(Update) Congratulations on repairing your tunnel and creating your first defensive trap! Because of your ingenuity using archaic materials, you have been awarded the skill – Rudimentary Defensive Trap Design (Level 1) and Basic Mechanical Engineering (Level 1). These skills will help you understand the finer points of trap creation, material usage, and allow you to create a blueprint of any traps you design. These blueprints will give specific instructions to your drones so that they can recreate a trap anywhere you deign, as long as they have the required materials.
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?
Nice! Wait…what the?! Suddenly, his mind was flooded with all sorts of ideas on how to effectively create additional traps. Tensile strengths, material compositions, physical force multipliers, and other engineering information invaded his consciousness, so much that he couldn’t keep up with the “download”. Add to that the knowledge of how to create blueprints of his trap designs and his awareness of his surroundings faded until his mind shut down under the onslaught. A familiar – and welcoming – blankness engulfed his mind, allowing him to retreat to the recesses of oblivion, saving him from the unintentional information overload.
Chapter 11 – Leakage
“WAKE UP! C’mon fucker, get your shit together! We’ve got a major fucking problem!” ALANNA’s shouts woke Milton up from his temporary stupor, although it took him another minute of verbal tongue-lashing before he could comprehend what she was saying.
“Whoa, slow down. I was only out for a couple of minutes – what could have happened in that short of time?”
“Couple of minutes, my ass! You’ve been incapacitated for weeks! I’ve been trying to get through to you since left me hangin’, and now it might be too late. Call your drones down. NOW, fuckwad!” Her last shout cleared the rest of the cobwebs clouding his mind, and he did what she asked immediately. I’ve never seen her this worried before, even when I was being attacked by that Scaly Bear. Hopefully she’ll explain if I just go along with it for now and…wait…I was out for weeks?
He didn’t have any more time to ponder that before ALANNA started talking again, “Your fucking reactor leak is worse than I thought. Being in an enclosed space like this shithole of a room, the leakage has been allowed to pool around your core. With such concentrated radiation, it has started to detrimentally effect your damaged components. If you don’t fucking solve this, like right fucking now, you won’t have more than a week before any structural integrity you have left will go to shit. You need to figure this out, before we both end up 6-feet-under.” She looked around at their surroundings for a moment before she amended, “Or 300-feet-under – either way, we’ll be fucked.”
New Short-term Goal: Leakage Problems
Solve the problem with your rising radiation levels by any means necessary.
Difficulty of Goal: Hard
Timeframe: 6 days
Rewards: Not being blown-up by a reactor failure
Although he was glad that he had allowed her to continue cursing whenever she needed to, the added stress on Milton wasn’t needed. He furiously thought about a solution, thinking about what he knew about radiation from TV and movies he had watched back on Earth. The only thing that came to mind was a show he had watched once where some scientists were investigating something radioactive and when they got back to their “base”, they had to go through decontamination with a shower of some sort. He wasn’t sure if it would work, but it was best solution he could think of.
“ALANNA, how close do you think a source of water is down here?”
“It’s probably fairly close – you dug down far enough that I’m surprised you didn’t hit the water table already. Why? What’s your plan?”
He explained his thoughts to her, hoping that she wouldn’t come up with some reason that it wouldn’t work. “That’s…actually not a bad idea. If you can get a source of running water through here, you’d be able to carry away a good portion of the radiation jacking up your Core. This could even become a more permanent solution until you can start repairing your fucked-up reactor. Now, send your drones out to find us some water!”
Ignoring her foul language in favor of expediency, he sent his drones digging outwards from his Core room in different directions. He wasn’t sure where he was going to find the water, so he had to hope that he hit his liquid payday before time ran out.
At first, he continuously cycled through his drones, looking at where they were going and directly controlling them to make arbitrary minute changes in their direction. After three hours of this – and not achieving anything more than aggravation and impatience – he pulled back and let them go about their searching. While he still took control of them from time to time and continued to monitor them, he realized he had some time to kill.
“ALANNA – what the heck happened to me? The last thing I knew was that I had partially completed that quest and received two new skills – and then BAM! All sorts of information flooded my mind, completely overwhelming me.”
“It all comes back to how fucked-up you’ve become over the years. Your central memory system has the accumulated technical, socio-economic, and cultural knowledge of countless species contained within it – which you can’t do ass-all with. Those fucking, yet smart, Station Core developer bastards used the same reasoning behind this lack of access just like your Combat Levels and stat point increases – they didn’t want you to be too powerful too quickly.
“In relative terms, imagine if you arrived at the station you were supposed to defend and had all sorts of advanced knowledge and materials at your disposal, without the experience to properly use it. The first time you were attacked by a fucking squirrel, you might say, ‘Holy shit, I have to defend myself now! How about this nuclear bomb? That should do the trick!’
“Ergo, they didn’t want dumbasses like you to inadvertently destroy what you were trying to defend. That’s why they make you fucking work for it – the more you understand about what you are doing, right or wrong, the better decisions you will make in the future. These skills and skill-ups will provide you with the information to start you on your way to be a smarter, knowledgeable, and more conscientious Station Core.
“Of course, you’re still a little fucked-up right now. Normally – on an undamaged Core – when you obtain a skill that the system determines you deserve, the knowledge is absorbed easily by a fully-functioning processor. Depending on the amount of knowledge imparted, there may be a momentary hiccup in concentration as the information is ‘digested’, but in your case the amount of knowledge you acquired kicked you on your ass. And then sat on your face. Followed up by a massive fart. Which. Knocked. You. The. Fuck. Out. Understand?”
Well, crud. Despite her filthy mouth, understand what she was trying to say about system safeguards – in fact, I agree with them for the most part. Even though he could really use the knowledge the system was keeping from him, he understood the analogy she presented. It wouldn’t do to give a massive noob in a MMORPG a high-damage Meteor spell with a short cast-time and unlimited mana and expect him not to use it on every little mob. “Is that going to happen every time I get a new skill?”
“Not every time, but until you get your shit fixed, every skill that imparts a large amount of knowledge might fuck you up. Depending on the magnitude of the information, it could be anywhere from a few seconds to months for major dumps. On the one hand, you need this information to protect yourself and to complete your long-term quests. On the other hand, acquiring a skill at the wrong time could have disastrous consequences, especially if you’re in the middle of defending against hordes of attackers. Either way – you’re fucked.
“You could play it safe like a pussy and try to avoid learning anything new, but you’ll probably never do shit with that strategy. The only way to unfuck yourself is to learn, learn, and
learn – improving yourself so that you can finally fix the damage to your Core.”
Milton looked at her, taking her advice at face-value since she had no reason to lie to her – if he was stuck here than so was she. And he knew she wanted him to succeed, so that she could leave the planet with him and discover what happened to The Collective. I just hope she isn’t pushing me too hard for only her own selfish reasons.
His worries were somewhat mollified by her next softly-spoken words, completely out of character for her, “Just…be careful…I don’t want you to die…you’re…kinda growing on me.”
“Awww, and here I was thinking that you didn’t care. That means a lot to me.”
“Just shut the fuck up and get back to work or it won’t matter who I care about,” she snippily replied. She turned away from his core, but he had enough sensors around that he could see a small smile threatening to emerge from the corner of her lips. When she noticed the sensor orb above her head, she immediately regained her don’t-fuck-with-me expression.
It took more than two days of edge-of-the-seat anticipation and worry before one of his drones discovered a large underground lake located about 250 feet from his Core room. His frantic switching from drone to drone ended up netting him an increase in his Communication/Charisma stat, bringing it up to 7, as well as a boost in his Drone Manipulation skill.
Congratulations!
You have upgraded the skill: Drone Manipulation (Level 3)
Allows you to have finer control, increased production, and faster response time when directly controlling your drones. This upgraded skill also allows you to split your concentration so that you can control multiple drones simultaneously.
Current control limit: 2 drones simultaneously
Wow! I wonder what else I can increase just by using these skills? I bet I could…nevermind, I’ll think about that later – I need to survive long enough to play around with that. Getting his mind back on track, he looked at what his drone had found.
Fortunately, when his drone tunneled through the wall of the underground lake, it emerged just above the water filling up most of a giant cavern. About 300 feet in length and only slightly less in width, the room had a massive body of water that – at least from what he could see – filled about two-thirds of it. Stalactites hung down from the ceiling, hanging down until they almost touched the rippling water. Wondering why it seemed to be moving, he caught a glimpse of a small waterfall on the far side of the room, continuously filling the underground lake. There must be some sort of outlet, otherwise this cave would have been filled to the top a long time ago.
Milton recalled his other two drones to his Core room while he directly controlled his successful drone on a survey mission. He didn’t think that water would hurt his drones – since they could survive even in space – so he jumped into the lake, immediately sinking to the bottom. Slipping and sliding amongst the rock lining the bottom of the lake, he eventually found what he was looking for.
Near the center of the body of water, he found a hole about the size of an 8½X11 piece of paper. The suction from the egress almost caused his drone to be sucked down against the hole, but the strength in its little limbs was more than enough to hold it in place. Quickly coming up with a plan, he slowly made his way back up the side of the lake. Using the drones’ uncanny ability to stick to vertical surfaces – and even the ceiling – he used its stone cutting tool to knock a couple of stalactites off the roof of the cave, dropping them into the water. After that, it was easy enough to maneuver the larger pieces of rock under the water so that they covered up the hole and were stuck in place due to the intense water pressure. Once that was done, he ordered the drone to return.
Meanwhile, his drones had made it back to the Core room by this time. He used them to create his own egress for the water that would be arriving soon. Starting on the other side of the room from where the water would soon arrive, he instructed them to work together as they quickly tunneled downwards from the room, where he hoped to find some sort of underground river nearby. He was sure there was one, because the lake water had to be going somewhere before he found it.
This time, it didn’t take more than an hour before he hit the jackpot. A massive underground river of swiftly flowing water was located nearly 100 feet below his room and fortunately right in line with his exit tunnel. He almost lost the lead drone because it ended up coming through the ceiling, but it was agile and strong enough to bury all its legs into the tunnel walls, saving it from a watery ride. He didn’t think it would hurt it, but the current appeared so strong he didn’t think it’d be able to make it back to him before being swept out of range.
Quickly creating small sandstone blocks, he instructed all three of his available drones to start lining the entrance and exit tunnels. He wanted to make sure they wouldn’t erode the dirt tunnels over time, which could possibly lead them off course. He sent one of his sensor orbs up the tunnel towards the lake so that he could keep an eye on the rising water levels. The water level was slowly rising, but it would still take a while since the room was so large.
Six hours later – and a mentally exhausted Milton – saw both tunnels completed with cleanly-joined sandstone tiles. It was just in time as well, because fifteen minutes after that saw the first trickles of water running down the entrance chute. The trickles turned into a small stream, then a river, and then a flood as the water reached his Core room in such quantity that it was quickly filling up. Once it reached a foot high, it spilled over into the exit chute, to be carried away to the raging underground river below.
New Short-term Goal: Leakage Problems – Complete!
Solve the problem with your rising radiation levels by any means necessary.
Difficulty of Goal: Hard
Timeframe: 6 days
Rewards: Not being blown-up by a reactor failure
Congratulations!
You have upgraded the skill: Basic Construction (Level 2)
Allows the construction of basic structures such as tunnels, ditches, walls, aqueducts, and sewer systems. Higher levels improve the quality and durability of structures as well as granting access to more complex construction projects.
Congratulations!
You have gained an achievement: From the Jaws of Certain Death
Your perseverance has paid off, snatching you from the jaws of certain death just when all seemed lost. Your ability to overcome unforeseen obstacles means shows your willingness to conquer all challenges thrown your way.
Bonus: +3 to your Insight/Luck and Ingenuity/Wisdom statistics.[11]
It wasn’t instantaneous, but over the next hour he could “feel” a reduction in the amount of radiation surrounding his shell. ALANNA agreed, even going so far as to congratulate him on a job well done. Well, not exactly – what she said was, “Nice job, motherfucker! That crazy-ass plan of yours actually worked!” Same difference.
Chapter 12 – *Pop*
Now that he was saved from “certain” death, he could concentrate on “possible” future death. He needed to find out what had happened when he out of commission for those couple of weeks. After asking ALANNA, he learned that he could review the footage of his sensor orbs that he had set up throughout the tunnels and at strategic safe locations above-ground. After extensively watching the recordings, which were conveniently organized by order of importance, he discovered that there was only one notable incursion into his new – for all intents and purposes – dungeon.
He saw that his compliment of Lollipop Snakes and Jackalopes had fought off a plethora of small invading creatures, most of which were eaten afterword to feed his voracious snake “army”. In fact, he had lost three of them to starvation already since they had eaten up all the available local food supply. I’m going to have to split them up and send them out farther afield – otherwise, I can’t support them logistically. Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about his Jackalopes because they were feeding on the plentiful vegetation available.
He
had become adept at battlefield logistics in his previous incarnation as a top-tier gamer, but he never had to worry about finding where the food came from; as long as he had the requisite gold or resources he would be able to buy enough to outfit his units. The town-building games he had played in the past allowed the creation of sources of food – but it was more of a point-and-click construction and then it would be up and running after a short period of time. He was going to have to learn more about sustaining his Combat Units in the future so that they wouldn’t drop dead of starvation when he needed them the most.
Despite the starvation and near-starvation of his snakes, as well as the well-fed Jackalopes, his front-line defenders did an excellent job of protecting the entrance tunnel. In fact, the only thing that got past them was a small dog-like animal which was about the size of a dachshund but with the quickness of a greyhound. Speeding past their swift strikes without harm, the – he was going to call it a Greywiener (a combination of a greyhound and a dachshund, or wiener-dog) – dog only made it as far as his pit trap before it met its end. His pit trap initially worked wonderfully – up to the point when it needed to be manually reset.
Running through his dungeon tunnel, the Greywiener practically flew along the floor on stubby little legs. When it reached the flooring for his new trap, its weight caused it to tilt downwards just as he had planned, but the little dog somehow was able to perform a powerful jump that propelled it forward – falling mere inches short of safety. Unfortunately, that added pressure on the pit cover caused it to slam against the rubber bumper with greater speed than he had planned for, causing it to rebound at an accelerated rate. It just missed the falling Greywiener, instead leveling out and almost jumping up, which then made it fall quickly again.
The Station Core_A Dungeon Core Epic Page 9