Chapter 44: Book 1: Chapter 18 (Part 2 of 4)

Anastasia nodded and led me and the other two through the cabin door.

Inside the cabin was a corridor illuminated by softly glowing orbs slotted in the walls at head height every few feet. The corridor extended about five metres before it opened up at the end, with a double stairwell that led down under the deck that was visible. The spatial extension was subtle, but plain to see if you paid attention. The exterior cabin dimensions were half the length of the corridor, if that.

The width of the corridor was about a metre and a half, or six feet. That was unusual, I hadn’t been on many smaller boats, but I’d seen plenty on TV and they were usually compact. Midway between the exit and the open area for the stairwells were two doors, opposite one another.

The most important detail, though, was that the interior of the vessel didn’t match the black crystalline exterior. The inside was more typical of what you would expect to see on a working ship below decks. The walls were made of polished dark brown wooden panels.

Anastasia led us through and as she passed the doors, turned, stopped, and spoke. “As my dungeon is only level one, this is a Mark One Corsair Class ship, or so I’ve been told. As my dungeon gains in levels, so can this ship. Mark Two vessels are a little larger and have further options for armaments. You’ve seen the outside already. Inside, Mark One vessels have two decks, imaginatively named upper and lower,” she snarked.

After a light chuckle from the three of us, Anastasia’s shoulders seemed to relax slightly, and she continued her tour guide spiel.

 “This is the upper deck. It currently has two rooms, Navigation,” she pointed to the door on our left, “and the Captain’s Cabin,” and she tapped the door on the right.

As Anastasia did so both doors swung open, and we wandered around both and got a good look around. The Captain’s Cabin was like a decent-sized living room. It had a large oak table with a dozen chairs in the centre and the walls were surrounded by red upholstered benches. On the far side were clear windows that looked out onto the riverbank.

Which was a little odd as there were no visible windows when you viewed the ship’s exterior.

The Navigation room was smaller, but also had a table made from the same crystal as the ship covered in charts in its centre. The upper part of the walls in here were the same black crystalline substance the exterior was made out of and the walls displayed various maps of the area within the crystal, like a screen. I noticed one was of the southern half of Michigan with all the dungeon information I’d absorbed from my sense conveniently marked upon it.

Another appeared to be a marking of all the waterways with dots that I could see were moving. The legend on the side of this display listed what the dots were, and they were all low-threat creatures.

I pointed at that display. “I presume this means you have already interfaced with my spyglass.”

“Yes, as soon as you stepped on board,” Anastasia answered from outside the cabin.

“Good,” I replied. “What else is there?” I asked as we trooped out of Navigation.

“If you’ll follow me,” she requested and led us to the double stairwell at the end of the corridor.

You could go down from either side and we descended from the left which was the closer of the two sets of stairs, which meant we emerged on the right side. The next deck had a similar layout except the central corridor was double the width and about three times as long. At the far end was a single set of steps that led up.

“Here we have the lower deck,” Anastasia said as she walked ahead of us. “If you look behind you under the double stairwell you will see the distinctive shimmer in the air that is the entrance to my dungeon.”

I wandered over and joined Anastasia and beneath the stairs was a stone archway about two metres high and only a little less wide embedded in the wall under the stairs.

“Alright, so if we wanted to run your dungeon again, we would go in this way?” I asked.

“Yes…and no,” Anastasia replied hesitantly.

“I’m guessing there is more to it then,” I suggested.

“Hmmm, how best to phrase this without offending you,” she muttered unconvincingly. “Well, it’s like this. I’m not allowed to kill you as helpful as that would be to me, or anyone else covered by your soulbond or the Canon. Any energy I’d get for having you inside the dungeon is offset by the extra energy used to safeguard you. Therefore, you’d get no experience or rewards for completing the dungeon. And before you ask, you can’t order me to switch off the safeguards. The requirement is enforced by the Framework.”

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“Also, I have complete control of the ship, the portal to the dungeon doesn’t need to be where it is now, it can be moved. But under the stairs is conveniently out of the way.”

“Bugger,” I swore, more at the entry restrictions than its current placement. “Hang on. Quixbix I thought dungeons only grew in level by having people run them, and well, die in them.”

<That is correct, Torin> the imp answered promptly.

“Well, if that’s the case, and my ship can only get larger and stronger if the dungeon which powers it levels. How do we do that if running the dungeon ourselves provides nothing? I’m sure you told me it was only Anastasia’s avatar that levelled with me and not the dungeon itself,” I queried aloud.

<Yes, that is an accurate summation, Torin. Dungeons can absorb ambient Mana from the atmosphere allowing them to level even without activity> he said.

I could tell he was hedging, which was confirmed by Anastasia’s acidic addition. “Ambient absorption is slow as shit, Quixbix. Even here on Earth, where I’m told the ambient levels are higher, it will take ten years for me to become a level two dungeon. And it only gets slower after that, I might just reach level five, which would upgrade the ship to a Mark Two vessel, by the turn of the next millennium.”

Then the short blonde turned to me and there was a devilish twinkle in her eye. “You’re gonna’ have to feed me, sir,” she confided and chuckled darkly.

“Feed you?” I blurted dumbly, though I knew what she meant.

“Yes, sir. You need to feed me a steady diet of victims. Oops, did I say that out loud?” Anastasia covered the O of her mouth with her hand and then cackled wildly.

She had definitely recovered her earlier sass after our altercation.

“Is that correct, Quixbix?” I sighed.

<It’s not technically the only way, but it is the most efficient. ‘Character’ participation and their deaths are how dungeons grow in the wild. It is no different here. Spawned creatures can be forced in too, but they provide maybe a tenth of the energy that an equivalent level and graded person would supply. And only if the mob died, there is no participation benefit for them> he explained.

“I suppose I should have seen this one coming,” I groaned.

“Don’t look so glum, Captain,” Anastasia urged me. “The world is chock full of horrible fucking cunts who thoroughly deserve being fed to a dungeon,” she cheered gaily.

“It won’t be long before people think we’re the horrible fucking cunts,” I pointed out.

“Whatever,” Anastasia shrugged. “Chuck the Moaning Minnie’s in too, the more the merrier.”

“Were you always so…gleefully savage, Ana,” Shana chuckled at the inappropriately perky blonde.

“You mean when I was a person, before that weirdo who swears more than I do, turned me into a dungeon. Kinda’. I was a rich bitch and absolutely revelled in it. I spent a lot of time in Cali, but Papa is Russian and was thick as thieves with the movers and shakers when the old guard fell in the nineties, and he made out like a bandit. Let’s just say I had an ‘Uncle’ Vladimir,” she winked at that. “We were loaded, with a capital L and probably didn’t deserve a rouble of it.”

“I didn’t care about that then, and I don’t really care about what or who I’ll be taking from now. But, no I wasn’t as savage. I didn’t kill people, but I suppose I hurt a lot of people in other ways, and that didn’t bother me either,” she shrugged.

“Your honesty is refreshing,” Shana managed, though she seemed a bit awestruck.

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