"I like what you've done with the arches," Kose mentions, moving to peer down the changed hallway. "I can see you've paid a lot of attention to the little detailing. You're going to put a different puzzle between each pair of arches?"

"Thank you! And yeah, basically. Or a corridor leading to more of the same. I'm thinking the puzzles themselves or the door to the puzzle gives some kind of hint of what prize awaits beyond? And keep the same puzzles for the same prizes, which will be good for figuring out what people want a lot of, I think."

Kose taps her fingers, considering.

"Yes ..." she agrees. "That makes sense!"

"Do you know what prize and puzzle you want to figure out next?" she asks.

"Communication devices, the step on the correct spot puzzle I mentioned before. I'm poking at it, but behind a wall, so I can avoid another... incident." Oh, wait, she's supposed to be playing dumb about how the dungeon core thing needing air is bullshit. "That does remind me, I should put a place for it to breathe above where the door will be." She obligingly scootches stone out of the way to open to the room she's working on. Look at what an obedient and pliant pet dungeon she is. So cooperative.

She ends up making the communication devices before she finishes up the puzzle that will reward it, because those sound more fun, and she had a lovely sneaky little idea that would benefit her very much. So she wants to do that first.

The way she's been planning her communication devices is to think of them as walkie talkies. Different frequencies that a device can be turned to, and then talk on or listen to. Her plan is to have the frequencies correspond to a specific colored something, probably gem, which a dial of some kind will be turned to. This means that she'll be able to add more devices to the same system without issue, because the set of parameters will be the same for all of them. From there, she's planning three modes, at least; entirely off, mute, so that nothing can be heard from the other side, and then probably something voice activated. She has a brief debate over the merits of a push-to-talk or always on system, but decides that working that into something portable will be a bit too difficult to be worth it. So, just the three modes. And very, very portable.

What she ends up making is a pendant small enough to be comfortably used as an earring, though she doesn't give it any kind of associated hook or chain. Just a teardrop of lovingly decorated titanium, with a multicolored, hexagonal diamond set in the middle, and a loop at the top to easily string it onto whatever the wearer wants. The faces of the hexagonal diamond are each a different color; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple, all tidily changing from one color to the next at the edge. Yes, it is in that order, yes the purple does wrap back around to the red, she's not some kind of rainbow-less savage, thank you. The gemstone itself is set on a radial dial, able to turn in place in its titanium nest, and only one color revealed at any one time; the rest of the diamond is hidden away. Each color will correspond to a frequency to set to, and the one shown will be what the device is attuned to at the time. Over this window is a little shutter that has three set locations; fully open, half open, and fully closed, corresponding to voice chat, mute, and off, respectively. Or, well, that's how she's terming it.

This does mean that there are only going to be six crystal radio channels, but look, it was hard enough to stuff all of that complicated magic into such a small location, and she had to do a lot of heavy lifting with novel crystalline structures for the parts of the diamond. It had to be six for hexagonal reasons, the diamond structure was easier to hang everything off of that way. Maybe one day she will make something better, but for now, this is still pretty damn good, in her opinion. Practical, portable, and pretty. Also pretty damn durable, being made out of titanium and diamond.

She is immensely pleased when she shows a set of three to Kose. The affect she aims for is 'delighted golden retriever who is so proud to have made a good present for Mom.' It's not even entirely a lie, she really is this delighted with the cool thing she made. Look, look!! She made a cool magic thing!!!

(And if she just so happens to set six more of that magic cool thing deep into the stone of her various archways, as far away from the corridor as possible, with each one set to a different channel, well. That's her business, now isn't it. Heh.)

Kose is completely blown away by the pendants.

"These are amazing," she says. "I don't think I've ever seen a communication artifact simultaneously this compact and this versatile. I have no idea how you managed to fit so much magic into such a small space."

She bites her lip. "If it is functioning continuously, though, it will wear down faster. It's probably worth it, for something like this. I guess we'll have to see how long they last outside a dungeon."

Smug smug smug smug smug!!!

"Closing the shutter entirely will completely stop it from functioning," she assures Kose, "in either direction. So it can be stored and then used. And it's set to only send with a voice in particular nearby, but. Yeah, I haven't had much chance to test how quickly it'll wear down. I'll need to ask the next adventurers to test it and get back to me. Still!! I'm really proud!!!"

Kose smiles at her. "You should be! These look wonderfully useful. How did you get the idea to have the different colors?" she asks. "And do they still come in sets, or can you connect new items to the colors?"

Well you see, she comes from a world with much higher tech, and they have this thing called radio...

That sounds annoying to explain, and possibly freaky enough to get her possibly murdered for being a gigantic terrifying risk. Instead, she will continue with plan A: lie like a rug.

"I was playing with colors earlier, and I was trying to figure out something that scaled better than just a set that could only talk to each other? The two ideas smooshed together. And then once I had the idea I wanted to see if I could make it work, and then once I made it work, I wanted to see how much I could reasonably do because it was fun. But yes, new items to the colors, technically each one is two magical items that work together. The pendant and the diamond do different things, but each has triggers that will respond to the other."

"I see," Kose responds. "I'm afraid some of the intricacies of magic item creation escape me, since I can't do it directly. Is there any advice about making a multi-part artifact like that which I could remember and pass on to future dungeons?"

"Hmmm. Maybe, it's hard to put into words, but I'll try."

And she really will, because in the event that Kose does kill her, she wants the next pet dungeon (that will probably be inferior to her, for the record) to be able to give the humans nice things. So she retrieves appropriate materials for a visual demonstration to help.

"If... making things magical is hanging concepts off of materials," and she floats up little pebbles and starts connecting them with floating lines of dirt, "with better materials giving you more places to anchor to," and she adds more pebbles and then more lines of dirt from them, "then having two magical objects that interact is like... leaving a hook or a loop in the concept you make." And she forms the dirt connecting two pebbles into a hook. "Which can then grab onto a matching part of another magical item. If it's told to watch for the specific shape of that conceptual hook, anyway, magic isn't really good at making actual decisions? But it's good at finding specific things. So..." She adds some wiggles to her dirt hook. "If the hook concept is really specific, like one half of two puzzle pieces, then when it holds the other half, and looks for things it can fit with, it will be obvious what it'll react to. Does that make sense?"

Kose stares at the diagram for a minute. "So I get that you set one object to react to what the other does," she begins. "But ... what does the other item actually do? Like, what is the first thing actually reacting to?"

"In this specific case with the communication device, the whole thing together is kind of complicated and would take me a while to explain, because there is more than one proverbial 'hook' on either side. I would not want to use the entire thing as a teaching aid. But..." She considers the device, and which parts could be easily explained. "... So the diamond in it is... in the center of it and in the top facet, I've built in the concept of picking up a voice and, mm, packaging it for easy retrieval by other sources? That is all it does, if I made a bunch of these diamonds they wouldn't be able to do a damn thing on their own." Not even pick up information, actually, because the 'on' clause is worked into the shutter, but that's getting into how this is super complicated. "And meanwhile on the pendant side, if it's active, it is looking for information packets of that kind. And then if it finds them it'll grab the proverbial package and relay what it picked up."

"Huh."

Kose thinks about this for a while. "So you're directly ... passing the voice through the diamond and reacting to it in the other part as well. Interesting! I could see that being a really useful technique."

She gives Aestrix a considering look. "Do you think it would be possible to use a technique like that to make two-part magic items with remote triggers? Like, a firestarter which you could build into a stove and then activate without having to reach in and touch it?"

"Oh, definitely! Do you think that would be useful?" she asks brightly, all perfect innocence even as she absolutely connects the dots to 'remote detonated bombs.'

"It certainly could be!" she agrees. "That was just an example off the top of my head, but there are lots of magical effects that would be safer if they could be triggered at some distance, especially for stuff used in refining and crafts."

"Okay!" agrees Aestrix, still perfectly innocent. "That seems obvious in retrospect, but triggering something at a distance isn't really... useful for me?? All of the stuff I want to do is all here, in my reach. But it'd be really good for adventurers! Do you know any good ideas that they might like a lot? ... I should probably finish the next puzzle before I get started on my next magic item, though. I guess." Huff.

Innocent innocent innocent she is an innocent cute nerd who just wants to play in her one specific chosen hobby.

Kose smiles at her. "It's not something I've really thought about, because my previous partners didn't know how to do it," she explains. "But I'll think about more use cases while you work on your puzzle and let you know."

"All right. Please do."

She is not in fact going to go work on that puzzle, at least not immediately, but she will be working in that designated location. Just, you know, on other things. Because that was a very scary conversation. Probably the riskiest she's ever had here, too. She doesn't regret it, exactly, but she definitely displayed a level of competence that marks her as potentially very scary. But also extremely beneficial to what she thinks are Kose's interests. She hopes she managed to thread the needle to hit 'innocent and dumb enough to be worth the risk,' instead of, well. Kose deciding that murdering sooner rather than later is the safest option. She's just a smidge wary, and keeping a vague eye on her core. Not on Kose herself, because she knows better, just. She keeps it in the back of her mind for a little while. As most of her attention is elsewhere.

In the puzzle room to be, she puts together a small stone tube and tests to see if she can make a magic railgun. Not at any kind of speed that would be noticeable, just seeing if she can set up something that will accelerate little tiny diamonds that are put into the tube. Gently. Quietly. That can then be scaled up later if it happens to come up.

Yes, the magic is perfectly capable of accelerating tiny diamonds down a tube. Without any kind of measurement apparatus to compare against, it's not clear exactly what speeds she'll be able to manage if she puts as much effort as she can into it.

It's indicative enough to calm her down, a little. She makes a couple, with the most speed she can pack into the simple stone tubes, and hides them away in the ceiling of the puzzle room itself. They're in the same sort of place she hid her communication devices; set as deep in the stone as can reasonably be managed, far from the archway itself. That's safer than her core room, probably. She really needs to get that stainless steel tube of core protection installed, but she suspects that if she makes any kind of obvious effort to protect herself, that'll tip Kose off. So. Well. This is the best she can safely do for now, and if Kose were going to kill her over just this, she'd have likely tried already. Aestrix tries not to think about how it's likely she would have succeeded, with her current strategy.

Anyway, time to actually do the thing she's supposed to be doing.

So, her major barrier to making the puzzle (besides, uh, the situation) was less 'not knowing what she was going to do,' and more 'wanting to make something that could have different solutions without too much trouble.' She vaguely has plans to be the dungeon equivalent of an industrial factory, churning out magical items that people want. Which means that if she wants to do that and sustain herself, she needs to not have easy pre-solved solutions. It's not exactly a challenge if you follow the designated dungeon walkthrough and just do what you're supposed to, after all. The ring puzzle is pretty straightforward to adjust; but something more complicated isn't quite so easy. Therefore, she will need to use all of the programming knowledge she's picked up from sheer osmosis to make this sort of thing easier.

With the idea of someone needing to only step on certain (irregularly shaped) tiles, she links the tiles on the floor to activate corresponding tiles on a 'master' map. While active, if they experience appropriate pressure, they mark themselves as complete. To keep people from just stepping on each and every tile to see if it's the solution, she sets it so that if any of the tiles that are not marked as active are put under sufficient pressure, all tile completion for the whole board resets. From there, she can tie all completed tiles of this master to then activate a final 'solved' clause, attached to its own little pebble. Order won't matter, only all active tiles being completed, and once it's been 'solved,' that variable will stay up as solved until she resets it. This is because the door that opens to the associated alcove, containing communication devices, will be tied to it, and it'd be kind of unfair if it shut closed after they'd solved it by accidentally stepping on the wrong thing. She might figure out a system later that'll let it reset automatically, but she's not that strapped for attention just yet. In her experience, computers and computer-alikes, which she's been filing this system under, are dumb until proven otherwise. Better to keep the whole thing under her direct control until she will definitely and reliably prove that people are probably not going to run into a puzzle related bug. That could end badly, with how there continues to be a fairy hanging around her core.

This whole system also makes it very easy to make a map for adventurers based off of the master, and she does. She puts that map on a wall between where the door will be and where the puzzle is, facing away from the puzzle itself, so it's the first thing to be seen upon entry into the room. Activate tiles will be shown glowing on the map. The idea is, of course, you can't look at the given map and activate the tiles at the same time. Playing into the theme of communication, one of the most straightforward ways to solve it is with two people coordinating. Along with shooting projectiles at it or something, but that level of skill with aiming is a challenge in itself, so if anyone pulls it off they deserve it and they can take the loot with her blessings.

With it mostly complete, she considers how much feedback a user, she means adventurer, should have for optimal enjoyment. Hmm. Probably she should make it clear when they get things right and when they mess up, instead of only spitting out the reward at the end. That's the kind of thing that is frustrating and not fun. Therefore: the tiles can light up with a gentle glow when they have been activated, and are dark when they are not. Because of the set of conditions she's already worked in, this also means that if they mess up, everything will go dark again. It also means she can have some dramatic lighting, though she's not going to go so dark that it'll freak the adventurers out and think she's plotting murder. Tasteful inset lighting from above, to go with what's coming in from the window to the main corridor.

There. Now it's ready for alpha testing. That is to say, letting Kose look at it, and hopefully approve of how it is not at all threatening. In order to accommodate this, she actually makes a door to enter it. Kind of important, that. And then let Kose know.

.... Maybe see if she can sneakily take a peek at one of Kose's rings without alerting her, before letting her know. If it tips her off, she has the perfect excuse, and if it doesn't, well. That's very interesting, isn't it.

Kose perks up and turns to her when she starts examining the rings. "Hmm? Finished with the puzzle?" she asks.

Knew it. Damnation.

"Yeah!" she says, brightly. "Come take a look?"

"Sure!"

Kose heads out of the core room and examines the newly built puzzle space. She taps one of the floor tiles experimentally, and then jerks back when it lights up.

She steps back, and examines the map.

"So the Adventurers have to remember where the selected floor tiles are, and then step on those to get to the alcove?" she ventures.