Dungeon’s Path

As Wolf’s Rest and Doyle’s dungeon settled from the recent changes, Ace and company having made it over halfway through the fifteenth floor with the help of simple enchanted equipment, a disastrous event happened elsewhere in the world. How did Ace and Doyle, as well as everyone else, know about it? Well, the worldwide system message helped.

{World Announcement

Event: Prelude to the Fall of Civilization

The first system settled Community has fallen to the wilderness. Other communities are balanced on a knife edge and could soon follow it. Each remaining community will now get to invite those survivors from the fallen community and gain access to a limited time gathering quest.

You have been determined to be within a community with a system town, the community name will now be that town’s name. Your community’s name is now Wolf’s Rest community.

Leaders in your community will be gathered to decide on who to invite to your community from fallen community E12j8:029

Leaders from higher rank habitations will have greater control over who gets invited. Though be warned, the invited may reject the invite and be able to query who else is being invited where.}

{Gathering Quest

Event: Picking at the Bones of the Fallen

A tutorial dungeon not used to integrate your world will host a special limited time floor for your world to delve. The theme will be the ecumenopolis of a fallen race one degree more advanced than your world in magic and with similar achievements in technology. While a dungeon has created the setting, the story behind the race’s fall is true. May you learn from their mistakes as part of said fall is related to the most common danger your world now faces.

Requirements: Every community must send at least three 10 person teams who cumulatively stay in the floor for at least a week, with each team needing to stay a minimum of one day for their time to count towards the total.

Punishments: Communities that fail to fulfill the Requirements will be forced to send a quarter of their children and a quarter of their elderly, randomly selected, to other communities who have been judged able to care for them properly. Any attempt by a community to purposefully trigger this part of the punishment will instead have all children and elderly sent elsewhere and the community disbanded with those responsible left there while the remaining adults may petition to be taken in at other communities. Note: any elderly determined to be a part of purposeful failure will also be left behind with the adults

Rewards: various public infrastructure being added to every settlement within a community, credits to be used in purchasing supplies for a community from system stores, location of various nearby resources nodes, livestock, knowledge}

Doyle turned to Ally, ‘So uh, what happened?’

Ally shrugged, ‘Nine to one that they failed to stop some sort of growing danger. There was probably something like a nest of eusocial insects nearby that they didn’t clear. If I had to guess, it was probably wasps. While ants are just as dangerous, the system tends to keep the underground threats away from sapient settlements that aren’t natural tunnelers.

‘Once the threat got too big and too many settlements fell, the system decided the community had failed and so shut it down. Oh, and by community, the system is referring to a group of interconnected settlements it has placed and not an actual community. It is entirely possible that a bunch of settlements didn’t see whatever was happening as an actual threat and just allowed it to remove the “weak”.’

Doyle, ‘Yeah, I can see that. Though why the focus on the young and the elderly? Also, are credits gold coins under a different name?’

Ally, ‘The system adjusts to each race it helps integrate. Sometimes it could be a massive change just to allow the people to continue surviving. In this case, your species’ proclivity to care for your young and old means that it has decided to safeguard them a little more than not. The default is to treat everyone equally, though how it handles the young of a race tends to be what gets changed the most.

‘As for credits? You can think of them as being one to one with gold coins. The difference is that they’re more like the plethora of gift cards your planet has before the end. Sometimes you can use them for whatever. More often, though, each credit reward will be specific about where and what for you can use it.

‘Unlike gift cards is the fact you can’t give them to someone else. In fact, if you try to give someone an item bought with them, the system will judge the situation and might just remove the item. System granted credits are most common during the integration, though later on they tend to end up being used by large institutions. That being mostly because the fee to turn coins into credits can be pretty hefty and you are required to put enough restrictions on it as judged by the system. They’re something you would have learned about in a normal integration tutorial.’

Doyle, ‘Well, I didn’t exactly get the chance. Would credits be any good for me? I can’t exactly go out and spend them.’

Ally, ‘Not these, obviously, they’re for the town. However, I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t be possible to gain credits for yourself. The biggest problem would be spending them. Though I’m sure that if the system gave you credits, it would also provide you with a way to spend them.’

Doyle, ‘Though speaking of these, can I even do anything with this quest? Like, I have some monsters in my farms that could leave and go check it out.’

Ally shrugs, ‘The biggest problem would be getting your monsters into the event. Not like you can just march a bunch of monsters out of your dungeon and expect things to work. I know you’re against it, but in theory if you revealed yourself to Ace, you might be allowed to.’

Doyle recoils and shakes his core, ‘No, no no. Absolutely not. I, I don’t want that at all.’

Ally sighs, ‘You know? I suspect you might have some sort of trauma. Why are you so against them knowing about you being an awakened dungeon?’

Doyle, ‘I’ve had to deal with people way too much. Maybe others wouldn’t react like me, but honestly, a dream I always had in the past was to be able to curl up by myself and read. Not having to deal with other people ever again.

‘Like, having you hear is wonderful, especially since we seem to both like silently reading stuff. It’s like that almost joke, sort of stereotype, my world has around how guys hang out where two guys just sit together in silence. That has always been more my speed.

‘And now? I have that, but look at Ace, Jim, and the others! Even when they’re not handling the never ending meetings that being in charge seems to require, they’re chatting and what not. I just want to be left alone!

‘My work as a cashier was soul draining and physically painful, humans just aren’t designed to stay standing in one spot for hours on end. And why? Because “corporate” thinks we would look lazy if we sat down!

‘Hah! They probably made that rule while sitting behind a desk. Hell, if they have a secretary or aide, they’re also sitting at a desk. I just, I want to be alone! As a core, my feet don’t hurt and people don’t expect me to be cheerful. Yes, I still do need to run just to stay in place to some extent, but there is an actual path towards having free time.’

Ally nods, ‘And you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to. Of course, you won’t be entirely left alone as those two deities have proven. But, it’s alright to want some peace and quiet. Maybe in the future you’ll decide to change things, maybe not. We have all the time to figure it out.

‘Just do what makes you feel comfortable. Even with something like this, if we need to, we can figure something out. Maybe we won’t manage to send a ton of people, but it might be possible to sneak a small team of kobolds out to give it a try.

‘Or we can ignore it entirely. While I’m sure there will be some useful materials to be salvaged from the event. Stuff that we wouldn’t even be at odds with the town over. We already have mithril and anything else would simply be icing on the cake for the moment.’

Doyle rolls back and sighs, ‘And how much of this is because I’m a dungeon core? It was generally accepted that humans need to socialize at least a little bit.’

Ally shakes her head, ‘That’s the wrong way to think about it. You being human or a dungeon isn’t what matters. Does it change some things? Sure! But it doesn’t change who you are as a person. I read something once which I feel covers this pretty well.

‘You are you, wherever that is, however that is.

‘All those instincts from being a dungeon core are simply replacing the instincts you had as a human. They don’t make up who you are, just the unconscious reactions you have to some things. The biggest thing that decides who you are, is you.’

Doyle, ‘I know because nothing has changed. I’m still me and while I’m okay with that, it also feels like I’m outside of a house somewhere, looking in through a window at a happy family. They’re a short distance away from me and yet separated by so much. I don’t want what they have, but I want what they have!’

Ally nods, ‘Life doesn’t make sense. From what I could find, you grew up in a society with a very defined view of what happiness and a family is. They’re wrong and at the end there, people were breaking free of that tyranny. Yet that doesn’t change how you grew up.

‘Even if you truly don’t want what they espoused as “happiness”, they also stamped out the chance for you to have your own happiness. It was their way or the highway, and they weren’t maintaining the highway like they should have been. While the cost in life is staggering and will continue to grow, your world has a chance to heal itself now.

‘And you have a chance as well. If you want, we can stop growing the dungeon so quickly. We can settle down for a while and I’ll pull up a bunch of books for you to read. Either from the rest of the universe or from your world. While the system isn’t perfect, it does try to preserve a newly integrated world’s culture and since yours had the internet, we have a snapshot of it.’

Doyle sighs, ‘No, I enjoy building the new floors and watching things grow. But I’ve definitely been letting some things stall. I’ve now got multiple sapients in my dungeon and I should talk to them more. I can’t just offload all of the social aspects onto you.’

Ally shakes her head, ‘If you want, I can handle it all. I’m trained for it. After all, unawakened dungeons have bosses as well. Also, it helps that dungeon bosses count as an immortal species no matter what their actual species is.

‘While certainly not as bad as dungeon cores, they grow up quite slowly and have a timeless mindset. Dungeon bosses are pretty close to how born deities like Jess grow up. Without any outside interference, a newborn deity might end up as a child for thousands of years.’

Doyle shakes his core, ‘That’s not what I want. I’ve just been worried and putting it off because I don’t have a good way to let them socialize with me and each other. It’s not like we still have the internet and could set up a chat room. After all, last I checked, you weren’t exactly allowed to share the universal internet and the local stuff all failed, what with the lack of power.’