during my work on my dungeon, my mind had wandered off sometimes and during one of its trips, I realised I had a problem that I should address. A problem that was glaringly obvious during my interactions with Mary-Ann.

I can't speak!

Now, one might think that it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

In fact, it is not much of a problem at all. And yet... It was such a bother to have to use WIKI to talk to Mary-Ann.

And making every single person that I come across my agent seems a bit... reckless. And cumbersome.

No, I definitely need to find a way so I can talk, and in order for someone or something to talk is the ability to make noise.

Think about it. A human, when it talks, exhales air from its lungs which then passes through his throat and past to tongue to create words. Even animals 'speak' since they also force the expelled air through their throats to produce roars, growls, yips, squeaks, clicks, chirps and a whole lot more of noises, all to communicate some form of intent.

Not having lung complicates a lot for me.

But.

I'm a massive complex made of multiple tunnels and huge open areas that are filled with air.

And if you think about it, from a scientific point of view, sound is just the vibration of said air at a given frequency. If you know of what frequency the air needs to vibrate at and the length of the soundwave, you could, theoretically, re-create any sound. You could recreate the sound of rustling leaves that wave in the wind, the sound of waves that lap at the beach. Or you can go full predator and use it to fake the voice of others to use in traps.

Maybe I should leave that particular train of thought for another time.

Anyway, If I can manipulate the air that is within me, I should be able to, with enough practice of course, 'speak'.

And boy, do I miss being able to talk and sing.

Don't get me wrong, I can talk with WIKi, but he's like... a more advanced Siri. Capable of giving the information you need and being the obedient little servant but lacking a true personality. Any and every conversation that we have is basically me just asking question and him answering since he never says something to start a conversation.

He never just talks about the weather (Duh) nor does he ever talks about how he feels, or what he thinks might be out there in the cosmos or about any other subject you might talk of to another person.

Maybe I need to get him drunk somehow? Drunk people like to talk about the most random things right?

Focus.

In order for me to produce sound, I will need to be capable of doing a couple of things simultaneously.

First of all, I need to be able to make small air particles vibrate and make them move forwards at the same time.

In order for sound to exist, you need a medium, such as air, water or metal, that will carry your vibrating particles until they reach the intended recipient. There is no sound in space since space is a vacuum (relative) and as such, there is nothing there to act as a medium and thus any generated sound will not travel.

Secondly, I need to meticulously experiment and fiddle with frequencies and wavelengths until I can create the desired sound. I imagine it to work a bit like a speaker with my consciousness being the source that produces the sound and the speakers, or in my case my dungeon, to actually turn it into sound.

Lastly, I need to fiddle and play around with it some more so I'm capable of changing sounds instantly or at least nearly instant so I can actually create words and more complicated sounds.

It takes me quite a while of meticulous experimenting but eventually, I manage to recreate a myriad of sounds.

Throughout the halls, corridors and rooms of my dungeon the sounds of rustling leaves, the babbling of a small brook, the chirping of birds and the howling of the wind resound, sometimes rather silent, other times so loud that prolonged exposure could lead to auditory damage.

After that, slowly but surely, the sounds start to change. I manage to replicate the mooing of a cow, the roar of a bear and even the howling of an air raid alarm.

After even more time has passed, I manage to form actual words. Sadly enough, it all just sounds quite monotonous and robotic so that's what I experiment on next. In the end, after many days, I'm finally capable of true speech, with a voice that sounds almost the same as my voice from my previous life.

And this is where the real fun starts.

Song after song reverberates throughout my halls, going from Bon Jovi's living on a prayer to ac/dc's thunderstruck to Metallica's fear of the dark. Seems like I'm not the only one enjoying myself though since it looks like my yetis are tapping their feet to the music and my snow leopards are doing something with their head that looks a helluva lot like headbanging.

With my task accomplished, I turn towards other matters, such as creating a second floor.

Even though it is really cliche to build out my dungeon downwards, I still do it because of a couple of reasons.

If I were to build upwards, I would eventually come out of the side of the mountain and thus run out of space that way.

The same goes for the other directions that I dubbed as Nord, East and West since I would just run out of space there as well. That leaves down.

On top of that comes the fact that the further down I go, the higher the ambient temperature will go until it even might support other life forms. Who knows, I might even go down far enough one day for zebras to survive down there since it is unlikely that I will find a use for those striped ponies in the near future.

So down I go.

I start by making a rough winding staircase in my current core room that goes down for at least fifty metres.

At the bottom of the stairs, I create a general purpose room from where on I will branch out.

For my next floor, I envision some sort of maze that starts with multiple hallways branching out from the staircase, with multiple dead ends. Maybe even some false walls that I can close at will, to ensure that people don't find the exit by just using the 'hug-the-left-wall' rule, that would be just plain boring and annoying.

I start off by digging six tunnels but this time, I've decided that they will be slightly different from the corridors I used on the floor above. I make the perfectly round and make them slope ever so slightly downwards.

I have a plan, you see. What is one of the most typical things you see when it starts to heat up in the mountains, especially around springtime? Meltwater of course. So to make life miserable for those that want to traverse this floor, it is my intention to have a steady flow of freezing cold water to flow down the stairs through specially carved gullets and then flood this entire floor with enough meltwater to reach people's ankles. Hopefully, it will get in their shoes and boots and they will be miserable the entire time they wander through my maze.

The round and slightly sloped tunnels also can serve another purpose.

Where I was originally from, flash floods weren't a thing but I've seen enough movies and read enough books, mostly made by Americans, to know how dangerous and frightening a massive wall of fast moving water can be in tight spaces.

So this will be one of my next traps. When I'm finished with digging out my maze, I intend to create spaces above the tunnels with carefully sealed hatches in the roof of the ceiling that I can open at will or that I can link to tripwires, pressure plates and such. The round tunnels will make running away from the suddenly released water harder and might even make those that run away trip. And of course, since my tunnels will be perfectly round, they will also help to channel the water properly.

Maybe, one day, I can make use of the meltwater to create a hydroelectric power station and thus get an easy source of electricity. If electricity even exists here, that is. You know what, I bet that the people here have no idea how lightning and electricity works seeing as that this world seems medieval. There's a distinct possibility that the people of this world think that lightning is created by the gods or something like that. Maybe they will be like the Vikings, who believed that lightning and thunder was created when thor, the god of thunder, struck his anvil with his massive hammer.

Who knows, if the people here are somewhat like the Vikings, they might just shout at a solar eclipse to scare it off. Heh, would be funny.

During my digging, I encountered some veins of ore. Most common of all was an ore that held iron but, seeing as that geology has never been my strong suit, I couldn't tell exactly what it was and what other trace elements it might contain.

If I were to make use of these ores, I would either have to enlist the help of some locals, blacksmiths and such, to help me determine what kind of ores they are and what I can use them for and how to make stuff with them. Another thing I could do is to create various lab equipment to identify the elements that are present in those ores and in what concentrations. Now that I think about it, I would like to have a proper lab one day.... Maybe, with enough time, I can replicate some of the machines I used during my education.

oh god, I just came to a frightening realisation. I now lack access to some of the tools and knowledge that I took for granted as a chemist. Like for example, the periodic table. How am I supposed to know the molecular weight of each known element? And, what about any elements that I might come across that were unknown to mankind. Oh, I will even have to develop a way to accurately measure weight and length. So much to do, it feels like I have to start over from the dark ages and rediscover every bit of science. I don't even know if this planet exerts the same gravitational force.

I will just have to experiment I guess and try to remember how other famous scientist made their discoveries. And then claim them as my own in this world, mwahahaha.

Damm, I wish now I had an actual body so I could wear a lab coat, have really weird spiked hair, wear a pair of long green gloves and wear some weird glasses. A mad scientist laugh also needs some ambience, maybe some lightning in the background.

I'm getting sidetracked again.

After that bout of panicking and manic cackling, I resume my digging.

Before I get to do any proper science, I need to create a proper stronghold for myself and create plenty of space to do my experimenting in. Imagine this, maybe one day, I'll even manage to make a particle accelerator. Then I can make antimatter! No! Need to stow away the crazy scientist again.

Digging! Need to resume digging.

Making my mana act like a giant tunnel boring machine, I grind out a bunch of tunnels, some of them ending all of a sudden in dead ends. Whilst I'm about halfway done with the amount of digging I need to do to finish my maze, my mana tunnel bore stops all of a sudden. Puzzled, I disperse the mana to see why it stopped all of a sudden.

It seems that my tunnel bore came across a naturally occurring cave network. But this is not why it stopped though.

It stopped because, right in front of it, is a humanoid shape. Must have triggered a safety somehow, one I wasn't aware of that it even existed.

The figure that stands at the end of my latest tunnel is quite small yet looks... I'd say mature. The fact that he, at least I think it's a guy, has a beard with a twirling moustache and a nearly bald head confirms for me that the person in front of me is an adult. Have I also mentioned he's tiny? Going on his appearance and the fact that he's tiny, he can either be one of two things and, if I know my fantasy races well enough, I would say that this is in fact... a gnome.