Max went to his room and slept. Vera hadn’t really dealt with becoming a dungeon core. It all just happened suddenly. It had been like being kidnapped from her own personal heaven. She tried to avoid thinking about it by trying to solve problems and build things. The loss of a physical body hadn’t been too much of an issue. She had vague recollections of that happening to her before. The forest and caves she had built for herself were quite relaxing. She had the ability to go back to her playground but didn’t choose to use it. It was reassuring to know that it sat there ready for her to use. The best she could guess, she had been in the caverns for a day or three. It was hard to track time when she had no outside reference. She wanted a clock, but she had no idea how to build one. It might have been as simple for her to count out time, but that seemed unreliable. This was another thing she needed to ask Max.

Her core beat like a heart. The slowly strobing red light illuminated the walls with a red glow. The area outside of her influence, she presumed, should also be similarly lighted. It didn’t seem like a smart idea to stay in the middle of a cavern, just flashing lights. There had to be something safer she could do. Her thoughts of uncertainty returned, the rooms she created were more for a home not a fortress. She could tell that filling the rooms back in would be an issue. The loss of space meant that she would have less influence. With less influence, there would be less mana. She could fill in parts of the cavern and make some kind of maze. If she did that, she’d ruin the natural beauty of the cavern, besides that if she were going that route she might as well just go the full way and bury herself in rock. Vera never considered herself the type of person that would just shut herself away to stay hidden from any outside dangers. The last thought was something she would never consider seriously. There was something that had appealed to her. She could build a maze of sorts, but in order to do this, she needed to see if it was possible to move her core.

Vera loved to experiment with things. Creating her dungeon centipede gave her a thrill. There was a memory there, just below the surface. Vera didn’t have time to try to uncover it, she was busy. Objectively her core wasn’t too large, but something about the pillar of stone that formed around it seemed intimidating to her. This was her. She was looking at herself. If something happened while she moved the core she didn’t know what would happen. She tried selecting it like she had her various bugs. It was successful. She only had one option for her core. It was a single button that said Descend. She was unable to move. Attempting to use the button flashed a notification across her view.

>

Well that was anticlimactic she thought to herself.

The fear she had built up in her mind vanished. It seemed that, as a core, safeguards had been built in. Being a core was quite a strange experience over all. Had the system that allowed her to interact with the world been something built by Max, or The Laughing Man? Could she interact with the world without the system?

She felt her mind wandering and tried to focus on the problem at hand. The system told her that there wasn’t enough influence to move her core. This was a solvable problem. If her only option was to descend her core, she would probably have to see about constructing another level. She wouldn’t reorganize the rooms that she had built because she felt that the work she had already put in would have been wasted. There were four rooms currently. She hadn’t continued the work since Max returned with the materials. The doors didn’t scream ‘this is a prison’ to her. It was more like an underground monastery. The room at the entrance was the largest. The two smaller rooms were connected to it on opposite sides, while the fourth room was connected directly opposite of the entrance. Vera set about three hallways that bisected the middle room. The carving had been somewhat time consuming, but when she finished she was quite pleased with her work.

Max still hadn’t moved from his room. He was either sleeping or pretending to be asleep. Vera wanted to show off her new work, but didn’t want to wake him. She set to the next part of her plans for the underground monastery as she had started thinking of it. She started to carve individual cells along each side of the hallways. Each hallway would be lined with a total of ten cells. With each hallway she had carved that would bring her a total of sixty cells. That seemed like an appropriate number to her. This work, she found, had become a little tedious. She experimented with carving multiple cells at once, but found that it was more effective for her to work on them individually. There might come a time when that would change, but that time was not now.

When work completed on the cells she set about furnishing them with crude pieces of furniture that she fashioned from the rotted wood that Max had brought her earlier. Each cell contained a ruined bed frame, a decrepit chair as well as a small table for one. As she was constructing the furniture she found that she could alter her construction materials by lowering the quality. She was happy with this. Designing a dungeon with a theme seemed to scratch an itch she didn’t know she had. She attached doors to each cell’s doorway, some she fused the hinges shut with rust, others were broken in, littering the floor with shards of the decaying wood. It looked quite good, at least to her eyes. It was missing something though. The entrance was undecorated, and she had two rooms that were unused. That still wasn’t quite it. If she wanted the place to be believable, she needed further additions. Bathrooms! A kitchen! Food storage! A Library! The room ideas flooded her head and she set about working on these ideas. For the bathrooms, she carved 3 small alcoves at the end of each hallway, with a pit in the middle of each. She then set about carving a sewage line under the hallways that connected each bathroom. She had visions of running water flowing through to clean any waste. Was this too much? Vera pushed the thought aside. At the very least, the empty lines beneath the hallways were enough to get her some additional influence, and every bit helped. Max had brought her ruined weapons. That proved people were around. If they weren’t close, just the fact they existed proved there might be some kind of danger that she needed to protect herself from.

She couldn’t sense any water to connect to her sewage lines, but she’d ask Max later. For the toilet alcoves, she constructed simple doors that swung open and closed with a latch on the inside to prevent intruders. She left these in various states of disrepair, like the other things she had made for her monastery. The kitchen was next on her agenda. She used the room opposite of Max’s for the kitchen. Inside she carved stone grills topped with rusted iron grates. The stonework looked too new. She placed wood into each in an attempt to build a fire to create soot and ash that would give it that aged look, but all she could manage was neatly stacked piles of wood in each stone grill. She created stone ovens along the wall. To match the grills, but again found the same problem. There was no fire. She didn’t know how to make it. Well, that was wrong. She knew how to make it, but she couldn’t manifest it. This was probably a Max issue. With the kitchen done, she set about carving a connected room. In this she carved a channel in the ceiling and set about making wooden shelves along the walls. She set crudely made meat hooks into the ceiling and filled the shelves with wooden crates. Like the cells, everything was in varying states of decay. A thought crossed her mind. She looked into the kitchens. There weren’t any kitchen utensils. She hastily created a few large rusted woks and a series of spatulas and tongs. Everything was just as rusted as before. The kitchen seemed to be lacking more than just the utensils. Ventilation. In fact the whole monastery was lacking ventilation. She carved a series of ducts connecting each room in the monastery. For the kitchen she created vents to the cavern outside. Where the vents met the cavern she found that she had no influence and was surprised to see her mana pushing the boundary from the vent.

The next room she needed to make was the library. With the only room left that she could reasonably work on being Max’s room, she decided to hold off on working on it, as it might disturb him. She used some time to design some bookshelves that would go into the room as well as various track mounted ladders that would be built inside. It was going to be a rather well built library, something her imaginary monks would be proud of. She looked at the stairs leading to her underground monastery. They weren’t convincing. If they were so ancient the rough surface surely would be worn through the countless feet that walked across their surface. This was easy to do. She smoothed out the surface on the three steps that would be consistent with people using them to climb to enter the doorway. Next she placed a pile of wood by the steps, just for extra credibility.

Great. She was now mostly finished with her monastery. Now what? She didn’t have anything she could put in the cells. She couldn’t create any humans, nor any human skeletons. There was also a lack of books, or paper. She also found that cloth was lacking. What were monks without cloth robes? This was troublesome to her. She might be able to create skeletons, but they certainly wouldn’t be human. Could she make a new type of person? Or a new type of skeleton? It was possible, maybe. She thought about this a while. She really wanted to talk to Max, he seemed quite knowledgeable, albeit secretive. What kind of person lives in a cave? Maybe a lizard person. Max had killed one of those for her right? She opened her creature list and scrolled through it. Ah!

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She could work with the weird newt. The creature had large black eyes and it’s skin was pale white, with a pinkish tint. She decided the pinkish skin could be improved. There had to be some variation so she introduced a randomized pattern of colors that could appear on the face each spawned newt. She added frills like an axolotl’s gills behind the head. The gills were designed to be vestigial and colored to match the facial colors. She then raised a series of bumps underneath the eyes. She didn’t really have a reason for this, but she thought it looked cool. The newt was still small. With a few tweaks she started adding more muscle mass and added bone density. She worked on the hips and shoulders trying to mimic what she remembered from seeing a human skeleton. She also attempted to rework the brain to at least match what she remembered of a human brain. She couldn’t really tell if this would work or not. Would a minor monster core work on an advanced brain like this, or was a monster core just a replacement for a brain? Her dungeon centipede was a combination of both. The neurons seemed to interact with the monster core and vice versa. Why was she thinking about brains and neurons? Could she just magic the new creature to function as a being? She stared at the unfinished creature in her modification window. It looked cool at least. She’d have to wake Max. There were just too many things that she had questions about, and not enough answers.