No Need for a Core?

Kazue was really looking forward to experimenting with how to rebuild her first floor with the aid of a more knowledgeable source than her book minion had been, and listened carefully as Mordecai explained his ideas. Under his guidance, she reshaped her entrance, pulling the stone in a bit while encouraging plant growth, to disguise the entrance. While not having visitors slowed their growth, they also needed time to build and plan. Next, she worked on the initial cavern to turn it into a proper reception room and entry point to the rest of the dungeon, significantly widening and lengthening it as she raised the ceiling and smoothed all the surfaces to an almost polished texture, and removed the water spring she had created for her rabbits. That spring was what had helped lead Moriko here in the first place. On either side of the entryway, she created tables with signs saying ‘You are invited, but not required, to leave gifts from the outside world. Most especially, books and exotic materials that I can learn from are appreciated.’

Now the hard part, creating two paths and forcing a choice. Growing a second path wasn't terribly difficult, so long as she kept the starting path intact. Creating the forced choice was where it got complicated. According to Mordecai, there were ways to apply geases and blessings/curses to enforce choices made, but they didn’t have the power to create those yet, so were left to more physical means.

And the blasted man wouldn’t give her the complete design, only the concept and the pieces. Fine. Well, the sliding mechanisms and the worked stone seemed like a simple place to start, and in short order, each of the exiting doors had a sliding stone door. Though she found she could only make one of them shut at a time. Hmm. Well, design intent seemed to matter, and she wasn’t done yet, so she continued on.

Next, it was time to round out the back of the room into a semi-circle, which moved the entryways to face the center of the circle and spaced them 120° away from each other along the arc. Then she created a cylinder of heavy worked stone that matched the inner curve of her cavern wall, and added a third door at 120° from the other two, with its own sliding door. This created a separate foyer for the dungeon proper, while still leaving plenty of space in the entrance room. Hmm, it almost felt right, but she couldn’t close both inner doors at the same time yet, and the outer door didn’t want to close at all. He had said it could work, and she tweaked it a bit here and there, but she couldn’t quite get it to work. Finally, she gave up and opened her avatar’s eyes to look at him. “What am I missing?”

“Well, delvers have to be able to progress. So you need a puzzle in place, no matter how easy, to close and open doors before you can start closing them as a default. Also, there is a neat trick I can show you once it's done to make it look cooler and add another layer of security. Oh, before you decide the nature of your puzzle or controls, we should decide on a maximum party size. There are ways to create that as a Dungeon Rule, but again that’s expensive. Instead, we can create that as a condition to the puzzle. Most of the mechanisms we want to be physical, it’s cheaper and harder to bypass with low-level magic, but conditional triggers can be woven into the puzzle with little cost. So, most groups of explorers are four to five, and occasionally six. I’m thinking we can probably afford to be a touch generous and allow seven. Are you okay with that?” he asked. While he was talking, Kazue realized that he’d been playing with her hair and teasing her ears this whole time.

“Hey, it’s not fair that you can focus on your avatar and the dungeon at the same time!” The awful man just smirked at her, and the kitsune patiently reminded herself that someday she’d have enough practice to do that too. “Hmmp. Well, anyway, yeah, I guess seven is okay, if you think you can handle it if it comes to that. I... I don’t think I’d be much good in a fight.”

“It’s okay, you don't have to be right now, and we can work on that later if you want. So, go ahead and set up your physical interaction, and decide if you want something straightforward or a set of clues they have to figure out first. A simple choice will make it easier to implement some things, a puzzle will gain us more energy from the effort they exert. Both can be useful in the long term, so it’s up to you.”

She drew her tail in front of herself absentmindedly and nibbled on the tip in thought, until she realized what she was doing and dropped it hastily. Kazue also pretended to not hear a small laugh from her husband. He was going to be a good husband and good husbands never teased their wives like that. Right. To work. So she started with something simple; she raised a pedestal in the center of the circle, and put three buttons on it. Only one button could be pushed at a time, and pushing a different one down would cause a door to close before the one associated with the button would open. And there, now both inner ones could be closed because someone could just press the right button to open one of them.

Now Mordecai handed her a pattern of mana to add to the room, and Kazue examined it for a moment, picking out what he was doing. It sensed how many people were in the room and locked the button positions to keep the outer door open if there were eight or more people. It also required there to be at least one person in the chamber for any button to be depressed and excluded things like familiars and eidolons from being in the count of 'people'. There were also a couple of conditionals for if someone did something like depress two buttons or otherwise cheat, but those led to a ‘do nothing' state. She figured they could probably change that last bit later when they had a proper third option, so she attached the pattern to the pedestal and room, and poured mana into it. It was fun watching all the shapes and weaves of magic take life and interlock with the physical parts of the room, until everything was blended together as a seamless whole.

But she wasn’t done quite yet. The kitsune had decided on easy clues. She created two sets of ‘footprints’ leading away from the pedestal and towards each door. The set leading to the left were bunny prints. Then, to match the friendliness of the prints, she created some reliefs on the wall, one each of her and Mordecai with welcoming smiles, gesturing to invite people in with a slight bow. The other set of prints were dragon footprints, and this pair of reliefs had the two of them looking stern and forbidding.

Oh, but rewards, right. So, some background mural art to create some typical treasure stuff like coins and gems on the right, and then on the left she showed a pleasant path with fruiting trees and different herbs. She created some vaguely ominous figures obscured by fog on the combat challenge path, and three people gathered around a puzzle on the 'easy' path. Oh, let’s add a few books on a table too! And as a final touch to make sure it was clear that a choice was being made, Kazue sculpted Moriko centered between the two sides, seated in a classic meditative pose but with her hands held out and palms up, reminiscent of a weighing scale. It wasn't an exact reproduction of the pose that Yamaraja, judge of the dead, was often depicted in, but it was close enough to invoke the concept. There, that should let people pick easily. “Okay, what do you think?”

Mordecai examined her art with approval. “I know dungeon magic makes it easier to create what you visualize, but I think you should have been an artist in your previous life, not a shrine maiden. Well, that fate is done. Now, I have a neat trick to show you that will add a bit of cost to the whole setup, but make it more resilient to both brute force and people trying to manipulate it. You’ll want to move the frescoes forward, onto free-standing archways I think, and leave a gap. What you want to do then is create one more wall inside the other ring but with only one doorway. This wall however spins, and is attached to the buttons as well. Combine this with the sliding doors, and most people will not be able to mess with the setup. Honestly, most won’t, but it helps keep people from being tempted to try.”

“Huh, okay, let me try that.” He hadn’t given her any new patterns, but she was pretty certain she had all the parts she needed. There was some trial and error at first, but eventually, she got it and had solid free-standing walls lined up to show her artwork in front of each exit. She felt his approval, and they agreed that the front room was basically done now, though Kazue wanted to spend some time tweaking appearances later.

Now let's see, the gentle left-hand path she routed into a gentle arc, creating a couple more rooms in the process. She’d fill these in later with gardens, hedge mazes, progression puzzles, and such. The right-hand path was harder for her because she really didn’t like to think that way. However, once she started to work out a design that would be challenging and allow people to fight monsters, she felt some satisfaction in the creative process. It wasn’t really complicated, though she was able to work in a few tricky parts where the paths looped back on themselves, combined with sliding walls to create some time-wasting dead ends. Wouldn’t be too very difficult for people to figure out the first time. But she also made stuff like sharp corners that opened up immediately into a room, and other features that could make things hard for an incautious group but could be turned to the advantage of a cautious one. The last room though she left with a very straightforward design; Mordecai seemed to have a specific plan for that one. She made sure to leave the center area between these two paths open as well, as he seemed to have an idea for that too.

Then the room for the stairwell was the last touch and the location where the two paths met. She designated it as the transition between the first and second floors and created a mirrored copy of the selection 'puzzle' at the top of the wide stairwell, with a few changes.

It only had two doors on this level, and instead of a pedestal and buttons it was keyed to spin to the opening of a path that had just been completed, and to have a rest state where both entrances were sealed. The bottom of the stairway duplicated this exactly and aligned the doorways in the same position, but it was keyed to make sure that any adventuring groups were sent on the same path-type they'd already been traveling on. But the paths out of the doors did not yet lead to a fleshed-out second floor, and simply looped back to merge into a corridor leading to their Private Chambers, which was also the end of the dungeon, for there always needed to be a way for delvers to reach the end.

When Kazue completed the stairway, she was already thinking about how she was going to be repeating the design as the transition for each floor. With that thought came the realization that the entire stairwell setup now came as a ‘set’ for her, and that the completed design was slightly less mana-intensive than creating each piece had been. That could be useful.

With the explorable layout completed, Kazue turned to a concept that Mordecai had nudged her way. ‘Inhabitant and Guest Housing: Warrens’ was what he had labeled it, and just examining it helped make her aware of more concepts. She already knew her monster rabbits were inhabitants, but she could have designated guests too. And anything born or grown naturally in the dungeon would default to being a guest. Guests weren’t obligated to do anything except being nonhostile to the dungeon itself in order to retain that designation, but were unlikely to take kindly to people invading their homes. They also didn’t take up any capacity and were not bound by any other dungeon rules.

She was certain there was more to it than that, but she saw the anti-cheat potential of the setup, plus she liked having proper homes for her bunnies. So she used his suggestion to start creating a set of tunnels connecting all the rooms of the first floor, except for the entrance and the stairwell; and then a set of large rooms where she could create the right type of artificial light that would help plants grow, so her inhabitants would have food to eat without having to manually create the food out of mana. As she was about to put streams in though, she felt Mordecai tug at her attention again and opened her avatar’s eyes to look at him quizzically.

“Hey, I have an idea here, I think you picked up on part of it earlier. I want to take advantage of the fact that our inhabitants are going to generally do what we want, even when we aren’t giving specific orders. They can show any ‘guest’ rabbits what to do too. So, if in the big warren rooms you create a little spring with a small pool to drink from, you can create a stream to the other end. If you spread out the stream along the way until it became a thin layer of slow-moving water, it would make a good place for them to take care of certain business. Of course, that wastewater needs someplace to go, so that center area is where we can create a garbage pit.” Mordecai was grinning somewhat evilly now. “Also, it will be the destination of some other way stations we can create for our visitors to use along their routes. And it’s well known that certain types of monsters tend to spawn in sewage areas. We can eventually make this into a route to force unworthy guests through. And trust me, there are people who deserve this and more, but you get to decide what qualifies. We can work on that part later.”

Ick. Well, it’s not like she didn’t know there were really bad people in the world. And as a dungeon, well, she might get lots of just simply adventurous people, but she could find herself playing hostess to some real scum too. So it made sense to be prepared. But she was happy to leave most of that plotting to someone else. So, let’s see... yeah, the small springs didn’t take much energy to produce; combined with her artificial light, plants should be able to grow in the warrens. So she spread the streams out like he suggested, and guided the output to what was basically a big pit. Hmm, but if this was going to be a third route eventually, she needed to make it able to reach her final room somehow. So it couldn’t be too far away. And one giant pit wouldn’t quite work. Then she latched onto an idea, and fed the concept back to Mordecai, who sent it back with a slight tweak and his approval.

Kazue had thought about making the pit into a series of spiraling paths, so that the lowest one could be at the same level as the core. Mordecai didn’t change that, he just added a concept that was going to affect the rest of the dungeon: They were going to circle that central spiral, which would also enable them to easily run new wastewater channels as needed. Also, he showed her a small change to make in the wastewater paths: how to make small ‘u’ shapes in the vertical sections to keep the scent from coming back up. Eww. There were some drawbacks to being a dungeon, but she had to admit that one thing she liked was that her avatar didn’t have to deal with certain ‘facts of life’ anymore. Technically her inhabitants could also subsist on just mana, but they'd be more comfortable eating the way their instincts and habits told them to do. And the food had to go somewhere. It was also healthier for the dungeon to have independent life producing traces of mana instead of spending mana to support the inhabitants.

When her set of mud pits reached the second floor, she felt a slight change in something and realized they counted as second-floor rooms. Huh, that was useful. Well, that felt mostly done, but there was something else nagging at her, and she found Mordecai’s attention focused on the last room of the right-hand side, that he’d had her leave plain. Inside was one of her blunt-horned rabbits. Oh, that was the one that she had fed a lot of the mana overflow to. He had always been a bit of a chunky bunny, but he was a lot bigger and his black fur looked darker than ever. He also looked like he was waiting for something.

“Okay Kazue, I’m going to show you a trick. Uniqueness can be as important as power, and it’s not always easy to design your own uniqueness. This guy ate a lot of energy that was influenced by the presence of two shadow-related deities, and he was already kind of big, so that’s set him up for something I think could be fun. Rather than try to create a floor boss from scratch, we can feed our friend here some mana-backed concepts that could be associated with him, designate him as the floor boss, and see what happens.”

She thought about it for a moment, and, well, it’s not like she had any other ideas for a boss. “Sure, we can do that. Um, what concepts were you thinking of?” Oh, that made her dizzy. Most of them were familiar, but ‘gravity’ as a space-shaping force hurt her head. Well, her core probably. And there was something being hinted at, but it seemed to be out of reach for now. She ignored it, and focused on the plan, pushing the concepts of density, mass, weight, gravity, stickiness, adhesion, absorption, darkness, hunger, devouring, and consuming at her bunny, using magic to attach properties to those concepts. She watched as her bunny grew bigger and rounder, and slowly he turned so completely black that he seemed to draw light in toward him. There was a slight snapping sensation as he finished drawing in as much mana as he could, and she topped him off with the title ‘floor boss’. The change was startling.

The room suddenly changed its shape into a smooth sphere, with the corridor coming in at the horizontal circumference, and the one leading out being a few meters higher. Sitting at the bottom of the room was her black bunny, now almost 2 meters tall. And long. And wide. It would be hard enough to avoid him if one just wanted to go around, given the shape of the room, but there was something else too. Kazue could feel the way everything in the room ‘wanted’ to go towards the rabbit, as if it was twisting everything in its direction. The black ball of fluff wiggled his nose, and hopped. He didn’t go very far, but he landed with a loud thud, making the whole room vibrate briefly.

“Oh, I like him.” Mordecai whispered into her ear. “Good job. Looks like the room itself counts as a hazard or trap, and he’d be way too powerful for this level if he had any offensive abilities beyond a simple headbutt. I think the real challenge is to get around him without losing too much stuff. Mmm, I vote for a species name we can call him a void rabbit. But a boss should have a proper name, what do you think?”

It took Kazue a moment to respond, recovering from the sudden shiver as his voice created a tickle that ran down her spine. “Um, I ah... oh, how about Zushi? It’s kind of got a round sound to it, but it’s cute like him too. And yeah, void rabbit sounds cool.” Oh goddess she was tired now though, and pulled her attention mostly back to her avatar. “Are we done for now?”

“Yeah, I think so. Feels like Moriko is on her way back anyway. You did good. And figuring out how to make stuff helped your growth. It wasn’t just your personal skill I was training, it strengthens you as a dungeon to figure out things. But a guiding hand can speed up the process a bit. Anyway, let’s just wait here for a bit until Moriko returns.”

Kazue nodded weary agreement and curled up more in his lap. She didn’t exactly fall asleep, sleep wasn’t really a thing for her anymore, but her mind drifted happily as her energy and focus recovered.