It wasn’t long before I was in to see Dave. Blink was already in there eating piles of sugar. Sure she was the high priestess of Chaos, but that seemed like more of a reason for her to be hopped up on sugar than for her not to. The side of live worms, however, was what made me move past.

“Dave does the store have any katanas that I can buy?”

“Not under that name. Can you tell me what it looks like? I might can find something.”

“Can’t you read my mind?”

“Yeah, and we don’t have any. It just seems to help when I ask the questions and then act like I am looking. Most people don’t understand that I read all their surface thoughts so that I know what they are talking about. Yes, I also get all the interactions that you have ever had with a Dave as soon as you walk in the room.”

I replied. “Well that’s sad. Not that you read my mind but that I still can’t get a Katana. I am going to have to find someone to get one built and even then I am not sure it will be right.”

I ordered food and sat down far from Blink. There were just some food combos that I couldn’t do, and she had moved on from the pancakes with a side of worms to a syrup-covered grasshopper. She was pigging out in ways that I just couldn’t understand.

“Blink, we are going to take a good rest and then head up top and do a full sweep. With the number of orcs we saw on the other side I want to make sure we are okay before we head out.”

Around a mouth full of live grasshopper, Blink said, “Goods. Foods then Fights!”

I finished up and went out to the Dungeon heart. I pulled up the read file and selected “Targets” I figured the more I knew about dungeons overall, the better. If I was going to go claim the other one and use it as a source of income, I needed to know how things worked.

I would have called the Targets, Mobs. But that was just so that I would better understand what I was looking at. Targets were anything moving and attacking inside the dungeon. The light filled my brain with all sorts of info on what falls under a natural target and what would be a Dark One’s target. Training on both was needed as the natural might still attack. However, more effort was given to the Dark One’s targets. The learning pushed into my brain how I could cause the targets to act in different ways. I could select how challenging a level was, plus or minus two levels. I could put in bosses or change up the whole area.

If I ran across something new, the dungeon could make a copy of it. It would scan the brain of what was brought in, and from that, it would map out how it would act. There were some things, however, that wouldn’t ever show up as targets. For example, the world’s natural population of those who could worship would never be there. Also, other than the created troops of the Dark Ones, no other off-worlders could become targets.

I could, however, design a target out of my mind and place it in. The dungeon would help pick the level that the new creation would show up. We could tweak it some, but until it had enough combat, it wouldn’t know where a unique design should go.

When it was done with me, my brain once again felt like it had been put through the wringer. I needed to get my intelligence higher so that I could get through this stuff faster. So after that, I went down to the yurt. I was going to beat Blink this time and get a good bed. The Thicket wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t as great as the yurt.

I went to grab a beer only to remember that I had left it in the Thicket before the trip down. I didn’t need it. I was tired enough as it was to fall asleep, and so I crashed out good.

The next morning rolled around, and I headed up top. I hadn’t seen Blink in the morning, and she wasn’t talking with Dave, so I figured that she did the same as I had and racked out in the hammock. I wasn’t worried about her at all since she tended to sleep in stealth.

I popped out of the dungeon into my Thicket’s clearing. My plan was to go up into the room and use it as a lookout for a bit to see if I could see any problems from up top, and then if it looked safe, I would head out to make a circuit of my semi-claimed and secured area.

Before we left, I was going to put in a line of trees that could throw stone cubes. My idea was to just make one more and then buy them out of the dungeon. It would let me move things forward much faster. I could take a week in the dungeon just making cores, and it would only be seven hours in real time.

I ran up my stairs. I wanted to see if Blink was up there, and I needed to take a quick look around to see if there were any orcs. It had the best view of the upper valley, and so would be where I started my sweep.

I was in a good mood this morning. Great night’s sleep in the fall and breakfast that I didn’t have to fix. Provided that nothing bad was happening up above, the day would be good. I had just a couple of days left before I got to go find Lannah. With that thought, I opened my trap door and stepped into my room.

I felt a sharp pain on top of my head and then was falling toward the floor. When I next woke up, I was tied to my bed, and there was a woman staring at me. She was all of 5 feet 4 inches in height and could not have been more than about a hundred or hundred ten pounds.

Her hair was a deep brown, almost black, that was tied back in a ponytail and was mid-length down her back. Her face was thin, and she had round eyes that betrayed a scared and haggard appearance with dark bags under them. Her lips were pressed together into a tight smile. She had an effortless beauty if she cared for herself, but now her face was disheveled and dirty.

The dress that she was wearing was what I would think someone in a tavern would wear. It had a deep blue skirt and a front with a white shirt under it. It was much better made than anything I had, yet also appeared to be dirty and, in places, riped and very worn out. I took all of that in before a word was said. A word I would like to have said, yet I was at a double disadvantage in this matter. One, I had been clean, knocked out, and then tied up, and the other was that my short sword was in her hand.

With a clipped and angry yet also calm voice, she yelled at me as soon I opened my mouth. “What are you doing in my Treehouse? Are you here to hurt me? Did you follow me? Why did you attack me?”

Before I had a chance to answer any of the questions, she then pointed the sword at me and stated flatly, “if you even think about hurting me, then I’ll kill you with your own sword and toss you off the cliff down on that camp below and let them deal with your body.’

I took a breath after being hit with her tirade and simply asked, “Your tree house?”

“Yes mine!” She snapped.

“I built it and so I would like to know who you’re and why you attacked me in my room.” I bit back at her.

She waved the sword around and said, “I have been here for several days and never once saw anyone else!”

Looking at the point of the sword as she waved it around, I knew that I was dealing with someone without a clue on how to use a weapon which was both good because that meant that she was less likely to kill me and bad because she was more likely to hurt me. So I tried to keep my reply calm as I didn’t want to get cut by an over-excited squatter.

Speaking softly and trying to slowly fall back on my de-escalation phone call training, I said, “I have been out on a trip for a while and got back recently and was coming to check on things. I wanted to come up and have a look to make sure the woods were safe since I had a run in with some orcs yesterday.”

She stopped waving the sword and pointed it back at me again with an accusing sneer; she asked, “then why did you come charging in if you were coming home? It seemed more like you were coming up to attack!”

I gulped at my sword being just inches from my face. I didn’t know if she knew that it was magical and what it would do to me if she hit me. Then, speaking softly, I murmured, “If I would attack I would have had a weapon out.”

She glared at me with a smirk on her face and leaned in close before speaking again, “what did you say? I could not hear you!”

“I said, that if I came to attack I would have had a weapon drawn,” I growled out.

She took a few steps back and dropped the tip of the sword down, and started to pace, talking to herself low enough that I could not hear. Finally, after a few minutes, she sat down in the chair and put the sword on the table. She sat there for a little while and then got up and walked over to me, muttering, “I suppose he is right.”

She stuck out her hand like she wanted to shake mine and said with a cheerful voice, “Hi I’m Kasidy and you have a nice place here! What’s your name?”

“I’m Arn and I would shake your hand but I seemed to have been knocked out and tied up,” I deadpanned.

* * *