I decided to choose rust rats, copper roaches, and stonelings, the best of three worlds. While I’m not sure just how beneficial critters will truly be in the long run it was good to have them anyway, they provided a nice bonus for being around and it would make the place livelier. All I need to do now is to create a core room then I'll be done with this first part, so, how about we get things moving?
Makes sense I guess, and looking around, there wasn’t much to sway me to put it anywhere specifically, everywhere was either covered in the trash or covered in rocks. Pointing to the floor beneath me, I might as well just choose a spot and move on from there, and with a small ping the immediate area around where I pointed began to change.
Debris faded away, and stone began to warp into a large basin with four columns framing it, creating four archway openings to access the basin. The area just outside of the archways began to absorb the trash and filth, revealing a smooth but unpolished stone, forming another set of walls to encase the inner structure. And finally, with the crack of stone, three statues formed a triangle facing away from the center structure, each of what I presume to be an example of my monsters. One was a hulking creature with a series of magic-looking writing carved around different parts of the body, the second one was a many-armed thing, undoubtedly the biological constructs, and finally the third one, a tall automaton sporting many gears and bolt-like bumps along its body.
Once the screen closed out I could feel a tug at my side, a bright glow began to shine from the basin’s center, and with a snap a small sphere of some kind of gem appeared, and despite having never seen it before now, I knew that this was mine, my dungeon core. A surge of emotions began to fill me, happiness, excitement, fear, anticipation, and so many more, I don’t know why I was brought here, but I would become this world’s best damn dungeon there is, one step at a time.
Still high off of my excitement, I began to imagine just what could be, the monsters I could make, the traps that could be designed, oh the possibilities were end-
Ah, well, I suppose I was getting ahead of myself then, how exactly do I unseal the dungeon?
I don’t think I want to spend DP just yet, so I decided that I would build my way to the outside, just about to get started before a valid point floated through my mind, yes I could reach the outside, but what would happen when I did? Some defenders would be in order if I wanted to go out there, while I’m at it I might as well learn how rooms work exactly.
So I’m not making monsters so much as I am making something that makes the monsters for me?
So direct creation is better for things that are about the same cost as their node version’s cost then?
Umm, ok, anyway, what about rooms then?
Neat, and while the limit to the number of rooms I can have is, annoying, I can work with it, hopefully. Turning to the nearest point it mentioned, I began to carve room after room, creating four decently-sized rooms going from the core room to the surface with the fifth room stemming off from the room in front of the core, not taking as much mana as I thought it would have, each of the rooms only cost about 10 mana but I assume the actual heavy costs from making the rooms actually do something.
Speaking of the rooms, each of them was perfectly identical, each a perfect square with more smooth unpolished stone walls, floors, and ceiling. But it was the farthest room that caught my attention, just outside of the room was a white winter mountainside, with a large forest just below and beyond the entrance.
I couldn’t see much in the distance and while the dungeon wouldn’t let me leave I could still see that it was a bright and beautiful landscape just outside, I continued to admire this new world I was now a part of before I got a new message.
Well, that wasn’t too bad I-
System, what monsters are available to me?
One choice from each type then, hmm, all of them were pricey but useful, nonetheless. The clockworker could do a bunch of things on top of combat even if it wasn’t the best at it, and it could fix itself as well making it a far better option in the long run, helped that I already had to consider it from before. The golems were interesting in that there would be more of them, and they would be made from metal, and while rough copper doesn’t fill me with the most confidence, some metal might be better than no metal. And the final choice, the skeletal mover, was rather creepy to me, I wasn’t afraid of spiders too much but a giant one that controls a puppet and can use a sword and bow was pretty creepy to me, but for those very reasons it could be better than the others, the problem was that it was more expensive overall, and the only source of food I had so far was the rats I hadn’t made any of yet.
I had time to consider them, but a choice would need to come, fast.
What to do?
