Aaaaaaaaa she should totally be working on seeing if she can do invisibility or how to put up a little shield around her core in case they try to kill her or or or something but instead she is ANXIOUS and and and probably she has ensured her own survival by making a really genuinely useful thing!!! It's probably fine!!!! They will almost certainly want to milk her for more of her thing!!!! She probably doesn't even need to have spikes in her ceiling or anything!!!!!! It's FINE.

Pona and Timrat spend some time turning circles and figuring out which ones are linked. They definitely don't do so in an optimal way, but they do eventually manage to work around to the solved configuration after a few false starts.

And without any kind of fanfare, the door opens to a very pretty room. Inside is a lot of abstract art, and one little glass tube thing on a pedestal. And the dungeon's crystal core thingy, on another pedestal beyond it.

Aestrix herself has started anxiety sorting any carbon out of the ambient stone in her corner of shame. It will go in a little carbon pile, located in same. Maybe she'll make it into a diamond at some point or something. It's fine. It's all fine. Everything is fine and she is especially fine.

Tanth rotates the group so that he can be the first one through the opened door and into the room. He sweeps over the interior of the room, paying especial attention to making sure nothing is hiding behind the columns.

"Greetings, clever Adventurers!" Kose proclaims. "Your reward for your ingenuity is an artifact which pulls pure drinking water from foul water," she continues, gesturing towards the platform.

Tanth jerks his head at Timrat, who steps forward to pick up their prize. He turns it over in his hands, marveling at it.

"Thank you," Tanth replies, nodding his head respectfully. "It was a most clever puzzle. We don't often see such sophisticated puzzles so early in a dungeon's life."

Kose smiles, but says nothing.

Timrat and Pona bow, and the adventurers turn to leave.

"Thanks," she says, a little shyly. But definitely pleased. Granted, that sentence was maybe a bit loaded and meant something like 'this one is smart, Kose, watch yourself,' but still. She likes being clever.

There are absolutely no ambushes on the way out, either! It is all entirely innocent. She is such a nice and fluffy dungeon.

(And if she was considering whether or not she could launch tiny carbon pebbles at the speed of sound through all intruders without hitting her own core, that's her own damn business.)

Pona waves shyly at her on her way out, and then the adventurers are gone.

As they leave, Aestrix feels like she just got a shot of energy, or a second-wind. She feels as though she regained the energy she used to make the water-purifier and then some.

Eeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! SHE IS A GOOD DUNGEON!!!

"Can they hear me?" she wonders, after they've gone, because she never actually confirmed it. She was too busy, uh, plotting what to do if this became a situation where she needed to defend herself.

"They can hear you," Kose confirms. "Dungeons vary a lot in how talkative they are, though. So dungeon fairies such as myself handle the most critical greeting-Adventurers part while they get comfortable. If you're already feeling comfortable talking to the Adventurers, you can do the little reward speech when the next ones come! That was a good reward for the level of danger, so I'm certain they'll be spreading the word to other Adventuring parties."

"Oh, good, okay," they totally heard her flailing oh no, "then I should make some more of the little water filter things in case any others come by." She gets to making more of those, out of glass, again. This time with the water end already tinted blue. It's not too difficult, so she can talk while doing it. "Uh, so I was thinking a centralized chamber with offshoots into various puzzle rooms? And each puzzle room offers a different prize. And I will have my crystal thing off to the side or dramatically overlooking things, or something. Less, uh, in the direct path of the adventuring."

Kose nods thoughtfully. "That could be nice. It might even let you have several groups tackling different puzzles simultaneously," she notes. "Do you want to do a little diagram of what you mean by dramatically overlooking the puzzles?"

"Yeah, sure, so -"

She grabs a bit of stone, floats it over and flattens it. Then she makes a little star to mark her crystal, then draws the corners of a box around it. (And the protective covering is either there all of the time or slides into place when she tells it to, depending.) Then around that, she digs out a donut shape, and from there she adds little branching paths that will eventually contain puzzles.

"That. Basically. The little symbol in the middle being my crystal thing." And the whole setup to continue to be nice, and fluffy, and pretending to totally buy the bullshit that is being offered to her without so much as a cursory whiff.

Kose smiles. "I think that looks lovely," she remarks. "Do you think you could work in a little room near your crystal for me to stay in until it's time for me to move on to the next dungeon?"

“Sure, I could probably just put it directly under. The wings mean you can fly, right, I went with up because of the wings,” liar liar it’s because it was dramatic and you know it, you liar, “and you could easily get there but adventurers would have a harder time of it.”

"I'm not the most graceful person in the air," Kose replies. "But I think that works. That was very thoughtful," she praises.

"Thank you!" Damn it, now she feels bad, she wasn't actually thoughtful at all, she was being a lying liar who lies. This is why she's so bad at lying!!! And why she's better at it without a face to express with!!! This is a horrible thing to acquire, she didn't want to become better at lying, even if it's actually really useful in this specific circumstance!!

"But I probably can't afford claiming all of that at once, so. Baby steps around my crystal. Mm. Do you know any magical items that people would really want?"

"Certainly!" she replies.

Kose can list many examples of things which are useful: firestarters, weapons that have special effects like conjuring arrows or setting things on fire, armor that projects shields, amulets that warn of danger, paired devices that permit communication over long distances, devices which can evaluate how worn another piece of magic is, things for seeing far distances (or at night), and lots more.

Honestly, Aestrix is fine being directed at these things. Well, not so much the violent ones that seem like they're for dungeon delving. She kind of wants to have a better feel for what her fellow dungeons are doing before she'll happily hand out weapons that could kill them, but the others are fine. The firestarter's even straightforward, she is pretty sure she can just figure out how to make a mechanical lighter given time and materials, no magic required.

"Communication devices first I think, that seems really straightforward? ... Do they need to be just paired, because I think I can likely pull off a set." This would be much easier if she understood how to make a goddamned radio, but she does not, so uh. Magic radio it is. "Where if you talk into one it goes to all of the others. It even pairs well with what I had planned for the next puzzle."

"A set with more than two items is definitely useful," Kose agrees. "The difficulty with making paired items in larger sets is just that you have to keep the function of all the devices in mind as you're making them, which is harder with more items."

That... doesn't sound very hard at all, but possibly her brain has been hacked by the wonders of industrialization and mass production.

"Hm. All right. I'll think about design for them as I make expansions."

She can start reaching out to grab areas; for now, she'll fork her corridor off into what will be her next puzzle. While she's at it, she'll widen and deepen the corridor itself, reinforcing the wall and ceiling as she goes. Arches are more stable than rectangles, so she'll go with that for now for the ceiling. At some point she might venture into the land of fancy architecture with flying buttresses and whatnot, but for now, she will just make sure that she doesn't accidentally collapse the corridor during her expansions. Oh, and, she's moving the ring puzzle door. It's going out in the wall of the it's-really-not-a-corridor anymore to reveal a little alcove, which will then contain the associated prize. This means that she's without a door again, but, well. She can put a couple of walls around her crystal thingy. Not anything that might freak out her fairy chaperone, she'll leave a lot of open space, but so that there is some kind of protective anything around it. Just the corners of the (domed, she has a theme going now, okay) box, arched together to hold a ceiling, the rest open to the air.

Kose nonchalantly ensures that she is standing next to Aestrix's core as she makes the changes to the core room, but is otherwise content to watch Aestrix move things around.

Aestrix has definitely noticed how Kose seems to hang out in theoretical smashing distance to the core whenever she's doing something that might become alarming. She really doesn't like it!! She would kind of like if Kose would chill with the plausible threats of murder for a bit!!! Could you give her some space, please!

Anyway, she will try very hard to ignore the person who is maybe doing the equivalent of standing over her with a knife at the ready, in favor of redecorating. She has all of these nice wooden pillars she can replace with (prettier, and also stronger) stone ones, made from all of this ceiling and floor she's eating! The original pillars can get picked up and shuffled into her core room for Shenanigans later, which is also very important. There's a bit of a weird transition from the corridor she hasn't eaten to what she has, but, well. Growing pains or something. She marks the entrance to Her Lair (tm) with a pointed arch. Then, because she's herself, she immediately gets distracted implementing a gothic-style archway setup all down the corridor, and then also into her core room. Her major concern besides making a pretty thing is structural stability, but being a dungeon means that seeing what is structurally sound is... more obvious than it would be as a little flesh person. There is a reason gothic architecture does the thing it does, and it's not just to look pretty, it's because it's structurally sound. So she follows the path that was walked by her forefathers to their destination, with a little bit of guidance from dungeon bullshit.

Perfectly centered between some of her columns goes the puzzle door, and a little (tastefully in theme) alcove containing the designated loot. Between another set of columns on the other side of the corridor is her expansion for the other puzzle room, but she's not going to knock down that wall there until it's ready for viewing. Instead she'll just quietly start tracing in abstract, artful patterns to the floor. And have some real actual space for experimenting with invisibility, which she will totally do eventually, no really, just as soon as she finishes this complicated floor pattern. Which will definitely happen sometime soon, for sure.

... The end result is kind of like a church leading directly to her crystal thingy, but, uh. Oops. She'll. She'll fix that. It won't stay that way, okay, promise? Do not worship her.