Dungeon Life

Chapter Three-Hundred Forty-Six

While Teemo grins, watching those two leave, I start not-so-subtly poking through his status. “What’re you doing, Boss?” he asks, confused.

I’m looking for an acting title. You deserve one after that performance.

He laughs and I join him, both of us feeling pretty good about pulling the wool over the Earl’s eyes. Not only that, but we might have a Kaiser Soze after all. Teemo nods along as I think through what to do with the new opportunity.

“I’ll write the note and get a raven to deliver it to Miller, see how he wants to play this. If the Earl and the thieves guild are quieting down, this might be our best way to get him to spill the beans. Are you gonna ease up on the observations like he asked?”

Yeah, at least overtly. We have plenty of ways to keep an eye on delvers in my territory without constantly giving them the stink eye. We’ll let the Earl think he can guide us like an innocent child while Miller comes up with a way to increase the pressure on him. He could also be playing us with a double bluff, so we shouldn’t drop our guard. If he knows we’re on the ball, but lets us think he sees us as a stupid kid, we could easily get sloppy. Probably a bit of a paranoid take, but even if we do

Teemo nods and heads for the war room to pen the letter, and I take the chance to admire the work going into the public Sanctum. Right now, Coda is focusing more on it than the Hold. While the early phases of any build can be vital, Rezlar and the masons have the deigns and know what they’re doing. Coda will definitely be back to ensure the details are minded, but right now the digging is pretty simple for the Hold.

A lot of people from out of town are joining in the work, ranging from simple haulers through several disciplines of skilled laborers. Miners outnumber masons right now, and haulers are being kept very busy moving all that rock. At the moment, they’re digging rough tunnels, with plans to more carefully cut and remove stone as they get closer to finishing the areas. There’s going to be a lot of stone furnishings once the Hold is up.

But the details come later. Coda can leave the initial digging to Rezlar and them, while he focuses on the Sanctum. We’ve done a lot of the preliminary work, so now we’re getting down to the details that will need his attention, and he has a lot of people to help direct, too.

Unsurprisingly, my enclaves are more than eager to help, so Coda has been letting them plan the more artistic details. They’re also working on fancying up the entrance, too. I had originally planned to have more or less a simple hole in the ground leading down to the Sanctum, but my dwellers have more grandiose plans in mind. They’re even roping in my denizens for help.

My spiderkin are doing up the surface around the tunnel, draping the space with silk and making it look a lot like a tarantula’s home, but more welcoming. Poppy is helping with sprouting more trees to hang the silk from, with my rockslides helping to move the earth as needed, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if the area becomes a bit of a bazaar once everything’s settled.

Down in the Sanctum proper, ratkin are carving every inch of the walls and ceiling, following Aranya’s directions. It’s not difficult to see she has a plan for the Sanctum, too. There’s large sections already taking shape to represent my ratkin, spiderkin, and antkin, with more abstract carving taking up the majority of the space. She’s thinking ahead to leave room for any future enclaves to add themselves, too. She’s a good High Priestess.

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They’re not carving the floor because we’re still planning to put in the quartz viewing floor, though there’s work being done on that section, too. Right now, there’s a normal stone floor, because why tear it out before we’re ready to put in the quartz? In the area that will be holding my core, the carvers are detailing my scions and my spawners, again leaving room for any future expansions by filling sections with more abstract carvings.

Nova is helping out a lot, too. Not only is she helping with the tunnel, but she’s also making obsidian pedestals with sculptures of my scions on them. Right now, she has Teemo and Fluffles, and is working on Tiny. I’m proud of how she’s doing, glad she’s really found her niche and is shining in her own unique nova.

Jello’s helping with a lot of metalwork for the gears and whatnot we’ll need for the security shutter, as well as the mechanism to drop my core into the escape chute. She has her own group of ratkin and antkin helping her mind the forges and copy her work. It’s a lot easier than the metal honeycomb, that’s for certain. She bubbles as she works away, enjoying having something important to do, as well as getting to show the dwellers how to do it, too.

Her work is pretty public, but the production of the quartz is a bit more private, mostly because Thing and Queen are still working out of the Secret Sanctum. They’ve been working to scale up the quartz growing from the project with Slash’s axe. There’s a big size difference between a clear quartz block and a little quartz pickup. They’ve been able to get a proof of concept one going with the earth elemental’s help, and I think it’s looking promising.

The quartz chunk is pretty big, about a foot tall and about a foot along each of the six faces of the hexagonal crystal. With Slash’s help, it’s crystal clear, so now the question will be to figure out what the best way to use it will be. I’d love to be able to cut it like a sausage, leaving hexagonal windows to kinda keep with the theme established from the entrance tunnel, but I don’t know if that’ll be the most structurally sound option. We also could cut off two opposite points of the hexagons, making a rectangle, and use that for the tiles instead.

Right now, they’re taking a crack at both, as well as a few other potential cutting options, looking for the best strength and ease of enchanting. I expect it’ll be easiest to carve the runes into the rectangular faces of the crystal, which would also give more surface area for it, but I honestly don’t know. I also don’t know which facing will give the best strength in the direction we need.

It’s like a stack of paper. If you just stack them up and punch from the top down, it’ll handle the hit without much problem. But if you punch it from the side, you’ll scatter the paper all over the place. And there’s a similar issue with the carving. Writing on the surface of the stack of papers is a lot easier than writing on the side, too.

Thing’s carving the test tiles and taking notes, and I bet Coda will be testing the physical properties with the next several ones made. I would say that’ll probably be a couple days to get everything ready for him, but Queen is scaling up again, now we have a viable method. Her ants swarm all over, slowly building extra growth chambers, which is a fancy way to say hexagonal buckets, really. Still, they also need to get the plumbing for the solution, and leave enough room for Slash to be able to ensure the crystals grow properly.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts teaching some of the rockslides how to do it instead. He’s a great assistant with this sort of thing, but he has his own projects to tend to, mostly with practicing his music. I’ve been watching him when he practices, and he’s starting to toy with new sounds. He’s not at the point of having a synthesizer to make whatever instrument he likes, but he’s definitely working toward it. I wonder if we could make a keytar for him or something.

He definitely rocks with the axe, but I think his skill is approaching the point where the number of strings is starting to limit him. He’s been backing that up with developing his percussion, using his earth affinity to give him everything a drum kit can do and more.

I doodle a few ideas for keyboards as everyone continues to work hard. I can’t be slacking off while they’re sweating like that. If Slash is cooking up his latest magnum opus, I want to make sure he can bring it to life as accurately as possible. Not only is his music a great help in a fight, it also lends a lot of atmosphere and life to the dungeon.