The Heart Grows

Bookkeeper stretched and arched her back. "I love my job," she said. Not only were dungeons and cities getting along, but they were doing cool things. Looking around to make sure no one was nearby, she shifted the focus of her gaze to a room in a particular tower—and giggled at the golden picture on the wall. "He's so cute!"

Only indulging in the whimsy of her favorite dungeon core for a few moments, Bookkeeper released her focus and let the vision fade. Flexing her power in the safety of the godly plane, she pulled herself through to what some would call a higher plane, but was actually just deeper…

Deeper within herself.

The density of her mana here, inside her, would have crushed any mortal instantly. She mused about the other gods' ability to withstand it, and wound up shrugging what counted for shoulders on her current form. This was where the mechanics of dungeons and cities resided. Floods of faith and mana poured in as huge rivers, all filtering down from each dungeon and city as their residents thanked the creator of the huge entities.

Her body processed the energy, redefining it in terms of what miracles and life it could sustain, before sending it back to each of the sources. A portion of the power flowed as a constant stream, while a vast sum of it responded to requests through her System. It was, as she liked to explain to any god crazy enough to ask her to go into detail on how it worked, structured prayer.

There was one dungeon, though, that while she loved her to bits, was becoming a little too much. She began to explore the flows of mana and faith, filtering it all down and isolating Breeze from the rest. Bookkeeper expected to find a good flow of energy from the dungeon, but instead a huge glut flowed out of it. The magic required to sustain the expanse it inhabited should have dwarfed the income.

Not only was Breeze still producing vastly more worship and mana than she used, but it was a ratio that fully justified the amount of resources used. It took time to further filter the streams coming through Breeze, but Bookkeeper was more than up to the task. What she found made her giggle. "Happy, well-fed people love the dungeon giving them food."

It didn't stop her from pouting, though. Breeze was using more magic to run than the next five dungeons combined—and she included Travis in that count. "But she can't sustain this growth." It was the most hated part of her tasks: nerfing.

Pulling back from her own machinery of divine favor, Bookkeeper opened her eyes once more in the godly plane.

"Having fun?"

Jumping and spinning around, Bookkeeper stared at the speaker a moment before relaxing. They weren't a single entity, but rather myriad creatures, all female, and speaking with many mouths. It should have been disgusting, and it was, but Bookkeeper was used to it.

Her body a constantly shifting, merging, and flowing mass of animals, the Sisters of Grace rolled three eyes at Bookkeeper. "What? Not going to give me a hug?"

"Last time I hugged you, you took half my mana and I couldn't get the worms out of my dress for a century." Bookkeeper ignored the nature goddess' laughter and held a hand out, palm extended, toward her peer. "So, no hugs. What did you need?"

"That dungeon, Breeze, is—"

"No. The answer's no." Plucking her second-favorite plush toy from a hidden sub-dimension, Bookkeeper hugged it and glared at Sisters of Grace. "We made a deal, remember? You leave my dungeons alone and I leave your nature alone."

"That was fine when there was more nature than there was dungeon." Sisters of Grace gestured into the space between them, projecting a kaleidoscope vision of mini visions. Myriad views of lush, temperate, and even desert dungeon floors that seemed to go on forever. "There is more landscape in Breeze than in all the forests of that continent!"

"And?"

"It's not fair! When I made that agreement, there was more nature outside your stinky dungeons."

"Calling Breeze stinky isn't going to help. Besides, you've had as long as I have to do your thing. Those people in the north even prefer your stuff." All her points, Bookkeeper was happy to see, were hitting home. The last, though, seemed less effective.

"But they don't worship me!" At a glare from the mousy goddess of dungeons and cities, Sisters of Grace groaned and threw two arms, a wing, and a flipper into the air. "The fuzzy ones do, but not enough!"

"Then encourage them. Your church in the trade kingdom is fine. They know to praise you for every little thing that happens." This was more social interaction with her peers than Bookkeeper normally cared for, and she prepared her sub-dimension for a quick exit if Sisters of Grace didn't leave soon.

Halting in her quest to gain access to dungeons, Sisters of Grace paused and reached out toward the wolves of the North. "You mean, just do something for them so they know to pray to me?"

Already with one arm through the portal toward her coziest and most hidden sub-dimension, Bookkeeper groaned. "Yes. Their people are transactional, but be careful. They think all magic is evil. If you make your gifts natural, they will accept them. Create some new weird plant that makes them stronger or something. Buff them."

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"'Buff'?" As soon as Sisters of Grace asked, she realized that Bookkeeper had already escaped her clutches. "Humph. I guess I could do somethi— Oh! There's one right now. And they're beseeching their gods for a…" A smile spread over all the muzzles, beaks, and lips on display. "Thank you, Bookkeeper."

Listening until the moment Sisters of Grace had disappeared, Bookkeeper was nonetheless safe and cozy in her hidden space filled with fluffy toys. Comfort was something she needed right now. Bringing up the Awakened Verdant template, she looked at the numbers and sighed.

floorCost = ScaleByFloors(calc"floorCost * 10 * curFloors ^ 2")
floorCost = ScaleByFloors(calc"floorCost ^ (curFloors / 20)")

It was a tiny bit of code changed in the huge database of her own personal machinery. She trembled a little, hugging her favorite plush for support as she activated the code. "Breeze won't see this change for at least two days, given her current rate of expansion. I hate doing this to her…"

The giggle started small at first, then grew until Bookkeeper was rolling on her back amid the plushies, laughing gales of mirth. Finally, she rolled forward again and began to adjust her code. "If I can't give her more floors, and she's awake and smart enough to make good choices, then I'll just graft on Travis' research system!"

Pleased as punch with the idea, Bookkeeper began the task of importing objects and working it into the template Breeze used. There were problems immediately. With a sigh, she changed the direct import into an abstraction of Travis' model—then stopped that and instead made Travis' an abstraction of a less complex base object. With that established, she then made Breeze's new research options that were in a lot of ways similar, but more focused on growing and producing.

She was definitely thankful for Travis' memories. Her dungeon and city system used to be overly complicated and very unkempt. In the time it took her to design him the perfect system using video games as a reference, she'd already rebuilt most of her internal machinery to use designs his memories hinted at.

Humming to herself, a plush pressed to her tummy as she worked, Bookkeeper pondered what she would do after this. She knew Travis was planning to upgrade, and to balance the massive power shift, she had to make his dungeon go offline while it upgraded—which put him offline.

Query(Dungeon.Travis("Haiiii! You're going to upgrade soon, right?"))

As soon as she sent it, she fixed a vision on his heart room.

"Yeah. As soon as Penelope is back. She's my dungeon boss. The dra—"

Query(Dungeon.Travis("I know who Pen is. Okay, since you're going to be all eepy, do you wanna help me with some things?"))

"So I wouldn't have to deal with the horrible nightmares?"

Bookkeeper froze as she replayed the words over. The hope in them made her wince.

Query(Dungeon.Travis("I didn't know there were nightmares. There shouldn't be nightmares. But, uh, you'd be awake while helping me, but your dungeon would still sleep."))

"Yes. Uh, yes please!"

Query(Dungeon.Travis("(─‿‿─)♡"))

It vexed Bookkeeper that he had suffered without her knowing. "I'm going to have to figure something out with that when I get more souls to imbue into dungeons…" Murmuring the words out loud, Bookkeeper giggled after she trailed off. "When," she said, and giggled a bunch more.

There was more work to be done. She had a pile of city alerts to work through, most involving the three cities Travis had connected to. After those were cleaned up (mostly by correcting permissions), she set about reviewing Travis' final floor update. "Final for now, at least. I don't know how that situational quest got through, but it would have been crazy to give him another floor right away."

She thought about it for a few minutes, then discarded it. "That's a problem for future Bookkeeper," she said. Of course, past Bookkeeper had left her current work as a task for future Bookkeeper too, and now present Bookkeeper was future Bookkeeper. "I hate being future Bookkeeper."

Of course, Travis and Breeze weren't the only dungeons in Northridge. Bookkeeper turned her attention to the gnoll dungeon and found a happy sight. It had opened a new entrance in the training fort where Breeze had an entrance, and she noted the diabolical array of traps that lined every inch of its old entrance.

The thought patterns of dungeons always intrigued Bookkeeper. The way she built little paths in her code for them, how they followed those paths. But the gnoll dungeon (that she wished would pick a cute name) had instead skipped all the upgrades she'd laid out and instead traded with Travis for his minions to build traps that it could copy. There was a huge, long tunnel that was peppered with teleport traps that sent people back to the entrance. It was horrible and made Bookkeeper giggle riotously. She made an important note to get popcorn when the Northerners finally arrived.

Lastly, at least lastly on her current urgent notes, was a particular dragon Swarm dungeon that had acquired so many resources in its buffers that Bookkeeper was worried it had found an exploit—and in a way it had. She traced the code that triggered all the goodies back to a single kobold that had entered a dungeon and promptly been teleported to the bottom. Over four hundred floors bypassed and rewarded.

When she performed similar queries, she found minions from Travis and the gnoll dungeon had done likewise. "Breeze…" Her metaphysical shoulders slumped for a bare moment before she checked that the cornucopia of rewards at least had set the lockout timer. "They're all still generating more energy than they're using… except for that Swarm dungeon. But, if Travis is helping them along, I'm sure they'll be fine again in no time."

Setting her plush toys aside, Bookkeeper giggled. "Speaking of him, I think he's about to take his nap. I can't wait to meet him for realsies. Wait, I need to get dressed in something way cooler!"

It took Bookkeeper nearly twenty seconds to figure out what to wear, then all the remaining time between then and when Travis activated his upgrade to anguish over it and completely overthink it. When the big moment finally hit, she slipped down from the godly plane to somewhere a little more comfortable for non-deities to exist without exploding, and set about drawing Travis' consciousness up from the mortal world.

When he appeared, he did so as an amorphous blob of pink mana that swelled and swelled before she wrapped him up in a crystal structure that resembled, roughly, a human body. "Hi!"

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This story is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. If you are paying money to see this or the original creator, Damaged, is not credited, you are viewing a plagiarized copy of the story.