A Delicious New Friend

Chapter 37

I spent my time refining the blue safe stack in an irritable funk. One that caused all of my decisions to lean “atmospheric horror movie” a little harder than they would have normally. I still kept to the design rules I’d laid out despite it.

The blue stack did feature a significant deviation from what I planned for the others. Instead of putting the stairs to the next level in random places, I punched a single staircase down from the first blue level down through the other two. It ended at the start of the first green layer.

If normal folk wanted to explore or gather things, they could easily follow the usual path. If adventurers found their way to it, they could skip the safe parts. Despite that deviation, I did still add safe zones at the back end of the layers as well as descending staircases.

Though I was going easy in the blue stacks I didn’t want it to be possible to ascend all the way back up without crossing any layers. At least not without facing off against a boss. That deserved a reward and I decided to include teleport pads back up to the entry chamber in the safe zone after each one.

When it was about ten minutes until refresh, I decided it was time to spend my reserve mana. I was still uneasy about Elim, but I couldn’t really do anything for him as things stood. It was better to focus on my tasks rather than things I couldn’t affect.

I bought a single teleport pad and spent the rest of my mana as I’d previously planned. The hounds’ lava habitat grew a few tiles, I started my potions stockpile, and expanded the dungeon in general. On another day I’d probably feel content, if not rather pleased with myself.

Instead, I felt annoyed at the continued lack of communication. Instead of enjoying a sense of accomplishment, I started trying to figure out what bit of work to bury myself in next. The blue stack needed expansion and refinement but that was busywork. It wouldn’t keep me distracted.

My best bet was to start planning out the next stack, the green newbie zone. Starting something from scratch was always more engaging than fiddly details work. Since it was the formal start of the dungeon from an adventuring perspective I decided not to alter it too heavily.

There would be changes, architectural elements, art, a puzzle or two. Plenty of things that would give away it wasn’t a natural occurrence or the work of miners. It would be a continuation of the slow-burn horror of the blue stack.

I started looking through my monster notes, looking for something to use as the cornerstone of its design. Monstrous natural insects and animals seemed like a good if uninspiring starting point. The environment would seem to become increasingly more malignant as familiar things turned deadly.

That was a very “scary to experience, boring to plan” idea though. My mind was already wandering. I wanted to text Elim and check his health like a macabre helicopter parent. I needed something more substantial to do.

It wasn’t the best idea, but I decided for the sake of my sanity to design the green stack boss encounter first. The excited little hum I let out at the prospect of skipping to it an embarrassing, but good sign.

I started looking over my monster options a second time, trying to pick out the boss. Nothing was clicking at first, but I kept circling back to one particular monster. Skeletons, they were a staple of a lot of RPGs.

I felt a sort of kinship with them on a conceptual level. They were made of human parts, but no longer human themselves. It was almost poetic in a way. They were also a D class monster which made them low cost and relatively uncomplicated to place. Poetry was nice, practicality was king.

The only serious hang-up with them as a choice was how little character they had. They weren’t anything like naturally occurring. They needed an environmental explanation other monster types didn’t.

I could certainly plop down a necropolis or a mad necromancer’s lab. There were plenty of ways to explain them, just none that didn’t feel overused to me. My tail lashed irritably as I tried to sort the matter out.

An alternative to a good new idea was an interesting play on an old cliché. Since the top levels were an abandoned mine, I could link the encounter into the made-up reason that had happened. A curse of some kind.

“Unbridled greed was their downfall?” I muttered irritably to myself. I wasn’t really a fan but it was a starting point. Instead of dwelling on the thematic weakness, I decided to start building the room. It was a bit backward, but I wasn’t in a mood to be disciplined.

I made a large chamber directly connected to the stairs to avoid a build alarm. With only a vague idea to work with, I set up a kind of ‘generic fantasy cave’ scene with stalactites, pools of water, and other random geology odds and ends.

I fussed with it for nearly an hour before giving up. It was going to need a lot of work with the lighting and lines of sight to be anything worthwhile and my heart wasn’t in it. I still felt like trying to do the general layout for the boss encounter though.

Or I was just desperate to distract myself from Elim’s health bar. Nothing serious had happened, but he’d taken some damage. All of it was within range of what a cheap potion could fix but it kept happening every few minutes. I really hoped he was just being dumb and riding through thorn bushes or something.

I looked through the skeletons’ description and found they weren’t listed as undead like I’d assumed when I was skimming originally. They were necromantic constructs. An interesting distinction I wasn’t in the mood to look up.

Instead of immediately buying animated skeleton monsters I looked in my inventory and found one of the bandit bodies. After restoring it to a more usable state I tossed it in the deconstruct interface. I made a point of not examining the list of rendered parts too carefully. I was only after a skeleton and stuffed the rest in my inventory without looking at it.

I placed a few around the chamber, wanting to create some ambiance on the cheap. I gave them various weapons and laid them in a way that would mimic having fallen in combat. I felt a bit amused at how annoying the scene would be to a forensic tech. I’d essentially fashioned the scene with what would read as a set of octuplets since the skeletons were all copies of a single one.

“Oooh! Skeletons are tasty!” Blackmore said, eyeing the decorations like treats.

“Blackmore!” I admonished from halfway to the ceiling. She’d snuck up on me completely and I’d made an undignified squeak of terror when I jumped.

“I enjoy bones too,” Stalin agreed, looking at me disapprovingly before looking away. That little nonverbal diss burned a bit.

“No gnawing on employees and decor. I’ll add some to the dining room for you guys,” I said, with what little dignity I could scrounge up. I slowly lowered back down to the ground as the fear-fueled rush of whatever passed for adrenaline in my case ebbed.

“Yes mistress,” both hounds replied with very different tones. Stalin sounded like a kid who knew the scolding by heart. Blackmore was her usual excited self.

Thinking about the dining room I realized I’d set up pretty sweet digs for the hounds as things stood. For the skeletons on the other hand I was essentially dumping them into a plain room. I felt kind of bad about that.

After checking Elim’s health and finding it steady I bought some tiles and set up a secondary room. It would function like an employee lounge. I’d furnish it after discussing it with the skeletons once I summoned them.

The skeletons in the shop had NPC classes and that finally gave me an idea for how to set up the boss fight. If I bought enough of them, then when a party appeared they could form a matching group and face off against it. It was a little cliché, but better than my original half-baked idea of miners cursed by greed or something.

I selected a warrior skeleton to start with, curious about their ability to communicate. Its stats indicated that it was sapient but that wasn’t saying a lot. Random chance determined that the summoned one was a male since I didn’t set a preference.

He populated to my inventory when I declined to place him directly in the room. I appreciated that bit of efficiency. It would be a pain in the ass to have to manually load everything in after placement if I only wanted to stockpile it.

Skeleton 1 as he was designated for the moment looked up at me with sightless pits from his portrait. I couldn’t tell anything about him from it and had to fight down an urge to place him right away just to chat. I was intrigued by the idea of what he might be like.

Instead of rushing, I took my time to study his stats, wanting to get a feel for how strong a D level monster was. Marlow, the earth hound, was D rank as well but he was a D 8 while skeletons were a D 3. Marlow was stronger than Elim before reset, though less so after, so I wasn’t sure how a low D would measure up.

I was surprised to find this one had four levels of warrior, one of rogue and decent stats. Elim could have beat him, but not a group of them. I was impressed and somewhat concerned about using skeletons as the newbie encounter. I might have to push this boss encounter down a ways in the stack order.

Instead of being put off, I felt my curiosity rise. Studying his entry more I found a new tab that I hadn’t noticed in the hounds info. Checking theirs, I found it there as well, a fact which suggested it was a result of the interface upgrade.

[Enhance] the tab read, a straightforward heading all things considered. The enhancements cost mana but that wasn’t an issue in my eyes. It was about time to start playing with options.

It was a bit expensive but I immediately edited both hounds to respawn. There might have been a manual option to do it in the event they were defeated, but I didn’t care. I wanted to know that the pair would come back without issue if something happened to them. A desire that took a little work to set up in the end.

Respawn didn’t automatically return the original creature. Left as it was initially it would have simply replaced the defeated monster with another of its kind. I was deeply glad I took the time to read everything when I spotted that.

It would have been entirely unforgivable to lose one or both of them through such a moronic level of negligence. That also raised an issue with summoning sapient monsters in general. I’d need to do the same with the rest of them. Skeleton 1 for instance.