The core - Hecrux, now - tugs the grimoire closer to the center of the table with some metaphysical core magic. Graverra again notes to herself that some of this charade made little sense; If they were keeping things like stats in her grimoire and playing along with her use of furniture, either commit and give yourself appendages or take off what she felt must have been something like a tutorial mode.

But commenting on that would make it a discussion, so she just leans in a little closer to give Hecrux and the dungeon building her full attention.

“We can do a bit of both.” He says in response to the previous question of where do they start. “We probably will do some back and forth no matter what, something I’m sure Estremon thought would wind down the clock too, but we’ll work well together, won’t we?” There’s a squint to Hecrux’s single eye she takes to mean something like a smile… but somehow, even with the addition of her own, not made of the dungeon’s own flesh and blood

Graverra nods. Of course she wants this to work. It would be ridiculous after everything she’d gone through to not try now that she was here.

Hecrux pulls open the Dungeon Layout menu, which turns out to be just the map, but with a toolbar off to one side. Basic tile, dirt tile, cobblestone tile, planted tile… Graverra had never once considered there might be so many types of ground to walk over. A good portion of it all seemed restricted to them; Either because they were location specific or had to do with traps or puzzles they had yet to unlock.

“Do we have to be some kind of cave?” Graverra asks after a bit of scrolling. Most of their walling options were still what the system deemed basic; A lot of what was supposed to look natural or abandoned or a combination of both.

Hecrux navigates them to a list of prefabricated dungeon sections, more expensive than a single tile, but with the walling and ceiling already tied to it, wound up saving them some mana in the long run… At least Graverra felt to have intuited.

“Not forever,” He explains while searching. “But the height of our domain still counts towards upkeep. Our best bet now would be to build our entrance as best we can with our current resources, let the mana regenerate, fill it, keep going like that room by room. With hallways and some attention paid to theming, I think we should manage ”

Graverra is listening, she swears, but she’s also catching on to the idea that maybe the more numerical aspects of the dungeon were better left to Hecrux. They really hadn’t gone over who was in charge of what yet, which she might try to find a chance to rectify soon, but she’s already certain her strengths are going to lie in making sure the dungeon stays cohesive.

“I want a castle…” She can’t help daydreaming out loud, leaning over the table now to keep scrolling through their options. “Oh, with a mote! We could fill it with piranas… And a shark! Those have actual skeletons, you know?”

Hecrux sighs. “I am familiar with the concept of fish, yes, Graverra.”

“Just checking.” She flashes a sheepish smile and settles back into her seat. “I assume you had some idea of what you’d do with my added benefits?”

“Yes, thank you.” The grimoire turns towards Hecrux and the map fills in as if drawn by some invisible quill and ink. From the entrance, a hallway runs, angling downward and taking a few jagged turns before letting out into not so much a proper room, as much as a pause in the descent - presumably to house their first line of defenses. It also served as a branching point for the path to split into two separate hallways for a bit, before both turned inwards and let out into a rather large room.

Construct 256 Dungeon Segments for 5,120 mana?

Y / N

“Oh!” Before the decision can be confirmed, Graverra jumps up in her seat again. “We can rearrange things after we’ve placed them, right? Or does that cost?”

Hecrux’s brow raises, for the moment interested in whatever the interruption was about to be. “It depends on what it is.”

“Well, if it doesn’t cost anything, and I don’t know what your plans are regarding mob placement, but… It’s more annoying, from an adventurer standpoint, to have to go up stairs rather than down. I don’t think you should change all of them, but here.”

Though she hadn’t actually done this sort of thing before, Graverra figures since it’s based on mana, it can’t be too much different from casting her spells. There’s a small gasp when she realizes she’s not sure she still can cast any of her necromancer’s spells, but determines to see about that after this. Instead, she focuses in on interfacing with the drawing in her grimoire.

There’s an odd headiness to it as she thinks she manages, physically feeling the proposed space even as she still sits at her table. That could get interesting…

Graverra places a steadying hand on her chair’s arm, then tries to zero in further on the set of stairs she wishes to change - the ones leading into the half room. With some metaphysical exertion on her part, she at least watches as the notes surrounding the schematics change, the arrow showing the direction of the stairs flipping before her eyes.

“Ha!” Graverra claps her hands together, for a moment not terribly embarrassed to be seen struggling with something. She’d have to practice more on her own, however. “I don’t think you should change the others, though maybe moving forward… You mean to put a mob there, don’t you? If they’re walking down into it, they have a chance to see it coming.”

“That is clever…” Hecrux muses while making the necessary adjustments to the rest of the map.

Construct 256 Dungeon Segments for 5,120 mana?

[Y] / N

Masonry Skill Line Unlocked

One Skill Point Allotted to Masonry

Hecrux squints at the news. “That’s not right.”

“Wouldn’t you have already had that skill?”

“No… Cores don’t need skill lines, they just need mana.” He almost sounds wounded by the idea that there might be more to it than just mana now. “Skill lines are for adventurers and common laborers.”

“Well, I couldn’t even touch masonry before.” Furnishing skills were the ones you focused on when you had made it as an adventurer; After all your combat skills had maxed, your armoring, provisioning, probably even alchemy, got filled out before you worried about furnishing. You had to be able to afford somewhere to furnish to begin with.

As far as Graverra was concerned, this was a luxury.

Hecrux growls to himself, and the room quivers with him. “This is your fault.”

“My fault?” With their surroundings rumbling like that, Graverra’s heart flutters. She really should have asked Estremon if primary cores could murder secondary cores.

“We’re beholden to your crafting systems as an adventurer.”

“How was I supposed to know that would happen?”

It takes the core a moment before admitting with some reluctance, “You wouldn’t… This changes things, though.”

The list beside the map switches then to more furnishings to set dress the dungeon, and the map focuses in on their main room. Graverra grips either arm of her chair as a sense of vertigo washes over her with the zooming in. She really was going to have to practice a lot of this on her own time, so’s not to look any stupider in front of Hecrux.

Place ‘Desecrated Archway’ in Room 1 for 175 mana?

[Y] / N

They both pause, but nothing else triggers.

“Alright then…” Hecrux continues to grumble his words as he continues through the list. Several matching pillars are selected, but not placed, while he returns to the tile list from before. On the map, a second level, overlooking the rest of the room like a balcony, is faintly sketched into place.

Place 7 ‘Desecrated Pillars’ and 8 tiles in Room 1 for 255 mana?

[Y] / N

Masonry Rank 5 Required!

The drawing fades from the map.

“You see? This is going to be a nightmare…”

Graverra stares down at her grimoire for a moment, chewing on her lip partially because she was trying to puzzle this out and also not at all comfortable with Hecrux being so upset about anything, but let alone something that was more or less her fault.

“Where do we even see skill lines? They weren’t on our sheets…”

“I didn’t think to look for anything like that, because dungeons shouldn’t have them.”

While he doesn’t seem to be looking, Graverra pulls a face at the excessive sulking. She reaches out to spin the grimoire around to face only her, and drawing on her experience of changing the map before, flips the page while trying to manifest some sort of skill line list.

Skills Crafting Cultivating Alchemy - 0 points Animal Husbandry - 0 points Fleshwarping - 7 points Monster Taming - 0 points Leather Craft - 0 points Horticulture - 0 points Masonry - 1 point Mana Mining - 0 points Metallurgy - 0 points Necromancy - 7 points Textiles - 0 points Woodworking - 0 points

Graverra gasps again, happy to have found where her necromancy had gone and the fact that she still had access to it. Though she had to agree with Hecrux now, if they were going to gain skills at the same rate as masonry, this would slow them down significantly.

Having paused in his sulking, Hecrux lifts his singular eye back to the page Graverra had conjured and groans again. “Don’t tell me we have to start breeding our own mobs…”

“It looks like if I summon them as my thralls we could work around that. Of course, I’d need the pieces first. Is that what fleshwarping is for?”

“It’s this.” A tentacle of pink, uneven flesh rose from the floor and plopped its end on the table for a moment before retreating into the floor. “I’m not sure we can raise that in the way you were hoping.”

Graverra gives that a nervous laugh and moves on. “Well, we can still spend mana on mobs. It just looks like we’ll have to do a decent job managing them before we can get any better ones…”

Hecrux hums doubtfully. “You finish set dressing, then we’ll see what a whole reserves get us in that regard later.”

Part of her feels she should have been a bit more bothered by the way he gave up like that, but Graverra’s eyes light up again at the prospect of dungeon building herself. She eagerly turns back to the map page and begins skimming through her options.

Things like greenery and vines cost practically fractions of mana and as she began placing tufts off moss or whole curtains of the stuff, she found it began working on their horticulture skill line as well.

Horticulture Skill Line Unlocked

One Skill Point Allotted to Horticulture

When she looks up to show Hecrux, she finds nothing but a slowly beating heart, the eye closed and presumably sleeping. She huffs to herself, reasoning that she guessed this bit of decorating seemed to drain on her, as had the change in stair direction, the entire rest of the dungeon, and using over half their reserves probably took it out of a core. And if he wasn’t going to be awake to tell her no…

Rename ‘Room 1’: Courtyard

It didn’t quite make sense with the tunnel at the beginning, but they could sort that out later. Graverra moves back to where the archways and pillars had come from, finding them a fountain for the center of the courtyard with crumbling tiers and a few bits of cut stone to hold back her bits of greenery. Actually getting it to run, she soon realizes, requires an actual cistern to be built under the dungeon and she didn’t even need the system to tell her that was a bit beyond her level at the moment. She still takes the opportunity to swap some of the floor tiles out for gravel instead of cobblestone.

And on the subject of under leveled… Graverra pulls back up the pillars Hecrux had selected and places them where he had wanted. Even without the balcony bits, they looked fine and could probably hide a decently sized mob when they got to that part.

With the addition of a few more crumbling castle stones, Graverra comes almost to the end of their mana reserves. She spends the last five on more plants to hang from the pillars and even if they wind up moving them in the future; it works towards their horticulture. Further down the list, she’d found the carnivorous plants and while they currently out ranked her, they would most certainly be one of her future non-negotiables.

After nearly going cross-eyed trying to zoom and move across the map, Graverra finally shuts her grimoire and takes the moment to yawn and stretch. So dungeon building did wear you out…

She hugs the book back to its usual place against her chest as she gets up from the table. “I’d move the bed in here, but…” She tells Hecrux, in the off chance he is still listening while sleeping because of some core difference she hadn’t learned yet, then returns to her chambers to sleep off the regeneration period.