Five days ago, the evening a kobold wandered into the clearing by James’ dungeon entrance.

I watched as my new visitor turned his head and said something quite sibilant over his shoulder, and less than 30 seconds later, an additional pair of shortish lizard people stepped into the clearing. The new additions also wore bandoliers, one of them looked like it was carrying a sling, the other also carried a spear. I had to admit it was interesting watching them taking their time to approach my entrance, as they raised their heads into the air sniffing as they spoke in hissing undertones to each other. If I thought trying to understand the elf and the wolf beast-kin was going to stretch my poor linguistic capabilities, this was like listening to a snake trying to speak Ancient Hindu as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t even begin to tell where words started or finished, and from the cautious approach they were taking, it was fairly obvious that these new visitors of mine were even less trusting than my previous ones.

The first of the three to have entered my clearing was the largest of them, also it appeared to be the leader of the group, given the sharp gestures that accompanied its sibilant speech. The other two returned to the edge of the forest and picked up a fair bit of kindling and some stones in their four digit hands, before returning to almost the center of the clearing, some four meters west of my tuft of grass, and starting a campfire pit. Whilst the two were gathering the campfire supplies, the leader of the group came within a meter or so of my well lit dungeon entrance sniffing the air, and even tasting it with his snake-like forked tongue. I was starting to wonder if he was going to enter now or if he would do so later, when he abruptly turned and hissed at one of his fellows, waving his arm as he did so. The other lizard person stood at this apparent command and stomped off into the woods, tail swishing as he did so. The leader returned to the new campfire, and sat partly facing my dungeon entrance, apparently wary of what I may do.

After a few minutes watching the pair by the campfire, it quickly became obvious that they were waiting on their fellow to return, despite the glances towards my dungeon entrance every now and again. As the two didn’t seem to be doing anything terribly interesting at the moment, I quit my lallygagging, and got back to work on my branching logic problem. About 8 hours of accelerated time later I noticed the third lizard person had returned, carrying three dead squirrels by the tail as he strode back into their camp. I had been wondering where the lizards cook pot or utensils might have been as I didn’t see a pouch on any of them, that question became moot when they skinned and gutted the squirrels with a sharp fore-claw, and prepared the squirrels kebab style on a few sticks I hadn’t noticed had been set aside.

It was almost 24 hours of accelerated time later that I was finally satisfied that I had solved my branching logic problem, and not a moment too soon, as my step-down override trigger tripped and brought my perception back to real-time. I gave a mental sigh as I realized that before I had put in that override, I had more than likely been causing a fair bit of temperature damage to my core room, given how quickly that override kicked in. I gave my core room a quick inspection, and didn’t see any new signs of temperature damage, it seems as though the override was on the conservative side, which was frankly all to the good. My new visitors, like my previous visitors, had set out a watch, although their discipline seemed to be lacking in comparison as it became obvious about 3 hours into his shift that he was having trouble staying awake. Fortunately for him, despite his awareness issues, the next shift came about only another hour later and he wasn’t replaced by the leader of the group.

Having resolved my branching logic problem, I started reviewing all the various components I had designed and made notes on. It was 12:14 AM, just over 95 minutes after the override had tripped, that the lockout unlocked allowing me to go back to my fully accelerated perception once again. After another 30 hours of accelerated time, the override kicked in once again, it appeared as though that break I took to look at my visitors last time helped dissipate some of the heat build up, it was a good thing this time around as frankly if I still had eyes they would have been crossed at this point having spent over an accelerated day of time reviewing my own documentation and mathematical calculations of the design tolerances for each major CPU component. The next step in this whole process would be to start bench testing each component with dummy inputs and outputs, hopefully I wouldn’t have to redo too many components due to mistakes. I may have been able to put together a calculator and a clock, mostly from memory, and a bit of math here and there, but the CPU I had mostly designed at this point was an entirely different level, frankly despite my background and my notes I was more than a bit worried I had screwed up somewhere due to the complexity involved.

It was 4:30 AM by the time I had essentially finished reviewing all my notes, it was definitely time to start testing. In my computer lab I put together a step clock and several LED displays, which I hooked up to each of the registers I was using for that component, and then started the long and tedious process of testing actual versus theoretical inputs and outputs for each component. Even if working in an accelerated perception allowed me to accomplish things quicker real-time, I still had to slog through it myself. Eventually, assuming I get a good stable design that I could replicate, I might see about putting together a full testing system instead of the individual component system that I has started to put in place, until then I will just have to suffer through it.

The 16 and 32 bit ALU designs passed their tests on the first try, as did the 80 FPU design. The first snag I hit was with the 64 bit ALU, I had a bit shift error in the DIV operation, I must have been distracted or something, I should not have had that issue. A check of my 128 bit and 256 bit designs turned up the same error, and a one off error in signed versus unsigned modes. After much cursing, I got around to looking at what had caused those errors, it took another 16 accelerated hours before I realized that I had transposed one one of the circuits in the DIV operation in the larger than 32 bit designs, and also accidentally cross connected a different circuit which determined the signed versus unsigned values in the output. I was quite frustrated with myself by that point, and decided that I needed a break before I just melted the components down out of frustration.

It was 6:34 AM as I looked out at my visitors, leader of the group was looking warily at my entrance from across the campfire. The sun was not quite fully in the sky, but it would soon be there, a high pitched scree sound announced the presence of a griffin in the skies above, and the leader brought up his spear, despite the fact it did not dive on the group. Now that there was more light out, I could more clearly see that the spears the leader and the other lizard person carried were stone tipped, perhaps flint, although they didn’t have the glistening appearance that came from firing the flint. If their eating habits from the night before hadn’t clued me in, the quality of their weapons certainly indicated a significantly lower level of technology that my previous set of visitors.

Based on their visible level of technological sophistication, I was not terribly hopeful that my new visitors would be able to solve the puzzles that I had created for my dungeon but, I would have to wait and see, I could very well be wrong. After it was obvious that the griffin had moved on, the group cycled out to the edge of the clearing to take care of natures call, and then gathered back around the campfire, putting it out and preparing their weapons. It seemed as though the group was about to try and enter my dungeon, much like the previous group, they had decided to start their attempt during daylight.

The group approached the main entrance and sniffed the area thoroughly, the leader noticing the smaller door leading to the bunk room, and commanded in that unintelligible hissing voice that the one with the sling check out the door. The only clues I had to the meaning of that utterance was the arm wave of the leader, and the twitch of the one with the sling before he headed towards the bunk room door. Version two of the automatic door freak out was almost as funny to me as the first one, mostly because the leap back and the slung stone, didn’t become a pratfall, and the other two rapidly converged on the closing doors with spears out ready to pierce anyone coming out from the door. The very seriousness of the other twos reactions, not to mention the speed of those reaction, limiting the hilarity of the moment for me.

I do not really know how fast the other two visitors I had were, at least not beyond the hand speed of the wolf beast-kin, these new lizard people could definitely move. Several sibilant utterances, a few strong sniffs of the air by the leader, and a smack on the back of the head to the sling user, preceded them entering the bunk room. If I wasn’t locked out of my accelerated perception for at least another half hour, I probably wouldn’t have bothered watching the trio investigate the bunk room, sniffing the air around the bunks, poking their spears into the mattresses, and in general acting very much like the suspicious primitives I thought they were. I wasn’t able to get an exact time on the lockout, as I had made it temperature based, and it seemed as though I needed to get some additional airflow going in my core elevator shaft to help dissipate the heat.

To assist in that endeavor, I finally got around to adjusting the materials that made up my core elevator room and converted each of the sides to interwoven sheets of titanium and tungsten. The ceiling and floor of my little core room, I made of the same material, but I added a fine circular cheese grater grill pattern in the area immediately surrounding my core, out to four inches from the center of the pedestal supporting my core. Finally, having laid out the design I intended to keep for a while, I coated everything in a bilayer of graphene over diamond. I would have to adjust the materials for the elevator shaft later. By this time, the lockout had cleared more than an hour ago and I decided to see what my new visitors had been doing prior to jumping back into my testing regime.

Turns out, I shouldn’t have left my visitors without supervision for the two hours that I had, they had thrown several burning branches into the bunk room, trying unsuccessfully to light it on fire. Additionally it appeared as though they had stolen most of the utensils and had even defecated on one of the bunks, I am going to have to do some serious cleaning before that room is remotely habitable for visitors again. I was somewhat fortunate in that they had forgotten to block the door open, as they were currently trying to get past my airlock, and thus far, failing. As my visitors were occupied with the airlock, I flipped the switch that engaged the magnetic lock for the bunkroom. That should prevent future vandalism on the part of my new visitors. I then shutdown the air vents to the bunkroom, and started work on a large nitrogen tank that I could use flush the air out, and also kill any aerobic bacteria that got left on any of the surfaces. Having to be this careful was more than a bit of a pain, but frankly, not having to deal with the slimy feeling in my core as I absorbed the life of every insect and bacteria I killed whilst under my influence was more than worth the hassle.

Several sets of lasers, and much hassle and waiting later, and the bunkroom was no longer a level 3 biohazard. It was also 3:30 in the afternoon and my new set of visitors had given up trying to circumvent my airlock, although, they did manage a partial work around to get back out of the first puzzle room, throwing themselves back out. Overall my visitors seemed less than pleased as the leader hissed and waved the trio back to their campsite in front of my entrance. I still needed to replace everything that the group had stolen from the bunkroom but, I was going to see about doing that a bit later as I was curious what this group was going to do next. After a half hour of hissing back and forth, the leader pulled a scrap of treated animal hide out of his bandolier, and grabbed a stick from the resurrected fire, then proceeded to scratch out, what were obviously words of some kind, but looked like some kind of cuneiform to my eyes. The leader then sent the whipping boy of the group, the slinger back out into the forest, with the message, possibly requesting reinforcements, I am not sure.

I spent another five minutes listening to the remaining two lizard people, hoping to even make a stab at understanding what they planned on doing next, to no avail. I finished replacing what the trio had stolen in the bunkroom, and made one last pass over the bunkroom before pulling my influence back out, and restoring the normal air content and circulation. I then stepped up to my maximum accelerated perception, and got back to the tedious work of circuit testing. After several hours I had found several errors in the 160 and 320 bit FPU’s, I was so annoyed with myself. The errors were all fairly simple in and of themselves, but they were a significant pain to figure out from just the testing input and output.

It was several cycles of accelerated time later, and I had finally managed to complete individual testing of all the major math components of the CPU, I even had 4 minutes to spare before midnight. The new grate design had shortened the intervals of downtime by almost 10 minutes by themselves, I was still going to see about adjusting the airflow to the elevator shaft, but that was for later. My two remaining guests had had some sort of bird for their supper it seemed, judging by the skeletons left by the fire, they had also gathered a much larger amount of kindling than seemed necessary for even another weeks stay. I wonder what the morning would bring, until then, it was time to start working on testing all the other components in my CPU design.

I spent the rest of the night testing, and intermittently cursing myself, as I showed on several occasions why despite my good grades on my EE courses I had never been the top of the class. Sure I had managed when I was able to just memorize the heck out of a bunch of circuits, but I had obviously been relying a bit too much on the prebuilt component library in my circuit design application back at Stanford. Now that I didn’t have that nice prebuilt library to rely on, it was becoming more obvious that I had been coasting a bit at Stanford too. I hadn’t even started all the integration testing yet, and I had found, and managed to fix almost 250 different errors across all the different components I had tested. I still had a problem with some of the instruction lookup components, but if I lucked out I would finish that before 9:30. My two remaining guests were now both awake, as it was now 7:15 AM and the sun was a decent ways above the horizon.

So far no griffins had dropped by to keep my guest on their toes, but they were paying more attention to the forest edge this morning than the entrance to my dungeon. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that, but it seemed likely that they had sent for reinforcements and they were expecting them soon. I was not sure whether or not that was a good thing for me, at least based upon the state they had left my bunkroom last night, no use worrying about it until they arrive, back to testing, but I will try and keep an closer eye on the clearing.

It was 12:10 PM, and my two remaining guests suddenly stood from their places around their campfire, the leader made a loud hissing cry and beckoned what had to be the reinforcements into the clearing. I had thought, sure a few reinforcements, maybe ten or fifteen if they are feeling iffy about my dungeon. I certainly did not expect the almost two hundred males, females and children entering my clearing. As the last of them cleared the tree line, one of the trees was almost pushed over and a fifteen foot tall ugly humanoid with a hunched back, long arms, bad teeth and leathery skin entered the clearing with the rest of my new visitors. This bunch of visitors were definitely going to be a problem.