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.

Perkre nods. "That's the range of the fireball itself? How far back does someone have to be to be safe from the force?" he asks.

"I.... am less sure on that. Uh. Why don't I have you test with just one fireball diamond, from a definitely safe distance, and then you tell me how many you need for a proper battlefield that looks like it could have killed the raiding party?"

Perkre looks at the diamonds a little more cautiously, but scoops them into a pouch.

"That sounds fine. I'll try them out and let you know," he says. "How do you choose which one to detonate?"

Oh no. What is explosive safety. She is not qualified for this!! Who gave her explosives!! (It was her. She gave herself explosives, and it was perhaps a mistake.)

"With... those you don't, they all go up at once from the same trigger. So um. You absolutely have a pouch of horrible flaming death right there. With the one we are testing I will make another set. Of one. And think about how to reliably make little fireball diamonds that can be armed and have channels and some kind of safeties or something, because that is what a smart and clever dungeon who understands safety precautions would do."

Perkre carefully tucks the detonator into the same pouch as the diamonds it corresponds to, because it wouldn't do to get them mixed up. He's not going to press either detonator with the pouch strapped to his waist, though.

Kose thinks for a moment as Aestrix assembles the second set.

"Do you think you could replicate the 'triggers when another dungeon examines it' stuff?" she questions.

Yeah, Perkre is valid. She notices that he's not giving the explosive diamonds back though, which: also valid. Anyway here is his other, singular, explosive diamond and associated detonator. (This diamond is yellow, to differentiate, and she's put a little stripe of yellow on the detonator as well.)

"Absolutely! It might need some testing to get it right, but I'm not letting another dungeon show me up in magic item crafting, that would be silly."

"Once you have perfected it," Kose says, starting with the very necessary qualifier. "It might be nice to distribute explosive items that go off when exposed to another dungeon to people who want them."

"Oooo! Yes, excellent idea, thank you Kose. ... And yes, I. Need to have a higher barrier for giving out explosives. Uh, oops, sorry."

"If there's anyone who it would be fine to give untested explosives to, it's Perkre. He's too sensible to let it cause problems," she reassures, and then pauses for a moment.

"Well, if he doesn't get into one of his crafting moods, anyhow."

"At least you got in your practice with easily distracted experimental nerds before you got saddled with the friendly dungeon?" offers Aestrix, amused.

Kose tries to hide a smile, but eventually gives in and lets a grin spread across her face.

"Yeah, there is that," she agrees.

"So the explosions will helpfully delay how long the goblin caves takes to notice something is up, and you'll put together a perimeter to warn us of attacks," she summarizes. "But is there anything you can do for direct defense? I'm not even sure what that would mean, but things like making the village immune to fire, or enchanted walls, or something like that."

"Hmmmm. I could enchant things you make the village out of to be fireproof? Or make anti-fire charms that you hang places, that sounds more scalable. Walls... I'm not sure how I'd build them, but I've been thinking about a scaling shielding system. The plan was to have artifacts that connect to each other, and make a shield between them. That way you could put them where you want them. But it'd be really useful if it would only work in one direction, so - projectiles that go out, but are blocked coming in. But then that makes it more magical, which might mean it stands up less well to sustained damage, so... it's a tricky problem!" She hums again. ".... Maybe a mix of both? One-way projectile blocking windows, to shoot through, and then a literal actual wall that is enchanted?"

"Hmm."

Kose thinks for a moment.

"One way windows sound really useful, for sure. For actually building the walls, it's not that hard to set up a palisade — we don't have a complete one because the previous one burned down and we haven't harvested enough wood to put it back up — so maybe we could bring in the wood and you could enchant it as we build it."

She turns to stare thoughtfully out of Aestrix's entrance.

"I guess one thing I'm worried about with all these are durability. Items with constant effects instead of activated effects wear down really quickly, and I don't see how you could make the one-way windows work as an activated effect. Maybe you have more insight though, given everything else you've figured out about items."

"I might be able to manage it, but yeah, it'd be tricky. What I also don't want to happen is - when the magic frays off entirely, you get sent back to square one? That's why I also want to teach you how to make gunpowder, because if I die I don't want you all to be screwed. ... Hm, but one easy thing I can do is you bring me wood and I, uh, transmute it to something stronger and less flammable than wood. The problem there is that it'll be lossy, it'd be less like a thick wall and more like a thin and strong coating. .... But we can probably work with that. With a magic item for moving dirt to dig trenches and solidify the walls themselves."

"So, dig a trench and build up a mound on the inside, and then coat it with something strong? I can see that working. Do you know how much wood you'd need?" she asks.

"Not yet, sorry. I'll need to experiment with things to rearrange it into. The item for moving the dirt should come first, probably. ... Heh, I suppose I could also make little monsters to dig your trenches for you, but that's probably impractical."

Kose shakes her head. "Monsters pop immediately upon exiting the dungeon; we're not quite sure why. I think it's because they loose their connection to the earth."

"Huh. I wonder why. I will probably poke at that at some point, but the gleeful search for the answers to various magical mysteries should wait until after we've got you better defended. And possibly until that other dungeon's dead."