His building spree went on through the night. He wondered about the lack of tiredness that he felt. He’d been awake for 14 days. He did not feel tired or even a little mentally exhausted. He finally decided to let it go. It was just one more difference between his old life and his new. Jake 10.2.

After mulling over his condition and then thinking about what he still needed to get done, he decided to create all the remaining loot patterns first, before actually creating any of the items he’d decided he needed to create. He had about 562 mana points left before his mana reset at midnight. At least he would have. After his siphoning was complete. He figured that he could at least get the loot patterns created before the clock reset and he had mana to spend on construction again. Plus it would give him something to do while he waited on his mana to recover.

The loot pattern creation space or pattern space as he’d started to call it rocked. It was essentially a void space, he couldn’t tell what the surrounding environment was either composed of or looked like. It existed outside of his perception.

The objects that he was attempting to create, however, stood out from this background. To use the baskets as an example, he’d been able to rotate them, look beneath them, examine anywhere he wanted.

It was like the object was the only thing that existed in the space. He could tell how much it would weigh, what it would feel like, smell like, the colors that it possessed on its skin, but nothing else. It was as if the space began and ended with the object.

It was fascinating and if he pushed his perception trying to view the surrounding environment, a little nauseating. He wasn’t sure how a small pink crystal could become nauseous but he succeeded. Fortunately, the feeling passed fairly quickly. He wasn’t sure how to respond to wanting to throw up but not even having a digestive tract. Maybe he could get his rat to throw up for him?

But the thing that he liked most about the pattern space was that before he spent any mana he could make changes to the patterns. It was like the ultimate expert system. For instance, when he’d started to create the baskets, the environment had created an Easter basket looking thing. Then he’d thought ‘laundry basket’ and it had re-created those white plastic baskets that you’d get from Target, only instead of plastic, it was a rattan-like material. But then, he’d guided the system to its the basket’s ultimate shape: higher sides, angle them, big strap, no, not a strap, a handle. And as he’d commented the shape in the pattern changed. Things like the width of the basket walls, the size of the rattan had mysteriously changed to accommodate his wishes and to preserve the integrity of the design.

He supposed that he could have created a laundry basket out of a few blades of dried grass. Created a non-functional, nonsensical design, but the pattern space, the loot creation space prevented that or at least made it difficult to achieve. For which he was very grateful. His dad had had a few choice comments over his tool-using ability in the past.

The small round tables he envisioned, he decided to create out of aspen because it was cheap, at least mana points-wise. It was more durable than balsa and should be quite a bit harder. He thought back to all the furniture patterns that he knew, and frankly was a little bit surprised at all the designs he had in his head.

He guessed that it had come from the ‘crystallization’ of his thought processes. At least that’s what he was calling the sudden improvement in his memory as well as the improvement in his calculating ability, his spatial awareness, the speed at which he was able to think things through, all the changes he’d noticed since he’d become a dungeon.

He opted to go with a small round table about 1/2 a meter tall with four legs. The tabletop was about ¾ of a meter in diameter. There were no screws in the table. The table was put together with dowels and glue. When he investigated by zooming in and focusing on the dowel construction and its parts, the glue turned out to be made from some animal’s hooves. Well, it would have been made out of some animal’s hooves if it weren’t being created out of mana.

When the table was smaller, there were no cross pieces in the center of the legs, but as the table grew in height, the legs thickened, grew stronger, then when the cross pieces appeared, the legs shrank and became more delicate.

He played with the table for a bit, growing it, shrinking it, changing the wood to balsa, to red oak, to black ash, to other woods that he knew he could create the table from before finally changing back to his original design, back to aspen.

He selected the pattern, paid the mana, and had a new table design he could create. He did the same thing with the rest of the items he needed to create.

The benches and bar tables he was able to design out of red oak even though he was unable to produce the material right now. He thought it interesting that he could produce plans for something that he couldn’t actually create, but decided it made sense. Dungeons were meant to spawn creativity, he thought. At least according to what that last message from the Bobs implied.

‘Come join us in our mystical realm, discover the wonders of crafting,... and then get your face eaten off!’ Black humor, he thought. Not helping staying human.

Everything could turn out to be something mystical and profound he discovered. The beds, for instance, were a prime example of that. His first queen-sized bed that he’d made had runes all over the frame. Literally all over the frame. Carved into it like they were decorations. He was surprised the bed wasn’t glowing.

There were runes for health, fertility, runes for concupiscence which he didn’t even really know was a word until his Runescripting skill translated it for them, then runes for deep sleep, easy awakening, healing, rejuvenation, regeneration, basically everything positive you’ve ever associated with climbing into bed and sleeping or climbing into bed with someone.

After spending about an hour examining the runes, his skill levels in Runescripting shot up to three. It was the first time he’d actually received levels in a skill without using the skill. But it made sense, he thought. He’d learned the viagra rune and the good sleep runes too. As well as learned a lot about how to use them. His ability to connect the runes and control their effects had increased quite a bit too. It was a lot like programming he thought, remembering back to his senior-level C+ class he’d taken in high school. He’d passed, but just barely squeaking out the A he was trying for. Or a combination of C+ and one of those electrical kits that you bought for your kids where they plugged in different components to learn about how to create circuits. His dad had bought him one when he was a kid. He wasn’t that interested, but his brother loved it.

He was stoked. He couldn’t wait to drop the ‘Iron Mace of Concupiscence’ or the ‘Eyedrops of Fertility’. ‘That was some artifact level shit right there,’ he thought. ‘If satyrs don’t exist on this planet yet, by God, he could create them! He couldn’t wait to design the ‘Steam Room of the Satyrs’. Maybe his human urges weren’t as buried as he thought. Step inside and leave your innocence behind. A party's party!’

He went ahead and made the bed pattern with all the runes on it. He understood that his mom had been offered a class like ‘pack leader’ or ‘pack alpha’ or something like it. It was hard translating Baxter-speak to human-speak sometimes. And doing it at a distance added that extra bit of difficulty. He guessed he was getting better at understanding dog body language. But anyway, if his mom was going to be the leader of the pack, well the bigger the pack, the greater the leader, he assumed. The fact that his mom might be a little too busy to worry about him or to attempt to control him had very little to do with it. The fact that the bed pattern cost more than the fire pit patterns told him that the runes were strong on this one.

After creating the ‘Queen Bed of Concupiscence’ pattern, he decided to create a more normal pattern. He thought bed, bronze frame, queen, runes for good sleep and easy awakening and got a cheaper bed pattern. It was a simple bronze frame. At first, he created both the mattress and the frame together as a single pattern, but then he decided to create the mattress and the frame separately. The fewer the materials, the less complex the pattern would be, he decided. And the less complex the pattern, the less mana he would be spending on the actual item. Solid, single material construction seemed to be the way to go.

He wound up with a simple bronze frame inscribed with the runes that he’d specified. It was not bad looking, he decided finally. It pulled from the old west or maybe the victorian era. He wasn’t really sure. It looked like a lot of the beds that he saw when he was looking for a bed back in the day on the internet, back before he started living in a closet in New York City.

It had a headboard and footboard both made of bronze pipes bent around with a panel in the center of both. There were some decorative flourishes on the pipes where they joined. He was fine with all that, even the height of the headboard until he realized that he either needed to create a box spring or make the mattress huge. He decided to make a big chunk of balsa wood to act as the box spring. It didn’t really matter that much to him. Balsa wood chunks had become cheap to him. Almost a negligible amount. Commodity pricing, he thought laughingly. Trying to sound like Jim Cramer.

He thought about drawing some more runes on it but figured that might be overkill. Not to mention frightening to those people that actually lifted the mattress up and saw them there.

“The dungeon’s trying to zap my nads! It’s out to kill us, I say.” He could almost hear the voices now. Better not.

He thought about it some more and realized that the box spring replacement would need to be created in the actual room. He didn’t think that the giant blocks of wood would fit through his halls.

It’s always something, he thought. He wondered briefly about the frames but then saw that like the bedframes you could buy from Ikea, the plans that he’d made had allowed for assembly and disassembly.

And actually, using the pattern space he could learn how to assemble and disassemble the bed frames. It was a bit like having an unnarrated YouTube video. One that showed you what you wanted to know without all the pointless talking.

He went ahead and created the box spring replacement for all the beds in the rooms. It added to his ‘Create Materials’ skill, but it didn’t make a difference on his rank or level. Judging by the time and the number of uses of the skill he'd put in since reaching level nine, there seemed to be a graduated scale to the skill points needed. The first rank was easy-ish, the second got hard, and, well, forget about the third.

It was too bad, he thought. He had visions of a mage leveling up to god knows how high just by casting the light spell. Although, he was able to adjust the skills costs down by using cheaper materials or making easier patterns. In short, gaining skill points while spending less mana, working smarter, not harder. Taking shortcuts as his dad would say, usually before he whacked him for trying to do it.

He thought about making a bunch of balsa wood marbles sometimes when he didn’t need to make anything or dig anywhere or create any monsters or, yeah, it’s not going to happen, is it? Too little time in the day. Too much to get done. Not enough mana!

But still, the idea was ok. It was just getting the time and the freedom to do it. He’d like to get his ‘Create Loot’ and ‘Create Materials’, heck, all his skills up to Rank nine. He figured that’s what the old and powerful dungeons that existed on some other planet where the system wasn’t brand new would have done by now. Heck, those planets might be one big dungeon. The sole survivor of the dungeon wars.

He also thought about spells and abilities. What spells could he make or invent or even just discover? He thought it might just be a little unfair a dungeon having the capability to cast spells. He figured that with his mana pool, he was already the equal of an archmage if that was even a thing. Thinking back to the brief glimpse he’d had of Hildi’s status sheet, it looked like their mana pools went up by gains in their statistics.

‘That can’t be right, can it?’ he thought. ‘There has to be some level modifier in there as well. Otherwise, humans and other non-dungeon sapients are nerfed to the max.’ He put it on his list to talk to Hildi about. ‘But then again,’ he thought, ‘this whole place has to exist on my mana. I still can’t complete my second floor let alone stock it up with monsters and plants and loot. Perhaps they aren’t nerfed as bad as I thought. At least they don’t have to run a dungeon off their mana.’

He’d created the queen bed patterns, now he just needed to create the full bed patterns. He went through his now familiar creation routine and wound up with a pattern he called the ‘Bronze Full Bed of Good Sleep’. It looked like the Queen-sized version except smaller.

It was late, almost 11 o’clock and he still had some patterns to create. Unfortunately, he could not afford to make all the remaining patterns. The toilets and showerheads were both going to need to be pretty heavy on the runes. That meant expensive. That is unless he wanted to put in a complete sewer system.

He thought about that for a while. On one hand, it was a sewer, so gross. But how many stories had he read where the MC got chased into the sewers. It’s almost a prerequisite for a fantasy world! But then his common sense came to the fore. Actually, he just channeled his inner dad and he realized that it was a stupid idea. ‘That’s what my dungeon’s for,’ he thought. ‘Underground adventures. I don’t need to create a sewer. What I need to do to finish this damn Motel 6!’

He’d received a couple of loot patterns for toilets when he’d cleaned up the mess that the giant rats had created. They’d pulled the toilets from their locations where the Bobs had set them during the Event and added them to the nest that they’d created.

He didn’t remember paying any mana for the patterns either. He guessed it was because they were not new patterns and were made of relatively uncomplicated materials. Although, he could sense that he wasn’t capable yet of creating ceramics.

One pattern was for a urinal and the other was for a toilet. They were both plumbed but that led him back to the sewers discussion. He’d already decided that he wasn’t going that route, so he attempted something that he had only briefly done once before when he was modifying the rats. He attempted to open the pattern using his ‘Pattern Modification’ skill.

The skill didn’t work. Or rather the pattern didn’t open in the same way that the rat pattern had opened for modification. He got a sense of rejection. He could sense now that the skill was only useful for modifying living things. He tested that the skill was still working by opening the pattern he’d received of an Oak Tree. It opened in the same way that he remembered it working before.

He stopped the process and shut down the skill before he went down the rabbit trail of designing a new Oak Tree. He didn’t remember being this scatterbrained before, but something about him seemed to have changed. He was interested in everything now. He had to focus to get even the simplest things done. His mind randomly thought about everything. Once again, he chalked it up to the changes that had been made to him. Jake 10.2.

He thought about it some more and then decided not to make it so complicated. He opened his pattern space and thought ‘toilet’. The old pattern of a toilet showed up.

‘Dumbass,’ he thought to himself. ‘Of course, it works this way. It allows you to create anything. Why would you need to change a pattern? It starts with a pattern that you know and allows you to change it. You only pay mana if you’ve made some changes. And then you wind up with a new pattern.’

He thought about what it was he wanted the toilet to do? Remove waste. Did he need water for that? No, he decided. He didn’t. It actually added stuff that he’d have to get rid of to the design. He wasn’t sure where all the stuff that was ‘disintegrated’ went, but he didn’t want to overload the capabilities. Plus it probably took additional energy to get rid of stuff. He wasn’t even sure how runes were powered. Were they permanent? Did they grow old and quit working? If so, how long did they last? Did the materials that they were carved in make a difference? So many questions.

So basically in his design, he needed a place to sit, something to catch the waste and something that the user could use to say when it was done. Like a handle. Although did he need to allow the user to signal when he was done to start removing the waste? He pictured his dad getting his butt washed like with a bidet and couldn’t help but crack up. No, he decided right then. No handle. No preparation. Just whoosh!

He changed the toilet design then. He got rid of the plumbing, got rid of the water tank, made the bowl a deeper ellipse, added a back and some arms to the toilet. He made the seat part of the bowl, removing the hinges that allowed it to be lifted. He added a small trough at the front to capture items that were put into the toilet that shouldn’t have been and would not be disintegrated.

He thought about materials, but unfortunately, he was still stuck using sandstone. It was his highest level of material that he could currently create. He thought that maybe one day he might make a diamond toilet. Or maybe a golden one. 'Take that Trump! Not a gilded one, but an actual golden toilet!'

But, sandstone could be made up of various grain sizes, of various materials, so he thought of white Carribean sands, smooth almost like flour and the toilet changed to look almost like it was created using porcelain. It turned out that porcelain and glass were creatable at about the same level. And he was still a long way from that level.

Then came the fun part, adding the runes, making the toilet functional. He wanted it to be clean, all the time. No question about that. This was not going to be an outhouse. Then comfortable, resizing to match the person’s body shape and size, then there was the bidet function.

‘Oh yes, take that dad,’ he thought. He didn’t want it to be water, but something like air that worked like water. He wanted it to be slightly invasive, picturing his dad’s face made him laugh out loud. He also wanted it to be thorough. To really do a bum clean! Again, picturing his dad’s face the first time he experienced the toilet made him roll with laughter.

Enough so that Baxter must have felt it and asked, “What do?”

“Nothing boy,” Jake answered. “Just having fun designing the toilets!”

The dog just sent back a sense of puzzlement and a feeling of back legs kicking dirt.

And then Jake thought about the trough to capture all the stuff that a child would throw down into the toilet. Or of capturing things like a cell phone that might accidentally fall into one. A place where things not meant to be flushed would be returned, cleaned.

‘And, odor capturing. Need the odors gone too,’ he thought. ‘And finally, safety. Didn’t want anything that wasn’t waste to get disappeared. No disintegrating a kid’s arms.’

He accepted all the changes he’d made to the toilet pattern and the points were massive. The pattern cost him 125 mana points. That was almost twice what he’d paid for the ‘Queen Bed of Concupiscence’. He looked the pattern over and saw that there were runes everywhere. Basically every non-bowl area of the toilet was covered in runes.

He started looking over the Runescripting and by the time that he came up for air about four hours later, his skill in Runescripting had risen another four levels. The Bobs knew their runes he thought. It felt like he was being given an advanced course in rune creation and manipulation.

He could barely comprehend the structure and the way that the runes interacted with each other. But he could sense the flow, the way the design worked together to achieve its ends. The groups of runes performed an action, each group capable of receiving input from other groups and returning a value, modifying an action.

And the actual containers of the groups worked as limiters or expanders of the actions. For instance, one group of runes was surrounded by three hair-thin lines, broken in different places. That set of lines, he thought, controlled how the runes contained within them eliminated, well waste. The lines controlled how the waste was eliminated, how it defined the contents of the action. ‘This is an ass, it does not get touched. This is waste, it gets eliminated.’ Looking over the lines he thought there were some subtleties to them that he didn't understand yet. He figured that he'd get there. He had the time.

It was fascinating. And he had no more time. It was now four in the morning, his mana had reset and he needed to make some toilets.