efforts, thinking back on my recent conversation with my favorite dungeon born. Though she had gone out of her way to bother me, Minya had provided me with a very important piece to my puzzle. Opal. Right now I was collecting vast quantities of Essence, as well as various flavors of corruption and storing it for later use. Whenever I got too bored with the tedium of replacing multiple tons of stone, I turned to a few of my side projects that allowed me to automate the process of Essence collection to a higher degree. Hopefully this new gemstone would help, since I was getting too large to micromanage everything that happened here.

  The lining of various minerals through my walls did allow a constant flow of Essence and taint to drain into Beast Cores. This had the adventurer-beloved benefit of purifying the Essence in the dungeon without my direct influence. The downside was that the process was slow. Without taking a more active role in the interplay of energy, corruption had begun to build to noticeable levels.

  I sighed as I thought about the potentially superb usefulness of this gift… I should really apologize to her. Minya had good timing, even if she had gone out of her way to annoy me at that moment. Infernal Essence had been accruing at a higher rate than I had bothered to keep up with. It moved even slower through the diamond channels in the walls than the other types of Essence did. Because of its low… viscosity, for lack of a better word, there was a dense miasma of the corruption in my tunnels. Already over a month had passed since the multiple hundreds of defenders and infected had died in here, and there was no noticeable progress in clearing the taint. Hopefully, supplementing the diamond filaments with an opal version would help me clear the corruption from the air.

  I took a deep drink of my collected Essence and–refreshed–began working, threading the opal along every wall over the course of the next hour. A portion of the diamond wires melted back into my aura as I overlaid the original path with that of opal. I connected the shimmering gemstone to the murkily swirling Cores designed to draw in and store the infernal corruption and laughed gleefully. To my immense satisfaction, the effect was both drastic and immediate.

  The infernal Essence seemed to shriek with demonic glee as it flowed into the opal, flashing into the Core faster than any of the other Essences bothered to move along their own varied filaments. This confirmed another of my theories… the gems I was using were not actually the best type of material for the various Essences! The humanoids above me had it wrong! While the gemstones I was using were good at collecting their associated corruption, there would certainly be a better option. I laughed at my good fortune, now all I needed to do was-

  A meteorite slammed into the surface, jarring me from my cheerful examination. How long had I been focused on this? A day? The crater left from the impact extended into my influence, so I looked at the remnants of the meteor… a house? That's an odd celestial body… ah. A Mana storm must be forming above. Good, good. I’m in a cheerful mood right now, things are going well. I could use some company. I can only talk to myself for so long before I start to go… stop that train of thought! Gotta think positive!

  ~ Dale ~

  “Mana storm!” A screaming voice woke Dale from his uneasy slumber as an alarm began to howl. A rumble from an impact rocked the ground, making the awakening process much swifter. Dale started to sit up, but his instincts grabbed his attention and his body shifted into a defensive stance. He blocked the jagged blade tearing through the air, easily returning a double jab. At this moment, Dale was happy that he was always armed, his cursed weapons refusing to vacate their prominent positions on his fists. His pugilistic maneuver paid off. His clenched hand smashing into the robed figure wielding the blade. Surprised when the form didn’t go flying through the side of his tent, Dale charged recklessly, doing everything he could think of to avoid the dancing blade.

  The robed figure slashed at him, always just slightly faster than Dale could manage to perfectly block. Soon he had small, bleeding cuts crisscrossing his arms and chest. The robed figure took a step back at blinding speed, removing his hood.

  Pointed ears, ebony skin, and a scowl were revealed. “Enough. Barely passable. Weeks of training and you still allow the blade to touch your flesh. Pathetic, even for a human. You should be ashamed of your weak dedication to the arts.”

  Dale inclined his head in the smallest of bows, not trusting the other person not to attack. “Sorry, sir. I was a bit over-concerned that a Mana storm is settling in.”

  Dale’s combat instructor smacked him across the face hard enough to make his nose bleed. “You think your enemies are going to care that you are worried about a little snow? You think an assassin is going to hold off so you can seek shelter? Grow up, child! I should have just ended your miserable existence when we met instead of agreeing to train you. You know what? You need to show greater progress, or it will reflect poorly on me. From now on, your instruction is not limited to two hours at night,” he spat viciously. “I will be training you constantly. You should be grateful that I am giving you advanced warning. Very grateful.”

  Breathing heavily as he took in the significance of the Moon Elf’s words, Dale managed to grind out a few choice expletives before remembering to respond correctly. “T-thank you, sir. I am… overjoyed that you are planning on taking such an active role in my daily routine. Does this mean I should be expecting attacks in places like the dungeon? That I’ll see you in the latrine and bathhouse?”

  The Dark Elf chuckled snidely as he slowly vanished from sight. “Foolish boy. You won’t see me.”

  Dale switched his vision to an Essence enhanced version but didn’t detect so much as a ripple in the ambient energy of the world. “OhmygodIhatethis.” He mumbled/screamed under his breath. A second impact nearby made the ground shake, urging him to head for the dungeon entrance.

  The dungeon was the only place nearby that provided enough shelter to weather the storm and so it tended to b
ecome a bit crowded during these dangerous atmospheric events. Dale joined the gathering crowd, trying to wait patiently while the sky was filling with odd effects. Illusions of monsters in the air manifested and dissipated, small portals formed and vanished, sometimes leaving behind creatures or items. One portal stayed open for a few long seconds, blasting a torrent of water out at a forty-five degree angle. Fish began falling from the stream of liquid.

  “Are you bleeding? What? How?” Rose strode up next to Dale, looking at him then at the mesmerizing patterns in the sky. “It is almost beautiful. Not as bad as the last one at least.”

  “Please stop tempting fate with your poor choices of words.” Hans slid up next to her, trying to put an arm around her shoulders.

  A blade appeared at his throat, and Rose quirked an eyebrow at him as she played with the small dagger. “I’ll stop tempting fate when you do, Grandpa.”

  Hans’ face flushed. “I am not that old!”

  “An early excursion into the dungeon, my friends?” Tom strode up to the gathering, easily parting the crowd with the simple expedient of walking into people who didn’t move out of the way in time. The large man had Adam trailing behind him, casually using Tom like a battering ram. “I have a request for mineral samples from the walls of the fourth floor! We can make a pile of gold before breakfast!”