While he was killing time waiting for daylight, assuming that the sun still rose, Jake went back to siphoning and boring. He hoped the sun still rose and set. He could tell finally by the brightening on the windows through his rat’s eye’s vision that it did, so that was a relief. It was about six or six-thirty in the morning, he judged based on the amount of light in the windows.

He kept the rat still in its corner and let the sun rise and the interior of the building lighten. It was a big squarish or rectangular building. All pretty much one space. There was a line of windows running down the wall next to which his rat crouched, hidden. The big black mass turned out to be a large pile of stuff, not organized, shoved together. It looked like what it was, a giant rat’s nest. Along the wall with the windows, there were two areas that looked like they had a purpose at one time. Foodservice? They didn’t seem to be functional now and it looked like the rats had been pulling things from them. Items small enough for them to move over and add to the bleak accumulation of goods they called home.

He wondered at the place, somehow it seemed familiar, but he couldn’t figure out from where he knew it. He had the rat study the inside of the room, but nothing that he could see triggered his sense of recognition. The place stayed maddeningly, tantalizingly familiar without breaching the barrier between the known and unknown. Somewhat past the big pile of junk, the rat’s eyes picked out a glowing light that appeared to have a key on it. Once again though, he didn’t recognize either the key or the gas pump-like structure attached to the light. It reminded him of an old gas pump from the early part of the last century. But why a building would have a working gas pump in it, raised even more questions in Jake’s mind. Plus it was the only light he had seen since the apocalypse.

He had the rat leave its new hiddey-hole and go toward the window that he’d watched Baxter jump through. The rat crept alongside the wall. He could feel the rat’s happiness declining, but somehow, his desires overwrote the rat’s instincts and it crept forward.

It reached the window and hunched up onto its back legs, put out its pink paws and used them to raise itself high enough that it could look out. There was no glass in the window. It saw grass and strange clumps of trees that looked like they would provide shelter from the weather to people trapped outside. The trees looked planted in two rows, and he thought that there might be a road or exit beyond the trees. The rat’s eyesight was not that good. But, he did notice that the clumps of trees and their grassy surrounds were in turn surrounded by what looked like the start of the woods.

He still had no idea what place this was and why it sparked some feeling of familiarity with him. He knew for a fact that he’d never seen anything like the outside before in his life, so he must be familiar with the inside.

He caused the rat to turn and look inside the room again. Nothing seemed familiar.

“Baxter!” he called out, not using the rat, but in the way that he communicated with the dog. Which until now he hadn’t realized that they hadn’t been "talk" talking. ‘Of course,’ he thought. ‘How can something without a body, a set of lungs, vocal cords talk? We must be doing something different.’

“Baxter!” he yelled again.

“Coming! Coming!” he heard back.

He had the rat look out the window again and saw the dog tugging and pulling a somewhat charred 8 meter-long snake. He had grabbed the snake by the throat behind the head. The snake's body writhed behind the dog and it had big tears in its skin, places where the scales were torn free.

The rat freaked out and before he could tell it to be calm it had fled back to its corner hiddey-hole and frozen in place. It still continued to watch the window though, so Jake decided to leave things be.

After about 10 minutes, Baxter backed into the window, tugging on something, the snake, which he began to pull through the window after him. His tail wagged and his claws dug into the limestone floor, leaving gouges and making a screeching noise.

“Monster!” he said proudly. “I bring! Present.”

The snake was still alive, if barely, and not happy, but it was coming with him regardless of whether it wanted to or not.

“Oh, good boy! Yes, you are!” Jake said. “What a good boy! Bring it into your tunnel and then you can kill it, Ok?”

The dog grunted and then said, “Ok,” and proceeded to drag the huge snake into the building and toward his hole into the room. After about another 10 minutes, he tugged the snake’s head inside his hole and promptly bit it off.

Jake got an immediate notification:

Good job. Experience gained.

Soul Pattern Gained

Giant Western Rat Snake

You have gained the soul pattern for a Giant Western Rat Snake.

He could tell from the information that he’d received that the snake was a juvenal and would have grown even bigger than it was. He also knew that it could climb and swim. The soul pattern was a little bit like getting a Wikipedia article downloaded into his brain, but at the same time, it was so much more. He could feel what the snake felt, what it liked, what it didn’t like (evidently large dogs were high on its list). Things like how it mated, how it ate, what it felt after both activities, he now knew. He received a download of the snake’s life, only abstracted. He didn’t receive this dead snake’s life, he got an almost idealized version of what this snake’s life should be.

And then the snake’s body turned crystalline, gaseous and then vanished. Jake reached out and changed the mana back to green, blue and brown without even thinking about it. Life, Water, and Earth.

Baxter sat back in the tunnel, and said, “Jake ate? Ate all? Baxter hungry!”

“I’m sorry boy,” Jake said. “It just seems to happen when something dies inside me. Maybe it only happens the first time something dies. Like if you brought over another rat, I bet it wouldn’t vanish. Well, I don’t know, it probably would vanish,” he said, rethinking the previous statement. If things vanished when they died in him the first time, they probably always would. Just another dungeon condition.

“Jake greedy!” said Baxter.

“That’s not true. It happens. Because I’m I dungeon. And, I’m pretty sure you don’t need to eat or drink anyway!”

“Baxter hungry!” denied Baxter vehemently. “So hungry!” he whined.

“Look at you!” Jake said. “You look like you need a treat! I can’t make treats,” he began, and then he stopped and thought about it. ‘Can I make a Loot treat?’

He thought about it, really trying to picture a giant drumstick, like something off of the Flintstones. He pictured the meat on it, red, marbled with fat, dripping with fresh blood. The thick bone that it was grown on. He finally reached for the mana and realized that he had only 25 mana points left. ‘I hope that’s enough,’ he thought right before he called the skill into being.

Two things happened, one, a giant red-meat drumstick appeared in front of Baxter, and, of course, he got another three notifications.

You’re still learning and I ain’t done being generous yet. But think, boy! Think! It can save you a world of hurt.

Mana replenished. +345 mana.

He wasn’t sure, but he thought that Bob had just made something bad go away. He’d had 25 mana points, so the gift of 345 mana looked like his maximum mana points minus 25. In other words, he’d somehow spent too much mana. It sounded like he needed to take his mana supply seriously.

Well that’s another freebie. You gotta have a pattern before you can create the loot. Well, it costs less mana that way. Remember everything costs, and if you can’t pay, BAD THINGS HAPPEN. Experience gained.

Skill Gained.

Loot Pattern Creation

Elemental Sphere: All

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

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

Ability to design loot from raw mana. Loot may be usable by monster. Special abilities, enchantments, blessings, curses, etc. may cost extra. No previous crafting skills required. However, skills and patterns may be used to reduce the loot’s cost.

Loot levels:

Bronze Copper Iron Silver / Wrought Iron Electrum Gold / Steel Platinum Mithril Orichalcum Adamantine Unobtanium

Then he opened the next notification and saw:

Loot Pattern Gained

Giant Red Meat Drumstick

You have gained the loot pattern for a giant red meat drumstick. Hmm! Ok, that’s a new one. What kinda Chick-Beast have you created? We’ll allow it since it’s for Baxter. Can’t have a hungry monster dog running around off his leash now, can we? Besides what are dungeons for except to bring new things into the world.

Baxter, of course, grabbed the drumstick and pulled it down the tunnel until he reached Jake’s original room and then proceeded to nosh of the bone. The thunderous sound of his jaws cracking the bone with loud snaps. He appeared happy.

Jake, after Bob’s last message, decided he needed to develop a mana cushion. He wasn’t sure how, yet, but he was tired of receiving the Bobs ‘explodey’ messages. He didn’t know what they meant, but he didn't want to find out. He figured in the meantime he’d create 100 mana that he’d never use. In the future, he could come up with a mana battery or something that he could store mana in to use when he unexpectedly needed it.

He paused he, waiting for the expected +1 to Wisdom, but, of course, he didn’t get it.

‘It sucks to not be an MC,’ he thought. ‘I bet if I were a human hero, I’d be getting +1’s to Intelligence for figuring out how to wipe my ass with no toilet paper. But, it still is better than the alternative.’ He had to assume that Bob had been telling the truth about the soul pool. He wasn’t quite ready to be recycled yet.

Baxter was happy and seemed like he was good to stay in for a while. He wasn’t sure how long daylight would be, but he’d rather have Baxter in the dungeon while it was light out. He didn’t want him to cause any problems or to be handled as a problem by the humans on the surface. Although, he wasn’t sure what they could do to the giant dog. But, humans being humans and with the addition of mana and Qi, he figured that they could take on the dog. It was better not to borrow tomorrow’s trouble today.

He looked at his mana and tried to decide what he wanted to do with it. He could make more rats or dig more tunnels, or even make more loot bones for Baxter. After thinking about it for a while, he decided that he’d make a room at the end of his first corridor. He needed to finish expanding the last few sections of the corridor to 52 meters.

He did it and then thought about the room he was going to build. What size did he want it to be? He figured it had to be at least double the size of the corridor or tunnel leading to it. Just because. He wondered what animal he was going to put into it, but decided to table that thought for the time being. After all, he only had two to choose from, well three. But they were all first level. What size is a first-level, giant snake? The size of a boa constrictor? The snake Baxter had brought back was higher leveled than that. Did he want a pond or something in there? Stalagmites or Stalactites? An altar? Maybe of a ‘67 caddy with a Bob standing at the hood holding his hand out to shake? Better not go there, he thought. So far the Bobs don’t want or need worship, I’m thinking we should try to keep it that way.

Finally, he decided to go with a 12-meter by 12-meter by 12-meter room. He didn’t know how to make doors yet, so he thought he’d make a 1.25-meter hole in the wall of the corridor and let them crawl in. Make it a reverse igloo thing. They have to crawl a meter through the rock and then it opens up. He could picture a ledge with a snake on it right over the tunnel’s mouth into the room. ‘So, wow, that means I’d need to Bore about 144*3 times,’ he thought. ‘More than that to get the igloo tunnel thing into the room. That’s a lotta mana. I’ve got 313 mana left. I said I wanted to create a mana pad.’ He couldn’t help himself. He laughed at the name doing his best Beevis laugh, ‘Hee, hee, hee, Stayfree Mana pads with FlexiWings.’

He quit laughing. The laugh was scary. And then he thought, ‘It’s odd what your mind comes up with when you’re a big rock at the bottom of a hole. Flesh humor.’ He felt grateful that he still retained the ability to laugh. ‘Not much to laugh about being stuck down here,’ he thought. ‘I need to add that to my list,’ he thought. ‘Be grateful! Laugh more.’ He’d read shortly before he wound up as a dungeon that gratitude was the key to happiness. ‘According to Wade, it’s girls with big tits,’ he thought. ‘But I’m not thinking about Wade anymore, and then, to prove it, spent some happy minutes picturing Wade’s demise at the teeth of a giant rat.

‘So, how about a 9x9x9 room?’ he thought, once he got back on track. ‘That means I’d only need to spend about 821 mana points. Big room? Little room? Both rooms are expensive. An 8x8x8 cubic meter room would be 640 mana points.’ He finally decided on the small room. 8x8x8 was going to take a long time anyway. The only good thing that he could see about the amounts things cost was as his skills leveled up, things cost less and were easier and faster to build. For instance, that 640 point 8x8X8 cubic meter room would have cost him 3200 mana points at just a day or so ago.

He did the little dime-sized connecting tunnel thing that he’d done on the first dig site since Baxter had finished off the bone and gone to sleep. He didn’t want to wake him up. Then he began to dig out the room. This time the dime-sized tunnel was about 2 meters long. It was about a meter high, a couple of meters from the end of the tunnel. Since he had some extra mana, he tried to do more than one Bore spell at once. Trying to get a group discount or something. Maybe another skill only for room-sized excavations. He tried hard to cast four at once and, and he got another notification.

This one’s all on you bud. Way to go. Experience gained.

Skill Gained.

Room Creation

Elemental Sphere: Earth

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 60 mana per 4x4x4 cubic meters removed.

Ability to remove matter to create room space.

He now had a 4x4x4 meter3 room at the end of the tunnel. Well, almost the end of the tunnel. It kind of stuck out past the end of his tunnel about two meters. So, one end of the room started where the dime-sized tunnel entered the room. And when he checked his status screen, he saw that he still had 252 mana points left. 60 points for the room and probably 1 point for the two-meter long dime-sized tunnel.

He looked over the room and decided that it was big enough. It was a respectable master bedroom size and he figured he could put in a giant snake without any problems.

Once again, he felt the urge to start making monsters. He thought that keeping from becoming a murder pit was going to be a little harder than he thought it was going to be. ‘Staying busy!’, he thought. ‘Just stay busy!’.

He looked over his floor. He decided that one corridor and a room could be legitimately called a floor. So he looked over the floor and thought, ‘What now? Do I keep on digging? Start throwing in monsters? Maybe some traps?’ And before he really thought about it, he made a 1x1x4 meter3 hole in the corridor, right before the dime-sized hole that led into the room where he was planning on making the entrance.

‘Definitely going to be harder not being a murder pit than I thought,’ Jake thought.

Of course, then he got a notification.

Murder pit. Check! Experience gained.

Skill Gained.

Trap Creation

Elemental Sphere: Earth

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 25 mana per trap level. Special abilities +

Ability to change matter to create trap space.

He examined the trap that he’d created. It was a hole 1x1x4 meters deep. At the bottom, it had an exceedingly concave base, perfect for causing the adventures who fell in it to break an ankle or leg when they attempted to land on the tilted surface.

‘Wow,’ he thought. ‘I’m both impressed and appalled. And, Bob’s right, I want to make more.’

He guessed that this was a level one trap. Slightly better than a hole in the ground. It should break the legs of whoever fell in it. Although, it really was just a hole in the ground.

He thought about filling in the trap but then decided to let it go. Evolution in action. If they were stupid enough to walk into a dungeon and not watch where they were walking, they deserved a broken leg.

He checked his mana and it was down to 227, so he was pretty sure that it was a level one trap. He was a little down because the original hole that he was going to make would have only cost him five mana points. He didn’t like paying 20 extra points for a curved trap base. He thought that he could do that with his mana skill, maybe even get a little bit of the cost knocked off because he was removing less material.

And so it went for the next week or so. Baxter kept out of sight of the humans upstairs. They explored the building and fought the rats, but didn’t discover the hole that led inside his bounds. Their numbers increased, the three of them joined up with a family and then another three people showed up. Jake was starting to get worried, but then they left. The main guy, the one with the two girls that had been here the longest, and the father of the family, came into the building the final day, took some blocky looking things out and, like that, they were gone.