"Monsters are a kind of simulation of life," she explains. She fishes a stone out of her pocket and sets it on the floor in front of the door.

"To create a monster, you need to keep in mind all of its properties. How it will move, what it will do, how it attacks, and so on. And then you imprint those thoughts on an item to animate it. Eventually, you can make better monsters with better items, but you can use this stone to get started."

"I usually suggest that dungeons start with slimes. They have a consistent texture, simple movement, and a simple shape. Go ahead and give it a try, and don't be too discouraged if it takes several attempts to get the hang of it."

She settles crosslegged on the ground by Yarold's pillar to watch.

He spends a moment wondering why she would expect a new dungeon to be familiar with the idea of a slime. He knows them, from various pieces of fantasy media, but it can't be the case that all dungeons come from Earth originally, can it?

Well, maybe it does work like that. Who is he to say?

He focuses his attention on the stone, holding an image of a little green gumdrop slime in his mind's eye. He pushes the idea into the stone; the little jiggle as it hops, the way it clamps around things and then tries to digest them. He imagines it grabbing onto the leg of a stereotypical adventurer, wrapping itself around them and getting acid on their socks.

The idea doesn't want to catch, at first. He can feel the concept slipping away and back into imagination. He remembers the necklace Kose showed him, and focuses on the structure of the rock.

It is an ordinary stone -- an aggregate of various silicates and other minerals. He takes the image of the slime he's built up in his head, and wraps it around the inclusions in the material, tangling it between the grains of the rock. At first it doesn't want to stick, but it can't slip away as fast as he can twist it, imposing the idea onto the material.

Suddenly, the rock disappears from his senses with a popping sound. It is replaced by a little green slime, just as he had imagined it.

"Eek!" Kose exclaims, stumbling to her feet. "Wow, that was fast."

The slime hops towards her, and she quickly steps around the other side of Yarold's pillar, putting him between her and it.

"Uh, next up is telling your monsters where to patrol. If you examine it, you should feel that you still have a connection to it," she explains. "If you push the feeling of a new behavior into it, you can update its orders. Monsters are limited by their initial complexity -- slimes are kinda dumb -- but every monster can understand orders to guard an area."

Yarold finds himself wishing he had a way to take notes.

"Really, every monster?" he asks instead. "What's the dumbest possible monster?"

If you need 'better' items to make 'better' monsters, he probably can't find the smartest monster any time soon. But it's always good to know what the corner cases are.

"Oh! Uh, I'm not sure," Kose replies. "Slimes are pretty dumb. Oozes might be dumber? They can't even jump. It's sort of a hard question because something like a slime is already so simple that it's hard to make it simpler."

Yarold pulls a pebble from the wall of the corridor outside and starts thinking about what the simplest monster he could make would be. He decides to try for a simple cube that does not take any actions or react to any stimuli.

He starts to hold the image of the cube in his mind ...

And is interrupted by Kose. She is running (slowly) around his pedestal to keep away from the slime, which is still chasing her.

"Could you order the slime out into the corridor?" she asks, an undercurrent of tension in her voice. "Or at least tell it not to bother me?"

He sends the slime out into the hall, and returns to focusing on his cube-to-be. He performs the same mental motions that brought him the slime, enmeshing the idea of the cube into the pebble.

And with a pop, the pebble deforms into a featureless cube.

"You made an artifact?" Kose exclaims. "But I didn't explain ..."

"I mean, I suppose it might be an artifact," Yarold muses. "But I was trying to create the dumbest possible monster."

She picks the cube up, and turns it over in her hands.

"And you went with a tiny, immobile, non-acidic, rigid gelatinous cube?" she inquires.

Yarold would shrug if he still had shoulders.

"You must admit, it is hard to conceive of a monster dumber than that. Set it back down, please. I want to see if I can still tell it to guard an area."

She sets it down gently, and he orders it into the corridor with the slime.

If the cube feels inclined to guard the corridor, it doesn't show it.

It sits there, unresponsive.

"Well, that's pretty conclusive! Unless it just doesn't have a way to move? I'm not sure how you'd test that ..." he muses.

Kose fiddles with her rings.

"So you've figured out monsters," she states. "Maybe now is a good time to start talking about the purpose of dungeons, and then you can figure out monsters to put in your corridor."

He turns his attention from the cube back to her.

"Purpose?" he echos. He's felt ... weirdly okay with becoming a dungeon. He's pretty sure he died. But he certainly didn't agree to be responsible for anything here.

Still, it's always good to know what people expect from you.

"Dungeons and Adventurers grow together in a symbiotic relationship," she explains, slipping once more into a practiced rhythm. "Dungeons present tough-but-fair challenges to Adventurers, rewarding them with unique advantages and items, and in exchange the effort that Adventurers put forth to overcome a dungeon's challenges strengthen it."

"I see," he replies in the polite tone of an engineer trying to determine which parts of a client's request are sane. "What kind of challenges?"

"Monsters are traditional," she responds. "Although puzzles, mazes, and secret doors are also popular. A good dungeon has a mix of all of those, so that a team of Adventurers can rest physically while being challenged mentally, and vice versa. That makes their whole adventure more efficient."

"Well that seems straightforward enough. What kinds of rewards are best for attracting adventurers?" he asks, running his attention along his corridor. He doesn't have much 'stretch' left in him, for now, but he should be able to manage a pit trap or two ...

"Gold and gems are popular, but enchanted items are where dungeons really shine, because there's no other way to acquire them. Once you've gotten established, I recommend spending a lot of your time creating novel magical items. But until you've built up a little bit, gems are a good starting place. The previous dungeons I partnered with found it difficult to make gold without access to other materials, but they all found making diamonds fairly easy."

"Making diamonds?" he asks, mentally comparing pit-trap locations. "Not in the same way as monsters, surely, or you wouldn't have been surprised that I could make a cube."

"It's a different kind of making," she agrees. "Dungeons can make three kinds of things: monsters, in the manner you figured out, magic items, by imprinting magic into an existing thing, and mundane items."

She gestures at the cube.

"It's the same skill you used to pull the pebble for that one out of the wall, actually. And the same skill that you can use to re-arrange your interior once you've claimed more territory. Instead of pulling a pebble out of a wall, you can pull a gemstone out of the firmame..."

"Oh! Duh!" he interrupts her. He focuses his attention on a patch of air, bearing down until he can see the smallest parts. Then he pulls the carbon one way and the oxygen the other way. He bears down on the carbon, until it condenses in a tiny fleck of diamond.

"Wait! I didn't ..."

She trails off, and stares at the tiny glittering speck on the floor before Yarold's pedestal. She reaches out a hand to touch it, and then yanks it back.

"It's cold! What did you do!?"