Worthy Core

It's the next morning, and Xenia Worthy, Reincarnator Extraordinaire, is finally seeing the payoff for an evening's worth of 'mana exercises'. She apparently no longer needs to sleep, which is nice, but that doesn't mean she wasn't bored out of her non-existent skull. With instructions from Guy, the new dungeon has been learning the use of 'mana bait'. By focusing her efforts on expelling a certain amount of mana outside of her dungeon, with a certain kind of 'intent', it can be used as a sort of siren's call for people or creatures. Depending on the strength of her mana and the form of her intent, the stronger the effect would be, but it seems that at the moment Xenia has barely any mana at all - which is a good thing, frankly, as accidentally summoning a city's worth of people to her cave would probably end very badly for her.

Instead, with her barely-existent mana reserves and an intent of, at Guy's suggestion, 'vegetables', Xenia has managed to successfully attract...a bunny. Or a mountain hare, or something of the like - just because she has a new life as a nature reserve doesn't mean Xenia intends to start learning boring things like that, after all, a bunny is just a bunny. Seeing that the small creature has fully entered her cavern, sniffing around for non-existent plantlife, Xenia hops to her feet with a shout of success. "Whoo! Come into my parlor, said the sword to the bunny! Momma's gonna make herself a new fur coat!"

Guy, as usual, hovers forward to add some more clarifying information. "Remember, you can't just stomp the thing to bits. And all we currently have in the 'inventory' is stone. So, you need to - " Xenia shushes the floating screen.

"Yeah, yeah, I got it. I remember the shaping exercises from last night, this will be easy." Reaching up to the ceiling with one hand, Xenia focuses on a square spot of rock above the rabbit, carving it out into a heavy hammer to smush the animal flat. "Haha, take this! ...This! ...Guy, why is my smashy-rock stuck to the ceiling?"

Guy sighs, a sound Xenia seems to be hearing a lot of lately. "As I was going to say, you can't simply reshape the cave into big 'smashy rocks' to kill things with. It would be too easy - a dungeon core could simply collapse itself onto anyone that comes inside and that would be that. Instead, to keep things fair, while a dungeon can be smart its traps must be dumb - to an extent. The more powerful you are, the more complex or even 'alive' you can make your traps. But at the moment - your trap options are dumb. Generally speaking, you may use mana to create a trap trigger, and then create a mana link to the trap itself. As you can see here." Guy's display shifts into a short construction menu.

"Ugh, fine." Xenia points at the pressure plate option, and a construction spell forms in her mind, allowing her to place it where she desires. She does so, putting it almost right in front of the bunny, creating a very obvious square-shaped pressure plate near the cave's entrance. Fortunately, bunnies aren't very good at recognizing deathtraps, and it simply sniffs at it curiously as her spell changes into a 'link' spell, which she does to connect the plate to her previously-created 'smashy rock' dug out of the ceiling. A moment later the animal hops onto the plate, setting it off and causing a hundred pounds of stone to loudly smash to the floor. Xenia whoops in victory...until she notices the rock completely missed the rabbit, which scampered deeper into her cave.

"You, ah. May want to ensure your triggers and traps actually line up when you link them. Little hint."

"Whatever! Dammit! Pitfall!" Xenia readies another construction spell and, unable to simply place it under the hopping animal, settles for placing it down a foot ahead of its path. The bold bunny, again fearless of strange stone squares, hops directly on top of it - before falling out of sight into a hole. "Ha! Gotcha this time!" Xenia raises her arms in victory...only to freeze in place as the bunny sticks its head out of the hole. "...The hell? Guy, this thing's only eight friggin' inches deep!"

"Yes, well, higher level trap skills will increase the depth, or you could stack multiple in one location. Of course, adding stone spikes or something would also be a recommended step. As it is, well...it could perhaps break an ankle?"

Xenia growls and moves over to the intruding rabbit, which as if by some instinct decides now would be a good time to climb out of the hole and move on. "Shit! It's getting out! Tripwire! Plate! Plate! Plate!" Xenia hurls one construction spell after another in front of the now-panicking animal, making the chamber shake as rock after rock collapses to the ground. Finally, with one last crack and a squeak, the invader is finally laid low. "Gah! Fucking finally! Alright, let's see what that gives us, then let's clean up this friggin' mess before - " The dungeon master's thoughts are interrupted by a new sound coming from the cavern entrance.

Turning around, she spots a muscular young man in simple farmer's clothes peering inside, a torch held to one side. He says something in a language that Xenia's never heard before, but the intention seems fairly clear: a "Hello, is anyone in here?" With a gasp, Xenia turns to find Guy's screen.

"It's a hunk! Look at him! I thought that bait spell was only suppose to attract animals? We're not ready for company!" Guy seems to consider the situation.

"It's not specifically an animal-based spell. It's just that the required mana level corresponds to the level of soul 'complexity'. Which is to say, only the most simple-minded of creatures would have been drawn in by it."

Xenia squeals and runs over to the newcomer, who plainly doesn't see her virtual form. "Aaahhhh! Just like I like em! Big, strong, and dumb as an ox! Ahh, I need to clean up!" She turns to bring up her construction menu, but notices a disturbing message instead.

Xenia stares at the message, and takes a deep breath. "...Aw, shit."

Lundsen the Trapper is a simple man who leads a simple life. Living on the outskirts of the local village, he spends his day wandering the woods and mountains, laying traps to collect fur and meat, doing some fishing, and then checking his traps again in the evening. His life is made even more simple by the fact that his traps never catch anything, saving him the work of needing to actually skin or butcher any animals. Instead he mostly makes a living thanks to a generous helping of good luck, wherein he often finds items of value during his wandering - lost jewelry, ancient weapons, the occasional nugget of gold in the river by his usual fishing spot.

Today though, he's drawn by the scent of a different kind of treasure. The scent of...carrots. To be honest, he's not exactly sure what a carrot is supposed to smell like, but when he picked up the scent on his hike lower down the mountain, he knew there were some good ones up here. And Lundsen's not the type to pass up free food, after all, even fish get boring after a while. Fortunately the trail upward wasn't too difficult - certainly a bit out of the way of any of the usual paths, but not too far up the mountain, and without any overly treacherous paths required to reach it. There were even signs that someone had carved stairs into a few points long ago, though Lundsen didn't know anyone who would have done so.

That mystery however is set aside once he actually finds the cave entrance. Lighting a torch he carries for those times when he ends up hiking a little too late into the evening, he peers inside and finds a curious sight. A stone has collapsed to the floor not far ahead of him, but it has an oddly square shape to it, not the sort of thing he would expect from a cave-in. He did hear some noises on the way up, perhaps this had just collapsed? Could it be there was someone in here who was in trouble? "Hello? Is anyone in here? Do you need help?"

Carefully stepping into the cavern, Lundsen waves his torch up in the direction of the ceiling. Other than the oddly square holes the ceiling seems solid enough, and he turns his attention downward to see where the others landed. To his shock one is marked by a splatter of red blood, but as he rushes over to it, he notices a single rabbit's foot sticking out from underneath. Gingerly leaning over and pulling at it, the limb easily comes loose in his hand. "...Well, lucky rabbit's foot, huh? Not so lucky for the rabbit, I suppose. But what is this place?" Turning around again, he finally notices the over-sized pearl sitting in the center of the room. "...Well, that's better than a carrot..."

"Shit! Is he gonna crack me like an egg or something? Guy, what do I do? I've got no mana!" For their part Guy attempts to put on a calmer front, but ultimately doesn't come up with much in the way of helpful advice.

"Well, he doesn't have much in the way of tools on him, so I imagine he'll just loot you. Not that that's much better, of course - your mana won't regenerate outside of the dungeon borders, and I suppose eventually you're likely to get sold on to someone who will make use of your stored experience. A brand-new core like yourself wouldn't go for as much as most, of course, but you should still be worth quite the price."

"That's not really making me feel better, Guy! How do I stop him? The door's only - " As the man leans down and takes the core into his hands, a sudden sensation surges through Xenia's body. Her legs go weak, and she finds her virtual form faceplanted onto the rocky floor. As the man turns the core one way and the other, tossing it from hand to hand, Xenia feels as if she were aboard a boat in the middle of the mother of all hurricanes - her body rolls one way and the next, her sense of balance gone to the winds. As a representation of her mind and not an actual physical construct, this lack of balance seems to have very real effects as she briefly flies several feet to the left and then to the right. "...Dude. Don't...don't just yank a girl's pearl like that..."

Eventually the motion dies down a bit, but Xenia looks up in her horror to see that the man's apparently decided it's time to leave with his new prize. "No...wait, I just started this one, dammit, come back..."

The man doesn't notice, of course. Nor does he notice the bit of rocky debris in the way of his foot as he makes his way out, chipped from one of the many fallen stones. He does notice when his ankle suddenly gives out, causing him to plummet face-first towards the first heavy stone dug into the floor near the entrance. But soon after that, the man never notices anything again.

Climbing back to her unsteady feet, Xenia takes a moment to take a look at what happened. Blood marks the corner of the cracked stone, with the man's eyes left gazing at nothing from his even-more cracked skull. Awkwardly, a quiet voice escapes from her lips. "...Yay? We...did it?"

Instead of responding, Guy's screen shifts to a new message as the two corpses and the assorted stone wreckage melt into the dungeon floor.