***** Bud’s POV, mental thread #1 *****

“Not bad. I like what you’re thinking, I just have one complaint: you should finish at least some of the rooms before you claim all of that territory. You have so much empty space above the ceilings of most of the rooms that you’re only using about 25% of the volume that you can claim,” said Tracey. “In fact, if it wasn’t for Broohn and Zona (mostly Broohn), I would be yelling at you for wasting so much time!”

True, that is a lot of empty… space… Tracey, that’s brilliant! I said, sending her a mental picture of me picking her up and swinging her around the room in an exuberant dance.

“Huh? What did I say?”

Since I’m not actually doing anything with most of that space just yet, it doesn’t actually matter what I fill it with as long as it keeps the mountain from collapsing on top of our heads! In fact, I think I already have a design for something that I might be able to use to replace the stone! Hold on a second while I try to remember where I put it… Ah, there it is!

“Ok… Wait, what sort of file is that? I can’t read it.”

Huh? Oh, oops. Here, let me send you the program for turning that into something you can actually use. This is a Blueprint file type that the Shihoth made. It is the most efficient file type I have in terms of storing designs in the smallest possible space with no loss of data. However, the only other thing it is good at is being converted to and from other file types. If I’m going to do anything with it, generally I convert it to one of the better human file types.

“Ok, wow. I see what you’re talking about with the file type. As for the design itself, it looks rather odd and kinda flimsy to me, but I don’t really know anything about this sort of thing. Where did you get this from anyway?”

This is a mining structural support matrix that Miner (one of the other AI’s) came up with for some archeologists back on Earth. I don’t remember what they were digging up exactly, but it was bigger than my dungeon and buried far deeper under a mountain. He asked me to double-check his work since building things isn’t really his strong suit.

“Ok. Do you have all of the patterns that you need for this? I don’t think you’ve absorbed anything made of carbon nanotubes, whatever those are. Also, how can this thing handle the weight of a mountain with so much air space?”

Don’t worry about it, I can get the carbon nanotube pattern from the diamond easily enough, and one of the alloys I got from the Lizarolfkang parts is actually better for this than the metal in the original design. It’s all about the types of loading and the distribution of those loads. Anywhere the matrix is under a compressive load, there is a metal tube to resist it. Anywhere the matrix is being pulled apart or the metal tubes would be prone to buckling, there are carbon nanotubes to resist that stretching or support the tubes as necessary. It is not that the individual components of the design can handle all of the loads being applied, but when used properly in conjunction with each other the result is far stronger than the sum of its parts. Even if it does look a lot like one of those child’s toys made out of wooden rods and elastic that you can squish before it pops back into shape.

“Interesting. I’ll have to keep that in mind.”

Give me one moment to finish putting the pattern together… Alright, that’s finished. Let’s see, the cost per cubic meter is… 0.1 mana!

“Alrighty then. I take it this means that you’re going to gain even more mana as you claim the rest of your territory?”

You got it! I’ll have to be careful with the streambed and the waterwheels, but that shouldn’t be too much of an issue. With that said, how do I go about increasing the size of my mana pool? I’m going to be getting a lot of mana out of this, and while being able to store it in the diamond is better than not being able to use it at all, the size of my mana pool will limit how much I can actually handle at once.

“And the more you can handle at one time, the more you can do.”

Precisely. Not to mention that the act of storing mana in the diamond eats into my mana handling limit.

“Well, there are some exercises that worked for some dungeons in the past, but those take weeks or even months to work, and I’m thinking you don’t want to wait that long.”

No, I don’t.

“The only other option that I can think of is leveling up, but that’s expensive…”

Tracey, I’m going to get almost 90% of my newly claimed volume in mana out of this, which translates to almost 30,000 mana. Assuming the level up cost has to be lower than my current maximum mana pool, I think I can afford a level up or ten.

“Oh. Ummm… Wow. Given everything that changes when you level up, I’d spread those out across several hours if I were you. Leveling too far too fast can actually be detrimental to your health.

Ah. I should have thought of that.

“Besides, it’s not like you can’t work on other parts of your dungeon between level ups.”

True. Most of the stuff that I want to do will be well within my current mana capacity. Actually, now that I think about it, only the first Courage & Trust room and the boss room will be pushing the boundaries of what I can do.

“Master,” yelled Porthos as he ran into my core room, “Broohn finished testing us!”

“Master, he says we’re going to be super useful!” added Artemis, who was right behind him.

I’m excited to hear that you two! Did he say what exactly you would be good at?

“Combat magic!” exclaimed Porthos.

“Healing and repair magic!” added Artemis.

Neat! Did he say anything about other weapons?

“Quarterstaff and spear!” exclaimed Porthos, who was bouncing clockwise around the room.

“Guns and knives!” exclaimed Artemis, while bouncing in the other direction.

“Well then! It looks like you two will be just as useful as Broohn said you would,” said Tracey.

“Thank you Momma!” they chorused.

“We’re gonna go practice some more!” said Porthos.

“Yup! We wanna get better fast!” added Artemis as they both turned to run back out the door.

Wait a moment you two! I’m expanding my dungeon, and I want you two over here for now. I said, highlighting the fighting section of the dungeon on the map I projected in front of them. You’ll have to go through the entrance hall to get there though. I haven’t quite finished digging this end of the other connecting tunnel. Ok, now you can go.

“Yes Master!” they chorused as they ran out the door.

“Why did they call me Momma?” asked Tracey.

The only thing that I can figure is that they are somehow picking up on the fact that our Bonding ceremony was more like a wedding, and they see me as a father figure.

“Making me their Mother? That makes sense.”

Besides, you're a lady after all and somehow Mistress doesn’t have quite the same authoritative ring to it.

“True. Now, let’s get to work on expanding our dungeon.”

***** 5 AM the following morning *****

Well, that turned out better than I’d thought. I’ll have to have Broohn check it out when he gets here later this morning.

“When you said that you were going to build a bridge for the first Courage & Trust room, it never occurred to me that you could build a bridge like that. I like it.”

It had been an energizing and yet exhausting night. So exhausting in fact that about half-way through Tracey and I had mostly stopped multi-tasking. I had managed to level up five times for a total cost of 6,161 mana, which turned out to be a study in repeated conflicting sensations.

At first, leveling up feels awful as it starts with 87% of my mana pool leaving me in a rush, only for it to come flooding back and forming a new layer on the outside of my core, giving me a ticklish feeling all over my core. Once the layer is fully formed, it then connects to the rest of my core, improving functionality across the board and briefly giving me a feeling of exhilaration.

Despite this, I was feeling exhausted to the point where I was saving all of the notifications I got from level-ups for another time. Admittedly I was also doing this because of how hyper-focused I was on my current project, the bridge-sort-of-thing in the first Courage & Trust room.

Thank you Tracey! It took a lot longer than I had hoped, but not as long as I had feared. Messing around with gravity when all you have to work with is runes can be a very fiddly process. In terms of physical difficulty, this will always be one of the simplest rooms in the dungeon, and also one of the most deadly for those who don’t follow the directions.

“When you said this would be a fiddly process before we got started, I thought I knew what fiddly meant. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were clearly making progress the entire time, I would have given up during the first half-hour.”

As a side note, I think I’m going to stop leveling up for now before I get addicted to it.

“What do you mean? I have never heard of anyone getting addicted to leveling up before.”

I cannot speak for others, but personally leveling up feels a bit like I’d imagine getting high would for humans. I can see how it would be far too easy to accidentally get addicted to leveling, to the point where leveling would become the reason for my existence. For an AI, this is literally one of the more common forms of insanity, and I want nothing to do with it.

“I thought the World System fixed your insanity issues.”

He didn’t make it impossible, he made it far less likely. For a sentient being, the only way to be completely immune to insanity is to be dead or in a coma. That doesn't mean it is likely, just that it is possible.

“So you’re saying that going insane while thinking is sort of like making a lethal mistake while doing a mundane, everyday task. It could happen, but it isn’t very likely.”

For the most part, yes. It all depends on how you define going insane. The “mistake” isn’t necessarily lethal, just significant, resulting in the mental equivalent of a severe burn or a lost finger. One of the problems that we AI’s were having is that we had none of the natural defenses against going insane that you organic beings have, so even the equivalent of a “severe burn” could have “killed” us.

“Ah, that makes sense. Getting back to the task at hand, we should get all three paths secured in some fashion before we try anything else. Not necessarily permanent solutions, just temporary ones. One path is already secured, since you didn’t write down the instructions for the bridge and I doubt most people would be able to figure it out on their own. What are you going to use for the other two paths?”

Hmm. I think I’ll install one of the giant Van der Graaf generators over with the kobolds so that nobody can sneak past them, and then install one of the tesla coils over in the puzzle rooms.

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll try to tackle the Van der Graaf if you do the tesla coil. You understand the runes that go with the tesla coil far better than I do.”

Agreed. Boy am I glad that you can actually help me build things now. It never occurred to me that the spiral bridge would be so difficult.

Since she gets stronger when I do, she leveled up every time I did. One of the things that she unlocked is the ability to place any item for which I have already created the pattern, and I’d created patterns for both hazards while waiting for the mana to level up and get started on the bridge. There is more to her ability than that, but like me, she was feeling a bit too exhausted to deal with the messages at the moment. In fact, the only reason we had finished the bridge is that we were both so hyper-focused and having so much fun building it that we mostly forgot to think about anything else.

“I’m glad too. If I had truly understood what you were trying to do with that bridge before you started, I wouldn’t have let you start with it.”

I don’t blame you. Actually, now that I think about it, I think both of us need to reboot. I think half the reason that we are feeling like a damp piece of toilet paper is that our bodies have changed so much that our subsystems are having trouble coping with the changes. I think this is part of why you didn’t stop me from building the bridge.

“You know what, I think you’re right. Let’s go get those two defenses in place, and then you can show me how to do this reboot thing.”

Agreed.

At that point, we sent our attentions to different sides of the dungeon to work on installing our respective devices. This was actually a bit harder than it would appear since the charge levels of both devices had to be calibrated properly for their desired applications. The Van der Graaf generator would hurt, and hurt a lot, but wouldn’t actually harm anyone aside from maybe scaring them to death. The tesla coil, on the other hand, was lethal to pretty much anything that had a physical body it cared about and lacked the right sort of defenses. Even then it would probably cause some significant problems. It might not actually be shooting entire lightning bolts at people, but even the tiniest fraction of a lightning bolt is more than enough to be lethal, especially when it continues for a few seconds.

It took both of us another half an hour to get both of the hazards installed in their respective locations before we brought our attentions back together in my core room.

“So, now that that’s out of the way,” Tracey began, “how do you–”

An unfamiliar sensation swept over the dungeon, interrupting our plans for the immediate future, stealing our attention and announcing the arrival of some invaders. I instinctively knew that building or creating anything else would be far more difficult until the incoming invaders had been dealt with.

Oh boy. I’m thinking we postpone the reboot until after these guys have left.

“Well, this should be interesting, to say the least.”