The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Level 1

Heart 400/400

Experience 55/100

Workers 2/5

Monsters 0/10-2

Traps 5/10+2

Rooms 5

Food 90

Timber 219

Iron 24

Mana 0

Rock 133

Gold 110

Leather 51

Quest: Gather 100 Food

"Just try adding one. I want to test some things with food." Travis examined the pile of goods Stephan had retrieved from his cabin and was most focused on the haunches of meat. What he eyed most intently was the quest to "gather 100 food".

Unbinding the haunches, Stephan lifted one off the stack and looked at the huge dungeon heart crystal. "I just press it against your crystal?"

"Right, yeah. You've been working with the tannery a lot. I guess just stringing things up in there gives me the resources. For other stuff you just have to poke it into my crystal heart." He didn't have long to wait. Travis watched as Stephan shoved the joint forward and his food ticked up to 102.

Now he was watching for it, Travis saw the old quest disappear and a new one show up.

Quest: Make one of your monsters into a boss!

What he really liked seeing was the reward for the food quest seemed to have been 20 iron. "Woo! Guess what? That was twenty iron for getting all the food."

"How does food get us iron? That doesn't make sense!" Using his knife, Stephan started slicing hunks of meat from another haunch. "Pen! You hungry?"

Realizing Pen was digging deep into the back of the tunnels, Travis asked her for Stephan. "Steph wants to know if you're hungry. He's working on cutting up a haunch of meat. Oh, and we got more iron!"

Putting her pickaxe down, Penelope shook her head. "How did you get iron?"

"Okay, so I had this quest thing to get a hundred food. With what Steph just gave me, it put me over that. I got twenty iron as a reward. That'll help with our traps. So, do you want some of that meat?" Travis looked back to Stephan. "I'm asking her. She couldn't hear you."

"Yeah, I'll take a break now then. Tell Steph I'm on my way." Tucking her pickaxe away, Penelope started loping down the tunnels.

Letting Steph know, Travis focused on what needed building next. He waited for the pair to meet up and start eating. "Okay. So we need those new traps. I can have another seven in total, so I think it would be best to have them in the maze-S at the start there. Make it a big long line of them so people can't try to jump over."

When all he got was nods from the pair, Travis moved on. "Then we need more storage. We have plenty of wood, and now have some iron, so I think two more would be a good idea. All this rock is filling me up."

"You can't use it for anything?" Stephan asked.

"Not that I can find. Maybe I'll get something next tier." Planning out his next changes, Travis looked at the work area already established. "I have an idea for what I want. I just hope these rooms don't need to be bigger in higher tiers."

"We can always use some of that rock to move them, right?" Penelope asked.

"Yeah, I just hate the idea of being inefficient for anything. Okay, so traps here and more room digging here. I might use some tunnels now to make things safer and easier for later." Adding the tunnels for the new rooms was easy, but Travis still had no leather sludge for the traps. "How long until we get some of that sludge?"

Finished with his meat, Stephan gulped the last bit down. "I could get you some now. It's in buckets but if I empty that into the trough in the tannery, that should be in your resources, right?"

"Yeah. Give it a shot. We need five units of it for each trap. In all, each trap needs five leather sludge, five timber, and one iron." Travis would have rubbed his hands together with glee, if he had hands.

Standing up and stretching, Stephan advanced along the hallway and turned into the tannery. The two direwolf carcasses had been hanging for a good few hours and their hides had been drying too. He poured all the blood and guts into one trough and followed it with another smaller bucket of what had dripped off the hides. "How was that?"

"That was eighteen in total. So three slime traps worth. Nice work!"

Stephan wasn't used to the feeling of pure joy that praise from Travis brought him. It was a very kobold thing, he figured, but it wasn't exactly bad. "So that's enough for three traps. We just need to get more critters to skin and I'll be able to get you more. If there are any more of them"—he gestured to the two direwolf bodies—"that might be hard."

"Let's get these three traps built first, then you can head out and see if there is any sign of more. They're big predators, I figure they'll be eating everything they can get their teeth around here—which means less game to be spotted, right?"

It was sound reasoning to Stephan, on both parts. "Right, give us the order to build the traps then."

Inhaling slowly as the need to build came on him, Stephan had to admit that so far Travis had seemed to do all he could to not give them orders or treat them badly. "Thanks." When he realized that sounded a little odd, Stephan clarified. "For not just ordering us around. I appreciate that you totally could—but don't."

When he reached the heart room, Penelope had already left. Making his way down the hall, he saw her just in time for her to duck right at the end of the hallway.

Four wooden panels were carefully laid out and Penelope was starting to pour from a bucket into the middle of the first trap. "Okay, I didn't realize they were that big. How are we meant to get around it?" Walking up to where she was, Stephan started laying down the boxwork for next of the three traps.

Flashing her claws, Penelope gestured to the slight shadows on the walls. "Gouge out some hand and foot holds there. When you need to get past, jump up and claw your way along." She pulled a bunch of little folded metal spikes from her pocket and started scattering them around in her trap.

Stephan kept an eye on Penelope as they both worked. She was definitely a little faster than him at this kind of thing, notable that by the time he was just getting his wall-holds formed, she slipped past climbing on the wall and started boxing up the next trap. By the time he scattered his caltrops and was stirring the tree sap in, she was smoothing out the layer of sticky muck in the third one.

Rather than climb the wall and go past her, Stephan moved to the front end of the line of new traps. "I'm going to check my snares and see if those two were the only direwolves. Are you okay doing any digging that Travis needs?"

"Yeah-yeah. I got all the digging covered. Just don't let anything blindside you out there. The first sign of danger, you leg it back for the dungeon and lead whatever it is into these." Penelope stood up from finishing the third trap. "If you do bring something back, it'd be nice to get more of these down."

Leaving the dungeon, Stephan could see how much damage the two direwolves had done to their camouflage. He did what he could, but without a lot of work he wasn't going to be able to hide the entrance again.

The forest, when he left the safety of the dungeon, felt far more alive now. Stephan could smell animals and trees and hear plenty of movement. Finding his first trap line, he started going along looking for anything the beasts had missed.

Every single trap was sprung. Every single trap held just pieces of whatever he'd caught. It was disheartening, but the noise of the forest was reassuring still. He walked all around the normal game trails and then, down one particularly far from the dungeon, he froze.

The scent on the air was that of death. Lots of it. A little gore too. When he found the first of the direwolf corpses, he knew something really big had happened. There were chunks out of nearby trees, the ground was ripped up in places, and the beast's scalp had been removed.

That surprised Stephan. "Bounty hunters?" He shook his head and went looking for more of the bodies. Sure enough, there were four more. "Trav? I found five direwolf corpses out here. Looks like there was a fight with a bunch of hunters. They scalped them and—Oh wow. There were more, but someone used ice magic to explode them."

"Ice magic? How can you tell?" Travis sounded curious.

"There are little shards of flesh. They would have been frozen at the time, but the way they are separated shows that no knife cut or tearing happened." Uncoiling rope, he started to bind the wolves together and make a loop he could drag them with. "I'm bringing these back. Even if we can't use the meat, we can definitely use these hides and the sludge."

Robert Arskith shook his head. "I still don't get that, Katelyn. No one is staring at you." He nudged his big sister in the side.

"Yeah, that's because I am wearing robes so heavy they'd make a high-elf whore look plain. And if you want to keep all your teeth, you won't comment on that comparison. We have everything we need except that map." Risking pushing the hood of her cloaklike robe back, Katelyn Arskith felt at least a few pairs of eyes evaluate her based on her face and hair. She hated that.

"Okay, I'll go and grab a map. You wait here and try not to seduce the entire town." Robert ignored the deathly glare his sister gave him and headed into the adventuring hall that the town had built. Part barracks, part tavern, and part information center. It was the latter he was there for. "Hi, I need a map of the surrounding area—particularly the new dungeons."

When a bored voice replied, "Two gold," Robert dug two of the appropriate coins from his inner jacket pocket.

"They better be good maps." He took the offered map and paid for it, then unfolded it and headed for the exit. Once outside again, he looked around for his sister. "Of course she's talking to a guy. I can't leave her alone for five, damn minutes." Stomping over to where Katelyn was trying to ignore someone in the local Guard's uniform, Robert said, "Hey, Katelyn, you want to get serious about work?"

Looking to her brother in complete and utter relief, Katelyn let out a sigh. "I gotta go. You know how it is, monsters to kill, dungeons to explore."

"You, uh…" Timothy Devin, a guard for the town of Northridge, trailed off as the love of his life walked off. "This sucks."

Tannyr Stoneshave rubbed the sweat from her brow. It wasn't a forgefire that had her so hot but working in the bright sun. Dwarves, she told anyone who would listen, were meant to be underground or, failing that, in large buildings lacking windows. "We need that wall built as soon as possible!"

"I believe they're working as fast as they're able, Tannyr. It's my crafters holding us back. Only three tree fellers and two carpenters isn't enough—not that it's their fault." Howard Tailor was still running tallies on the production worksheet to ensure they could build the wooden wall and barracks before any projected threats were due. "Winter is too close."

"Winter don't matter, Brolly said. He told me that dungeons like this will keep producing in the dead of winter. We just need to keep safe up here and keep working at it without overwhelming the damn hole." Try as she might, Tannyr would not relax for a moment while she had a job to do—and this was probably the single most important jobs of her life. The future of the town could rest on protecting this jewel of a dungeon. "We could start building the front as stonework while working on the wooden palisade?"

"That—I'll need to divert all the quarried stone that was going to Northridge to here, but that would definitely give your workers something to do, and it will get the fortress fenced in faster. If we can get Christine to bankroll some stone from elsewhere, we could get a tower built, too."

Nodding, Tannyr rolled her shoulders and took a deep breath. "Runners!" She then left Howard to writing letters while she walked up to the dungeon's entrance. "And we still need to get a bunker built around this." She touched the raw dungeonstone at the entrance and jerked back. To anyone else it would feel like stone, but to a dwarf a dungeon's rock felt wrong.

Facing that minor "fear", Tannyr started measuring the entrance for the stonework and doors that would be put around it.