"... done this how many times, Tanth?" a voice is saying.

Yarold feels as though something is wrong with his arms. Scratch that, as though something is wrong with his brain.

"I just worry, Kose. That last one ..." a different voice responds.

He lies still, letting the sensation wash over him -- the sensation of a room. It is old, and square, and stone.

"I'll be fine. You get out of here so I can wake it up," the first voice replies.

He listens to the sound of footsteps, and then he jerks to fuller alertness as though he just downed a cup of black tea.

He peers around himself, taking in more details of his environment. The stone is carved with symbols that he feels as though he ought to recognize. There is a woman clad in leaves standing over him, pale purple wings spread behind her.

"Hello!" she chirps, and puts a face to the voice he heard before.

"Are you ...?" he asks, although he doesn't know where the question is going. "Am I ...?"

Her smile remains painted across her face.

"You're a new dungeon, and I'm your dungeon fairy," she says, as though that explains anything.

"A dungeon ..." he murmurs, taking in the stone walls around him with a new understanding.

"Yes! And I'm here to guide you through becoming the best dungeon you can be!" she replies. "But I'm sure you must be disoriented. Let me know when you're feeling more settled, and I'll talk you through inspecting your domain."

Yarold tries to close his eyes, but he can't. Instead, he just lets his awareness of the room ... unfocus, a bit. He stays like that for a minute or so, before re-focusing and inspecting everything in greater detail.

There isn't much to see -- old stonework, covered with lichen. A spatter of rust stains the ground before the plinth on which he sits. His own form, a floating tetrahedron of brilliant blue spinning gently an inch or so above the stone. This feels right, although he is not yet used to a lack of limbs. The woman, smiling and watching him. She stands a little under two meters.

Her wings curl behind her, competing with the many rings she wears for the position of most striking part of her appearance. A mole sits by her left eye.

"Alright," he finally says. "I think I'm ready. What is the first step?"

He feels like he knows. He wants to stretch a limb he didn't used to have, as though uncurling after a long nap. He wants to extend his sight beyond his room, and take in the earth around them.

"If you direct your attention to a particular part of yourself, you should be able to examine it in more detail," she explains. "With practice, your perception of individuals and areas can become more acute. Try examining this necklace."

She holds out a necklace, dangling it from her hand on a long silver chain.

He focuses his attention as she described. In his mind, the necklace comes apart. At first it is a singular thing, and then it is a separate stone and setting. With more focus, he sees that it is a wrap of silver wire around a polished quartz stone, and he can see the individual stresses in the metal and the flecks of impurities that give the quartz its speckled appearance.

There is something else in the rock, though. A thing which is more like light than like stone, and more like an edict than either -- a bundle of cause-and-effect woven into the stone, trapped by the layers between refractive domains of the quartz.

He wants to look deeper, but even this passing glance has given him a headache, and he reluctantly zooms back out to consider the whole room again.

"I see," he says instead, letting his metaphorical eyes relax from the strain of considering the necklace. "What is that, trapped in the necklace?"

She tucks the necklace back between the leaves of her dress.

"That is magic! Dungeons can produce magic items and effects for various purposes. That one was a gift from one of the previous dungeons that I was partnered with," she explains. Her voice has the cadence of long practice, as though she has said these things many times before. "Part of my job is explaining magic to you, but that can wait. Now that you know how to examine things, you should learn how to claim territory."

"Try directing your attention through the door and up the corridor. Be sure to stop once you reach the surface," she warns.

He follows her direction. Pushing his attention through the doorway feels as though he is pressing against a curtain, or a bubble. This is the stretch he's been craving since he woke up. He lets himself expand; the resistance slowly grows as he makes his way up a roughly-dug corridor. The corridor slopes gently upwards over the course of about ten meters. There are wooden supports spaced along it to hold up the roof.

By the time the corridor terminates at a low stone lintel, he has to shove quite hard to push any farther. He holds it for a moment, and feels his attention ... settle, for lack of a better word. He turns back to the woman in his room, but he can still feel the corridor in the back of his mind.

"Alright, that seems straightforward enough," he says. "But, look, I feel like we're skipping some important parts. I'm Yarold. What's your name?"

An emotion flashes through her eyes too fast for him to catch. Anger, maybe, or panic.

"Oh! Of course, how silly of me," she replies. "I'm Kose. It's good to meet you."

"How did you come to be a dungeon fairy, Kose?" he asks, casting his attention back up the corridor. He examines the shovel marks in his walls and the boot prints on his floor.

"I just woke up beside my first dungeon," she replies with a cheerful tone. "Dungeon fairies are tied to our dungeons -- when it's time for us to move on, we wake up beside our next one."

"I see," he replies. "And you've lived in different dungeons your whole life?"

"I have," she affirms. "But that's enough about me -- we'll have plenty of time to get to know each other once everything is set up. There's one last thing we should talk about, now that you've claimed your first territory."

Yarold has never considered himself an unusually insightful man, but this whole situation strikes him as a little off. He idly compares Kose's shoes -- delicate leather sandals -- to the prints outside the door to his room, before returning his attention once more to his pedestal.

Kose hasn't been wrong about the way his new ... dungeon powers ... work, though. Stretching himself to add a new corridor felt right, in a way he cannot explain.

"Oh?" he asks. "What's that?"

"Monsters!" she responds. "Dungeons can do many things, but one of the most fundamental is summoning monsters. To the point where you'll probably start feeling a bit itchy if we don't take care of that soon."

Now that she mentions it, he does feel as though his corridor is missing something. Not urgently. It's missing something in the way that his apartment was missing something before his boyfriend picked up a set of watercolors for the hallway. The corridor is fine, but a gauntlet would be better.

"Alright," he agrees. "How does summoning monsters work, then?"

"Monsters are a kind of simulation of life," she explains. She fishes a stone out of her pocket and sets it on the floor in front of the door.

"To create a monster, you need to keep in mind all of its properties. How it will move, what it will do, how it attacks, and so on. And then you imprint those thoughts on an item to animate it. Eventually, you can make better monsters with better items, but you can use this stone to get started."

"I usually suggest that dungeons start with slimes. They have a consistent texture, simple movement, and a simple shape. Go ahead and give it a try, and don't be too discouraged if it takes several attempts to get the hang of it."

She settles crosslegged on the ground by Yarold's pillar to watch.

He spends a moment wondering why she would expect a new dungeon to be familiar with the idea of a slime. He knows them, from various pieces of fantasy media, but it can't be the case that all dungeons come from Earth originally, can it?

Well, maybe it does work like that. Who is he to say?

He focuses his attention on the stone, holding an image of a little green gumdrop slime in his mind's eye. He pushes the idea into the stone; the little jiggle as it hops, the way it clamps around things and then tries to digest them. He imagines it grabbing onto the leg of a stereotypical adventurer, wrapping itself around them and getting acid on their socks.

The idea doesn't want to catch, at first. He can feel the concept slipping away and back into imagination. He remembers the necklace Kose showed him, and focuses on the structure of the rock.

It is an ordinary stone -- an aggregate of various silicates and other minerals. He takes the image of the slime he's built up in his head, and wraps it around the inclusions in the material, tangling it between the grains of the rock. At first it doesn't want to stick, but it can't slip away as fast as he can twist it, imposing the idea onto the material.

Suddenly, the rock disappears from his senses with a popping sound. It is replaced by a little green slime, just as he had imagined it.

"Eek!" Kose exclaims, stumbling to her feet. "Wow, that was fast."

The slime hops towards her, and she quickly steps around the other side of Yarold's pillar, putting him between her and it.

"Uh, next up is telling your monsters where to patrol. If you examine it, you should feel that you still have a connection to it," she explains. "If you push the feeling of a new behavior into it, you can update its orders. Monsters are limited by their initial complexity -- slimes are kinda dumb -- but every monster can understand orders to guard an area."

Yarold finds himself wishing he had a way to take notes.

"Really, every monster?" he asks instead. "What's the dumbest possible monster?"

If you need 'better' items to make 'better' monsters, he probably can't find the smartest monster any time soon. But it's always good to know what the corner cases are.

"Oh! Uh, I'm not sure," Kose replies. "Slimes are pretty dumb. Oozes might be dumber? They can't even jump. It's sort of a hard question because something like a slime is already so simple that it's hard to make it simpler."

Yarold pulls a pebble from the wall of the corridor outside and starts thinking about what the simplest monster he could make would be. He decides to try for a simple cube that does not take any actions or react to any stimuli.

He starts to hold the image of the cube in his mind ...

And is interrupted by Kose. She is running (slowly) around his pedestal to keep away from the slime, which is still chasing her.

"Could you order the slime out into the corridor?" she asks, an undercurrent of tension in her voice. "Or at least tell it not to bother me?"

He sends the slime out into the hall, and returns to focusing on his cube-to-be. He performs the same mental motions that brought him the slime, enmeshing the idea of the cube into the pebble.

And with a pop, the pebble deforms into a featureless cube.

"You made an artifact?" Kose exclaims. "But I didn't explain ..."

"I mean, I suppose it might be an artifact," Yarold muses. "But I was trying to create the dumbest possible monster."

She picks the cube up, and turns it over in her hands.

"And you went with a tiny, immobile, non-acidic, rigid gelatinous cube?" she inquires.

Yarold would shrug if he still had shoulders.

"You must admit, it is hard to conceive of a monster dumber than that. Set it back down, please. I want to see if I can still tell it to guard an area."

She sets it down gently, and he orders it into the corridor with the slime.

If the cube feels inclined to guard the corridor, it doesn't show it.

It sits there, unresponsive.

"Well, that's pretty conclusive! Unless it just doesn't have a way to move? I'm not sure how you'd test that ..." he muses.

Kose fiddles with her rings.

"So you've figured out monsters," she states. "Maybe now is a good time to start talking about the purpose of dungeons, and then you can figure out monsters to put in your corridor."

He turns his attention from the cube back to her.

"Purpose?" he echos. He's felt ... weirdly okay with becoming a dungeon. He's pretty sure he died. But he certainly didn't agree to be responsible for anything here.

Still, it's always good to know what people expect from you.

"Dungeons and Adventurers grow together in a symbiotic relationship," she explains, slipping once more into a practiced rhythm. "Dungeons present tough-but-fair challenges to Adventurers, rewarding them with unique advantages and items, and in exchange the effort that Adventurers put forth to overcome a dungeon's challenges strengthen it."

"I see," he replies in the polite tone of an engineer trying to determine which parts of a client's request are sane. "What kind of challenges?"

"Monsters are traditional," she responds. "Although puzzles, mazes, and secret doors are also popular. A good dungeon has a mix of all of those, so that a team of Adventurers can rest physically while being challenged mentally, and vice versa. That makes their whole adventure more efficient."

"Well that seems straightforward enough. What kinds of rewards are best for attracting adventurers?" he asks, running his attention along his corridor. He doesn't have much 'stretch' left in him, for now, but he should be able to manage a pit trap or two ...

"Gold and gems are popular, but enchanted items are where dungeons really shine, because there's no other way to acquire them. Once you've gotten established, I recommend spending a lot of your time creating novel magical items. But until you've built up a little bit, gems are a good starting place. The previous dungeons I partnered with found it difficult to make gold without access to other materials, but they all found making diamonds fairly easy."

"Making diamonds?" he asks, mentally comparing pit-trap locations. "Not in the same way as monsters, surely, or you wouldn't have been surprised that I could make a cube."

"It's a different kind of making," she agrees. "Dungeons can make three kinds of things: monsters, in the manner you figured out, magic items, by imprinting magic into an existing thing, and mundane items."

She gestures at the cube.

"It's the same skill you used to pull the pebble for that one out of the wall, actually. And the same skill that you can use to re-arrange your interior once you've claimed more territory. Instead of pulling a pebble out of a wall, you can pull a gemstone out of the firmame..."

"Oh! Duh!" he interrupts her. He focuses his attention on a patch of air, bearing down until he can see the smallest parts. Then he pulls the carbon one way and the oxygen the other way. He bears down on the carbon, until it condenses in a tiny fleck of diamond.

"Wait! I didn't ..."

She trails off, and stares at the tiny glittering speck on the floor before Yarold's pedestal. She reaches out a hand to touch it, and then yanks it back.

"It's cold! What did you do!?" 

A delicate flower of frost grows around the diamond for a moment, before evaporating into the warm dungeon air.

"I just pulled the carbon from the air, the same way I pulled the pebble from the wall," he explains. He grabs the diamond in his attention, and floats it in the air, turning it over.

"It's not very much. I'm not sure whether I could scale that up to a reasonable size. I bet I could do better with some wood or coal to start with, or something like that."

Kose stares at him for a moment, saying nothing.

Eventually she shakes her head. "It's fine. Just ... warn me next time you're about to do something like that, okay?"

"Of course. I didn't know it would be so dramatic," he reassures her.

"... right. So as I was saying -- you can pull materials out of the firmament. Not the air. It should feel like trying to pull something out of nowhere. One of my partners likened it to pulling a rabbit out of a hat, without the hat."

She puts the lightest emphasis on 'partners', in a way he might not notice if he isn't paying attention.

"So ... what is the firmament?" he questions.

Kose waves a hand vaguely at the air around them. "The fundamental stuff that permeates the universe. Some people call it the Ætheric medium?"

"Hmm," Yarold hums doubtfully.

He focuses his attention again, this time not on the air, but on the space between it. And then, before he can think about it too hard, he pulls a diamond out of it.

It's like being out of breath, or like giving blood. The vitality he had, the energy that he used to claim his corridor, bleeds out into the shape of a thumb-sized diamond, which falls to the floor with a tinkle.

"Yes, like that!" Kose cheers, clapping her hands. "Well done."

He just tries to catch his metaphorical breath.

When he has recovered for a few minutes, he addresses her again.

"That sucked," he informs her.

"It gets easier with practice," she assures him. "And it also gets easier when you have more Adventurers challenging you to rebuild your strength."

Yarold silently decides that he is fabricating as few materials as possible out of firmament, and will get by just fine using existing atoms from the air and from the soil.

"So I had best get started luring them in," he concludes. "Let me go think about all this and populate my corridor."

She nods, and settles on the floor again to wait.

Alone with his thoughts for the first time since his sudden arrival, what Yarold wants is a notebook to scribble diagrams in.

He settles for using his fantastic new powers to amalgamate some pebbles into a sheet of stone buried in the wall of his corridor and scratching some notes into it.

This whole setup feels weird. Being a dungeon is fine -- although the powers are wonky -- but there's no way that things are exactly as Kose is presenting them. For one thing, she clearly doesn't actually understand what dungeons are doing, which is pretty suspicious for someone who claims to have worked with a bunch of them.

Although perhaps not all dungeons are from modern Earth? He could imagine a random historical peasant grabbed from before the industrial revolution describing things in terms of Æther.

Ultimately, he just doesn't have enough information.

He turns his thoughts to his corridor. He has three sources of information about what has happened to him: experimentation, Kose, and whatever information on the outside world he can get to walk in through his entrance.

He briefly considers whether he can build a camera obscura into one of the support pillars, and take an image of the outside better than his own limited awareness provides.

He glances at Kose, and decides to shelve that plan. If he looks like he's building out her suggested challenge, maybe he can pump her for more relevant information on the world outside.

He presses down on the floor of part of the corridor, claiming the space and simultaneously compacting the dirt. He can't push it quite as far as he would like to, but he can still make a mildly annoying pit trap. Six feet deep and five feet across, suitable for bothering the unwary.

He grabs another stone and imagines a very flat monster.

It's either a mimic, or a self-opening trapdoor, depending on how you look at it. He imagines it fitting tightly over the opening of the pit, and then shrinking into itself when someone stands fully on it, or when directed.

He installs it, and then makes sure it won't close itself when one of his other monsters runs over it.

He places the slime right near the entryway to the corridor, and tells it to jump on adventurers and then retreat over the pit trap if it gets wounded. He also, after a moment of thought, scatters loose dirt over the pit trap hatch, so that it's not quite as visible against the otherwise-monotonous floor.

And then he pauses, to figure out what else he should add to the corridor.

He imagines a group of people walking in through the door. Imagines the slime jumping at them, imagines them slashing at it until it flees, and then pursuing it to finish it off.

He decides that what he need is a ranged option, to sit behind the pit, and harry the adventurers. He briefly considers whether he could put together a compound bow, but he hasn't exactly done much experimentation with materials, and he's not sure he could make something to string it with.

Eventually, he settles on a sling. He goes with a skeleton, because those are easy to picture, and equips it with a sling. He doesn't want to make more materials the hard way, so the sling is also a monster, one that will bite an unauthorized user if they pick it up. He gives the skeleton a pouch full of stones pulled from the wall, and sets it up on the other side of the pit trap, with orders to fall back to his main room and keep harrying the attackers from a distance.

The whole setup is fairly simple. He could add more monsters, but he's not well-calibrated on how much force is reasonable here. He plays through his imagined invasion in his mind's eye again, trying to imagine how it will go, and any more complications he can add.

He's ideally looking for things that can have variable difficulty, so that he can adjust them to different circumstances on the fly.

He tells the pit trap monster to let the first person pass if there's a large group, to split them up. He carves holes in the wall for the slime to hide in, and then decides that's too obvious, so he changes the slime to have a rock on its head that it can use as a shield, or to close off the hole once it's hidden.

He fills all the holes with slimes, so that he can wake up a variable number as the fight progresses.

And then he realizes he's been having a failure of imagination.

He replaces the wooden tunnel supports with monsters. Monsters that will just sit there holding up the roof until he needs to trigger a collapse for some reason, at which point they will pull down the ceiling.

He floats the wood into his core room, and piles it up for later reprocessing. He's sure he can find a use for some good wood.

Kose starts as he brings in the wood.

"Did you remove the tunnel supports?" she asks, rushing to look down his corridor. She pauses, seeing all the supports where they used to be, and a single skeleton with a sling standing about half way down. It waves at her.

Yarold realizes that in his creative focus he failed to consider whether he wanted to keep knowledge of the tunnel support monsters to himself.

"I was just thinking about future expansions," he extemporizes. "It's easier to make matching stuff if you have something there to copy, and I'm expecting these tunnel supports to get scratched up once we start having fights in there."

She looks at him dubiously.

"Yes, well, Adventurers will be here sooner or later. You should probably focus on your one corridor for now, and then we can plan an expansion once we have more to work with."

Yarold is perfectly clear on who is doing the planning, here.

"Yes, certainly."

He looks back at the corridor with fresh eyes, and decides to add some visible slimes, and a second skeleton, this one equipped with a sword to defend the ranged skeleton as it falls back.

He tries to conduct another failure analysis -- imagining that this setup did fail, and trying to figure out why that might have happened -- but ultimately, he is still running pretty blind. He has no idea what adventurers will be like, whether they'll have physics-defying abilities of their own, what the consequences for failure even look like, how his monsters will respond to scenarios he hasn't pictured exactly, or anything like that.

He turns his attention back to Kose, finding her mumbling silently to herself and twisting one of her rings.

She snaps to attention before he can say anything, and stands with a stretch.

"So, ready for me to take a look?" she asks.

"Yes, please. I'm particularly interested in your assessment of how much of a challenge the monsters will be for a group of adventurers," he remarks.

"That's always difficult to tell," she replies, standing in the doorway to inspect the skeletons. "There is a lot about a monster that is difficult to see just from looking -- how well they move, how adaptably they react to the circumstances, etc. That said, two skeletons and three slimes is a decent starter challenge!"

She turns back to smile at his core.

"These monsters might go down pretty quickly, since they're just made around normal stones. I can walk you through making some higher-quality items to base future monsters on while we wait for the first Adventurers to show up."

"How long will that take, do you think?" he asks. "I mean, we have no idea how remote the entrance is. We might be off in the middle of the wilderness."

"Oh, it never takes long for Adventurers to show up once you're ready for them," she remarks, clasping her hands. "Anyways, lets talk about creating magic items. It's somewhat similar to creating monsters. The difference is that you're not imposing a new form or any complex behaviors on an item. Instead, you keep in mind a single, concrete effect that should happen in response to a specific activation method. I suggest starting off with a crystal that makes light when you squeeze it."

"Alright," he agrees. He grabs the diamond that he made earlier, and starts tangling the idea of glowing in response to a squeeze into it. Like piezoelectricity, he thinks. He wraps the concept around the planes of the crystal. When he feels as though it is thoroughly enmeshed, he hands it to Kose to test.

"Give that a squeeze, please," he asks.

She pinches the diamond between her fingers, and radiant white light spills out between them, casting rainbows around the room.

"Oh, well done!" she remarks. She stops squeezing it and then resumes squeezing it a few times, seeing how it responds to different amounts of force. "It's the same basic concept for other enchantments, just varying the trigger and the effect. Over time, you can get better at producing finely-honed effects or producing effects more efficiently."

"Thank you," Yarold says, accepting her compliment absently.

She described it as similar to making a monster, but as far as he can tell it's not just similar, it's the same thing, just applied differently. The same way that he can move a stone and make a diamond by dragging matter around, he can make a monster or an item.

He's not sure what that means, exactly. It raises a few questions, about the difference between monsters and items, and about why making the larger diamond was so qualitatively different from everything else he's done with his new powers.

He scratches some notes into his notetaking rock.

He probes her for more detail on artifact creation. She can list many examples of artifacts and how well they are received by adventurers, but she is less able to articulate additional details about making them. He nonetheless takes some detailed notes on different effects, and speculates about how they would best be expressed.

"You mentioned 'higher-quality' items a few times," he remarks. "Do you know what makes an item higher-quality with respect to magic?"

"There are some theories," Kose responds. "But I think the general consensus is that certain materials are inherently better, and that intricately detailed art is ..."

She's interrupted by a chiming noise, and turns to look down his hallway.

"Ooh, they must be here!" she exclaims.

A moment later Yarold feels an ... increase in pressure, is what he would call it. A sense that he is being crowded, or compressed, or perhaps inflated. It's difficult to describe. Not unpleasant, per se, but unexpected.

He focuses his attention down the hall, on the three figures who have just stepped past his threshold.

The leading figure is a young man, no older than 20 or so. He carries a long sword, already unsheathed. His hair is brown, and tied back out of his face.

"Slimes!" he exclaims, spotting the visible ones.

A slightly younger woman with a bandoleer of throwing daggers and a shortbow strapped to her back stands just behind him on his left. She has her hair cut short, and a pair of leather gloves with a stone inset in the back.

She steps around Timrat as far as she can, and readies a knife to throw.

The last member of the trio is an older gentleman with beard starting to show signs of age. He has a short-sword and scuffed leather armor. His eyes glance around the tunnel, checking it for any changes.

Yarold doesn't need to prompt his slimes to attack -- they are fully prepared to engage with the adventurers right away. The three visible ones hop up to the leading swordsman and lunge for his ankles.

"Gah!"

He deals them a clumsy swipe, unused to hacking at enemies no higher than his shin.

Pona lets loose her dagger, puncturing one slime and sending its acidic interior spilling across the floor. It makes a goopy recovery and does its best to retreat across the trapdoor, but it is too badly injured and looses cohesion.

When it can no longer hold together, it's fluid vanish, and the stone which Yarold used to make it drops to the floor.

"A stone?" she complains as she pulls out another dagger. "That's not exactly a useful drop."

"Young dungeons take time to make things worth fighting for, you know that," Thanth chides. "We're just checking it out."

The two remaining slimes have not stopped for witty banter. One was dealt a minor blow by Timrat's sword, and is retreating across the trapdoor. The other has managed to get into his shoe.

"Ow! Get it out!" he insists, shaking his leg to try and dislodge it.

"Stay calm. Just do it enough damage," Tanth councils. He reaches around to hold Timrat's leg steady, and then calmly slices into the slime with his sword. This slime disappears with a pop as well.

"Ah! The drops in my shoe," Timrat exclaims. He starts to bend over before Tanth pulls him back up.

"Hey! Pay attention," Tanth reprimands him. "The fight's not over."

Yarold's skeleton chooses that moment to hit Timrat with a stone from its sling, which would have hit him on the head had he continued bending.

"Like that," Tanth continues. "Pona, you get the last one. Then we can rush the skeleton."

She steps forward, pausing only to grab her discarded dagger, now clean of slime. She stalks up to the last slime and stabs it before it can jump at her. Then she moves to stand behind one of the support columns, so that the skeleton will have a harder time hitting her.

The skeleton tries its best anyway. It's not terribly fast or accurate with its sling, although Yarold can't say whether that's because it hasn't had much practice, or because his mental model of how to use a sling isn't as good as it could be.

He makes a note that he should try having the next generation of sling-monster be self-releasing, and see if that helps with accuracy.

Timrat and Tanth move up to join her. When Timrat is solidly positioned on top of the trapdoor, it snaps its door open, and he falls into the pit.

"Aaah!" he screams. He lands on his ankle at an odd angle, since he had been trying to take weight off of the rock in his shoe.

Kose whirls to look at Yarold's core. "What was that?" she exclaims.

"I added a pit trap," he explains. "It's a good way to break the adventurers up so that the skeleton doesn't have to deal with them all at once."

"It is certainly ... effective," Kose agrees. "It's usually a good idea to keep your dungeon fairy informed of the hazards present in your dungeon so that they can help point out synergies or flaws," she continues in a lightly reprimanding tone. "Is there anything in there, like spikes?"

The hole is not terribly big, so Timrat can easily reach the lip, which he grabs onto to try and pull himself out.

He's doing well until the wall-slime which Yarold left in the wall of the pit just under the trapdoor hits him in the face with its stone hat.

"Kakestrit!" he curses, one hand going reflexively to his nose, leaving him hanging from his other hand.

"Not really. I left a slime in there," Yarold replies. "He took out one of them pretty easily, though, so I don't think it will really bother him."

The wall-slime pulls itself back into its crevice before Timrat can make a grab for it.

"Are you okay in there, lad?" Tanth asks, stepping up to the edge of the hole and peeking in at him. Tanth is still careful to keep an eye on the Skeleton. It seems to be trying to land a hit on Pona, but its aim isn't very good and it's not willing to close to closer range.

"It hit my nose!" Timrat responds. "Uh, I mean there's another monster in the wall there," he continues, pointing.

Tanth eyes the location.

"I don't like this," he mutters to himself. "Pona, you hang on there for a minute while I get Timrat out of this hole and then we can regroup."

Yarold frowns internally as the skeleton's shot goes wide again. It seems as though it's erring too far to the left (towards the center of the corridor) for some reason. He's not sure why. He feels as though he's going to have to do a lot more experimentation to produce skeleton's with decent aim.

"Aim at the gentleman instead," he tells it.

Tanth crouches and tries to lever the wall-slime out of the wall with his shortsword. It pops out a moment later, and falls down onto Timrat, who crushes it against the wall before it can recover.

The skeleton hits him in the head. Tanth is slightly rattled, but his helmet takes the brunt of it. He grabs Timrat's arm, grunts, and stands, helping Timrat haul himself out.

Tanth and Timrat jump over the pit. Tanth deflects another bullet with his bracer, and they join Pona behind the cover of one of the tunnel supports.

"This is surprisingly sophisticated," he warns them. "The dungeon already has traps and ambush monsters, so we should be on our guard for any other tricks. I'm going to rush the skeleton. Timrat, you back me up. Pona, you watch our backs for any additional surprises."

After receiving a pair of nods, Tanth steps out from behind the pillar and charges the skeleton, which backpedals toward Yarold's core room. It hits him in the jaw with another stone.

Kose throws herself out of the doorway where she had been watching as the skeleton comes backwards into the room.

"I realize I didn't mention this, so it's totally on me, but it's generally a bad idea to let the fight get into your core room," she advises him, ducking behind his pillar. "Because fights can be messy, and you usually want to keep that away from your core."

"That makes sense," he replies. "But it's not like I have a lot of territory for the skeleton to retreat through, and it's very much a ranged monster."

Behind the adventurers, the wall-slimes have sensed an opportunity. About a third of them pop out of the wall, forming a five-slime-strong hopping phalanx to pursue the adventurers.

Tanth proves the point by shoulder checking the skeleton, and then following up with a sword-swipe to behead it. The skeleton disintegrates, spilling the rest of its bullets and letting the sling flutter to the ground.

He straightens up as Timrat follows him through the door.

Kose stands from her defensive crouch and absentmindedly brushes the leaves of her dress flat.

"Greetings, brave Adventurers," she starts to say, before being cut off by a cry from Pona.

"Guys? There's more slimes, and they have hats," she calls. One of her daggers lies behind them where it fell after skittering harmlessly off of the hat of the lead slime. She readies the other to throw, but the slimes' short stature makes trying to hit them below the hat more difficult than it looks.

"There's more?" Kose exclaims, before schooling her face. "I mean, uh, I'm afraid your challenge is not quite complete."

Tanth shoots her a dirty look before wheeling and running back out the door. He comes back alongside Pona, and aims a low swing at the leading slime.

"What? I mean, uh, ma'am," Timrat says, touching his forehead and turning to follow Tanth. As he steps up behind them, Tanth steps around to Pona's front in a practiced maneuver, to let them both face the slimes.

Timrat stabs one, making it blurble angrily and lunge for his shoe. He hops backwards and takes another swing, which it deflects with its hat.

Pona crouches, and uses the lower position to make a shot between the swordsmen. Her accuracy suffers a little, but she puts a dagger through the first slime on the left, popping it.

Tanth pops another, and then the remaining three are quickly mopped up. The adventurers warily check to see if any more are in evidence, but Yarold instructs the others to stay hidden. He wants to see where Kose was going with her aborted speech.

The adventurers tromp into the core room. Timrat discreetly bends to remove the stone from his shoe and wipe up some of the blood from his nose on a handkerchief. Tanth crosses his arms.

"Greetings, brave adventurers," Kose says, with just as much dignity as the first time. "You have faced the challenges of the dungeon, and you have overcome them. Allow me to present your final reward."

She hands Tanth the light-up stone that Yarold made.

He takes and nods gruffly. "It was a well-made challenge," he responds. "I look forward to being surprised by the dungeon's ingenuity again in the future."

Yarold remains silent, paying attention to the body language that Kose and Tanth display. After a long moment, Tanth nods his head. The others bow, and then they turn and file silently out of the core room.

As they leave, Yarold feels a sense of lightness, as though he might float away. He feels as though he could run a dozen miles, if he still had legs. He sweeps his attention along the corridor, restoring the expended monsters and closing the trapdoor.

He already feels as though he has so many ideas for improving their performance. His skeleton needs work, but it also needs armor. His trapdoor worked perfectly, but now he feels as though he can deepen its pit. First, though, he needs more than just a single, straight corridor. He needs storage space! Testing rooms!

"... Yarold. Yarold!" Kose calls, catching his attention. "That was great! Now that you've had your first challenge, we should talk about how it went and what future adventurers will expect, as well as plan your first expansion."

Yarold is deeply ambivalent about the prospect of sharing his planning with Kose, who he is by now pretty sure has some connection to the adventurers. He's still not sure what it is, though. Maybe they're paying her off for insider information about his dungeon? But he doesn't think she had any contact with them after she entered his core room for the first time until just now.

"Sure," he says, mentally bifurcating his plans. Some of them are obvious, and he might as well discuss them with her. The others? He's going to hold them in reserve. He has lots of ideas; he can afford to sacrifice a few while he works out more of what Kose is angling for.

He divides his attention between listening to Kose talk about difficulty standards and encounter balancing, and carving out a testing chamber above his core room to see which of his ideas actually work.

He tries many things. Monsters that act like fiberoptic cables! Monsters that are made out of acid! Monsters that are railguns, and servers, and fire suppression systems.

And he tests to see whether or not he can make a monster which looks exactly like his crystal.

He listens to Kose's descriptions, and he shares the least of his plans with her, and builds out a maze populated with skeletons under her watchful eye.

And eventually, she goes to sleep.

He drops his pedestal through the floor (gently, slowly), and replaces it with an identical pedestal and crystal monster. He moves his crystal through the floor, to a randomly selected spot under his maze. He builds his more lethal ideas into the walls, and creates a management process that can coordinate lethality levels between the different defenses (fail deadly).

And he documents it all thoroughly, and writes integration tests, and does end-to-end user testing with monsters that play at being human. He is an engineer, and he has his pride.

When Kose wakes up, he greets her cheerfully.

"Good morning!"

"Good mor—" she begins, before staring at his decoy crystal in alarm.

In a flash, she is on her feet, a spectral longbow made of rainbows in her hands. She aims through the walls and floor of the dungeon at the place where he has secreted his crystal, and she fires.

Yarold dies a second time.