by Troy Neenan
David decided to get something easy just to test it out. He selected a copper coin.
You have selected Copper Coin of unknown mint. Do you wish to research this object? Yes or no?
David clicked yes.
You have three research options. Theory, Practical studies, and Obsession each selection determines the effort that you put into knowing about the object and if any upgrades can be extracted.
Again things just had to be complicated.
Not sure what would happen, the dungeon picked theory.
***
David looked at his email again and wanted to throw something.
Dejected once again, he rubbed his face with his hand and looked at the rejection letter. You would think that it would be easy to get a job with his resume. Five years of call centre and trouble shooter work, computer training, certificates in engineering; the arseholes should be hunting him down with job offers.
Feeling another wave of frustration, David stood and stretched.
Kev came over, “No luck?” he asked. Seeing his roommate’s grumpy face, he let out a sigh. “Come on man. Don't give up.”
“I'm not giving up.” David said, “I can't sponge off of you for the rest of my life.”
“You're not sponging. You help out.”
The only thing that David “helped out” was to make Kev's life easier. It had been four months since David got out of the hospital. Of course, the company had fired his arse.
He should have gotten compensation for almost dying on the job, but their lawyers had argued that since David had gone into a coma on the emergency unit's helicopter, that it wasn't work related and therefore they didn't have to pay him at all.
At the time David was in no condition to protect himself or his rights, and the moment they could, the company fired him.
Two years was a long time. He had lost his flat, but more, the arsehole manager had taken the initiative and sold off all his things. David hadn’t even been able to afford physical therapy so he was forced to walk around with crutches and the hospital bills had eaten his savings.
Desperate, he had to go to the one prick who was morally obligated to help him. Kevin.
David had been Kevin's supervisor in the company and had trained him in everything. This, of course, didn't mean that Kevin owed his old superior spit, but it had also been Kevin who had been the reason that David had been up there in the first place. Kevin had begged David to cover for him; he had no desire to go to the arse end of nowhere to fiddle around with a few wires.
So David had put the guilt trip on Kev. Fortunately, Kev's missus left him and he needed a bit more rent. It was also fortunate that Kev was a slacker and had better things to do with his time than making reports, such as fragging noobs on his stupid game, and he was eager to pass the work onto someone else.
It wouldn't last forever. David knew that all Kev had to do was tell him to leave, and carer's allowance or not, David would be out on the street, crippled and forced to bum Wi-Fi from pubs and cafes. He needed a job and he needed it this year.
He searched through the sites, “Sales, sales, sales. Fuck you. No. Shop greeter...”
Kevin snorted at that, David was unable to say hello without sounding sarcastic. “Maybe you can try government or bank work. You're good at telling people to go fuck themselves.” he sat on the couch and turned on his game console. “Want to go co-op?”
“Nah,”
“I just don't understand why you need work. You get enough doing nothing.”
“Because I don't want to give you the power to pull the plug on me the next time I end up in a coma.” David's luck, Kevin would do it just to play to some woman's sympathy, and as much as he was willing to play Kev's wingman, he didn't want his funeral to be a prop to yet another of Kev's attempts at conquest.
Also, David needed to do something. He had spent four entire months doing nothing and while somebody like Kev was happy enough to do that, David needed some proper income coming in.
There was an explosion from the TV followed by Kev shouting, “Bitch bitch bitch.” He passed the controller to his roommate, “Come over here and help me blow up New York.”
David let out a sigh that sounded like something between a wounded dog and a whale's yawn. “Fine,” he said and signed into his account.
As he played he looked at a different hub. Ever since he had woken up, the Dungeon Core had been... Different. For one thing he was now able to view his status screen.
Name: David Mascoff.
Species: Dungeon Core, human.
Status: Damaged.
Currently Doing: Playing games.
Power: 60/60
That was it. That was all that it displayed. No strength or dexterity numbers. No abilities. In role playing games there were always numbers and statistics, but not here. Everyday David checked his status page and nothing changed.
After about two games of being beaten by what David could only assume was some ten year old's birthday party, he gave it quits. A thought wormed its way into his head. It just came out of nowhere, like part of a pop song that you heard years ago.
He signed out of the game and moved back to his tablet.
“Rage quitter,” Kev called out.
David ignored him and instead concentrated on scratching his new itch. He turned to his browser and began to look up copper. His eyes looked at the page, studying it like it held the secrets to life. When he was done he began to look at other pages. Copper wiring, copper based alloys, acids that reacted to copper. Copper, copper, copper.
“Hey, you alright?”
The Dungeon Core jumped when he felt Kev's hand on his shoulder, “What?”
Kev gave him a look like he had just spoken French while taking a shit. “You zoned out of it there. I asked if you wanted pizza or Chinese?”
“Oh,” David looked at his tablet's clock. He had just been looking up medical uses for copper. That itch was still there but it had greatly diminished. He wanted to learn more. No. That wasn't right. He needed to learn more. It was as if there was going to be a quiz later and he needed to cram as much of this nonsense into his head before the teacher brought out the metal ruler.
David rubbed at his eyes, “Sure, um. Chinese.”
He hardly felt tired at all. He must have learned more about copper wiring in electronics than he knew about computers. The information wasn't just on the metal itself, but of abstract terms like mining and recycling methods, information that he had never been interested in.
The Dungeon Core looked at his history and was shocked to see that he had read complete journals on the substance. He must have read thousands of papers in just a few hours. Just what the hell was going on?
Not really tired but knowing that he would regret it if he didn't get some sleep, David retired to his bed. He laid there, mind drifting through what he had learned, thinking about copper and the various uses for the metal.
Eventually he got out of bed and returned to the lounge room where he booted up his laptop. His sausage fingers danced over the keyboard. He attacked the internet, trying to find more and more about the common metal, not having any particular goal but to study with everything that he had. He absorbed the information like a bathmat, sucking up everything to do with copper.
Hours passed without him noticing.
Sleep finally came to David when he realised that he had crammed enough about the metal into his skull. He knew how to refine copper ore, how to create copper rings, and how much a 1976 Canadian penny was worth five hundred years ago. He knew, and unlike his German lessons back at school, it all stuck.
Secret quest completed. Know your copper.
You have learned all that you can about the substance, copper. Using your world's technology you have gone far and beyond this task.
Reward: You can instinctively locate and identify copper in your surroundings.
David landed back in his bed, feeling as though he had just run a marathon while drinking a bottle of rum
. No mixers, just straight guzzling it down while sprinting for the finish line. He wasn't dead but he felt as close to it as he was willing to go.
He looked at the clock and found that it was four in the morning. He squinted at the construct and suddenly tiny glowing green specks appeared within the time piece. He turned his head and stared at a wall only to see that ribbons of the same green glow appeared, like streamers. It took him a minute for his sleep riddled mind to figure out that what he was looking at was the copper wiring in his walls.
As super powers went it was kind of lame. Being able to see copper, what kind of power was that? He yawned, already feeling as if he had just consumed an entire glass of horse tranquilisers. He could figure it out tomorrow.
Twenty minutes later, David's eyes broke open. No longer were they red from exhaustion, instead they looked clean and fresh. Restless, he picked up his laptop and began to find something boring to exhaust himself with.
Hopefully, reading a few paragraphs on the complete history of silver would numb him back to sleep.
Chapter Nine
A man in his sixties with a huge dent in his skull watched from the side lines. He had been working at the local men's work shed for nearly ten years, putting together trailers and doing the occasional odd job now and then. The man had seen a few things since he had joined, like the time someone actually made their own wooden leg.
But this was a new one on him.
Yesterday, David had come to the shed, really not knowing anything. His arrival caused all of the veterans to scoff. They thought that he was just some weekend tourist. It happened now and then, somebody came in thinking that they could build a huge throne or gaudy looking stool, then they went home crying like children, blaming their screw ups on the tools, and perhaps they were right.
The men's shed wasn't exactly rolling with the latest saws and drills. Most of the wood and metal that could be found on the property was leftover scraps from the old timers who used the place as a club room.
After being given the basic tour however, David had taken to the grinders like a drunk to a bottle opener. Those who watched him thought that the Dungeon Core had worked for years in the industry. He worked like a horse, never taking so much as a breather as he ground the metal.
It had taken the out-of-work Australian just four straight hours of work to make a broadsword. Not one of those replicas or decorative pieces either, but a real medieval weapon with an edge that could land him in jail if he wasn't careful.
One of the reasons behind some of the speed was due to the lack of needing to measure the iron. It was all in the Dungeon Core's head, like a song that you knew all the words to. David also had this uncanny feeling that the steel was morphing to his will. Every time that he had shaved off too much, the iron seemed to be able to repair itself.
It wasn't until hour two of his sword smithing that the Dungeon Core noticed that he was using his personal reserves of energy. What he was using it on he had no clue, but he also knew that working with metal shouldn't be this easy
Then, when it was all done and David had finished making his broadsword, he went home feeling like his eyelids had weights to them.
Today, the shed’s veterans sipped their coffee and watched as David used his bare fingers to set a string of metal links together. If they suspected that the metal was pure iron and not some kind of soldering wire, it was possible that one of the old men might have had a stroke.
“Think I should offer him a job?” one of the old men asked his fellow craftsmen and drinking buddies.
“He's not welding, Hector,” another of the veterans said. “at least, I haven't seen him weld.”
“Doesn't matter. I haven't seen him use a measuring tape or a compass, yet, and look at it all.”
For the veterans it was impossible to not look at all the iron on the ground. Iron boots, iron chest plate, iron gloves; all of it expertly made and all of it by a man who yesterday didn't know how to use a blowtorch.
One of the veterans had picked up one of the gloves and was surprised by the weight of it. From the way that David seemed to twist the metal with his bare hands he had thought that it must have been really thin aluminium, but no. Everything had been made from nearly forty kilograms of iron.
When he had first left the house, the Dungeon Core had doubted his own sanity. Ever since he had left the hospital, David's paranoia had caused him to avoid public areas for fear that at any moment a SWAT team would descend upon him from a black, unmarked helicopter and guide him to a dissection table.
One of the reasons that he had chosen Kevin as his room-mate was not out of the belief that Kevin wouldn't rat him out, but that the dropkick was too incompetent and utterly useless to be a threat.
Right now, however, David couldn't have cared less if one of the men who were currently watching him was a CIA agent in disguise or that a spy satellite would pick up that he was possibly leaking exotic radiation. What bothered the Dungeon Core at the moment was that he hadn't brought anything to eat.
During the first few hours of working on his project, David had been stumped over the reason why his energy bar gradually decreased. As his work began to mature and his stomach began to groan, however, a thought came over him and he began to experiment.
Previously, the Dungeon Core's energy bar hadn't been a problem to maintain. Due to his injuries he had never done anything too exerting beyond getting into and out of a car, but now that had changed.
David's energy levels and his hunger were somehow intertwined. Low energy meant that he needed fuel (food). This revelation was nothing, however, as the Dungeon Core learned where that energy was going in the first place. David was crafting.
He used his hands like a sculptor would, bending the heavy metal as if it were tin foil. In just over three hours since he had begun, the Dungeon Core had created a full suit of medieval armour. It wasn't the plate armour that one usually associates with knights and kings, but gear that one of the better paid soldiers of the time might wear.
It wouldn't win any fashion contests, not unless the subject was heavy and cumbersome attire, but it might stop an arrow. The key word being might.
David let out a deep sigh as yet another prompt came up.
You have created Kuhre'ue armour.
This armour is for higher class soldiers who have sworn since childhood to protect the line of Menjordon.
The Kuhre'ue armour has been added to your collection, you can now recreate this armour using energy.
David did find it hard to believe that he had just made a full suit of armour. Sure he had an engineering degree but that had covered the theory more than practical knowledge. As he examined the vestment, David realised that what he had made had to weigh at least half as much as he did. That didn't concern him right now, however. Right now, that itch that had been bothering him had been sated, he no longer felt the compulsion to learn about armour, and eBay willing, he would find somebody who would buy the cumbersome thing.
Done with this place, he began to drag his creation outside when a new prompt made him hesitate.
New quest alert. Iron and steel.
Iron has this tendency to rust and be as heavy as a bitch. Create a version of the Kuhre'ue armour from steel.
Reward. Modified Kuhre'ue armour. The practical ability to make alloys.
David frowned. He found that dealing with alloys was a tedious process. Iron alone had dozens of impurities that was within the boundaries of the smelting process, plus there was oxidation to consider. Steel was an alloy and was traditionally iron and copper that was mixed in a 60 to 40 percent ratio, but some organisations liked to cut costs or add in some other stuff to make the alloy stronger. To David, each nail and screw was as unique as a snowflake.
The Dungeon Core looked at the metal glove that he was holding. He really didn't feel like making another suit of armour, at least not yet.
Half an hour later, a panting and sweating David had pushed the suit of armour into the boot of his
latest car. It hadn't been an easy job. Unlike the Beast, this pimple's only redeeming feature was that it was cheap to buy and cheap to maintain.
It was small, had only two seats and David needed to rely on his old Tetris skills to just get his arse in the driver's seat. As for an engine, it was highly possible that there was a lawn mower pushing the thing on.
Unlike the Beast, David had not chosen to give this car a name. It was such a pathetic piece of machinery that it hadn't deserved one. Its only redeeming feature was that it was cheap to buy and cheap to maintain.
He was about to kill his back getting in when the Dungeon Core cursed himself, he had forgotten the bloody helmet. With the grace of a swearing, three-legged mule, Mascoff got out of the car and limped back over to the building.
“Christ,” the man with a dent in his head called out as he examined the suit's helmet. He looked over to see the hat's creator come in, “Is this iron?”
“Yep,” David said. He groaned as a sharp stab of pain shot through his back. “Oh crap.” Instead of retrieving his property, he moved over to the shed's couch. A tired looking relic from the seventies that was coated in plastic sheet.
“You alright young fella?” one of the veterans asked.
“Stood up too long, need a rest.”
For a second David thought that he wouldn't make it to the dusty thing. He practically fell onto the ancient cushions, hitting them so hard that it might have been called a rugby tackle. Wounded, he lay there like a dead fish on a beach, breathing in both rat shit and saw dust. He felt exhausted and drained.
The pain which assaulted the Dungeon Core made him picture a long and barbed dagger, the blade pumping in and out of his back. Brutally getting shoved into his spine and then slowly being drawn free.
Seeing the overweight man that was taking up a substantial space on their couch, the man with the dent asked, “Back, huh?”
“Mmmm. Car accident.”
“You seemed pretty lively when you were dancing around the cutting torch.”
David didn't know how to reply to that. The itch or whatever it was had seemed to push out the pain. The need to research both the armour and the sword had been so overwhelming that he had forgotten that he was wounded. It had been... nice.
