Kose blinks, and then nods. "Of course. Everyone? Let's head out and give Aestrix some space," she commands, motivating the remaining people out the door.

She stops by the doorway.

"I wouldn't normally leave a new dungeon unsupervised, but I think you've more than earned our trust. If you need anything, or just to talk about it, feel free to ask me," she says, wiggling her communication pendant.

"And Aestrix ... Thank you."

She steps through the doorway and into the sun, and Aestrix is alone for the first time since she arrived.

"You're welcome. And thanks for your trust. I'll do my best to live up to it."

And then she's just going to. Chill for a bit, actually. No things required of her, no one's brains to model, no contingencies to plan for. Normally in this sort of circumstance she thinks she'd read or play some sort of mind-numbing game, but, well. She currently hates all of the games and puzzles she's already made, can't be bothered to try to figure out how to design something that would fulfill this very vague desire of hers, and also that sounds hard. So she'll just. Exist, for a bit. And try to let her thoughts form into something coherent instead of being a combination of ruthlessly efficient and unstoppably sweet and charming.

The first thing she coherently thinks, when she's thinking coherently again, is that... clearly this attack was dungeon sponsored. The timing was also very suspect; if she were an ordinary dungeon, she suspects this is when her village would be at its weakest. One of their best fighters would be distracted babysitting the dungeon, but they wouldn't have gotten any magical items out of that dungeon yet. And then instead, because she's amazing and brilliant and not at all an ordinary dungeon, all of the people that were sent to capture unwilling slaves are dead. Well, probably. Granted, some of them might still be alive, purely at the discretion of her humans, but either way, it would be extremely not what an enemy dungeon would have been expecting.

She attempts to figure out if she has some kind of emotion about the killing of people, all of which were almost certainly leveraged victims of an enemy dungeon, but mostly what's coming back is cold tactical assessments. She should probably see about assassinating the dungeon responsible sooner rather than later. She hopes that someone of the attack force is alive, not really for the sake of the preservation of life, but because she wants intelligence on the enemy dungeon. Furthermore, she is absolutely certain that the dungeon responsible is in fact her enemy, because, uh, sending what's essentially a slave army to capture shiny new slaves for dungeon power definitely isn't any friend of hers. She doesn't want to negotiate, she doesn't want to teach the poor sad dungeon how to love people, she doesn't want to attempt to navigate the likely delicate dungeon geopolitics at play, she wants a person that has almost certainly made quite a lot of other people suffer dead. Is it maybe a bit messed up to handle killing people by wanting to kill more people? Maybe, but she never said she wasn't, so. Probably she should wait to indulge her murderous tendencies for if her guess about their gear turns out to be correct or not.

... It does kind of hurt, that the humans she killed were almost certainly victims. Victims who were choosing to make other people suffer to presumably lessen their own suffering, but still. She pities them. It sucks that they're dead. But she doesn't regret her choices. ... Okay, while she doesn't regret killing them, she kind of regrets not having prepared better. But if wishes were fishes, no one would starve, or something. If there are more detailed feelings, they'll have to be shaken out over time. For now, this seems to be all she's got. Or, well, at least all she's cared to figure out before boredom and being antsy about the situation get to her.

"Hey, Kose. How are things going?" she asks, when she feels like she should engage with the world again.

"We've got the bodies sorted out. There were no survivors. If you're okay with company again, I can run up their enchanted items for you to take a look at. I've gone over them with the glasses, but I suspect you can get more out of them," she says.

"The houses were still pretty hot after you put the fires out, but they've cooled down now. We didn't lose too much because they were put out so quickly. Some people are working on re-thatching them."

She's quiet for a moment.

"They came from the goblin-caves. We get occasional raiding parties from that direction, but usually not such a bold strike."

"Yeah, I'm up for company, and I have a couple questions about their stuff anyway. Uh, mostly what struck me is that the timing seemed meant to strike when you were weakest? Normally you wouldn't have gotten anything out of your dungeon by now, yeah, but you would have still been held up babysitting. And you're one of the best fighters here."

Kose runs her fingers through her hair, not that Aestrix can see it.

"Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it's also pretty worrying, because it means we are being targeted specifically, not just as an attack of opportunity," she points out.

"No kidding. ... Is Tanth doing okay? And, uh, what were the casualties, was anybody taken?"

"Tanth is alright. We used your healing artifact on him, but he's still asleep — which makes sense, with a head injury. Actually, everyone who made it until the healing stone got to them is fine — no lingering injuries. Nobody was successfully taken, but we did lose Pona, Merdrek, and Sulfet. I'm not sure whether you had met those last two — they were two of the archers," she replies.

She steps through Aestrix's doorway, a heavy bag full of enchanted items over one shoulder.

"They had a lot of stuff on them — armor, helmets, swords, nets, fire-starters," she lists.

"Damn." Objectively speaking, though, three deaths in comparison to the carnage she wrought upon their enemies is a very good ratio. Just ultimately still not good. "Glad the healing artifact worked fine, though. Let me know if you need it topped up or another. Until then, let's see, what have we got..."

First, though: that leather armor. Is her horrible, horrible hunch about it correct?

No, the leather appears to be ... rabbit, probably? Lots of small patches of approximately rabbit size stitched together, anyhow, although she doesn't have a rabbit on hand for DNA comparison or anything like that.

Why the dungeon chose rabbit leather is a little hard to tell. Perhaps it's because the concept baked into it — something like turning quickly away from harm, or slipping through a briar patch unscratched — fits easily into it. There are also thin gold threads woven through the leather that have concepts of tripwire and a message conveyed over a long distance attached to them, although they're so fine and enclosed the humans probably wouldn't notice unless they looked very closely.

When she does look at them, the pressure of her regard is strong enough that they snap and fray, a whisper of message darting out of her entrance too quick to catch.

Son of a bitch. She hates it, but kind of admires it, too. Why did she have to have competent enemies! The worst!!!

"Tripwire to alert when a dungeon looks at them," she informs Kose. "Probably informing the dungeon responsible that it has been looked at. So, uh, fuck. At least my horrible hunch was wrong about the source of leather, so that's, uh. Nice I guess."

"Where did you think the leather ..." Kose begins to ask, and then blanches. "No, no. Dungeons keep animals, too — not because they're helpful to expanding their domain, but because you have to feed people something. And animals are generally easier to keep partially underground than plants, which need sunlight."

"Right. Can't say I'm sorry to have been wrong. ... I should be very careful about analyzing the rest of this, if there are tripwires like that in everything. One analysis of some armor is explicable - maybe someone comes in wearing it, I get a peek at some point - but if I systematically work through this pile right now, it'll be obvious that we're working together."

She nods. "That does make sense. Do you have any idea why the magic-seeing glasses didn't set it off, though?" she asks.

"Hmmm. I think there are two parts to it, the first is that it has something to do with the... weight of the attention?" She peers at the bit of gold that held the tripwire in the armor. "The glasses are passively relaying information, not doing anything to the item in particular. Whereas directly looking at it with my bullshit dungeon vision is, hm. ... I don't know a good equivalent, but it puts pressure on what I'm looking at. I might be able to get around it with very careful leveraging of magical items, just, uh. It'll be tricky, and I'll need to take it slow so as not to give the game away. I also expect that there just wasn't room to fit in a more robust set of triggers? This is delicate and specialized, and I imagine an enemy dungeon isn't expecting me to, you know. Empower and trust humans. What a silly thing to do, what kind of nut would want to do that. Better to prepare for things actually more likely."

The last part is, clearly, more than a little wry.

"I guess not being able to see what enchantments they've got on their equipment isn't too big a loss," she muses. "Since that wasn't really a possibility beforehand anyhow."

She sits in one of the chairs that was left against the wall.

"If they're making targeted attacks, we could really do with better defenses, though," she points out. "I know you didn't want to give out weapons, but after seeing you snuff out the fires like that ... I bet if we brought you some materials to enchant you could get us some much better defenses than I was imagining. I'm used to only really being able to get personal equipment, not so much artifacts that can cover the entire area of a house."

"Mhm! I'd be happy to enchant all of your equipment. I also think an artifact perimeter to notify when something comes within range would go a long way, too? No more surprises or ambushes. .... Heh. And I bet I can make it look much dumber and less sophisticated than it actually is, if I'm clever." What would that be, one major artifact to monitor the other ones? Yeeeeees, that'll likely work. "It'll need to be like the communication pendants, everything carefully mass produced to work the same way, so I'll want more materials to work with, but. This'll be fun."

"Do you know what materials would be best?" Kose asks. "It would be fairly easy to bring you raw materials like dirt, water, stone, etc., or to have Perkre get you metallic items. Oh! Or wood, of course. But with your ... diamond transmutation, I don't really know how to guess what raw materials you could use."

"Metals would be great, water would be appreciated, but I don't expect to weaponize it in particular, it's just useful to have around. Wood would be an excellent source for diamond, yes please. Other things like it... as a general rule, living things contain it in abundance? Things that have been burned, too, those should still have a lot of carbon, so feel free to use wood for cooking and then give me the ashes. .... I guess I could literally make weapons out of the ashes of our enemies, but that's uh. A little bit too psycho for me, thanks."

But the sentence 'ashes of our enemies' gives her an idea, which of course immediately derails this train of thought.

"... Oh! Actually hold on, we should make it look like you handled the attack without major dungeon interference, in case the goblin caves dungeon investigates. The most plausible way to me that you could have pulled it off seems like gigantic explosion?"

Kose nods slowly. "Yes, that's a good idea. It's possible we could have taken them out without it, but certainly not with so few losses, so an explosion would make sense."

"Right. Uh. Then let's get that set up sooner rather than later, Perkre is your explosives guy, yeah? I do not actually want to break anything you care about, I just want to trick an enemy dungeon into underestimating us all."

Kose gives her a lopsided grin. "I guess 'explosives guy' is one way to put it. I think working in the forge has given him a bit too much experience with fire."

She fishes out a communication pendant and sends a message down to the village asking them to tell Perkre his expertise is needed.

"Knew it! Man after my own heart..."

Meanwhile Aestrix will consider explosives and how to enchant them. She can probably pack an explosion into a diamond? Remote activated by a separate trigger. ... Probably multiple diamonds, if it's going to plausibly be a big enough explosion to have killed an entire raiding party. And maybe make it more like an explosive fireball than just a flat explosion. It seems straightforward enough to set them to all activate on the same signal.

The explosion/fireball diamonds are, of course, colored orange. The activator to blow them up is a palm sized bit of stone, with a cap covering the button. In order to activate, the cap must be pulled back and the button must be pressed, to potentially avoid any accidents.

A few minutes later, Perkre ducks through her door. "So what's this I hear about needing to make an explosion?" he asks. "Because I've been thinking about it, and I bet you can make pretty fine-ground flour if you don't have some magic to do it instead."

"Ooo! Flour would work great! .... We should not blow up valuable food stores, though, that's wasteful. Sulfur's more plentiful anyway, and that's just a hop, a skip, and a jump away from gunpowder. Which I will show you once I reverse engineer it from my bullshit dungeon knowledge. For now, though! Magic. These diamonds," creative, she knows, but look, carbon is everywhere, "will all remotely explode into fireballs upon activation with this activator. Range for fireball is about, mm, one meter diameter, or a little more than about three feet. ... I have no idea if those measurement units mean anything to you. This distance." She marks a circle on her floor to demonstrate.