Museum Core Chapter 22: Growth

Naturally, the first thing Thomas did was replace most of his defenders, though he didn’t re-summon the insane number of boomslangs all over the place.

And immediately after that, he increased his domain to include the dinosaur section and added a new wall in the corridor between the two entrances to that section.

That way, anyone trying to get to his core would have to walk past the dinosaurs to reach the mammal gallery.

There was one small issue, though. All the dinosaurs he currently had were the animatronics still in there, he was yet to gather any patterns for the big lizards.

He also realized that he had quite a bit of extra expansion potential at his disposal, so he also started to dig straight down. The archives were still there, true, but he now had a different way to get stuff from within rather than waste expansion ability.

The point was mainly to make him less vulnerable against something deciding to go straight through the outside wall, a tactic that could lead to them emerging as few as ten meters from his core.

But while he was halfway through that, he realized that his domain felt less … connected. Less … singular. He’d have to check, but it seemed like someone being in any part of his Dungeon would no longer shut down the whole bloody thing.

And even after that, he still had enough to absorb the entirety of the cafe, though he held off on that since he hadn’t tested his new domain.

And because he was trying to be responsible, he did the necessary stuff before the fun stuff. So, cleaning everything, widening the mezzanine in his hall to make wallbusting seem like the less attractive alternative option, and creating a second room as large as mammal hall underneath the original one.

That room was then turned into Cheshire’s new boss room while he rejoined the two halves of the original room and added a Landwyrm.

Actually … he wound up swapping the contents of those rooms. He wanted to boost Cheshire more than he wanted to upgrade random other creatures, so it made sense to have her a bit closer to the entrance than the final boss room.

On second thought … Cheshire let out an annoyed growl as he made her move for the third time in as many minutes but went along with it, entering her new “nest” at the core-ward end of the dino section. There was enough between her and the entrance to prevent an unfair “we ran straight into the final boss and got slaughtered” situation, but she was still close enough that most invaders would likely reach her and strengthen her if they died.

“All clear, you can call the humans back,” he sent to Elias. “Could you explain to me how split domains work while you walk?”

Elias somehow managed to stretch out the explanation to the point where it took up the entirety of the trip to the humans and the cafe from there.

It was ultimately quite simple, though. Instead of the entirety of the Dungeon being shut down, the room with people was removed from the Dungeon’s control, as were the rooms around it, with walls and even doors reducing the range of the effect, to the point where two rooms right next to each other wouldn’t affect each other as long as there were no direct connections between them. And no direct connections in the adjoining rooms.

In theory, re-routing the path to the cafe to the opposite end of the entrance hall should be enough to allow people to be within without messing with his control.

In practice, he’d be damn sure to test all of that before he messed up a good thing. The cafe had already been stocked with impromptu beds made from curtains, seat cushions and tablecloths. Well, actually… to be honest, Thomas had started thinking of them as “nests”, because they really did like the bed a cat or dog would make if allowed to do so.

So while Lea and Bethany went back to “bed”, Teddy got chased all over the Dungeon so Thomas could test the limits of his domain. It turned out that his presence shut down the room he was in and any up to two connections away, assuming they were mid-sized rooms. If he was in the cavernous entrance hall, mammal hall, and the boss chamber underneath the mammal hall, for example, rooms two away from him weren’t completely blocked.

With that covered, Thomas subsumed the cafe and created an alternative entrance from the marine reptile corridor, which branched off on the right of the entrance hall, opposite to where his dungeon lay.

That was a damn good thing. For one, Thomas could have creatures protecting the refugees in the cafe without running any risk of the monsters snapping if they were, say, petted too hard by an overly excited little girl.

He could also easily create food and utility objects right where they were needed, all it would take was for everyone to briefly dip out.

Teddy yawned loudly. “I don’t suppose you’ve managed to heat up the coffee yet? Or got any energy drinks?”

“He’s done enough, he should go to sleep, I should have hot coffee in the morning,” Thomas said and Elias passed it along.

Ok, now that was done. All done. The humans were in bed, Elias seemed to believe he’d been human even if he hadn’t properly apologized, and he had all this loot to play with.

***

As it turned out, creating an avatar was very simple. All Thomas had to do was pour energy into the pattern while “twisting” it slightly to create an empty shell that he could fill with his consciousness. Once again, Elias went very metaphysical with his explanation, but it turned out to be quite simple.

And suddenly, Thomas had four limbs again.

“I CAN TALK!” he shouted.

Or rather, tried to shout. It … it came out as discordant monkey screeches that made Elias shoot off like a bottle rocket.

The fairy came to a stop in the air, clutching his chest.

“Don’t scare me like that. What’s wrong with … oh. Right. You’re gonna want to level that thing up and create the ‘avatar’ power. Basically think ‘I want to inhabit this body and use it to communicate’ and make an F-Rank power based on that.”

“Once again, that would have been nice to know before,” Thomas grumbled.

“Sorry,” Elias sighed, then added “But it wouldn’t have made a difference if I had mentioned it.”

Nice apology, Thomas thought, but decided to leave it at that.

He just dumped a ton of capuchins into the entrance hall. A literal ton.

They might be cute, but they had sharp teeth and could all the way down to the bone on humans.

And Zerg rushes were pretty powerful unless there was an uncrossable power gap. For example, the Landwyrm would probably be pretty fine against a mass of monkeys.

Thomas sighed. He’d been looking forward to getting an avatar for as long as he’d known about it, and now, that had mostly been yanked away from him.

But he did other cool stuff to do. Specifically, upgrading the giant sloth and boomslang, and employing the Fer de Lance.

Fer de Lance.

Or lancehead viper, if you wanted to be boring and use the English version of the name.

Being bitten by one of these was a nightmare, likely to cost limbs even if an antivenom were applied in a timely manner.

Unlike the boomslang’s hemotoxin, which affected the entire body, the Fer de Lance caused more localized damage, but that damage would be rapid and devastating. Especially if applied to a joint, or, say, the back of the neck?

That was probably the first thing he’d do with the Fer de Lance venom, give it to the jaguar the next time he had the baseline model ready to rank up.

The big cats dropping down from the ceiling had easy access to people’s vitals, and if they could essentially rot off everything around the area they bit in addition to the damage caused by the bite itself, they’d be significantly more effective.

And until then, he scattered plenty of both snakes around the various rooms with orders to not attack until and unless he told them to. They were there in case another wyrm of similar attacked. The goal was to simultaneously make himself well-defended from actual invaders while not becoming a death trap for actual delvers, who used the dungeon as Elias said Dungeons were used in the wider multiverse.

Namely, a consensual “murderer-murder victim” relationship, which was utterly insane in Thomas’ mind, but apparently, that was how many worlds worked.

Being a Dungeon diver wasn’t too different from, say, being a mercenary, or maybe a soldier during a particularly tumultuous time, risking life and limb in exchange for a reward.

In fact, diving Dungeons was probably a little safer, simply because it was fairly predictable compared to the chaos of war. You could choose when to go in, and as long as the Dungeon didn’t prevent it, retreat at any point.

Thomas was definitely going to let people retreat, and also keep away some of his nastier creatures for standard delvers.

In fact, he wasn’t too hot on the idea of having people die inside his creation, but he was a lot less hot on the idea of staying as he was at the moment. Simply put, there was a finite number of creatures in the jungle, even if the humans that had been outside the catastrophe’s radius didn’t kill any of them.

He didn’t want to be helpless, ever. Not against monsters, not against humans, not against anything.

Humans especially were going to be a concern, if, as Teddy had said, they’d started gaining powers. All throughout history, the powerful had become cruel. Not all of them, but enough to establish a correlation between power and cruelty.

Thomas sighed. Even if the changes to the world were limited just to what he already knew about, things would get really crazy.

So what was left to do?

Replacing stuff? Done.

Renovating? Done.

Existential dread? Done.

And now, all that was left to do was have fun.

Thomas entered his avatar again and used his new monkey form to scamper towards the dino section, while mentally calling over one of the few sabertooth tigers that had survived the Landwyrm fight.

And when it was in range, he jumped on and clung to the fur on the back of its neck.

“Onwards!” he cheered with a cacophony of monkey screeches. Oh, this was awesome. The only thing that could make it even better would have been an F-Rank proper avatar, but that wasn’t too far off in all likelihood.

The Dungeon around him was huge from his perspective, which only made it all the cooler. He felt like he was going through a world of giants, or like he were a kid again, exploring an incredible place. He’d been here before, obviously, but it was just so different.

And that was even before he entered the dinosaur section.

Huge skeletons rising towards the ceilings, skulls bigger than he was, fully painted, life-sized replicas, … oh it was every kid’s fantasy to be in a world like this.

Oh, and there was a nest of eggs with baby Majasaurus models that he promptly absorbed and recreated in his core room.

… It was cute.

But aside from the occasional theft of cute or cool displays, Thomas was mostly shopping for monsters.

He found several that were replicas, sadly, which he couldn’t turn into patterns, though he ate several for use as decoration.

The only things he found were a camarasaurus skeleton on full display, and a scolosaurus that was still entirely trapped in the stone it had been found in.

The camarasaurus was a sauropod similar to a diplodocus in build, with a long neck and tail that was mostly protected through sheer size but lacked any particularly powerful natural weapons. It was also so long it could barely even turn around in this room, but he replaced the elephant he had in the entrance with it. It made for one hell of an impressive first showing without being too powerful.

And the scolosaurus was, in essence, a small ankylosaurus, complete with a tail club and an armored back, five meters long and standing at chest height for an adult human. He liked it, so he added two to this room.

But that alone wasn’t going to be adequate for defenses. So what should he add? Capuchins riding the dinosaurs could be both cool and adorable, but was it effective?

Maybe he should test how that would work?

He jumped off his current steed and had it carry him around the room again. At some point, he just laid down on his back to stare at the ceiling while the scolosaurus plodded on.

And then, he sat bolt upright and facepalmed.

… There were more exhibits on the ceiling.

Of course, there were several replicas there as well, but after another five minutes, he’d gotten his hands on a tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops, and stegosaurus.

The stegosaurus was a major gain in the “cool factor” department, but he didn’t use it since its power almost entirely lay in pointing its rear end towards the enemy and waving its tail around.

And while that was a solid strategy in nature, in a Dungeon, he had better options.

For example, the t rex he placed in the dinosaur section.

He left out the triceratops though, he’d be saving it for any long straight stretches, in which they could charge, once he had such space available.

And then he spent several minutes using the T-rex as a jungle gym before he withdrew from the avatar and dissolved it, returning to his normal dungeon existence.

Thomas’ consciousness returned to his core, where he zeroed in on two patterns.  The boomslang and the giant sloth.

His choice for the latter was obvious. He had a lot of cool options available, but there was one choice that was not only funny but also fit in perfectly with another trick.

The Landwyrm’s Rubber Physiology was a fantastic all-round defensive power for a creature wrapped in scales, which made it resistant to piercing or cutting attacks in addition to blunt impacts, but without such a solid, un-“rubberized” shell, it allowed for far more.

Namely, limb elongation. It would not only allow the sloths to strike with unexpected reach, giving them a nasty sucker punch when first employed, but also combo nicely with the environment he built for the sloths in the chamber right in front of his core room.

On the surface, it was a copy of Cheshire’s room, with a smooth marble floor covered in a thin layer of water for extra slipperyness.

But it had numerous handholds on the ceiling. Those had taken forever to carve, but he was very happy with them.

The sloths would easily be able to reach them even without stretching, and their new physiology would allow them to slingshot themselves about the place, becoming a deadly, high-speed threat … once they mastered the trick.

They hadn’t managed to make quite as much of a mess as Cheshire, he’d literally had to glue one of her teeth back in on one occasion, but there was still a very obvious learning curve.

If he’d had internet access and a phone, he’d have been able to make a mint by selling the videos.

He watched the pandemonium for half an hour, with Elias occasionally dipping in,  before returning to his final upgrade.

This one was tough.

Adding the Fer de Lance’s venom to the boomslang would instantly create an infinitely deadlier bite, but it was still one that would require it to be able to successfully land a bite.

In the meanwhile, giving it the wyrm’s acid spit would add another weapon to its arsenal while giving it a way to break armor and open gaps to land bites in.

And lastly, he could outright give it a stronger bite, for example, one based on the hippo, to straight up bite through enemy defenses.

He wound up picking the last option.

A deadlier bite and a way to maybe land a bite through armor would have been nice, but guaranteed venom delivery beat both in his mind.

Thomas proudly looked over his Dungeon, cackling to himself whenever he spotted one of the hidden snakes.

And once that was done, he spawned a new snake to use as an avatar and used it to explore the various crawlspaces of the museum. Sure, he could have just projected his point of view in there, but damn, it was just cooler this way.