Two snakes richer, the world looked like a safer place to Jake. He was ready to plan his next moves. And they all depended on security, safety, protection, call it what you will, it all means the same thing, Jake and his keep living. The dungeon part of him said, ‘and everyone else dies,’ but he’d already discounted those voices. So he ignored them and started thinking about what he could do.

‘Long term, it’s about utility,’ he thought. ‘If I don’t make myself useful to the humans I won’t survive. Hildi said it, “I’m a rock with powers”. I’m put here by the Bobs to do something. Something with mana, maybe something with humans. But one thing any monster movie should tell me is that if I’m not useful, not human-friendly, I’m toast. And given the way the Bobs are handicapping me, I’m toast in their eyes too. So I’ve got to make this place both useful to humans and at the same time, strong enough to survive the greed and anger that comes with them.’ With that thought, he started looking around his dungeon.

The first thought that came to his mind, exposed. He was too exposed. He was 20 meters from the surface in a small room, down a now well-lit corridor. ‘Problem one’, he thought. Once he thought about it, the dungeon side of him became restless. It didn’t like any hint of weakness. He felt the urge to create some more snakes, a bobcat or two, a pack of coyotes.

‘Ok,’ he thought, ‘get my core lower is the first step’. He wanted to keep planning but then thought of Hildi. ‘What would Hildi do?’ he asked himself and then immediately said, ‘Drop the core now!’

He considered his situation. He could actually focus on his diamond body now. After Hildi had pointed him out, he’d overcome the blindspot that prevented him from seeing himself. As Hildi had pointed out, he was pink. He was not happy about that but decided it was way down on the list of shit he had to worry about now. When he examined it, his core was somehow set into the wall of the dungeon. When he tried to move it, nothing happened.

He tried to remove stone around the diamond, to free it. He couldn’t. The stone was set in the wall. He then tried to remove stone behind his core, starting about a foot in the back of his core and was able to do so. He now had a little what looked like a saint’s cubby hole in a Catholic church only instead of the statue of the saint, there was his pink diamond body. The column was about 3 meters high, and the alcove that surrounded the column was about half a meter behind the column. His core still faced into the room. He wasn’t able to remove the stone that surrounded it, so the top of the column was flat with a little shelf on it in which he was inset.

He tried to shorten the column and was able to do so, dropping it down to 2 meters, but it felt like someone flushed every bit of perception that he had. He felt like a compass that had its magnetic north reset. Its needle spinning. After a few minutes, the feeling quit and his perception felt normal again. Different, but normal. The zero points on his axis had been reset.

He stopped then and thought about this for a while. While he was thinking, he went on shaping the stone. In the same way, he’d played with coins in his pocket back when he was human, he kept making changes to the column while he tried to figure out what he could do. He changed the stone of the column to a black basalt, then a white marble, then to alternating stripes of black and white, kind of like a barbershop pole.

He wondered if he could actually lower the room? If that would cause his perception to reset? He wondered if the bigger the change, the longer the dizziness would last.

“Baxter,” he said.

“Yes,” the dog answered.

“Where are you at?” he asked.

“Almost there. Girl home. She say,” the dog answered.

“Any problems?” he asked.

“Nope. Just dizzy,” the dog answered. “Almost fell. You do?”

“Yes,” Jake answered. “I was trying to move my core.”

“Hildi fall!” said the dog.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to. Let’s not tell her that I caused that, Ok?” asked Jake.

“Ok,” answered the dog. “Two snacks!”

Jake didn’t remember the dog having this mercantile streak before. But he figured that the dog was growing and nothing like new experiences to cause growth. “OK, deal,” he said. He also wondered about the dog answering his call. The range they could talk at had grown. Had Hildi’s presence helped? Maybe the dog was ignoring him before?

He started to say something to Hildi but then decided that he didn’t want to have to explain his part of the dizziness spell. He hoped she didn’t fall badly.

In the meantime, he’d changed the column completely to white marble and put the core on the front face, being careful not to move the core. Just creating the stone, reshaping the column, increasing the size of the alcove behind the column. He added a fan-shaped crown of marble above the core. It still looked a little bit plain, so he drew an outline of John Travolta from “Saturday Night Fever” dancing underneath the stone, with the core replacing John’s head. His mom was a huge Travolta fan. He’d had to watch all his movies several times, especially Grease.

He next thought that if he moved the room itself, it wouldn’t impact his little group, wouldn't cause vertigo. The bond must have some real-world strings that tied them all together. He wasn’t sure why his idea would work. He had no reason to suspect that it wouldn’t impact them, but it was at least something that he could try. He “cut” a razor-thin line in the rock surrounding the room, leaving the area underneath the column untouched. When he finished, there was a fine cut, almost a crack surrounding the room. He’d started the crack at the doorway, then ran it up the wall into the rock surrounding the room. He’d given himself a cushion of about a meter on the other three sides and the floor and the ceiling. The column itself was separated from the room, connected to the rock below.

He thought about the next step. Did he want to remove the stone surrounding the room? That seemed like a bad idea. Plummeting in a stone box didn’t seem that smart. Finally, he decided to create columns underneath the room, four, one for each of four imaginary quadrants he’d divided the room into. And one column that his core rested in that stuck up through the floor. He then planned to remove tiny layers of stone from each of the columns. Now, the only thing attached to the surrounding rock in the room was his core column. Everything else rested on the four columns.

He began removing the rock from the four columns holding up the room and his core column. All at the same time, all the same amount. He did it only for about a millimeter to start with. He did it once and didn’t feel the nausea return. He looked at the space at the top of the room that separated the room from the rock surrounding it and could see that the space had grown. Although he called what he was doing ‘removing or slicing or cutting’, it wasn’t that. When he removed stone, it was gone. As if it had never been. The same as when he removed blood and bodies, he guessed. Somehow, this minute process bypassed the vertigo, kept his senses focused. It must be like when a human dancer spins, they’re told to stare at a point to prevent dizziness. His maintaining the same distance within a familiar space, kept the spins away. Kept the perception problems muted.

Next, he tried two millimeters, success again. Then three, four, five, he jumped to ten and felt the vertigo return. Not the full-on attack that the first movement had caused, but a smaller case.

Just then, Baxter said, “Girl fall. Two snacks!”

Jake said, “Fine, I owe you two snacks.”

“No,” said Baxter. “Five snacks! You pay!” The or else was pretty obvious.

Jake had been also been testing the dog. If he couldn’t do math, well, he should learn. It could be considered a learning experience. And would save Jake mana and prevent an overweight dungeon monster. “Ok,” said Jake, quickly, “Five snacks!”

The crack between the upper bound of the room and the surrounding rock was now 23 millimeters. Jake sighed. It was going to take a long time. Fortunately, he didn’t get bored and the removal wasn’t costing him a lot of mana.

He started removing rock, five millimeters at a time. After he’d done this a couple of hundred times, he got the notification he was hoping he’d get. Hoping he’d get a lot earlier, but the Bobs move in mysterious ways.

Jump down turn around, remove a millimeter, jump down turn around, fall a little deeper, oh Bobby, you’re really moving, oh Bobby hope you have all day. You got some patience on you! Here you go, have a gift. We couldn’t bear to watch any more. We were taking bets, but none of us thought you’d keep it up this long! Experience gained.

Skill Gained

Move Core.

Elemental Sphere: Earth

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: Within dungeon bounds

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 25 per 1 meter moved.

Ability to relocate your core. Slowly. To cause the core and its attached room to move a meter in the selected direction. Inconsistencies will be resolved.

He wondered about the line ‘Inconsistencies will be resolved’ but didn’t even bother asking. He figured he discover what it meant in Bob’s good time. Or in other words, whenever it was least convenient and probably embarrassing.

He started to move, using the skill for the first time. And discovered what the line meant. The cracks surrounding the room disappeared as well as the columns underneath the room. The rock space over the room filled in. Now the room seemed to sit surrounded firmly by rock with a vent leading down to the room’s door. The vent was a simple square meter-sized hole that extended from the corridor down to level with the room’s floor outside the room. Currently, it was just two meters and about 23 millimeters long.

Jake was actually thankful for the skill, not enough to say so to the Bobs, but he did feel a little grateful. ‘Gratitude!’ he thought. ‘The key to happiness!’

Directly below him was an enormous kilometer-wide hole, four meters high. He wondered about dropping the room into it, but decided to rely on that line, ‘Inconsistencies will be resolved’. A four-meter drop is a pretty big inconsistency. He had this vision of the room supported on the back of turtles, ‘turtles all the way down,’ but kept using the skill.

After using the skill eight more times, he got a notification:

Prior planning prevents piss poor performance. Something to think about. Experience gained.

Skill Level Gained

Move Core

Rank: Bronze

Level 2

Choose:

Minus 1 mana to use skill

He started to get upset about the low mana decrease but then thought about how much time the skill had saved him and let the aggravation slide. “Option A,” he said. And didn’t bother to check his status sheet.

After another 25 uses of the skill, he got another notification:

At least you’re planning. Now. Experience gained.

Skill Level Gained

Move Core

Rank: Bronze

Level 3

Choose:

Minus 1 mana to use skill

“Option A,” he said. And kept on using the skill.

Sixtyseven more times brought another notification. He selected Option A again. One choice and the Bobs didn’t even smart off this time. Level Five.

After another 101 uses he finally figured out how the Bobs were going to resolve the inconsistency of having his room appear in the big hole he’d created making the second floor.

A column appeared underneath the room and his basically 239-meter pit trap that ended at the doorway, disappeared, leaving him with a hole into the room 23 cm high about 4 meters off of the ground. It felt like it might be a relatively safe place. Who would ever think to look inside the top portion of a 3.25 x 3.25-meter column that was in such a gigantic space?

It had also taken him about three and a half days to get the room down that far. He didn’t get bored per se. He was in the zone. A large part of the time he was waiting for his mana to refill. Even with his mind compartmentalized and one half siphoning mana, he kept running out. He’d tried to get both parts of his mind siphoning, but wasn’t able to get that to work. It seemed almost like he needed another skill for it and after he tried for an hour, he gave up. Maybe if he were ambidextrous in his human life he could have done it, but somehow, the two parts of his mind trying to do the same thing at the same time led to his whole mind doing it.

He and Baxter had several chats. He couldn’t reach Hildi. Baxter said that he didn’t know why he could now hear Jake so far. He swore that he couldn’t hear Jake outside of the tunnel pre-rat and outside of 100 meters post-rat. Well, actually, he said, “No hear. Rat hear. Not far,” from which Jake extrapolated that he didn’t know and couldn’t tell what happened to make the range they could hear each other increase.

During one of his breaks, waiting for his mana to fill up, Jake remembered that the collar the Bobs had given Baxter had said something about “Other abilities still discoverable.” He figured that he’d discovered one.

He wondered, assuming he could afford the mana if he could get Hildi to wear it? Somehow he doubted it.

"Hildi, here you go, a present. Its light will sure come in handy and it boosts our conversational range."

"Does that tag say, 'Hildi'?"

Maybe he could have Baxter ask. I bet he'd do it for two snacks.

The two-pack, as Jake had taken to calling them in his head, were doing fine. They had reached Billy. Gathered up some things from the house. Hildi had discovered that she had an inventory. Jake didn’t, although he did have a kilometer-sized room so he wasn’t too bitter. Anyhow, that discovery made packing up easier. She threw everything that she wanted to keep, such as photos which made it through the apocalypse intact, pans (somewhat intact, the metals seemed different), sheets and blankets and pillows (now with no polyester), silverware, into boxes (which used to be plastic crates in the garage) and stored them in her inventory.

Then she left a note in a place that she was sure her parents and sister would look, but that wasn’t obvious to someone who wasn’t a family member and went to my mom’s house.

This took a lot of two-word sentences to convey. But Jake had time while waiting for his mana to refill and was able to keep the dog snack bribes down to a minimum - 20 so far.

Then they left for Jake’s mother’s place. While on the way there, Billy and Hildi got their first experience when Baxter had to kill a couple of monsters, a Giant Skink and a Giant Earthworm.

Jake didn’t think the Earthworm should have existed. For one, it now had teeth. Earthworms didn’t have teeth in the old world. Its mouth, really a maw, again this took a lot of time to convey, looked like a drill. Three rotating, toothed parts that seemed to rotate independently of each other. It looked from what Jake could gather like an old, tri-cone drill bit from an oil drilling well. Except it was organic and wet. The worm seemed to drive it by water. Its lips surrounded the drilling part and seemed to suck back in the water driving the drilling part as well as the bits of food that the earthworm drilled. At the same time, stuff that wasn’t food sprayed out from its mouth. The process wasn’t instantaneous, so when the worm breached the surface, it was still spitting rocks and other stuff that it had drilled through. This acted as an AOE weapon against things that were in front of it. As if all that wasn’t enough of a reason for the worm not to exist, the worm was about eight meters long and about a meter across at the head.

The existence of the worm monster kind of blew one of Jake’s theories about the apocalypse out of the water. He was sure that monsters were giant forms of regular animals. Maybe with a really bad attitude. The worm made that impossible. He knew that worms didn’t have drill bits in their mouths before the apocalypse. The change was much bigger than he had thought.

Baxter said that Hildi was happy when she looked over her little bro’s status sheet. It turned out that Billy had a low constitution and vitality. Both of which she could have him raise and he’d be healthier. It also led to their first argument. Billy wanted to be a Mage/Alchemist. She wanted him to be a Cleric and a Fighter. Each class gave a bonus to one of the two low attributes. They still hadn’t resolved the argument before they arrived at Jake’s family’s home.