Man, have I really not expanded since I ate Neverrest? I had forgotten how much goes into actually making the new space liveable. I didn’t forget about the new spanwer I get, but I’ll focus on that in a moment.

For now, I’m just taking a few minutes to get a feel for what I’ve got now. It’s one thing to be able to list off the volumes of moveable space, gallons of water, and raw volume of area I gained with the expansion, but it’s another to actually understand what that all means and how it all relates to each other.

While the tunnels immediately under the manor are mostly tunnels and small caverns, the new expansion has more… cavernous caverns. I’m pretty sure the rock is different, too. The tunnels were some kind of brown stone, probably something sedentary? The new caverns seem to me more like granite or something, probably more igneous. I’m hardly a geologist, though. All I know is the rock down here seems to be much stronger than above, which allows for those large caverns.

I hardly need to tell Teemo to go head down there and work his magic, though I do tell him to pay special attention to how he makes his shortcuts. He’s been making no progress at all with trying to expand his control into temperature, which makes me wonder if his shortcuts are really non-Euclidean and somehow manage to have larger inside dimensions without actually increasing volume. Or he might just have trouble visualizing it, I dunno.

So I’m having him concentrate a bit more on how his magic flows and actually works when he’s making his shortcuts. I figure, worst case, he’ll understand his spatial magic better. You know, get a bit more depth before trying to widen it into temperature and other stuff.

I do have to tell Coda to head down there and survey, though. I think he expected his assignment would be mostly in the general tunnels, but if he’s going to be my Architect, I’m gonna need him to get a good look at each expansion. I wonder if I can get him to go on expeditions to survey stuff before I expand. Maybe I’ll even get a discount? Getting my scions to do stuff has gotten me discounts on everything else, so why not?

I think the first thing I’m probably gonna have him do, one he’s finished surveying, is to dig a more direct route from the largest cavern up to the tunnel system. I think I’m going to keep working and making the crypt complex be my strongest stuff, so now the caverns will get to be my tier between the tunnels and the crypts. Besides, most delvers tend to stay away from the undead. Thankfully, the crystal shield guys love the area. I bet that gnome high priest is telling everyone he can to come here to train, too.

But, if I’m going to leave the crypts as a place for priests, paladins, and whatever other divine classes are a thing, I’ll be using the caverns to help train up the more ordinary delvers. So I’ll need a good path there for them to reach. The only problem is that I don’t know if my little ratling crew is going to be up to it.

Pretty sure explosives are the preferred way to get through tough rock, and I don’t really have any boom. With the lab being expanded, I think Queen is looking into making some, but I’m not exactly holding my breath on it. Not that I don’t think she can do it, just that I think I’ll have a better way to get through that stuff: my new spawner and scion.

While most of my stuff has been pretty mundane, my new spawner is probably the most ‘fantasy’ of the stuff I’ve gotten so far. Yes, I have undead and slimes, but they’re both still fairly normal, at least in my head. My new spawner is an elemental spawner. An earth elemental spawner.

Right now, it’s just spawning stalasprites, which are little vaguely-conical stone things. They make me think more like snails than sprites, though. They have a single foot like a snail, and they like to climb and rest on ceilings, and drop on baddies. They seem to be really good at dealing with the gremlins, too. The little resource thieves just can’t pick them out from the normal outcroppings on the ceilings. I’m gonna want to get them to propagate in the tunnels and my various mining nodes, to help keep them secure.

My new scion, though, is different from them. He’s a vaguely-humanoid pile of rocks and sand. He has shoulders and arms, and a head, and even fingers when he wants them. Aside from that, though, he’s a kinda lumpy column all the way to the ground.

I have a vague idea for what I want him to do, mostly because it’s a terrible pun and I can’t resist. It’ll be a while before I can even start working on that, though, so I’ll just name him Slash and leave it at that for now. I tell him to take a look around, meet the other scions and just get a feel for how things will be working around here.

And, with the extra room, I can try to get those other two spawners I’ve had my eye on ever since Leo joined: gremlins and moles. Moles are my top priority for the moment, though, and are the reason I’m not going to pressure Queen for explosives too hard. If I can get a mole spawner, I can either upgrade it enough for it to make some kind of mole-thing that can dig through rock, or I can have Queen transmute their claws to steel and they can dig that way.

Or both. I remember how quickly that scythmaw was tearing at my walls before Tiny took care of it. If I could get something similar, but with steel diggers, Coda would be able to carve out stuff with ease! But, before I go counting my moles before they hatch, I need to actually catch and convert one. I tell Leo I want him to capture a mole and convert it, and then look into what other upgrades I can make to the jail. I’ll probably be able to decouple it from the punishment gauntlet soon, but not quite yet.

The upgrade options seem to lean more into inquisition territory, rather than rehabilitation, though. I’ll probably have to finagle something…

Leo

The Alpha has a new mission for him, and Leo is excited for it. The trio with that halfling are probably going to be freeing themselves within the next week or so, which will leave his jail rather empty. But with the new expansion comes a new order: convert a mole! He’s not certain how well that will work, but the Alpha’s strange thought process isn’t too outlandish. Thankfully, the Alpha doesn’t seem to expect it will go as smoothly as it did for him. Leo didn’t have much other option, so had no problem changing his loyalty to the new dungeon.

So now he needs to find a mole… which is the first hurdle. He’s a wolf, not a ferret. He can’t exactly go diving down a mole hole to grab one of the things. He might be able to with the help of the Voice, but he has his own new duties to attend to.

The other problem with catching a mole is that it’s shockingly difficult to grab one without just killing it. He still doesn’t have thumbs. Ok… think outside the box. Maybe an aranea can help him?

He goes and tracks down the one that will likely be going out on expeditions, and she’s weaving the sample bags as he approaches.

“Aranea. I need your help to weave a trap for some moles.”

“No,” comes the simple reply, and Leo growls.

“Why do you refuse?”

“Not my job. Job is weave. Job is make. Make to wear. Not to grab,” she explains, and it’s pretty clear to Leo he’s not going to get anywhere trying the aranea. Sure, they’re smart for denizens, but they’re still pretty simple. If the Alpha ordered them, they’d probably listen, but Leo doesn’t want to go running to him at the first sign of trouble with his task.

So, if the denizens are too simple to help, he should try a scion. Fluffles could probably handle catching a mole without too much difficulty. The only problem is he’s almost as hard to track down as the Voice. Leo patrols the tunnels as he thinks, trying to figure out who he can ask for help. He notices Jello oozing by, and stops in his tracks.

Could the Purifier help him capture a mole? Could she even help to convert the mole? His instinct is to ignore her… but trying this is just the kind of strange thing Alpha Thedeim would do. He thinks it over a bit more and comes to a decision. If it won’t interfere with her duties in the tunnels, there shouldn’t be any harm in trying.

He approaches her, and she notices him. She burbles in friendly welcome, and he nods in return. “Purifier Jello. Could you assist me on the surface? Alpha Thedeim has tasked me with capturing and turning a mole, but I’m having difficulties catching one,” he explains.

“Jello can help friend Leo! Tunnels are full of friends, so Jello can leave the defense to them for a while. Where do you need Jello?” He simply motions for her to follow, and the two quickly slip through a shortcut to the surface. Many of the delvers there look with confusion at Jello, but nobody does more than give the pair strange looks.

Leo shows her a few of the more active mole tunnels. Queen and her ants do their best to collapse the tunnels as they find them, but some are good to leave open for the snakes to be able to hunt. “Here is one of the main mole tunnels. If you cover this entrance, I can cover a different one, and hopefully with the two of us, we’ll be able to capture one.”

Jello burbles in affirmative and moves to literally cover the entrance, and Leo moves to a different one. It doesn’t take him long to notice something strange with Jello. She’s burbling again, but not saying anything. Perhaps she cannot handle the sun very well? She’s been in the tunnels for perhaps her entire life.

“Is everything alright, Jello?” he asks, concerned he may have made a mistake in asking her to help.

“Yep! Jello is fine! She’s just exploring these tiny tunnels some,” she says without further explanation.

Leo tilts his head at her in curiosity. “Exploring? How?”

In answer, she oozes herself off of the entrance, and soon reveals a long thin tendril that she had sent down the hole. “Like this! Jello likes to be a cube most of the time, but she doesn’t always fit like that. So sometimes she does other shapes.” She leans towards him and whispers. “She’s even tried to be a sphere like the Voice, but a sphere is a lot harder than it looks!”

“...Teemo is a rat, not a sphere,” is all he can think to reply, and Jello just burbles in laughter.

“Not that Voice! The other Voice!” she says, like that explains anything. After a few moments, she tries to help her fellow scion. “You know, the Voice that tells us what to do? Voice Thedeim?”

That makes… not quite sense, but at least Leo understands what she’s trying to say. And with that understanding comes the understanding that he made the correct choice in asking for her help in this, too. “So you can extend yourself down these tunnels without difficulty? Can you grab a mole for me like that?”

“Jello would love to!” she replies, and takes her spot above the hole once more. Leo watches and wonders if this is how his Alpha tends to get such strange ideas for how to do things. He didn’t expect to be spending his afternoon watching the slime scion hunt for a mole, but that’s what he’s doing. None of the steps along the way were too outlandish, but the final result is just the kind of weirdness he’d expect from Alpha Thedeim. He supposes he’s doing his job right, then.