Chapter 87: Scramble

  CROWN

  The first thing I did when I returned to my own Sanctuary was adjust the time dilation. I turned it all the way down to 10:1 in favor of the Sanctuary, so that I had plenty of time to talk and think without too much happening in my world.

  “Anything serious happen while I was out? How long has it been?” My questions leapt from my mouth as I stormed into my control center, where Duck was lazily spinning in her chair.

  “Relax, boss,” Duck laughed. “You were only gone about six years of planetside time. Even if things went bad, it wouldn’t be enough time to break the whole structure.”

  I strode across the floor to where Duck was waiting, spinning the world display to settle on the Sisterhood monastery. It was still standing, and I didn’t even see any major damage to it. “We have to move our plans forward. I expected another few thousand years, but we may only have a few hundred. That’s going to make full coverage of Upside a lot harder unless we move quickly.”

  “Slow down, boss.” Duck kicked up her feet and rolled, draping across her chair like a lazy teenager home for summer break. “We have to get things moving, but you’re running your mouth like we have to rush. Take a few minutes to get your bearings and think about how you’re going to fix the problem. You know you’ll mess it up if you jump right in.”

  She was right, of course. Her entire purpose was to poke holes in what I was doing so I’d think it over more clearly, and that’s exactly what she was doing. It made me stop, take a breath, and stare at the world itself. I needed to organize my approach.

  “Okay.” I stared at the map of the world and zoomed in again, checking both Upside and Downside situations I’d left behind so suddenly. “Let’s see what the situation is, first. Maybe that will help me think.”

  A quick glance at the dwarves and the Sisterhood told me they had some kind of mostly beneficial relationship. They were wary of one another, but had limited trade. That was good, because the dwarven metalworking would greatly boost the elven progress… if they could get it to the bulk of the elven nations, which were thousands of kilometers away.

  I swung my attention to the elven Homelands, and that’s where I paused.

  “They’ve heard of the dwarves already… most people, even,” I noticed. “It has been six years, but I’ve not seen information spread this quickly. I wonder if a dragon got involved? Or one of the gods? I’ll have to ask next time I talk to them.”

  Duck flicked an ear in a dismissive note, the equivalent of a human shrug. “Maybe there was a pilgrim there that carried the story back right away. It only takes a couple years on foot. If they had a bounder or a viswolf, it’d be even faster.”

  I pulled back from looking over the settlements and nodded. “I suppose. One less thing for me to worry about. We’ll want them to start trading sooner rather than later, but I can give them a few decades to figure it out themselves and step in if they’re too slow about doing it. We need that cultural exchange to prepare for the incursions.”

  This caused Duck to roll off the chair and to her feet, where she stretched lazily. “See? You don’t need to do everything. Sometimes the world works things out on its own.” She tapped her chin. “Even though I guess technically you are the world, too. That’s always been hard to comprehend.”

  “I try not to think about it.” While I agreed with Duck on this, I didn’t want to get caught up in what it meant for my soul to host millions of smaller souls. “Let’s see what Downside has been up to… oh, ugh.”

  Good news was, the Domain of Chall had managed to conquer the dungeon that I’d placed nearby. Further good news, it would probably give me a lot of energy. So in that respect, it looked like my simple spread of a story may have helped… or maybe not. It was hard to tell without knowing alternate timelines.

  The bad news was, as I’d feared, war had broken out between the large tribe near the dungeon and Chall. Even though part of me knew it was for the best, I still felt a pang of guilt. Could I have prevented that if I hadn’t aborted my mission early to check in on the Sisterhood? Should I have tried to stop it even if I had been there?

  “Okay, let’s get priorities straight, you’re right.” I sighed and stepped back, looking at the world from farther away. I set it spinning, watching the terrain flow by. “I want to go down and do more prep work with the vaskans, but that can wait until we’ve set things up. It isn’t a priority, especially with the time dilation on.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Duck wiggled her tail at me. “Speaking of that. I figured out how to set it up so you can talk to the gods in your chat even while you’re not in their domain. You have to manually turn it on, and it only works if you’re running at 1:1, but this way you won’t need to burn any energy on a proxy or anything.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, and meant it. Part of me had missed my old friends. Too bad the others had chosen to go back into reincarnation. That just reminded me of the next steps I had to do, though.

  With a heavy sigh, I started going through the list. “First we need to set up more dungeons with fake incursions. We want them used to the idea by the time the real thing hits. Second, we need to increase the population Upside. We can’t just add new species without thinking of how they’ll handle things, though. We might only have a few hundred years, there’s no way they’d climb from the stone age to something better for dungeoneering without some kind of help.”

  To my surprise, Duck lowered her ears and tail in a guilty expression. “I kind of messed up. I did tell you to put off making new species… I thought we’d have more time.”

  I ruffled her hair – easy to do for the blue elf that came up to my chest – and grumbled. “I did too, so I guess I can’t blame you.” A distant part of me nudged my mind in a reminder that Duck was a part of me, but she didn’t seem like it. Had my rapid growth given me a totally different personality?

  I didn’t have time to think about all of that though. I had too much to work on.

  “I was hoping to figure out a way to prepare the insect species and the elves and dwarves before dropping more dungeons.” The vaskan had in many ways been a test run of how to prepare a people, but I didn’t get enough data. I’d have to do it blind now. Which meant something much more unpleasant.

  Turning back to Duck, I took a deep breath. “Okay, while I handle the finishing touches on a few new intelligent species, I need you to place the dungeons in a wide net. Nothing too far from civilization, though. I can probably get the gods to give some related quests, but we’re not going to be able to risk the storyteller plan. We need these up and running fast.”

  The small elf started to nod, but I continued. “This means we can’t spend time carefully designing the trigger conditions of each dungeon. We’re going to need to roll them out with the emergency failsafe already active. Especially in the insect lands. I’ll have to figure out something for the fungal networks.”

  That order made Duck pause and squint at me. “Not that I disagree that this would help a lot but… are you sure, boss? I know how uncomfortable the failsafe makes you. And it’s untested. The filters should work, but I thought we were waiting for a new Sub-Terminal to help with selection.”

  “I’ll double check the filters and increase the value of the boons before we go live,” I reassured. She wasn’t wrong, though. This whole situation made me very uncomfortable, even if I’d tried to be as fair as possible about it. “Also we’ll have to go with the right of refusal, too. I don’t think I can really stomach it otherwise. Don’t forget to put some underwater. I’ll figure out how to handle those, myself.”

  Duck gave me a dubious look, but she turned to look at the world display anyway. I understood her reluctance to do this. She was more pragmatic than I was, in many ways, and this whole idea still made her uneasy.

  It wasn’t complicated on its surface, just… morally questionable. The dungeons were normally programmed to just boost and alter local animals into monsters, and to enclose themselves in an increasingly complex defense system as time went on. One creature would be designated as the Anchor Monster, and empowered more than the others.

  The dungeon would grow steadily until the first time the Anchor Monster was defeated. It would gather and concentrate local mana to do this, which is why I preferred to place them near a node. It could even recreate monsters within its domain, with enough mana. However, if it grew too large without being defeated, or without even having an attempt, the failsafe would trigger.

  Past a certain point, the automatic behavior would have a clear indication that it wasn’t working. The failsafe would start filtering available souls from the reincarnation queue, then offer them the chance to live on as a dungeon core to control and shape the dungeon intelligently.

  Unlike with most reincarnations, they’d keep their memories as a dungeon, and work toward their specific goal. Usually this would be to make a difficult but beatable dungeon, expand the area, then stop expanding and develop their existing area once the Anchor Monster was defeated. At this point they could choose to abandon the core and return to the reincarnation cycle at any time.

  The better their performance, the better boons they got in their next life. The idea was to reward them for performing a service to the world, since I couldn’t imagine being a dungeon core was fun. I couldn’t let them reincarnate with full memories, but I’d designed several possible rewards to motivate the soul-empowered core.

  I’d intended to make a proper afterlife as one of the rewards, but no such luck. We had to deploy early. And that meant no pilot programs, less chance to pull back and revise if something got screwed up, and no afterlife sitting as a reward for people who lived life well or did a sacrifice for the common good. So… boons it was.

  “Okay, I’ll get things set up here,” Duck was saying. “You still need to figure out a plan for mushroom-men. At least the insects are talking to the dragons, so they know what quests are.”

  I nodded. “Speaking of, I think I’ll give soul-empowered dungeon three Quest tokens. Might mean we can introduce Quests to the vaskan that way. Does that sound like a good idea?”

  “I realize you made me to bounce ideas off of, but I’m a little busy here.” Duck glanced over her shoulder at me and wagged her tail like a chiding finger-waggle. “Focus on your own problem. That sounds fine to me, but we’ll have to see how people handle Quests from dungeons later.”

  She was right again. I was second-guessing myself and I really had to work. I grunted in acknowledgement and opened my interface to the work I’d been doing on possible uplifted species.

  I had a lot of work to do.

  Core Principles