The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Level 1

Heart 400/400

Experience 100/100

Workers 4/10

Monsters 0/10-2

Traps 12/10+2

Rooms 10

Food 27

Timber 131

Iron 199

Mana 4

Rock 319

Gold 219

Leather 77

Leather Sludge 27

Lava 7

Quest: Make one of your monsters into a boss

"The quest hasn't updated yet. I bet it's going to happen when she wakes." Travis hated that it hadn't updated. He focused his attention on the quest note and tried to will it to complete. "Ugh. She's perfectly safe. It's not like something will slip past us and kill her while she's still changing."

"Trav?" Robert asked.

"Yes?"

"Relax. It's been what, a few hours? That's nothing. One of the more important lessons an alchemist has to learn is patience. You know how I was going to use a poison to subdue you? That took me weeks to brew from start to finish." Robert swung his pick with practiced ease. It felt good to dig, Penelope had taught him that, but he also buzzed with anticipation and hard work was a good way to deal with it. "Do we need more warehouses?"

"All five of the remaining ones I've planned are probably going to be required. Maybe more. We need a lot of wood and a lot of food." Travis had willed some lizards into Penelope's room. He watched her even as she slept. A little creepy, he figured, but he owed a debt to her—maybe twice now. "Also, it's been at least three hours. I keep track by how many explosive runes your sister makes."

"When I have some glass, some water, and a little time—I'll make you a clock, Trav." Robert marched to two of the remaining planned out warehouses. "Okay, Trav, let me at them."

"Okay, but just a word of warning, we don't have enough timber to make any more warehouses." Working out what he could do without timber, Travis had to concede what he needed was for Stephan to wake up and start chopping more wood. The alternatives were, of course: "Once you have these two dug out, would you mind going and mining as much gold as you can?"

"How much gold are you looking at?"

"We need eight-hundred for the tier one upgrade." Travis hated how much that sounded like. "And we need four-hundred food and the same of timber. You and Katelyn will probably need to make another trip into town when everyone's awake again."

Waking up was strange. Everything felt strange to Penelope. She could still see in the dark, though it was still obvious that it was dark, but there was some kind of new quality to her sight. Rather than get up and get back to work right away, however, she remained comfortably curled up in the dark.

This ability to be lazy was new to her—new since she'd become a kobold at least. With the need to obey lifted, she could see it for what it was.

She'd been under the direct control of Travis.

It was something she'd already known, but this was the final proof of the matter. She was now aware, however, just how much control that entailed. Now that she wasn't restricted by it, Penelope's thoughts opened up to myriad things that she'd wanted in life. Traveling had been one of her biggest pleasures, and was again.

Slow, deep breaths. She stretched out in her own head to feel for more things that'd been denied her. Her revenge was still in the forefront of her mind. Sitting in one place reduced her chances of getting it, but part of her saw surviving and being happy as a good enough revenge—even if another part of her wanted to see William and Peter struggling in sludge traps.

That was one thing she could definitely find consensus on with her previous, controlled self. Relaxing further, she kept focusing inward. Going outside had been scary. Was that because it was leaving the dungeon or was it more that kobolds just don't like open spaces? This and more questions about her state of mind were hard to classify without an outside, free kobold. The problem was that kobold are dungeon monsters and weren't self-sustaining outside of them.

That's what she'd always been taught. If a dungeon's heart is destroyed, all its minions die. Could a dungeon release its minions?

There was a lot to work through and Penelope wanted to get it clear in her head before going out and talking to anyone. Travis had, with his boss upgrade, freed her from the control that a kobold was usually under, and she wanted to know what this meant for her now.

The major thing she could deduce from everything, though, was that he was doing everything he could not to take advantage of it. But, apart from the need to follow dig orders, she didn't know if he realized how much control he had.

"Travis?" Penelope asked.

"Yeah? Oh, you're awake!"

The excitement and relief in his voice was reassuring to Penelope. More and more she started to realize how good Travis was. He could have easily just taken over and used them all—instead he seemed more like a friend. "You know none of us could leave if we wanted to, right? I mean, we couldn't even want to."

"Yeah." His tone was downcast. Penelope was thinking of saying more when he added, "I figured something like that. It's why I don't want to do this to people unless they either want to join us or were actually kinda assholes. Though, I don't want asshole kobolds either."

That made her smile a little and sit up in the darkness. Her legs felt a little odd, as did her arms. Her back was the weirdest though—she could feel way more going on back there than she'd had even as a kobold. "Do you know how far it was going? I remember feeling scared just going outside. I don't know how Robert and Katelyn manage it without going crazy."

"Maybe it has to do with me sending them out. Like, they're working specifically doing something I wanted them to do. You were just hunting for food which—it was for you, I guess."

"So I need to speak to Steph about that." Leaning forward, Penelope gathered her legs under her and stood up. "I'm not controlled like that anymore, Trav."

"You're not?!"

"Nope. I guess, being a boss monster, I need some freedom." Penelope rolled her shoulders and felt more movement behind her. "And I think I have wings now."

It took just one step for Penelope to realize the motion and rhythm of her walk, that she'd practiced as a kobold so hard, was now different. Looking behind her—and ignoring her wings for now—she noted her tail was longer now. "And more tail. I'm curious what the rest of the boss changes will be."

Stepping out of her room, she found the new gait a little more than just the extra tail and wing movement. She had slightly longer legs now and it made her hips want to sway. "No comments from you about how I'm walking, either."

"What do you mean?" Trav asked.

Penelope took a few more steps to demonstrate. "Look at this. My hips are all over the place."

"I hadn't noticed."

"Liar." She couldn't help laughing at her accusation, though, and it relaxed her to hear Travis laugh too. "I'm going to have to learn to move all over again thanks to this. It'd better be—" She froze as she stepped out of the old sleeping quarters and looked down on Travis' heart. It had grown but only in the number of facets. She walked closer and put her hand out on top of the heart and felt her connection to Travis.

"You're a lot bigger." Travis sounded impressed. "Like, you're bigger than you were as a human."

"Are you trying to tell me I was short? I know I was short. It made me a better rogue to be short." Penelope walked down the hallway to the traps she'd first built. "I can just step over some of these triggers I had to jump over before."

"Pen?" Robert asked from behind her.

Turning, Penelope looked back at Robert and realized that she was going to be taller than all her comrades now. "Yeah. Turns out Trav wanted a bigger kobold."

"Wow. Okay. Do you want me to do anything?"

The question surprised Penelope. She was a boss, but did that imply something about the others' relationship with her now? It was yet another question for her to toss on the pile, or she could test it right now. "Hop on one leg for a minute. I need to test something."

It was a perfectly easy to follow request, but also completely stupid. When Robert shifted his mass to one side and started hopping, a shiver of disgust ran through her. "You can stop, sorry Robert."

Balancing easily back on both legs, Robert looked up at Penelope with some confusion on his face. "What'd you need me to do that for?"

"Do you think you could not jump on one leg if I asked you to again?" Penelope asked. "I'm pretty sure that all kobolds have to obey everything Trav commands, and now me too."

"Well, yeah. I knew about Trav being able to. Didn't realize you'd be the same—but it makes sense." Robert looked around at the traps. "I had a thought, too."

A distraction was just what Penelope wanted. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. We dig up these traps here, use two of them to fill out the sludge trap line, then use the other two to make the back two sections a pit filled with sensing explosive runes." Robert jumped, stepped, and hopped around all the triggers for the dart, crusher, and pit traps, then walked down to the area in question. "That way, if anyone managed to jump past the traps—down they go into an explosive pit."

"That's a good idea, actually. Better than making a lava pit." Following, Penelope surveyed the changes and nodded. "That'd definitely work well. Any thoughts on it, Trav?"

"It does worry me a little when you talk of removing traps, but I think I get what you want. I'll ask Katelyn to swap to making the triggered explosive runes. I don't know if they take longer to make, but let's get four per pit," Travis said.

"So eight in total." Robert scratched his chin and looked at the floor. "Given she takes about an hour to make a solid explosive rune, we have some time to do other stuff."

"Wood. We need lots of wood for more warehouses," Travis said. "Steph is already out cutting down trees."

"Let's go help him, Robert." Penelope froze as she realized how she sounded and how Robert's inability to resist a command might react to it. She was about to say something when he patted her shoulder.

"Relax, Pen. I can tell when something is an order and when it isn't. You just want some help cutting down trees, and I'm fine with that. Gathering resources is what kobolds do best." Instead of working past the traps, however, he instead headed past the donkey and cart rooms and pulled out a pickaxe.

"Right. I keep forgetting it's easier to just do that. Not like we don't have plenty of rock to back-fill."

It had been a major bit of work, but Tannyr Stoneshave could finally breathe easy that the wall had been completed. It wasn't all stonework, of course, but even the wooden palisade was impressive enough to keep predators and even low ranked dungeon monsters back while their archers could pepper them from above.

The other key part of this was the huge entrance that had been bricked in around the dungeon. A huge vault door had been fitted with the ability to be locked. Tannyr had one of the keys to it, as did the three elders of Northridge.

Spotting a group of guards eating their lunch, Tannyr made her way over to talk to them. "Right, now we need to fill out the garrison here. Where's that lad Windchime?"

"Back in Northridge, ma'am. Want me to send a squad to fetch him?"

"It'd be quicker if I go and drag him back here myself." Turning toward the dungeon entrance, Tannyr made sure the door was locked with her key before fetching her old armor and her sledgehammer. The old, dwarven-made steel was harder than anything humans had ever made short of magic-imbued metals.

A dwarf at a trot was never as fast as a horse, but her stamina meant she could keep the pace up the whole trip back to the town. She walked to the guardhouse and asked around, then made her way to the tavern to find the three leaders of the town sitting down and snacking while they chatted. "Sorry if I'm butting in, but I thought you might all want to hear this. The animal dungeon has a full wall around it, mixed stone and timber. It also has the entrance seal installed."

"Good news indeed, Lady Stoneshave." Howard Tailor was always happy to treat his most talented crafter with more honor than she deserved. Her muscles and mind had planned and built Northridge from a little hamlet to the huge town it was today—her work, in fact, had helped trigger the event to put Northridge on the map. "Won't you sit down? We were just discussing how we'd go about encouraging said dungeon."

Knowing when it's time to just shut her mouth and listen, Tannyr did just that.

"We've already had some delvers find it producing grass turkeys, so we could further align it with fowl by giving it a bunch of chicken to take care of." Christine Sellswell was already quite taken with the idea. "That would give us eggs and feathers in addition to the meat."

Brolly Windchime nodded, but tapped the papers before him. "Cows would give us milk and hides too. Hides make for some good armor."

"You can get the same from goats, plus they are faster to grow," Christine said.

"Plus we could include other birds as well. Peacock feathers sell well to nobles and the like."

"Cows and horses. A dungeon-bred horse would be an amazing animal!"

Howard just looked across the table with a bored expression at Tannyr. He gave a half-smile and raised an eyebrow only to get a smirk from Tannyr. "Why don't we introduce all of them?" he asked. "See what the dungeon is happy to work with."