Dungeon Configure: Book One Dark Exchange

by Troy Neenan

  He already knew what he would find but he checked on the hell butterfly's page.

  Monster species: Hell Butterfly

  Native homeland: Lower realms, fey lands.

  Rarity: Uncommon

  Special dungeon powers: Torturing delight, abyssal portal, glamour magic

  Description: The great demon and fey torturers keep these bugs as pets and tools. Hell butterflies eat pain and misery and have been known to swarm in places of great suffering. Not just able to drain a victim of their pain, these insidious beings enjoy causing as much agony as possible. To a hell butterfly, every pain is a spice that they want to taste.

  What the hell was this uncommon shit? David had never even heard about a hell butterfly. They didn't even come up in fantasy novels. Uncommon where?

  He really didn't want to but he checked the special abilities that he would have gotten off the demon bug. If he had made a contract with the hell bug, not only would he have gotten the ability to create portals to hell, but she would have given him the ability to convert a person's pain into DP. David's whole dungeon would have turned into a snuff movie. Hostel goes Aussie.

  David moved into the security office. Needing his fix to calm his shaken nerves, he grabbed the coffee pot and poured himself a cup. He sniffed the contents, not really caring if it smelt like stale sewage. As he took a whiff, he grinned. That was the stuff. No foreign brands, no exotic flavours. Just pure caffeine goodness.

  The moment that the first drop of coffee touched David's lips the monitors gave off warning lights. He took a second gulp and looked into the screen. His dungeon points just shot up by fifteen points. Which was good, except that one of the other icons proved to be flashing.

  “What is it now?” he growled. He clicked on the button and found himself looking at a spreadsheet of his internal storeroom.

  David was impressed. The storehouse not only collected raw materials, it also held finished objects. His car was seriously messed up but the raw materials that it provided weren't something to sneeze at. Nearly a ton of plastic, steel, and oil had been sucked into his storage space. The objects that his body had stashed in his boot had also survived and he could take them out whenever he wanted to. So what was the problem?

  David looked and saw that his storage had gone from 1000/1000 to 950/1000. Not sure exactly what happened, he took another gulp of coffee and watched as his dungeon points shot up to 83 and his storage went down by another fifty.

  David, who was not an idiot, looked down at his cup and got a sickening feeling. Carefully he put down his mug, making sure as to not spill a drop.

  It turns out that David had the ability to sacrifice items for energy. There were upgrades you could purchase to improve the ratio, but it looked as if every sip of coffee cost him 50 points of building materials. Which by the E=MC2 law was a really inefficient way to do things. David had just drunk enough potential energy to turn the planet into dust and only got... Well, he didn't know what 30 points could buy him but the conversion rate sucked.

  Quickly, he looked at what his coffee habit had cost him and felt sick. One trailer load of dirt, forty insect bodies, and his spare tyre. Nothing that could be useful at the moment, but knowing that he had just drank ground up dirt and bugs did not make things better.

  Wanting to know more about his new job before he adjusted his seat and accidentally blew himself up, David proposed to read the hell out of the instruction manual, or he would have if one of the screens hadn't lit up.

  Warning. Dimension breach detected. Incoming.

  “Fuck me,” David shouted. Without much choice he moved to the monster menu. Looking back at the screen it appeared that David had mere seconds to react. Not bothering to read the tutorial, he prepared to spend points like crazy.

  Monster name

  Type

  Size

  Cost Dungeon points.

  Bull ant

  Insect

  Tiny

  0.5

  European wasp

  Insect

  Tiny

  0.8

  Blow fly

  Insect

  Tiny

  0.3

  Hell butterfly

  Insect/demon

  Tiny

  213

  Komai Oatzzi

  Exotic

  Small

  705

  He could choose power or numbers. One of the hell butterflies or a shit load of common bugs. Still having the fear that one of his creations would get ideas backstabbing his arse; David went for a good old fashioned swarm.

  He drank the rest of his coffee which brought him down to 800 storage points and his DP up to 113.

  Looking at his monitor in awe, David watched his army spawn into existence. There were no portals or anything like that, instead the insects punched through the solid earth, having seemingly burrowed inside. Almost instantaneously, two hundred bull ants were brought into his service.

  From his seat, the dungeon had to admit that it was a frightful fucking sight. Two hundred of some of the nastiest monsters that Australia had to offer. A snake wouldn't take this swarm on. With that number it wouldn't be hard to believe that a full grown man might die if attacked.

  Now that David had his fodder, it was time for some air support. Fifty wasps were brought in and David's stores dropped to just over 700 points.

  No one liked wasps. European wasps were a naturally pissed off plague in Australia. Fifty of the highly aggressive blighters were enough to make a squad of marines back off. One down your throat was an instant kill.

  David looked at his current DP pool.

  Dungeon points: 3.

  He placed the bug zapper at the centre of the dungeon. No. No, that wasn't a good idea. The light would only work on insects and anything could pop up. David accessed his storage and inserted a hook onto the wall. Or to be more precise, the hook grew out from the wall like a flower.

  He made sure to place it on the wall opposite to the exit; he wouldn't want another hell bug so much as looking for an escape route. Next, he got the ants to hide up in the ceiling. After all, no one looks up. Next...

  Time ran out.

  On the monitor, David watched as a patch of water came pouring out of thin air. These fuckers definitely didn't bother knocking.

  He hurriedly ran outside of the office. David would just have to distract whatever came through. Australia already had enough problems with non-native animals, and making a contract seemed to come with too high a price.

  It had been a good thing that David had put his army on the ceiling, by the time he got out of the office the water had already climbed up to his ankles and most of it was draining out of the dungeon's exit. He closed the door to his office just as his new guest came through.

  It was big, bigger even than the truck. Its body was slick and smooth, the better to strike fast and hit even harder. David, of course, wasn't interested in its aerodynamic design as all he saw flying at him were rows and rows of dagger-like teeth. The longest one as big his foot.

  “Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” David screamed as the creature's huge mouth swallowed him whole. The dungeon caught glimpses of organs and meat as he phased through the creature’s body.

  David opened his eyes and found himself back inside his office. He patted himself down, recalling what he had learned from his previous guests.

  It was then that he realised that this wasn't his body. Or that was to say what looked like his body was nothing more than a game avatar. The only way that he could die was... Actually, besides his contracted animal dying David didn't know if he could die, he would have to look that up.

  For now, he concentrated on exploding into righteous fury. This fucker had come into his home looking to con him? Fuck that. This was his game and he was going to play it his goddamn way.

  He turned to the computer monitor, “Alright arsehole, I'm gonna mess your day up.”

  At first David didn't understand what he was looking at. What had just landed in his domain was
a great white shark with a luminescent bulb growing out of its forehead. The thing was flopping around like mad and though it didn't have proper mouth to form the words, David found that he could understand it.

  “Dungeon. I beg of you. Help me. Water.” The shark called out.

  David guessed that the shark had been thinking that this was an underwater dungeon. Even if David wanted to, which he didn't, he couldn't save the shark. His water supplies included two full bottles of spring water and he had a feeling that this guy liked his water salty. That did give him an idea though.

  Going to the building menu he drained the water that the shark came with. There, now his building supplies increased by twenty points.

  “Noooo.” the shark cried out in terror.

  Chapter Six

  The whole making monsters thing from thin air didn't make a flip of sense. The dungeon supposed that if they were just light constructs like out of Red Dwarf or something, then yeah, it possibly could make sense. But the guy doing the math would have to be drinking something like bleach to get the theory going.

  It was like teleportation and giant spaceships going faster than the speed of light. Science fiction was full of that kind of shit. It didn't make sense. It was cartoon logic. And yet, David had made life. No billions of years of evolution, no scientific explanation. Just point, click, and there was an ant.

  It turns out that creatures made with dungeon points were more like robots than living creatures. When they moved outside of the dungeon domain they disintermediated into dust. The wiki however, indicated that they could reproduce with real creatures and the offspring of such an unholy union could go outside. Which was how Morgan's people were able to escape their dungeon.

  Another complication was that his corporeal body was actually his core.

  A dungeon core was effectively a dungeon's heart or engine. It generated energy, which it used to support its monsters and gave the dungeon a DP over time. There was also another and very real danger in that the core and the dungeon were linked, and if the core ever died then both David’s were fucked.

  David was still getting some energy from his core and his army of ants, so he wasn't completely screwed, yet. Right now he was breaking even, but if a few hundred bugs left or died that could quickly change.

  The dungeon looked down at his tiny kingdom. A line of bull ants were bringing in a trail of leaves, dead bugs, and small rocks which they either ate or David turned them over to his storage bin.

  Speaking of the storage bin, the dungeon had made some rough estimations and he figured one ton of dirt constituted about six hundred storage points. But there was more to the storage than just weight and mass. You also factored in the object's rarity, its complexity, and how easy it was to transform into energy.

  It was kind of like eating grass and sugar in a way. Sugar was nearly pure chemical energy so it was easy to get fat off it, and while you could extrapolate sugar from grass it would actually cost more energy to eat a bag of grass clippings than a few teaspoons of raw sugar.

  So he had a long time to go before he could take another sip of coffee, for a coffee addict such as himself this was torture.

  It was now day five since David's GUI update and progress was pure agony.

  Morgan had been right. As his workers ate the surrounding rocks, the material went straight to his storage shed. Another interesting thing was that, on occasion, a bunch of energy came out of nowhere and David could manage to get a free DP.

  With a few mouse clicks, the dungeon was able to see his current progress.

  He had wanted a room that was 3 meters by 3 meters. He also wanted it 3 meters high. Not counting the security office or the entrance, it was going to be his first real room.

  David planned to turn this dank shithole into the motherfucking Batcave. The main problem was that a thousand ants and a few spiders weren't exactly the best workforce. Sure, if you went by scale of work to their actual size they were amazing, but it would take years, or possibly decades to get half a room built. David needed something bigger if the Dave cave was going to be more than a dream.

  For the tenth time that hour, he scanned his creature list for anything that had changed. His eyes drifted over to his latest entry.

  Monster species: Fori

  Native homeland: Mye

  Type: Fish

  Rarity: Common

  Special contract powers: Blood tracking, blood frenzy

  Description: The Fori empire stretches from multiple oceans. While nowhere near the largest predator in Mye, they are some of the most savage.

  The contract bonuses were pretty basic. David could give his monsters a shark's sense of smell, allowing them to track a bleeding opponent over vast distances. The other upgrade gave his minions a berserker mode when the enemy got wounded. Neither option interested him.

  What David was more interested in was the shark's body. Instead of turning it in for 30 DP, which was a very tasty idea, he allowed the Fori's corpse to remain in the starting room. Nothing attracts flies and bugs like a dead fish.

  Unfortunately, it had worked a little too well.

  It seemed as if every fly in the Northern Territory was in David's little room. Blow flies and march flies. Worse, European wasps had shown their fucking heads and had started laying eggs in the Fori's mouth. And as much as he loathed every single one of them, the dungeon was forced to concede that he needed them.

  Through some playing around, David was able to create an energy bar which allowed him to see how things worked on a deeper level. He set up with zero to ten points. Each one of the putrid creatures added a single spark of energy pool. Individually it was nothing, but when you combined all of the thousands of flies together the energy bar was slowly going up.

  Without much to do, he watched the bar slowly climb. When the bar restarted with no sign of where the energy went, he did a little more fiddling around and after many hours of thinking, decided to expand the bar to a hundred. But it was only until he increased the bar to a thousand that he understood what was happening.

  David was actually making DP.

  Every time the bar turned to a thousand, the dungeon obtained one single point that he could use later.

  There was just one problem; the thing was as slow as his dead grandfather. He was currently making one DP every four days, and every creature that he summoned ate at that energy regeneration. Create too many insect puppets and David would go into the red.

  It couldn't just be a one off payment. Oh, noooo. That would have been too easy. There had to be an accumulative cost. You couldn't just have a horde of zombies and skeletons and expect them to work for free. You had to give them dental and time and a half.

  This meant that David needed to bring in more insects and animals if he hoped to really play with the system.

  “Why does everything have to be so fucking complicated?” David had once screamed at the monitor.

  One curious thing was that the energy regen, which was what David referred to as his maintenance costs, were not stable. There were the occasional boosts and it wasn't until he began playing around with the flies that he understood what was happening. Every time that something died, the dungeon got a single burst of energy from that creature's death. It wasn't much, a blip. But it forced him to go back through the logs and analyse the data.

  The dungeon couldn't access the information before his upgrade but he did see something. When the Fori died, he received nearly seven and a half dungeon points. Which was vastly more energy than he would have gotten if the animal had lived.

  He came to one conclusion.

  “I have to kill to get anywhere,” he said aloud. The dungeon avatar's eyes moved to his precious coffee pot. The words DEATH FOR COFFEE taunting him.

  He got up out of his chair and paced the room, speaking to himself as he did so, “No. No. I'm not killing anyone. There isn't even anyone out here to kill. I'll just stick to getting more flies. I mean, there's no real rush. For all I know my stupid co
re could end up getting hit by a bus two seconds from now.”

  David took a look around his security room, the only sanctuary he had. It hadn't been a week and he was bored out of his bloody mind. Needing something to occupy his time with, the dungeon returned to his seat and began to examine the wiki.

  Dungeon

  The species, Locas Ventris, is a curious species of creature that takes on the appearance of a room or landscape. Locas Ventris naturally exist across the multiverse, in a variety of realms where the lines between worlds intercept. It is also possible that Locas Ventris can be man-made using synthesised dungeon cores.

  They are creatures of the abstract. A source of wealth, a curse, a home, and a prison. Many people see these places as a threat to their survival, while others see them as cradle of civilisation.

  In some barren worlds the Locas Ventris was the focal point of life itself. Dwarves, elves, fairies, demons, and humans. Some can trace their lineage to one simple cave or patch of forest. Through time, dungeons grow to the point where accession is possible and become the world's gods...

  It all kind of blurred together after that. From what David was picking up, some outside forces used dungeons to seed other worlds. He supposed that made some sense. Dungeons didn't need food in the general sense, nor did they need oxygen.

  David thought about it into terms of something like NASA dropping a biosphere on Mars and giving it a reasonably intelligent AI. They would use another creature as a base, and instead of waiting for something to happen in billions of years or so, they could have sentient creatures pop up in a few centuries.

  What was surprising was that the wiki's knowledge was very limited. Being a dungeon himself, the avatar thought that if anyone knew more about a dungeon it would be another dungeon, but that theory was starting to look like utter shit.

  Exhausted from pure boredom, David closed his eyes and decided that he had earned a nap. Before he could shift into unconsciousness however, a prompt brought him back to the waking world.

  You have slept for 25 hours and 7 minutes. Your raiding team has successfully attacked a European wasp nest and have brought back the following spoils.