NOVGO.NET Chapter 2006 Dungeons?
Chapter 2006: Chapter 2006 Dungeons?
— Kat —
Everyone was sipping some tea as Weaver asked. “So, what has been happening? And start at the beginning! I know we went over this before, but now that we have as much time as we desire and the ability to talk face to face again we can chat properly.”
“Well… it started like this I suppose,” said Kat as she began the retelling. Quickly, though, the story was paused when Kat mentioned the teleporting part of the Winter area. “I don’t think we experienced much of that though.”
“I can assure you, that you DID in fact teleport quite a few times,” countered Weaver. “I felt my node moving all over the place. Even when you were just flying around during the day sometimes you got moved. It wasn’t always a lot, but it was quite regular. Perhaps every few hours?”
“Wait, really? How the heck did we not notice that?” asked Kat.
“I couldn’t say. My best guess would be that the environment moves as well, ensuring that the landscape doesn’t change from your perspective because it’s going along with you. The other reason is simply the weather. I’m currently reconnecting to my old tunnels… and I think, maybe, I might be responsible for the teleporting issues…”
“Wait what?” asked Kat.
“Well, the tunnels here are strange. They weren’t sealed properly even if I was cut off from them. It seems that instead… they’ve sort of twisted together and are somehow able to build up a store of energy which is then discharged down the tangled linkages of the tunnels which connect them to each other. I’m not entirely sure I CAN untangle them actually. I’m also not sure how useable they are.
“I think that it would be safe to send a person or two along them occasionally, but not leave them open the way I normally do. To untangle them I might need you to take a node over… but they’re such a mess a node going through from this side will not work. I’d need to send you with a fresh node to the city, or heck maybe back to Autumn or something and then direct you from there,” sighed Weaver.
“That sounds…” Kat slowly trailed off.
“It sounds hellish,” Hedera cut in. “Especially as we’d still be teleported around while trying to reach the nodes correct?”
“Sadly correct,” sighed Weaver. “I could cancel the changes out through the node of course, but it would use a lot of energy and potential damage the delicate balance of SUCK that keeps the tunnel network in Winter from imploding. I genuinely have no idea how it got like that. My best guess is someone tried to seal them off from me, but keep them connected to each other so they could still travel? Or something? It’s been too long to guess just from looking at the remaining mess.”
“Is that something you’d want us to do?” asked Kat, a touch unsure if they even wanted to leave the city let alone deal with something like that.
“I mean, sure, with infinite time and resources I’d love you to take a look but we don’t. I think connecting Summer and Spring is probably more important and far less of a hassle. Might still be easier to go from Autumn into Summer even if you want to head to Spring though. I didn’t realise it was quite so bad. Perhaps having a node on you made it worse?” Weaver pondered.
“Fair enough,” agreed Kat. “With that tabled for now, this is what we did next…” except Kat didn’t really get all that far as when Kat brought up the Primordial of ice, Weaver hissed in protest.
“Dammit, one of those things is still around? Dammit. My original job before I started my tunnel network was fighting them,” grumbled Weaver.
“Why?” asked Hedera. “It doesn’t seem like something you’d care about.”
“A fire Primordial from Summer decided it really hated my webs. It would come in and burn ALL of my hard work over, and over, and over again when I was younger. Weaker. I couldn’t kill it and arguably still can’t depending on what you count as ’kill’ when it comes to those things. Still, I started a quest for vengeance against them and managed it pretty well. There hadn’t been any on the island when I was… talked around into starting the tunnel project.
“Makes me wonder if the ice Primordial is one returning from those times or if it’s simply another one. Depending on how involved it was in the tangled mess of Winters tunnels it could be. Perhaps nobody broke them intentionally but the Primordial managed it?” pondered Weaver.
“How did you deal with them?” asked Hedera.
“I separated them into so many tiny pieces that they were essentially nothing and then sealed those pieces away in different sections of space hoping they’d eventually run out of energy and disappear. I know for a face it worked on the fire elemental because I kept checking up on the bastard. Then again, I also needed to make sure that it couldn’t burn my webs so I employed and enchanter to enchant the everloving SHIT out of the area I held each of the pieces in and how to enchant my webs with fire resistance for normal stuff. I don’t always bother, but I can do it now,” explained Weaver.
“So how likely is it that the Primordial is the same one?” asked Kat.
Weaver shrugged, “Depends on how likely it is any Primordial is actually a separate entity? I don’t even know if I can still get to the ice prison spots to check on the pieces to confirm one way or another… and Primordials don’t really remember stuff. Sure I like to say the fire one had a grudge against me but it didn’t act like anything with a brain. It didn’t think.
“Even when I started to rip chunks off of it and seal it away forever it was never scared of me nor worried. It just kept on burning things and going about its business. There’s a reason they are considered to be forces of nature rather than monsters like slimes. Still… I’m trying to think if it’s even possible for freeing one of them to cause such damage…”
“Question,” intoned Hedera. “Why does this seem to imply that the Ice Primordial was in the Winter area? Wouldn’t that be a bad idea?”
Weaver nodded, “Well it’s certainly not the preferred idea… but the fact of the matter is I couldn’t move the pieces too far away and while I’m good at sealing, for something like them? You really want to seal them in a stationary position. So I couldn’t spare the time or effort to take them too far away. So pocket dimensions it was.”
“Wait… is that how dungeons spawn?” asked Lily. “Some powerful, godlike monster, gets broken up into pieces and then thrown into a pocket dimension that eventually cracks and leaks back into the real world?”
Weaver paused, thinking over the question as if she’d never even considered something like that. “Hmmm… that makes a lot of sense actually. I’m not certain, I’ve never looked into it, and I don’t know if there are any dungeons on the island… but yeah it would make sense if something along those lines is what causes a lot of dungeons,”
“Would the Trapmaster’s puzzle thing count as a proper dungeon?” asked Kat.
“Definitionally yes,” agreed Weaver.
“I’d have called it one,” offered Hedera at essentially the same time. The pair looked at each other, and Weaver gestured for Hedera to go on. “Well… assuming Lily is correct, then it would be a different kind of dungeon… but really dungeon is more of a descriptive name. It’s a place with a bunch of monsters, a higher than average concentration of ambient mana and usually some sort of rewards to find.
“Not as much ’loot in chest’ type of things as people think but the monsters tend to have valuable parts to them, and there’s quite often plenty of useful things in the rooms. An iron ingot soaking in higher than average ambient mana for a few decades is worth a good deal of money to the right people.”
*You know. That makes a lot more sense then finding random loot in chests all of the time. It doesn’t normally matter to us but Monster parts are probably quite valuable because of how hard it is for normal people to kill them. On top of that, not everyone has chests of random shit lying around. Though I bet at least some do.*
[Well, we have no idea if that’s a stereotype from OUR world or one that’s also present in this one. Plus, good, sturdy wooden chests with metal banding to help stop the wood from warping and allowing easy access to the chest as it ages are pretty standard for this sort of time. Especially with enchantments. You could make them last just about forever so it might be that loot is scattered around, but the best stuff is always in chests because that’s where you’d store your valuables?]
*Huh… I guess I can see them being sort of like medieval safes.*