“How do you know all of this?” I ask as we’re still hanging out in the tall grasses off the main road between Rivayne and the Marches.

  “Skyreach has access to several dungeons, two of which we administer for resources. The Yetis hold dominion over one of the more brutal ones in the north and the Gnomes and a band of cave-dwelling Halvyr share another that we are allowed to delve on a schedule. Every few hundred years before I became High Shaman, I rotated with the other Ancients to administer the two we control.”

  The sheer absurdity of her statement from a human perspective strikes me. “It’s hard to imagine that there are Trolls alive right now that are older than the oldest record of written language in my realm of origin, and how you casually mention rotating work every few hundred years.”

  She pulls me into a hug with her massive mitts. “Most of the young have issues imagining our lifespan, and I’d wager that it takes a few hundred years to come to terms with it. When was your revelation, Ladira?”

  “Oof, of course you bring that up. I dated a Half Elf for a while, who ended up being the great granddaughter of my first mixed-race dungeon group. I mourned my friend fifty years before I met Maisey, and watching her age was what brought it home—I am watching the third generation after my friend get old. I’m only 347, so I’m not even that old to have realized, but I wanted to see the world and it led to me watching everyone age. I’m told that the grief comes full circle to appreciating the vivacity of life that Humans and Elves have, but I’m not anywhere near my first millennia, where that’s supposed to happen”

  “Thanks for sharing that.” I grab her shoulder and squeeze, but Ladira does not want to share the emotions that she’s feeling.

  “Can we get back to your Dungeon? This focus on me is currently a waste of time.”

  “Alright. Dear, your administration menu should be near your property and settlement menu options. After you find it, please share it with me.”

  About to quip that not everyone has a settlement tab, I find that I do indeed have a settlement tab on my ‘Property and Ownership’ window along with the new Dungeon Management tab. I share the new tab with Vitara and Larida.

  “Ten to fifty? That started with a lot of energy. You should start with the ‘Administrator Action’ prompts, obviously. Then you should set lethality so that the first floor is non-lethal, teleporting them out if they were about to die. This generally keeps people from gathering groups that massively overwhelm a dungeon from conquering it to opening it up. You should also set a group size min and max, if possible.

  “With this being max level 50 right now, it should prevent local humans from trying to overwhelm the dungeon. Include at least one ‘findable’ secret room to ensure that low-tiers don’t keep searching until they find something you don’t want them to. Anything to add Larida?”

  “Yeah, from what you said before, you have currency ore in that dungeon, so you should allow the dungeon to convert those resources into the currency of the land instead of ore rewards. Letting humans find currency ore is just asking for a high-level kill squad to come take your dungeon.”

  That is certainly in like with the vibe I got from my brief time with the Guild, so I immediately go in and tailor the ore rewards to automatically convert to coinage and relegate any ore nodes I couldn’t convert to a series of hidden rooms.

  We spend hours at a makeshift camp combing over what I should do with my Dungeon, and quite a bit of that time was hiding my core in a fancy Puzzle room that is also my aether crystal room. While the puzzle has to be solvable with clues and resources found within the dungeon, I don’t have to make it solvable from clues within the same floor or room because the core is not an exit requirement. I designed it so that when the dungeon expands, so does the number of puzzle boxes required to access the core, and the number of unique items required from each floor to solve the puzzles.

  “Unique access and a puzzle binding? With a Growth aspect? Oh, now that is clever. Darling daughter, I like the tilt of your mind.” She sighs and studies my face for a few moments before continuing. “With a very unlikely approach to seizing your core, I don’t think I have to intervene. Though it may press the new Shaman to migrate with some haste—which brings some hassle of its own. I will impress upon them that the land is yours, and that the dungeon is under your control. In either case, I doubt you will have issues with Larida and the weight of Spirehawk behind you.”

  “Will you head to the Spire now?” Larida asks.

  “I have no further business with the Humans of Rivayne. Zeph can recover my belongings before her return. If I have to spend another moment around his insufferable wife, I will end the whole city in frustration.”

  “If only the Human Magisterium weren’t always watching you eh?” Larida chuckles.

  “Those insufferable mages. You teach them a lesson for allying with the Yetis, and they never forget it. That is the only group of humans I harbor anything close to respect for. Extended lives, detailed histories, and breed like damned hogs. Magic with the ability to waste lives is something we cannot manage.”

  “Speaking of magic, is my class going to be an issue?” I ask the High Shaman.

  “The Ancients will not like it, but if you couch it as Gnomish tinkering, they will be less . . . repulsed. That said, we rarely get a magic outlier class, so I have quite a bit of hope for a mixed tech and aether class.”

  I bump my head against her ribs and hug her side. “How are you so understanding?”

  She chuckles. “You aren’t asking anything of me and are being accommodating of my quirks. There is nothing to understand besides that you are my daughter, and after being gone for years, I want nothing more than to get the opportunity to know you.”

  I groan, “You are so sappy.” I don’t stop hugging the giant woman, though. Feels way too nice to have a mountain to anchor yourself to.

  Larida avoids the family moment as long as she can stand, then tells both of us our mounts are fed and saddled and that if we want to make the next town before dark, we have to go.

  Leviston is nothing to write home about, and is not commonly a stop for travelers, but with a small guest room and a stable, we weather the few hours of sleep with merely a few silver. We skip the next typical rest stop for Southern travelers and push firmly for seven more hours to Bordertown South—the last stop in the incorporated Empire before we spend three to four days in the Southern Marches before reaching my farm.

  Bordertown is where the Imperial pavement ends, just dirt and cart tracks to follow from here. We have to camp the nights afterward, as the lands here are quite wild and mostly hostile with beasts and semi-sentient beasts. While the aether shadow of my land’s concentration shelter’s Marcrest, the ambient mana in the Marches is overall, quite hight.

  “Skymother, this place has my aether itching.”

  “My property has natural treasures that focus said aether, so I don’t notice so much. That and I work with charged crystals and dust, as well as blowing myself up far too many times. This doesn’t even register to me as I imbue as a profession?”

  “Is your house this charged?!” Larida nearly shouts.

  “Maybe, I can’t tell.”

  “There is an aether source right there. How much more?”

  Instead of humoring her drama, I just start handing her charged aether crystals from my storage. “Just tell me when to stop. Low aether concentrations are hard for me to identify as other than less than normal these days.”

  “You are going to burn me with these.”

  “You are definitely not living in my house with that kind of sensitivity. Good thing you brought at tent. It’ll only be a year or so before the Shaman and their clan get here, right?”

  Larida swears at me for a solid hour before I tell her that she’ll get used to it.

  The next morning, when she asks why she doesn’t notice the tingling inside the tent I tell her that it’s only exposed skin. She swears at me for another hour, then hassles me with petty bullshit for three days. When I’ve had enough of that, I slip aether crystals in her sleeping bag and whether she realizes I don’t think it’s funny anymore, or that she can’t escalate without hurting me, it stops—the whining, the pettiness, all of it.

  “I’m sorry I teased you about your discomfort. I’ve only ever read about aether sensitivity like that. No one I’ve met has ever mentioned it otherwise.”

  “I’d prefer to ignore what happened and just act like this is work until I figure out what that looks like.”

  “What were you tasked with?” She certainly isn’t acting like a guard.

  “To accompany and assist with your efforts. I don’t know what your efforts are, so that may look a lot like following you for a while.” She does not seem thrilled at the prospect.

  “The first things I’ll want to be doing is organizing a party for the first floor of my dungeon to see how much it has changed, then I’ll try to get that traveling merchant to come down so I can get some more cash to finish some of the projects I’ve started on my land. I am no doubt out of ready cash by now. Once that development slows down, I’ll want to advance my crafts and try to get to level 20 in a few years.”

  “Do you have a subclass in mind, or are you aiming to swap to a different base class?”

  “Uh, I though your class advances? What does a subclass do?” I guess it does say subclass at 20 on my character tab. I have been thinking about it wrong for a long time.

  “Oof, I might just be your remedial education instructor for the time being. Subclasses are like motivations, vocations, personal foci, things of that kind. Classes don’t strictly advance until they distill at level 50. Outside of war and Dungeons, leveling is typically slow. Skyreach has to schedule dungeon time for all Trolls on this continent, so we typically reserve it for our fighters, or as a reward to help people target their subclasses or their distillation. With essentially a private Dungeon you should think about what you want to do with your class and somehow implement that idea during your dungeon runs.”

  “I want to imbue elemental effects into my devices and weapons. With the idea I am a Shaman in training, expanding that into an elementalist that uses tools for life and progress as well as war.”

  “Sounds like taking items that you’ve altered or made into the dungeon with you will move that along. I will tell you that imbuement is not a common talent, so I have no advice on how to change the element you imbue, but enchanting with runes is an excellent way to use neutral aether for elemental or other aspected effects. Vitara uses runes to empower totems with water and earth effects using her fire and wind aspected aether.”

  “I’m sure I will love the experiments in my future, but right now, learning a whole new craft seems daunting. Maybe I can get an intro-book or hire some instruction. It would be very cool to have elemental bolts for my bolt repeater. How cool would it be to shoot lightning from a crossbow?”

  “I’ve never seen a tall blue Gnome before, but I think I’ve been camping with one.”