Communities after the trials are especially harsh. Different peoples are crammed together, no easy source of food barring the coins that everyone has. People do anything to survive. The only reason it isn’t an all out slaughter is because people are separated from those who would support them in such an endeavor. Locations with dungeons have it easier, but only relatively.

-”Conflicts Big and Small: Volume 1” a compendium by the Chroniclers of Creation

Violet’s face went from purple to lilac in a flash. She pulled me along to the entrance and we got to the first floating rock where the bats were. Our intruder was not looking at the bats at the moment but was looking at the noble Terrence. The lilac Violet went paler, maybe to lavender?

We currently had no way of affecting our intruder, or even Terrence who was only technically an intruder. Well, at least not personally. The intruder had a single chance to smash her weapon down on Terrence. Terrence moved faster than ever and shot out of the dungeon and straight off the land bridge, both to the intruder’s astonishment as well as my own. Violet was too busy to be astonished and had the bats move from the first boulder to attack the intruder.

The intruder, to her credit, recovered quickly from her astonishment and smashed the first bat who came at her. The first bat was the first creature to become part of our dungeon and really stayed true to it’s past, she was the first to arrive and upon arrival was the first to be hit and was the first to die of a broken neck. The next three bats were marginally slower and came from three angles, for the intruder’s part she simply crouched and the bats banked above her head to come around for a second attack. The intruder recovered and swung at bat number two and missed a kill but got a wing. The bat’s wing was broken, but the metal edge was stuck in the stick.

The intruder tried to shake the bat off the stick and got her first cut because of that bat number three had done a sharp turn and ran a wing across the intruder’s thigh. Bat number four went for the face and was slapped into a wall. The blood made the intruder ignore the bat hanging from her makeshift bat and hit bat number four with the stick, ending it. Bat number three saw an open back and went for the neck. While in some cases wise, it was not wise in this case as the intruder had long hair covering her neck. Several strands of hair were cut, but the bat got caught in it. The intruder grabbed the fourth defender and flung it to the ground at her feet and stomped on it. Bat number two was smacked into the rock that was his home and was thus out of his misery.

The intruder tried to put her back to a wall and failed, almost falling on her butt while trying to do so. Upon failing to find a wall she instead went outside, almost passing through Violet to do so. Both were either trying to calm down or look for Terrence, yet for different reasons. I didn’t care as much about the intruder, but I went over to Violet to check on her.

Hey Violet, are you okay?

Yes, just the intruder scared Terrence off.

It’s okay Violet, Terrence is safe.

I know, just… he’s gone, and with an adventurer already here it means more will come so I probably won't see him again.

He was a noble creature Violet. If you’d like we can make the second floor boss Terrence the Turtle Two. I know it’s not the best idea, but. I paused here not knowing what to say. Dungeon bosses were killed a lot from what I understood.

She smiled. Thanks Jack, I think I’d like that.

I was glad the immediate issue was averted, but I didn’t know if that would be it. Terrence had been her way of relaxing. I enjoyed looking out the bubble, watching the otters, even practicing creation a bit. For Violet sitting at the entrance watching Terrence had been her favorite thing. She had seen him grow from palm size to about half a meter in diameter. He was her lovely lazy lad. Violet took a deep breath and looked at me.

Really, thank you Jack. Let’s get to loot, I doubt that some bats will mess her up for long.

True, though I am not sure she can beat the toads or otters, but we need to prepare. Let’s start with the rabbits and go from there.

Alright, what did you give the intruder from the bats?

Nothing. She went right past you and just a moment ago without even looking for loot. If we have to give her something, maybe a piece of metallic fur.

She frowned a bit at that. I guess that makes sense for a first clear, we can have that as a more rare loot drop, they are only weak bats. Did I mention we can also make coins for loot?

Uh, no?

Oh, well we can make coins. Little grey coins that have value regardless of where a person goes. Other than that we can make other loot. A part of the animal, as you suggested, isn’t a bad thing. I had thought we were going to do meat though as you wanted to provide food. The coins are food, by the way, but meat seems more natural and from what I recall it tastes much better. As you wanted to hurry I will say that the first rabbit and toad will each give a leg of their respective meat.

I paused a bit for my brain to process the bit about eating money, but put it aside for later questioning. Rabbit meat or toad legs seem reasonable, otters I am not sure I want to encourage being eaten, coins can be possible. You are right that meat is more natural, but I can’t truly fault treasure on an adventure. Let's follow along with our intrepid adventurer and see how it goes.

Violet smiled, seemingly back to her calmer self and fiddled with some lights while waiting to see if the adventurer was coming back. I could feel that the lights were her setting some probabilities for loot drops. I’d have to ask her how to do it later, or maybe try figuring it out myself. She had changed the bats to a swarm monster and set it’s loot for either a piece of metallic fur or a coin. The horned rabbits were a leg, two coins, the pelt, or a horn. The bats weren’t even guaranteed to drop something every time, but the rabbits were.

The toads were still odd as we weren’t certain how hard they would be, especially for our solo diver, but we tried our best to be fair. I am not sure if we succeeded as they were hard opponents and Violet may not like this adventurer as much. The toad offered a large toad leg, four coins, a waterproof piece of skin, or a large blob of the sticky goo. Violet insisted that the goo could be useful, but I think she might’ve just had it as a means of revenge. I let her be on this one, we would probably need to adjust the loot later anyways and could change it then.

The otters were the last loot we prepared. We set the loot as 10 coins, a metallic pelt, a few metallic claws, or the bladed tail pelt. As the woman still hadn’t come back we set about deciding to put a secret treasure of coins. Neither of us were ready to go back to planning the second floor at the moment and this was a nice way of relaxing while still using what time we had well.

The first we hid in front of a trap I especially liked. I remembered from the movie that the trap drove people towards the golden idol, and mine was not too different. If the trap wasn’t triggered the five coins were basically free. If the trap was triggered people could either run back down the hallway and lose a chance at easy coins or run towards the coins and be trapped in a room where the next part was extra hard. A person would easily survive this by walking up the sides of the wall and just losing a small entrance and a small amount of money, but men die for riches as animals do for food, and this was both. The trap had been fun before, but now it was better as I finally had bait for it. Violet was unhappy at how safe this was, but I reminded her that was the point for this dungeon.

Violet chose her location to be a place that a person would need to choose instead of happening upon by chance. Near the end of the dungeon, when the bosses were in sight she made a little cave that was an option from all the entrances to the boss. She had gotten my agreement to bring back the battering toad as a sort of mini boss. It wasn’t necessary to enter the room, but if a person did they would get the loot from the trap toad, with the change of a sort of mace made from the fused spine and head of the toad instead of goo. If a person then looked around that area they could find a secret stash of five coins. Not much, but basically doubling the value of the room.

I felt both gave a decent feeling of adventure, perhaps Violet’s even more than mine. We talked of a third but couldn’t agree on where and it didn’t feel necessary currently to have so many secret locations on the first floor. It had been an hour and the woman still hadn’t come back in so VIolet and I went to the entrance bubble and took a peek outside trying to locate her. We couldn’t see her, but we could hear her down below.

She had apparently decided to bathe in the river. I could understand the sentiment, she had looked quite bedraggled upon entering the dungeon. She’d been there a while, but who was I to judge. If I had a body I might luxuriate regardless of the temperature. That was something to check about later, what exactly a dungeon avatar was. It sounded like something useful to remedy such a situation.

I had questions on top of questions. I really should’ve spent my time more wisely but I’d just felt so happy to be alive and things were interesting enough I’d forgotten to ask more. I needed to be better about using my time well, though sometimes taking a break was the best use of time. In this instance the best use was to get ahead, adventurers were obviously going to start coming more and more and we didn’t have enough to accommodate them all.

Violet, we need to get a move on it. We already got an adventurer and more are bound to follow. Our dungeon can’t be this single level, regardless of how vast.

True, I guess the question is do we start on our second level or on a few instances of our first level? We are drawing in enough mana that we might only take a quarter of the time per instance instead of half. The second level would take perhaps a month and we would still only be accommodating a single instance. By then our first level instances could be done in under a tenth of the time.

Yeah, I really needed to ask more questions. We could’ve been creating an instance while deciding on the layout of the second level. A day or two could’ve helped, a minute was less important. We needed to figure out what was best.

The lady got hurt at just the bats. In regards to difficulty this is fine. For now let’s add a fourth otter to the boss to stall for time and get started on the second level.

Done and done. Let’s try and get our second level in the process of being created before she comes back up. I want to watch her attempt.

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