That's very sweet, but now is not the time. She is fine. She has to be. "Ask me again when I'm allowed to fall to pieces."

She runs through her mental checklist of things she should get done before that happens. Okay, survivors of the extremely one-sided battle delegated, searching for anyone left from either side, what else is a major priority after a large scale battle...? "... I need to pick up everything I used, don't I, I do not want an enemy dungeon to get their hands on any of that, one moment -" she switches back to the pendant. "Kose, I haven't found anything so far, I'm going to leave the search here in favor of picking up all of my weaponry so it can't be reverse-engineered."

"Ah, that's a good idea," she agrees. "I didn't realize that they left anything behind. We'll also want to send people to strip the magic items off of the bodies and have you inspect them, just in case."

"Will do, thanks." The bodies and their stupid leather armor and martial weapons. ... A horrible thought occurs to her. Nope nope nope nope nope not dealing with that right now that is extremely in the realm of not for right now. What is for right now is: "Let me know if I need to assist with the fires."

So, the convenient thing about using a very specific diamond lattice with very specific element composition that just so happens to turn the diamond black is that you can then make a magic item referring specifically to that exact composition of diamond. She figured this out with the communication pendants. This means it's pretty easy to slap a her-specific-black-diamond-lattice magnet-alike onto one of the two drones she called back, and then have it go whirring off to play cleanup. To the group of raiders that had Tanth first, that's closer to being recovered by enemy forces. Zippy zippy goes the little drone, can she maybe recover all of the diamonds she shot?

Yes, nothing interferes with her collecting the expended diamonds.

By the time she has sent out her drone, and Kose has reached the treeline, the men in the village have started a bucket chain. They're having relative success, but a fire-retardant drone would certainly be faster.

"It doesn't look like they need help, per se, but I'm guessing you can do something a lot faster and more effective than just helping bring buckets of water," Kose remarks.

"Battle debris near the border recovered," she reports, "I'll get to work on something for the fires now."

She is calming down from whatever the dungeon equivalent of adrenaline is, so she can properly think through this problem. Her main barrier for solving this is ironically her own education; there are different types of fires, and they require different things to make them stop. This was why she was stubbornly trying to shove that-one-foam-used-in-fire-extinguishers into something, because she would much rather let other people actually specialized in putting out fires do her work for her. But that wasn't working. Because trying to shove a concept you only vaguely have an understanding of into a magical item is, well, sort of like trying to shove a square peg through a round hole. It might be able to fit, with enough shoving, but it's not in-line with the more elegant designs she's used to. So. What is the elegant way to make a perfectly ordinary fire - not a grease fire, not an electrical fire - stop its shit.

Well, now the answer is obvious. Fire (in this circumstance) is a reaction that requires oxygen to work. Therefore, she'll suffocate it.

She has something set up in about a minute. When activated, it will pull all of the oxygen in set area around itself to itself, and hold off any that might zip in closer. Off goes the drone, where it can fly right into the middle of the nearest fire and tell it to knock its shit off.

The fires vanish.

Kose shakes her head, but says nothing. The men peer at the no-longer-burning houses, and then disperse in various directions — to rendezvous with the people in the dungeon, to houses in order to check for damage, or out into the fields to tend to the bodies.

Is there anything else she should handle sooner rather than later? Injured, probably. That sounds doable with her bullshit powers.

This one she very purposefully does not overthink. Her high education did her in with the fire earlier, it will not do her in with healing. Sure, the body is very complicated, but also, it has a pretty good idea of what it should look like when it's whole. It can just be magically assisted in reaching that desired state. Just, uh, she needs better materials to manage this, so - bye water safety experiment, she needs your copper for possibly saving lives. (She removes all of the other bits of metal from their water testing locations at the same time, so as not to actually ruin the experiment.) This done, she is going to shove the concept of 'restoring of bodily integrity to its ideal state' into this bit of alloy so hard. So hard! It will activate its healingness when in contact with a human who is not in an ideal state. And the attached diamond will give an indicative glow when it's active, so they know when it's working and can tell when it stops.

"Made a healing artifact," she announces, both out loud to the people inside the dungeon and over the communication pendant. "Where should I put it so it can be best used? It activates upon physical contact with an injured human."

Rokat selects a mobile young person, and assigns them to run with it down to the village, where people are most likely to be injured.

Excellent. She relays that when it glows it's working, and that if it stops glowing it needs to be returned to be refreshed, or it's finished its work.

And then she... doesn't know what else to do with herself, frankly. Mostly what she wants right now is for all of the people currently sheltering inside her walls to get lost and let her have some space. It has been a subjective eternity that she's been beholden to giving a shit about other people's opinions at all times. Considering the situation, that's not really actionable, though. The local dungeon is in fact still the safest place for them all to be, even if the local dungeon kind of wants to mope about killing people. A cold and mercenary part of her is tempted to demand that if they stay inside, they should do something productive, which will either get them to directly help her or get out, but, well. She's still on dungeon probation, and has an enormous amount of power over all of these people. It'd be messed up to put them in such a position. She will not take out her recently blackened mood on people she wants to help and protect, even if she's still really very cranky about wanting to be left alone for a little while.

Hm, well. She won't demand or leverage anything of them in particular, but she's not against positive incentives. There are some coin-shaped materials that are good for enchanting and haven't been enchanted. It won't compare to something properly built for shielding - if nothing else she wants to reverse engineer the loot from the various people she horrifically slaughtered - but a shitty shielding enchantment is better than literally nothing. She leans on crafting with concepts for this, because these are meant to be basic bitch shitty enchantments that go under other, more specialized things. So: if something is moving (this) quickly or faster towards the body of the holder, it'll instead be directed off course, within this set distance around the holder. It won't do anything against temperature, poison, strangulation, or a really slow sharp object, but again: better than nothing. This takes a bit of finesse, but she has it carefully wrapped up around one eiko. From there, she sets the diamond inside to give off a faint (blue, obviously) glow if the associated coin it's attached to is still functioning properly. There will be no surprise failures on her watch, thank you, she knows what failing gracefully is.

This sorted, she enchants all of the available eikos she has, and informs everyone inside the dungeon. "I've figured out a basic shielding enchantment that I'm going to put on every eiko I give out from now on. If anyone got any before I did this, and hasn't exchanged them for something, just shuffle the coins where I can get to them and I'll fix that. The glow is to denote that the shield is functioning; if it stops glowing, please bring it back to me for free renewal."

Does she still sound a little bit detached and mechanical while saying this? Yes. Yes she does. With a touch of emotionally exhausted, which she definitely is. Okay, people, give her the dungeon nom noms if you're going to be here, disturbing her precious introvert time.

People startle a bit at that announcement, but don't seem all that motivated to action. They are not as uncomfortable as Aestrix is, but there is still a lingering tension in the air. Lomon tsks and has a quiet word with a few people. They fan out between the various games and start playing them.

Other people confer with Rokat, who is coordinating things in the village via communication pendant, now that an extra one has been sent down. They get organized and head out, making the place somewhat less crowded.

A few minutes later, Kose arrives back, and informs everyone that the raiders have been taken care of. She politely but firmly gets everyone except the people solving puzzles or playing games to go down and help sort out the damage to some of the houses.

Oh, good. More space. Less overcrowding. People she recognizes, too! It’s probably weird for Kose to not be as socially expensive to interact with as the general citizens, considering that whole relationship based on maybe killing each other, but. …. She likes Kose. Rokat and Lomon too, but she’s had less time with them. Probably she should state a preference out loud, even.

“… if it’s not an ongoing emergency where people need to be in here to stay safe, I’d uh. Appreciate some space. Not to - do - anything, just. Um. First time I’ve ever killed people, I don’t think I can sort out how I feel about this while hosting.”

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."