The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Tier 1

Level 2/10

Heart 6400/6400

Experience 100/1600

Workers 5/15

Monsters 0/16+1

Traps 26/25+4

Rooms 43

Food 400

Timber 1403

Iron 1014

Steel 0

Charcoal 0

Mana 49

Rock 1643

Gold 2000

Leather 455

Leather Sludge 300

Lava 51

Glass 800

Explosive Runes 10

Triggered Explosive Runes 8

Quest: Have 10 minions in your dungeon

Quest: Get 10,000 gold

Travis left Penelope to show the people around. He double checked everything else in the dungeon to make sure it was ready. The odd thing he'd noticed was that one of his warehouses looked different. "Robert, can you check the warehouse nearest to the sludge traps?"

"Got it, Trav. Anything special I'm looking for?" Robert slipped out of the new hidden door that led to his lab and the glass smithy.

"I've only got some lizard eyes in there, but it looks like the room is full of gold." Just when he'd finished saying it, Travis realized that one of the quests had changed. Checking his resources, he found that gold was his most abundant—which seemed odd to him but in a good way.

Reaching the room, Robert looked in and then activated a light stick. "Yeah. Trav, you have a lot of gold in here. Look at these racks and supports—that's not wood or even iron, it's steel!"

"I just noticed that my get 10 adventurers in the dungeon quest completed with the inspectors coming in. Guess this is what it got me. How much gold do you think's in this room?" Proud that he'd solved the little drama, Travis noticed that Penelope was leading the investigators down the stairs. "We have company coming. I told Pen to lead them down toward the gold mine first. If you'd like to open the tunnel to the inner area?"

Robert snorted. "How far down into the warehouses do you want me to open it?"

Travis tried and failed to hold back his laughter. "I think the end of the tunnel would be good. Good thinking, too. Once that's open, can you run around and make sure all the secret doors are closed and locked?"

"On it. Wait, you could get Katelyn to check the doors." Trotting along the dark tunnel, Robert closed off his light stick and tucked it back into a pouch on his shoulder harness.

The harnesses, Travis thought, were a great idea Stephan had come up with. Kobolds, or at least the kobolds that lived in his dungeon, hadn't shown much of an affinity for clothing.

"Stephan?" Travis asked. "Do you know what a kilt is?"

"Kilt?" Stephan had chosen to ignore the investigators. Travis was always reluctant to push him, mostly because he'd been the first (and he hoped only) time he'd just grabbed someone to be a kobold.

"Like a leather wrap around your waist. You could add a belt so it can be used to carry tools and equipment."

Tilting his head this way and that, Stephan picked up a piece of leather and chewed on it. "A leather skirt? I don't know if you noticed, Trav, but whatever gets in your head when you become a kobold, it doesn't seem to leave need clothing in there."

"Right, but it would mean… I'm pushing again, aren't I?" Travis asked.

"A little, Trav, but you're doing it in a way that doesn't feel like a command. I'm okay with that kind of pushing. I'll ask around if anyone wants this or some other kind of clothing—before you try, Trav, leave it to me." Stephan spat out the hunk of leather in his mouth and picked up a needle and some gut-thread he'd made and got back to work.

Travis made a mental note to not bug anyone about clothing… for a week or so. He had a problem with the phrase good enough when it came to the dungeon. Everything should be better. Everything could be better.

"And this is where we can't proceed into the dungeon floor itself because traps." Penelope stepped to the edge of the slime trap and held up her light stick. "All the traps, and some of them are explosive. I'm not going to tell you which ones."

"You need to put a sign up." It was neither the snooty one nor the note-taker. One of the inspectors that had toured the adventurers' rooms upstairs seemed to think Travis' dungeon needed to be OSHA compliant. "Warning anyone working in here that there are traps."

"Tell him we'll put up a door. Will that satisfy him?" Travis said to Penelope.

Penelope's head snapped to look in the direction of Travis' heart then back to the guy who asked her the question. "We can put a door up and write on it 'adventurers this way'. Oh, we could do that at the maze, too."

Travis couldn't help giggling at the facetiousness in Penelope's tone. It might be a joke, but he was pushing to make his dungeon safe for those visiting, and if that cost him two traps and let him make a joke at the same time, so be it. "Doors everywhere! Signs telling people to be careful of stubbed toes!"

Penelope lasted a whole second before barking with laughter. Every time Travis suggested another silly sign or door, she started all over again until she literally had to lean against the wall to contain her laughter for fear of falling into the sludge.

"What's going on?" Fife asked. "Pen, are you okay?"

"We need—" Penelope shook her head and giggled furiously before continuing. "We need to add a gong with a sign on it, 'Caution"—she giggled some more—"long drop."

Fife blinked a few times before she started to smirk, then she broke into laughter too. "Where—" She just shook her head.

Travis figured he should stop tormenting Penelope in case he gave the game away about being the dungeon itself. "I'll stop. Robert opened up an entrance to the storage area at the end of this tunnel. Feel free to use the time to work off the giggles. Hey, maybe I should put a sign on a door at the entrance that reads, 'beware of puns'?"

Gritting her teeth, Penelope managed to say, "This way," before stalking off to where Travis had told her where Robert had dug.

Penelope hated how good Travis was at making her laugh. Not that she'd had much time to explore that in the past, but he had come up with a dozen ideas that were so stupid she couldn't even think about them without grinning. "We dig and fill our own entrance when we need it. Takes only a handful of seconds to do it, and it's safer than trying to get past the traps."

"You modify the dungeon? But doesn't that mean the layout changes? This is fascinating." Cartography, the profession Blake's family had tried to force him into, had been useful to learn if only because it gave him the supreme attention to detail and drawing skills needed to map a dungeon.

Of course, Blake had mapped dozens of dungeons before, but never—absolutely never—one that had asked to be mapped. Well, he assumed there was some level of intelligence to the dungeon and that the strange kobold creature with the odd sense of humor wasn't completely in charge. Clearing his voice, he asked, "Who runs the dungeon?"

Stopping in her tracks, Penelope looked back at the walking stack of notepaper. "What do you mean?" She felt a tiny hint of nerves rising that the bookworm had stumbled onto a question she didn't want to answer.

"You think a kobold really knows the answer to that?" Jack asked. "She's as likely to say the dungeon runs itself or that she runs it or even that the goddess of nature runs it."

That, Blake thought, sounded like they were evading his question, but that meant that the group of adventurers escorting them were working for the dungeon, and though he could think of myriad reasons why anyone might hire adventurers, a dungeon hiring them seemed even more interesting than his question.

When Penelope led the way through the new tunnel and back toward the west, Blake stepped to the side and let everyone pass him as he carefully tuned down his light stick to a bare whisper of light. He judged the group was out of earshot before asking, "I know someone will be listening. Can I talk to someone?"

"You can," Robert said. "Getting an answer to your questions is more complicated."

Blake couldn't see an inch in front of his face, but the sound of the kobold, apparently right beside him, didn't make him jump. "What's all this about? Why did a growing city's council vote unanimously to declare an active and otherwise hostile dungeon to be off-limits to adventurers? Not just that, but even offering to protect it?"

"You want all the reasons? It will cost you. We're not here to answer this question for you, so it's an extra." Listening to Travis in his head, Robert didn't need much of a hint to know what to ask and what to offer. "We'll answer that one if you promise to bring us writing slates. Good wax ones. I'm sure you have the money to do that."

Bartering goods for information wasn't a new concept, but doing so with dungeon creatures was unheard of. "Okay. A slate for a question?"

"Two slates per question." When Blake nodded in the dark, Robert continued. "The answer should seem obvious now. We trade with the town. Some resources we don't have, some we do. We have gold, Northridge has iron, glass, books, oats."

It was obvious, now. Without even seeing his paper, Blake made two marks. "Who runs the dungeon?" He added two more.

"The dungeon runs the dungeon. We dig and build it. It's as simple as—"

"Don't. You are hiding so much with that it might as well be a lie. Does Pen control the dungeon or—or is the dungeon its own entity?" Blake wanted to know so much that a bunch of wax slates was the least of his worries. He made another two marks on the paper.

"The dungeon does its own thinking, of a sort. It guides us, it can order us to do things we wouldn't normally do, and there's not a rat's arse bit of resistance we can put up to that." Robert wasn't sure if he was acting well enough, but he was telling the absolute truth. "That's six slates."

"Yeah, I got that. So, how smart is the dungeon?"

Robert almost swore. "I don't suppose telling you that I'm not answering anymore questions would make you forget you asked?"

Blake snorted and shook his head. "Then I get to choose the answer I want based off what you absolutely wouldn't want to tell me, which would be that your dungeon is smart enough to design mazes, build a tavern, and plan to entertain adventurers it keeps on retainer for doing jobs for it."

"I could knock you out and bury you in a wall so fast your head would spin." There was no malice in Robert's words. Even to his own ears they sounded hollow. "But you broke off from the rest of the group, even helped Pen hide you being missing. What's your angle here?"

"I've always wanted to be in a dungeon. To explore it, to find its secrets, to know—I know it sounds silly."

"Doesn't sound silly. Dungeons are pretty cool. You can trust me because I'm a kobold who lives in one." Looking back behind himself, Robert saw a dull glow getting brighter. "Follow me. I'll show you something those others won't get to see."

In the absolute dark, Blake let a kobold lead him down tunnels hidden in the dungeon, past something that clicked, and then into a lit room. There was a fire in a forge, though it was a dull one, but Blake could see several buckets of what looked like glass beads as well as tongs and other glassworking equipment. "You make—?"

"Glassware. I'm an alchemist. Those sludge traps out front? Those have been… improved."

Now Blake could see Robert clearly, he could see that there were burns along his arms, little splatters of different color that the glass had probably left, and in that head that barely came to his stomach was a pair of eyes that looked worryingly smart. "Lucky I'm just here to draw maps. If they asked me my opinion on this place, I—I don't know if I'd tell them to send the army to destroy it or build a city around it."

"Either would be wise, but I'd like your opinion. Would you like to live in a dungeon?" Robert gave his best fang-filled grin, hoping that he didn't look too much like a predator.