Dungeons Are Bad Business

Vee and Alforde stood at the gate that led to Westown, with two carts full of building materials behind them. It wasn’t enough to build the entire dungeon – not even close, to be quite honest, but a good start and today was just the first of what would probably be half a dozen or so trips out to the site. He’d hired Nen and Cris to drive them, and the bandits in training looked more than a little nervous about the prospect of going into the fiend controlled part of the city.

The guard, a salamander woman with armor specially fitted for her thin frame and long tail, was dumbfounded that anyone wanted to go through the gate.

“But there are fiends!” She said, for what must have been at least the fourth time. “And ghosts!”

Vee rolled his eyes. “So I’ve heard. Please, just open the gate and I promise that we’ll return before sunset.” He held up the pass that he’d gotten from the adventurer’s guild. “See? We’ve gone through the appropriate channels and everything.”

There was a bit of grumbling, but the salamander guard knew her business and that business included the ironclad rule that passes from the guild were as good as council law. She waved to her partner and with a great heaving turn of the crank next to the guard station, the heavy gate slowly opened up. Vee led his little band through it and they made for the dungeon’s location.

Fiends were not something that Vee had much experience with, and despite the assurances from Reginald, Nen, and Cris that the monsters didn’t roam the streets during the day, Vee kept casting his eyes back and forth as they walked down the street, expecting an ambush at any moment.

[Devious Mind +1]

None came though, and a little while later they stood in front of the dark looking tower and empty lot where Vee was going to build his dungeon.

The first thing he did, naturally, was to make sure that empty lot was devoid of any lone roses. It was, thankfully, and Vee breathed a sigh of relief at dodging the lifelong quest of any lunatic bands of pseudo-immortal [Gunslingers] who may be passing through. Dealing with a band of those guys was known to be a momentous pain in the butt.

He directed Nen and Cris to start unloading the carriages into the lot, and then turned his attention to the tower’s door. This was going to be the challenging part, because while the fiends apparently kept to themselves during the day, he was putting himself right into their territory, and it was totally reasonable to assume that they wouldn’t take kindly to such an invasion.

Vee was prepared for that though, as he’d spent the last several days scouring the books in the Oar’s Crest Library for every scrap of information on fiends he could find. He’d learned enough, or at least he hoped so. Fiends were fast and dangerous, and hurting them with melee weapons required a near constant channeling of energy that was tougher to maintain than it first seemed. Their shapes weren’t fixed, nor were their sizes, but all fiends had fangs and claws, and they were imbued with some sort of fire magic that gave any wounds they inflicted a chance to spontaneously ignite.

Had Vee been an adventurer, he would have been in for a very difficult clearing job, but he had come across a fact that made the fiends substantially less dangerous for him.

They were spirits.

And that meant that he could make them do his bidding.

Reaching up to the sky, Vee stretched his fingers as far as they would reach and activated [Ghost Baton].

There was a squelching sound in the air as Vee drew ectoplasm from the sky and formed it into a rod. When it came to conducting ghosts, you could use bone, wood, or metal, but like attracts like and ectoplasm worked best. The only downside was that the batons tended not to last all that long. Most of Vee’s only tended to stick around for a few hours, and then they started to melt away.

What that meant was that every baton was a little different. In almost no time at all he was holding a thin black stick connected to a handle adorned with golden flowers. It was pretty, in a way, but it wasn’t the nicest one he’d ever made. Oh well. It was temporary. Lifting the baton, Vee closed his eyes, held up both hands, and activated [Form Orchestra].

[Form Orchestra] was the skill that made his class what it was. It had been discovered by accident long ago, when a research-inclined necromancer wondered why he always felt the presence of his long-dead wife when he played his violin. With time and research, he discovered that “music” (defined very loosely as a series of telepathic orders tied to repetitive sounds) was the key to getting ghosts to do one’s bidding.

The size of a [Ghost Maestro]’s orchestra was dependent on the number of sounds they could telepathically command, and at Level 13, Vee could only manage three. La-la, na-na, and doot-doot. Not legitimate song lyrics, but perfectly acceptable for controlling ghosts.

Vee stepped into the first floor of the tower and as expected, a fiend lunged for him.

“La-la! First section!” He cried as he pointed his baton at it, sending his will into the fiend’s consciousness, and establishing himself as the spirit’s master. The fiend became docile almost instantly. Behind Vee, Alforde lowered his hammer and looked both relieved and disappointed at the fact that he wouldn’t have to fight.

The pair slowly made their way up to the top of the tower, with Vee adding each fiend they came across into his orchestra. Each sound could bind a maximum of seven spirits, and so Vee could only control twenty one ghosts at any given time. If they encountered more than that, he’d have no choice but to use his [Banish] skill on them and turn them into little puddles on the floor.

He hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. He had plans for the fiends. Specifically, they were going to be the laborers that built his dungeon. Though they weren’t particularly strong or skilled outside of fighting, as spirits they didn’t need to eat or sleep, and they worked cheap. It was much easier to come up with repetitive noises and refined ectoplasm instead of fleurs, even with Sacre’s “assistance”.

Clearing the building took the better part of two hours, and to his chagrin Vee ended up using [Banish] a handful of times. He would have had to use it more, but Alforde managed to take a few of the monsters out with his enthusiastic, albeit clumsy, hammerwork. Vee supposed that all the armorsoul’s practice was paying off.

Vee’s orchestra was full, and he could feel the twenty one spirits inside his mind, messily arranged into three sections. Vee considered them for a few minutes, and then began the process of changing their groupings so that each sound was filled with fiends of roughly similar shapes and sizes. Sorting wasn’t a perfect science by any means, but Vee figured that having them in more specialized groups would make it easier to give them directions as time went on. Ghosts tended to like structure and order. He mentally designated the La-las, filled with short and scrawny fiends, as the Light Section, the tall and broad fiends following the Na-na command became the Medium Section, and the hilariously fat fiends in the Doot-doots became the Heavy Section.

The fiends, for their part, took to their new groups about as well as they’d taken to their old ones. Being able to rename orchestra sections was a blessing, and Vee said a silent prayer of thanks to the [Ghost Maestro] who’d discovered that it was possible. He always felt a little silly giving orders with la-las, na-nas, and doot doots.

[Upkeep due! Your Orchestra requires refined ectoplasm to be sustained!]

Vee frowned. He hadn’t expected upkeep to come due so quickly, and hadn’t prepped any refined ectoplasm as a result. Normally, upkeep wasn’t a huge deal. Most spirits didn’t really want or need much, and could last almost an entire week or more just off the initial burst of ectoplasm they were given as their joining bonus when they became part of an orchestra. Even the more powerful ones would work for a few days before they started requiring more ectoplasm.

Fiends weren’t so forgiving. As he examined the status of each section and the orchestra as a whole he saw that he’d have to pay upkeep every day and a half or so. That was going to be unpleasant. It wasn’t that ectoplasm was in short supply or anything, it was that refining so much took time, and was a fairly involved process which made it difficult to do anything else.

It was well worth doing though. Refining ectoplasm and keeping the orchestra paid well would give him plenty of experience for his [Ghost Maestro] class. He was ashamed to admit it, but for how long it’d been since he’d earned the class from the Academy, his level was hilariously low. Hopefully the upkeep costs would go down a little bit as he leveled up, or would be due a little less often.

Activating [Commune with Spirits], Vee asked if his new followers would be willing to wait a day or so for their first payment in exchange for extra ectoplasm. The sections conferred with one another, and then agreed. For an extra fifteen percent.

Vee wiped his forehead. It was going to be a late night. But that was Future Vee’s problem. Right now, he had jobs for each section that needed to be done. The heavy section was sent down to the empty lot, to help unload the carts and stack the building materials nicely so that the construction crew would have an easy time when they arrived. Vee made sure to impress upon the stocky monsters that Nen and Cris were friends and NOT to be attacked under any circumstances. He hoped that the boys would remember the plan and not panic when they saw the fiends coming towards them.

The medium section was assigned to go out into Westown and look for other materials that might be useful for building. Vee had access to Sacre’s money now, but he was smart enough to know that the best course of action would be to use as little of it as possible. Eventually, he’d be expected to pay it back.

The light section was assigned the task of cleaning each of the rooms in the tower, scrubbing the walls and floors, and getting rid of all the cobwebs on the ceiling. They grumbled in Vee’s mind, as cleaning wasn’t really in a fiend’s normal routine – they liked the cobwebs! – but for an extra five percent ectoplasm, they were willing to do what needed to be done.

[Congratulations! By creating your orchestra and negotiating with each section, you have advanced to Ghost Maestro, level 14!]

[Your Ghost Baton skill is now more powerful! Your Ghost Baton is now permanent!]

[Your Commune with Spirits skill is now Befriend Spirits]

[Your Second Sight ability is now Third Sight!]

[Your Refine Ectoplasm skill is now more powerful! You can now refine ectoplasm faster!]

[Wit +2]

[Faith +1]

Well, that was a welcome level up, but he wished that he wasn’t stuck with his current baton. He twirled the thin stick in his hand, and noted that it felt much more solid. The perpetual sliminess that marked it as an ectoplasm creation was gone. It felt a little bit like glass.

Hopefully the speed increase on his ectoplasm refinement was noticeable and not something like what had once taken an hour would now only take fifty-eight minutes.

As he looked out the window of the tower’s upmost room, he saw the city once again and thought to himself that with a little time and a lot of work, maybe he and Alforde could move out of Sculla’s boarding house and live here instead. The mountains looked close enough to reach out and touch.

The sections of the orchestra filed out of the room and set about their tasks. Vee took off his hat and nodded at Alforde. Reginald blinked up at him, and his fabric mouth curled into a grin.

“Well, now that that’s done it’s time to make this official, boss.”

Alforde looked unusually solemn as he held Hammy vertically and struck a pose that looked a little bit like a salute. Vee grinned as he reached into his pocket and drew out Reginald’s old core. The rock seemed smaller in his palm than it had once been, but it was still warm with energy. He looked down at his hat.

“You’re sure that this will work?”

Reginald twitched his brim. “Almost all of the power I left in that thing is there for the taking. It should be fine for what you need.”

Vee held the core up and closed his eyes. No point in dilly dallying now.

“[Found Dungeon]!”

[Warning! This skill is consumable; once its used, you will no longer have access to it. Do you wish to continue?]

Vee selected yes, and there was a rumble like thunder in the room as a strange machine Vee had never seen before in his life materialized on the ground in front of him.

It was a cube, but at the same time, it wasn’t. The machine’s shape seemed to flicker and shift every few seconds, and Vee didn’t trust his eyes as he continued staring at it. Tubes and gauges covered every inch of the machine’s outside, and when Vee looked at a few of them, he saw that their markings were symbols he didn’t understand. There was an open slot at the top that was the perfect size for the core in his hand, and so he did the sensible thing and put the rock into the machine. What could go wrong?

Clunk. Clunk. Brrrr! Yellow light filled the room and parts of the machine began to whirl and spin. It growled like a bear and shook like crazy, and a tiny voice in the back of Vee’s mind warned him to stand back in case the machine blew apart. Though, if he was being honest, an extra bit of distance probably wasn’t going to do him much, if any, good.

When the machine finally stopped, Vee, Alforde, and Reginald all watched it warily for a moment, waiting for what would happen next.

Their answer came when a small, tinny voice spoke up.

“Hello! I am the Dungeon Heart 3530, it is nice to meet you! You can call me Dheart! Please tell me the name of your dungeon and then I can set its boundaries. Once set, this name cannot be changed.”

Vee looked at Reginald. “Got any ideas?”

But instead of the hat, it was the machine that answered him.

“Got any ideas? Is that your desired dungeon name?”

“No!” Vee said quickly.

“Understood. Please tell me the name of your dungeon and then I can set its boundaries. Once set, the name cannot be changed.”

Vee gestured to the door and picked up Reginald as he and Alforde stepped out of the room to discuss.

“Anyone got any ideas?” Vee whispered, hoping that Dheart couldn’t hear.

“Isn’t that your job?” Alforde asked.

“I’m not good with names,” Vee said. “Even if I didn’t have [Big Picture], I’ve always had a hard time coming up with good names for things. It’s always the last thing I think about, and then when the time comes I’ve never got anything good.”

The three companions stood in silence until they heard Dheart’s tinny voice. “If no name is entered in the next three minutes, I will simply assign the dungeon a name from my internal name generator. The most likely selection is currently “The Barrows Of Death, Despair, and Shredded Cheese.”

Alforde tilted his helmet to the side as if to say “Not bad” and Vee glared at him and swore.

“There’s no way I’m letting the dungeon get called that,” the [Dungeon Master] hissed. “We’d be laughingstocks!”

He glared at Reginald. “Isn’t this the type of thing my [Majordomo] should be handling?”

The hat shrugged again, and Dheart helpfully told them that they were down to two and a half minutes to come up with a name, though now the most likely selection was ‘The Catacombs of the Thunder Spirit Emperor With A Side Salad’.

Vee closed his eyes, wracked his brain, and tried to come up with something. What was in a name anyways? Something something rose, something something sweet. Heck, the dungeon’s name didn’t even have to be good. It just had to not be whatever Dheart was going to go with.

He came up with an idea. It wasn’t great, but it’d do.

With one minute left, Vee went back into the room and stood in front of Dheart.

“Crestheart.”

“Crestheart? Is that your desired dungeon name?”

Vee said yes, and a popup appeared in front of him.

[Congratulations, you are now the Dungeon Master of Crestheart, a level 1 dungeon located in the city of Oar’s Crest!]

[You have advanced to Dungeon Master, level 3]

[Leadership + 3]

Stat Sheets:

Vee Vales:

Primary Class: Ghost Maestro (Locksmagister University), Level 14 (+1)

Secondary Class: Dungeon Master (Oar’s Crest), Level 3 (+1)

Might: 6

Wit: 22 (+2)

Faith: 12 (+1)

Adventurousness: 8

Ambition: 5

Plotting: 3

Charisma: 2

Devious Mind: 5 (+1)

Leadership: 5 (+3)

Guts: 3

Alforde Armorsoul:

Primary Class: Clunker (Vee Vales), Level 9

Secondary Class: Right-hand man (Vee Vales), level 8

Tertiary Class: Hammer Afficionado (Self), Level 2 (+1)

Additional Class: Dungeon Champion (Oar’s Crest), level 1

Might: 19 (+1)

Wit: 10

Faith: 23

Adventurousness (Bound – Vee Vales): 5 (+1)

Reginald:

Primary Class: Core Spirit (Unknown), Level ???

Secondary Class: Loudmouth (Self), Level 26

Tertiary Class: Majordomo (Vee Vales), Level 1

Might: 1

Wit: 24

Faith: 2

Ambition: 20 (+1)

Greed: 16

Deceptiveness: 36

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