NOVEL NEXT Chapter 34: Dungeon Tour
After Lilith left, Carmen walked over to Lilith’s old seat and sat in it, allowing her to see everyone. “Before I show you everything, what questions do you have?”
“Where’s Siph?” Mike asked anxiously.
“She’s on her way.” Carmen replied. “She’s been with Lilith for moral support and help training this past month, and she was leveling up while waiting for us. Lilith’s going to let her know everyone’s awake while she’s on her way to see Kali.”
“Speaking of,” Jessica said, “what was all that about Lilith and Kali? She’s going to try and get into a relationship with her?”
Carmen nodded. “Not going to try, she will. All she has to do is ask and it’s official. Believe me, mom, it’s a sure thing.”
“And…you said they were sleeping in the same bed, right? What’s the story behind that? Did they…”
“No, nothing like that.” Carmen said quickly. “It’s…weird, it just felt…natural to do it, and then one thing led to another and that was just where she ended up sleeping the whole time.”
The door opened and Siph walked in. “Are you talking about Lilith and Kali?” She asked.
“Yeah, that’s right.” Carmen said, smirking. “I wasn’t about to let something that frustrating continue, so I forced Lilith to go make things official.”
“Thank goodness. I’ve been telling her she should just go for it, but she would never listen.” Siph said, walking over to her spouses and giving each a hug and a kiss. “I’ve missed you two.” She purred. “I’ve been thinking up some ideas this whole time and I can’t wait to put them into action.”
“Later, mom.” Carmen said sharply. As fun as it was to tease Lilith with this sort of stuff, she was busy at the moment and Carmen didn’t really want to see that either. “Any other questions that aren’t about my relationship status?”
“Are you sure she’s fine?” Vithi asked. “I think that’s pretty important.”
Carmen nodded. “Yeah, she’s perfectly OK. No mind alterations have been made to her, well, save for the ones needed to make Mae and Nuwa, but other than that it’s all basically been etiquette lessons.”
“I was there the whole time.” Siph soothed. “We just had to teach her to be more assertive so she wouldn’t get taken advantage of.”
“And it worked? In just a couple of months?” Vithi replied dubiously.
Carmen shrugged. “For strangers, yes. If any of you want something, she’ll probably still bend over backwards to get it, and then make it look like that was just a side goal of something else she was doing. She’s not very good at it, though.”
Siph shook her head. “Good grief, you wouldn’t believe some of the excuses she’s given me. I mentioned being chilly once and she kitted out the entire dungeon with an advanced temperature manipulation system under the guise of “training for extreme environments”. I don’t think she’s used it for that purpose once.” A small smile crept onto her face as she recounted the incident. “I’ll have to show you all how to use it. It’s pretty nice.”
Carmen nodded. “Anything else before we go?”
“Should we pick up Raphael?” Siph asked. “I believe she was in her room, mentioned wanting some time alone, but that was a few hours ago.”
Carmen thought about that for a moment. “No, when she comes out of her room, she can find us. She’s probably thinking about Elenoa.” Carmen paused, before turning to Alex. “Actually, could you talk to her? I feel like she’s been needing someone to talk to and Lilith, Siph, and Kali weren’t the greatest people for the job.”
“Why me?” Alex asked, taken aback.
“You two have a lot of similarities.” Carmen replied. “But mainly because this is about her relationship with Elenoa, and I think you’re the one with the closest approximation to what she has going on.”
“Oh. I…yeah, I can do that.”
“Thanks.” Carmen said, hopping off of her chair and stretching. “Alright, what do you want to see first? The training stuff or the living quarters?”
“I say we see the training stuff first.” Siph said. “That way they can take some time to get settled in the living quarters without having to walk back.”
Carmen nodded. “You make a good point.” She turned back to the rest of the group. “While you all get up, this is the medical bay. It’s got an effect that enhances the regeneration of your HP, Mana, and Stamina while inside, as well as the ability to put the occupants into a deep sleep in case unpleasant operations need to be done on someone before we can apply healing magic.
“And be careful with healing magic, too. It’s always best to get things treated properly before applying it, as otherwise it could lead to incorrect healing. The only real exception to that is if the magic is super high level stuff, like what Lilith and I can toss out. We’ve got literally the best healing ability out there, so we don’t have to worry about any of that.” She winked, walking over to the door and waiting for everyone. Once everyone was ready, she opened the door and ushered everyone into a large circular room, bare save for the doors lining the outer edge of the room.
“This is our hub of sorts. Aside from the door to the medical bay and the door to the teleporter to the living quarters, each door leads to a hallway with further rooms for training based on your needs. For the time being, I’ll show you one of our low-level halls, most of the others will look fairly similar, so there’s really no need to look through them all.”
Hey, mom. She said to Siph. Will you go kill something for me? I’ve sent you a party invite, I just want to have my stats as high as possible for a demonstration and I’ll need some levels for that.
Of course, sweetie! Siph replied. I’ll only be a moment! She hurriedly made her way down one of the medium level halls, into the room she was training in before.
“She’s just helping me get ready for some stuff.” Carmen said. “She’s already pretty familiar with this place anyway, so she’s not missing anything.” She paused to open the door to the hall she had been leading the group towards. After everyone was inside, she continued her speech. “There are two rooms here for every major type of element, status, or other kind of attack, one for monsters that are weak to that, and one for those that are resistant. In addition, we have a few rooms filled with traps designed to help train your reflexes, and a few that are under construction. We’re hoping to make them a place where you can make a customizable fight, but we don’t quite have the resources to do that yet.”
Each room had a large window next to the door, often showing a monster or set of monsters, standing completely immobile. Carmen stopped by one, nodding as she saw that Siph had already defeated a few enemies, raising her level. She’d made sure to set her Class to High Arbiter earlier, so as to get the most out of the levels she was going to get. Between the Skills in Arbiter’s Arsenal and her Racial Class levels more stats were probably overkill, but more could never hurt, and she’d have to gain those levels sometime soon anyway, so she decided to go for it.
She created a rock using the dungeon and tossed it to her dad. “Go ahead and squeeze that, if you would.” He nodded and squeezed the rock. Nothing happened. Carmen went over and took the rock, before moving back to her position at the front of the group. “Just a rock, right? Didn’t feel soft or anything?” She asked.
“Yeah.” Mike replied, “Why?”
She held up the rock in a single hand and squeezed, turning it to powder. She smirked, watching everyone’s stunned faces. “Believe it or not, Lilith’s almost twice as strong as I am right now. But, that’s not the point.” She turned to the window and threw a punch at it, causing a very loud thud as she hit. She turned back around. “The point is,” she motioned at the undamaged window, “That these windows and the walls are near indestructible, so you can feel free to go as wild as you want, it won’t affect anything not in the room. The monsters inside are going to stay completely still until you take hostile action towards them, and if it looks like you’re going to retreat, they’re set to disengage from combat. That doesn’t mean that they won’t try their best to kill you while fighting, though. If you do happen to die, you’ll just come back in the medical bay, so there’s absolutely no risk to any of this, aside from any pain you’ll feel while fighting.”
Alright mom, that’s good enough. Meet us back in the main room after you finish off whatever’s left in there, I want to talk about the party before we move on.
After receiving an acknowledgement from Siph, she showed everyone a few more of the rooms, and then led them all back to the hub room.
Once everyone was together again, she began to talk again. “Alright, so, does anyone here have questions about parties?”
“I was getting a little curious about how experience is shared.” Vithi asked. “Is it everyone gets full, or…?”
Carmen nodded. “Valid question. Unless someone has a Skill that changes things, experience is split evenly between all party members who currently want to share experience. You can choose to stop sharing experience, but if you do that then you won’t get any of the experience earned by people who are sharing experience.
“More importantly, some Skills only work on your party, and being in a party lets you view the Health, Mana, and Stamina of all the other party members, allowing you to work together better. Keeping this in mind, right now we’re going to put everyone into here in one big party with me and have you all share experience.
“Another one of the Skills Lilith picked up lets us forfeit our experience earned to boost the amount of experience you all gain by five hundred percent, meaning instead of the experience being split seven ways and everyone getting fourteen percent experience, it’s now split six ways and everyone else gets…full experience, actually.”
She held up a hand to forestall the complaint she could already see Alex and her parents getting ready to make. “Lilith, Mae, and I will be fine. We can make up that much experience in a snap, and it’ll only be for a couple of days. Once we’re comfortable with where everyone is at, we’ll be splitting everyone into two parties of four, with Lilith, Mae, and myself switching between the two as we see fit.”
She paused. “Oh, and if you were wondering, we all count as one person for the purpose of parties, so it’s all of us or nothing. Anyway, we’ll let you all decide who groups with who, but we might change things around if we feel a party doesn’t have enough strength. In case of disputes, Lilith has the final say,” she paused again, thinking, “well, theoretically Lilith always has the final say in everything now, but that’s semantics. Anyway, we’ll set that up later tonight when Lilith is back. For now, just follow me and I’ll show you the living quarters.”
As she had expected, everyone was pretty shocked with just how much Lilith had put in their new home. Since much of it was either just making new rooms or replacing materials, there was little in the way of DP costs, provided she could get the materials from somewhere.
And, as it turns out, Kali has a pretty large pile of wealth that she was more than happy to spend for things like this. She practically forced it on Lilith, finally winning her over by pointing out just how much it would improve the quality of life of everyone, Kali included.
Most of what was purchased ended up being raw materials, as once her Dungeon had absorbed something, it was able to reconstruct it from its components. And, as it turned out, buying the raw material in bulk was cheaper. So, Kali had got in touch with some companies she knew, and suddenly Lilith had anything she could ever want to get her residence made.
And so, no expense ended up being spared. There was a pool, a shooting gallery (made to accommodate bows, guns, spells, and any other ranged weapon Lilith could think of), several rooms with movie-theater size screens, a gym, an indoor garden/greenhouse, a room filled with all sorts of instruments, a library, a recreational room with tables for games like pool, ping-pong, and cards…the list just went on and on.
Beyond that, she made sure everyone had their own room and bathroom (save for her parents, who would share an extra-large room), put in a couple of extra-large kitchens (kept stocked with food via the dungeon), and made a large living room where everyone could gather if it was necessary. It even had a few rooms designed with Siph’s dragon form in mind, for if she ever felt like she wanted to return to her base form for a while.
It was the most luxurious place most of them had ever seen, and Carmen could tell that everyone was feeling considerably better about being basically forced into staying there now that they had seen it. So, she had everyone pick a room, and let everyone begin to settle in.
