The Heart Grows

Dungeon Status:

Level 1

Heart 400/400

Experience 15/100

Workers 2/5

Monsters 0/10-2

Traps 5/10+2

Rooms 5

Food 82

Timber 219

Iron 29

Mana 0

Rock 52

Gold 20

Leather 4

Quest: Gather 100 Food

Travis was shocked when Stephan finally returned. He'd had a backpack that looked comically oversized compared to him and had his arms filled with yet more things. Most of what he carried was baled hides that he carried, silently, through to the tannery. When he strung them out in different places in the room, Travis got a big boost to his leather.

"I've got more things I'd like to bring. Furniture, mostly, but it's mine and I'll be damned if this"—Stephan gestured at himself—"will make me not want everything I've worked for." That said, he turned and started marching out again.

"Stephan, is there anything I can do to help?" Travis asked.

Stopping at the entrance of the dungeon, Stephan pushed aside the brush to see that twilight was closing in around the forest. He sighed. "No, Trav. I'll get over it soon enough, but it'll take a little time. You could say I hadn't planned to be turned into a kobold at all this week."

It took Travis a moment to realize it was a joke. "Well, I can promise to be the best home I can be, if it helps?"

Barking a laugh, Stephan nodded. "Yeah, it kinda does. Tell Pen I'm not mad at her just—I'll be back in a while with some furniture."

Turning his focus back to Pen, Travis watched as she stood alone in the empty room among their other work areas and started swinging around herself with her daggers. It took him a moment to realize what she was up to—she was training. Her body didn't seem to be moving right, but the longer she was at it the more natural it looked.

She started over, her movement much smoother now as she turned, kicked, slashed, and even bit at imagined opponents. When she paused her shadow-boxing fight, Travis cut in, "I have a new trap."

"Oh? What'd you get?" Sliding her daggers back in her sheaths, Pen turned for the entrance to the room and started off.

"Sludge trap. Slows things down and has some nice upgrades on it. Extra Sticky makes it so anyone trapped has a chance of being stuck completely, and Bait—well, I guess that works like the pit trap."

"There's a better upgrade for them, but I guess it will take the smelter—filling the slime with caltrops. Just about the most annoying trap, even at high levels it is a nightmare to deal with a hall filled with them." As she walked, Travis noticed Pen was walking far easier, though her hips rolled more.

"I guess it's time to make the thing, then. Okay, let me put that down for you to build." Travis selected the room to place and set it into the area Penelope had been practicing in. "We need iron and gold. More food, too. I have some kind of quest to get a hundred food. Not sure if we need to gather a hundred more than we had or if we just need to get to a hundred."

"What are we at now?" Pen asked, turning back to the room with the build order.

"Ninety-two after what Stephan just brought in. I guess if he can catch more stuff with his snares, we'll get there eventually." Watching her work made no sense to Travis except if he considered his whole dungeon a game. Penelope just drew tools and resources out of nowhere and quickly built the smelter in the middle of the room. It came with an annoying loss of iron, but the rock cost of the smelter barely ate into how much Penelope had mined earlier.

"Alright. If we're going to mine, we need to set some traps in that tunnel. I don't want to accidentally break into a monster cave and get rushed by nasties." Penelope started back toward the mining tunnel.

Travis, however, had a better idea. "No, we do this right. Until we have that tunnel secured, I'll loop it around and join it to the entrance tunnel. Then we can add more traps there."

"You—Okay, Trav, you are legitimately good at this. An old dungeon would never have the smarts to do something like that, let alone a new one like yourself. Lay it out and I'll dig it." Penelope had barely a moment to wait before Travis had the new tunnel pattern set and had set down a whole line of the new traps.

Like with the mine tunnels she'd first dug, Penelope got into the motion of digging and left her body to do the work while she mused on what had become of her life. Her pickaxe moved and she thought about Stephan. Despite her lying to him that she really didn't think was lying, he was a handy guy to have with them.

She mused more into her own specialties—which so far consisted of dungeon knowledge and a good pair of arms for digging. After a few cross-ways tunnel sections, she turned in the direction of the entrance and got her pace going again.

Travis, she knew, needed more workers. More kobolds, which meant more people to lure into the dungeon and not kill. Pondering further, she realized this would either require more tricking people (like with Stephan), or using the threat of death. The beauty of the sludge traps, she well knew, was they took their time in killing.

"Trav?"

"What's up?

"I don't want to trick people into becoming kobolds. It's kinda dishonest." She dug out another section of tunnel and turned the corner toward the first arm of the big S at the entrance. "So what if we put down a bunch of those sludge traps, filled them with caltrops, and offer to rescue people from them if they agree to help?"

"Well, I mean, I don't really want to kill people, but if they're trying to get to my core—and I only have one floor right now, so that's the only target—then I need to use deadly force." Travis paused for some time, still not having answered the question. "Okay, that sounds fine. But we don't want idiots, so I'll screen people to see who we want to keep."

"We all have to live with whoever we do recruit. I think it would be best if all of us okay anyone—anyone who's an adventurer, anyway. Don't get me wrong, I used to be one, but that just means I know the type more than anyone." Penelope hefted the pick and looked back at her work. "Anyway, now I need to do more digging. Iron and gold are the orders of the day, right?"

"Right, and if anything jumps out at you, lead it to the traps. But you need to go back through to where the tunnel joins to my core room and fill-in that little section so everything gets funneled around. Here's the build order. Try to make sure you're on the other side of it."

Walking back, skipping around their traps, Penelope ran her hand over Travis' core before finding herself at the to-be-filled-tunnel. "Okay, I get what you mean." Backing into the new section, she poked at the ceiling with her pick and the rock came tumbling down to fill the gap.

Turning, she looked at the tunnels that should have been pitch black. "I used to have trouble seeing in dark dungeons. Even pondered getting some of those fancy goggles that let you see everything in black and white no matter the light level. This is much easier. Okay, point me to a rock face and let me at it!"

The order appeared soon enough, so she got stuck into extending the main tunnel and adding more spurs to it. When she got just six hunks of rock into the first seam, her vision was filled with dirty yellow. "T-Trav!"

"I see it, Pen. Says it's a gold seam. Try, uh, hacking at it with your pick." His voice sounded excited in her head. When she swung her pick at it a few times and a large hunk of yellow broke off, he cheered in excitement. "That was fifteen gold, Pen! Fifteen!"

That was a stupid amount of gold to just get. Without a second thought she swung again, and again, and again. Three more times she liberated hunks as big as the first. "How much now?"

"We have eighty, but I can see it appearing in the warehouse, so I must not have much capacity for it normally. Oh, and that warehouse is really full of rock." He sounded, to her, a little worried. "We're going to need more warehouses."

"Let me grab a bit more of this. What's the first cool upgrade we can get with just gold and rock?" Swinging again, Penelope really liked the idea of getting a lot of gold. It was a strange notion, but she was already making plans of spending the night in the warehouse on the gold that was likely there.

"Nothing, really. Well, except for unlocking Draconic Monsters. Do we really want monsters? I mean, I figure most dungeons like them for killing adventurers, but that's not what I'm about.

"There are unlocks for increased max worker count. I think we're good for that right now.

"If we can get some iron, there's an upgrade to make one of my creatures a boss. I don't know how that would work, without monsters, but it doesn't require the monsters upgrade to work."

"That's a lot of stuff, actually," Penelope said. "Boss monsters come in a few flavors. There are level bosses, mini-bosses, and dungeon bosses. First can be a monster that's tougher on the floor. Second are every five floors, and they can be really nasty. Third are usually about as bad news as you'll get. In a dragon-themed dungeon like this, it'll be a dragon.

"As for regular monsters, I think I'm fine with just traps. We can control traps. Monsters seem… I don't know, just more trouble. Stick with kobolds, we're the best monsters you'll ever need."

"Okay, so if we get some iron, we'll get the boss thing and see where that goes. There's also a Tier 1 unlock, which is a pile of gold, timber, food, and experience. Let's save up for that, but in the meantime we really need iron and—Get to the door! Stephan's in trouble!"

All the blankets and hides from his bed were wrapped up in a bundle. He had several joints of curing meat bound together, and finally a small bale of straw was his final load. Just days ago he would have struggled to lift any one of the loads, but despite having become shorter and lost the musculature of a man who worked hard his whole life, he hefted all three onto his back.

"It's not all bad, I guess." As he walked out of his small cabin, Stephan looked at his vegetable garden that he'd used to supplement his diet. "I'll get back to that, too. It might need to be hidden a bit, but I could get away with some tubers and onions at least."

As he started to walk back, Stephan felt more and more comfort start to return. All the skittishness that he'd gained while walking in the forest—outside of the dungeon—was fading as he set his sights on returning. He was halfway there before he felt the forest still around him.

A chill filled Stephan unlike even the iciest waters could produce—he knew there was a bigger predator than him in the forest. Not changing his pace, he tried to think of what was around him and around the dungeon entrance. "Trav, if you can hear me, I think there's something hunting me."

There was only silence. Stephan tried to summon some calm so he could think more clearly. "It will be close getting back. I have a load of stuff from my cabin, but none of it's anything I'd want to give up—least of all the food. If I run, it'll attack me sooner rather than later."

As he moved, Stephan was trying to step around sticks and other dried things to avoid making noise. If whatever was following him was doing so by sound, he figured, it might be a way to avoid it.

The evening's twilight was descending over the forest, not that darkness harmed his chances of seeing things. The hidden entrance to the dungeon was in sight when he heard a branch snap that seemed to echo—but sounded right behind him. "I'm not going to make it."

Then he heard Travis' voice. "I saw you were in trouble. Pen is just coming out the front now, get ready to duck to your right when she does."

With his legs pumping hard, tail swaying slight to balance himself, Stephan's eyes were fixed on the hidden entrance until he saw Penelope. As she started bringing her arm back, he took a wide step to the right and heard something fly past the side of his head.

A screaming yelp made Stephan turn his head—he saw a wolf half again as tall as he was tumbling into the forest floor with a bleeding and ruined eye. There was another right behind it, bounding over it, and bearing down on him.

"In here!" Penelope held the bushes aside for Stephan as he approached the entrance.

The wolf, a direwolf given its size, was right on his heels and he could practically feel its breath on the back of his neck. No sooner did he get inside the tunnel than he heard it crash into the dead-fall that was concealing the dungeon.

"Down here. Come on!"

Penelope's voice was, to Stephan, that of an angel. She got his legs moving faster as he rounded the corner and entered the tunnel. As he turned left into the entrance of the S, he noticed the new tunnel leading off into the dark.

When the first direwolf reached the corner, the beast struggled to get itself around the corner without losing all its speed. Behind it could be heard the injured one, snarling and furious.

"Come on. We just have to get past the traps."

Stephan dodged the trap triggers with dexterity that should have been beyond him with the load he was carrying. He rushed around the little angled bit of tunnel after the traps and pressed his back against the wall. "W-What—?"

There was a scream and the sound of a direwolf falling into a pit trap. The screaming whine from it at the bottom was the surest sign that Penelope had installed the spikes in the bottom. A moment later there was a dull thud, then a second, and finally a screech from the half-blinded wolf as it found the dart shooter.

Leaving the supplies on the ground, Stephan followed Penelope to the corner and peeked around. The beast was snapping blindly at the air, blood coursing down from a second ruined eye. Blind, it looked panicked and furious. It backed up a few steps before its hind leg came down and found nothing under it.

"Now." Her claws digging into the stone, Penelope rushed forward at the direwolf. At her side, Stephen had no idea what exactly the plan was, but he dropped his shoulder at the same time she did and shoved at the wolf.

For a second, as Stephan pushed against the wolf's flank, he felt the strength of the beast to be too much. He growled through his clamped-closed jaw and dug his claws into the stone under him and pushed with everything he had.

The direwolf tried to turn to deal with the two kobolds, but that put it off balance and with a final attempt to snap at one of them it fell into the pit as well.

With all his weight and strength against the animal, Stephan toppled forward and started to shout—only to have Penelope grab his arm with one hand and the frame of the triggered crusher trap with her other. "Thanks!"

Pulling Stephan back from the edge, Penelope patted him on the back. "Thought I'd lost you outside. Travis was shouting at me to do something to slow them down. Direwolves, by the way."

His voice shaking a little, Stephan nodded. "I know—I know what direwolves are. They shouldn't be around here. There is a small pack of gray wolves in the forest. I—I sort of have a deal with them. Pots of clean water, any extra critters I don't eat myself I get from my traps"—he shivered and shook his head—"those monsters would have killed them."

Looking down into the pit, Stephan could see the two wolves in the bottom—motionless—and could smell the strong scent of blood.

"I need to go find my knife. I'll be back as soon as I can," Penelope said, dodging around the edge of the pit trap and down the tunnel toward the entrance.

Crouching down, Stephan noticed a different smell coming from the pit. It was more than just the blood and the offal—it was something he'd never smelled as a human, though. The strangest thing about the scent was it got stronger the longer he sat there, and when he stood up a little it faded.

"What're you doing? You haven't taken care of them yet?" Penelope asked when she returned with her knife.

"There's something odd. One got stuck real good, I can smell its guts and blood, but there's another smell here." Sniffing some more, Stephan's head snapped around as Penelope got close beside him. "You smell like it too."

Looking down, Penelope took a deep breath, but didn't notice anything. When she turned to look at Stephan, and opened her mouth to speak, he looked like he'd just had a religious experience. "What?"

"Your breath. That's what I'm smelling—breath." Stephan looked down at the two bodies in the pit. "One of them is playing possum."

Penelope chuckled. "That—That's a neat trick, St—"

"Just Steph. Call me Steph."

"Got it, Steph, and thanks."