Dungeons Just Want to Have Fun

Things were getting exciting again. Kelsey was starting up production lines that hadn’t seen use for years. Not the stupid new ones, that wove cloth or filled bottles. The fun ones. The deadly ones. Kesley had spent a lot of time developing explosives, only to find that they were too effective. Once set in place, the danger that they represented settled.

Mel had tried to explain it to Kelsey, but Kelsey didn’t understand meaning as Mel did. Danger was like a liquid. It pooled around the explosives, not in any physical way, but in an ever-accumulating reservoir of meaning. That was what people with a sense for danger detected.

Danger that came at someone’s whim sent only the slightest scent ahead of it. Danger that wasn’t complete was diluted by the possibility of survival.

Kelsey had rigged a tunnel to explode, the trigger being an electrical signal that she could send from outside of the magical interference that humans put out. The trap waited patiently for the delvers to find it. Its intent gathered and intensified the entire while.

The delvers refused to go anywhere near it. They felt it, as soon as they approached a certain point. Certain death, if they took another step. They looked for magic or mechanisms but found none. The wires and the charges were locked behind solid rock. And for all its wonderful effects, electricity wasn’t magic.

So the delvers backed off. On the plus side, it gave Kelsey a chance to develop areas without fear of delver interference. The minus was that if Kelsey left the tunnel up too long, it would attract delvers of a high enough level to survive a tunnel collapse.

Eventually, Kelsey found the balance of risk and reward that kept the delvers coming but didn’t attract the higher-level ones. Explosives weren’t a part of that. Some of the lower levels, that humans didn’t get to, were mined, but those charges had never gone off.

It was a shame. Mel had enjoyed watching the dynamite and the 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene go off. She’d asked Kelsey why one of the names had numbers in it, but Kelsey had just said it was called something else.

Now the production lines were firing up again, but that was not was not what Mel wanted to talk about.

“Kelsey!” she said, pointing an accusatory finger. “You had sex again!”

Kelsey’s mental avatar was currently sitting at the table she’d made near the secondary entrance. Two skeletons were standing next to her as some sort of honour guard. Now she looked at Mel and raised an eyebrow. “Uh, yeah? I know? I was there?”

“I thought you stopped!” Mel said. “You stopped for… a while.” Time was a bit tricky for Mel, but Kelsey had definitely stopped for longer than a day.

“Yeah, we couldn’t do it on the boat because those two kids were self-conscious about the Kabimen hearing. Or seeing. Honestly, it’s not like those guys were interested. They don’t even do internal fertilisation.”

“I thought you got tired of doing it,” Mel said.

“Ha! As if I could get tired of sex!” Kelsey said, laughing. “I mean, you’re not tired of it, are you? At least not once you get horny.”

“I—” Mel started, and then stopped. She shouldn’t be blushing. That was a physiological response, involving blood vessels that she didn’t have. But embarrassment was an emotion that she could convey, that had meaning. So whether she was blushing or not, Kelsey could tell that she was embarrassed and Mel could tell that Kelsey knew. The feeling was excruciating.

“How did it go this time?” Kelsey asked innocently. “Did you try the self-care I taught you about?”

Mel stared, her horrified look caught by Kelsey’s blandly interested one. Mel knew that Kelsey knew everything that went on inside her. They pretended that Kelsey only saw Mel when Kelsey’s avatar was there.

Kelsey knew what Mel had been doing. She knew everything that Mel had tried and what effect it had had. She knew about every moan, every cry.

Kelsey was better at this game than Mel was.

“Yes,” Mel finally managed. “It went… fine.”

“Great!” Kelsey said with a friendly grin. “Just let me know if you want to keep doing it that way, or if you want some help.”

Mel thought that the pause before she could respond went on for long enough that a human would have become worried. It probably didn’t last the three million years that it felt like. Kelsey didn’t let it worry her, she just waited patiently for Mel to respond. Dungeons were made to be patient like that.

“I will,” Mel finally said.

“Great!” Kelsey said again. “Now, I don’t know if you want to take off. I’m meeting Suliel down here, and I know you’ve been avoiding her.”

“Meeting? Can she see this you, now?” Mel had, in fact, been avoiding Suliel. She had only seen her once before the human had taken a class that gave her sovereignty over Kelsey. That was… not right. Even if it was due to a class that the gods had made.

“Nah,” Kelsey said. She pointed at the standing skeletons. “But she can see these guys. We’re testing her new Trait, Bind Undead.”

“She’s stealing your creatures now?” Mel gasped.

“Some of my Tier One skeletons, at least,” Kelsey said. “Not like they’re good for much. Things should get more interesting when she hits Tier Three.

“I suppose I should watch,” Mel groused. “It’s not like she’s going anywhere.”

“That’s very mature of you,” Kelsey said, “She’s just about to arrive.”

Kelsey looked over as the door started to open. She would, of course, have been aware of Suliel’s approach through the previous two rooms.

Suliel entered the room, carefully and silently. The two skeletons noticed her as soon as she entered, rotating their skulls to face her. They didn’t move to attack though, no matter how much Mel willed them to.

The young noble was no doubt talking with Kelsey over the bond. That Kelsey now had a way of communicating that didn’t include Mel was just one more reason for Mel to dislike the current status quo.

Suliel looked at the skeletons. They straightened to attention, not at the same time, but one after the other. Then Suliel looked right at Mel.

“What the!” Kelsey exclaimed. “She can see you!”

“What? What! WHAT!” Mel yelled in fright. She started flitting around. As an immortal, immaterial creature, she had no instincts to flee, but the situation called for her to do something. Probably keep an eye on the dangerous invader from an unseen angle, but try as she might, she was unable to evade Suliel’s gaze.

“All right, all right, calm down everyone. Suliel, it might be less confusing if you spoke aloud. That way we can stay on the same page. I presume you can hear Mel as well as see her.”

“She’s a witch!” Mel yelled.

“I heard that,” Suliel said flatly.

“Great. Mel, stop flitting around before you work out how to injure yourself. You can hide behind me if it makes you feel safer.”

Mel tried it, zipping behind Kelsey and grabbing on to her shirt. Then Kelsey spoke again, words of foul betrayal.

“Suliel, you still can’t see me, can you?”

Mel froze in fright as Suliel answered. She was still exposed!

“No, I can see… it… just hanging from something? What is it?”

“This is Mel, my Dungeon Fairy. Mel, you can’t just hide under the table.”

“I’m not supposed to be seen by humans!” Mel called out. Kelsey didn’t seem to understand the situation, which was about normal for her. “This is very bad!” she explained.

“Let’s give her a bit of time to get used to the idea, shall we?” Kelsey said, taking a seat and gesturing for Suliel to do the same. “It might help if you didn’t look directly at her.”

“I still want to know what she is,” Suliel said. “She keeps changing when I look at her closely.”

“Don’t do that!” Mel yelled from under the table. “No looking!”

“She doesn’t have a material form,” Kelsey explained. “You’re seeing what I imagine her looking like, and I don’t generally bother too much about consistency. So she changes.”

“So a tiny winged person with green skin is what you imagine a fairy looks like,” Suliel said slowly.

“I guess? This must be a side effect of our link. I wonder if you can change what she looks like… can you imagine her with blue skin?”

“No imagining! No testing! No looking!”

“Maybe we should focus on what I actually came down here for,” Suliel suggested.

“Oh, yeah, I almost forgot about that. You bonded them on sight, didn’t you?”

“You can’t tell?”

“I don’t have my avatar here, so my link with them was broken when you entered the room. That they didn’t attack you is a bit of an indication, but I think you might be seen as a part of me now, at least to my monsters.”

The two skeletons suddenly saluted and then marched to behind Suliel’s chair. They saluted again and stood at attention.

“You don’t need line of sight?” Kelsey asked.

“No,” Suliel answered thoughtfully. “I can feel a bond between us.”

“Once you’re out of the dungeon, that bond will probably need to feed them mana for maintenance,” Kelsey told her. “It shouldn’t be much for a couple of Tier ones, but it will add up. We’ll want to see if you can feed them from monster cores.”

Suliel nodded. “The real problem is that they’re only Tier ones. They might startle the nobles at court, but they won’t be a real threat.”

“Well get some more levels then! There’s some stuff we can do. I’m training a squad right now. It won’t be much, but they’ll fight better than the average skeleton. Plus, you can arm and armour them with Tier Two equipment, or even Tier Three if you’ve got it.”

“That would make them more dangerous,” Suliel agreed. The skeletons stepped forward and put their rusted and chipped swords on the table. “I won’t be needing these then.”

“I’ll take care of them,” Kelsey promised. “You want to head up and start testing things out?”

“Yes, but what about…” Suliel pointed at the table, and the fairy hiding underneath it.”

“You know what, let me talk to her while we work and you can meet her properly another time.”

Suliel agreed, and left, taking the two skeletons with her. Kelsey’s avatar didn’t follow her, but Mel imagined she was still conversing via the link. Her avatar stayed in the room with her, absorbing the swords on the table and giving her a disparaging look.

“Honestly, Mel, what was all that?”

“Humans aren’t supposed to see me,” she repeated sullenly. With no human to hide from, she flew out from under the table. “That's the rule, and more than that, it's how it's been for… a long time. A thousand years? A million?”

“Well the rule has changed,” Kelsey said. “Start getting used to it.”

“It hasn’t changed, you just cheated with that link of yours!”

“Did I?” Kelsey asked. “You’re always saying, the gods get to do whatever they want… wasn’t it a god that did this?”

“Maybe it was a bad god,” Mel said. “Trying to get you in trouble with Riadi.”

Kelsey’s smile got a little colder. “If Riadi has a complaint, they can lodge it with my complaints department.”

“I don’t know what that is, and I don’t think you have one,” Mel said suspiciously.

“We’ll find that out together, won’t we? Anyway, Mel, I think you’re missing the bigger picture here.”

“What’s that?”

“If Suliel can see you, she might be able to touch you,” Kelsey said. “And if she can touch you…”

“What?” Mel asked. “You only touch me when you want to—” she cut herself off and stared at Kelsey in horror.

“You’re getting it,” Kelsey said happily. “Soon you’ll be able to have your first threesome!”