And then there is a girl in it.

She squeaks in surprise and alarm, loses her balance with the sudden change of footing, and tumbles to the floor.

The floor is rough stone. Water drips in the distance.

A creature left in the dungeon when it was abandoned hears the squeak and comes to see what's going on. With a sound of wide, heavy hooves on the stone floor, a creature rounds the corner. Two glowing eyes illuminate an angry-looking roughly-humanoid face which given its face and height above the ground would appear to belong to some sort of giant. The eyelight reveals a square room with a single exit and a circular dais in the centre.

Oh that is a deeply unpromising noise. She curls up as still and quiet as possible when she hears it, even though at this point stealth is likely to be a lost cause.

...the source of the noise somehow manages to be even more ominous than anticipated, but she still doesn't have anywhere to hide.

Human youth. Clothes look vaguely Overworlder, but that doesn't say much.

The creature speaks in a menacing growl.

"What brings you to this place?"

Eeeeeep???

Okay, it spoke, presumably this means it can be spoken to, so she'd better pull together the world's fastest language acquisition before she finds out what happens if it gets impatient.

She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment and murmurs something indistinct into her cupped hands, and then she says in the same language, "I have absolutely no idea."

"Ha. Well if you don't know how you got here, I expect you don't know how you can get out. But I do."

Everything about this situation is incredibly concerning.

But...

Having information is better than not having it. "Um - how?"

The monster smiles for a moment. A clawed hand and arm come into view as he gestures at the dais.

"Behind you is an inactive dungeon heart. Claim it, and you will be able to open a passage out of this place. Refuse and you will die!"

Concern levels reaching critical thresholds!

"I don't know what that is - claim it how -"

"Simply put a little of your blood onto it and desire its power. I can handle the rest."

"That doesn't really tell me what it is or what it does or whether claiming it is a good idea," she can't help observing, although probably she should just be shutting up and doing what the enormous terrifying monster threatened to kill her if she didn't do.

"A Dungeon Heart is an artifact of immense magical power. Claiming it will give you access all the powers of a Dungeon Keeper- an immense wellspring of mana, access to termendous wealth, the ability to bind monsters to your service, and of course the means to expand and reshape dungeons."

She runs a nervous hand through her hair, pushing it behind her ear.

The monster... doesn't seem to be lying, as far as she can tell? Truthweaving is a slippery discipline but she's at least confident he hasn't voiced any outright falsehoods.

Slowly, reluctant to turn her back on the obvious danger he represents, she turns to examine the thing he called a heart.

The "Heart" is a stone cylinder, around three meters tall and six across, with an indentation halfway up.

She touches the side, traces her hands along it enough to get a sense of the diameter, then reaches up as far as she can towards the top. She can see its approximate shape by eyelight, but she wants details.

(In theory she could make light, and then she would be able to see much better, but there is a large terrifying monster over there who just threatened to kill her and his presence is somewhat inhibiting.)

There are indentations on the top that feel like they might be runes.

"Yes, that's the Dungeon Heart. What are you waiting for?"

"I'm—trying to figure out how—"

Yeah she's not going to manage this with that monster looming at her. Give her half an hour of calm and quiet and she could at least pull together a basic understanding of what this thing's all about, but like this? No.

If she doesn't do the thing she gets murdered by the large ominous-sounding hoofed creature. If she does the thing, she gets... well, at least some useful things, with which she might in theory escape the trap that doing the thing definitely absolutely is.

Blood, blood, what sharp things does she have with her... she reaches behind her neck to grab the clasp of her necklace, scratches the side of her hand with the corner of the clasp, puts the hand on the stone, and—well mostly what she really wants is not to be immediately murdered but some power would be nice too.

There is a sound of stone cracking. The hoofed creature takes a step away from the Dungeon Heart.

And then, with a deafening noise and a numinous feeling that something immensely important has changed, the stone explodes, sending fragments of stone flying. in its place is a pit, emanating glowing green motes, with three arches over it far too tall to have been hidden under the stone. in the pit, an enormous piece of skinless flesh beats like a heart, the heartbeat-sound audible.

Torches appear on the walls, illuminating walls decorated with murals depicting monstrous humanoid figures.

The monster is a red, mostly-humanoid figure carrying an enormous scythe.

When the stone explodes, she squeaks and ducks, huddling on the ground with her arms over her head.

Then, slowly, she uncurls and peeks at the........ the that. Whatever that is. A literal giant heart, apparently.

"...you did not mention it was going to explode," she observes.

"Do you want to get out of this pit or not!? The Dungeon Heart just made you some imps, tell them to get digging! The shortest way out is that way!"

He indicates one of the walls.

"...Imps? And is there something about that suggestion that makes it a better idea than most instances of digging around inexpertly while trapped underground?"

"Show yourselves, imps, or I'll sniff you out and rip your limbs off!"

Some terrified-looking, roughly humanoid creatures emerge from behind rocks. They're small, green, dressed in loincloths, and carrying picks.

"Your magic and the imps' magic won't let your tunnels collapse unless something pretty powerful hits them."

"..."

Okay then.

She points at the indicated wall. "Dig."

The imps- of whom there are four- begin enthusiastically digging into the indicated wall. As they dig away at the earth, it turns to dust and flows in a stream through the air into the Dungeon Heart. Perhaps as a result, the digging proceeds surprisingly quickly.

"If you can manage to possess one of the imps, it will be able to channel more of your magic to dig faster."

"I don't know how to do that and the last time I followed your instructions on how to handle strange magic without checking them first it exploded."

Grr

"I hear it's an application of Keeper transport"

As the tunnel gets longer, Rainwarden will sense that, if she had more gold, she could create structures in it.

...that's... a weird and sort of alarming thing to sense???

"What's... Keeper transport...?"

"Keepers can travel from one place to another within their domains almost instantly"

"...in some way that also lets us possess things? That's unsettling."

"No-one can possess you unless you pledge them your service."

She really, really needs to figure this out.

It's going to be kind of hard to sit still and concentrate on her magic with the tall red guy standing there, looming menacingly and looking impatient.

But there seems to be a whole lot of crazy shit going on and the sooner she understands any of it, the better.

"... I need to sit and think about this for a minute," she says, and she parks herself on the floor with her back to the heart and closes her eyes and reaches for the Tower.

The big question is, what changed? What is she now that she wasn't before? What does she have that she didn't before? Apparently she can move from place to place very quickly and possess things; what other drastic changes have gone unnoticed?

Magic settles in around her, invisible from the outside. She always sees the Tower in its knowledge aspect as a twisting spiral of light. In her mind, she reaches into the streams of knowledge and runs her fingers through them, looking for relevant facts. They flow past by the thousand, each individual glowing mote a piece of knowledge about something or other, brighter the more people know them. She has to wait a couple of seconds before something sticks and she pulls it out to examine it.

Dungeon keepers can have their imps claim ground for them like this. Within a Dungeon Keeper's claimed ground, they can look at stuff remotely like this, travel like this, manipulate objects and cast spells remotely like this, and spend gold to create rooms like this.

Ooookay. That's... that's something. (The mote dissipates, absorbed into her memory.)

She reaches out again, looking for more things about what it is to be a Dungeon Keeper.

If someone accepts an employment contract from a dungeon keeper, they are magically bound to the keeper until the contract ends; the keeper can remotely see through and communicate with them, can move them within the keeper's territory the same as they can inanimate possessions and prisoners, and can possess them.

A keeper can claim insects within their territory. The insects then become like imps; bound to them in the same manner as their minions and also compelled to obey their every command.

These powers just keep getting more concerning, don't they.

What else?

A keeper can convert any material into gold, and gold into mana.

A keeper's dungeon hearts are metaphysically as much them as their original body is. A keeper's body can travel instantly from one heart to another.

If a keeper's body or one of their dungeon hearts is destroyed, their awareness will pass to their soul in the realm of the dark gods, which is like this, and they must create a new body by passing back through one of their remaining dungeon hearts, like this. If they don't have a dark god protecting them when this happens, they risk being intercepted and tortured eternally by a hostile dark god.

She flinches, losing hold of the magic. The spiral of light falls away. She stares blankly at the industrious imps.

Things are clearly very, very different here than she is used to.

The Horned Reaper has taken to repeatedly hitting the wall with the back of his scythe.

She flinches again every time she hears the sound.

This is... bad. This is a bad situation and it is bad that she is in it.

But, since she can't change what's already happened...

She attempts to possess an imp.

This is not straightforward and will take a lot of trial and error.

It would go so much faster if she could read the Tower again, but you need a clear head to do that and right now her head is not at all clear.

Her information about Keeper transport is solid enough that it only takes her a few tries to assume the right form, but after that she spends a fair bit of time bouncing off of minions. At least when she's like this she isn't in danger from that scythe. Unless the creature decides to kill her giant heart with it, in which case apparently she gets tortured forever. This is not a soothing prospect to contemplate.

But eventually she will be able to possess an imp.

Everything is bigger now. She can feel the imp's fear of whatever just happened to it, and of the horned reaper behind it, and its boredom. She can access its instincts for how to use a pick.

The wall indeed starts to vanish noticeably faster.

This is very weird and unsettling and bad but if it gets the tall red fellow to leave her alone faster she'll take it. Diggy diggy hole.

Eventually a hole forms, opening out from the side of a hill.

Once it's wide enough for the Horned Reaper, he runs off, slicing all four imps in half with his scythe on the way out.

After a moment of pain and faintness, Rainwarden is returned to her physical form. The Reaper vanishes into the distance.

She stumbles, shaking, back to the room containing her dungeon heart.

If she were a real Rainwarden she'd—

No, let's not even start with that. He literally just murdered her without warning ten seconds ago, and she was powerless to stop him. She does not have the capacity to chase after him and prevent him from wreaking havoc. She is upset about the havoc but not upset enough to risk being condemned to eternal torture over it.

(Should have let him just kill her. She'd be getting eternally tortured but he'd still be stuck underground unable to hurt anyone else. Should never have listened to him in the first place, and then she'd just be dead and he'd be stuck underground et cetera.)

But then, what about the next person who came along? She doesn't know what brought her here. She might be in a better position to deal with this situation than whoever the mysterious phenomenon would have delivered next.

Well, if that's so, best prove it.

She stands up straight, closes her eyes, and calls the Tower.

This time, visible things happen.

Over the course of a few seconds, her plain ordinary clothes transmute into something more elaborate, hairstyle included. A similar change sweeps the room, altering the decor into something with a lot of blue and black and teardrop-shaped gems. She's still standing there, glowing faintly; she's always been slow to complete the change if she can manage it at all, and it leaves her unpleasantly vulnerable while she wrestles with her Heartland. But there's no one here to threaten her anymore and she's going to need a lot more magic at her disposal if she plans to do anything about Tall, Red and Angry.

The transformation wavers; she nearly loses it. Ugh, does she have to...? Fine, for this she'll say all the stupid-sounding words it takes.

"High Tower," she whispers in her own language, "lend me your strength. Lonely Tower, give me your comfort. Wise Tower, teach me your knowledge. I am your Rainwarden."

The transformation slips again, farther; her hair comes unbound from its neat tail and blows in her face as the magic spins out of her control. Draperies flutter and unravel in the rising whirlwind. She grits her teeth and repeats herself, louder. "High Tower, lend me your strength! Lonely Tower, give me your comfort! Wise Tower, teach me your knowledge! I am your Rainwarden!"

It wavers again, steadies, starts to fall apart...

"Dammit, you idiot pile of metaphorical rocks, I need this!"

And with that heartfelt outburst, the magic snaps into place. The wind drops; her hair sweeps back over her shoulders and ties itself up again.

She opens her eyes.

In this state, her vision will go where she tells it to. She sends it out to follow the red creature.

The Reaper is running along a road, slicing through the trees along the side of it, occasionally veering off the path to bisect a bird or squirrel.

Okay.

There is... a lot that a Rainwarden can do to someone, with a little space and some time to prepare.

Part of her wants to warn before escalating but the rest thinks the first part should shut up and look at the data. If he wanted her to play nice he should have been more honest and less violent when he had the chance.

She breathes deeply, assigns a small fraction of her vision to warn her of any movement at the tunnel entrance, keeps the rest focused on him, and plunges her hands into the truthstream. What sort of creature is he, exactly? The knowledge comes faster and in greater quantities than she's used to, and she almost stumbles in the rush, but she keeps her balance and sorts through it.

He is a Horned Reaper. Horned Reapers are created by the Dark Gods to embody their wrath and to kill people in general and their enemies in particular. They are one of the most powerful types of monster; killing even a weak Reaper takes either a large number of well-trained, heavily armed soldiers, a comparably powerful monster, or an expert war magician. Killing an especially powerful Reaper is nigh-impossible now that the Avatar is gone, although with sufficient resources and preparation it can be possible to trap one in an effectively inescapable prison. They have extraordinary durability, strenght, combat skill (particularly with the scythe), and can develop immense speed and weak magical ability with training. They also have powerful innate fire magic, making them extremely hot to the touch, totally immune to injury by heat, and capable of throwing powerful fireballs given proper training.

Despite their power, many Keepers are reluctant to employ them because they are unruly; they are easily bored and easily angered, and likely to deal with either by going on a killing spree, slaughtering the Keeper's other minions as well as anyone else who happens to be nearby. A Reaper bound to a Keeper (or just sufficiently incapacitated) can technically be sacrificed to the Dark Gods at one of their temples, but most Dark Gods don't appreciate such sacrifices and some actively dislike them, preferring to keep the Reapers in the world.

... Well. All right then.

She considers the resources at her disposal, and the threat she faces.

Then she reaches out her magic to the horned reaper,

and she makes him Alone.

Other people can see him, but he can't see them, or hear them, or feel them touching him, or directly detect their presence by any other means, or understand anything they try to communicate to him, or successfully target them with magic or weapons or thrown objects. He can be injured but he won't notice the injury until the person who inflicted it is no longer near him. He lives in a world of absolute and uncompromising loneliness.

And now she has committed a fairly serious war crime, but at least she can be confident that no one is going to suffer for her mistake in letting him go free.

Of course, her dungeon heart might not qualify as a person in the relevant sense, in which case she just became the only person in the world he knows how to hurt. But that's a separate problem.

A few minutes later, the Reaper comes to a village. Frustratingly, it seems the population somehow knew to evacuate, so he sets about destroying their homes.

Most of the villagers flee. A rider is sent to warn the next village.

A knight in armor and a big man with an axe attack the Reaper, hoping to buy time for everyone else to escape. This goes surprisingly well, in that he does not immediately kill them. They proceed to slowly hack away at his legs.

...she wonders if they might be able to stop him.

She wonders if she can afford to assume that, even if it's possible.

She thinks... no. She still needs to treat him like an active threat until she has personally verified that he isn't.

So... what else can she do to him?

Aloneness is the most central and obvious example of a Tower curse, but it's not the only one. She knows the more benign variants, too: little exclusions that protect someone from their fear of mice or spiders by ensuring that they never see one again, illegal in some jurisdictions but not banned by international treaty. She doesn't think something like that would be likely to help very much more than Aloneness already has.

...what if she went the other direction?

What if she took everything out of his world, himself included?

That's... honestly super horrifying and she probably shouldn't even be considering it. It would either kill him more thoroughly than she can imagine anything being killed, or trap him as a disembodied consciousness with no possibility of external input until something else took care of the killing him part.

On the other hand, if she doesn't do it, he might destroy her dungeon heart and condemn her to eternal torment.

...she thinks about it. And watches him in the meantime. And tries to come up with a less drastic solution.

Eventually the warriors manage to hamstring the Reaper. After some discussion, the knight climbs onto the Reaper's back and sets about cutting his throat.

This is good. Probably. She would like to minimize the number of war crimes she commits today. Even though at this point she is absolutely sure that this place has no connection whatsoever with any place she's heard of.

...but she still finds herself reaching for the magic that would let her exclude the universe from his awareness, and holding it ready in case he gets free somehow and comes charging back.

After about a minute, the knight manages to cut an artery open, and the Reaper stops moving. The knight hurriedly removes the pieces of her armor that were touching the demon.

Okay. The emergency appears to be over. Or at least this emergency appears to be over. Other emergencies may be en route.

She really wishes she knew enough to know what questions to ask. Having all possible information at your fingertips may sound exciting, but it doesn't actually do you any good unless you have some idea of what it is that you need to know.

Well, more information about what sort of thing she's turned into seems like a reasonable place to start. She reaches out into the shimmering current and looks. And keeps an eye on the body of the Reaper, in case of further developments.

Claimed ground provides mana to it's owner's dungeon heart; the more territory a keeper claims, the more mana they will have available.

Keepers can be recognized by their glowing red eyes, which persist no matter what form they wear.

Keepers lead armies of monsters from the Underworld, often assisted by Overworlder mercenaries and mind-control victims, seeking to kill or enslave the people of the Overworld, and often also to war against one another and against the free Underworld states. They are immortal unless killed, and generally can only be killed by destroying all of their dungeon hearts. Some devise diabolical schemes which take centuries to mature.

Disobedient servants of a Keeper can expect to be tortured.

Dungeon Hearts serve as gates to the realm of the Dark Gods, through which Corruption flows, poisoning the land, causing disease, blight, extreme weather, and so on. Also making aesthetics spookier and more risque.

A minion's bond to their Keeper can be broken by sufficiently extreme anger on the minion's part.

Like anyone else, a Keeper can become a minion of another Keeper; generally such "Subordinate Keepers" serve as the lieutenants of their masters' armies.

If a keeper angers a Dark God and does not have a more powerful Dark God protecting them, they can expect to have their Dungeon Heart cursed, removing their and their minions' protection from the worse effects of its corruption and subjecting them to horrific diseases and so forth.

...well. Corruption is going on the 'problems to solve' list, then.

..does she have glowing red eyes? She doesn't feel like she has glowing red eyes.

She summons a small fraction of her vision briefly to check.

Her eyes are glowing... purple. There's red there, but it's being drowned out by blue, resulting in an actually quite pretty shade of indigo.

Okay. So that's a thing that's happening.

If she can trust her sense of aesthetics here—and you generally can, where Heartlands are involved—then the Tower has a strong interest in helping her deal with her current situation. Insofar as the Tower is interested in things. No one's ever been quite sure how conscious Heartlands actually are, and if anyone's ever managed to reach deep enough into the Tower to find out, they did not share their results with the world. But anyway—regardless of whether it has a mind, you can certainly think of it as having preferences, and if it's mitigating her red glow like that, it's signaling a preference to mitigate the rest of this nonsense too.

"Could be worse, I guess," she murmurs to herself.

Now—oh, here's a question: what's up with the imps? Did the Reaper get rid of them permanently? Have they shown up again while she wasn't paying attention? What is their deal, anyway?

A different set of four imps, who didn't exist before, have shown up. They are pretty confused about everything on account of not having existed before. They are exploring the dungeon.

Imps are created magically by dungeon hearts. A heart with fewer than four imps will produce imps until there are four, and there is also a spell (cast thus) with which a Keeper can create additional imps out of mana. Imps feed on mana, taking from their masters' mana supplies.

Imps are mischievous, pettily cruel, and totally incapable of disobeying their masters' wills. They are both talented at and magically good at earthworks. Spaces they dig out are held up by their masters' magic. They can claim ground like so, and reinforce walls like so.

...so the magic just... makes... people... to be her slaves.. whether she likes it or not. Slightly evil people. That's... that's just great.

...how people-ish are they exactly. She'd like to know how concerned she should be about making sure they don't all get murdered again.

They make complex short-term plans and a have a complex understanding of how the world works, but have no discernible awareness of the long-term future. They can appreciate works of art. They can understand complex language but can't produce it. They have good concept of mind. Some of them come to care about the wellbeing of one or two fellow imps. They have concepts of self but no concept of freedom or independence.

Okay, imps are super concerning but she doesn't presently have the ability to do anything about that, so, moving on!

Does she have a way to fill in that tunnel entrance? Because now that she thinks about it she is pretty sure that she would not like to have her dungeon be accessible from the outside. She can always dig it back out again if she needs to leave to find food. Can Dungeon Keepers make food? She goes looking for information about possible tunnel-filling and food-creating capabilities.

Tunnel-filling capacities; here is a spell which can induce a cave-in, although it will take multiple castings to make an imp-made tunnel impassible. Here is a much more difficult and time-consuming spell, until now known only to one Dungeon keeper, which directly creates a block of seemingly-undisturbed earth connected to its surroundings.

Food creation; Here's how a keeper can create a chicken coop, with chickens in it, from gold on claimed ground. Such a coop will also magically supply itself with feed. The chickens and feed created this way, like all directly-magically-created food, are not nourishing except to poultry. But the eggs they produce, and the chickens who hatch from those eggs in time, are entirely normal.

Only chickens can be used this way; chickens are special. One scientifically-minded and pork-loving keeper has been attempting to create animals who count as chickens but are in most respects like pigs, but has so far been unsuccessful.

Pig-chickens. Well, that's a possible avenue of research that can go at the bottom of her list for after all the immediate crises are solved.

She directs her imps (with only a very small amount of internal screaming) to dig out a room next to the dungeon heart for her to put a chicken coop in, and she casts the undisturbed-earth spell a few times to fill in that tunnel entrance very thoroughly, and has the imps claim the territory of the future chicken coop site. Now, about that gold... what are the usual avenues for acquiring some? She certainly isn't going to steal it. (She suspects that normally you steal it.)

The ground her imps claim becomes floored with an intricate abstract mosaic of rectangular and triangular tiles in various hues and shades of blue, some black, and lines of iridescent silver. The walls acquire similar patterns, and carvings, and tapestries. The torches are replaced with fountains of glowing water, jets sprayng from symmetrical, abstract, organic-and spiky blue stone structures set in the wall. These fountains and ones similar in design set in the floor feeding streams running through raised channels that form part of the pattern of the mosaic. The ceiling becomes arched and gabled. The arches are dark blue with irregular pentagonal cross-sections; a 90-degree angle pointing towards the center of the room, then 135 degree angles so the arches meet the wall and the ceiling at right angles. Along and coming out from the 90-degree edge are silver lines in a pattern suggesting ribcages. The ceiling itsself is sky blue with black and silver lines in a lattice pattern. Between the arches black lace hangs in an impression of spiderwebs. The entire room is symmetrical, with the sole exception of the spiderweb lace.

As well as stealing gold, dungeon keepers also:

-have their imps mine gold; this is in fact a pretty common approach

-mine or steal gems, which dungeon hearts can automatically convert into a volume of gold far larger than the gems they started with

-mine other metals, which can be converted into a much smaller quantity of gold

-steal various precious spices and timbers which can be converted into gold

-cast this spell, which converts mana to gold

-cast this more complex but more efficient version of the same spell

Well that's convenient! She can just stand around making gold by magic until she has enough to build a chicken coop with, then. And... maybe also have her imps dig out another room. Once she has a food supply sorted out she's going to want to investigate other aspects of her powers.

She digs out and claims a sort of spiral around her dungeon heart: a grid of nine squares, with the dungeon heart in the middle and the chicken coop along one edge, each square connected to the next one by a single doorway and forming into a spiral pattern overall. While overseeing this excavation, she casts the gold spell—the worse one to start with, then the better one to see if she can, and then the better one a bunch more times. That should be plenty to build a chicken coop with, right?

It is enough to build a chicken coop with. Especially once, in the course of excavating more rooms, her imps find a vein of gold.

It is normal for every Keeper's claimed territory to have a look unique to them. Facilities they create from gold, however, should all look the same. Nonetheless, her chicken coops are conspicuously squarer, bluer, and more neatly made than is normal.

Heh. Good. The Tower is helping.

It's convenient that she has this of all Heartlands. The Temple might have been okay, and the Wasteland would have had a less horrifying solution to the horned reaper, and the Castle could have helped her fortify, but none of those are as good at finding things out, and she is really relying on her ability to find things out here.

Speaking of fortification, what are her options there? Does she have any? Reinforcing the walls has got to be something Keepers put time into, right?

Imps can reinforce the walls in claimed areas without needing resources to do so. Dungeon Keepers usually also have their minions make various sorts of trap to protect their dungeons against enemies; here is how they make workshops which automatically stock themselves by transmuting gold.

Hmmmm. That seems plausibly useful, but she doesn't want to build too many rooms, and...

If she reaches out looking for a list of all the rooms she can build, she suspects she won't be able to hold them all long enough to examine them. But even five or ten examples out of an unknown multitude of possibilities would be a better basis for deciding what to build first than haphazardly thinking of problems she has and then finding out if there are any rooms that solve them. She tries it.

Dungeon Keepers can indeed build an enormous variety of rooms, with dungeon hearts being designed so that newly invented facilities can be programmed in. By default, it is programmed to create treasuries, chicken coops, bedrooms, library-come-laboratories, crystal balls used for communication, latrines, bathrooms, and rooms designed for combat training. Other popular room designs include living rooms, throne rooms, workshops like she already saw, prisons, torture chambers, temples to the Dark Gods, graveyards for making and respawning vampires, gladiatorial arenas, casinos, art galleries, larders for purchased food, theaters, playrooms for children, and a setup called a Scavenger Room containing giant eyeballs which are used to whisper into peoples' dreams, tempting them to join forces with the Dungeon Keeper or otherwise serve their ends.

Well some of those are pretty concerning but some are definitely good to know about. She thinks she will put her living space—bedroom and bathroom—in the room just past the chicken coop, and a library in the room after that. Except that when planning this out it occurs to her that this means her bedroom is the only route between the place where food comes from and the rest of everything, and that sounds like it would be terrible if she literally ever has any other people in here.

She doesn't want to move the chicken coop. She doesn't want to sacrifice the meager defensibility of her room spiral by opening up new connections to take some part of the square off the path. She doesn't want to add her bedroom onto the *end* and that wouldn't help anyway, it would just make for a longer walk. She doesn't want to waste space on corridors... well, this grid layout is pretty spacious, maybe if... hmm, yes. She replaces some dirt and commands the excavation of some other dirt, and ends up with the large square corner space subdivided into a corridor and two smaller rooms, so that to get from the chicken coop to the library one steps through the innermost corner of that space and to get to her bedroom one steps into that innermost corner and then walks the whole length of that square and turns another corner up into a small cozy rectangle. Much better. Now she can give herself a bedroom and bathroom and library.

Other rooms have fewer channels of flowing water than the chicken coop room, and differences in the details of the mosaics, but are mostly similar in design. The Tower continues to apply its aesthetics to her furniture.

The library comes with its shelves full of books, which is not how this normally works. It also has workbenches and a crystal ball configured to contact various book merchants willing to deal with Keepers.