"... done this how many times, Tanth?" a voice is saying.

    "I just worry, Kose. That last one ..." a different voice responds.

"I'll be fine. You get out of here so I can wake it up," the first voice replies.

There is the sound of footsteps, and then Aestrix suddenly receives a shot of energy, as though she's just downed a shot of coffee.

???

Aestrix notes that she doesn't have a body anymore. The hell? She doesn't mind very much, because being a flesh sack of meat is kind of gross and often unpleasant, but it's weird to wake up to.

She takes a look around with her... senses...? It's not really properly vision, but she can definitely sense things. And she's... a room???

Her knowledge of writing tropes catches up with her. Wait, wait, wait. Is she a dungeon?? Because that sounds so cool and also like so much fun, no wonder she was excited!!

"Hello!" says the woman standing next to Aestrix's central column. She is clad in a dress made of leaves, and two large wings extend behind her back. She addresses her remark to the small crystal floating a few inches above the pedestal that marks the center of the room. "How are you feeling?"

The pedestal is decorated with carved lines, and looks recently hewn. The rest of the room is made of old, worn stone. There are arcane symbols scratched into the walls near the ceiling, and a faded stain on the floor.

Uh, can she talk, is that a thing she can directly do...?

"Hello?" she attempts. Oh, good, she can. "Fine, thank you, hello!" Social conditioning carries her onward past such frivolities of 'awkwardness' and onto: "How are you? Your wings are very pretty!"

"Thank you!" Kose preens. "I'm quite attached to them," she jokes. "Anyways, hello! I'm your dungeon fairy."

"That is the standard with wings," agrees Aestrix, amused. "I suppose that makes me a dungeon, then! I'm Aestrix. Do you come packaged with all of the knowledge I need to become a proper dungeon, that seems like how this is likely to work."

She did notice the Ominous Conversation that happened before she had the energy-boost, but, well. Sharing concern towards another's welfare is not in itself ominous, and she probably has a lot of power to do horrible things to this person, so. Honestly some concern is Pretty Legit, in her opinion.

"I do!" she agrees, after a brief moment of hesitation. If Aestrix wasn't looking for it, she might not have noticed the brief look of alarm that crept across Kose's face. "I'm Kose. I've worked with a lot of dungeons before, helping them get established, so I'm pretty good at getting new dungeons up to speed."

"Huh! And when they're set up you... go find and poke another one awake and help them be a dungeon, too? Well, pleasure to meet you, Kose. ... Does being a dungeon involve murder, because I would really rather not."

"Oh, no! Murder is a really bad idea," Kose agrees, fidgeting with one of the many rings that adorn her fingers.

"When Adventurers struggle against a challenge in a dungeon, they provide the dungeon with energy that it can use to expand its territory or produce items. So it's important to challenge adventurers so that you can grow, but if you murder them then they can't come back and try again, so both you and they lose out," she explains.

"Oh good! Mutually beneficial arrangements are the best kind. How flexible is the term 'challenge,' here, can I give them a gauntlet of puzzles or a rock wall to climb or...?"

Kose settles crosslegged on the ground, to better deliver exposition. She smiles at Aestrix, apparently encouraged by her pacifistic bent.

"Puzzles are very popular," she agrees. "And so are feats of strength, dexterity, or daring. Many dungeons choose to make combat challenges using monsters, but you can -- and should -- also make your monsters so that they will spare downed or retreating adventurers. Usually I don't get into that until a bit later though, because there's a few basic things about being a dungeon that usually need to be dealt with first. Rest assured that we will have plenty of time to talk through what form your challenges will take."

"Yeah, I am not comfortable making monsters without some kind of safeguard in place to make sure everyone lives. And no permanently maiming or traumatizing them or, uh, whatever the various grab bag of horrible things I can probably do to people. There will be none of that. What sorts of things need to be dealt with, first? Am I, I dunno, starving to death from lack of giving anyone challenges right now?"

While she's talking, she starts poking at her floor, to see if she can start giving it a pretty floral pattern. Does changing the floor have a mirror feature like in an art program or something? Let's find out! Because this will absolutely be symmetrical.

Kose frowns a little to herself in thought. "No, you're not starving to death," Kose replies. "You just need Adventurers to grow, not to sustain yourself. Well, not if you're not making items. But new dungeons usually get a little itchy, I think is the best way to describe it, until they go out and claim their first territory beyond their core room."

Kose reaches into her dress and pulls out a pendant on a long chain.

"A good first step is learning to focus your attention. Try focusing on this and seeing what you can discover about it," she suggests.

Aestrix's new-found dungeon powers don't come with a built-in mirror tool, but she might find that her newfound awareness of her own space makes it easy to make symmetrical patterns. It's a little bit like having propioception for the entire room and all of its contents -- moving things and changing things at precise distances to other things is as easy as holding her hands a certain distance apart or moving them symmetrically would be if she still had hands.

"I guess I'm a little itchy," she muses, about her lack of claiming any area. It feels like she's... small. Vulnerable. She doesn't like it. "But there's a lot of new perceptions I'm being distracted by? It's not too bad."

Hmmmmm the strange perception will do for appropriately mirror purposes. It's kind of an interesting sort-of-physical challenge, to draw four things at once in different locations, but her dungeon brain is totally up for it. Not that she should, uh, focus on this right now. Instead she will do as directed, and focuses her attention on the pendant and chain.

The chain is nothing special -- it is a mostly-pure alloy of two different metals. Aestrix might be able to recognize them as silver and copper if she metaphorically squints.

The pendant, on the other hand, is exceedingly peculiar. It feels like ordinary quartz, although polished to a shine, but there is something other tangled in it. A concept, or an idea, wound around the facets and inclusions of the crystal and pinned against the grain of the stone.

She's totally going to metaphorically squint, does anyone here really think she is not a metaphorical squinter? They are wrong. She really, really is.

"Silver and copper chain, quartz pendant, and a... there's a thing tangled inside it, oh look at that, that's fascinating." Can she tell what the concept or idea is? Or is it just a vague impression of A Something?

If she continues her metaphorical squinting, she can make out that it is related to the concept of sampling, attention, perception, and warmth. And these things are bound together in a way that makes it look as though the pendant -- grows warm when someone is paying attention to the recipient?

She continues peering at it. Interesting, so it's set to do different things under different conditions, and those conditions are 'grow warm when someone is paying attention.' The obvious reason for that is that Aestrix herself can observe things without it being obvious under normal conditions. Kose has a pendant that lets her tell when a dungeon is paying attention to her.

Her immediate first instinct is to state this aloud like the try-hard honor student she totally is, but, uh, maybe... she should not let on that she's that smart just yet. It seems likely that she will cease to exist if her crystal thing is smashed or something. Maybe she should make an effort to not be threatening so no one feels it's smart to kill her. Thus: lie like a fucking rug about observational skills. It's a little uncomfortable squinting this much at something, sort of like getting a headache. She can ignore this without too much trouble, but it's a plausible reason for her to have stopped looking at the pendant before she figured out the details of it.

"Something... about warmth?? It warms under... some conditions??? Mrh, ow. That's really complicated," she adds, and then she stops looking at it. It's a really good thing she is a dungeon and therefore doesn't have facial expressions, because she is a garbage liar and she knows it. Smart enough to come up with good lies? Absolutely. Any good at follow through when it comes to making the right faces with her flesh face? Absolutely not. Just schooling tone is much easier.

Kose nods and tucks it back into her dress. "Yes! It was a gift from one of my previous dungeons," she explains. "It warmed up when it thought about me. Which was nice when I was away."

Kose, on the other hand, is an excellent liar. Good enough that Aestrix has no particular way to discern this.

She can still tell that this is bullshit, though. It's what makes logical sense, okay? This is clearly a dangerous thing to be doing. It makes much more sense to have a safety measure to know when to get out of dodge than to carry around a memento of a dungeon long past.

Aestrix totally wants to look at each and every one of Kose's rings to figure out what they do, because yes she noticed her playing with them, but she suspects that the rings are probably caught under the umbrella of 'the recipient.' That'd just be smart.

"That was sweet of them," she says sincerely, because it really is sweet for a dungeon to give someone a way to alert them if a potentially hostile dungeon is looking at them. She's tempted to offer to try to make another, but, uh, she is currently lying like a rug. Abort, etc.

She instead goes back to making floor patterns. This floor will be very pretty when she is done with it, though she's mostly working by moving the bits of stone around to make lighter and darker parts, and some subtle engraving. Not too much to trip over, but some. That'll be good for puzzles, later.

"So! Puzzles! I have thought of a couple basic ones, but don't know how viable they are with my current, uh, is there a term for dungeon power? My dungeon power budget."

"I think some scholars call it a dungeon's extent," Kose offers. "There are ... some things which take energy, and some things which are basically free. Moving things around within your territory, creating monsters, or imbuing existing objects with magic are all free. Creating new items from nothing and extending your territory to cover new areas both take energy. I generally teach dungeons the basics of creating monsters and magic items using simple stones, but once you're set up, you'll want to put a good chunk of your energy into producing high quality items to lure Adventurers in to challenge you."

She taps her finger on her chin, thoughtfully. "There are some puzzles that might be too large to fit within the territory you can claim right of the bat. And there are some puzzles involving magic items that I think are probably be beyond your skill to create for now, because they require a delicate touch. But if you stick to 'manually' operated puzzles made of stone for now, I think you have a lot of flexibility! How about I show you how to claim the corridor outside, and then we can see about fitting your puzzle in there?"

"Sure! Though - what counts as high quality? Can I make, uh. Water purification pebbles that suck up all of the non-water parts of a body of water? Or is it just material goods?" If it's just material goods, it's smart to do things like 'textiles,' because unless this place has some kind of industrialization going on, making cloth is hard.

Kose blinks.

"It's making the physical items themselves that takes energy," she explains. "Making items magical isn't tiring. But how much magic you can attach to an item depends on its quality -- what material it's made of, and also its shape. So for good magic items, you usually want to start with a high-quality base. In the specific case of a water purifying pebble, the difficulty would be in having a continuous magical effect. Magic wears down over time outside a dungeon, and continuous effects wear out much more quickly than triggered effects."

"A pendant that purified water when it was dipped in it would be more efficient than one which purified water continuously," she suggests. "That way people could dunk it in their canteen after filling it, and know that the water was fresh."

"Oh, I see. That makes sense. So things that only worked when people specifically take an action would last the longest. And high quality is how well things stick and how complicated they are. Would water purification be good? If not, I can probably make some pretty good textiles if I had the right materials..."

"Water purification is definitely useful," she agrees. "Most settlements have decent sources of clean water, but that's mostly because you can't settle places that don't have clean water."

She adopts a more cautious tone. "Textiles are definitely valuable, but they're tricky to make from whole cloth, as it were. It's difficult to visualize all the necessary details to a sufficient level of precision when making them from firmament. Until you get very good at precision crafting you should either stick to making thread and then weaving it by hand, which an be a bit slow, or summoning items made of leather or metal that have easier to visualize textures."

She shakes her head.

"Anyway, I was explaining how to claim territory. If you 'push' your attention down the corridor, you should be able to claim it as part of you. Be careful not to go outside, though. It can be dangerous to try and expand so far."

And, probably, she should not expand outside of a designated area and freak the humans out by being an almighty dungeon that could easily kill them if she wanted. That seems hella likely. Also things about eating her proverbial seed corn, or expanding/making so much that she can't make anything challenging to feed herself. Or something.

"Right, okay." Puuuuuush, down the corridor. Not particularly far, just a little. And then also a little above her room, to see about easily getting stone for building materials. She'll eventually give it a nice dramatic arched feel, make this place look less like a box of sadness. With pretty designs on the floor. And also a stain.

... Speaking of, is the stain on the floor of anything she can recognize? Is that a thing she she can check with her bullshit dungeon senses? Because she absolutely wants to clean that up, but she will catalogue the appropriate associated data first.

Yes! That is blood. Old blood, which soaked into the stone some time ago and has since had years of time to have dust ground into it and to fade, flaking to a dull patina.

Cool, cool, cool, not alarming at all. She's cleaning that up and pretending she didn't notice it, thank you. Have a pretty floor design instead.

This task complete, she will grab a bit of ceiling stone and scootch it into a nice tidy slab of stone by the corridor. If all goes well, this is the start of her first puzzle. It will be fairly simple; a series of stone circles growing in size, making a series of rings, all of which can move independently. It should be easy enough to set some of these to move others when moved, right? Time for a basic bitch video game puzzle! Hey, at least it's not a tower of fucking hanoi. She has standards, there are enough of those damn things as it is.

If she is willing to try a few times with different circles, she can eventually figure out the technique for making a magical item. Having seen the structure of the pendant, it's fairly intuitive -- hold the desired behavior in your head, and then 'push' the idea into the material. If she just pushes it, it slides off again without sticking. But if she enmeshes it in the stone, turning the idea over and over until it's caught on the grains of the stone and layered against itself, then it sticks even after she turns her attention away.

Kose comes and leans on the doorway to watch her progress.

Excellent! Then she will carefully set some of these circles to move when some of their fellows are moved, and once just about everything is connected to each other, she grabs more stone from the ceiling to draw something onto the series of circles. Hmmm, water purification tablets pebbles, so... Stylized design of some water, then. She can do a lovely, asymmetric swirling art of waves, dark stone for the color of the ocean, lighter stone for the froth of the waves, and the in-between for the sky above. Artistically speaking, it's not her best work, but she probably shouldn't get too fussy so soon in her dungeon life. It looks pretty enough.

"I was thinking have this be a door, which then opens to reveal water purification pebbles when the circles are arranged to get this design," she explains, to Kose. Demonstrably, she moves one of the rings in the set of circles; two others move with it. "And some of the rings coincide with each other, like so." She moves the ring she touched back, and the other two rings follow to restore her artwork.

"Oh, how clever!" Kose remarks. "Is there a pattern to the way rings are linked to each other?"

“Sort of! It depends on which ring you move. So, if this one,” she marks the ring she’s moving with a little indentation, “is moved, then the other two also move. But!” She puts the ring back, removes the indentation, and adds one to one of the rings that had been moved, “If this one is moved instead, it moves an entirely different set of rings.” As promised, when she moves this one, another ring that had stayed still before moves instead.

“There are a couple here that can be freely moved without changing the others,” she continues, putting the ring back in both location and indentation. “Mostly to make this a bit easier, I want to make this a neat puzzle, not literally impossible. I want the Adventurers to get nice things!”

Kose displays a tiny flash of skepticism, before a smile breaks over her face.

"That's great!" she agrees. "I'm sure an attitude like that will make you a very popular adventuring spot. If you've figured out the rings, do you think you've also got a design for the water purification stones worked out?"

“Mmm, sort of? I have a couple concerns, mostly about starting parameters and conditions and general safety. Probably it’d be easier to suck up and then filter the water, a pebble that purifies bodies of water it’s touched to seems trickier. Like, what percentage of water to not-water is enough for it to activate? Where does what’s being removed go? If I answer all of those questions with magic, that makes it more complicated, and likely to rub off quicker, and I need to have better starting materials to hold that complexity. Better to make an efficient design. So, hm, maybe more like a… tube….”

She is totally going to start making a tube out of her stone, now.

"Perhaps I should also explain how to make things directly out of firmament, so that you're not restricted to stone?" she suggests.

“I guess that would be more hygienic, I don’t exactly know which types of rock are and are not toxic. Let me map out the overall design in stone first, though? Then I can make it in, uh, something else.”

Tube: is made. She adds a design of a button to its side, then with a moment of thought, a hole near one of the tube’s ends. Hmm. Maybe she should also color the side of the tube that water comes out of as blue for ease of use? Is that possible? That can go be tabled until she’s making stuff, she thinks.

“Right, I’ve got something,” she says firmly, floating the unassuming looking tube over to Kose. “The plan is to have it activate when the little marker on the side is pressed. It sucks up liquids on one side and outputs pure water on the other, with all of the gunk being removed shoved out through the hole in the side. Simple and efficient.”

"That does look efficient!" Kose agrees.

"Although sometimes efficiency in magic can be a little counterintuitive. It can be more important to have a concept simple enough to hold in your head in its entirety than to have the simplest possible mechanism," she warns. "Since imbuing magic is free, perhaps you should see how well your concept fits on that model before we try making one with better materials?"

"Sure, okay."

It's honestly a pretty straightforward concept to hold in her head. She knows what vacuums are. She understands filtration. Water is just dihydrogen monoxide, it is not complicated to set it as the only thing to be expelled out of the end of the tube. Pressing the button (Technically speaking it's not actually a button, but it's got button like qualities. It aspires to one day be a proper button, when she figures out the particulars of how to make that physically possible. A button awaiting transition surgery to become its true self, if you will.) will cause this end to suck in stuff, and only water will go out the other end. Everything else goes out this hole in the side, which in retrospect she maybe needs to make bigger, but this is why we prototype designs before we put them into production. Nice and tidy, easy to set into the stone, different parts of the stone doing different parts of her system.

Kose watches her fiddle with the prototype.

"Does it feel like the magic set?" she asks when it looks like Aestrix is done. "I normally have dungeons make something we can test right away, but this one might be harder to test. Perhaps we can ask your first set of Adventurers to test it and report back."

"It does!" says Aestrix, happily. She is so pleased that she is getting a good grade in doing a good job at being a dungeon. "Hmm. But we can probably test it here, can't we? There's water vapor in the air. It wouldn't give us very much purified water, but it should work just fine. I didn't give it any sort of minimum parameters, it'll just work when it's turned on."

Kose splutters a bit. "In the air? But water's a liquid. I guess steam ..."

She shakes her head and refocuses on Aestrix. "It's certainly worth a try," she responds, although from her tone she's not very confident that the test will succeed.

Oh. Oops. Did she display a basic knowledge of chemistry in a world where that is not a thing? She totally did. Look, in her defense, it was a fun problem, and she was excited and furthermore she regrets nothing. Unless Kose and her friends try to kill her. In which case, uh, she maybe regrets that.

"Sure. You can do the honors? Put pressure on the little," it is still not actually a button, "stone on the side, and we'll see if it works."

And if it doesn't work then that's probably going to make her look much more nice and fluffy and harmless. While she, just, you know. Thinks about how she'd do some self defense of her crystal thingy, if it hypothetically were to ever come up. Purely hypothetically.

(Rocks fall and everyone dies seems so inelegant. Probably a container holding the crystal thingy that redirects all kinetic force back where it came from? And then also she can figure out how to put a fucking spike trap in the ceiling, or something.)

Kose reaches out and takes the prototype. She presses the stud, and then re-angles the exhaust to point away from her face when it blasts her with dry air. A few drops of water spatter out of the output end and color the stone.

"...huh!" she remarks, releasing her hold on the activator. "Well done. I can see that being really useful."

She holds out the prototype for Aestrix to take, and then clasps her hands. "Now that you've got your first puzzle and reward worked out, is there anything else that you want to make sure to handle before your first Adventurers get here?"

"Thank you! Uh, I think I'd like to dress the place up a bit better first, it looks, um." It looks better than it did when she first began, and there are pretty designs on the floor and a nice domed ceiling above her crystal thingy, and her puzzle door's looking pretty promising, but. ... It's kind of still just a box of sadness. With a little corner of shame that she shunted the blood off into, along with various other debris that she wasn't using at the time. "... I can do better," is what she settles on, instead of the idea that she feels like she'd be greeting guests in her pajamas.

And also she can get in some self defense mechanisms in place with all of the pretty. The nice thing about complicated designs is that you can hide tricky things in them like a little sneak. Pretty and practical! Her favorite.

"Should they, uh, be able to touch the crystal thingy? That seems like it's kind of important," she says, as she carefully starts doing detail work on her room. There will be columns! And, hell, she forgot the name of them but little decorative engraving things, there will be those! She refuses to be an ugly dungeon, it's not allowed. And if she happens to plan for putting super sharp spike traps that drop out of the pretty engravings in case there's an emergency, that's her business, isn't it.

Kose peers around at her aesthetic changes, fiddling with one of her rings.

"The crystal is the nexus of your power, but it isn't you," she claims. "If a dungeon's crystal is disrupted, it will reform over time from the natural energies that pervade the area of a dungeon."

She walks over to stand amicably beside Aestrix's central column. "And for that same reason, it's important to leave access to the crystal unobstructed, so that your energies can flow in and out."

Hello, central, this is Aestrix, we're detecting a high chance of bullshit, over.

Also, saying something alarming like 'the scary dungeon knows how to not die' coincides with Kose messing with her rings, which is very interesting. It doesn't necessarily mean anything, but it's interesting. She super wants to know what those rings are, but she is still being fluffy and innocent, and so she will not look at them. Especially not coincided to when Kose is actively messing with them. Tralala, no pattern recognition here, she is an innocent and fluffy dungeon made out of sweetness and light, and she is not at all concerned that Kose is maybe prepping to murder her if she gets uppity, nope.

"Huh, okay. And if it's disrupted I... lose my ability to do stuff for a while?" she asks, still perfectly innocent. "And the same if I cut it off from, er, myself?"

Kose nods. "Yes, exactly. It also reduces your awareness of what is going on within yourself. But it's not permanently harmful. The only things which can really harm dungeons are large external disasters, like earthquakes, which disrupt the natural confluence of energies."

She sits down and examines the artwork on the ceilings in more detail.

Since she hasn't figured out how to put any spikes into anything yet, there aren't any. For now, it's actually just a pretty pattern. But the floral circular design around the central column holding her crystal thingy is totally going to eventually be built to conceal a shield of some kind. Eventually.

"Good to know. Oh, actually. We totally forgot about directly making things? I absolutely want to make the water purification tube out of better materials, I don't want to accidentally poison anyone while I'm trying to give them clean water."

Innocent. And. Fluffy.

"Yes, of course!" Kose responds, abandoning her investigation of the artwork. "It's actually the same skill that you've been using to move items around. Only instead of pulling a stone out of the wall, for example, you pull it out of the firmament, instead. The firmament is the universal medium that everything is embedded within. One of my previous partners compared it to pulling a rabbit out of a hat, without the hat."

... what.

Uh. Okay??

She. Will pull. A glass version of her prototype (with a slightly larger exhaust hole, she remembered her earlier thoughts) out of. Nothing???

It feels like being out of breath, or like giving blood. The vitality Aestrix had, with which she claimed the corridor area or the space above her core chamber, crystallizes into a glass vessel exactly matching her imagination. It's tiring, but not as bad as it might have been if she had pushed to claim the full corridor.

??????

What the fuck.

She has matter creation powers!! Holy shit! What the fuck!!! Aestrix is fine with this, because who wouldn't be, but she stands by her cursewords! What the fuck!!

"....... huh," she says, blandly, emoting failing her in the face of the physics defying nonsense she can apparently get up to. Well, she was kind of already defying physics, so, uh, this. Is just doing that more directly, she guesses???

... can she tint end of the glass tube that the water will come out of blue? She remembered that was a thing upon looking at it.

She doesn't seem to be able to freely change objects once they are made, except in the normal way that she can reshape everything in her dungeon, but perhaps she could summon individual motes of blue dye inside the glass?

She absolutely wants to do that. But first she should probably locate a... blue dye of some kind. Probably the artificial indigo that made the color blue much more approachable to the general populace? Is that a thing she can summon with her bullshit dungeon material repository, because it's not like she knew the exact chemical composition of glass, either.

So first she attempts to fucking create ahahahahaha a tiny speck of That One Artificial Blue Dye that got invented in the 1900s and opened up the color blue to the general populace. Is that a thing she can do?

Since she has one specific substance with which she's already familiar in mind, yes! A speck of blue appears with the tinyest exhalation of effort.

Good, good. It is correct that she can in fact summon the color blue. Very aesthetically appropriate. It pleases her.

Anyway, this proven, she's going to make just a little bit more and then start gently shoving it into the glass at the appropriate end of the tube. In the center of the glass, away from the bits that touch air, so as not to potentially contaminate her drinking thingy. This sort of thing is probably bad for budgeting of dungeon, uh, extent was it? the power she's using, but she can't bring herself to care. It is worth the investment to avoid accidentally poisoning anyone, and also the blue makes her happy, so nyeh. She made a puzzle without actually using any extent whatsoever, if she needs to budget she can budget.

Once it's appropriately tinted, she'll get to hanging the same magic thing that went onto the stone purifier. She remembers how it goes, it's still really straightforward.

Kose watches her tint the glass, but doesn't say anything, content to let Aestrix focus on magic item crafting.

“Got it,” she says, when it’s all hanging properly. The stone one can get shuffled to the corner of shame, which is being tastefully hidden by one of her carved columns. “Is just this and one puzzle enough to persuade adventurers to come back? It seems a bit of a letdown.”

She goes back to making things pretty. Kose might notice that she’s not particularly attached to anything specific in the overall design; she will often switch colors and shapes to see (well, ‘see’) what looks best before deciding on something.

(So, stainless steel for the crystal thingy defense container? Some sort of carbon fiber might be better, but she’s not sure she could properly visualize it just yet. She does suspect that she can make it perfectly see through and do the kinetic redirection thing, though. Hmmmm…)

"Adventurers are used to new dungeons not having very much set up yet," Kose explains. "They know that you need challengers in order to grow. The first Adventurers are more likely to be worried about figuring out what kind of dungeon you'll be, and exploring so they can see what has changed when they come back."

“Oh. I see. Is there an obvious sign that a new dungeon, uh, started? Call to baby Adventurers, come poke your noses inside and whatnot?”

You know, besides the obvious insider that was planted from the start directly saying that the dungeon is ready now. Besides that.

"The quickening of the energies around a dungeon's entrance is noticeable to people who are sensitive to these things," Kose tells her. "So it generally doesn't take very long for someone to come investigate. But you could also consider creating a monster which makes noise if you want to draw attention. Bugles and gongs are both popular."

Ew. Yeah, no. If she’s doing dungeon music it’ll be good dungeon music, thank you very much. No bugles. None.

“Huh. Okay. Well, I’ll get everything set up for adventurers right now, in case any come by, and see about making another puzzle in the meantime.”

She gets her door in place and sets it to open when the image is restored, and close when scrambled. … hm. But then she might need to solve it herself to open it, after other people mess it up. That sounds annoying. Especially if it’s the door to and from her crystal thingy. Consensual puzzles only, please and thank you.

“Actually, wait, hold on, this one still needs work…”

On the back of the door, she will add a little indentation of a circle. Can she set it up so that it’ll watch the way the circles are moved, and that, when pressed, it will undo all movements to reset to this (solved) orientation of rings?

The magic doesn't like the idea of remembering potentially arbitrary numbers of things. That idea is too complex to stick to the simple material of the door. It looks like she could probably fit "move the rings until they are solved" or a similar simpler framing of the same idea if she changes her framing of the problem.

Hmmm. Fair enough, magic. She wouldn’t want to do that, either. Uh… like asking a computer, given [the way the thing is set up], return to this orientation in the minimum number of moves?

Sure, if she has a general idea of how you would go about doing that -- consider sequences of moves, shorter ones first, until it finds one which would return to that orientation, and then do that. The magic ends up spread out over about half of the back of the door, to embed all the pieces that make a scheme like that work, like knowing what would happen if a particular ring moved, etc.

She absolutely does have a general idea of how to do that. Granted, implementing it is much, much trickier than making the puzzle itself, but then, it would be, wouldn’t it. That’s how puzzles go. Oh so easy to mess up, so much harder to put back together. Also how life goes, really.

“There. Now you will be able to get out if I close it,” she says, when this is done. “And it’ll return to its solved orientation without me having to solve it personally if anyone gives up.”

Kose stands again to inspect the door. "So they have to solve it to come in, but it doesn't have to be solved to go out?" she asks. "And you can personally reset it to the solved position?"

Technically speaking, they are one and the same, but honestly that might be more clever than she wants it to be, so. Uh. Yeah sure, those are definitely two separate things, and she didn’t spend forever essentially magically programming an automatic door solving system to do both at the same time. Yes. Definitely. … damn it, it would have been much easier to just have something disengage the ring reliances and then just solve it. And then just a door open button. Oh well. Too late now. She’s committed.

“Yeah. Trapping anyone inside me,” sounds like it needs a negotiated safe word first, heh, “seems like a terrible idea for everyone involved.”

Kose nods. "Yes, it's a good idea to make sure that Adventurers can retreat if they need to," she agrees.

She gestures around at Aestrix's decorations. "This all looks really good. What are you thinking of for your second puzzle?"

Before Aestrix can respond, however, an older gentleman with traces of silver in his beard peers around the lintel of her partially claimed corridor.

“Something based around stepping on a specific path that - adventurer!!! Oh shit I need to close my door uhhhh and put the thing on an impressive thing and and fuck - one moment please I will be with you soon!!”

Door! Door close! Tube thingy! Onto little altar platform that is somewhat haphazardly placed in between the door and the crystal thingy! It’s fine! It’s all completely fine! She’s going to go see if she can turn stuff invisible in her corner of shame now. She belongs there.

(Probably the adventurer can’t hear her. Hopefully? That would be embarrassing. On the other hand, it’d mean she can only be heard by Kose, which would probably get really lonely really fast. So, uh. She’s of two minds on this topic, and both of them belong in her corner of shame.)

Tanth pulls back, and then re-emerges a second later followed by two other figures -- a young man with a sword and a young woman with a bow and throwing daggers.

"That door looks like a puzzle, but keep your eyes out for an ambush," he tells them, leading the way down the corridor.

The three adventurers look at the door for a moment, and then Tanth steps to the back, turning to watch the corridor.

"What do you think, Pona, Timrat?" he asks.

"It's ... uh, there are carvings?" Pona notes. She reaches out and tries pulling on one of the rings.

It's kinda heavy, but it will in fact turn. One other ring moves exactly in turn with it.

There is, of course, no ambush pending. She is a nice dungeon. She doesn't actually even know how to make any monsters. Probably she could kill them anyway, with the powers of thermodynamics, but still.

(She takes the opportunity to properly center her altar of adventurer offering. Since, uh. Yeah. She is... now too nervous to play with invisibility, actually. Is. Is her puzzle a good one. Will they like it. Will it feed her the nutritional energy she needs to survive????)

"They turn," Pona notes, grunting at the effort required to turn the dials.

Timrat pulls out a palm-sized clay tablet from inside one of his pockets, and makes a few marks on it with a stylus. "Try moving each one," he requests.

The presence of the adventurers feels like being compressed, or maybe wound tight light a spring. She can't quite tell if she has more energy yet, but their attempt is definitely doing something.

Aaaaaaaaa she should totally be working on seeing if she can do invisibility or how to put up a little shield around her core in case they try to kill her or or or something but instead she is ANXIOUS and and and probably she has ensured her own survival by making a really genuinely useful thing!!! It's probably fine!!!! They will almost certainly want to milk her for more of her thing!!!! She probably doesn't even need to have spikes in her ceiling or anything!!!!!! It's FINE.

Pona and Timrat spend some time turning circles and figuring out which ones are linked. They definitely don't do so in an optimal way, but they do eventually manage to work around to the solved configuration after a few false starts.

And without any kind of fanfare, the door opens to a very pretty room. Inside is a lot of abstract art, and one little glass tube thing on a pedestal. And the dungeon's crystal core thingy, on another pedestal beyond it.

Aestrix herself has started anxiety sorting any carbon out of the ambient stone in her corner of shame. It will go in a little carbon pile, located in same. Maybe she'll make it into a diamond at some point or something. It's fine. It's all fine. Everything is fine and she is especially fine.

Tanth rotates the group so that he can be the first one through the opened door and into the room. He sweeps over the interior of the room, paying especial attention to making sure nothing is hiding behind the columns.

"Greetings, clever Adventurers!" Kose proclaims. "Your reward for your ingenuity is an artifact which pulls pure drinking water from foul water," she continues, gesturing towards the platform.

Tanth jerks his head at Timrat, who steps forward to pick up their prize. He turns it over in his hands, marveling at it.

"Thank you," Tanth replies, nodding his head respectfully. "It was a most clever puzzle. We don't often see such sophisticated puzzles so early in a dungeon's life."

Kose smiles, but says nothing.

Timrat and Pona bow, and the adventurers turn to leave.

"Thanks," she says, a little shyly. But definitely pleased. Granted, that sentence was maybe a bit loaded and meant something like 'this one is smart, Kose, watch yourself,' but still. She likes being clever.

There are absolutely no ambushes on the way out, either! It is all entirely innocent. She is such a nice and fluffy dungeon.

(And if she was considering whether or not she could launch tiny carbon pebbles at the speed of sound through all intruders without hitting her own core, that's her own damn business.)

Pona waves shyly at her on her way out, and then the adventurers are gone.

As they leave, Aestrix feels like she just got a shot of energy, or a second-wind. She feels as though she regained the energy she used to make the water-purifier and then some.

Eeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! SHE IS A GOOD DUNGEON!!!

"Can they hear me?" she wonders, after they've gone, because she never actually confirmed it. She was too busy, uh, plotting what to do if this became a situation where she needed to defend herself.

"They can hear you," Kose confirms. "Dungeons vary a lot in how talkative they are, though. So dungeon fairies such as myself handle the most critical greeting-Adventurers part while they get comfortable. If you're already feeling comfortable talking to the Adventurers, you can do the little reward speech when the next ones come! That was a good reward for the level of danger, so I'm certain they'll be spreading the word to other Adventuring parties."

"Oh, good, okay," they totally heard her flailing oh no, "then I should make some more of the little water filter things in case any others come by." She gets to making more of those, out of glass, again. This time with the water end already tinted blue. It's not too difficult, so she can talk while doing it. "Uh, so I was thinking a centralized chamber with offshoots into various puzzle rooms? And each puzzle room offers a different prize. And I will have my crystal thing off to the side or dramatically overlooking things, or something. Less, uh, in the direct path of the adventuring."

Kose nods thoughtfully. "That could be nice. It might even let you have several groups tackling different puzzles simultaneously," she notes. "Do you want to do a little diagram of what you mean by dramatically overlooking the puzzles?"

"Yeah, sure, so -"

She grabs a bit of stone, floats it over and flattens it. Then she makes a little star to mark her crystal, then draws the corners of a box around it. (And the protective covering is either there all of the time or slides into place when she tells it to, depending.) Then around that, she digs out a donut shape, and from there she adds little branching paths that will eventually contain puzzles.

"That. Basically. The little symbol in the middle being my crystal thing." And the whole setup to continue to be nice, and fluffy, and pretending to totally buy the bullshit that is being offered to her without so much as a cursory whiff.

Kose smiles. "I think that looks lovely," she remarks. "Do you think you could work in a little room near your crystal for me to stay in until it's time for me to move on to the next dungeon?"

“Sure, I could probably just put it directly under. The wings mean you can fly, right, I went with up because of the wings,” liar liar it’s because it was dramatic and you know it, you liar, “and you could easily get there but adventurers would have a harder time of it.”

"I'm not the most graceful person in the air," Kose replies. "But I think that works. That was very thoughtful," she praises.

"Thank you!" Damn it, now she feels bad, she wasn't actually thoughtful at all, she was being a lying liar who lies. This is why she's so bad at lying!!! And why she's better at it without a face to express with!!! This is a horrible thing to acquire, she didn't want to become better at lying, even if it's actually really useful in this specific circumstance!!

"But I probably can't afford claiming all of that at once, so. Baby steps around my crystal. Mm. Do you know any magical items that people would really want?"

"Certainly!" she replies.

Kose can list many examples of things which are useful: firestarters, weapons that have special effects like conjuring arrows or setting things on fire, armor that projects shields, amulets that warn of danger, paired devices that permit communication over long distances, devices which can evaluate how worn another piece of magic is, things for seeing far distances (or at night), and lots more.

Honestly, Aestrix is fine being directed at these things. Well, not so much the violent ones that seem like they're for dungeon delving. She kind of wants to have a better feel for what her fellow dungeons are doing before she'll happily hand out weapons that could kill them, but the others are fine. The firestarter's even straightforward, she is pretty sure she can just figure out how to make a mechanical lighter given time and materials, no magic required.

"Communication devices first I think, that seems really straightforward? ... Do they need to be just paired, because I think I can likely pull off a set." This would be much easier if she understood how to make a goddamned radio, but she does not, so uh. Magic radio it is. "Where if you talk into one it goes to all of the others. It even pairs well with what I had planned for the next puzzle."

"A set with more than two items is definitely useful," Kose agrees. "The difficulty with making paired items in larger sets is just that you have to keep the function of all the devices in mind as you're making them, which is harder with more items."

That... doesn't sound very hard at all, but possibly her brain has been hacked by the wonders of industrialization and mass production.

"Hm. All right. I'll think about design for them as I make expansions."

She can start reaching out to grab areas; for now, she'll fork her corridor off into what will be her next puzzle. While she's at it, she'll widen and deepen the corridor itself, reinforcing the wall and ceiling as she goes. Arches are more stable than rectangles, so she'll go with that for now for the ceiling. At some point she might venture into the land of fancy architecture with flying buttresses and whatnot, but for now, she will just make sure that she doesn't accidentally collapse the corridor during her expansions. Oh, and, she's moving the ring puzzle door. It's going out in the wall of the it's-really-not-a-corridor anymore to reveal a little alcove, which will then contain the associated prize. This means that she's without a door again, but, well. She can put a couple of walls around her crystal thingy. Not anything that might freak out her fairy chaperone, she'll leave a lot of open space, but so that there is some kind of protective anything around it. Just the corners of the (domed, she has a theme going now, okay) box, arched together to hold a ceiling, the rest open to the air.

Kose nonchalantly ensures that she is standing next to Aestrix's core as she makes the changes to the core room, but is otherwise content to watch Aestrix move things around.

Aestrix has definitely noticed how Kose seems to hang out in theoretical smashing distance to the core whenever she's doing something that might become alarming. She really doesn't like it!! She would kind of like if Kose would chill with the plausible threats of murder for a bit!!! Could you give her some space, please!

Anyway, she will try very hard to ignore the person who is maybe doing the equivalent of standing over her with a knife at the ready, in favor of redecorating. She has all of these nice wooden pillars she can replace with (prettier, and also stronger) stone ones, made from all of this ceiling and floor she's eating! The original pillars can get picked up and shuffled into her core room for Shenanigans later, which is also very important. There's a bit of a weird transition from the corridor she hasn't eaten to what she has, but, well. Growing pains or something. She marks the entrance to Her Lair (tm) with a pointed arch. Then, because she's herself, she immediately gets distracted implementing a gothic-style pointed archway setup all down the corridor, and then also into her core room. Her major concern besides making a pretty thing is structural stability, but being a dungeon means that seeing what is structurally sound is... more obvious than it would be as a little flesh person. There is a reason gothic architecture does the thing it does, and it's not just to look pretty, it's because it's structurally sound. So she follows the path that was walked by her forefathers to their destination, with a little bit of guidance from dungeon bullshit.

Perfectly centered between some of her columns goes the puzzle door, and a little (tastefully in theme) alcove containing the designated loot. Between another set of columns on the other side of the corridor is her expansion for the other puzzle room, but she's not going to knock down that wall there until it's ready for viewing. Instead she'll just quietly start tracing in abstract, artful patterns to the floor. And have some real actual space for experimenting with invisibility, which she will totally do eventually, no really, just as soon as she finishes this complicated floor pattern. Which will definitely happen sometime soon, for sure.

... The end result is kind of like a church leading directly to her crystal thingy, but, uh. Oops. She'll. She'll fix that. It won't stay that way, okay, promise? Do not worship her.

"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.

"Yeah! And if they touch any incorrect ones it resets."

"Hmm. That makes sense!" she agrees. "A puzzle of memory and dexterity. Is that the full puzzle, or are there any hidden pieces?"

Kose makes no particular move to complete the puzzle herself.

"Nope, that's the full puzzle. Do you think it's enough, or I should add other stuff to it??"

While Kose is busy being distracted, Aestrix will take this opportunity to create and install the stainless steel tube, off in her core room, set inside the pedestal itself. It's not very big, but it's wide enough to fully encompass her crystal thing. She makes a small cover to place overtop of the cylinder if she so happens to need it. The mention of magic sensing items kind of implies that the best way to hide something here is just genuine subterfuge, not any clever tricks with invisibility. Even though, no really, she does want to play with that, just as soon as her to-do list stops growing exponentially.

"No, I think that looks like a full challenge," she agrees. She turns to walk back into the core room, up the little flight of stairs which Aestrix added. "Hopefully the Adventurers will be back soon and we can get a better idea of how it will work in practice."

"Yeah. What do you want in your room, by the way? I don't think I have the spare extent to make it yet, I kind of... uh, spent it on materials, sorry, but. I want to make some place you'll like!"

"Don't worry about it!" Kose replies. "I'm used to it taking a little while before my partner can make me a room. Usually, I like to ask for just a little sleeping nook with a soft bed."

She ponders for a moment. "Do you think you could do decorations like my dress? Like a faux-vine curtain, a leaf bed-spread, etc."

"Ooo!! Yeah, I bet I can! That'd probably be a good place to put the wood, too." It is of course still sitting there awkwardly, in a pile. She has mostly been sourcing her carbon from the large amount of dirt she hasn't been able to put to much use.

"What would you use the wood for?" she asks. "Part of the structure of the bed, or decoration?"

"Decoration, but I can add it to the bed too, if you like? I'm open to suggestions. It'll be your room, it can be whatever you want."

Kose isn't very picky about designs, but that's mostly because she usually does her own decoration of her room. Aestrix is unusually good at putting together pretty rooms, so she's willing to give it a shot. They discuss floorplans and materials. They're talking about designs for a wooden writing desk when the next set of adventurers poke their heads in.

"... out for anything threatening," Tanth says, leading a pair of women older than himself.

"Oh, don't baby us, Tanth," one of the women complains. "We were adventuring in dungeons when you were still in nappies. We know very well what to look out for. I'm just glad we can be of use doing something other than spinning for once."

Oh man, you know what dungeon powers would be so incredibly good at? Spinning yarn. And thread. And then weaving textiles. She thought that when she first got them and she still does, thank you, just. ... She's a bit too nervous to bring this up yet. Look, they're strangers, and she's shy. She'll just be oh so quiet and watch. And notify Kose that they're here, but still. So quiet!!!!!

Kose moves to watch their progress from the door of the core room.

The adventurers examine the picture of the puzzle floor, with its selected tiles, and then walk past it into the room itself.

The old woman who has not spoken yet turns and gives Tanth a smack on the arm. "Ha! You picked the wrong people for a challenge like this, my lad. I don't think my old bones are up for hopping across a floor like this."

"I'll keep watch," the first woman offers, turning to watch the rest of the dungeon.

The second woman plants herself in front of the map and starts describing tiles to Tanth, who takes up the task of stepping between them. Occasionally she leans her head into the doorway to get a better view of where Tanth is.

They have a few false starts -- "No, the squiggly one. Did your mother never teach you what a squiggle looks like ..." -- but eventually manage to guide Tanth through stepping on all and only the selected tiles.

Aestrix giggles quietly, where only Kose can hear her, at the banter.

After the puzzle is complete, the door to the alcove containing their prizes opens. Normally, she'd push past her social anxiety to properly congratulate them, because she has a sense of dramatics and wants to fulfill the aesthetic properly, but. ... It seems tactically smarter to be shy. More nonthreatening. Much closer to the good shy cute nerd who just wants to hide in a corner and make pretty things and neat artifacts.

"Congratulations," she says softly, all shy awkwardness. "I, um. Made communication artifacts as a reward. Kose, can you, erm. Explain how to work them, please?"

The funny part is that she does sincerely want to go hide in a corner, too. Just, well, this is not how she usually tackles her social anxiety. It's kind of weird to lean into it instead of away from it.

Kose takes one of the pendants, and shows them the shutter and the diamond channel selection.

"And more pendants can be added in later," she mentions, giving Tanth a significant look. "The dungeon isn't sure how long they will last, exactly, but since more can be added in, it shouldn't be too much of a problem to come get new ones when they wear out."

Tanth strokes his beard. "Quite remarkable," he agrees. "A very useful reward. We should go test them to ensure they work as expected."

"I want one of those water purifiers my granddaughter got," the second woman interjects. "You know I have my doubts about my well."

"You're well is fine," the other woman tells her, rolling her eyes.

"I ... suppose we can take a look at the first puzzle as well," Tanth agrees.

The second woman quickly declares that moving the rings is too difficult for her and gets Tanth to do it.

While the others occupied, the first woman quietly addresses Kose and Aestrix. "You'll have to forgive Tanth, he has no manners," she tells them. "I'm Lomon. My mother always said that people are either beautiful, or they have a lovely personality. My friend Rokat over there is the good-looking one."

   "I heard that!"

"Anyway, it's good to see a dungeon that doesn't jump straight in with the monsters. I like your arches. Very decorative."

Aestrix giggles at this banter, too, but this time where they can hear her.

"Thank you!" she says brightly. Ah, yes, the 'ask a nerd about her favorite topic' in, now she has a good reason to display a personality besides 'shy.' "Also structurally sound! The weight is distributed well so that it can better hold things up. ... Should I make the ring puzzle easier to move? For in the future?"

"No, no, it's good for him to get his exercise," Lomon responds. "If he weren't here I'm certain that Rokat and I could cooperate to shift them just fine."

She leans in to whisper "Personally, I think she just enjoys bossing him around."

Snort!

"I do get that impression," she agrees, just as softly, with a little giggle.

Lomon straightens back up, glancing at the others to see how much progress they're making on retrieving the water purifier.

"The light-up floor seems simple enough," she remarks. "With testing dexterity and communication. But what gave you the idea for rings that move each other? I don't think I've encountered anything like that."

Years of video game puzzles. That's it, that's the reason.

"Really? Huh. It seems like it'd be straightforward, to me? I wanted to make something that would reveal a pretty thing I made, but if I didn't have the rings move each other at all, it seems like it'd be too easy? It's obvious the way every ring is supposed to go. So I had to make the difficulty in how someone would reach the answer they knew was right." She hums thoughtfully. "... I guess I wanted to make it like... like making magical items is for me? Because I find that a fun challenge. I know what I want it to be, but the implementation is the hard part."

Lomon nods thoughtfully for a moment, but whatever she was going to say is interrupted by a triumphant cry from Rokat as the rings slip into alignment. She turns to look at them, and then walks over to peer into the revealed alcove.

Kose looks at Aestrix's core for a moment, and then walks over to congratulate them and explain the function of the purifier.

…? Why the strange look from Kose?

…. Oh, uh. She made the puzzle before she made the purifier. Shit. Fuck. This is why lying is the worst. Also, you know, the various bits about ruining trust and whatnot but. Needing to keep all of your lies straight with an actual real timeline of events.

Well, nothing for it now. Except some self hatred for how stupid she definitely is.

Once they have been briefed on the function of the purifier, the adventurers make their way back out, with a certain amount of cajoling from Tanth. As they step past her threshold, Aestrix receives another burst of energy.

"Tanth promised they would test the pendants and let us know how well they last," she says, walking back up to Aestrix's core.

"Okay! ... I guess I should probably make something for measuring the power left in them. Does that sound like a magic item they'd like?"

Kose nods. "The only alternative for really testing magic items is using them to exhaustion, carefully noting how long that takes," she responds. "And since every magic item is a little different, that doesn't give a totally reliable estimate."

"Makes sense. Hmmm. How do they look after they've started degrading? I think I might need a comparison point, I haven't seen one that is partially exhausted or completely out of power."

"That makes sense," Kose agrees. "Unfortunately, magic items don't wear down inside of dungeons. Something about your natural energies reinforce the magic."

She glances down at her rings, and picks out one from her left hand, set with a yellow stone.

"Here -- this one is a simple light. I think I've used it outside a dungeon enough that it should be partially worn down."

She holds the ring out on her palm, for Aestrix to examine.

"Even ones made by other dungeons? That's neat."

But, yeah, she'll get to peering at this one ring in particular. Does it look... faded now, or something??

The magic has started to tug free of the ring, like a favorite sweater that starts getting pilly and shedding fibers until it wears away at the elbows. The concept of light hangs off the ring like stuffing starting to work its way through the seams of a well-worn stuffed animal.

"Oh I see..." she muses, as she looks at this. Well, this is easy enough to fix; she does so. It's just reinforcing the concepts that are already there, and smoothing out the rough edges that have started to come apart. Tie everything back down, nice and tidy, and then press it back flat against the material of the ring, so it doesn't start to wiggle loose again.

"... Well, it's really easy to fix if it's just started... I'm going to call it fraying? Which is to say, oops, I fixed your ring. I think I can make a magic item to see magic items, though, this was very helpful, thank you!"

Kose blinks, and then returns the ring to its place on her finger.

"I ... didn't know that fixing a magic item was possible, short of disenchanting it completely and putting new magic in from scratch," she admits. "How does that work?"

"Hmm... sort of like... smoothing out thread? And tightening the anchors it already has." It's kind of a pity she can't shrug. "Honestly, if there are a lot of magical items that fray like this, I'd be happy to just fix up any that adventurers bring to me. It's really, really easy, and kind of. ... Nice to do? Restful?"

Also really goddamned helpful, she bets, but. It is in fact also restful. Nice mindless work of Putting Things In Order.

Kose sits against the wall of the core room and lets her head slump back against the stone. She is silent for a moment, and then takes a deep breath and lifts her head to address Aestrix.

"I ... that would be wonderful," she agrees. "Adventurers often have old magic items that are worn out or nearly so. Often they keep them as family heirlooms. We can make the offer when they come back with the results of testing the pendants."

She notices her hands are trembling very slightly, and folds them neatly in her lap.

"Okay. Sounds good. ... Are you all right? Should I work on your room sooner rather than later? I have the slack for it, now."

If her read of Kose is right... that's a mix of relief and probably terror. Yeah uh. That's incredibly valid. Possibly it was a mistake to display this much competence, but, look, she can't really bring herself to regret offering people an end to a type of scarcity.

"I'm fine," she replies, a little too quickly. "But it's very kind of you to ask."

She breathes out. "Yes, I think it would be nice to look at my room. And that would let us stop using your core room for wood storage," she continues.

Aestrix snorts. "Yeah. The pile of wood is a bit of an eyesore, isn't it."

So she gets to building Kose's room. As promised, it's directly below her core room, with a set of stairs winding around the core itself and down to it. The room itself is rectangular, and Kose's bed is set into the stone directly below the core itself. The idea is to put Kose at ease about how totally vulnerable to killing she is (don't mind the foot thick slab of stainless steel she's putting in between the two, hidden in the stone) and to justify putting protections over the whole area later. See, she's protecting her dungeon fairy, that's all it is. Along with that, there's a wooden writing desk whose sides are made of interlocking arches that evoke tree branches, and a wooden shelf in the same theme. There's a door out to the main corridor of the dungeon, divided from the corridor itself by a curtain of (fake) vines, and a leaf-themed rug on the floor. It's a bit empty for Aestrix's taste, but this is what Kose asked for, and the walls are nicely decorated, with lots of (fake) flora nestled in the lovingly detailed designs.

Plus, there's a surprise. Across from the shelf is a planter, also set into the stone, and filled with some of that dirt that Aestrix keeps having too much of. She'd asked, and Kose had been cautiously desirous of real, actual plants, but resigned to their inevitable death in underground conditions. So, it's of Aestrix's opinion that clearly the only thing to do is to figure out how to make a magic sunlamp, and let her fairy/chaperone have literally any real part of the outside in here.

"So I don't have any seeds or any real idea how to make them," she informs Kose as she shows her the room, "but I bet I can rig up a magic light that'll act like a sun, so you can grow whatever you'd like. If you want to."

Kose sits on the bed, and looks up through the ceiling.

"I think plants don't usually do well under magical lights," she warns. "But if you could manage that, it would be wonderful."

She runs her feet along the rug.

"This is a really nice room! Thank you for making it for me," she continues. "Do you think I could have a moment to myself to admire it?" she asks.

“You’re welcome! Rest well.”

She’s a little too nervous about having displayed such skill and competence to do much of use, but. She’ll add in reinforcements around her core room (hidden by stone) and do general touch ups around the dungeon. Like re-doing her first puzzle to make it better programmed, because it’s been bugging her a bit, okay.

Kose walks around her room for a bit, casually running her fingers over the various surfaces. When she is satisfied she lies down on her bed for a moment, facing into the alcove.

"We need to talk," she whispers. "I'll brief you, and then you need to call a vote. The dungeon ..."

When she emerges a few minutes later, she is smiling again.

"The room is nice," she tells Aestrix as she makes her way into the core room. "I like it. Do you have any ideas for your next puzzle?" she asks.

"Thank you! I'm glad you like it." Jury's still out on if she's about to be murdered or not, but that sounds like a thing she should not think about too hard! Probably she's too valuable to kill immediately after only milking her for five magical items in total! (Three communication pendants, and two of the water purifiers.) That just seems like a pathetic amount of loot to her gamer mind, okay.

Anyway, on to thoughts safer for the role she's playing. She's 100% going to steal a puzzle premise from an app that she played regularly. And also plotting out how she'll do her magical item that sees magical items. Honestly, the magical item creation is more fun than the puzzles; can't she just set up a gym or something for the squishy humans, let them challenge themselves without her needing to do anything...? Bah. Not enough trust built up for that sort of thing, probably. Maybe one day.

"I was thinking... something about connecting lines of color on a 2-D surface without intersecting them? Different motes of color need to be connected across a... probably set of tiles, hexagons sounds too complicated, and each tile can only be one color at a time. Does that make sense? I might need to just show you what I mean, it's pretty visual..."

"Hmm. Connect motes of color with lines of ... paint?" she guesses. "I haven't heard of a dungeon with a painting challenge, but it could be a good test of skill and dexterity."

"Sort of like paint, yeah. I'll begin making a space for it, hold on." This doesn't need to be a whole room, and she wants the magic-sight items to be easy to get, so she'll just be putting this in an alcove, like the water purifier.

More importantly:

"Also, I have a plan for the next magical item!! I don't think I can do something that'll show what things do, exactly, not easily, but I can just make something that'll sort of... overlay what I see? Which would let people see magical things, and how frayed they are, and how complicated they are, and what... parts of them are important to keep safe? What physical parts are the anchors of the rest of the magic."

"That sounds fascinating!" Kose enthuses. "Some of my previous dungeons have made things like dowsing wands that react to concentrations of magic, which can be helpful for experimental thaumaturgy. But being able to see the structure of magic would just be ... such a large boon to the study of magic."

She walks over to the forming alcove to watch.

"Well then, now I've gotta, that sounds fun. I want to hear what clever things people think of," she says brightly. Noting that, also, it would be very good for locating weaknesses in things dungeons make, and probably therefore really really good for the squishy humans. She'll have to make sure it can't see too far into solid objects, with how much she hides things deep in stone. Anyway, right, yes, puzzle making.

What she ends up making is more like a two dimensional coordinate system than a set of proper tiles. Shallow grooves are carved in a tidy grid onto the door, enchanted to light up in the corresponding color to small markers that are set into, and slide along, the grooves. Each marker will be a different color, and if any differing colors intersect, the line of light that is cut off will correspondingly be, well, cut off. The line that was there previously will go out, even at corners; there will be no color touching whatsoever. From there, she makes little 'start' and 'end' resting points at different grid intersection points, which she will for simplicity's sake call eyelets, accordingly decorated to match their associated color. Each marker can go in one eyelet to start, to imply that it needs to also get to the matching one. This all set up, she carefully weaves the logic into the door such that she can easily move the start and end points around, and that it'll only open when all start and end points are connected by their colored light. This is to continue her theme of stuff that she can easily change without too much trouble, because again: she does not want to be stuck having to reprogram/impress this puzzle all over again now that she's done it the once. Much tidier to let it be solved in various different configurations that she only barely has to pay attention to in order to reset. Oh, and for good measure: the eyelets will only accept the marker of the appropriate color.

It's definitely not as difficult to complete as the one for the communication pendants, and there are multiple solutions to the same puzzle, but it's supposed to be easier.

"What do you think, pretty straightforward? I don't think this needs a whole room like the last one."

Kose examines one of the markers, trying to pick it up, and then just sliding it along between the tiles when it proves to be attached.

"So the Adventurer would use these pens to draw colored lines between these rings?" she asks. "That does seem pretty straightforward. What happens if they make a mistake?"

“When the colors cross, the crossed one disappears. I suppose I can also make it so that when the marker is put back at the start, it’ll reset that color? Hmmm…” That sounds a bit trickier to program, though. Is it worth it for ease of user access? Unclear.

“Or maybe just something to reset everything to the start would be easier...” It would, in fact, be easier to program.

She nods. "I see, that makes sense."

Kose adopts a thoughtful look and runs one of the markers around in a square, trying to cross its line with itself.

Ha, joke’s on you, Kose, she was expecting that kind of shit! The line does not disappear. She now has a glowing square.

Meanwhile, Aestrix will see about making a reset button. It can go above the grid, in easy reach, and she has the technology to make it an actual button.

“Reset button made. It won’t put the markers back, though, just reset the board to blank.”

"What happens if you leave the markers outside their rings when you reset?" she asks, returning her marker to its ring and stepping back from the puzzle.

"It certainly seems like a solid puzzle design to me," she continues.

“You’d just start drawing with that color from there. The eyelets still need to be connected, though, it doesn’t actually matter where the markers themselves are. Start and end points are arbitrary, really. But I’m glad you like it!”

Kose smiles at her. "You seem to have a knack for puzzle-creation," she agrees. "Have you thought about whether it makes sense to organize the puzzles in some way? Like grouping them by general mechanism instead of by order of creation?" she asks, making her way back to the core room, where she sits against one of the walls.

“Thank you! I haven’t yet, no. With three I don’t really have enough to organize. I think if I were organizing now it’d be by type of magical item, not the puzzle itself? That seems like what Adventurers would actually care about, being here for the shiny prizes. Though I guess there would be puzzles that are more doable by some groups than others…”

"The light-up-floor is clearly meant to be a group puzzle, but the other two seem as though a solo Adventurer could work through them," Kose observes. "Do you have thoughts about other group puzzles?"

“Technically the group puzzle can be solved by someone throwing things with really good aim, but yeah. It’s meant for a group. I think other group puzzles should probably all have their own rooms to let Adventurers solve it without distractions? As to specific puzzles, maybe… timing or something? I want to have the next magical item before I start making another puzzle, though, I haven’t actually made the magic viewing item for the latest puzzle yet.”

Kose nods. "Entirely reasonable. I'll stop distracting you, then."

“They’re good questions, just if I don’t reliably give out prizes, Adventurers won’t trust me to be fair,” she agrees, but then yep: on to making the next magical item.

‘Programming’ it is actually incredibly straightforward. When it’s activated, it’ll show a less complicated version of what she sees; little glowing lines of where concepts are anchored in space. To differentiate where one item ends and another begins, she’ll color the threads by order of appearance; moving right to left after being activated, it’ll go through ROYGBV (no indigo, because it’s not a real color, it was made up by some jerk that arbitrarily wanted seven colors. … admittedly all colors are arbitrary, but indigo is in this system extra arbitrary, okay, so it’s not allowed in this club.) and then back to R for red. This is not how the color spectrum actually works, but the human eye doesn’t know that, so. Tidy rainbow circle.

The next part is entirely self inflicted. See, she wants to make it something like a scroll, so it can easily be folded up and then brought out and unrolled to view things through the ‘screen.’ Which means she needs to get into textile weaving. Preferably a textile that can also be seen through, but she needs something strong enough to stand up to miscellaneous adventuring, so… what would that be. Glass fiber of some kind? Introduce this world to the horrors of microplastics?? Ooo, ooo, spider silk, she can totally do spider silk!

Soon enough, she has something workable. It’s essentially a little roll of fabric, set in a tube, with the ability to unroll several feet. On/off is marked by a rod at the pulled end, which can be clicked into two different positions. Up is on, down is off. Easy. It does not, of course, show magical things that are set more than three inches inside of solid material. She needs some way to have secrets here, okay.

“What do you think, pretty practical?” she asks Kose, when she’s done.

Kose gently unrolls it, figures out how to switch it on, and then looks around with the device.

"I suppose that the spell was too big to fit on a pair of glasses?" she remarks. "You might have better luck with brass -- it's good for holding magic."

Glasses. Why didn’t she think of… glasses are so obvious!!! She even wore them! She’s such a dumbass!!!

“I… didn’t think of glasses,” she admits, embarrassed. “Um. Why don’t I. Attempt to make those instead, how about.”

Kose looks up from the scroll. "Oh! Um, I didn't mean," she begins. "I mean, having a larger viewing area is probably good for collaboration. So a large version will be useful too."

"Glasses sound way more practical, though! I can't believe I didn't think of that!! ... I'll have this be the current prize and then go also make glasses, how about. This will be... iteration one. Of magical item viewing. Two will be glasses."

Kose nods. "That makes sense," she agrees. She finishes surveying the dungeon through the scroll, and rolls it back up to be set in the alcove.

(There is, for the record, totally some magic showing through the scroll. The various archways are all magically reinforced, and obviously the puzzles show up as magical. But otherwise, it all looks very innocent. It even actually is mostly very innocent. All of her secret things are set deep into stone.)

The scroll is put away, and the door to the alcove is closed, and then Aestrix will see about. Making some glasses. That do the same exact thing. She'll see about using brass for the frames, how about. Can she totally cram this exact same thing into a pair of glasses without too much trouble?

It's a bit of a complex idea, and her first attempts see the concept come unwound from the glasses. But if she uses slightly chunky frames, and tucks the idea into them just so, she can produce an appropriately ensorcelled pair of glasses.

.... okay, but these are ugly.

How about if she experiments with different materials, do those have better results?

Titanium does not work nearly as well. It seems as though concepts are somewhat easier to impress on it, but that they find it correspondingly easier to wiggle free.

Steel works somewhat better. It is just barely easier to imprint concepts on than brass, but it offers many more points and areas around which to tangle the magic. If she focuses, she might realize that it's the carbon inclusions in the alloy that lend the magic its fastness.

Copper doesn't work particularly well at all.

Gold works noticeably better. It takes a bit more mental force to make the metal accept the magic, but once it does, the magic settles in and becomes difficult to budge.

Silver works a bit better than copper, but worse than gold.

Platinum is interesting. The idea of seeing the magic sticks to platinum well enough, but the idea of organizing and colorizing the results sticks very well. The idea of colors just seems to fit neatly into the metal, almost clicking into place.

... Huh! That's all really interesting. She makes the mental note to use platinum for organizing and coloring things, because she knows herself and she's going to use that so much, and then she'll start poking at some alloys. Probably what she's going to end up with is some sort of complicated interconnected machine thing with different bits of metal doing different things, sort of like what she did with the communication pendants.

Electrum! Invar! Actual iron, because she totally skipped that because for some reason she thinks of steel before iron! Bronze! Uh... Tin and nickel and zinc by themselves, she hadn't thought of those, wow she's not very good at remembering either alloys or the periodic table. Her minecraft mod knowledge is running a bit dry. Um. Shit, this is hard. Gold alloyed with various other metals? Including platinum?

Electrum works better than gold -- allowing her to get the glasses pretty thin, if not yet down to wire-frame sizes.

Invar seems like it should work really well (and it almost beats gold), but the concepts are too ... bendy, for lack of a better word. If they were just slightly stiffer, they might click into place the way these ideas did with platinum.

Iron works about as well as stone, actually. Better than copper, otherwise not remarkably special.

Bronze performs similarly to brass, but slightly worse overall.

Tin works somewhat like platinum -- the magic does the same 'clicking' into place -- but it's much easier for magic to work itself loose, so it ends up being comparable to steel.

Nickel doesn't quite to the same thing. It ends up being even worse than copper on its own.

Zinc doesn't have special affinity with the magic at all, but it does do a bit better than copper. Something about it feels smoother than some of the other metals.

To summarize, her researches have produced the following ordered list of compatibilities for this specific magic: nickel, copper, zinc, titanium, stone, iron, silver, bronze, brass, steel, tin, gold, invar, electrum, platinum.

She’s going to need to take notes. Probably where Kose can’t see, because literacy seems like it’d be really alarming from a dungeon. So, uh. One of her walls, but on the opposite side from what adventurers and fairies see. In her puzzle room, that’s nicely out of the way. And she’s definitely going to keep a little material library to test with. If only she could make a proper spreadsheet. Alas, she’ll just have to do the best she can with her bullshit dungeon powers.

So, there is something of a pattern, so far; alloys perform better than pure minerals. Interestingly, the combinations will often do much better than the sum of their mineral parts. For example, nickel is kind of garbage on its own, but in invar it’s one of the best she’s found so far. ‘Best’ also seems to be relative, it feels like some materials are better at holding certain concepts than others.

Unrelated to her glasses project, but in the interests of science, can she enchant invar with something like ‘strength’? Or maybe that kinetic redirection idea she had?

"Strength" is interesting. It takes reasonably well to the general idea. How does she test the behavior of the strengthened material?

Kinetic reduction doesn't want to click at first, but if she tries some variations on the theme she will quickly discover that invar is well suited to turning it into heat. In fact, a chunk of invar enchanted to resist motion generally will fall slowly, as though falling through a strong magnetic field, and become ever so slightly hotter as it does so.

Oh, damn. She’s going to need to make a secret experimental lab space, isn’t she. She can’t actually test this properly at all. Mrrrrh. That’ll need to wait until she’s got more slack to work with, she’s kind of blowing a lot of her budget on materials. Again.

She will make the note that invar seems correlated to heat in her sadly-not-an-actual-spreadsheet, and then she’ll go back to fairy approved projects. Platinum was one of the best metals for this particular type of magic, so: how does it do when it’s alloyed with, er. For lack of a better idea she’ll go for strength. Iron, and carbon, and titanium, in little separate experiments that she can directly compare to one another.

…. Oh, and separately, she should make and add aluminum to her library. As it occurs to her, because she wants to do that before she forgets that it exists or something.

Platinum/iron gives her an alloy that does slightly better than plain platinum. But it stops 'clicking' with the magic as well. It still does, but the click has less ... depth to it, maybe? She gets the feeling that there is some other concept which this alloy would take readily.

Platinum/carbon works very well! The magic clicks just as well with the platinum, but she can wind it around the carbon to secure it much more tightly, letting her pack it into quite stylish frames. If she thinks to do a drop-test, though, she will note that platinum/carbon is fairly brittle compared to other metals.

Platinum/titanium also works quite well. The magic clicks, she can wind around the titanium inclusions, and the overall strength is comparable to other metals. She can make a hard-wearing yet thin-rimmed and light pair of glasses with this mixture.

Aluminum is weird. It feels in some ways like a metal, and in some ways almost like ... very smooth wood? It reacts strangely to the magic, casting ghostly shadows around the visible images. She gets the same feeling that it would take very well to something that isn't this.

Note: aluminum is weird. To test later, possibly when she has a proper mad scientist lair.

She does totally think to do a small drop test (in her puzzle room, away from prying fairies) to figure out which of her platinum alloys is stronger, and then promptly crowns platinum/titanium the winner of this contest. She can probably make a set of pretty-enough glasses with just the frames, but, hm. The lenses are part of this construct too, aren't they? She should start testing types of glass. She.... knows next to nothing about types of glass. Shit. Um. Well, can she lean on how completely bullshit her matter conjuration abilities are, and aim specifically for the glass used in her specific set of glasses that she really actually wore, and, uh, what's that one super famous baking glassware... Pyrex! Can she cheat outrageously and summon Pyrex?

If she is familiar enough with Pyrex to know what distinguishes it from other types of glass, yes!

Pyrex feels like it has some of the same thing going on that invar does. But it otherwise isn't very suited to holding magic, being unable to hold very much before other bits start coming lose.

The glass her glasses were made of -- or at least, what she got when trying to conjure that -- turns out to be one kind of crystal coated in another substance. The outer substance doesn't hold magic hardly at all, and makes every 5th piece of magic invisible. The inner substance holds magic a little, but not as well as the plain glass which she has been getting so far in her experiments.

On the other hand, the inner substance shows magic further away (if she doesn't concentrate on a specific range) for some reason.

Score one for bullshit conjuration powers! There's just one problem: she has no idea how to work with any of this! At least in regards to how to leverage it for her current fairy-sanctioned project. The high refraction index of her glasses would be excellent for binoculars or microscopes or the like, and Pyrex's uses are obvious, but nothing she hit on in her vague glass related flailing has gotten her anything that really works well with magic. So, uh. Cool, cool, they go into the library, and she can maybe one day figure out how to use them properly. Current winner for lenses is Pyrex, probably, but maybe there's something stronger she can come up with.

Hmm. Can she also conjure bulletproof (actually resistant, nothing is truly bullet proof, but that's the name) glass?

She can conjure a different kind of glass, certainly. It also turns out to be made out of a few different layers. One layer is similar to the outer coating on her glasses, but doesn't appear to do anything interesting when used as a lens. Another layer feels a bit like wood, and takes magic better than the 'generic' glass which she had previously been conjuring. It is also a bit lighter. The last layer seems to be more like the generic glass she's been conjuring, but with a different ... flavor? It seems ... newer, insofar as she can put words on it.

Neat! These will... also go into the library, for lack of a better idea. In order, because the layering is important, even if she's got barely any idea what the different layers actually do besides 'different things to stop bullets.' And then she will, er. Test the newer glass as compared to the generic, and Pyrex, all at similar sizes. By, er. Shoving them into her copious amounts of dirt and then 'punching' them with other materials. To soften the inevitable sound of breaking glass. Kose would probably be okay with it, but she suspects this kind of systematic testing is what a fairy might find 'alarming.' So. Secret tests it is.

"... is all I'm saying," a voice interrupts her, drifting down her entryway.

    "We all know what you're saying, Perkre," Tanth replies in a weary tone, entering just behind the other man.

Perkre is built like a castle -- carefully and methodically, with the clear implication that he will pour boiling oil on you if you try to prop a ladder against him.

"So this is the dungeon, is it?" he asks, casting his gaze around the decorated entryway. "Interesting arches."

Kose pokes her head into the corridor to see who has arrived, and then hums under her breath.

"That's a new puzzle," Tanth remarks. "We should probably make sure to try it before we leave."

Perkre is valid, she will also pour boiling oil on people if they try to break into her. Er. Metaphorically. Practically speaking she is built a bit more like a delicate flower, and boiling oil is inefficient in comparison to the powers of velocity.

"It offers something to see magic with," she ventures, a little shyly, "to better tell how well things I make hold up outside. Hello."

Tanth raises an eyebrow at that description.

"That sounds mighty useful," Perkre responds, stroking his chin. "What gave you the idea?"

"Kose, and how she - so she showed me a magical item that had been fraying? And I want the things I make to be the best there are, which will only really work if I know what's going on. And then it was obvious that you could all see how it was fraying, too, if I just gave you the ability to. So, please check things I make and then get back to me on how well they hold up outside, I can't test it by myself."

Hoooow does she break into 'and also I will fix any and all magical items you ask me to for free,' that sounds hard, she will. See how they react to this before she breaks into that part.

"I can certainly understand pride in your creations," he replies, patting the handle of the hammer strapped to his back. "Is that what you want to do, make the best possible magic items?"

"Pretty much," she agrees, immediately and sincerely. "And also make pretty and structurally sound things, but. ... It's in the same vein of making things that last?"

He and Tanth exchange a look.

"That's good," Perkre claims, turning back to address her. "There's awfully few things that do."

He claps his hands and turns to the newest puzzle.

"Well, it sounds like if we want to see what you've made, we'd best solve some puzzles. Do you mind if I take a first stab at it, Tanth?"

"Go right ahead," Tanth agrees, moving to stand where he can watch the rest of the corridor.

"Did seeing that 'frayed' magic item give you any other ideas?" he asks conversationally.

Subtle, Tanth. Really subtle. Master of subterfuge, this man.

"Yes!" she says, accepting the opening despite how this is getting into dangerous territory, "Um, so it's actually really easy to just. Fix? At least if it's not all unraveled, I haven't seen anything that's been completely rubbed off. So if there are magical items you want fixed, I'd be happy to."

The muscles in Kose's neck tighten the slightest amount as she refrains from facepalming or otherwise reacting.

Tanth whistles.

"That'd certainly be useful," he agrees. "I suppose you're planning to put in a puzzle for it?"

".... why," she says, a little blankly. "It doesn't cost me anything to do?"

Tanth opens his mouth to speak, and then closes it again.

"I don't think," he begins to say.

Perkre elbows him in the side.

"Hey, do you think I can get this orange bit in there? Otherwise I think I might have to start over," he comments, pointing at the partially solved puzzle.

Tanth glances at him, but switches places without complaint.

"Couldn't you just take it through this corner," Tanth says, dragging the orange marker. "Oh. No, I guess you can't. Hmm."

"It's a tricky one, isn't it?" Perkre asks. "Makes you think."

Oh boy. Loaded conversation, this. But yes, good job, Perkre, Tanth was totally failing at subterfuge and did in fact need to be saved. This veneer of not knowing what the conversation is really about is protecting her, too, don't go puncturing it like that.

"Honestly it'd be more work to gate it behind a puzzle than to just fix it myself," she explains. "These are kind of hard to make?"

Perkre nods. "That makes sense. Every craft takes effort if you want to be good at it," he agrees. "There's a lot more to smithing than people think. What goes into making a good puzzle?"

Ah, someone's trying to get at her underlying psychology to understand the risk factors at play. She continues to like Perkre. Yes, absolutely, she is more than happy to display what sort of person she is.

"So a lot of it's a balancing act," she muses, "because while I can just arbitrarily decide that this is the one true solution to something, and you're all stuck until you figure it out, that's not really. ... Fair? And I mean, dungeon, right, I don't even see things the way you do. Kose had to tell me that it would be better to make glasses that can see magic instead of the weird thing I actually came up with. So making a puzzle means a lot of putting myself in the Adventurer's shoes and thinking of how would I solve this? It's. It's sort of backwards of just figuring out something myself? Not a bad kind of backwards, it's also kind of enjoyable figuring it out, just. It's a significantly harder problem than just.... 'How do I cram this into this,' or 'How do I arrange this for strength,' or something."

"Hmm. So it's more about crafting the idea than putting it into practice?" he muses. "That's appropriate to what they are, I suppose. Why use puzzles if they're so much trouble in the first place, though? Most dungeons seem to do just fine with monsters, and that still lets you make magic items."

Tanth curses as he manages to back himself into a corner again, and resets the puzzle.

"Yeah, pretty much. As to why no monsters..." Safe sane and consensual? No, no, can't go with that, it won't make sense, so: "... it seems like it could go really badly, really easily? I can't... put people back together? I guess I might be able to make a healing artifact, maybe, but natively, I can't put you back together like I can with a wall. If you break, that's kind of it, I have broken something and it might not be fixable, possibly ever. If I fuck up a puzzle, someone will be frustrated for a while, or I'll need to step in and help them out, or something, but if I make and throw literal murder monsters at people, then, uh. That could go so very wrong, so very easily, even with safety precautions in place? It's higher risk than I'm comfortable with.

"I'm also not convinced what I'd gain from that would even be worth it? It'd be easier on me, I guess, but. ... I want people to trust that they can come in here and be okay? That seems better long term, having a positive working relationship with Adventurers. And, hm, if everyone is expecting that... at any point in time, I might drop spiders on people, or something, then only people that could handle spiders-or-whatever would ever come in. So. Open to people that can't deal with spiders being dropped on them. Or the equivalent. I don't really know what things other dungeons do, that just seems like how you all act when you come in here. Like at any time, spiders could be dropped on you."

"Heh. I suppose we do, don't we? I think it's a rare dungeon that cares to foster a ... positive working relationship with other people. Which in turn means the people who have had spiders dropped on them probably don't make the best first impression," he says.

He claps Tanth on the back.

"Tanth, I don't think I need to watch your back in here. I'm going to go try and get me one of those water-sticks for Rona's distillery."

He walks over to the ring puzzle and begins fiddling with them.

"She's been pretty excited about the water-sticks," he explains. "Accidentally set my apprentice on fire with one, not that that's uncommon. Young love."

“Set your apprentice on…” she says, sincerely surprised. “How? The… using it to pull water out of air and pointing the end blowing out air near coals or fire?? Is that what happened??”

Oops, she displayed too much intellect, probably, but no seriously how.

"Ooh. That's a good idea! I should try that on my bellows. But no -- she used it on a pint of beer. Apparently nearly pure alcohol is flammable enough to go up just from the temperature of the air, and he wasn't expecting it," he explains, heaving the rings into position. "There isn't much alcohol in beer, but it was enough to set his tunic alight."

"Rokat made her give it back, but she wanted one of her own to experiment with. She thinks if she does it when it's cold enough it might not catch and she can make something strong out of it," he continues.

Aestrix can't help it. She cackles. It's funny, okay. And they want to use it to make stronger liquor!! Humans!!! Humans are so themselves, wherever they are!!

"I see. Well, not the intended function, but sure, why not. You've already figured out that you can rig up something else to press the little thing to activate it, right? I didn't key it towards needing a person to do it. I'm pretty sure you can absolutely set it up to use it to blow air from a distance."

"Oh really? I don't think we had figured that out, actually," he replies. "That'll certainly make things easier."

He and Tanth finish their puzzles at almost the same time.

Tanth takes the scroll and turns it over in his hands before peering through it at the dungeon around him.

Perkre takes his water purifier and tucks it into a pouch.

"I'm glad I got a chance to talk to you," he says, moving to re-group with Tanth. "I'll be sure to come back and let you know how well the water-stick works as a bellows," he promises.

"Yeah, it was nice to meet you, too. Have fun. Let me know if I should maybe work on making something that can put out fires sooner rather than later, I. Admittedly did not expect making a water purifier to maybe result in pyromania." She envisions this, then snorts.

Dungeon: still really innocent! There's some magic, but it follows the archways and really is just for structural stability.

"Oh! Wait, before I forget. Could you or someone else bring back seeds of something for Kose? I am going to try to set up a place where she can grow stuff."

"I can bring some up tomorrow," Tanth offers, tucking the scroll away. "I'll bring a bit of everything, although I don't know how well it'll grow underground."

"Thank you! I guess we'll just have to see."

Is that the tone of voice of someone who is absolutely sure that she will 100% make some plants grow underground, come hell or high water? Yes. Yes it is. Her tone is very clear, like that.

Perkre waves, and Tanth follows him out.

"That went well," Kose remarks. "This is a lot of Adventurers in a short time-frame. I think your all-puzzle approach is paying off."

"Thank you! I'm glad," she says brightly. "Is Tanth the designated dungeon guide for Adventurers? He's been with every group so far, if I get too popular will he be run ragged?"

She cannot with any credibility pretend that she hasn't noticed, okay, she's playing dumb, not literal vegetable.

"Probably!" Kose agrees. "It's usually pretty common for an experienced Adventurer to help guide initial exploration of a dungeon, because they have more experience with what kinds of things they might find inside."

She sits back down against the wall.

"Usually, the Adventurers end up rotating through without a designated guide after a few days. I'm not sure whether that will hold in your case, though. You might get people coming individually, instead of in groups, since most of your puzzles can be done solo."

"Gotcha, okay. Well, we'll have to see, I suppose. Until then, I should go finish the glasses. They're really tricky, and I got... kind of distracted playing with materials and how they'd accept magic. Ahem. Relatedly, is there anything you want before I inevitably start blowing all of my budget on materials yet again? I want to make sure I have all of the necessities squared away first."

She smiles. "I'm good for now, I think. Although ... are you just trying to make the glasses directly into the alcove? You could make them out here so I could offer feedback, if you wanted to."

Ah. Right. No hiding things from her chaperone. Right, right. She doesn't super want to have a client fairy standing over her as she works every minute of every day, but she's absolutely used to keeping people updated on her work as she goes. Just think of it as freelancing, and being On The Job™. Framing it that way makes it much better than someone creepily standing over her while she works very hard to try to help them while holding the equivalent of a knife at the ready the other ways she could frame it.

"Oh? Okay. So I've got the frames so far," here are the platinum-titanium frames. Kose will note that they are pretty, delicate, and have hinges like the glasses Aestrix is used to. "They'll be a good basis for the type of magic I'm weaving, but before I do that properly I was working on getting the lenses set up. I'm a little worried about them breaking easily? So I've been trying to see if I can make glass that's stronger and less likely to shatter. From what I've been able to find, glass is not very good for holding enchantment, so I might as well go for strength."

"It definitely makes sense to make magic items durable," Kose agrees. "But usually any reasonable mundane material will outlast the magic, so there's not too much point in trying to build an object that will last the ages when it has a limited number of uses."

“That’s true. But the cost is in making the material, not what type of material I make? And glass breaking near someone’s eyes seems, uh. Bad. Plus I’m willing to just put the magic back on, especially for stuff that I’ve made, so. It seems worth the time investment now. Though I guess I might not have a good idea of what sorts of things Adventurers have to deal with. Do you want to help me stress test these before I even enchant them?”

Kose blinks. "... sure, I would love to help with that," she replies. "What kind of testing did you have in mind?"

She should not display creativity in ability to stress test things. Displaying knowledge of thermodynamics and chemistry is not innocent and fluffy.

"Mostly I've been dropping things? This is kind of what I need help with, because I kind of. Don't have things in mind. You could throw them, I guess?"

Kose relaxes.

"Maybe you could make a statue to wear them and then try hitting it in the face with various things," she suggests.

“Sure, okay.”

She obligingly forms a statue (out of tightly packed dirt) and then places the glasses on them. With, er, Pyrex for the lenses, why not.

“What is most common thing to hit Adventurers in the face?” she asks. “I could, er. Throw a rock??”

"Rocks and sling bullets, definitely," Kose agrees. "Also mallets and maces. And sometimes things like elbows from friendly fire."

Right. She throws a rock at the statue. At a normal speed that a human could manage, instead of bullshit dungeon railgun speeds. Various other tests follow in a similar sort of toothless vein.

Kose might nonetheless be surprised about how well they hold up. It’s not bad; platinum is a fairly strong metal, and alloyed with titanium it’s even better.

Kose picks up the glasses after one shot knocks them off, and inspects them.

"They seem pretty durable," she comments. "Did you work in an enchantment for that?" she asks.

“Nope! I went with a platinum alloy.” She should probably not mention titanium by name, it’s not clear if it’s been discovered yet. Platinum is safer. … probably. “I want it to be strong without any magic involved at all.”

"That's great!" Kose replies. "It seems like you've really already found your niche in magic item crafting."

She places the glasses back on the testing statue.

"I can't really think of any more tests for the glasses," she comments. "They seem pretty robust."

"That's the idea! Hm... let me test out some different ways to arrange glass on their own, then I'll call it done. I really want to avoid glass shards in anyone's eyes."

Now, at last! She can do that actual glass test that got interrupted by needing to host! And she can do them in front of Kose without it being alarming! Excellent. Pyrex versus the generic versus the arrangement of glass for the final layer of the bulletproof (resistant) sandwich. They will go onto little stands on the ground, like one would place a board that one is going to karate chop. At lens size. The tiniest little chops, for the tiniest martial artists.

Then she will start dropping tiny rocks onto them from high up. Wheeeee~!

They all hold up fairly well! Except for the generic glass, which breaks like, well, glass.

When they do break, the Pyrex breaks into jagged shards. The glass from the composite breaks into little hexagonal-ish nodules, with the occasional sharp corner, but overall perhaps a bit safer to have suddenly in your eye.

... Glass from the composite, then. She can work her way up to it being a proper composite with all of the layers that people who actually specialized in engineering came up with. This decided, she puts the glass back together, and then finishes constructing the glasses. Magic and all.

"Do you want one of these?" she asks, when she's got the magic on it properly. "Or a communication pendant too, now that I think about it. Or just a magical item you want, really."

Kose's eyes widen, and she thinks for a moment.

"I'm not sure what I would do with a communication pendant," she replies. "But I would love a pair of magic-sight glasses. And perhaps you'd be willing to repair one of my rings?"

She tugs a ring off of her middle finger, and holds it up.

"I try not to use it outside of a dungeon, so that it doesn't become too worn, but I don't know how much life it has left in it."

The ring is clearly well used, but nowhere near breaking. The concepts tied to it are things like "food" and "health". It seems as though it might supplement or replace food.

One pair of magic seeing glasses, with the frames given a loving leaf pattern, just for Kose!

And then she peers at the ring. "Oooo, this is neat. I didn't realize magical items could do this, I'll maybe see about making some. It's well used but wasn't near breaking." She then carefully smooths everything out and makes sure the concepts are properly anchored in place; with the glasses, Kose can even see what she's doing. "There you are! Want a spare, too, just in case?"

Kose smiles. "Yes, please, if it's not too much trouble."

She accepts the glasses, and settles them on her face.

"Rings like that aren't as good as real food, but they can be invaluable when you need to travel somewhere that food is scarce," she remarks.

"Makes sense. Good to have, just in case. I'll have that be the next magical item, if that sounds smart to you? Since I'm already figuring out how to make it."

Speaking of: this will need to involve some peering at the ring, to properly understand how to copy it. Smoothing it out and pinning everything back in place doesn't require the same understanding that actually making one does.

She taps her fingers thoughtfully.

"I'm not sure that a ring like this is necessarily a good idea," she replies. "While they are definitely useful, they're something of a niche item. I think probably the most valuable types of item that you don't have represented yet are weapons and shields -- the wilderness can be pretty dangerous, and Adventurers go through things like that quickly."

The communication amulet which Aestrix has secreted away chooses that moment to come to life.

"Well, can you hear me?" Rokat's voice asks.

"I can," Pona replies. She sounds slightly out of breath. "I don't see why you wanted the first test to be so far away, though."

"Oh, remind me to tell you about the time we got the set of communication pendants that only worked if you were getting closer. That took a long time to sort out, let me tell you. And not only because they only dropped after you killed one of those terrible bear things. Anyway -- does it sound clear?"

There's a bit of a pause as she does a little dance on the inside. It's working! It's working!! Her clever spycraft is totally working!! Wait wait no don't just fall randomly silent in front of Kose, pretend like nothing is happening at all. She will allow herself to be steered towards things that would be useful in violent situations, sure. To a point.

"Oh? Okay. Uhh... so, shield or healing, then? I mentioned that one as a possibility to Perkre, that seems like it'd be really useful if I can figure it out. I guess I can make weapons, but I don't really, er. Know how they go, I think dungeons that actually have monsters would make better ones."

... It is hard to hold a conversation while listening to another one. This is perhaps a flaw in her master plan. She'll need to figure out some clever way to have, uh, speech-to-text channels she can check later, probably, she's plenty good at juggling those.

They step through the six channels, and then Rokat instructs Pona to head another four miles out of the village and see where the edge of the range is, but the Aestrix misses a bit of their conversation before she tunes back in.

"... but don't go too far, now," Rokat admonishes her.

"I know where the boundaries are! I'm not seven," Pona protests. The cadence of her voice suggests that she's running again, her breaths coming between words. "Anyway, I'll check in every 500 paces."

"Shields are definitely useful," Kose agrees. "Actually, that gives me an idea! If you're going to want to make your magic artifacts as durable as possible, you could set up testing them like we just did as a challenge for adventurers. It would let you test shields and refine your designs, while also providing a non-harmful physical challenge."

"It's just an idea, though," she continues. "It's ultimately up to you."

"Oo! Yeah, that does sound good! Much easier than coming up with another puzzle. I should carve out a little testing area for them, then..." She will get to doing that, because doing that explains why she is not being talkative while there is a conversation she is attempting to listen in on going on. Boundaries? Why are there boundaries?? That sounds like valuable information about the fabled ~outside~ that she knows so little about.

Unfortunately for her, they really are just testing the limits of the communication pendants. Or perhaps fortunately, because she hasn't set up any kind of speech-to-text system, and she suspects she will be very quickly overwhelmed if there's too much talking at once. This was, probably, a good test for her system as well. There's still time to set things up before anyone goes saying anything important on these things of hers.

She builds her testing chamber with dual purposes in mind; first is the obvious, and second is a place to fit her planned sensory accommodation. So far her architecture has been tall and delicate, but the room at the bottom of the set of stairs leading down and away from the rest of the dungeon is sturdy and squat. It does not break into being a sad box, because she has standards, but it's definitely not the striking gothic architecture from before. Just a very sturdy domed and square room, with visible and only mildly decorative support columns. This is so that people can try to break things inside without causing too much mayhem, but also so that it can support a second, secret room above. That'll be where she has her speech-to-text system, once she figures out how to pull it off.

Before she works on it properly, though, she has some general dungeon chores to take care of. Kose gets her spare ring of sustenance (this being what it clearly is) and the planter in her room gets a little sun lamp that is very pointedly enchanted to give off sunlight, thank you. The next set of communication pendants, already made and untouched by the last set of adventurers, get the titanium in them swapped for the titanium-platinum alloy that worked so well for holding the magic of the glasses. She has a vague hope that this will keep the magic from fraying for longer, but the fundamental structure of the concepts is exactly the same. It's just hopefully on a material better suited to hold it for longer periods of time. While she's doing chores, she neatens up the ring puzzle, adding color and making it lighter and easier to turn. The strength element is kind of silly, okay, she wants little old ladies to be able to wander in here and get something to make their wells safe all on their own, thank you, even if it means extracting less dungeon bullshit per capita.

From there, she adds a couple of elements to her growing library, from elements she thought of that might perhaps become relevant to her interests. Bismuth, tungsten, lithium, and antimony are the ones she can definitely recall being real actual elements that really exist, and from which she can probably actually build stuff out of. She could make more dangerous elements like sulfur, magnesium, phosphorus and mercury, but she'll pass, actually. No war crimes, thank you. She might make lead at some point, it's genuinely a useful material, but doesn't waste budget on it when she knows she'll flinch away from ever using it for fear of giving people lead poisoning. From there she then has herself an extended experimentation session trying to make things she remembers that may or may not actually exist. This gets her iridium and cobalt and palladium, but not much else. Really, that was better than she was expecting, she's glad she had this idea. Pity that she cannot actually bring all of the various Minecraft metals and alloys to reality, she could have done some great things with enderium, but yes, yes, fair enough. Following the almighty periodic table of elements, and all that.

With this all done, she then gets to work on that speech-to-text enchantment. It's going to be a bit of a project, but if she can stupidly program a puzzle to solve itself, she thinks she can absolutely pull off impressing the concept of written language. Maybe even before someone says anything notable on the communication channels! Wouldn't that be nice.

The next thing to interrupt her experimentation is a visit from Tanth. He is nervously fingering the hilt of his sword, and appears to be alone.

He pauses just inside the dungeon, and clears his throat.

"Ah, Aestrix? Do you have a moment to talk?" he asks.

She has not, at any point, told him her name.

“… yes?” she asks anyway, still aiming for the picture of innocence even as she’s on high alert. “Is something wrong?”

"No, no, not at all."

He steps a bit further into the dungeon, and then stops. He looks at the architecture, for lack of a better place to direct his gaze.

"We just, uh, that is to say ... the other villagers and I haven't been entirely honest," he explains. "And we talked about it, and we want to come clean. Because you don't ... that is, you don't really act like other dungeons."

Kose leans on the doorway to the core room with her arms crossed, watching him with a neutral expression.

"I'm clearly far superior in both aesthetics and function?" she teases, lightly. In her experience, a little playful humor helps break the tension. So long as it’s backed up by sincerity and gentleness, which is the tone that follows. "It's okay. I understand that dungeons are, uh. Really extremely scary? You're just trying to stay safe."

His shoulders droop a little, in relief.

"Yeah, that's exactly it," he agrees. "Dungeons ... they're the source of magic. But that also means that within their domains, they can do pretty much anything."

He moistens his lips.

"So, uh, with most dungeons we really can't treat them as more than opponents. But you're not ... acting like you want what most dungeons want from us. And we -- that is, the whole village -- talked about it, and we thought maybe this time could be different. And we agreed that if you were going to help us, with the restoring old magic items and all that, we should start off on the right foot."

He takes a deep breath.

"Kose isn't really a fairy," he blurts, and then tenses up like he's expecting the pretty gothic arches to come down on him.

!! Aww!! Awww they're really actually trusting her!

"I know," she says, still in that gentle reassuring tone of voice. Fluffy and nonthreatening and not at all surprised by this revelation that is supposed to be massive, that's her. "Honestly, I'm glad you have a system to keep baby dungeons from going mad with power or something. It's much safer this way, isn't it?"

He is struck dumb for a moment.

"W-what? What do you mean you know?" he replies.

"Tanth you enormous idiot!" Kose says, striding down the hallway towards him.

"Do you have any idea how many times you've almost blown my cover this time? Well, I say almost. Things go very slightly differently, and you loose all your hard-earned caution?"

She reaches him and pokes him in the arm, releasing a small spark of electricity.

"Ow!" he objects.

"... yeah, that's probably fair," he continues after a moment. "When did you figure it out?" he asks Aestrix.

"I first had an inkling something was up with the pendant that warms when a dungeon is paying attention to the holder," she says, a little amused. "I very nearly offered to make you another, you know. From there it was just a matter of paying attention."

Kose raises an eyebrow. "That early? Damn. And it's not exactly something I can improve on, given the givens."

"Well, if you already knew, then it's probably a good thing we didn't try to drag it out."

Tanth shakes his head.

"Anyways, I was sent to deliver the message because I was most likely to get out alright if you took it badly," he continues. "But I'm not exactly good with diplomacy, as Kose so delicately pointed out. Since you seem to be taking it well, would it be alright if I went to fetch some of the others? We're hoping to work out a fair deal that can get us both what we want with, uh, fewer monsters and deadly traps than usual."

He seems vaguely lost at the idea of not having to deal with monsters and deadly traps.

"Yeah, of course. Go right ahead." Then, to Kose: "Uh, best advice I can offer for a hypothetical next dungeon is to pick the light ring or something else very innocent to show instead of the pendant? But that's very nitpicky, and I doubt I'd have done any better. ... If we've stopped lying to each other, can I put protections around my core now, I feel a little like I'm hosting while stark naked."

Kose emits a surprised laugh.

"That is ... gosh. I have so many questions about what the experience of being a dungeon is like," she responds.

She fishes the amulet out, and holds it out for inspection.

"Unfortunately, this particular artifact requires a little bit of attention from a given dungeon before it can 'recognize' them. If I don't work in showing it off early, it does me little good."

"Oh I see, so it wouldn't work unless you showed me. Damn, that is a problem. Hmmm, maybe I can... wait, wait, no. Proverbial clothes first before I fall back in to magical item crafting." She brings up the tube of core protection, then carefully adds in some kinetic-dampening shielding with little bits of invar. "Anyway, yes, let me see if I can do better..."

"Why do you ... have a nudity taboo?" she asks. "Since you don't have, you know, nudity."

She walks back towards the core room, but just leans on the doorframe instead of going in.

"Actually, scratch that. Why do you know anything? We've worked out that new dungeons show up with a ... basic set of assumptions about how the world works. And that 'dungeon fairies' often fit into those assumptions, even though they don't really exist. But we have no idea why. And I can't normally just ask, since I have to project an aura of competence to stay on top of things."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure I was alive, as an actual human, before this. I don't... think that's true of all dungeons, but. That's why I'm so aggressively nonstandard. I have a truly astonishing grab bag of strange knowledge. I... might have trained for this?? I'm not sure. That's more plausible than actually just having a bunch of bizarre architectural and geological knowledge. Definitely volunteered to be a dungeon, though. For a while I kind of suspected the bloodstain on my floor was my own, but then I keep... having knowledge you don't seem to, so."

"... huh."

She absentmindedly spins one of her rings.

"That is ... bizarre."

Tanth, Rokat, and Perkre interrupt their brief conversation by stepping into her corridor. Timrat follows behind with a scroll tucked under one arm, and a charcoal stick in his other hand.

"Hello!" Perkre calls. He sets down a chair he was carrying for Rokat, who sinks into it gratefully.

Tanth leans against one of her arches to watch, and Timrat settles crosslegged on the floor, and unrolls the paper to show a hand-drawn map of the area. Two edges of the paper are marked with arcs of large circles, the areas behind them being less detailed.

"I figure we should probably talk about the general situation, and then about how we can work out a fair deal for commissioned magic items," Perkre explains, addressing his remark to her ceiling. "But first I should probably check to see whether you had any urgent questions to ask, now that the weasel's out of the bag."

"Hello! Uh. ... Do you want some chairs, I can't promise they'll be comfortable, it'd be shuffling around materials instead of making them, but. They will exist. Otherwise, yes, please tell me all about this fabled outside."

"Chairs would be lovely, thank you," Perkre agrees.

He looks down at the map, and gathers his thoughts.

"So I guess the thing to know is that most places are under the control of dungeons. They can't directly affect the surface, but unless you can fly that doesn't do much good when they can pull the ground out from under you," he continues.

"This area where we are, isn't. That's because some of the founders of our village two hundred years or so ago managed to kill the dungeon that was here that had been keeping them captive. Since then, Tensmouth has remained free. But not without great costs."

He points to the two great arcs on the map.

"These two dungeons -- the sea-mouth and the goblin caves -- have been slowly extending into the territory since the old dungeon died. It's not fast, but it is persistent. Every year we lose a little more ground. And that's without counting the raiders -- both dungeon sponsored, and from other free towns that are just a touch more desperate."

"Without a supply of magic items, there's little chance that we'd be able to hold our own, and the raiders would come and drag us back to the goblin caves. And without a source of humans to empower you, you'd find yourself easy pickings in another century or so when the goblin caves' territory reaches this far."

He clasps his hands.

"So that's the situation, pretty much. I'd summarize, but Rokat would take me over her knee for using language like that."

Chairs: exist.

"... Oh," she says, stunned and horrified. "Holy shit, okay. I didn't realize things were that bad but, that. That does follow from all powerful dungeon thing, doesn't it. Raiders to drag you back to a dungeon as fuel. Eugh. Right, moratorium on making weapons is hereby lifted, what do you need."

Perkre blinks. Tanth relaxes a fraction of a degree. Rokat smiles at her.

"That was a lot easier than I was expecting," he admits. "That was going to be the main thing we were going to ask for. That and a promise from you not to keep captives, in exchange for ... whatever it is you want to trade for."

"So, thank you, really. That's pretty much the best we could ask for."

He leans back in his chair.

"I think the big things would be ... warning systems, shields, ways to see in the dark, magic arrows, magic crossbows, swords, ways to track people who get taken, ways to suppress fires, ways to start fires, good armor ..."

He trails off in thought.

"Those water purifiers are a good start," Rokat chimes in. "But some things to make carrying water easier would be nice. And maybe you could dig us a better well. Also food rings, for the lean times, and anything you can think up to help with harvests, for the good times. My father had a magic sickle that bundled the wheat for you, but it broke when I was a lass."

"Yeah, absolutely. I actually already made Kose a spare ring of sustenance, if you need it now. Everything else... yes. If things are as you say, you'll have it. Better than you're thinking, I think, because I," and she sounds incredibly smug as she says this, "can do so much better than magic crossbows."

She casually dumps all of the magical items she'd been keeping as future reward in a little tidy pile on the floor. Including five of the six secret communication pendants.

"I do want to verify this before I do actually make weapons that could presumably be used to kill me, but for now you can just have these," she says. "Could you bring me materials? In fact, just use me as your garbage dump, anything you don't want, please feed directly to your friendly village dungeon, most of what I've been spending is making stuff, when actually it's much cheaper to refine it."

Rokat laughs.

"You are too good to be believed," she remarks. "There are stories ..."

Perkre nods. "That makes sense," he agrees. "Actually, if it's the making things that's costly for you, and not the making them magic, I could bring in a lot of already forged things for you to enchant."

"So you want our refuse," Rokat continues. "What else? And what kind of proof do you want to see? We can't exactly take you to the borders."

"Just bringing me things to enchant would be great! I might also refine them to be stronger, depending on if you've got a steel forge or not.

"... And I was just going to request permission to make a magic item and literally go check myself. It's just that I suspect doing that without checking with you first would be, you know. Alarming."

"Ooh. How would that work, then?" Rokat asks, leaning forward. "I've not heard of magic like that."

"Also, Timrat, pick those gifts up. Don't just leave them on the floor like that," she chides. Timrat hurries to obey, scooping the magic items into a carrying pouch.

"Along the same sort of line as the communication pendants. A multi-part interconnected magical tool with different parts doing different things. One to fly," drone style, "one to send visuals to me, probably some for protections, since it sounds dangerous? And then remotely piloted via the same logic of the pendants. It can be set up to respond to things I do, after all. But that might take a while to set up, so. Probably first should be shielding and magical item renewal? And night vision and alarms, and, ways to track people that get taken, was it? I'm going to need to make a list..."

"Ah, if you can make some paper I can take notes?" Timrat offers, wiggling his charcoal stick.

Perkre has a look of barely-restrained enthusiasm at the thought of getting to break down a multi-component complex magic item.

"Tanth, would you run back out and let people know it's going well? And that they should bring any run-down magic items, and also anything they want to get rid of. We can make two separate piles."

"You're sure you'll be okay?" Tanth asks.

"Yes, I'm sure we'll be fine," Rokat assures him.

"Oh, I've just been taking notes in my walls. But thank you, that's very sweet. Let's see, directional kinetic barrier? Things coming in all directions except the allowed one get slowed...? Hmm. Defining the parameters large scale would be tricky, I'll need to think about it. Seeing in the dark would just be infrared, and I guess this is important enough to use the sub-standard glass for..."

She starts putting together a pair of glasses to see in the dark. With the pyrex and - what does she have extra of that's good for holding magic? - electrum. Amplify infrared light and other faintly visible light to give a black and white image...

Without much delay: here are a pair of night vision... glasses. Tink, onto the floor where she'd dumped the rest of her goodies.

Timrat reaches to pick these ones up too.

"Are those night-seeing glasses?" Rokat guesses. "That was ... fast. Kose made it sound like new items usually take a lot longer than that."

"They do! Usually magic items take, like, at least half a day to get the dungeon to put together a good version. Making them work is easy, but making them work robustly and be usable usually takes a few iterations. But Aestrix just ... pops out magic items that work perfectly first try! Somehow."

She leans back against the wall.

"Honestly, it's very impressive," she continues. "But it is a bit unnerving."

"Oh. Uh. I'd say sorry but I'm... kind of not. Heh. To be fair, I do make iterations, I just don't bother to show anyone until they're any good.

"Anyway, night vision glasses are really straightforward, and I already had the materials on hand from the magic seeing glasses. These won't hold up as well under stress, by the way, electrum is not a very strong alloy, and I haven't sat down to figure out the perfect alloy combination to hold this type of magic. This is just what I had on hand right now without needing to blow resources making things."

Kose waves a hand at the ceiling in a 'see?' gesture.

Perkre takes the glasses from Timrat, and turns them over in his hand.

"Electrum, you say? I don't know it by that name. What's it an alloy of?"

He delicately scratches one nail along the frames to see how the hold up.

"Gold and silver. And the magic seeing glasses have a platinum-titanium alloy. Actually, while I'm being a magic item nerd, you should be aware that as far as I can tell, alloys are much better at holding enchantments than pure minerals. I also don't think there's a flat 'better at holding enchantments' value, I think it's more like certain materials are better for holding different concepts. Which I have yet to systematically experiment with. Yet."

He strokes his chin.

"Interesting. I don't get a lot of call to work with gold and silver, but we've long suspected that they play some role in magic, since they're so often found in dungeon-made items," Perkre replies.

"We might be getting a bit away from the subject," Rokat remarks. "Aestrix, were there any other questions you had for us? Either more general things, or thoughts about the design of defensive magic items to get started with?"

"Mostly I want to," minmax and powergame like the little shit she is, "figure out the exact definitions of what constitutes a proper 'challenge' for dungeons to get extra extent? Like, I don't have to personally make each and every challenge for you to be challenged by, do I? Can I just make a little gym and let you all go to town as you like and not have to be involved at all? Does assisting in the practical design of magical items count, because I absolutely want to have you go test things I make and have design opinions and whatnot. Do animals also work, or is it just humans?" Can they tell she has been bottling up her urge to SCIENCE, she has absolutely been bottling up her urge to SCIENCE. ... Actually! Science is only science if you write it down, therefore, her actual priority should be:

"Oh! Oh and, this is unrelated to my ceaseless curiosity, but! Do you want a copy of my material library sooner rather than later so that if things go poorly, you have a thing to waft at your next baby dungeon to get them to make specific materials? Having a specific physical slab of materials to look at would almost certainly get them making stuff that lasts longer."

"Having a library of materials would be amazing!" Kose agrees. "... but don't strain yourself. I don't actually know if it harms a dungeon to make too many things without being challenged, but that's because none of the other dungeons I've known are willing to make as many things as quickly as you are."

She taps her lip thoughtfully. "As for the exact limits, I know that feats of strength absolutely qualify. But I don't know whether self-imposed challenges do. Once we're done having people come in and out with initial loads of refuse, we can have someone try it and see? I do know that animals don't work — one of the dungeons I worked with tried using treadmill dogs, like from a kitchen, and that did nothing."

"Dang. Oh well. I guess if it were that easy to game it would have been done. But yeah, I was going to ask you to please pay for making the material library, however you want to. I do have literally any self interest in me to speak of. Just, I am absolutely willing to make a copy for you as a just-in-case precaution in the future. Uh, scrubbed of some dangerous materials, for full disclosure, but that's probably best for your future interests, too. There are some things I know how to make that I haven't because they are, you know. Poisonous. Or explosive." Or radioactive! Wouldn't that be an inefficient and horrifying way to kill people! She'll do it never, thanks!

Kose gets a pained look at the mention of poison and explosives.

"Yes. Thank you for holding on to those. It's definitely best not to give young dungeons ... ideas."

Perkre makes a generally apologetic face at Kose, who waves him off.

"Well, I'm certain we can get some strapping young people in to do some challenges," Rokat continues. "I think the threat of death usually puts a damper on how many people really want to spend time in a dungeon, so since that's not an issue here we should be able to get people through more frequently."

"Right! Overall I expect that this will be more profitable in the long run. Plus, you know. Ethical. Kind of important, that. ... Do you want age related accommodations? I can just drag over the marker puzzle, it's absolutely appropriate to all ages. The ring one might be too, I have lightened up the rings a bit but I'm not sure sure I got it where anyone could do it by themselves."

Rokat blinks a little at 'age related accommodations', as though this isn't really something she's ever encountered the concept of before. She pushes herself out of her chair and makes her way over to the ring puzzle.

"Well, I'm still hale enough to make the trek up here," she responds. "And as much as I enjoy ordering Tanth around, I think the ring puzzle was the only one that would have given me any trouble, physically."

She tries turning one of the rings, and confirms that it moves easily enough.

"Honestly, you might want to make some more physically demanding challenges. Young people love showing off like that. Maybe an archery range, or a stone-lifting challenge, or an obstacle course."

"Sure, sure," she says casually, tone definitely belying how she regrets nothing and probably can't be argued out of her ways. "But these are my first puzzles, no reason I should cut out large swathes of my demographic for no reason, right? And I had been planning to have the puzzles correspond to specific items, and this one is for purifying water, so, uh. No, I don't want to gate that behind something many people can't do, actually, that's supremely messed up."

Rokat screws her face up in confusion.

"Everything is gated behind something some people can't do, though," she replies. "I may be too old for some of the fighting I did in my youth, but the youths lack the wisdom to accomplish some of the things I've done as I've gotten older. Perkre is a lousy cook, but Dismat would make a poor blacksmith. That's just the way the world is."

"I think, from a dungeon growth point of view, that having puzzles available to everyone makes perfect sense," Kose chimes in. "I might actually see if I can change my starting advice to young dungeons to take advantage of that. But I also think that if you do run out of accessible puzzle ideas, it would be fine to make some more restrictive ones since at that point you would already have many available. And Rokat is right that people like bragging about overcoming puzzles, and that having a variety will help with motivation. That can be a concern for later, though."

"Oh, yeah, I didn't want to give the impression that I wasn't going to occasionally make challenging things for people that just wanted to do them? I've, you know, met at least one person, ever. But my point is more...

".... So, you're right, that that is the way the world works. It is imperfect and messy and often cruelly unfair. But, you see, I'm a bullshit dungeon, so it is my pleasure and privilege to say: fuck that shit, everyone gets clean water."

Rokat blinks heavily and looks away.

"That ..."

She trails off, trying to find the words.

"Thank you," she says. "For not being cruel."

"You're welcome. Besides, this way I can be insufferably smug about winning over a whole town! You do not know how much of my personality I have been sitting on, would you believe that I have been trying to be as nonthreatening as possible?"

Kose chokes.

"Trying to be nonthreatening!? Do you have any idea how close I came to," she starts to exclaim, before cutting herself off.

"I mean to say," she continues in a more even voice, "that I am sure the whole town will be delighted to get to know you."

Perkre laughs.

"The world is a funny place," he says when he's calmed down a bit. "A funny place."

Aestrix is also laughing. Or, well. Cackling. She's cackling.

"Oh no," she giggles between cackles, "I'm sorry for scaring you so much you almost pulled the trigger! I really was trying!! My mantra was 'fluffy and nonthreatening' the whole time, I swear!!! I'm just... also kind of garbage at it."

Kose sighs and wipes a hand down her face.

"I think we're very lucky to have gotten you," she replies. "I'm not sure we would have survived a brilliant savvy artifact-crafter who was also good at lying."

... Well, that drops her mood immediately. It's not hard to figure out what 'immune to fire, until it broke' and 'recovered from the ashes' add up to. She is sad now.

"Thank you," she says, sincerely, "We can set up some kind of bucket from the surface system, maybe? Like I'm a well of magical items instead of water, for people that do not want to go into the scary dungeon."

Then she immediately loses that train of thought in favor of being nerdsniped.

"... Hmmm.... most of this is rubbed off, but it's got a few scraps left of what it was, let me see if I can..." Figure out the logic of the way that this had all hung together, when it was whole, like figuring out the shape that something alive had from its picked over bones. Except this is easier than that kind of puzzle, there aren't as many pieces and they're mostly laid out in the proper formation...

Tanth shifts his weight a bit, but lets her work in silence.

The enchantment is a bit like a pair of jeans worn until the holes overcome the cloth. The parts of the enchantment that took the most damage were the most important, load bearing bits. But, by the same token, the scraps that remain clearly imply their shape by the outline of what they must have been connected to. It is not as easy to repair as simply jamming her own concept of fire resistance into the metal would be, but isn't too difficult, to bind the fragments back together into a solid whole.