PART FIVE

386 roared with frustration. "I'm a dungeon! It's my job to kill people! Is that really the extent of your amazing, visionary recommendation? Your breakthrough concept? Your generational idea is that I, a highly trained killing machine, should stop killing people?"

I've read some business articles in airplane magazines. I know how to handle these situations. "There's always some difficulty adjusting to a new paradigm, but once we get buy-in from all the stakeholders, we can synergise our competencies and achieve delta."

The dungeon core glowed and dimmed, glowed and dimmed, as though it was hyperventilating. "Go and get the hammers," he said.

I laughed. "386. Dude. I get why you're mad. I get that this is weird. But trust me, we can make this work. We'll have people coming in here, walking through your corridors, HAPPY TO BE HERE, giving you their mana all the while, having a lovely old time, and then they'll go home and tell their friends. Imagine a huge network of corridors just filled with people, all bustling to and fro. You're going to look like a giant ant farm."

The heavy breathing slowed just a little. "Happy to be here?"

"Right!" I said, starting to pace up and down the main corridor, gesticulating in time with my thoughts. "The first thing is to stop trying to kill everyone. If you want people to come, no more traps."

A horrified rasping gasp filled the air.

"No more traps, no more tentacles, no more... what's a monster that begins with T? No more pterodactyls."

The groaning stopped. When dealing with people like 386 you can interrupt their brain patterns by saying something wrong so that they have to correct you. "Begins with p," whispered 386. It was so faint that any other noise would have masked it, but of course the dungeon was utterly silent.

"Can you get some music in here?" I wondered.

386 said nothing, sulkily.

"Rule 3. You have to make a fair effort to follow my advice."

"That's rule 2. I am currently in discussions with the Engine to have our contract nullified. Please stand by. Ugh."

"He ruled against you already?"

"She ruled against justice. Against the natural order. She seems to think I should try your plan. Ugh."

"The Engine is female?"

"The Engine is a highly sophisticated set of checks and balances that sometimes chooses to present as female."

"Aight. So are you ready for phase one?"

"If it involves hammers, yes."

Numberwang

I wanted to dive right into making changes and implementing my plan, but I had to sort of take a time out to learn more about the actual mechanics of building and running a dungeon.

386 had 13 corridor tiles, each costing 0.1 mana point per day. Why did it cost MP just to have a corridor? Answer: infusing the impenetrable stone. As long as you paid the mana cost, the stone would be unbreakable. When dungeon cores were killed, this magical protection would leak out of the dungeon's walls, they would start to crumble, and the hallways would soon be overrun by rats, spiders, and worse.

The core chamber counted as 4 tiles. Lennie was free. So the total cost of the dungeon infrastructure was 1.7 MP per day.

The dungeon was absorbing a variable amount of mana from its contact with the ether. The exact amount varied depending on the Winds of Magic, which meant that mana rose and fell. This seemed like a down and dirty way for the developers to nerf (weaken) wizards whenever they wanted. Oh, wizards are overpowered in this battle? Oops, the Winds of Magic are barely blowing. You only get 80% mana today. Sucker!

Anyway, the average income from this 'ether' was 1.5 MP a day.

386 was losing 0.2 MP a day.

I brought up my in-vision calculator and knowing that the guy expected to die in 400 years, I did some math. "Have you got about 29,000 mana?" I was encouraged. It seemed like a lot!

"No," he said, "I've got 704."

I explained the math I'd done.

"Perhaps you should leave the maths to me," he said, extending the S on maths in a very passive aggressive way. Stupid American coders making everything British! Do it in Doubledell, sure, but this was Chicago. "You've done the basics right but as I get closer to zero MP the Engine will intervene to keep me alive. Most commonly it will 'gift' me some mana, or insert traps, or remove tiles. The equations involved are... challenging."

"You seem to enjoy doing math," I said.

"I do indeed enjoy... mathematicsssss. Don't forget that if you come into my dungeon I get about 4MP for the first hour, about 3MP for the second, and so on, trailing off exponentially."

We'd talked about that before. My character was level 4. A level 20 guy who stayed in the dungeon for an hour would give off 20MP. If you're saying 'oh in that case I bet wizards don't go into dungeons' then SNAP! I said the same thing. But heroes don't LOSE mana. They just sort of emit it, like body heat.

Something was bugging me. "Why would the Engine remove your tiles?"

"When someone asks a stupid question, the codex recommends allowing them the chance to answer it themselves."

Look who'd been reading the help files! So it wasn't just me doing extra-curricular homework. Interesting! Maybe 386 wanted to live, after all. The 5-minute warning flashed up. I focused. "Less tiles, less running cost. Got it. One last question for today. What traps can you build for 700 mana?"

Lennie scratched his head with the dagger. I could see him thinking, 'But I thought you said...'

386 perked right up. "So... I’ll be building traps after all? That blade trap down the corridor is 500 mana. A simple pit trap is 200, but it's only useful when combined with monsters. Do you want to hear how much it costs to summon a tentacle?"

"No. I'm going to come here for an hour a day to help you get some mana. I need you to cave in all the tiles beyond your core room. That broken trap is costing you mana, right? A little bit? Absorb it. Start saving up. We're going to put a new room by the entrance. And inside, we're going to build a new kind of trap. One that has never been seen before anywhere in the BetterVerse."

"Yes!" said 386. "A new kind of trap! I love it! Why didn't you say that in the first place? A new kind of trap. Ahahahahaha!"

And thus Part 5 ended with his villainous cackle.

I let him enjoy the moment. He was in for an unpleasant surprise.