Unlike the surface, there are monsters in the In-Between even during the off-season, but so long as we don’t run across anything Heroic or higher, we should be fine. And if we run across anything Heroic or higher, we will hightail it back to Hebron so Uncle Hawk can take care of it. We’re more than happy to take the opportunity to hunt down anything Basic or Elite that crosses our path.
This section of the first layer is primarily populated by greenish-gray semi-aquatic lizards. I feel bad about wasting the essence from just leaving their corpses here, but it would be impractical to haul all of them back to Hebron when we’re scouting. Still, we skin some of them anyway, because I want to practice making armor with it. Anise is happy to carry the pieces so as not to weigh us down in case we need to run.
After killing our fourth Basic lizard, I spot a larger, stronger aura signature up ahead.
[Elite lizard in the side cave to the right behind the purple giant mushroom,] I send to my party, pointing out the location telepathically.
It’s lazily resting in its nest and might not bother us if we just sneak on past, but what’s the point in that? It will be good experience and a chance to test our teamwork on a stronger enemy than these mooks but still well within our capabilities. I bring out my dagger and lay my staff at the entrance to the tunnel, since it’s already not very useful against the thick hides of the lesser lizards. I think I need another spear.
Anise hangs back so as not to steal our experience, but stays close enough to jump to our aid if we get too badly hurt. The four of us creep into the side tunnel, but Basalt and Rowan’s footsteps sound like drumbeats echoing on the walls. We’re much less stealthy than we would need to be in order to sneak up on this thing.
A lizard the size of a crocodile rests in a small pool in the middle of a ten meter wide cave. It bears the same knobby gray-green hide as the Basics, but they’re “only” the size of gila monsters. This one looks like it could swallow a dwarf or a 9-year-old boy whole and then let out a monstrous belch.
The creature stirs and pins her gaze upon the group of small, foolish human(oid)s trying to ambush her in her own lair. She lets out a deep, rumbling growl that reverberates through the cave. I steady myself against the powerful fear effect, but Jade freezes up and takes a step back involuntarily.
The monster lunges, but Rowan blocks the massive jaws with his shield and slashes at her face with his green poison sword. Blood wells up from a long cut that narrowly missed the creature’s eye.
The lizard turns and swipes at me with her thick tail, and I tumble back. Taking advantage of its momentum, I thrust my dagger toward a weak point. I miss the leg joint and only manage a shallow nick.
Jade dances around to the opposite side and scores a deep cut on the lizard’s foreleg, slowing it down. The lizard snaps at her with yellow fangs, but she leaps back out of the way.
Basalt swings his large bronze axe and nearly removes a hind leg in a single blow.
Between Rowan’s poison and the bleeding injuries we’ve inflicted, the monster is slowing down. She’s not out of tricks yet, though. Energy builds up in her tail and the next swipe summons a surge of water. The frothing wave is too wide to dodge. It slams into me, sending me sprawling across the ground.
As I climb to my feet again, I’m grateful to realize I was the only one knocked down. Basalt and Rowan held firm and Wren was on the other side. The battle doesn’t last much longer as we harry the monster to death.
“That was a nice workout,” Jade says, wiping off her daggers.
A half dozen eggs the size of golf balls lay within the shallow pool where the monster was resting.
“I thought monsters were spawned and didn’t have to lay eggs,” I say, crouching down to examine one.
“Sometimes they come in eggs,” Anise says, approaching now that the monster is dead. “Remember how Burdock’s familiar hatched from an egg?”
“Yes, a cat hatching from an egg,” I say dryly. “I remember. I thought that was a special case, though. No three-eyed cat showed up and laid that, so far as I know.”
“This is probably a spawning room,” Anise says. “You see them in dungeons sometimes, at least the ones higher level than those you’ve been visiting. If we take these eggs here, more of them will appear later even if nothing is here to lay them.”
“I’d like to get them back to Hebron,” Basalt says. “They’d make for a good source of meat and hides. The Elite might make a decent guard dog against low level intruders.”
Anise helps skin the Elite lizard and extracts the monster core. I’ve been doing that for the Basic ones but this is an Elite so it’s best to let an Elite handle that part just to make sure it doesn’t get messed up. She scoops up the six eggs and nestles them morbidly between the pieces of their “mother’s” hide. Having them hatch in her pack would be annoying rather than especially dangerous, since they’d just be Basic-rank babies.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” Rowan wonders.
The twisty maze of tunnels north of Splott has us extremely lost and trusting that Basalt’s dwarfy senses know where we’re going. We have to backtrack repeatedly as the entire area is a 3D maze, and Basalt keeps marking dead ends on walls to minimize us getting even more lost if our [Mapping Step] isn’t up to the job. And let me tell you, [Mapping Step] gets very confusing when dealing with tunnels sloping up and down.
“We’re getting close to the northern edge of Tempest and the upper boundary of the first layer,” Basalt says.
“It’s good to know that your magic dwarf senses can tell how deep we are, because I am completely lost,” Rowan says.
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Violet-glowing shelf fungi line the walls, but the higher we go, the more tiny blue ones are sprinkled over the ceiling. They’re getting so dense that their green vis blocks my [Aura Sight]. It is an unfortunate fact of nature that fungi are alive and all living things give off vis.
“I hear something,” Jade whispers. “And I feel air movement.”
Orange light shines upon the walls around the next bend that’s definitely not from bioluminescent fungus. As the stealthiest of us, Jade creeps forward to take a closer look. I follow behind to see what I can scan, prepared to stop if I detect alarm in her aura.
Beyond the fungal veil lies an opening onto a ledge overlooking the edge. The hole is too small for a human or even a dwarf to squeeze through, only an uneven 10–20 centimeters, but it’s enough to peep through.
A dozen people shuffle about the ledge, moving boxes off a flying boat barely larger than a goblin kayak and stacking them up.
“What do you see?” Rowan whispers.
[I think we just stumbled upon how they’re getting floj into Tempest,] I tell them.
There are too many people here for us to fight if we were inclined to fight. In addition to the several Basics, I count four Elites, plus a Heroic gnome overseeing the operation.
The gnome swaggers as though he were much taller than a meter high, though a shock of blue-black hair extends his height by another good 10 cm. He barks orders in a squeaky voice that would probably be less intimidating if he weren’t using skills to boost it. His neatly tailored brown clothes might not draw the eye if seem on the street, but I detect sigils woven into the inner lining and two artifacts at his belt.
“Come on, you rusty cogs, move faster!” the gnome yells. “Vetch Halkyn’s expecting this delivery and he has far less tolerance than I do for screw ups.”
From the muttering of the workers, I gather that the gnome’s name is Carter. No idea what the rest of his name is, and I don’t care to stick around long enough to find out in case any of them can detect us. After watching and gathering information for a few minutes, we withdraw to a safe distance to discuss it.
“We’re here to destroy their drugs, not fight them, right?” Rowan asks.
“Yeah, they’re too strong to fight,” Jade says. “But mess up their stuff? That we can do. Maybe even burn their boat.”
“I’ll need to find or make a hole we can slip through,” Basalt muses, rubbing his beard. “They probably have a way up into their back alley shop from here, too.”
“This is gonna be fun,” Anise says.
“Who in the Void is that gnome?” I wonder.
“Dunno,” Jade says. “Never seen him before. I would have remembered that hair.”
“We need to map the area around this ledge a bit more,” I say. “And then we’ll return to Hebron to rest and make preparations. Now that we’ve mapped out a fair number of the tunnels, we should be able to traverse them more quickly. By which I mean Basalt should. My [Mapping Step] is not quite up to the task yet.”
We return to Hebron without further incident (just a few more Basic lizards to spice things up) and deliver the extra Basic cores to be absorbed since we don't need them . Binding an Elite to spawn is more expensive (and even the Basic lizards are pricier than the centipedes), but Hebron assures us that it will make up the cost in no time from the orcs who will be happy to kill them repeatedly. Plus the meat will be helpful in sustaining the village once it becomes a village, rather than just eating grapes and whatever can be hunted.
Uncle Hawk’s party have left on another expedition by the time we arrive, so we’re alone in Hebron at the moment. I cook a dinner of some of the lizard meat we’d collected on the way back (no longer needing to worry about making a quick escape) and dry some of them for rations. Maybe sometime we’ll find something down here that makes for good seasoning, but this will do for now.
While I’m working, the party discusses possible approaches to disrupting the smuggling operation.
“I could just set everything on fire,” Anise says cheerfully.
“Anise, there were multiple Elites and a Heroic down there,” Rowan points out. “We will need to be cautious.”
“I could just cautiously set everything on fire.”
“We could set up traps, maybe?” Jade suggests.
Basalt strokes his beard. “I could try to collapse the tunnel leading up to the back alley shop.”
I stay quiet for the moment, listening to the others’ ideas and thinking. I certainly don’t know the “best” way to do this, but now I’ve gone from impulsively wanting to rush in and break stuff to overthinking it all.
Once we’re done eating, I go to set up the lizard spawns. Jade and Basalt follow along out of curiosity (and also because this is their home) but trust that I know what I’m doing for some reason (I don’t).
“Let’s have the Elite lizard guard this room by the stairway,” I say. “That way, she’ll be able to judge who is supposed to come down here or not and we can unseal the entrance. Admittedly, she’s only an Elite, but our options for dealing with anything Heroic or up are limited at the moment anyway.”
“Sounds good to me,” Basalt says.
Hebron’s small voice puts in, [Having a guardian will also save on the cost of sealing and unsealing the entrance. Place the core on the ground and select your preferred spawning option.]
I set the greenish ball of vis in the middle of the floor and examine the menu that appears in my third eye. Spawning the monster as an egg is by far the cheapest option, but spawning as an adult would be preferable if the idea is to have a guardian at all times. Balancing essence costs is a bit of a pain and I’m kind of glad I didn’t get reincarnated as a dungeon somehow. (I’m not sure that’s even possible, but let’s be honest, it would be very silly to say something is impossible in this crazy world I live in.)
Corwen’s devil-goats spawn as babies, but it’s also merely using them as livestock rather than a first line of defense and with six of them, there’s only going to be a couple of them immature at any given time. Regardless of cost, I want to make sure there’s an adult guardian here at all times. I select the option to spawn as an adult on an hour respawn timer. (The Spooky Grove’s instantly respawning giant spiders are both ridiculous and unnecessary.)
Energy coalesces around the monster core as essence turns into matter. I will never stop being impressed at the way aether cores can just casually violate the laws of physics. A ball of protean plasm grows around the core, glistening blue ooze quickly going from shapeless to shaped. The blob gains definition and its color shifts as it becomes flesh and bone covered in gray-green hide. In moments, the giant lizard we fought before has returned to life.
It’s the same monster, but her aura marks her disposition as friendly and she seems to bear no grudge for being killed. She looks around at her new surroundings without confusion, innately understanding her role of guarding our front door instead of a spawning room.
“I can’t believe the core just… did what you asked, instead of telling you what to do,” Jade comments.
[My own decisions led my halls to being empty for over six hundred years,] Hebron replies. [I am willing to try something different to see if it works better.]
“She’s semi-aquatic, so she’d probably also like to have a pool of water like she had back there,” I say.
The floor warps, stone seeming to melt for a moment and leaving an circular indentation as though a giant had pressed a thumb into clay. Jade jumps back in surprise as it rapidly fills with water, clearly not used to seeing a dungeon simply changing things before her eyes.
“She’s going to need a name,” Basalt says. “Jade, would you like to do the honors?”
“Me? Oh. Um… I don’t know, let me think… This is hard.”
After bouncing around a few suggestions, we wind up settling on Nessie. I leave the six Basic-rank eggs in the pool here with her.
I do some work on my equipment while we’re here as well. I attach a stone point to the bottom of my snake-headed staff to allow it to be used as a spear if necessary. I really need to make a better one but I don’t have any good staff wood down here.
I also see about trying to make these lizard skins into armor. It doesn’t turn out very well, but at least it’s good practice. The Elite hide gets saved for later, but I don’t mind if the Basic ones just wind up getting tossed in the trash pile for absorption.
It irritates me ever so slightly that working with hide apparently counts as [Tailoring], but not enough to tempt the system into cluttering my character screen even further.