“Mr. Davies, this is Verifier John and Mediator Doe. We don’t know, we don’t ask.”
John Doe was seemingly one person. When I inspected them, though, I got three stat screens. One was John’s, one was Doe’s, and the third seemed to be a combination of both. John Doe’s said that his (their?) class was “Judicator”, which seemed to be a normal class, while the split mind’s were both half the class. interesting, but I wouldn’t get to study them unless they died in my dungeon.
John cast a spell called {Zone of Truth}, which did exactly what it sounded like, though not in the way you might think. Instead of making me unable to think of lies or unable to speak them, it let me speak, and then twisted the sound waves into the truth plucked from my mind. I didn’t test this, I just looked at the mana and assumed some of the types and runes functions.
“Mr. Davies, do you hold that everything in this pamphlet is true?”
“I do.”
“Then we must draw up a contract. Doe?”
Doe pulled a sheet of clearly infused paper from his bag. The guildmaster was surprised.
“Using the expensive stuff?”
“Yes, maam. This is clearly an important moment, and triple infused paper is extremely durable. We need this to last a long time, don’t we?”
“Only triple?” I was surprised. Infusing was so easy, why wouldn’t they… oh. “Nevermind, I forgot humanoids can’t see mana lattices.”
“How many times could you infuse this paper?”
“All materials have a maximum of five infusions. Any more, and they either outright refuse to take the mana, or try to take it anyway and break, with varying levels of violence.”
“Even master Artificers can only get to four infusions, and even then, it is difficult to do so without a... violent disassembly. How do you do it?”
“Well, each layer has to go perfectly on top of the other layer to get to five. I imagine that you just can’t see the lattice in order to rotate it.”
“Hmm. Mikah, write that down.” He did so.
“Now, we need to draw up a contract. We can’t let you produce money, because too much money-”
“I know inflation, my world was significantly more technologically advanced than yours.”
“Fair. You can produce valuable materials, though.”
“Do you have a method to get out of a dangerous situation without dying?”
“Not everyone, only platinums and diamonds can really afford to use a resawn crystal, and then only sparingly, they run out of charge and break fast.”
“I’ll make some respawn crystals then.”
“You can just respawn crystals?”
“They’re just fully infused crystals in a certain shape, and a little bit of logic. Alder, my first floor boss, has one already.”
“A certain shape?”
“I imagine you have to inscribe a bunch of overcomplicated enchantments on them?”
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“Yes…”
“Well, if you can’t infuse a crystal enough for it to become core crystal, and you can't make a perfect d20, I suppose this information is useless to you. I can probably teach you how to infuse better though… But that will have to be a rare reward on a low floor, and I only have the one for the moment. You’ll just have to wait.”
This made her rather grumpy; I suppose my leverage-building tactics had worked.
“Back to the task at hand. We need to draw up a contract.”
The next two hours were spent negotiating a rather complicated contract, though it boiled down to:
- I won’t make the difficulty spike too quickly
- I won’t produce money
- They won’t try to destroy me without good reason
- Good reason has to be agreed upon by me, the guild, a judicator, and the system
- They won’t ever attempt to bind me, no exceptions
- They need to set up a town around me, run by the guild, so I can have delvers (not that they weren’t already planning on that, but whichever country ends up with the rights to this land, won’t be able to take it from the guild without force, which is a
- Other such bureaucracy prevention things, such as taxes, are also included in this clause.
Ultimately, I was very satisfied with my contract. I took my Avatar back to the dungeon, and devoted attention back to monster designs.
—
I wanted these monsters to be clockwork creations, because that would be the easiest thing I had access to. The engineering was simple enough, the memories (no, my mind is not being infected, the system automatically cleans the memories, and they have no soul behind them) of the Gnome showed many ways to make mechanical things.
I wanted each floor to have a specific challenge. The first floor would be team coordination and cohesion, if you didn’t have a full party, or your party wasn’t working together, you would be pretty screwed going up against my monster equivalent. The second floor would serve great as a test of skill. I considered raw damage output, AOE and brute force tests would be just as if not easier, but I wanted top notch adventurers. That meant tests of precision, finesse, and control.
I started out with Gearshift Spiders. They would be tanky beasts, six feet tall just on the body, and suspended in the air on large legs, but solo monsters. They could spit webs using an alchemical compound courtesy of my so-far MVP, the Gnome, had extremely pokey legs, basically pitons, and their carapace was made of enhanced aluminum, preliminarily Mythril. I could have used iron or titanium, but iron turned into a rather aspected metal I’ll call Pyre Iron (three guesses as to what its affinity is), and titanium into what I'll call Frostrime, which melted when cooled and hardened when heated. Steel was also just an upgraded Pyre Iron, I’ll call it Forgesteel. Mythril was nice and unaspected though, so that would be the shells for my clockwork constructs. Back to the spider. I would reward skill by making the joints, naturally small targets, into unarmored weak spots. The core would be inside the body, so I made cutting off the legs a valid strategy for gaining the ability to tear off the armor.
Next, Devised Duelists. These humanoid constructs would roam in packs of five, large arsenals in spatial bags, and given the ability to cast by inscribing spells I learned or devised (note to self, make some spells) into their mana circuits. These would cast an isolation spell, and then match the abilities of their opponent bar for bar. If a party member defeated a duelist, they would be allowed to intervene in another member’s fight by entering their bubble, and then would be stuck there until the monster was dead. I would code the monsters to be able to do this as well, but if they were fighting multiple people, they wouldn’t be able to use multiple combat styles at once, to prevent one duelist from being able to act as two monsters. They would have all the same weaknesses a human does, which caused them to look a bit like C3PO.
Finally, Hammerfrogs. These extremely light constructs would jump into the air and attempt to land on delvers. However, if they managed to get their rubber, sticky tongues around an adventurer's equipment, their weight would increase If they got heavy enough, they could even extend their storage space entrance around their tongues, enabling them to grab armor. They weren’t at all a treat if they didn’t have any equipment though. These constructs and their weight adjustment and snatching mechanics were made possible by the trace amounts of tungsten I found while digging out the beginnings of the labyrinth that would be the second floor (yes, I mean labyrinth, the adventurers would have to retrieve an object and bring it back to the entrance to open the boss room). When I enhanced the densest material in the universe, it became denser, what a surprise! This came also with the effect of gaining weight exponentially with something in a storage made with it, and also a small gravitational pull unbefitting of its size. I made these frogs out of the Blackwarp, and voila!
I think I’ll include traps further down, when I make an open-world floor, because traps are more a general survival test.
I think I’ll need to design the boss later, DWYBS is trying to get my attention.