by Hugo Huesca
If someone bypassed these security measures, a sign hanging at the door of the farms’ gates simply read, in St. Claire and Tillman’s own penmanship: we fucking told you. Half the sign was missing, the other half was covered in bite marks, but Ed hoped it got the point across.
Ed and Heorghe went down the tunnel.
The staircase brought them deep into the bowels of the earth, the magical torches shimmering their pale light across the rough steps. The low ceiling forced Heorghe to walk hunched over.
“You’re moving a bit stiff, Edward,” Heorghe said. “How’s the training going?”
Ed’s shoes were slick with humidity, and he almost stumbled down the stairs when his footing slipped for a fraction of a second. He gripped the rails tightly. A tiny stream ran down the side of the steps, fed by the water that ran down the walls.
“It’s the training,” Ed said. “Kes didn’t like that I skipped the first day, so she’s been extra hard the rest of the week.”
Heorghe chuckled. “I saw you and your friends running around the camp yesterday morning. No idea how you didn’t freeze to death in the storm.”
The memory made Ed’s bones shiver. The storm had caught them when they were coming back from the run, and when they were the most tired. “We never stopped moving, that’s how we kept warm.”
After they had dried off inside the Haunt, Kes had ushered him into her own sadistic version of a weightlifting program. She had explained that it was the same variation the avian people used to raise their usually very low Endurance, and that if her own people didn’t complain while doing it, then neither should they. In fact, she raised the number of exercises for every whine she heard, which had thrown Lavy into an almost suicidal loop of protest.
The only one who hadn’t complained once was Klek.
“How are the storms treating your family?” asked Ed, anxious to change the subject—fearing that Kes would hear him think his complaints and make tomorrow’s session extra hard. “You could move into the Haunt, you know. There’s no need to stay in those tents.”
As it turned out, Starevos’ winter had begun with constant thunderstorms. They lasted all morning and most of the day, barely giving the land enough time to breathe at night before starting all over again. Ed had never seen anything like it back in his hometown: distant trees collapsing after the impact of lightning, the flames challenging the reign of the storm, the mighty trunk splintering and disappearing into the sea of green.
“Trust me, I’d love to, but my wife would murder me,” Heorghe said. “She feels safer near our people, and… well, our people don’t trust you very much, what with you not allowing them to leave, and all.”
Ed knew that Heorghe’s wife wasn’t very happy with the blacksmith, because of his decision to stay in the dungeon rather than leave for the countryside. The Dungeon Lord knew about it because the spiderlings were very curious creatures and had no concept of personal space.
Ed couldn’t convince the villagers to accept the safety of the Haunt, and he wasn’t willing to further strain their relationship by ordering them to abandon the tents, so the only thing he could do was to make sure their abodes didn’t have any leaks.
When the tunnel ended, Ed and Heorghe reached a closed, circular chamber carved into the rock via drone-chomping. It was mostly empty, despite the size. The center was dominated by a cylindrical contraption made out of iron, almost twice the size of Heorghe. Under the sturdy iron legs that held it up was a pyramid of logs. More logs were carefully ordered next to the walls, covered in a tarp to protect them from the humidity. At the roof over the cylinder was a hole slightly smaller than the cylinder. Ed knew for a fact that the hole led all the way to the Haunt’s floor.
Near the entrance, a workbench held Ed’s recent experiments, and materials for drone transfiguration were strewn in a bunch next to it.
“What’s all this?” asked Heorghe, his eyes examining every part of the room carefully.
“I hope it’ll become the reason we won’t freeze in the winter.” Ed pointed at the cylindrical contraption, which was actually the skeleton for what would become a furnace. “We stockpile coal and firewood to send hot air through pipes below the Haunt’s floors.”
Heorghe walked to the furnace. “Some nobles warm their castles using a similar system,” he said. “But it is very expensive to set up, and also to maintain. You’d need men to keep the fire running, and a lot of fuel.”
A drone appeared close to Ed, scurried under the table, and came back out carrying a small pipe. The drone brought it to Heorghe so he could examine it.
“The drones are free labor,” Ed said. “They can make the pipes easily, as long as I give them the material. This one is made out of clay. I asked Lavy and Alder, and Alder mentioned that Heiliges uses lead piping in their castles, but I’m not too enthused about using that for the Haunt.” Since lead was a poison back on Earth, Ed didn’t want to risk it being the same in Ivalis too.
Heorghe shook his head. He took the small pipe out of the drone’s hands and examined it. “You’re right to distrust lead. Heiligian lead is rich with calcium impurities—it insulates it—but Starevos doesn’t share that blessing.” He flashed Ed a grin. “Clay works just fine. You’ll have to replace it eventually, with all the construction you’re doing around here, but it’ll last nicely until you can afford better materials.”
“Clay it is,” said Ed. Most of the cutlery of the Haunt was built out of transmuted clay, because making it was so simple that the transmutation toll on the ingredients was tiny. It was the only material Ed knew of that was better to transmute than to make the old-fashioned way. “You think you could lead the project? I know you are a blacksmith and not a builder, but the drones are experts in construction, so they’ll handle all the technical parts. Just make sure that the thing works.”
“To be honest, a warm Haunt would do wonders to ease my family’s fears. Maybe they’d let me move us inside the dungeon. With the drones working day and night, I think the hardest part will be getting your furnace right. It should take a couple months… but this kind of project normally takes years. And you know what? I have so much free time anyway…”
Ed smiled. Heorghe was pacing as he talked, and the blacksmith’s eyes flashed at the furnace with clear interest. Ed knew the feeling, because he’d felt the exact same way when designing this project. It was the challenge of having a difficult problem that he knew he could solve and had the right resources to do so. It was the same sensation of working all night on a complex computer code, looking for the tiny syntax error that he knew was throwing off the debugger. Annoying at first, but once he caught that first scent of blood… ah, the chase was on.
It was the thrill of the hunt, one of the oldest emotions in the world. The athlete felt it while breaking a previous personal record; the detective felt it while uncovering a clue that everybody else missed; the barbarian felt it while carving in the skull of an enemy warlord.
Mankind, as a species, shared the same obsession with problem solving. Ed and Heorghe shared a similar version of that obsession. They saw a system, they studied it, they found a flaw in the system—like a cold dungeon in the winter—and then they improved it.
It was the way of the optimizer.
And gods knew that Ivalis could use some optimization.
Ed and Heorghe made eye contact as the blacksmith paced. They had a childlike grin, two boys in adult bodies who were just realizing that the world is their playground.
Your Dungeon Engineering has increased by 2 ranks.
A few weeks later, Ed met with Andreena in one of the dungeon’s newest chambers. He made a wide, sweeping motion with his arm to envelop the Brewery.
“Well?” he asked Andreena. “What do you think?”
The Herbalist examined the facility with critical, experienced eyes. A group of batblins carried a heavy sack of Decadentaculous Malt Mixture to one of the copper machines that stood atop one of the several tables across the Brewery. Bar
rels filled with either materials or botched batches of ale waited in every corner of the place. The barrels were made out of wood planks and sealed with tar. According to the instruction manual, the tar shouldn’t add any flavor to the brew, but Ed was sure he could taste it.
“Hopefully this project of yours won’t go the way of the hell chicken farms,” Andreena said.
A single drone foreman instructed a batblin on how to handle the fermentation bin. The batblin dropped in a little too much yeast, and the smell of excess yeast wafted across the Brewery. Ed withheld a sneeze.
“We’re still looking into what went wrong with those,” Ed said.
“I know what went wrong. Those damn fools at St. Claire and Tillman are cheap bastards!”
Another drone opened a brown sugar sack and looked inside. The critter fell down and disappeared into a cloud of sugar. On the opposite side, a boiling pan simmered next to a cauldron filled with boiling water.
“Maybe, but their products are free,” said Ed. “It’s a good place to start, in my opinion.”
“Malt powder?” asked Andreena, reading from the stamp on one of the mixture bags. “Who the hell thought that was a good idea? Wetlands, Ed, it’s no surprise the ale tastes like piss.”
“You know, Heorghe told me you had a… hobby. A brewing hobby,” said Ed, using the indignation of the Herbalist to move in for the kill. “He said you made nice coin on the side, back in Burrova, making ale for the villagers.”
Andreena put down the mixture. “Is that so? That big snitch. Brewing ale without being a member of the Militant Church is illegal, Ed. And you need a permit for alcohol like the tzuika,” she said. Ed recalled that the tzuika was a cheap, local liquor that peasants made in their homes. “So whatever you’re thinking, be careful about it.”
“It’s not like we can break Heiligian law any harder,” Ed said. He shrugged, then gestured again at the Brewery, in what he hoped was an alluring motion. “You could be in charge of all this, you know. Bring a little order to the chaos… and get a cut of the profits.”
“I’m an Herbalist, not a damn tavern wench,” said Andreena. She crossed her arms and frowned.
One of the batblins—a female from the hidden camp that had recently moved into the Haunt due to the storms—dug her fingers into a barley mix and tried to snort the powder, which she quickly came to regret.
“With your help, the Haunt may start making something people can actually keep in their stomach,” Ed said.
Andreena sighed. “Gods damn you, that’s a very good point. Hogbus knows that the villagers could use some booze to calm their nerves. But where am I supposed to get the ingredients? Tzuika is easy to make—but barley and malt wheat, we’d need to go to the countryside farms for those.”
“Let me worry about that,” Ed said. He did his best to hide his triumphant smile. “I’ll go with Alder to one of the other villages and trade some hell chicken meat for whatever you need to start.”
“And let you poor sods get swindled? They’ll sell you weeds and tell you it’s wheat. No, I’ll go with you and choose the ingredients myself. Have Kes tell your minions how to salt the hell chicken meat, and I’ll teach them how to mask the flavor of the Netherworld—otherwise you’ll scare the villagers into forming angry mobs, and we all saw how your batblins dealt with those.”
Having achieved total victory, Ed clasped his hands behind his back, thanked Andreena, and urged her to follow him.
They left the Brewery to the batblins’ care—Ed hoped there’d still be a Brewery left when they returned—and crossed the Haunt toward one of the newer sections that had sprung into existence during the weeks of Ed’s renovation efforts.
One of the new chambers sent puffs of heat out into the tunnel Ed and Andreena followed. The Herbalist gave an interested glance inside said chamber as they passed by.
“Is that Heorghe?” she asked. “What’s he doing there?”
“That’s the new blacksmith workshop,” Ed told her, following the direction of her gaze. The workshop was about the same size of Heorghe’s shop back in Burrova, with one crude forge—built by the combined efforts of Heorghe and the drones—lording over all other tools. It stood like the trunk of a metal tree growing against a wall and rose into the stone ceiling, where it disappeared. The chimney ensured that no one would die of CO2 poisoning, but it also was a danger: the smoke came out by the top of the hill where a flying observer could notice it and pinpoint the Haunt’s location. Since, so far, Ed hadn’t made any flying enemies, it was a problem that he could solve later.
Heorghe himself worked close to the forge, using a pair of tongs to lower a red-hot piece of metal into a barrel of cold water. He was making screws, which were a bit beyond the capability of Ed’s drones. A small group of batblins stood near Heorghe and handed him tools from the benches nearby when he asked for them. Although everyone was covered in protective gear, most of the batblins had minor burns in the fur of their arms and bellies.
The blacksmith glanced at Ed and Andreena and shouted a greeting at them as they passed.
“So that’s where Heorghe went,” Andreena muttered. “The villagers were wondering if you had had him sacrificed.”
“You’re kidding, right? Heorghe’s worth his weight in gold,” Ed told her. “If I wanted to sacrifice anyone, it’d be Brett.”
The governor had done little since his arrival at the Haunt, but at least he kept quiet and gave no trouble, which was all that Ed could ask of the man. Zachary, on the other hand, had tried at least twice to convert the spiders into Alita’s church.
Andreena barked a laugh. “You wouldn’t get many experience points out of that deal, let me tell you,” she said.
The tunnel led them to a room about the size of Heorghe’s workshop. Unlike the workshop, however, the place was mostly empty, except for a group of drones who labored industriously in the walls. They were carving a lasershark in bas-relief. The lasershark hovered over a cauldron—whose contents simmered under a badly rendered fire.
“They can decorate now?” Andreena asked, while she and Ed watched the drones work.
“Started as soon as I got to dungeon engineering skill rank nine,” Ed told her. “I’m still trying to find out how to change the decoration—so far it seems they do whatever they want.”
He had had to demolish several rude carvings and one obscene statue before the drones stopped that avenue of artistic expression.
“So this is for you,” Ed told her. “If you want it. It’s not as cozy as your hut, but it sure beats the tent.”
He gave her a brief tour of the place. There were several cauldrons, all of different sizes, propped under the obligatory chimney. Empty rows, benches, and storage bins waited for Andreena to fill them with plants. Hooks hung from the ceiling, and brewing equipment for potions lay neatly ordered in workbenches and tables.
Behind this room was another series of rooms and chambers that served as a fully functional house. It had a bedroom, a bathroom that would have running water as soon as Ed figured out how to adapt the piping the Haunt was already laying, bed tables, a kitchen, and a living room decorated with ugly drone-tapestry and clay cutlery. A single piece of artwork hung from the wall of the living room, a drawing of a batblin made with the skill of a three-year-old using crayons while coloring blind. It was titled “The Ranger Slayer in Combat.” Ed had tried to take it down, but the drones’ hurt expression had dissuaded him. No one would accuse him of not being a patron of the arts.
Andreena took this all in with wide eyes, walking to every corner and examining each detail closely. One singular thing claimed her attention. She went to the table and propped it open. It was a book, filled with blank pages.
“Careful, the pages are brittle,” Ed told her. “It took Lavy and me several tries to get it right.”
As it turned out, Ivalis mostly used parchment—since they lacked Earth’s paper-production technology—but there were several Ivalian kingdoms that knew of paper. Ed had bent his dr
one’s transmutation a bit to make it—the book was technically a part of this room’s design, which he had dubbed “the Herbalist Workshop.” The plan had worked, but Lavy had gone for a quick walk outside the Haunt while Ed’s drones performed the transmutation. Just in case.
“How did you make it?” Andreena asked while she softly flipped through the pages. The book had a solid black cover, built with hardened leather.
“Wood, spider poison, leather, spiderweb, and a couple other things to make the glue,” said Ed. “It took a lot of attempts to get it right, but I’m adding books like this everywhere I can justify their presence. It’ll be useful for you to make recipes, keep an inventory, and so on.”
Andreena returned the book to its table, next to the ink. Making the ink had been Alder’s job, since, as a Bard, he knew the most about writing instruments. He’d done a fine job at it after a couple trips to the forest, but the Bard had refused to give up the recipe, citing “bardic secrets.” Ed suspected it involved charcoal, since Alder’s clothes had been covered in the stuff after his trips.
“I can’t afford this,” the Herbalist said softly. “It’s too much.”
“You don’t have to pay for it,” Ed said. He dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “It’s all yours. The way I see it, I owe you. You healed my people, you stayed when you could’ve left, and you’ve helped keep the peace. And now you’re the head of the Haunt’s brewing operations. This is the least I can do.”
Andreena took a moment to acclimate to the idea. She glanced across her new workshop, then smiled. “I like the place. It’s going to need some work, but I can bring whatever is left of my hut here.”
“Great,” said Ed. “When the Haunt starts making money, make a list of ingredients and whatever else you need that we can’t make by abusing transmutation.”
“If I were any good with money, I wouldn’t be a small village’s Herbalist,” Andreena said with a chuckle. “Ed, I believe you didn’t just build this place as a random gift. Heorghe is making pipes and weapons in his new forge, isn’t he? He has a part to play in whatever plan you have. What’s mine?”
