Author’s Corner: Welcome to another random rambling of author-sama!

So, I’m sure everyone is tired about hearing about my gradual recovery. I’ll try to keep this short. There really wasn’t a whole lot for me to do while we were at Hydra anyways. For the first three weeks, I was still fidgety, and could only occupy my time by playing with either Chrome or Jasmine, or by reading reports on the dungeons. After that, I started to get better. I was still not allowed, or interested in going down to the dungeons myself, but at least I could go five minutes by myself without screaming at the air.

We made a nice little bamboo fountain out of one of the arrow vines from my grove. Not only did it help with a constant background noise, it even made my room look a little nicer. After the fifth week, I was almost all the way better. I mean, I still had nightmares, and would get twitchy if I was by myself too long, but my only real panic came at the most embarrassing moment. Because I’m such a nice guy, naturally I’ll tell you all about it.

After a long night of dungeon diving, Sharon and Yin decided to watch a holo-movie with me in my room. About halfway through it, Sharon suddenly hit the pause button so that she could go to the bathroom. However, she didn’t say so before hand, so all I saw was the movie suddenly freezing. Although it was only a mild panic attack, they did have to calm me down for a couple minutes. I swear, I’m getting better, honest.

After two months had passed, the boredom started to settle in. I wanted to go do something productive, instead of just reading reports on the different dungeons. So, that’s exactly what I did. Well, sort of. I didn’t go down and fight monsters or anything, I just got to work on enchanting items. I wanted to make sure that everyone in the crew had at least one enchanted accessory to boost stats.

Of course, half of these accessories were lost in the following month, due to people taking them down to boost their abilities in the dungeon. But still, it gave me something to do, and helped me to practice something I’ve been needing practice with. At first, they were just metal rings formed from the ores in my grove. However, Yang began making rings from bones she collected in her dungeon runs, so I would work on those as well.

Speaking of Yang, she has been coping quite well with going down to the dungeon. Since she is a crafting class, she was unable to get experience from it, but she was still able to watch the fights and collect the resources. Yang was definitely not the leader of her team, as she had someone else in the group take care of that, but at least she wasn’t hiding from it. The worst that happened was I caught Yin having to comfort her after one of their first runs, because she was scared of what had happened.

Yin herself had actually done much better, surprising me with how well she could lead a group with her reluctance to speak long sentences. Out of all of them, her team had the lowest death rate, usually no more than one or two per run. According to the reports I read, any time a situation looked dire, she would step in at the last second and prevent a fatal strike from landing. Those that did manage to die in her team often did so because of either friendly fire or an ambush.

Yo… well, she let someone else lead her party and was just having fun ‘playing’ with the dungeon monsters after we got a soul core for her to clone herself into. Unlike us, she actually had to put her entire body into a large cylinder so that she didn’t spill out when she relaxed. Aside from that, though, her clone worked much like anyone else’s. She even managed to absorb one of the monsters from the boss room of the ‘goblin’ dungeon, the ettin. Seeing her turn into a giant, two headed slime woman was… I’ll just leave that out. She was still as affectionate as ever, even in that form....

Now, as for the dungeons themselves. We made a total of ten of them. Two of them became plant dungeons, which was not surprising given the fact that plants seemed to be much more abundant on this world compared to animals. One turned into the goblin dungeon I mentioned before. One actually became an undead dungeon, filled with skeletons on the first floor with a zombie boss. That one wasn’t very difficult, but the second floor was a mix of zombies and ghosts, the latter required magic to deal with.

Another dungeon spawned rock-based creatures, much like I had encountered in NeoLife. Then there was the lizard dungeon, the fire dungeon, the water dungeon, and the weirdest of them all… the demon dungeon. In the demon dungeon, all of the creatures had at least rudimentary intelligence, and some even spawned with weapons, or used methods to make them themselves. Creatures weren’t really spawning around us, so we weren’t able to tell, or get the readings I had wanted.

Since we couldn’t get the readings, Celeste modified the scanning device. Rather than something the group carried, they placed them inside the dungeons, and they would scan constantly, taking note of when the mana began condensing. To power them, Celeste rigged them to run on the ambient mana of the dungeons themselves. With those, we began to get semi-regular results. She had the results automatically sent to a terminal she set up in my lab on the planet, powered by a few elemental seeds to keep it running. The rest of the seeds were brought up to me.

Now… is there anything else I’m forgetting… While we were here, Celeste has been gradually teaching me the language of the people we are visiting next. From her information, they are a powerful psychic race known as the Ha’vosh. In NeoLife, almost every Ha’vosh is born with at least two psychic powers, sometimes even more. One is almost always rudimentary telepathy, while the others vary as much as other psychic powers. It would not surprise me if we found a Toybox owner or two among them.

I think, with that, I’ve caught you all up with where we are now. The last of our crew members have just gotten back from their final dungeon runs, and we are taking one day of rest before we leave for the Ha’vosh homeworld. As for me, I am leaning back away from a pile of bone rings I just finished enchanting with extra strength and agility, while thinking about the things that had happened lately.

“John?” I hear Celeste speaking up from behind me, and turn around to find the Deus Ex waiting at my door. I wasn’t in my quarters right now, but instead in an empty room I had repurposed for my enchanting and alchemy experiments. It’s good to be captain. And yes, I have another bamboo fountain in here, too. Though, the two headed dog sitting between my feet was an even better anchor for my sanity. “Can I come in?”

“Sure, what’s up?” I could see a bit of a troubled expression on Celeste’s face, her brows furrowed slightly in thought. “There an issue with the lab or something?”

“Ah, no, nothing like that. Well.. maybe not. It’s probably completely unrelated.”

“Slow down… what’s the matter?”

“Well…” She took a deep breath, more likely to calm herself than to actually breathe, because of the fact she doesn’t breathe in the first place. “It’s this planet. I got curious, so I did some calculations.”

“And…?”

“I plotted its location three thousand years in the future, and cross-referenced it with the star maps I had memorized. I found out where it will be, when the players begin arriving in the future.”

“Again, and?” Not really sure what she was getting at, but I didn’t think I was going to like it.

“Well… we’ve been here before. You and I have, specifically.” She said, still looking a bit nervous.

“Celeste… What is this planet…?” Okay, now I was starting to get nervous. Not in a panicky sort of way, I checked. But still.

“You remember that jungle planet we crashed into…? Where we met that dryad, Arianne?”

“Wait, you’re not saying…” I subconsciously looked to a nearby wall, as if the planet we were orbiting around was just behind it.

“Yeah, this is the same planet. Obviously, it’s not been overrun yet, so it is still relatively safe. As safe as any other planet these days.”

“I hate time travel…” I shook my head, thinking this through. “I read Fallem’s report about the first floor of the plant dungeon you guys visited early on. Thanks again for the specimens, by the way.” The unique plants they had brought me were sitting on their own little island in my grove, waiting to be studied. “So… we come on this voyage, gather a crew, find a planet to train them on. But, that planet’s dungeon then spawns something that escapes, and over time takes over the entire planet. The same planet which I then crash land on three thousand years in the future.”

“And meet a naked plant lady, yes.” She added in that last part to tease me, I just knew it. Chrome yipped at her, and I mentally cheered him on. At least someone is on my side.

“And meet a naked plant lady. But still, awfully big coincidence. But, if this is indeed the same planet, then we should be halfway between the elven homeworld and the Klax, correct?”

She nodded her head slightly. “That’s right. They haven’t been one of the nearest races to us yet, so I haven’t brought them up. But yeah, they’re about half a year away from this planet.”

“We won’t be going there anyways.” I shook my head. It wasn’t just because the Klax were a warmongering species, or that they literally bled acid and looked like a monster straight out of a horror movie franchise. No, why would you think that? It’s because we don’t have a reliable means of communication with them. Since they speak in clicking tones, only Celeste would be able to carry on a conversation with them.

Hearing my reasoning mentally, Celeste put on a knowing smile. “Very well, Captain. Is there anything else you need before I return to my duties?”

“No, that’ll be all.” I said, before remembering something “Wait, no. I still need you here for a minute. Some research I’ve been meaning to conduct.”

“On Glenda, right?”

“....Glenda?”

“My G-series modular cannon. I named her Glenda.” Celeste smiled brightly, skipping over to me and showing me the thick metal bracer.

“Yes…. On Glenda. Unless you’ve conducted your own tests?” I looked up at the Deus Ex, who looked away innocently. With a reluctant sigh, I shook my head and asked. “What did you find?”

“A soul.” She said, starting to show some surprise as we got onto this subject. “Using your Soul Arts, I found that Glenda had a soul. Not only that, all of her enchantments seemed to merge together into one. It was so cool!”

“And did you get any ideas on how to make our own ‘soul weapon’?”

Celeste furrowed her brows in thought again, and then gave a slight nod. “If we give an intelligence enchantment to an item, it should be capable of holding a soul. Not an intelligence boost, but an actual intelligence. Take a look, you’ll see what I mean.” She said as she held her wrist out again.

Nodding, I extended my Mana Sense to observe the cannon in its inactive form. “Her name is Glenda.” Celeste corrected my thoughts. Sorry, Glenda’s state. Like she said, there were various enchantments, but they seemed to be all mixed together. And there was one part of the aura that seemed to be the center of everything else, and was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Well… not quite anything, but I’ve never seen it in an aura before. It looks like… “It looks like a neural map, right? I think this is the basis of her intelligence. Without this, it would be meaningless to give an item a soul.”

I glanced up at her suspiciously after she said that, and she again looked away before admitting something else. “I kinda already tried. I had Yang make me a bone dagger, and enchanted it with a fire spell. Then, I tried adding a soul to it. The soul went in, but nothing changed. The aura grew stronger after killing monsters with it, so it was getting some experience, but it wasn’t showing any signs of growth like Glenda does. When I kill enough creatures with Glenda, she has the ability to make new effects based on her enchantments. An intelligence enchantment is probably needed for that.”

I really didn’t know what to say next, so only gave a defeated sigh. “You know, I was really looking forward to doing that research myself…”

Celeste giggled lightly, but shook her head. “Nope. You were too down lately to do it. If I just waited for you, I didn’t know how long it’d take. And I was really curious. So I checked it out on my own. And before you ask, no I don’t know how to do the intelligence enchantment. I’ve got some ideas, but…”

“The simplest would be either to create an AI and convert it into a magical formula, or to write an artificial intelligence in runes, right?” I asked, and she nodded. “Either one of those would be hard, but the last one would require an insane amount of mana to activate. Easily the tens of thousands.”

“Right. I’ve already started work compiling some basic AIs on my terminal. Keeping them entirely separated from the network as a safety precaution, don’t even have the terminal itself connected to the ship’s systems. They are basic, low level learning AIs. Should be around the same level as the one you had in your house back on Earth. The problem is converting them to an enchantment.”

I nodded my head at that, starting to think on it. “We’ll come up with something, I’m sure.” I reached down and picked up my adorable little two headed dog and put him in my lap. Good boy, Chrome. Good boy. “Is it just me, or are we actively trying to break the system?”

Celeste grinned slightly at that remark. “Well, it’s just payback. The system did try to break us first, right?”