Sky Island Core

"I gave a small shake of my head. 'I'm going to ignore that incredibly disturbing possibility.' 'Ignoring something doesn't make it less true, Penellaphe." ― Jennifer L. Armentrout, A Kingdom of Flesh and Fire

By this point, it was the middle of the night, and I pondered going back to expanding my domain to mute my dungeon cravings or to continue moving coreward, but I wasn't especially feeling it. I decided instead to continue my studying and moved on to reading the Tenets of Almeidra. I was curious, after all, about what scripture would look like for a Goddess of Knowledge. I could see a couple of possibilities – the less interesting of which would be ones that focused on the Goddess being all-knowing and focused on uplifting the less knowledgeable or ones that focused on exhorting followers to constantly better themselves. The first would be good for promoting schools and education, but probably less effective at pushing research and innovation; the second might be better for that but would also tend to promote a sense of superiority, wherein those who had studied longer and harder would be considered better people.

Reading through it gave me a better understanding of the goddess, and one that reinforced my general impression of her from our brief meeting. She wasn't a strict schoolmaster or even a formal scholar – her defining characteristic was simply curiosity. She wanted to know everything for its own sake, eagerly pursuing that which was new or otherwise unknown. This came through mostly in the text through her recorded conversations with her senior clergy. That included parts where she chided them for being too closed-minded or ignoring the value of less serious works. She did focus rather heavily on the written word, but she seemed to encourage a lot of metatextual analysis and an appreciation of how the culture, beliefs, and personal experiences of an author structured their understanding of the form and the function of their work. It got a bit abstruse for my tastes, after a while, but nevertheless painted a sympathetic portrait of the goddess as a patron of anyone who wanted to improve themselves through learning. She was, explicitly, not omnipotent and took endless joy in learning new things herself.

I assumed that there was a decent chance she was aware that I was reading her Tenets, though it was also possible that she wasn't. Still, I thought I'd offer her a work in exchange. I considered offering scripture from my own world, but I wasn't much of a believer, really. Instead, I opted to offer her a more scholarly work, if still fitting the category of introductory level textbooks – The Anthropology of Religion, Magic, and Witchcraft by Stein and Stein. It served as a reasonable overview of both a diverse array of religious and magical belief systems from my old world from a cultural relativist perspective (which I recognize isn't to everyone's taste). I was sort of curious how the Goddess would regard both the practices described and the formal research in a system where Gods, if there were any, interacted rather differently with their believers. In any event, there was no immediate response to my offering the book on her new altar, besides the book being transported to her divine realm and a vague sense of appreciation.

As I worked into the wee hours of the morning, I was kind of on a book tear, so I leaned into it long enough to transcribe a couple of cookbooks to the archive for Janelle. In the end, I stuck to a couple of old classics, mostly because those tended to have fewer images (which I still struggled to reproduce at a respectable level of quality). So, I started her off with the 1931 classic, The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer. Technically speaking, I'd never read that first edition, so the version I included was the one I was most familiar with – the sixth edition that I assumed my mother had used through my childhood. Recreating it here had an odd effect for me, in that it provoked nostalgia without actually allowing me to remember much about it. I recognized some specific dishes but couldn't remember my mother cooking or serving them. I didn't really care for the experience, so resolved that I'd try to focus on cookbooks that I'd used (or at least encountered) as an adult.

The last book I transcribed to the archive was also quite old, but one that I hadn't picked up until I was fully grown – Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. I'd seen her show as a child but became interested in the cookbook after watching a biopic as an adult. I'd never really cooked much from it, but I had at least flipped through the whole thing. I had the dim sense that I'd seen the film with my wife, but the separation was at least one more step removed and less able to provoke remembered emotions. Those seemed to count as non-fiction (or lore, as the quest put it), and I suspected that I was getting close to completing that next step in the quest chain, but clearly, I wasn't quite there yet.

That seemed like more than enough book work for the time being, though I did spend a few minutes to see what kind of results searching the archives for "crystallographic magic" would return. The results were promising, in that there were many more works than there had been for fungalmancy, but not quite as massive a selection as "runic magic" had generated. That reminded me that I hadn't asked Glynesha and Orentha about crystallographic magic, despite having received a blueprint for enchanted explosion crystals; that made it seem like a painful oversight, and I resolved to correct it the next time we spoke. That said, having just set up a schedule to meet with them, this oversight could wait the couple of days until our next discussion. I didn't want to be the guy who ignored his own schedule – at least not after a single meeting to establish the schedule... Still, I felt a bit foolish about the whole thing.

Feeling a bit cooped up, oddly, from having spent all this time focused on my core room, I decided this would be a good time to put in some time pursuing my divine quest by following the access tunnel back towards the core. By this point, I was kind of assuming that the mana conduit would flow fairly directly to a central collection point, that likely was at or adjacent to the primary control room for the sky island's maintenance and possibly navigation. I wasn't super confident about the control room, and even less so about navigation, but it seemed like a reasonable scenario. I assumed that there'd at least be some engineering space near that central node. That said, I still had a pretty good ways to go before I got to the actual core. From the survey my Hawk-Eagle had performed, I'd come to an estimate that the sky island was about 5 or 6 km from edge to edge at this broadest central region, though hardly perfectly circular. That would suggest about 2.5 -3 km from the edge to the core, and for all my exploration to date, I was probably not even halfway there at the leading edge of the tunnel, though potentially slightly closer where I'd run into the dracolisk scale.

If I stuck to my 5-6 hour a day schedule, I could probably claim about 250 meters of the tunnel each day and make it to the central space in about a week (give or take), assuming it continued in a straight line. I was tempted to send a scout ahead just to see but decided I was enjoying the anticipation and the sense of discovery each day. **No spoilers* I thought to myself, amused. I did think the new schedule was helping my mindset a bit, as I have a tendency to get a bit single-minded at times – a trait I don't think converting to a tireless dungeon had done much to help. Just deliberately switching focus periodically helped keep it a bit fresher in my mind.

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At any rate, I began expanding along the tunnel, with my set goal of 250 meters for the day. I have to admit that it was a bit dull, as with the entrance sealed, I really wasn't finding much. Tracing the mana conduit was interesting and potentially important, but there wasn't much to see. Keeping my mana sight running helped a bit, as I could see the rhythmic pulsing of the mana along the conduit. In the visible spectrum, it was just a nondescript 3-cm-thick, metallic cable strung through stone eyes along the length of the wall. I suspected that the stone eyes weren't exactly the same material as the stone of the walls, but I was unwilling to mess with them. If nothing else, they glowed a bit in mana sight, though I'd assume that after millennia of having focused mana transmitted through them, it would be a surprise if they WEREN'T mana-enriched.

It did take a solid 5-hours to meet my daily quota – though at least having a quota kept me going. In all, though, I really didn't find much – no loose change here, no stray screws, or the like. Not even a cockroach. Literally, the only blueprint I picked up in the entire morning expansion was for a non-descript lichen species. Spoilers? I was starting to regret the decision...

Blueprint Acquired: Gray Stone Flower Lichen

Sadly, the most interesting thing about the lichen was that it answered my question as to whether it would count as a fungus for my quest. It did not. It had been a very slow morning, by any standard, and I was really hoping that a visit with Hakdrilda would turn that around for me.

****************************************************

Hakdrilda, in fact, was hoping to experiment in ways that were both rather interesting and ethically quite questionable. She was curious as to how many ways I could use my control over the air in the dungeon to kill invaders and was hoping to experiment on some spawned in creatures – albeit small ones on the level of insects or possibly small rodents.

I needed to be more careful what I wished for. I had a variety of ideas for how to kill with air magic, but I didn't really need to give Hakdrilda a clear sense of how easily or how horribly I could kill people if pressed. Instead, I spent some moments trying to decide just how far I was willing to humor her along these lines. If nothing else, I was reasonably sure that with some knowledge of chemistry, and particularly with time to experiment and no particular safety constraints, I could recreate some truly awful ways to die. I could pump in toxins, or nerve agents, or various caustic agents; I could probably dose them with anesthetics, psychedelics, or opiates. I could remove the air, so they suffocated or fill their lungs with noble gases or CO to similar effect. I could use compressed air to push them around, shove them off cliffs, or into traps, or just shoot them with things; I could increase the air pressure gradually so that they'd get the bends if they left too quickly. I could use it to add particulate matter into the air in dust form – ranging from powdered glass to fuel oil. I was pretty sure I could do a fuel-air bomb, if I cared to. I didn't want to share any of that with her, and mostly I didn't even want to consider the conditions under which I'd be willing to do most of those things to anything sentient.

Logbook Entry: Sorry. Not killing things for experiments.

"What? But they're just bugs and maybe some mice?"

Logbook Entry: Bad idea. Kill things too easily or too horribly and no one comes.

"Seriously? Wait. Do you... Do you have ways in mind to kill people both easily and horribly?"

**YELLOW**

"You're not sure? Or you don't want to say?"

**GREEN**

"Oh, Forgemistress take your damned ambivalent lights! Tell me straight. Could you kill me?"

**GREEN**

"Fast?"

**YELLOW**

"Under 5 minutes?"

**GREEN**

"Would it hurt?"

**YELLOW**

"You don't know? Or it depends on how you did it?"

**GREEN**

"Damn it! It depends?"

**GREEN**

"So, you could make it hurt?"

**GREEN**

"Or painless?"

**GREEN**

"Or even feel good?"

**GREEN**

"So, you could kill me in my sleep, and I'd never know?"

**GREEN**

She blew out a deep breath and thought for a minute. "Okay, so you haven't done that, and I have no reason to think you would. But you don't want to tell me or show me, because that will just freak everyone out and cause a backlash against you, and, hells, possibly me."

**GREEN**

"Right then. Let's just... Let's just say this conversation never happened and go back to working on more constructive things. Sound good?"

**GREEN**

After that brief but mutually upsetting discussion, it was a while before she relaxed again, and I could see her periodically freeze up as she had intrusive thoughts cross her mind. She'd lost focus, and eventually she conceded that today wasn't going to be a great day for running experiments.

She sighed and put down the airfoil she'd been idly rotating in her ever so slightly trembling hands. "I'm sorry, Vay. I'm afraid I'm having a hard time letting this go and focusing on work. Consciously, I'm aware that you're a perfectly reasonable, sapient being who means me no harm, and in fact is going out of their way to be helpful. I also know that you could have killed me numerous times already, and that if you wanted to do me harm, you likely wouldn't have warned me of the range of possibilities.

My subconscious, however, has been raised on horror stories about killer dungeons and is having a bit of a meltdown at the moment. I'm going to ask that you give me a couple of days off from your active participation while I meditate a bit on this. I'll use the time to read some more, and ponder the direction of my research. I'm hopeful that with a good night's sleep where you don't kill me, my subconscious will start to come around. Is that? Is that, okay?"

I won't deny that it stung a bit to hear that she was now scared I'd murder her in her sleep. That said, it had always been a possibility, and I'd heard Norfoth warn her not to trust entirely in my good will. And of course, a non-sapient dungeon would be actively trying to kill her all the time, it just wouldn't have the tools I did to do so. Having a healthy sense of paranoia regarding a dungeon you were in made a certain amount of sense, though I'd hoped our working relationship had cleared those doubts.

This all flashed through my mind rather quickly, and I hoped the pause before my answer wasn't too noticeable.

**GREEN**

I briefly considered slipping a sedative or a mild euphoric into her dwelling space, but that was such a bad idea on a variety of levels that it didn't survive even brief consideration. I left her a bottle of whiskey and some herbal tea and left her to make her own decisions.