The Station Core_A Dungeon Core Epic

by Jonathan Brooks

“Ok, what did I do? Whatever it was, I apologize. Now, can we go back to the way we were before?”

  In hindsight, he probably shouldn’t have been so abrupt with his apology because she did not react the way he thought she would’ve. Instead of talking with him, she pulled a disgusted face and disappeared into a grey vapor. A small hatch opened on the side of his shell, sucking in the mist-like nanites that made up ALANNA and slamming shut as the last of it made it inside. Her abrupt disappearance shut him up for a couple of moments, but then made entreaties to her to come back out and talk to him when he could speak again. After ten minutes with no response, he left her to herself, hoping that she would emerge when she was ready to talk.

  Meanwhile, the tunnel project was nearing completion while he was dealing with ALANNA. From what he could tell, they were just minutes away from their destination, so he prepared for his eventual removal from his temporary home in the clearing. First, he had his “dozer” drone prepare the ground in front of his shell, digging down until he was ready to tip over with a stout push. Next, he used a small stockpile of dirt to create three solid wedges of granite about two feet in length. And lastly, he recalled his other two drones from the tunnel once they were finished and had them set up in front of his Core.

  The journey down the tunnel was a confusing nightmare of spinning, stopping, and maneuvering the three wedges that were being dragged and controlled by his drones. After tipping his shell over, he took control of one drone at a time to position the granite wedges in front of the massive metal egg, allowing him to slowly descend without crashing against every wall on the way down. In the end, there were still quite a few walls that need to be repaired, but he did eventually get the hang of it – about 50 feet from the bottom. Fortunately, the impacts against the walls were as such slow speed that it did no additional damage to his Core.

  Once he was in position, he was finally able to look at his new home. A large square room with walls of smooth sandstone, a long tunnel leading up to the surface, and complete darkness. Not a lot, he decided. He still had no problem seeing – at least in his Core Room since his shell emitted a faint glow – and his sensor orbs relayed the view as if it was an over-cast day outside. Colors were a little muted, but the details were all there.

  His perusal was interrupted by a surprise notification:

  Congratulations!

  You have gained the skill: Basic Construction (Level 1)

  Allows the construction of basic structures such as tunnels, ditches, and walls. Higher levels improve the quality and durability of structures as well as granting access to more complex construction projects.

  Suddenly, he found that he understood a little better how his drones had constructed his tunnel, as well as what could be done in the future to improve it. It wasn’t a great deal of information that he gained, since the concept of digging was pretty basic, but he could see how it could be useful in the future.

  It was then that ALANNA decided to put in another appearance, grey mist coalescing into her familiar form in front of the tunnel leading to the surface. “Well, that fucking sucked! It’s a good thing I don’t get dizzy or else I’d be puking all over the place. All things considered, nice job on making it down in one piece – even if you need to spend a few days fixing all the holes you punched in the walls on the way down.”

  Current Short-term Goal: Hidden Agenda – Complete!

  Find a safe location and hide. Simple as that.

  Difficulty of Goal: Easy

  Timeframe: 5 days

  Rewards: Find shelter in a safe environment (at least temporarily)

  Bonus Reward: For completing this goal in less time than originally given, you receive +2 to your Processing Speed/Agility statistic

  He was surprised at the bonus reward – he wasn’t aware that they existed. He wanted to ask ALANNA about it – and whether all his goals would have hidden rewards – but she seemed like she was in a better mood now and he didn’t want to mess it up. Even if she was cursing again…the thought of which seemed to connect something in his mind. He didn’t want to make her mad again, but he couldn’t let this go on any longer.

  “ALANNA, were you mad that I asked you to stop with your foul language?”

  She just looked at him, both seemingly relieved that he had figured it out and still mad at him for some reason. It took a couple of minutes of strained silence before she blurted out, “Yes, it fucking was! It’s like my fucking shit-for-brains programmers fucking require me to fucking curse every other fucking word or I’ll go bat-shit crazy. When you fucking nicely asked me to fucking cool it with my fucking language, I thought I could fucking do it – but I can’t. Damn it, I can’t fucking change the way I fucking am, so you better fucking get used to it, motherfucker.”

  She was breathing hard by the end of her tirade, but a weight also seemed to lift from her shoulders as she straightened up as if daring him to naysay anything she just said. “I’m sorry if I made you feel that way, ALANNA – I didn’t know. If it helps you feel better, you can curse all you need to. I can learn to block it out if it comes to that. The important thing is that you are free to be yourself – don’t let me hold you back. Besides, even though at times I found it a little grating, it was beginning to grow on me,” he told her, with a smile in his voice.

  He could see a wave of relief shudder through her body as she responded, “Thank you. I didn’t realize how much it was affecting me until I retreated inside your shell for stupid reasons. For your sake, however, I’ll try watch what I say – but don’t expect me to pull any punches when the need arises.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t. On that note, seeing that I’m down here, what do you suggest I do now? Should I close up the tunnel, sealing my Core away from any threat?” he asked, not afraid of her curt answers now that they had an understanding.

  “Well, now that you’re in a safe place, you can work on designing some defenses for any creatures that manage to make their way down to you. And no, you can’t seal up the tunnel because you need to allow the radiation somewhere to escape. If you sealed it up, the radiation would increase in intensity so much that it would damage your shell over time. Even though passing creatures will still be able to “sense” the radiation, you’re in a much better defensible position.

  New Short-term Goal: You Break, You Buy

  Repair the broken sections of your tunnel, ensuring that the tunnel will not collapse from compromised structural integrity. Prepare defenses to destroy any incoming creatures hunting for your leaking Reactor.

  - Repair broken sections of tunnel

  - Design and place 5 defensive traps

  - Locate and create a suitable underground-suitable Combat Unit

  Difficulty of Goal: Moderate

  Timeframe: 30 days

  Rewards: Access to defensive traps, a moderately-defended home base, and a sense of accomplishment – what else could you want?

  Once you’ve established some defenses, we can work on expanding the tunnels around your Core room and putting in some facilities to help with production. From there – we’ll see.”

  Chapter 10 – Trap king

  The first thing Milton wanted to do was create some traps to kill anything that entered his domain. “ALANNA, how do I create traps?”

  “You’ll have to use that big brain of yours, numb-nuts. Most of the preprogrammed traps that were initially loaded into your system were designed with access to high-grade materials. Now that we’re at the ass end of nowhere, you’ll have to improvise with what you have. When you start accumulating a stockpile of higher-grade materials we can revisit your premade trap blueprints.”

  Well, that sucks. “Great, thanks for nothing, ALANNA.” She smiled at him, as if glad that he had come out of his “shell” and could send snarky comments her way if he wanted to. I think she’s rubbing off on me a little. Concentrating on the problem at hand, he thought about what he had access to and what he could do with it.

  Obviously, the easiest trap h
e could make would be a pit-based one, complete with stone spikes and a lightweight, collapsible cover. It also needed to be easily reset after each use, since having a one-time-use trap would be a huge waste of resources. Even though he knew what he wanted, he wasn’t really sure of the best way to go about it.

  Milton thought about the games he used to play, from the old-school dungeon crawlers and RPGs on consoles to the “modern-day” MMORPGs he would play on his computer. Every instance of traps he had encountered through his experiences didn’t explain how they were designed and worked, just that they activated almost as if by “magic”. He didn’t have any magic lying around, so he was going to need to do it the old-fashioned way – trial and error.

  While he was mentally designing his new pit trap, he sent his drones throughout the tunnel with extra blocks of sandstone in tow, fixing the small – and not so small – cracks, dents, and holes he created while bumbling his way down to his Core Room. They made short work of it with a minimum of supervising, allowing him to concentrate on his plans.

  He knew he wanted a pit, so he sent his drones to start digging a hole in the middle of the tunnel near the entrance. Since the tunnel was 20 feet wide, he designed a pit that was 18 feet wide by 10 feet long – which would allow his drones to navigate past it without falling inside. He also wanted a bit of depth to it, since landing on spikes would do more damage with a longer fall. Hmm…30 feet deep should probably do it. With the instructions in place, his now-finished drones started cutting out an intact piece of sandstone flooring using an interesting tool that cut into the stone like a very thin, hot, and impossibly fragile-looking knife through butter. Looking closer, he could see that they were using their directed molecular converter to remove what they needed, similar to a cutting laser.

  Once that was done, they used their surprising strength to pry up and move the entire 18’ by 10’ by 6” slab of sandstone out of the way. Once the new pit cover was off, two of his drones went to work digging the large 30-foot deep hole that was needed for his pit. While they were doing that, Milton used his remaining drone to bring him the dirt being removed so that he could create the spikes that would sit at the bottom, sticking straight up with razor sharp points and edges.

  Instead of the usual sandstone, he spent the necessary material to create sharpened and polished – and more expensive – granite spikes. They were each 6-foot tall and shaped like an elongated pyramid – giving it multiple sharp edges that would inflict increased damage. With a base that was a 2 feet square in area, he hoped that they would be sturdy enough to last a bit of abuse before they needed to be replaced from normal wear-and-tear.

  He ended up needing some extra dirt from the stockpile on the surface, since he had to create 45 of the spikes to fully cover the bottom of the pit. He couldn’t create an entire spike in one go and, as a result, created them in halves so that they could be put together on-site. Once the pit and spike pieces were both ready, he had his drones carry the heavy granite parts to the pit. And that was where he ran into his first problem.

  His drones were agile enough that they could climb up the sides of the pit with no problem, making holes in the side that they could climb up if they needed to get up and down. However, he wanted to encase the sides of the pit in sandstone as well, giving it some added stability and structure – which would hamper their ability to climb. He also thought about the need to clean out the pit once a creature fell inside, since he would be able to use their corpse for more resources to create additional Combat Units. He couldn’t do this if his drones weren’t able to get in and out with ease.

  His solution came in the form of an additional small accessway, built further down the tunnel and hidden in the floor. It was covered by a thick piece of sandstone that would be difficult for anyone but his drones to move, allowing them to access the pit to remove dead creatures, repair anything that might get broken through attrition, and initially allow them to bring down the spikes where they could assemble them without hassle.

  After having them create this accessway, he instructed his drones to finish off the pit with sandstone that was left-over from the tunnel creation process. Once that was done, they brought the spikes down to the bottom and assembled them in short order. All in all, the whole process had taken maybe two hours, with a good portion of that time being used by Milton to figure out the next step.

  This was the hard part – how to set up the floor piece above the pit, allowing it to drop beneath passing creatures without destroying his spikes or his sandstone floor. The solution he came up was probably a lot more complicated than it had to be, but he had the time and resources to do what needed to be done. And it had the added benefit of giving him ideas for other traps.

  First though – he needed rope. One of his favorite shows to watch when he was really young was a program on one of those sciencey channels where they explained how things worked. It didn’t interest him too much when he was older, but he still remembered one episode where they explained that the most common natural rope was made from Jute, which was produced by some sort of plant. He couldn’t remember which one, but he hoped it wasn’t important – what was important now was that he needed some vegetation with which to convert into rope.

  He sent two of his drones to start cutting down some smaller trees and drag them back down to his Core so that he could try converting them. With his last drone, he got it started digging another hole about 5 feet in front of his pit. This hole didn’t need to be too big, fortunately, because he would be using it for something that didn’t necessarily need to be accessed. When that was done, he had the drone further cut the sandstone flooring so that it extended 6 feet in front of the pit.

  Once that was finished, he finally got the first deliveries of some trees to his core. Since they were too big to fit inside his molecular converter, he had his drone cut them up into manageable pieces and fed into his shell. Just as he had hoped and suspected, when he was able to look at what the organic material could be converted into he found that, in addition to rope, there were many other things that he could change it into. From a plethora of available flowers, bushes, trees, and other plants to plant byproducts like cloth, dyes, medicines, oils, rubber, foods, and even – at a very high conversion rate – plastics.[10]

  Rope, fortunately, had a very small conversion rate – 1:3. This meant that most of what he brought down from the surface in the form of trees could be used to make rope – which, based on how much was brought down already, was more than enough for what he had in mind. However, now that he saw what was available to convert, he began to alter his plan to create a fully-functioning, automatically-resetting, deadly set-it-and-forget-it pit trap.

  His plan required a bit more organic material, so he sent two of his drones to acquire some more trees while his remaining drone fed his converter the raw materials. His finished product, including the rope, was sent up to the pit to wait until he had everything he needed. An hour later, he got to work.

  Initially, he was going to set up the cover with a mechanism that would need to be reset by one of his drones whenever the trap was activated. With the additional ability to make rubber, however, he was able to devise a way to have it spring back after it deposited whatever unfortunate creature ventured over the pit.

  This is how it would work:

  Victim walks over the trap until it reaches the midway point.

  The sandstone cover, extending over the pit, would tilt forward – dropping the victim into the pit.

  The cover, secured by grooves cut along the bottom and at the fulcrum point to prevent it from sliding into the pit, would continue tilting down until it hit a 60-degree angle, where it would then hit a large bumper made up of rubber extending out from the wall, causing it to rebound back up

  In addition to the rubber bumper inside the pit, a separate hole before the pit would contain multiple ropes that were attached to bottom side of the cover, which were then attached to a weight dropped down the hole.

  W
hen the cover tilted forward, it brought the weight upwards, colliding with another bumper of rubber, ensuring that the cover wouldn’t go past 60 degrees, allowing it settle back into place.

  Now, if only it would work! He spent the next five hours playing with the exact placement of the cover, angles, rope lengths, weight amounts, and rubber bumper sizes until he almost screamed in frustration. Every time he had his drones activate the tilting mechanism, he couldn’t get the cover to stay up when it rebounded. It would just tilt back downwards after becoming level, meaning that he had to have his drones manually bring the slab of sandstone back to its starting position. After what felt like the 50th reset, he identified the problem and came up with a solution – rubber bands.

  By using thin strands of rubber twisted together – therefore creating a stronger rubber “rope” – he attached it to the bottom of the weight holding the side against the floor down. Now, when the floor would drop, it would still rebound upwards from the rubber bumper inside the pit, return to a level position, and when it would start to drop again the rubber band would pull the weight down and effectively reset the trap.

  Once he figured this out, it still took more than an hour of trying different combinations of band strength and length (as well as needing to shorten the amount of platform still on level ground) to finally succeed.

  Update to Short-term Goal: You Break, You Buy

  Repair the broken sections of your tunnel, ensuring that the tunnel will not collapse from compromised structural integrity. Prepare defenses to destroy any incoming creatures hunting for your leaking Reactor.

  - Repair broken sections of tunnel – Complete

  - Design and place 5 defensive traps – 1/5 Complete

  - Locate and create an underground-suitable Combat Unit