The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 1/10

Heart 1600/1600

Experience 0/400

Workers 4/12

Monsters 0/12-2

Traps 11/15+2

Rooms 17

Food 29

Timber 33

Iron 581

Mana 14

Rock 607

Gold 1303

Leather 102

Leather Sludge 49

Lava 38

Explosive Runes 3

Quest: Reach Tier 1

Quest: Kill an adventuring party

"No." Travis was getting bored of his subconscious.

An image of his high school English class appeared with all the other students there, staring at him, while he stood at the front of the room naked.

"No."

Travis bit into an apple, and immediately his teeth stuck in it and others started falling out.

"Eww. No."

Spiders—

"If this is anything but a journey-to-Australia dream, no."

His dreamspace was quiet for several millennia, or maybe just a few seconds, then Travis was a dungeon again. It seemed normal—Penelope, Stephan, Robert, and Katelyn were all there and doing their things. Everything was calm until adventurers started to pour in. They had guns (modern rifles, for some reason), Molotov cocktails, and one had hand grenades.

He tried to remind himself that this was wrong and people invading his dungeon wouldn't have those things, but being a dungeon again felt right, and so he was sucked deeper into the dream.

It felt wrong. So very wrong. Penelope walked back to the dungeon with three adventurers at her side. She had to constantly shove aside the part of her that wanted to attack them and make a run for it, though it wasn't too hard given they were helping her carry stuff.

"So, will you give us the tour?" Fife had a barrel under each arm—one full of grog and the other copper piping—and despite having her arms full, she felt excitement buzzing through her. A dungeon with creatures that weren't trying to kill her? That might, perhaps, open a bar? "Can we see the heart?"

"Fife, no." Brayden didn't want to stomp on Fife's excitement too much. Having her find something that let her forget Porter was a good thing—having her become best friends with a bunch of kobolds, however, was a little more than he was prepared to put up with. "If they ask us, it's fine, but we aren't going to get pushy."

Penelope wholeheartedly agreed with Brayden. "No offense, but I don't think we know you well enough yet. We'll see about setting up a bar at the entrance, though." It was crazy to Penelope that Fife had even asked that earlier. The even nuttier thing was that it would be good. They could turn resources into local currency should their gold run low.

"Hey, none taken. I've seen my fair share of hearts and from what I get, dungeons don't like you seeing them." The uneasy feeling of a whole city of monsters hating you was part of what Fife meant, though she wasn't articulate or caring enough to go into it. "You know adventurers are going to come in here to fight, right?"

"We're not just ready for that, we're anticipating it." Penelope held her tongue from explaining further.

Still worried, Brayden wanted to offer more help, but wasn't sure what he could do apart from words. "Brolly said he'd try to distract adventurers from finding your dungeon, but they will still come. Are you sure—?"

"We are. Trust me, I know what is coming and we're preparing for it."

Jack cleared his throat. "I've been wondering something. Well, wondering and listening."

"Spit it out, Jack. I hate how you keep circling around stuff like that." Fife would have punched him in the shoulder if her arms weren't full.

"You speak too well, miss kobold. You make contractions, your word choice is excellent, and you speak as if you have been a native speaker for a score of years or more—not a six month old dungeon monster." Raising one eyebrow as Penelope stopped, Jack waited for her reply.

The question pained Penelope. Jack was too smart for his own good, she thought. "It's complicated. There is more to it than what I'm saying, but I'm not ready to explain it."

"No malice there at all, and no evil intent." Brayden shrugged his shoulders. "We all have secrets, Jack. If she says this one is hers to keep, it's definitely hers to keep."

Fife, who hadn't stopped walking, took a moment to look back at Penelope. "Maybe you'll trust us one day. Until then, let's get you brewing the weirdest damn stuff in the whole kingdom!"

From there, everyone let it drop. Penelope was much relieved when they reached the dungeon with no further more-than-she-wanted-to-answer questions. "Well, you might as well help me get it to the actual entrance. Come on."

"Wait, you said you didn't want us seeing the heart. What gives?" Despite her confusion, Fife was still walking after Penelope. She definitely wasn't going to look a gift-kobold in the mouth.

"This is nowhere near the heart. Particularly since we just got our second level." Penelope couldn't help but smirk at that. A dungeon as young as Travis was shouldn't have a second level yet. Part of that was the town's help in trading with them, of course. "We haven't started building into it yet, but that's because we were having a celebration for getting there."

"I imagine buying all that iron and grain helped." Reaching out his hand to the wall of the dungeon, Jack ran his palm along it. "How do you get these so straight?"

Penelope shrugged. "Beats me. We dig, walls are straight."

Taking the stairs down, relying on the light stick Brayden activated for light, Fife smirked at the familiar tunnels. "Ah, this used to be your entrance, huh? What happened, it went down and made room above it?"

"Yeah, seems that's how dungeons work. I guess we'll find out when we get the third level." Leading the group to the trap section, Penelope pondered leading them into the traps—but rejected that idea. There was no way she wanted to listen to Fife for the rest of her kobold life. "This is the end of your ride."

"Sludge traps? Holy shit, look at them. You built a whole corridor of sludge traps! I'm glad you're friends, 'coz I'd hate this place." Fife set her barrels down and dropped to a knee at the first trap. Reaching her hand in, she felt the stickiness of the sludge immediately—and got a caltrop stuck in her palm for good measure. "Whoever designed this is not someone I want to meet."

"Thanks, but you've already met her." Fishing around in her bag of badly-pressed coins, Penelope pulled out ten and tossed them to Brayden one by one.

"What's this for?" Not that he was unhappy to get paid gold—that was literally one of the few things that Brayden Smith was never unhappy about—but he was wondering what the twist was.

"For not being assholes. For stopping your former party member from doing a number on me. For being more than typical adventurers." When she looked at them, all three looked a little nervous and embarrassed. "And I promise you'll be the first outsider to try our kobold beer, Fife."

"See? Now that's what I'm talkin' about. If you ever need a hand with something, just let us know, eh? We'll fight damn hard for that much gold—and harder for friends." Wiping the sludge off on her leg, Fife held out a hand for a shake.

Without realizing what she was doing, Penelope reached forward and clasped forearms with Fife. The move was, traditionally, a way for adventurers to promise something between them. Her eyes met Fife's and she realized the fighter recognized it. "I gotta be going. Party to plan and all that."

"C'mon, let's get out of here." Brayden turned, still not believing what he'd just seen.

Jack looked from Fife to Brayden. "But she just—"

"Hustle your butt, Jack. We have gold to spend and there's not enough ale in this dungeon—yet—to get me drunk." Fife bodied Jack away from Penelope and back the way they'd come.

When the sound of the adventurers had faded from her sharp hearing, Penelope started swearing. She swore at length, she swore in new and creative ways, but she didn't stop until she'd gotten their goods behind a wall.

Katelyn had been practicing her new spells. They were odd and weird and she wasn't quite sure how to deal with them. It had taken her hours of focus to scribe them, and even then they all seemed about five times more complicated than any spell she'd ever cast.

It took her two hours of study to realize what it was she was seeing. "These aren't wizard spells." It was a given that a wizard spell could have any of her usual techniques used to simplify them, add extra flexibility, and even reduce their mana use—but she was sure they weren't wizard spells.

They cast like wizard spells, they performed like wizard spells, but they weren't.

"Alright. If I accept these aren't wizard spells, and that they came from me becoming a kobold, that means these are kobold spells." It was a small step, but one she knew needed to be taken. Calling them kobold spells meant it was obvious why her wizard techniques weren't working. "So now I have a new field of magic to pursue—kobold magic."

"Heyyyyy sisssss."

Freezing her mental charge down the path of unraveling a new spellcasting system, Katelyn turned to the doorway of the library and looked at her brother. "You only slur like that when you've had something to drink. I know that can't be the case because—"

"Lighten up and come out here. We got some booze." Holding a half empty mug in one hand, Robert held the other out toward his sister. "And we have some celebrating to do."

"What? Robert, I don't think we should—" Stopping herself short before she went too far and convinced herself it was a bad idea, Katelyn stood up and walked over to take the mug from Robert. Lifting it to her lips, she took a long hit of it, almost half emptying the mug.

And that's when it hit Katelyn. "Where did you get this? This isn't rotgut."

"Pen's got all the details. Come on, or they'll finish all the good stuff." Robert led the way back to Travis' heart where Penelope and Stephan were both sitting down and talking. "Here she is. Are you going to tell us now?"

"Yeah!" Penelope still didn't feel perfect about the last bit, but she was determined to think the best of Fife, Jack, and Brayden. "Get a top-up and relax." She waited for Robert and Katelyn to do that, and for Stephan to pass them each a tin plate of sliced meat, and then started telling her story.

"Hey, Brayden?" Fife asked, after half a walk back to town in silence started to get on her nerves.

"I saw it too, Fife. I don't want to leap to any conclusions, but things are starting to stack up into an odd picture." A really odd picture, Brayden could admit in the privacy of his own head. "And no, we ain't telling no one about it—not even Brolly."

"Two clients," Jack said. "Two clients means we don't blab either's secrets to the other."

Holding out his hand, Brayden opened his fingers to show the ten coins in it. "Exactly."

"Can we talk about it, at least?" When neither responded, Fife continued as if they'd agreed. "She used to be an adventurer. Knowing language so well, knowing traps, and that agreement clasp confirms it. So what happened to her?"

"Cursed, maybe?" Jack asked.

"What about the other two?" Closing his hand, Brayden tucked the ten coins into his pouch. "Are they the same?"

Fife mulled over the words and moved to a different question. "What if it's the dungeon doing it? Is that why she doesn't want us to see the heart?"

"We've got too many questions and not enough answers. For now, let's agree not to ever go deeper than those traps until we get to the bottom of this." Now Brayden's hand closed around his holy symbol, the sharp points digging into the leather of his gloves. "Because I don't have plans that include spending the rest of my life in a dungeon, digging holes for a living."