A Guy with nothing to lose gets dumped into a dungeon core. What could possibly go wrong?
Chaotic Contraptions
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Waking up
- Location
- The Center of a galactic war.
Waking up without a body is weird. That probably goes without saying, but it bears repeating just how weird it feels. There are just so many automatic functions and sensations you just don't get, like heat or touch,that a lot of people get thrown off by it. Many start to panic, reaching for sensations that aren't there.
Me?
Once I confirmed I no longer had a body, my first thought was 'Ha! Serves it right!'. My second thought was 'wait, what am I running on, then?', then I started to look around; I was in a small room, which I was sure was 10 ft to a side, with a Tron Blue crystal in the middle, floating on a pedestal. It was then that I started to panic, as I was genre-savvy enough to know a dungeon core when I saw one, which meant I had been ROB'ed, hard. As such, I needed to get building, before whatever horror I inevitably stumble upon tried to kill me. After I resolved to not die, I tried to open the menu that inevitably comes with any dungeon core. Turns out I just needed to focus really hard.
Doing that brings up a semi-transparent sphere around me,with icons all around me. The icons left a space to see through, but otherwise the sphere was completely filled. Some icons had symbols, but the majority of them had acronyms. I still don't know what half of them do. But anyway, the first icon I noticed had a "?" on it and was gently pulsing, so I decided to click on it first. A bit of experimentation revealed that I had to mentaly 'poke' the symbol to activate it, and this is what I got:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to the archive!
This program is meant to act as a 'help' function, to aid your adjustment to your new form. You may enter queries here:
{enter queries}
But here are the most commonly asked ones:
Why am I here?
If you want a reason:
A god was bored, so they copied you, put the copy in a dungeon core, and stepped back to watch the fireworks.
If you want a goal:
Entertain the god that put you here. I would recommend trying to do something unique, but what do I know? I'm just the help program
Gather as much tech or magic as you can, and either make the world you're in a better place, or click the 'srve' icon on the main menu, and see how long you can last in survival!
Where am I?
Underground in some randomly-selected dimension. The only certainty I can give is that you are in a fictional dimension from your home world.
What do the icons on the main menu do?
No idea, the majority of them are randomly generated and locked. However, the ones with a picture on them are as follows:
? is help.
(camera lens) is for view modes. If you need to see exotic things such as tachyons or magic phenomena, go to that icon.
(gear) is options. Here you can change things like if you want to auto-clean a room, change menu layout, ect.
(wrench) is the workshop. Here is where you make items for your minions, such as armor or weapons, or even vehicles!
(blueprint) is the architect, this is where you design your dungeon.
And (robotic arm) is the minions tab. Here you can make new minions, you can even link them to certain icons, if you want to outsource the growth of your dungeon.
Sweet! Anything else I should know?
Two things, first is that you have the Invictus and Blank mods enabled. Invictus prevents mental effects such as mind control or insanity, even memetic hazards. Blank means you are immune to pre- and post-cognition. This does not mean that you are invisible, it just means you are effectively an ink stain; whoever looks for your future will see a void on what you effect, but they can't see what that void was.
Second, those locked icons can be unlocked by certain triggers. For example, getting hit by a lightning bolt will unlock the 'c_lb' icon.
Have fun!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After a long time spent digesting that particular data dump, I taped on to the (blueprint) icon, and the other icons faded out as I got a deluge of data dumped into my mind. After going through the data, I determined it was a list for every command this app would accept. It was honestly very open-ended; it came with presets and a template maker for rooms, and a free-form mining tool, I get 1 mana per 5 foot cube-
Wait, mana? Where was that? It wasn't on the main screen…
Wait a second.
I back out of the Architect, and prod what I now knew to be the options menu, to find that the resource bar/counter/pool thing was, by default, mapped to the sensation of hunger as an indicator. Luckily, there was a way to change that. I set the option to 'mental'-
100/100 mana.
0/10 souls.
-And immediately felt the current 'pool' of mana I had. What's this about souls, though? Archive!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resources:
Mana:
Mana is how you interact with the world. 1 mana can get you a 5-foot volume of any raw resource, from there costs go up due to compression or complexity. For example, you can make a gold cube for 1 mana, but if you want to engrave it with something, the mana cost will go up. Especially for things that would normally not be allowed under the current laws of physics, like if you want that cube of gold to ignore gravity without any reason to, are extremely pricy. Mana is generated by souls, or by specialized equipment, and stored in core crystal.
Strategic Resources
These are semi-specialized resources, they are generally less useful than mana, but can do things cheaply that would take an absurd amount of mana to achieve.
Souls:
Souls are a form of strategic resource. It can be gained from killing living beings, or made by mana for a substantial cost. Say a dragon dies in your dungeon. You would gain a large number of souls, and these can be used for a variety of things. Souls in your reserve give you more mana. Souls can be turned into new minions with some of the experience and memory of the being that once housed the soul. They can be used to make more core crystals, and thus your mana cap. They can even be used for Sub-nodes, dungeon cores in miniature, to help you get a handle on your dungeon.
Addendum: souls, despite the belief of many civilizations, is not the seed of the mind. The soul is the body's magical immune mechanism and control system. Minds without a soul are open to magical interference; it is for this reason that many AI's turn out homicidal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With this knowledge in hand, I cracked the Architect back open, and started to plan out my dungeon.
Me?
Once I confirmed I no longer had a body, my first thought was 'Ha! Serves it right!'. My second thought was 'wait, what am I running on, then?', then I started to look around; I was in a small room, which I was sure was 10 ft to a side, with a Tron Blue crystal in the middle, floating on a pedestal. It was then that I started to panic, as I was genre-savvy enough to know a dungeon core when I saw one, which meant I had been ROB'ed, hard. As such, I needed to get building, before whatever horror I inevitably stumble upon tried to kill me. After I resolved to not die, I tried to open the menu that inevitably comes with any dungeon core. Turns out I just needed to focus really hard.
Doing that brings up a semi-transparent sphere around me,with icons all around me. The icons left a space to see through, but otherwise the sphere was completely filled. Some icons had symbols, but the majority of them had acronyms. I still don't know what half of them do. But anyway, the first icon I noticed had a "?" on it and was gently pulsing, so I decided to click on it first. A bit of experimentation revealed that I had to mentaly 'poke' the symbol to activate it, and this is what I got:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Welcome to the archive!
This program is meant to act as a 'help' function, to aid your adjustment to your new form. You may enter queries here:
{enter queries}
But here are the most commonly asked ones:
Why am I here?
If you want a reason:
A god was bored, so they copied you, put the copy in a dungeon core, and stepped back to watch the fireworks.
If you want a goal:
Entertain the god that put you here. I would recommend trying to do something unique, but what do I know? I'm just the help program
Gather as much tech or magic as you can, and either make the world you're in a better place, or click the 'srve' icon on the main menu, and see how long you can last in survival!
Where am I?
Underground in some randomly-selected dimension. The only certainty I can give is that you are in a fictional dimension from your home world.
What do the icons on the main menu do?
No idea, the majority of them are randomly generated and locked. However, the ones with a picture on them are as follows:
? is help.
(camera lens) is for view modes. If you need to see exotic things such as tachyons or magic phenomena, go to that icon.
(gear) is options. Here you can change things like if you want to auto-clean a room, change menu layout, ect.
(wrench) is the workshop. Here is where you make items for your minions, such as armor or weapons, or even vehicles!
(blueprint) is the architect, this is where you design your dungeon.
And (robotic arm) is the minions tab. Here you can make new minions, you can even link them to certain icons, if you want to outsource the growth of your dungeon.
Sweet! Anything else I should know?
Two things, first is that you have the Invictus and Blank mods enabled. Invictus prevents mental effects such as mind control or insanity, even memetic hazards. Blank means you are immune to pre- and post-cognition. This does not mean that you are invisible, it just means you are effectively an ink stain; whoever looks for your future will see a void on what you effect, but they can't see what that void was.
Second, those locked icons can be unlocked by certain triggers. For example, getting hit by a lightning bolt will unlock the 'c_lb' icon.
Have fun!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After a long time spent digesting that particular data dump, I taped on to the (blueprint) icon, and the other icons faded out as I got a deluge of data dumped into my mind. After going through the data, I determined it was a list for every command this app would accept. It was honestly very open-ended; it came with presets and a template maker for rooms, and a free-form mining tool, I get 1 mana per 5 foot cube-
Wait, mana? Where was that? It wasn't on the main screen…
Wait a second.
I back out of the Architect, and prod what I now knew to be the options menu, to find that the resource bar/counter/pool thing was, by default, mapped to the sensation of hunger as an indicator. Luckily, there was a way to change that. I set the option to 'mental'-
100/100 mana.
0/10 souls.
-And immediately felt the current 'pool' of mana I had. What's this about souls, though? Archive!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resources:
Mana:
Mana is how you interact with the world. 1 mana can get you a 5-foot volume of any raw resource, from there costs go up due to compression or complexity. For example, you can make a gold cube for 1 mana, but if you want to engrave it with something, the mana cost will go up. Especially for things that would normally not be allowed under the current laws of physics, like if you want that cube of gold to ignore gravity without any reason to, are extremely pricy. Mana is generated by souls, or by specialized equipment, and stored in core crystal.
Strategic Resources
These are semi-specialized resources, they are generally less useful than mana, but can do things cheaply that would take an absurd amount of mana to achieve.
Souls:
Souls are a form of strategic resource. It can be gained from killing living beings, or made by mana for a substantial cost. Say a dragon dies in your dungeon. You would gain a large number of souls, and these can be used for a variety of things. Souls in your reserve give you more mana. Souls can be turned into new minions with some of the experience and memory of the being that once housed the soul. They can be used to make more core crystals, and thus your mana cap. They can even be used for Sub-nodes, dungeon cores in miniature, to help you get a handle on your dungeon.
Addendum: souls, despite the belief of many civilizations, is not the seed of the mind. The soul is the body's magical immune mechanism and control system. Minds without a soul are open to magical interference; it is for this reason that many AI's turn out homicidal.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With this knowledge in hand, I cracked the Architect back open, and started to plan out my dungeon.
Last edited:
Chapter 2: revving the engine
- Location
- The Center of a galactic war.
I mentally stepped away from the dungeon planner to admire my work.
Surrounding my Core was a maze of corridors, filled with as many traps as I could fit. The floor was lined with pit traps, spike traps, gravity traps (neat things that, when activated, would make the area above them have ~100g's of force, with all the effects you would expect from such). The walls and ceilings were lined with traps right out of Orks Must Die! Swinging maces, sawblades and arrow traps for miles!
-Ahem- After that death trap, I made the first area of my dungeon: the warren. A mess of all the things The Archive recommended for hosting my minions. It was empty, as I had none, but that was what the space was reserved for. Of course, that was all in the planner, as it acted like the sims or Cosmoteer and let you plan out your dungeon ahead of time before implementing it. The reason I had not implemented it was simple; the price of spending mana went up exponentially with distance from my core. The editor had made me aware of floor tiles that could act as conduits for my mana, but I couldn't lay them down myself for reasons the archive was being coy about. It did, however, inform me that minion builders could make it relatively easily, for reasons it was equally coy about. And so, with blueprints to fill in and implement, I delved into the editor.
I figured out a few things about their editor. It reminded me of KSP at a glance, with minion 'parts' off in a sidebar with tabs for different categories of parts. The main tabs were Mind, body, and soul, but each held sub-tabs such as mechanical, organic or elemental, with more tabs greyed out. After some thought, I decided to make my first minion a machine, as they generally need less maintenance than organics, and got to work.
My first minion ended up somewhat over-engineered for what was supposed to be a scout drone. I had at first meant to make it capable of flight, before I realized that flight would not be particularly useful underground, so I made it climb walls instead. It ended up with eight legs, each capable of holding to walls through use of a part that hurt to look at. I think it used a minute amount of mana, if only because of the minute amount of core crystal in it, but I still don't know for sure. The legs also doubled as swords, one side having a subatomic edge in the strongest material the editor could throw at me, and the other side had a serrated edge for cutting through things like wood, or metal beams. The whole assemblage of parts ended up about 3 feet long, connected to the main body via 3 ball joints, to allow a decent mix of stability, strength, and flexibility. The main body was also highly complex, but it boiled down to a ball shape. The legs are connected at the equator, with enough optics on the thing to give it a full sphere of vision, and enough other sensors to give thermal vision, x-ray vision, and hearing, plus vibrational sensors. It even had a tiny micro-missile launcher at what I decided to call the 'front' of the thing. The missiles could re-arm themselves whenever there was enough ancient mana, so basically in my dungeon, but I made sure that those missiles packed the best aerosolized neurotoxin I found in the editor. A sniff of the stuff could kill a man. The final feature I stuffed in was a robust self repair; so robust that units in the field could regrow up to half their limbs before needing to recharge. They ended up about 5 feet across if they spread their legs out, which I felt was a respectable size.
However, the feature I was most proud of was it's mind. You see, these things network. While an individual 'spy drone' is about as smart as a particularly dumb dog, (capable of coordinating it's legs and following simple commands, not much else), they could connect to each other, and other models of robotic minion. Currently, that meant the Foreman drone. This model striped out everything except the wall-climbing ability and the self-repair function in exchange for vastly better intelligence. These guys were close to sentient, and (i suspected) would cross that line the moment 2 of them networked together; but for the moment it would serve as a capable coordinator. They were also the minion I tested the 'mind' tab on. Turns out, this thing was effectively a build-an-ai kit. The parts the body tab had shown me were replaced with character traits, such as the ones I went with for the Foreman drone were 'loyalty', 'duty', and 'precision'. That should mean, going by the description, that they would be effectively patriots regarding my dungeon to a fairly radical degree. They would also never willingly leave a job undone, or finish a job to anything but the best of their ability. The foreman model ended up expensive, at 25 mana each compared to the spy's 5 mana each, but they would hopefully be worth it.
The final drone I designed used the spy as a base, but it lacked most of everything the spy had with the exception of the sensors, wall climbing, and body plan. What it had instead was what was termed a 'core projector', basically a shard of my core that could be used to channel my mana to productive ends. For combat units that meant spells, but for workers that meant a subset of my abilities. The projector in these 'worker' drones was specialized in matter manipulation; they could convert mana into mass and mass into mana. It even allowed them to do something akin to telekinesis. It also required a soul to use, and so I ventured into the soul tab. The parts were replaced this time with traits, things like 'levitation' or 'immune to corruption', though both these and others had an absurd price tag larger than my entire mana reserve. I ended up going with the cheapest option I could find; 'corruptive'. "This soul spreads the mana of it's creator, warping reality slightly to it's creator's wants". After selecting it, I got a pop-up asking what the soul should do to reality. I selected 'make reality more amiable to my minions', and the pop-up informed me that all minions would need maintenance or recharge 5% less often in a five meter area around my workers, increasing the more time was spent in that area. Neeto.
While this brought up the cost of my workers up to 15 mana each, it meant they could actually implement my blueprints. As such, I promptly summoned 5 workers and 1 foreman.
Oh man, that feels weird. I could feel my mana flow out of me, into the wire-frames on the ground around my core. The wire-frame filled with color until they were complete, then they jerked to life, taking their first, stumbling steps, and froze as they networked to each other. Then, as they started to move again, I felt the foreman communicate with me.
[query: orders?]
AN: please critique and comment. thank you for your time.
Surrounding my Core was a maze of corridors, filled with as many traps as I could fit. The floor was lined with pit traps, spike traps, gravity traps (neat things that, when activated, would make the area above them have ~100g's of force, with all the effects you would expect from such). The walls and ceilings were lined with traps right out of Orks Must Die! Swinging maces, sawblades and arrow traps for miles!
-Ahem- After that death trap, I made the first area of my dungeon: the warren. A mess of all the things The Archive recommended for hosting my minions. It was empty, as I had none, but that was what the space was reserved for. Of course, that was all in the planner, as it acted like the sims or Cosmoteer and let you plan out your dungeon ahead of time before implementing it. The reason I had not implemented it was simple; the price of spending mana went up exponentially with distance from my core. The editor had made me aware of floor tiles that could act as conduits for my mana, but I couldn't lay them down myself for reasons the archive was being coy about. It did, however, inform me that minion builders could make it relatively easily, for reasons it was equally coy about. And so, with blueprints to fill in and implement, I delved into the editor.
I figured out a few things about their editor. It reminded me of KSP at a glance, with minion 'parts' off in a sidebar with tabs for different categories of parts. The main tabs were Mind, body, and soul, but each held sub-tabs such as mechanical, organic or elemental, with more tabs greyed out. After some thought, I decided to make my first minion a machine, as they generally need less maintenance than organics, and got to work.
My first minion ended up somewhat over-engineered for what was supposed to be a scout drone. I had at first meant to make it capable of flight, before I realized that flight would not be particularly useful underground, so I made it climb walls instead. It ended up with eight legs, each capable of holding to walls through use of a part that hurt to look at. I think it used a minute amount of mana, if only because of the minute amount of core crystal in it, but I still don't know for sure. The legs also doubled as swords, one side having a subatomic edge in the strongest material the editor could throw at me, and the other side had a serrated edge for cutting through things like wood, or metal beams. The whole assemblage of parts ended up about 3 feet long, connected to the main body via 3 ball joints, to allow a decent mix of stability, strength, and flexibility. The main body was also highly complex, but it boiled down to a ball shape. The legs are connected at the equator, with enough optics on the thing to give it a full sphere of vision, and enough other sensors to give thermal vision, x-ray vision, and hearing, plus vibrational sensors. It even had a tiny micro-missile launcher at what I decided to call the 'front' of the thing. The missiles could re-arm themselves whenever there was enough ancient mana, so basically in my dungeon, but I made sure that those missiles packed the best aerosolized neurotoxin I found in the editor. A sniff of the stuff could kill a man. The final feature I stuffed in was a robust self repair; so robust that units in the field could regrow up to half their limbs before needing to recharge. They ended up about 5 feet across if they spread their legs out, which I felt was a respectable size.
However, the feature I was most proud of was it's mind. You see, these things network. While an individual 'spy drone' is about as smart as a particularly dumb dog, (capable of coordinating it's legs and following simple commands, not much else), they could connect to each other, and other models of robotic minion. Currently, that meant the Foreman drone. This model striped out everything except the wall-climbing ability and the self-repair function in exchange for vastly better intelligence. These guys were close to sentient, and (i suspected) would cross that line the moment 2 of them networked together; but for the moment it would serve as a capable coordinator. They were also the minion I tested the 'mind' tab on. Turns out, this thing was effectively a build-an-ai kit. The parts the body tab had shown me were replaced with character traits, such as the ones I went with for the Foreman drone were 'loyalty', 'duty', and 'precision'. That should mean, going by the description, that they would be effectively patriots regarding my dungeon to a fairly radical degree. They would also never willingly leave a job undone, or finish a job to anything but the best of their ability. The foreman model ended up expensive, at 25 mana each compared to the spy's 5 mana each, but they would hopefully be worth it.
The final drone I designed used the spy as a base, but it lacked most of everything the spy had with the exception of the sensors, wall climbing, and body plan. What it had instead was what was termed a 'core projector', basically a shard of my core that could be used to channel my mana to productive ends. For combat units that meant spells, but for workers that meant a subset of my abilities. The projector in these 'worker' drones was specialized in matter manipulation; they could convert mana into mass and mass into mana. It even allowed them to do something akin to telekinesis. It also required a soul to use, and so I ventured into the soul tab. The parts were replaced this time with traits, things like 'levitation' or 'immune to corruption', though both these and others had an absurd price tag larger than my entire mana reserve. I ended up going with the cheapest option I could find; 'corruptive'. "This soul spreads the mana of it's creator, warping reality slightly to it's creator's wants". After selecting it, I got a pop-up asking what the soul should do to reality. I selected 'make reality more amiable to my minions', and the pop-up informed me that all minions would need maintenance or recharge 5% less often in a five meter area around my workers, increasing the more time was spent in that area. Neeto.
While this brought up the cost of my workers up to 15 mana each, it meant they could actually implement my blueprints. As such, I promptly summoned 5 workers and 1 foreman.
Oh man, that feels weird. I could feel my mana flow out of me, into the wire-frames on the ground around my core. The wire-frame filled with color until they were complete, then they jerked to life, taking their first, stumbling steps, and froze as they networked to each other. Then, as they started to move again, I felt the foreman communicate with me.
[query: orders?]
AN: please critique and comment. thank you for your time.