The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Level 1

Heart 400/400

Experience 65/100

Workers 4/5

Monsters 0/10-2

Traps 8/10+2

Rooms 6

Food 102

Timber 134

Iron 34

Mana 1

Rock 272

Gold 110

Leather 91

Leather Sludge 43

Lava 7

Quest: Make one of your monsters into a boss

Stephan was the best right now, as far as Travis was concerned. He was happily doing his thing, working on finishing up the leather hides while every other kobold seemed to want directions.

Once Penelope and Robert were finished digging out the library, Travis gave the final order to open the room to the inner dungeon area and fill in the tunnels leading to the gold mine. The next step was to issue the order to build the library. "That's a lot of resources, but this should be worth it."

"Do you think I could buy a few extra books? I know Robert will need some gear too if he's going to set up his lab here." It took Katelyn several tries to get the words sounding right, but she finally got her mouth around them as she walked into the library-to-be and approached the center. "Hey, I can feel a need to—"

"Build. Come on, it'll be your library, after all," Robert said, having had time to practice his speaking while he'd been digging.

Travis watched as the three worked together to lay down the flagstone floor of the library, then build all the shelving. The odd thing was that as they worked, other work just seemed to complete around them. When it came time for them to use the leather, though, they instead found stacks of books laying around.

"Where does all thee—this stuff come from?" Robert asked.

Penelope shrugged her shoulders as she set more books on shelves. "The materials are from Trav's stores. The books? I have no clue. This dungeon is some kind of weird theme based off all the games Trav's played about dungeons. Haven't you noticed there are no curves or anything, either? All hard corners."

Katelyn froze during the explanation. "Games? What manner of game is this?"

"Dungeon games. Basically, doing what I'm doing; running a dungeon. It wasn't real, though—but this is." Travis wondered briefly if he was going to need to keep explaining this to everyone who came in.

Robert, as he finished setting books out, said, "Okay, I need you to fill me us in here. Who are you, Travis? I thought you were just a dungeon heart but—but you're speaking as if you were someone before you became a dungeon."

The rush of sensation as the library was completed made Travis shiver. What was even wilder still was he noticed his mana ticked up by one. "Nice work! Hey, what can you do in here?" The excitement was getting to him. Travis yanked himself back to the topic and trying to help fill his new friends in. "Right. Focus, Trav. I was just a guy. The world I came from had no magic, or at least I am sure it had no magic, but one day I just wake up and I'm a big pink gemstone in a hole."

"You figured all this out from playing games?" Katelyn asked.

Travis felt confident now in his answer. "Yeah. I mean, Pen has helped a lot. She's an adventurer—"

"Ex-adventurer. Full-time kobold now, and happy with it," Penelope said.

"Really?" Robert asked. "We were—I mean, we came here to take over the dungeon and sort of control it. Didn't expect it to turn out like this, but if I get my alchemy equipment I guess I won't really mind so much."

"I need more books. I'm a wizard, remember? While the staff is a nice present, and I love how much it amplifies my fire magic, I would like to study and learn more."

"Uh." Metaphorically biting his lip, Travis had to ask. "What were you going to do if you took control of me?"

"Build a wizard tower on top of you. Experiment linking my mana to yours so I could cast a lot bigger spells. Uh, maybe try to steal the magic of your monsters for my own." Katelyn slumped down on the floor. "It seems a bit silly now, I guess. I could have used gold to buy more magic tomes."

"We could try doing that last one. I have plenty of gold. How hard would it be for a kobold to buy things in a town?" Travis asked.

"Kobolds are monsters. No one would so much as look twice if we were killed. They'd take our gold, our lives, and just laugh." Katelyn reached out for one of the books and picked it up. "What's a let's play?"

It made sense to Travis that the books in his library would be full of things he knew. He just wondered how much this might taint everyone—or worse, reveal way more about him than he wanted to. "It's a kind of guide to playing a game."

"This one's a romance novel," Robert said, flicking through another book.

"Hey, uh, those are—" Travis wasn't sure how to tell them not to flip through him so casually.

"Ahem," Penelope cleared her voice. "Trav, are these your memories?"

"Yeah. I don't mind you reading some, but can you not poke into my personal life?"

"Rr-right. Sorry, Trav." Robert closed the book he was reading and put it back on the shelf. "Should we put ones you don't want us to read all together?"

Travis really wanted to just end the conversation and move on, so decided he'd do just that. "If you ask before taking one, that'd be okay. Anyway, I was thinking, what if we could buy stuff in town? Katelyn, you want more books. Robert, you're an alchemist, so you'd want equipment too. Pen, Steph, do you want stuff too?"

Penelope shook her head. "What I really want right now is to make you safer, Trav. We need iron, we need more sludge traps, and we need more upgrades for them. I'd like to start getting involved in poison and magic traps, too." She looked around at the others to find them staring at her. "What? If we're not going to use monsters, we need the best traps we can make."

"You, Pen, are way too kobold. You know that?" Travis couldn't keep the laugh from his voice. "But you're not wrong. So, does anyone have a way to disguise themselves and sneak into town? We can get plenty of gold, we have plenty of skins to sell—we just need someone to do the buying and selling."

Everyone was silent as Robert started to laugh. Turning to her brother, who had a barking fit mid guffaw, Katelyn was the first to demand an answer. "What are you laughing at?"

"You—" Robert was caught in another giggle-fit. "You remember that old slur for lizard-kin?"

Katelyn's face fell. "No. You—Just no."

"Yes! It will work!" Turning to look at the others, Robert's grin was far too big for him to speak properly, and he spent three goes trying to get the words out before he had to stop, shake off his expression, and try again. "Two of us wearing a big cloak will look kinda like a lizard-kin."

Penelope just stared at Robert while Stephan started laughing hysterically. She'd heard the same jokes, mostly from her two former companions, and usually while trying to grift a lizard-kin target. "Okay, jokes aside, it has merit."

Everyone stared at her, but Penelope just shrugged off their opinions. "The opportunity is way too good to just give it up out of hand. The trick will be to always pay good price for everything, so we're considered worth being quiet for, but not so much that it raises suspicion."

"We'd need to mint the gold into coins, but what coins?" Robert asked, seemingly trying for all his worth not to laugh.

"Trav, do we still have the coins and stuff I had on me when I—uh—died?" Penelope asked.

"They're in your sleeping room I think."

"Cool. I had a range of coins from different places. We don't want any local stuff, because it'll be too easy to discover as forgeries, but if we go with somewhere a little further afield—Oh, right, lizard-kin coin would help sell it, and I have some of that." Loping out of the library, Penelope headed down the dark corridor and passed Travis' heart before finding the single room they slept in.

"Trav, it might be a good idea to dig more rooms. I—I know it's nice as a kobold to sleep with other kobolds, but there's a lot of us now and we should start giving the choice to everyone." Picking up her bag of coins, Penelope started looking through them as she walked back to Travis' heart. There was a good variety in her bag, but she quickly found one of the ones she wanted. "Here we go. We need to make a clay cast of each side of this, then melt some gold and pour it in."

"Stephan's going to try making the cloak. Robert and Katelyn are arguing over who will be riding on whose shoulders." Travis' voice had a hint of laughter to it. "Pen, what are the chances this will work?"

"Pretty good. A lot of people don't notice things when there's a bag of gold on the table. Greed will distract them while we get what we need. You don't realize it, but dungeons tend to be seen as a good thing by most cities. Apart from a few combos, they are a source of income for adventurers, and those adventurers need support from the nearest town to function." Walking down the tunnel, Penelope smiled and nodded to Stephan before turning left into the smelter.

"Can you give me clay or something? Wait, wood might do. I could probably carve the pattern I need into it with my claws, and the gold melts at a low enough temperature." Reaching down, Penelope instinctively picked up two short planks of wood. "Thanks, Trav."

Despite what Travis had said, Robert felt bad for having snooped into something personal and, feeling like a bit of a third wheel so far as setting up for their trip to Northridge went, he decided to go ahead and just sort the books anyway.

Picking up on what her brother was about, Katelyn started doing the same. She got armloads of books and took them to the side of the library and started sorting them into three stacks—those that looked personal, those that looked interesting, and those that spoke of dungeons.

The two siblings worked together and, by the time Penelope returned with a sack of coins, they had started setting the personal stack on the far-end bookshelf. Katelyn looked over and asked, "How did the forgeries go?"

"They look like crap, and wouldn't pass the scrutiny of any money-lender guildsman, but the gold is more pure than the coins should have anyway, so we aren't exactly ripping them off." Penelope set the bag down on a reading table to one side of the entrance. "We just need Steph's cloak and that should be enough to try this madness out. I'd suggest we all make lists of things we want and things we need—and be honest about the two."

"Want to help us put these books back first?" Katelyn asked. "We're making this far bookshelf off-limits. It's all personal stuff that was obvious just from looking at it. The middles stack is more about technology and ideas that might be useful. The last, and there're only a few, are books that seemed to be about the dungeon games Trav played."

"Hey, uh, thanks for this. I just—we all have stuff we don't really want to share and—"

"Travis," Robert said, "it's fine. We do all have that stuff, and it shouldn't be gone through without permission." It surprised Robert how much he sympathized for Travis, but it didn't take him long to figure out why. Becoming a minion had changed him in subtle ways he was still trying to grasp—feeling supportive of Travis seemed to be the latest he'd figured out.

His plans, to poison and control a dungeon heart, were shredded. He couldn't even contemplate trying it now. The odd thing was Travis was perfectly happy giving him everything he wanted anyway. He had myriad resources—and would get far more as the dungeon grew—and he need never fear being usurped.