No Need for a Core?

Mordecai smiled at Kazue’s expression, and he could feel her mixed anticipation and suspicion. “Now, while this might cause some hazard to a group carrying open flame or creating sparks, few groups that we would be sending towards the sewers would be likely to need a lantern to see, as both magical light and the ability to see in the dark are usually available to anyone we would consider dangerous. And short-term exposure is not technically toxic, though people can get giddy from the rush. And it carries a side benefit to anyone moving into the sewers, as it helps provide more fresh air. Though, making sure that sewer air is mixed with fresh air near a pit where there might be metal armor striking metal spikes, well, that’s just one of the hazards of delving into a dungeon you’ve angered isn’t it?”

He saw her wince a little as she realized the potential for explosions to be mingled with her pit trap, but she recovered quickly enough. Kazue was stronger than she thought, but with her empathy and slightly sheltered background, it was going to take her a while to cope easily with violence, even just the potential of it. So he was not going to push her too much, he did not want to risk traumatizing her. “But all of that is secondary. Most of the hostile organisms growing in the sewer don’t like that aspect of air. If they did, they’d grow just as well in a lively forest as in a sewer. So, if you make two air springs in the chamber closer to the dungeon, and only one in the chamber closer to the sewer, then rig the sewer door so it only opens if the chamber side has a higher air pressure, and then do the same for the center door but requiring that the dungeon side chamber have the higher air pressure, then even a person coming from the sewer side will be unlikely to have airborne spores follow them.”

Learning how to rig the doors was for her to figure out, but he did insist that she make this system physical. While detecting how many people are in a room required magic to automate, pressure sensors could be made with liquids and pressure plates, which only needed to trigger locking mechanisms and not power the doors. While she was puzzling that out Kazue frowned at a thought, and asked “Wait, why would we be concerned with someone coming out of the sewers? Isn’t this supposed to be a one-way thing?”

Mordecai nodded. “True, but there is always a chance we would have cause to send one of our own in or have someone surrender, or have it turn out that a member of a group had been coerced, or some other circumstance I can’t currently think of. A phrase I learned long ago was to ‘future proof’ as much as possible. Plan for as many contingencies as feasible. You’ll never think of everything, but the more options you give yourself then the less you have to work to adapt to something new.”

“Um, sort of like what you did with your avatar? A lot of what you told me about seemed rather redundant.”

“Exactly, which is also going to bring us up to your next lesson shortly.” So much of what he was teaching her was just something that a young dungeon wouldn’t have the chance to figure out, no matter how intellectually capable even a newly born core was. At this point, Mordecai wasn’t entirely certain which was knowledge that he had figured out and what was tidbits he had learned from someone else, though eventually he would be able to access the memories that would let him know how he had learned them the first time. “After you have this completed.”

It took about half an hour more of fiddling, but Kazue eventually had everything working smoothly. It wasn’t the solution he would have chosen exactly, but that wasn’t the point. She had learned how to figure out this solution, which meant she had learned a bit more about how the world worked at a deeper level. And had grown more confident in her ability to come up with solutions.

“Excellent! Now, for this next bit, I need you to put this hood on your avatar, you’ll want to use your dungeon senses anyway, and it might damage your eyes.” Mordecai produced identical hoods for both of them, even with his modifications this might be a bit intense. It’s not like he’d tried to create true sunlight since he’d woken up, and even with his knowledge it was a delicate process, sensitive to local variances.

Once they both had their hoods on, Mordecai sat down and drew Kazue into his lap. Then he focused with his core on a spot about 10 feet away. His thoughts had drifted towards trying to create an object of the right temperature, he felt certain that would work, but as soon as he had the idea he also came across the knowledge that the temperature was probably unreachable for them right now, and bad news even if he did manage to create it.

Fortunately, he knew the actual colors he wanted and their ratios. So he created a small pillar that branched off into dozens of tips, each ending in a small setting holding a glass sphere. One by one he lit them up with different light incantations, each creating a specific color by normal standards, but containing a small continuum of color. He could feel Kazue watching curiously, but he said nothing yet as he experimented until he was satisfied with the true-white color for human eyes. Then he added some more colors, and tried not to be too amused at Kazue’s confusion when she felt him create a light effect but couldn’t see any new light sources. Once these were balanced as well, he created a globe with a mirrored interior and a small hole to create a shaft of light aimed at a wall.

“Okay, hoods off, just don’t stick your face in the light.”

Kazue blinked as she took off her hood then stood up to go examine the results of his work. “I don’t get it. I mean, it looks like proper sunlight, even more so than the lights we created for the warrens, but you did something else weird too.”

“We’ll get there. But I want to walk you there.” Mordecai walked along the bright shaft of light, tilting his head as he judged his distance and creating another pillar that ended just below that beam. Upon he placed a perfect prism of quartz. He glanced at the wall, then adjust its position a little. “Now, tell me what colors you see there.”

“I married the weirdest man.” Kazue muttered before listing off a set of the basic colors. “I see red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and indigo.”

Mordecai smiled. “What about the rest of them?”

“Huh?” She blinked at him.

“The rest of them. Right here, next to the red, there’s another color. Same on the other side, next to the blue. And a couple more right past them. I can see them, and I am pretty certain you can too. Don’t be limited by what you think you should be able to see.”

It took her only a moment longer to get it, then she closed her eyes and looked again with her core. He waited patiently as she tried to shake off her assumptions about color and light, then she gasped and her surprise radiated across link and core boundary alike. “I can see them!” Her eyes popped open excitedly, followed by a second wave of confusion. A few seconds of double-checking passed until she asked “Alright, give. Why can my core see those colors but not my avatar?”

“Well, for the ones past red, the answer is going to weird you out. Look at your avatar with your core now.”

“Okay… hey! I’m glowing! You are too! What is going on?”

He couldn’t help but chuckle now. “And that is why most creatures can’t see much past what we know as red. There is actually a bit of a gap until you reach the colors that you glow in, and I don’t know why most creatures can’t see that bit as well, but outside of constructs and creatures of ice and such, almost everything alive produces enough heat to glow like that. It’s sort of like heating metal in a forge, it starts off glowing a dull red, but then gets brighter and eventually turns white. Turns out the glowing starts earlier than that. Now, as for the other side, it turns out that eyes are really sensitive in a bad way to that color, and most species have a barrier in the surface of their eyes that blocks it, to prevent damage.”

“Mordecai, this is super strange,” Kazue informed him as she continued experimenting with the differences between her visions. “Hey wait, is this it, or is there more?”

“Mmm,” he took a moment to formulate his response, “I think so, but I am not sure. If there are, and they come on sunlight, then they don’t interact with a prism the same way. This makes me think that ‘seeing’ might not be the right concept to sense them, but I am not sure where to go, and I don’t know if dungeon senses can pick them up even if I had the right concept. Oh, that reminds me, you’ve been seeing these ‘new’ colors with your dungeon senses this whole time, your mind was just filtering it. There are more things you are going to find odd, even being born as a dungeon some of it took time to figure out because almost nothing else responds to those stimuli, so they are easy to ignore as you learn to pay attention to the senses everyone else responds to.”

Kazue sighed. “This is giving me a headache. Are we about done with this part? I want to take a break soon.”

“Almost. The key thing here is that light a little beyond blue. We’re going to add that to the isolation chambers because it is really good at killing the sort of mini hazards sewers can spew. It's not great for skin or eyes with long exposure, but safe enough for the duration people should be in there while passing through. And don't forget, there must always be a way forward, no matter how we feel about it. So we want to add a button or such to those chambers to open the door forward, and some sort of gauge to tell people that they are waiting on something before the button will work. Manually cycling means that too much is under our direct control, we can only force them onto the route if the potential for forward progress is guaranteed. Once you finish these up, we can take a break, and then revisit our floors and figure out what we want to redo.”