The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Level 1

Heart 400/400

Workers 1/5

Monsters 0/10-2

Traps 5/10+2

Rooms 2

Food 71

Timber 343

Iron 40

Mana 0

Rock 44

Gold 20

Quest: Gather 100 Food

Another day had passed, but Travis contented himself with the fact that Penelope and himself were safe. The first quest had quietly completed without him realizing it, and it had given him gold as a reward.

Penelope had finished off his timber mill (costing him 50 timber), worked on some spears, and added them to the bottom of the front door pit trap. It had cost him one food for her to bait the trap.

His head was swimming with all the plans and needs for his dungeon. In games, he normally preferred to go with undead builds, since most games have them auto regenerate. He didn't want to see if Penelope auto regenerated. "Hey, uh, Pen?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you tell me what's by your right foot looking at you?" It was something that'd been bugging Travis since he finally figured out how to handle the sight thing.

"Big, fat, lizard. Looks like he's probably good enough to eat, but I don't think I want to go that far until you're actually running short on food."

It was a surprise for Travis. "Lizards! I guess it makes sense. I can see through their eyes too."

"Right, you can see through my eyes. I keep forgetting that," Penelope asked.

"Yeah."

"That seems a little weird, but I—It's really hard to think anything bad about you. It's like you are in my head." She froze a moment before barking with laughter. "That's so stupid now I hear myself say it. Of course you're in my head—you're the dungeon heart."

The words stung Travis. It hurt to know he was in control over someone and hurt more still since he couldn't give up that control. "We'll figure out a way to free you—"

"What?! No way. You need me in here, Travis."

"Yeah, but—"

"No! No buts. We need each other. You saved my life when you didn't have to, and I bet you'll do it again. We're a team, Travis." Pulling back from the tunnel she was digging, Penelope glared right at one of the lizards. "And I'm not so stuck obeying your orders anyway. Look, I can even stop digging."

Travis laughed at the show of willpower, mostly because she held her pickaxe in one hand and he could see her clawed fingers tightening and squeezing the handle. "For how long?"

"That doesn't matter. I can do it." Penelope picked up her pickaxe, turned, and started digging again. "Besides, I like digging."

"Did you like digging before you were turned into a kobold?" Her answer made Travis smile—on the inside, of course, since he no longer had a face.

"I didn't get to find out." She spun around to look back down the tunnel she was digging. "I heard something at the entrance."

Travis was confused as why he couldn't see the front entrance for a moment, then he realized it was because most of the lizards had apparently crawled around the pit to start nibbling on the bait.

It was so stupid that Travis had to groan at not seeing it coming. "I can't see anywhere except around you and the pit—most of the lizards went and started nibbling at the bait."

Penelope didn't breathe a word as she carefully advanced up the tunnel and to the zig-zag to look around it and see what it was she had heard. At the same moment one of the lizards looked up from where it was trying to bite at the corner of the haunch of meat to see a huge, shaggy bear looking at it.

Travis held his metaphorical breath as it sniffed forward, trying to reach the meat at the back of the trap without stepping on the mechanism. "A bear. Well, it'll be smelly, but I guess the hide will be good. Also, I hope the meat is edible. Does it know there's a trap there?"

"It smells me on the trap. It's unsure." Penelope was whispering, her head turned back toward the tunnel behind her while she spoke.

I watched the bear solely through the lizards' eyes as it reached all the way to the back of the trap to grab the meat—and leaned its weight down to grab it.

The roar of the bear as it fell was punctuated by an even louder, furious shout as it hit the spears at the bottom.

"I hope the spears kill it. I don't have a bow handy to deal with it." Penelope walked up to the edge of the pit and looked down as only silence and stillness came from the depths. "Wow."

A spear had caught the bear under its neck and gone through into its skull.

15xp gained

Experience 15/100

A good tingle ran through Travis at that. XP caps, he mused, meant that was how much he needed to level. "It's dead. I'm pretty sure it's dead, anyway, I just got experience for it."

"Experience?"

Fumbling for a non-gamer answer, Travis finally settled on, "Uh, used in games to measure how far until you get more powerful. I guess bears are worth a bit. I'm fifteen out of a hundred."

"I don't think I've ever seen a dungeon like you, Travis. But, I guess I haven't looked at this side of dungeons."

"Trav. Just call me Trav. It's shorter and way easier to say if you need my attention in a hurry."

"Okay, Trav. Just keep up calling me Pen and we'll be fine I think." Penelope stood at the edge looking down for several more minutes. Finally, she said, "I think it's dead. Nothing will play possum that long."

Watching as she nimbly climbed down into the pit, Travis watched her quickly move around the bear and ram a knife into one of its ears, digging it down. He knew she knew exactly what she was about, but it still weirded him out a little.

"I'm going to need to make some kind of rope to pull this out. Even if I cut it up down here, I don't think I can pull it up. Ugh, and there's a downside to using the pit trap like this—half the hide is full of holes."

If Travis had a hand, he would have slapped it against his head (assuming he had a head, too). "I should have thought of that. Damn, do we have anything we can use that will kill them with less damage to the hide?"

Climbing back out of the pit, Penelope shook her head. "No. Not unless you have a rifle, powder, and bullets handy?" Lifting her head, she reached around to her back and Travis watched as a length of rope appeared in her hand. "This is way too handy."

Penelope had found one big advantage she had as a kobold. She tied the rope around the bear's torso just behind its front legs, climbed back out, and gave it a pull to make sure it was secure. What she didn't expect was to half lift the bear up with just a test pull.

"Guess I'm just lower to the ground and have a body built to work instead of fight." Digging her talons into the rock under her, Penelope leaned into the rope and started pulling hard. The bear left the ground, and she felt all its dead weight hanging over her shoulder as she walked—always keeping one foot anchored to the dungeon floor.

When it was all the way out, she figured it was easier to set the trap again and finish dragging the body to the back of the dungeon.

"How are you able to move all that? You lifted it up what, fifteen feet?" Travis asked her.

"Kobolds are strong when it comes to work. Plus I'm also on my home turf here—you. The real trick will be when I have to disarm all our traps to haul it past. Do I just stuff it into you or do I need to butcher this thing myself?" Hoping against hope that she wouldn't damage the skin too much, Penelope kept dragging the bear back through the tunnel.

"Tannery and butcher both require metalworking, which requires a smelter and a blacksmith. It gives a bonus to what you get from each animal. Just try stuffing it in. If you need to break it down into smaller bits, do it."

"Trying to keep a slim figure, Trav?" It was teasing, she knew, but Travis had proved to be someone she could joke with.

"Yeah. If I get too big, I won't be able to fit through the dungeon and go for long walks in the moonlight anymore."

Penelope almost fell in the pit trap from laughing too hard rather than disarming it. "Damn it, that was a good one. Oh, huh, remind me to put some spikes in the bottom of this trap."

Once she got the bear to the heart, she shoved it up and just started tipping it into the giant crystal. When she started shoving the head in, there was a flash of pink light before she felt the bear yanked from her grip and pulled into Travis. "Huh. Did that work?"

"Yeah. I got fifteen food from that and five leather. Okay, setting the upgrade on that pit trap. Oh, I can upgrade you to use ranged weapons now. Here we go, it'll cost you two wood to get a spear."

There was a pull toward the timber mill, so Penelope started walking back toward it with a bounce in her step. A spear, she mused, would mean she could hunt better game outside.

The work team was mostly common laborers. Digging holes and positioning posts was grunt work, but it was still work that needed to be done. Howard Tailor had pushed Tannyr Stoneshave to drop her current task and build a new church, and while she hated leaving something unfinished, she would be as happy as the next person that Rupert had some competition in town.

The annoyance of leaving the barracks unfinished was growing stronger the longer she worked on the church. The first day it was nothing but normal dwarven anxiety for something that wasn't perfect, but by the third day she was almost chewing her fingernails in annoyance.

It wasn't something that was specific to Tannyr, either. The locus that had grown was vexed. It couldn't very well order the humans that had formed it (like a dungeon could), but Northridge was not big enough to need two churches, nor did they even have a second priest. So, like any good mother hen, it herded and tried to shepherd its charges away from that to more useful tasks.

Waking up with the surety of another day of anxiety ahead of her, Tannyr went through her normal morning routine, fetched her tools, and headed off to the worksite. When she got there, she felt oddly bereft of that burning sensation. She looked around the site in a bit of a daze as to what was different.

A wagon was rolling up at the front of the new church's steps, and despite herself Tannyr found herself not just attracted toward it, but drawn there. The wagon was nondescript, but just as she reached it the most amazing and beautiful woman Tannyr had ever seen in her life opened the doors and stepped down to the ground.

Fairheart looked at the partially constructed church, then her eyes strayed—following wisps of magic from every stone—to the dwarf that stared at her. Walking over, she raised her hands, palms up. "Blessings upon you, good lady dwarf. You do wonderful work."

Blinking herself out of a daze, Tannyr looked at the woman who, if her ears had anything to say about her lineage, was at least half elven. "Sister." She dipped her head. "We'll have the structure built within another five days."

Her own church. Fairheart should have been waiting years more for the first chance to get a secondary position at a church, but then her friend had approached her with a story and a plan. "Five days or ten, I trust a woman who puts so much heart into her work to build a fine church. My name is Sister Fairheart, but please, call me Farah."

"Well, Farah," Tannyr said, unable to hold back a big smile due to the field of raw joy the priestess pooled around herself, "I said five, and I mean five. If you'd like, I could stick around a little longer and help make the building into a church."

"I'd appreciate that very much…" Fairheart raised one eyebrow.

Tripping over herself vocally, Tannyr thumped her own forehead. "S-Sorry, Farah. My name is Tannyr Stoneshave—just call me Tann." What shocked Tannyr was how much she felt attracted to Fairheart. Not physically, but something else. It took a moment for her swimming head to filter out the word she was looking for—spiritually. "Sorry if I'm rambling, but I've been feeling lousy these last few days."

"I'm not surprised. Northridge didn't want you to build a second church with only one priest in town. I could feel the locus welcome me as soon as we spotted the town—just after dawn."

What Fairheart said confused Tannyr at first, until she remembered the talk of dungeons popping up nearby. And, about then, she started to remember a little of the party the town had held at the news—she remembered the hangover, though. "Right. Can't say as I've felt that before. Why would the locus be paying so much attention to us? We're just builders."

Snorting, Fairheart raised an eyebrow at Tannyr.

"We are!"

"You are building the backbone of the town. Every building carries the song of your hammer and the warmth of your heart. You are the arms of the locus, forging it bigger and stronger with every day." Walking closer to Tannyr, Fairheart leaned down and pressed her finger under the dwarf's chin—tilting her face up into the soft kiss.

Fairheart's lips were soft, warm, and literally magical. A fire that Tannyr hadn't felt before lit inside, and she felt a lurch in her body as if something was waking. When the gentle kiss ended, the priestess gave her a stunning smile and a wink before turning. "Have a wonderful day, Tannyr Stoneshave, and know that the mother's light shines upon all her daughters."

Brolly Windchime had hoped the barracks would be finished before the church, but he concurred that they needed more coin coming in and that meant a more forthcoming clergy in town. A priestess of the Sisters of Grace was a boon for any growing town, what with their ties to fertility.

The one thing about the barracks that was finished was the noticeboard at the front of it. There were a few missives already stuck to it, mostly the various businesses in Northridge advertising for employees, but now he had something significant to add.

The map he affixed to the board showed the town, the limits of the wall, and one little skull printed off in the jagged foothills to the north. Dungeon, it read, Vermin—rot.

Rot dungeons were annoying. Even slight cuts would get infected and any existing wounds or infections would go wildly out of control—or worse. The two adventurers who had announced the dungeon hadn't mentioned any other, but Brolly was sure there would be at least one other.

At least a vermin dungeon would be somewhat less of a worry than more organized affairs. Goblins, beastmen, undead, dragonkin—Brolly shuddered to think of what some dungeons might mean. Though, at the same time, if they had a famously dangerous dungeon, it would attract more adventurers.

"Interesting times ahead," Brolly said.