Chapter 127: 125. Our Father

When Sapphire returns, she just shakes her head at you and the Oread standing placidly at your shoulder.

“You didn't need to.”

You shuffle your feet, the noise echoing in the significantly larger room.

“It's still not much. But at least now it's something you can work with?”

The once small room has been expanded to several times it's previous dimensions, now a roughly egg shaped cave with multiple stalagmites forming natural pillars that break up the sight lines across the room, and cast deep shadows that spill over the walls. The ceiling is a dense maze of crevices and stalactites that Steve colonised soon after their creation, the white spider spinning thick webs over every surface and then vanishing into the arachnid maze, almost invisible in her chosen environment.

On the far wall, a small hole leads into the darkness, just large enough for someone to pass through if they squeezed – or perfect for a kobold. The room beyond was nothing more than a small, rounded oblong. But it is somewhere Sapphire can build things, store things.

She nods at your question, her eyes roving around the small cavern.

“Oh yes. Yes, I have plans. But for now this is... just wonderful. Thank you, sir.”

You relax, just a little bit more. Every time you make the time for your girls to listen to them and try and help them, you feel just a little bit better about everything.

You nuzzle her and leave, letting her explore her new space in peace. It's not like you don't have your own things to be doing, now Mercy has brought back the mother-load of stone. And Sith hasn't reported any issues with her evolved form, so you should probably think about evolving your other imps and moving them upstairs.

Honestly, if you'd planned ahead more you probably would have based Mercy upstairs too, in the hedge maze. The lower floor is really scaled for creatures half her height at most. Maybe eventually you can do some kind of reshuffle, but for now she's still your most powerful guardian.

Shaking your head to rid it of the less than helpful thoughts, you call the first person you see, Woodsaw, over to ask her to send the imps upstairs before ascending the steps yourself and opening your menu.

Sapphire's refit took less than a hundred stone, leaving you plenty to mess around with, and you still have several ideas.

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Firstly, the tunnels that lead up from your larder – They're in an inconvenient place to build into the actual structure of the second floor, sort of behind the boss room, and any expansion you place will be somewhat out of place and useless, ignorable.

So if it can be ignored, why not play with that? A fake secret, a false hidden door? Didn't Amanda have an idea like that a while back? Something to make heroes think they've found something special, with a piece of attractive loot in the middle. If you're going to do that, you need somewhere just busy enough that a fake door would look like it could be missed...

This circular thinking is making your head hurt.

You're making a demonic, undead infected castle. What should a demon-death castle have?

Evil magic room? Big fake summoning circle in the floor, drippy candles, dark altar, that kind of thing?

A jail, but, like, a different one than the one you already have?

… maybe not a jail.

You scan the large, open space from the top of the stairwell, before inspiration hits you – a graveyard, with attached evil church would fill out much of the lower area very nicely. A few mausoleums would give you space to expand a few secret tunnels if you want them later, a spooky tree or two if Mercy wants to move up here at any point, and you'll have a very thematic opening to the floor. A bit of a marsh vibe near the stairs to the castle proper, if you can get more water element, to provide more discouragement to heavy armoured fighters.

You flick through your menu as you muse, throwing down and editing designs till you're happy.

Earthen floor for everything not upstairs or in the hedge maze, then a medium room of stone blocks to form the church body in the middle of the cave wall, offset away from the castle proper. A bit of finagling with the menu gets you a slate-like roof and vaguely threatening but non-denominational symbols on the walls, interspersed with shallow arches. Wooden pews made of, or at least made to look like, large chunks of sea-bleached driftwood fill the rows before a simple shrine made of a single chunk of dark rock. Another few minutes of, frankly, artistry with your menu gets you a bone skull, almost entirely human but for the smoothed over eye sockets and slightly sharp teeth, slotted into a small crevice in the altar. A double door of wood, offset and crooked, completes the basics.

Evil church, get.

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