The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Level 1

Heart 400/400

Workers 1/5

Monsters 0/10-2

Traps 0/10+2

Rooms 1

Food 76

Timber 400

Iron 40

Mana 0

Quest: Build 5 Traps

It was completely and utterly insane, he thought. There were dialogue boxes, resource counters, and even a quest. He still couldn't remember where he'd come from, but for some reason these games stuck in his head as fitting the world—and so they did.

"I can't figure all this out. Where's the build menu? Nothing fits the room we have and—I think I need to give orders to widen paths out to make rooms or something," he said, though he was sure only Pen could hear him.

"Give—dig." Pen looked at his heart with a resignation on her reptilian face that looked comical.

"I don't want to order you around. It feels—"

"Give dig!"

She looked angry now, but he could see—from some upside-down viewpoint that was becoming more natural by the minute—that she was also grinning. Trying to focus, he poked at the rock near the entrance, just inside the dungeon, and it turned green with a little pickaxe symbol on it.

Pen shoved her arm into his heart and pulled back with a pickaxe in her grip. She spun around on one foot and started marching down to where he'd marked to dig.

Dungeon games, he well knew, rewarded mazes and clever trap-building. He lined up his poking and drew an S shape with elongated lengths so that the tunnel would snake around, then clicked on the old bit of path and told it to be replaced with rock.

Opening the trap menu, he found the usual assortment of starter traps that games would give. A slowing trap, a wall-spikes trap, a crushing trap, and a spinning trap. The problem was every time he looked at one of the dangerous traps, he remembered Pen staring down at her gut—bleeding out.

"You know about dungeons, right?" he asked.

Pen, who just destroyed the first hunk of wall with her pickaxe, looked back at the heart of the dungeon. "Yeah. Been in frargg." She stopped and wobbled her chin a little side to side. "Been in few."

Rock 1

Ignoring the new resource that popped up, he focused on chatting with Pen. "Are traps—are they safe? I don't want to hurt anyone, except for Peter and William, but you know what I mean, right?"

"Traps hurt 'n' kill." Working away with her pick, Pen broke down another section he'd marked for demolition. "Kill monst too."

"Monsters?" He looked at his menu some more. Pen didn't seem like elaborating right away.

The next section broke down and Pen looked around at the work she'd done. "Monst. Other dung. Wild ones. Monst." She spat on both hands and got back to work.

He hated that he'd need traps, but if he had things other than adventurers to keep out, he'd need something. He poked the crushing trap and then poked the two bits of tunnel nearest to his heart. The traps didn't place right away, they just had green glowing outlines that showed him where they would be; like Pen's digging.

"You name?" Pen asked him.

"You're going to think it's lame. Travis. I don't even know how I got here or became this. A week ago I was just a human."

Pen put down her axe for a second and walked back to the edge of the tunnel to look at Travis. "You dungeon now."

"Yeah, and you're a kobold now."

She flashed both rows of her fangs she grinned so much. "We both screwed." Turning, she grabbed the pickaxe and returned to her digging. "Kobold dung more traps. Nasty traps."

Looking at the status again, Travis noticed anew that he had +2 traps and -2 monsters. "Where I come from, we don't have dungeons, but we have games that are like being a dungeon. I'm trying to figure it out like that."

"Game? Strange game. Make sure wirrg." Pen shook her head again. "Stupid mouth. Win."

"Yeah. You'll want somewhere to hide after these traps are done. Then those shooters can't get you." Looking at what he'd planned, Travis noticed a problem with that. Halting the work order on the two traps, he made another dig order to add a little curve at the end, then put the traps in front of that. "Uh, can you come and work on this bit first?"

Walking to the end of the tunnel she'd dug, Pen looked back toward his heart. "Good plan. More traps." Closing the distance with the spot quickly, she narrowed her eyes at the spot where the two traps would be. "Good trap. Put a pit in front."

"A pit? Right, so they climb out of the pit and step into this thing. Added that."

Penelope had never heard of a dungeon heart that could talk before, but then she'd never tried. Finding out this one was a human was doubly strange. What really took the cake, for her, was Travis not having heard of dungeons—but having games about them.

She mused on her thoughts while she worked. The traps she knew well enough, having taken a good deal of them apart in her life, but what surprised her was how fast her mind started looking for ways to improve them. The crushing traps, she wondered, could have slime applied to secure items or clothing to them, and the pit trap really should have spikes in the bottom.

But spikes and sticky slime would take work. She'd need somewhere to cook slime down to make it extra sticky, and she'd need the slime. Spikes would need work with an axe and timber.

It was uncanny for her how relaxing digging was. Purely cathartic on too many levels, she felt like she could just dig and dig forever and she'd never get tired of it. She knew it was part of being a worker for a dungeon.

"You have dart trap?" Looking back down the hallway, Penelope ran one clawed hand over the wall she'd just built up. "Go here." She only had to wait a moment for the order for a trap to come. Building the trap was surprisingly easy. It was like every time she looked down for the next part it was already there.

"Traps need parts late—later." She caught herself about to growl-yap this time. It was getting easier to talk, though she didn't want to test herself out with too many words. "Need more kobolds."

It was the truth of the matter distilled down. Kobolds were never alone—there was always a dozen more behind you with daggers, spears, spears with daggers on them, daggers with spears on them, and all of it dipped in something nasty to wear you down.

Now that all sounded like the best fun ever. "Kobold getting in my head."

"I don't know how to make more. There's nothing here I can poke to make more. Your thing was a popup and I tried to make sure it didn't say it would kill you or anything before hitting yes. I wonder if it will work again? Like, can you drag someone close to my heart and I can make them into a kobold too?"

"Dangerous. If they beat me up, they kill you." Walking around the triggers for her traps without any problem, Penelope made her way to the tunnel-maze again.

He was silent a while. Enough time for her to finish the maze off and even fill-in the middle pieces to ensure people had to navigate all the way around it. "You okay?"

"Just not used to being—Life isn't this dangerous where I'm from, okay? I mean, people still die, but no one's daily job is literally trying to kill me."

He sounded scared to Penelope, and she had to wonder what kind of weird place he was from that didn't have dungeons or, well, bad people. Dodging back around the traps and around the double-dogleg that broke line of sight with his heart.

"You come from nice place." She walked up to him and wrapped her arms around his core. He was scared and dealing with things she had no idea about, but he sounded like a nice person to her—particularly since he'd saved her life. "I protect you."

"Yeah, and I'll protect you, too."

Hearing his voice now more cheerful, Penelope let go of the hug and rolled her shoulders. "Need somewhere sleep. How good you at game?"

Giving new orders to her, Travis said, "Pretty good. The trick to them was remembering what each area has and customizing your dungeon to deal with it—which I can't do here because I don't know what's around. So I—"

"Yeah, but I know what's around. Your entrance there is pretty well hidden, the others wouldn't have found it if I didn't have dungeon-finding tricks. You're nestled at the base of a mountain range with forest all around outside. With some work, I could stack branches and rocks up at the entrance to hide us even more."

For her size, Penelope had to marvel at how strong she felt. The pickaxe was almost weightless in her hands and swung with ease against the rock and compacted dirt.

"Probably the best thing to do is turtle up and explore as much of the build tree as we can before anything else shows up. When something comes in, we make sure we can deal with it."

Travis' words confused Penelope a little. She understood scraps of what he said, but felt she was missing a lot of the meaning. "Okay, but what does that mean?"

"Right, no gamer lingo. So, we'll keep hidden, fill this place full of traps, and I'll try to work out how to build out the best defenses we can."

"You need resources from outside. Wood, food, maybe other stuff." The repeating cadence of her pick striking the cave was a rhythm that Penelope shouldn't have enjoyed as much as she did. It was a song that thudded and danced in her blood. "Leather too. We could lure animals inside though, and get food and leather."

What constantly surprised her was there wasn't any rock or dirt when she finished chipping away, and the walls were all shored up just fine.

"I only see wood and food here. I guess leather comes later. I think it costs one food per day per worker. I've got seventy-six food left, so there's no worry about that.

"When it let me make you into a kobold, there was something about a catalyst. Do you know what that would be?"

"No clue. I was a little busy dying and stuff." Penelope was trusting her words more and more. She still felt an urge to yap and growl, but she could control that while she was focused on digging. "What would be a catalyst?"

"You'd probably know more than me. This stuff is all kinds of confusing. I guess when we find someone who wants to hang out with us cool kids, we try recreating what happened to you. Uh, minus shooting them."

She liked the way he thought, even if it was strange, and she liked the way he cracked jokes that were sometimes morbid. Huddling in the corner of her new home, Penelope let out a soft little bark of relief at having gotten away from the two worst influences in her life—even if it had taken her death to do so.

It took Penelope three days, but she finally had the entrance suitably concealed to her liking. There was a felled branch that looked like it had been ripped from a nearby tree that covered most of the opening, with leaves and forest floor detritus over it that made it look years old.

What was annoying her was how she felt like there was a target painted on her back. Being inside the dungeon felt right, and out in the forest she just felt exposed. "Can you hear me out here?"

"Better than that, I can see through your eyes even out there. That's some great work on the entrance. The only humans we might have that will test it, hopefully, will be campers looking for timber to burn."

He was so naive and trusting that Penelope almost had to slap herself. The scene had played out in her dreams each night since her "death". All the ways it could have gone. What if she'd had a spare talisman? What if she had been a little more careful about keeping her only talisman a little closer? What if she hadn't told them not to take the missions she didn't want to take?

The questions had continued to ping around her head while she worked. The mellowness and calm that working for Travis gave her was perfect for picking them apart until she finally had the real question: What if she had never trusted anyone?

But she had to. There were some things and some people you had to trust. The mages who ran the talisman system, the priests who you paid to bring your dead butt back to life, and usually the friends you adventured with. They were all people you absolutely had to trust with your life.

Dropping to her hands and knees, she crawled through the brush that hid part of the entrance and was inside and in the wonderful darkness again. It was like putting her armor back on or walking into a town with actual guards patrolling—safety.

After everything she'd been thinking about, regarding distrust, she felt a compulsion to trust Travis. "Okay, that's the safety side of things. Now we need to ensure we don't run out of food and start getting some leather. Cue me up a side room from this entrance and put a pit trap in there."

"We'll need bait and some way to deal with whatever falls in the pit."

It amused her that Travis didn't want to hurt people but had no problem building a pit for catching animals. "If we had a room for working with wood, I could make spikes for the pit—and put up a sign warning people of a trap."

Already with her orders to dig a trap room, Penelope picked up her pickaxe (that was just out of view and at her side, not that she'd left it there) and started on the new two-room tunnel. Just as she finished making the pit trap, she felt a pull for more orders. "You got it figured out?"

"Yeah. I found a menu with rooms I can build. Uh, timber mill, smelter, tanner… There're a lot of entries here. I don't know if we can even get enough kobolds working here to fill the buildings with workers. Also, thanks for the idea of a sign."

Penelope shrugged and started walking further into the dungeon, around their traps, and finally to the back area of the dungeon. Pulling out her pickaxe, she started digging. "You'll probably want tunnels here. All of these areas are kinda core to you, and we'll need them accessible easily. Oh, you are making a tunnel."

Rolling her shoulders with each strike of the pick, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for Penelope to keep digging.