The daily grind of being a dungeon kept on. For some reason though, Jake didn’t get bored. It was like those times when he was writing and all the words just flowed and he didn’t notice time passing. Or as a kid mowing the lawn, the sun hot and bright, the lawn stretching out in front of him, square and waiting to be chopped down to size. And his mind turned off and he became one with his mower and the grass in front of it. In any case, his new ability to edit out the boredom of existence made the grind of boring out the dungeon bearable.

Siphon, Bore. Siphon, Bore. In this way the hours went by. After about five hours, he got another notification.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt ...

Skill Level Gained

Excavation (Boreing)

Rank: Bronze

Level 4

Choose:

Another meter3 of material removed Minus 5 mana to use skill

Once again, Jake said, “Option b, please,” and the box vanished. When he checked his status sheet he discovered the cost of Boring had dropped to 10 per four meters3.

10 hours went past and Baxter still had not come back. It was Ok though, he could sense the dog out at the edge of his awareness, adding additional space to his body. Of course, that was before his tunnel had broken through to the surface and he’d gone exploring. Jake couldn’t sense him anymore. Who knows, perhaps this is what Bob wanted him to do. Dig! Dig! Explore! At least it was in line with what Jake was doing, bore, bore.

He’d decided not to worry about the .25 of a meter3 at the side of the passageway. He was carving out a straight passage, 3X3 meters wide. That meant that the room he was in was a little wider than the passageway. It bothered him a little, but he wasn’t going to worry about it. He wasn’t. He’d made the decision and was going to stick to it. He was. For now.

Siphon, Bore. After another couple of hours, Baxter came back. Tired and muddy, he looked like he had a bit of blood on his mouth too.

“Baxter,” Jake said. “Do you have something to tell me?”

Baxter had been digging like a dog digs. Anything that looked interesting was the direction he dug in. East was pretty much a guideline that he’d pretty early on given up on.

Jake had advanced his tunnel about 28 meters down the corridor formed by his original 44-meter hole that he’d carved. He’d just made a bigger tunnel following the path created by the smaller tunnel he’d made earlier.

Baxter had left that tunnel behind about 10 meters in and started what appeared to be a winding circular approach to the surface. Jake had kept his senses on it and the dog both, but wasn’t worried too much about anything. After all, Baxter was now about 2 meters tall and 4 meters long. He didn’t think too much could bother the dog, even if there were monsters up there. The dog hit the surface about four hours before and vanished from Jake’s perception.

Baxter lay down and ducked his head, “Sorry Jake. East boring.”

“I know buddy! You just need to be careful, Ok?” Jake said.

“Ok,” Baxter replied.

“Did you find anything?” Jake asked.

“Found rats,” said Baxter. “Maybe humans. Not look.” Which meant, according to Jake’s budding ability to understand Baxter, that he’d gone to the surface, found some rats, had sensed the humans, but decided to leave them alone, at least for now.

Jake decided that he’d better talk to Baxter about humans. There’s a difference between going up to a bunch of humans as a golden retriever-sized Labradoodle and going up to a group of humans as a two-meter tall pitbull-looking dog. He didn’t want Baxter to have to defend himself when he was looking for an ear scratch.

“So you made it to the surface, yes?” Jake asked.

“Yes,” Baxter answered.

“Were you outside?” Jake asked.

“Nope, inside,” Baxter answered.

“What was inside?” Jake asked.

“Rats,” said Baxter.

“Did you eat some rats?” Jake asked, trying to account for the blood he could perceive on the dog’s muzzle.

“Yes,” said Baxter. “Tasty!”

Jake didn’t really have a response to that. Rats were rats. Anyone that lived in the City pretty much hated them. The idea of Baxter eating them would have kind of made his skin crawl if he’d still had skin. But, at the same time, any time something killed a rat was in his mind a time to celebrate.

“Where they big rats?” asked Jake.

“Yes,” said Baxter.

“How big?” asked Jake.

“Big,” answered Baxter.

Jake seriously was starting to wonder about the dog. Did he have a sense of humor? How long, if so, was he going to keep on pulling his leg? “Were they bigger than a pigeon?”

“Yes,” Baxter answered.

“Were they bigger than you used to be?” asked Jake.

This time it looked like the dog considered the question. It gave Jake pause to think about rats that big. He figured that mana he’d released into the building had to have done something. Now he knew what it had done.

“Same, same,” said Baxter. Jake was getting pretty good at interpreting the dog’s two-word answers. Same, same meant that the rats were about as big as a golden retriever.

“How many rats are there?” asked Jake.

“Many,” answered Baxter.

“As many the number of toes as you have on your black paw and red paw,” Jake asked. Thinking that the four toes of a dog would give him a numbering system of up to eight, but when he looked again at Baxter’s paws, he saw that the dewclaw had moved down closer to the pad of his foot and kind of rotated behind it to act a little like an opposable thumb. The dog had five toes, almost fingers, on his front paws.

“More,” said Baxter. “Nest.”

“Oh,” said Jake. ‘Great,’ he thought. ‘Just what I want, a rat’s nest right by my entrance. Especially a nest of giant rats.”

He had a thought then and before he could think it through, he asked Baxter. “Do you think you could bring me a rat?” Jake asked. It wasn’t his first choice for monsters, but he had to start somewhere, didn't he? It was also his first attempt to do normal dungeony things. Well, except for digging. Couldn’t get more vanilla dungeon than that.

“Want rat?” asked Baxter.

“Yes, please,” Jake said. “Alive.”

“Ok Jake,” Baxter said. “Get rat!” and he stood up and took off back through the tunnel he’d made.

‘I hope he doesn’t run into any people,’ Jake thought. ‘That would be a disaster. For the people.’

Jake went back to boring and siphoning. It had almost been twenty-four hours so he wasn’t surprised to see his mana reset as he finished up his first bore. He’d finished siphoning mana and had some in the tank. He wasn’t shocked to see that his mana only filled to his maximum amount of 310 rather than 310 + the 25 he’d just siphoned. He was a little disappointed, but not really surprised. Dungeons had it rough. Thinking of his mother and step-family he hoped that they had it better, but wouldn’t have bet money on it. He hoped that they at least got help files. Technical writers like help files. Even former technical writers that are now dungeons like help files.

Baxter came back about an hour and a half later, carrying in his mouth an extremely large, mostly dead rat.

“Here rat!” he said, proudly.

“You’re such a good boy, thank you so much! Thank you, Baxter. Thank you, you good boy you.”

Baxter looked pleased at the praise. “Why need?” he asked.

“I’m a dungeon," said Jake. "We, at least according to stories, can recreate monsters or things that die inside us. Well, maybe not humans, but monsters and animals.”

“Recreate me?” asked Baxter.

“I hope so,” Jake answered. “If you get in trouble, I’d like to be able to bring you back.”

“How know?” asked Baxter.

“I don’t know, Baxter. I hope we never have to find out.” Baxter seemed to think about that for a moment and then Jake saw him shake the question off. Baxter actually shook his head and then looked at the rat again.

“Rat die?” asked Baxter. “Need kill?” and he started toward the almost dead rat.

“Hang on,” said Jake. “Let me try to get ready. I’ll tell you when to kill it.” Jake had grown up in Oklahoma. He’d been deer hunting with his stepdad a couple of times, even bagged his limit both times, but hadn’t really enjoyed it. His stepdad and stepbrother were both much bigger hunters that he was. However, looking at the dying rat, he felt a surge of what felt like hunger toward it. He wasn’t sure what the feeling was, but he figured that it had something to do with his new dungeon body. 'Murder pit might be harder to avoid than he thought,' Jake mused.

He calmed himself and started to focus on the rat. It was bleeding from many bite marks where Baxter had bit it during their struggle. Its eyes closed. It wasn’t long for this world. Jake felt the rat’s blood draining onto his tunnel floor, he could both feel and hear the rat’s harsh, gasping final breaths. He could see the mana in the rat: green, a lot of grey, a fair amount of brown and a slightly larger amount of black. He figured the grey was from the fact that the rat was dying. Its mana turning from the other colors to the grey of death.

“Ok Baxter, now!” Jake said.

Baxter leaned forward toward the rat, opened his mighty jaws and shut them on the rat’s throat. Snap like a pair of hedge clippers snipping a branch. The rat’s head and torso separated cleanly and in that moment, Jake saw all the rat’s mana change to grey. He felt a desire to do something and reached out with his mana manipulation ability and somehow changed the swirling mana’s attributes back to green, brown and black. The mana dissipated in the air and he could watch the newly attributed mana swirling toward the exit tunnel of the room. The rat’s body turned crystalline, then gaseous, and finally was slowly pulled into the floor of the room.

The blood disappeared as well. There was nothing to show that a rat had been in the room a few seconds ago.

He got three notifications:

All right. Doing what needs to be done. Experience gained.

Ability Gained

Mana Cleaning

Elemental Sphere: All

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

Death comes for us all. You’ve discovered one of the reasons dungeons exist. You have the ability to change death mana back to other elemental states. Consciously or not, anything that dies within your bounds will have its mana cleaned and returned to its former state. This only works on mana. Dead is still dead.

He closed the first one and then this one popped up:

What’s a dungeon without monsters? A boring hole about 44 meters long, I’d say. And I didn’t mean digging there. Experience gained.

Ability Gained

Soul Patterning

Elemental Sphere: All

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

When death comes, you’re ready. Every non-sapient being that dies within your bounds, leaves a soul-print that you can use to re-create that being or a similar being as a part of your dungeon. PS, not their actual souls, just a copy.

After looking it over, he closed it and another notification immediately followed.

Bob damn it! You are taking so long to get anywhere. I swear! Don’t say I never gave you anything. And I don’t mean digging there. Experience gained.

Skill Gained.

Monster Creation

Elemental Sphere: All

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 25 per monster level created. Special abilities +.

Ability to create monsters and other life forms from raw mana. Monsters will obey the dungeon; however, they may not leave the dungeon bounds.

He wasn’t sure what he felt about the notifications, the abilities and the skill he’d received. He also wasn’t sure about his response to the dying rat. Something to think about he finally decided. Something to watch out for. He wasn’t ready yet to put something down on his list of racial imperatives, but he was getting closer to it. And it was one he wasn’t really comfortable with. He’d also figured out the quasi-divine part of his description. Anything that can make life has to be at least quasi-divine.

He looked over and Baxter had laid down, head pointing east through the hole he’d carved in the wall. Somehow just seeing him sleeping relaxed Jake. He was glad they were together. And it was time to get back to it. ‘This dungeon ain’t gonna dig itself,’ he thought, laughing at the voice he’d used to say it, Festus off of Gunsmoke.