Museum Core Chapter 14: Final Questions

“Pick the wall-climbing power,” Elias said immediately. “That increases the number of spots they can attack from and gives them a chance to reach spots they normally wouldn’t be able to. Hidey-holes are too obvious and you can get stealth from proper Dungeon design. Wall climbing, on the other hand, might not even be discovered after the first time they drop down on someone unless they’re spotted on the walls or ceiling.

“And steel teeth and claws aren’t going to make nearly the difference you imagine them to be, these are predators, they’re already plenty dangerous with what nature gave them. Also, steel bones aren’t going to matter if an invader can easily destroy organs with a single hit.”

Sometimes, only sometimes, Thomas could see Elias for he’d claimed he was, a veteran adventurer of untold power, an ace on a planetary scale, one of the youngest people to ever reach that level.

Which only served to make it all the more frustrating when he wasn’t like that and made stupid, simple, moronic, mistakes.

So he transformed the wolverines, evolving them into F-Rank beasts. Their raw power didn’t change much, like Elias had said, if they’d evolved around magic, something with a wolverine’s physical abilities would also have already gained magic, but now, they’d start to grow in power every time they killed something. And they had their very own superpower, the ability to climb solid surfaces.

Species: Wo‚†€®erine

F-Rank

Powers

Hyrax Climi∂⁄†Ω@⁄†∂€][¢

What the heck? Was that how he was supposed to be able to see everything?

Sure, the screen was glitched to hell and back, but it still showed what seemed to be the status of the minion he was modifying. It was a wolverine and in his hand, he’d named the power “Hyrax Climbing”, which seemed to be what had been written there as well.

And then the whole affair vanished without his input, and he couldn’t get in back no matter what he tried.

“Elias, did you see that?” Thomas practically shouted, causing the fairy to jump a foot in the air.

“See what?” Elias asked, sounding only mildly interested.

“I just saw some kind of strange window describing the wolverine, but then it vanished.”

“Was it blue?” Elias suddenly sounded a lot more invested, leaning towards Thomas’ core as though that would let him hear him better.

“Yes?”

“That’d be the monster’s status window,” Elias said. “You should be able to find it by calling up yours and then navigating to your monster list. Try saying or thinking  ‘status’.”

“Status.”

… Aaaaannd nothing happened, a trend that continued on the next twenty tries, as well as every variation he used.

“So, the System’s still glitched,” Elias sighed. “We’ll try again later.”

Later. He couldn’t have it now, he had to wait.

And as an adult, Thomas should and did have patience. But considering what the universe had just dangled in from of him and snatched away before he could even realize what it was, he was closer to throwing a toddler tantrum than he’d been in years.

With a weary sigh, he went back to doing what he had been doing before getting sidetracked, namely, playing with the wolverines.

Their climbing ability was good, but unfortunately, it looked like the wolverines were a little too heavy to make the most of it. In fact, it seemed like the only place they could get up was on top of glass display cases, the perfectly smooth surface apparently working perfectly with the “sticky” feet of the wolverines.

The solution was simple and tedious. Make every surface in the Dungeon mirror-smooth.

It worked, obviously, but it was, well, tedious. So tedious, in fact, that Thomas would have almost been glad if the solution had failed.

While he worked, Thomas started to chat with Elias.

“How could the Alpha Ripper get stuck? I thought that I was incapable of preventing invaders from reaching my core?”

“That only counts for the local sapient species, if monsters are too fat, that’s on them.”

“So how narrow can I make my corridors?” Thomas asked. If he could create something straight out of those traumatizingly claustrophobic cave exploration tiktoks, that would deter most invaders and leave everyone else sitting ducks.

“As narrow as you have them is about the limit,” Elias replied immediately, dashing his hopes. “People need enough space to properly walk and freely wield normal weapons. If someone’s stupid enough to try using a greatsword or quarterstaff, that’s on them, but regular swords will need to be useable.”

Thomas laughed softly. At this point, these Dungeon rules felt less like magical truths and more like OSHA regulations.

“Could I make a temporary opening for Cheshire to leave the Dungeon without having to go through the mezzanine? Like something where I balance a boulder so it’ll drop into a hole and open a door if a creature knocks away whatever is holding the boulder in place, send Cheshire out, and have a boulder above it with the same setup to re-seal the hole?” he asked.

It’d been something he’d come up with last night, but making that would have been a massive project to undertake without first doing a little sanity check.

Elias shook his head with barely suppressed mirth, the bastard.

“You don’t have nearly enough control over your Dungeon to set up something that finicky and even if you did, it wouldn’t work because the boulder wouldn’t be as hard as your walls.”

“It would be made of the same material as the walls?” Thomas asked.

“But they’re reinforced because they’re walls, they’re not made up of some special material.”

“Except they’d be a part of a wall,” Thomas pointed out.

“A moving wall is called a ‘door’, Thomas,” Elias reminded him.

Sadly, Thomas had to admit that was a good point. There went his best idea so far.

But now, he really had a ton of cool stuff to play with until something else interesting happened.

He’d gotten a ton of interesting antelopes and deer from the section of the archives he’d broken into, as well as a serval, a kind of African wildcat, and a painted dog. He wound up summoning the dog in its juvenile form, aka, as a puppy, and put it into his core room. Cute animals were cute and he liked to have them around himself, even if they weren’t doing him much good.

Yet after half an hour of messing around, digging through his patterns, and seeing just where he could send the wolverines, he finally remembered what he’d been meaning to do, decided to bite the bullet and start grilling Elias … who was currently playing with the puppy, scratching its chin while a tail bigger than he was wagged at the puppy’s rear, making for an unbearably cute scene he could barely bring himself to interrupt. Barely.

“How do I prevent my control over the Dungeon from being shut down every time something enters?” Thomas asked.

“You grow. There’s a rage limit for the effect, and as you get stronger, you’ll also be able to limit it with your walls. You’ll never be able to drop a monster on someone within a couple of ranks of you, but eventually, you’ll be able to make changes even with invaders,” Elias explained.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Thomas asked. That would have been decently useful before now.

“Because it wasn’t relevant yet,” Elias shrugged. “Or are you telling me you’ve only got a reason to grow now that I told you about this?”

“And would you have remembered to tell me when it did?” Thomas asked acidly.

“Obviously.”

Not obviously. Elias could be smart, and seemed to be pretty good at analyzing combat situations, but he wasn’t exactly a stellar teacher, which seemed to be the role Dungeon Fairies were meant to occupy.

“Are you ever going to tell me anything before I can use it?” Thomas asked.

“I’ll tell you stuff as it becomes relevant,” Elias said.

Yeah, he did, with the added caveat of needing to remember to do so. Thomas sighed.

“Look, I get that there are some concepts I shouldn’t be messing around with. Trying to eat spacetime is probably a bad idea, as is seeing if I can summon enough matter in one spot until it turns into a black hole. I heard that if a penny were to suddenly turn into a black hole, it would instantly return to being regular matter while releasing enough energy to wipe London off the map. I’m not asking you to tell me about that stuff.

“But I’m new to all this and you’re the only source of information I have, so could you please just tell me everything you know about Dungeons? What can I do, what can I expect to get, what are some things I should be doing? And for the love of all that is holy, I’m not a mindreader! If I don’t have to worry about an invader and you don’t tell me, guess what, I still worry!

“So get your head out of your ass and do your job as a Dungeon fairy.”

Thomas had worked himself up so much that he only realized Elias had turned to stare at him with his face a mask of absolute horror and frozen that way. It would have been comical if it hadn’t looked so believable.

“You … you … catacl- … how could you possibly …”

After at least half a minute of shocked spluttering, Elias managed to pull himself back together, tried to return to his usual “too cool for school” posture, and failed miserably. But at least he seemed to have regained his ability to string together a coherent sentence.

“Yeah, don’t summon overlapping matter, that’s a really bad idea. Like, really bad. Continents have died due to the mistakes of Dungeon cores. You won’t be able to cause that much damage yet but … just don’t do that, ok?”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Thomas responded sourly. Couldn’t Elias have responded to everything else, namely, the entire point of the fucking speech?

Elias seemed to deflate at that.

“Good.”

“Now, can you please tell me more about what I can do? You don’t have to share any secrets, but I need to know as much as possible about what I am.”

At that, Elias seemed to deflate further.

“I’m not a good teacher, am I? Dungeon fairies are supposed to be these incredible fonts of knowledge, capable of advising their bonded cores on anything that they could possibly need to know.

“I … I’m not a teacher. I’m good at fighting and analyzing combat scenarios, not teaching. I never know when to tell you about anything and even when I do have to say something, I don’t always remember.”

“So how about you tell me everything you remember when you think of it?” Thomas asked.

“That’s going to take a while,” Elias said, sounding torn, though Thomas wasn’t entirely certain between what.

“We have nothing but time.”

“Alright, in the interest of full disclosure, I actually still have some powers from my time as a warrior. In an emergency and only given emergency I can boost if you feed your creatures with the powers are used to have. I didn't tell you, because I didn't want you to start doing stupid things, knowing that you want me to fall back on, but honestly, you could already call so much destruction it doesn't matter if you know about this.”

Did Thomas believe that? Sure, Elias could be forgetful at times, but on the other hand, this time, the explanation tracked with everything else he’d done so far.

His biggest fear was that Thomas would turn into a slaughterhouse a place that chewed up humans and spat out death. Knowing that there was a literal get-out-of-death free card in play could have made that far easier. keeping that knowledge hidden and only really revealing it when it came up … it made sense even if it grated on him.

“And when were you going to tell me about this?”

“When you needed to use it,” Elias said simply.

“And you're not hiding any other secrets like that are you?”

“I have a million secrets, but nothing like that. I promise I’ll tell you if I find something else like that. And until then, I’ll share every bit of information I have on Dungeons … unless they’re like it.”

From context, Thomas guessed “it” was the “dangerous secret” he’d deduced.

And then came a true flood of information, an overwhelming flood of trivia and tricks that he wouldn’t be able to use for a hundred years, and by that point, he’d probably have to ask Elias to explain the whole thing again.

Maybe, just maybe, Elias deciding to throttle the flow of information had some small, tiny, infinitesimal, amount of justification behind it.

But Thomas was still very much skeptical about everything. The only thing he knew for certain was that if he really had to know something, he’d have to ask, that was the only guaranteed way to get information.

Either the fairy would prove useful, or he’d be out on his ass.