No Need For A Core? - 181: It Belongs in a Museum

181: It Belongs in a Museum

No Need For A Core? by Zagaroth

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Kazue was quite happy with the way the young trio was forming up. One of her biggest concerns with regard to taking Fuyuko on as a ward was making sure that she had friends who were peers, and this seemed like a great opportunity to set her up with a couple of them.

Of course, nothing was guaranteed. Derek was pretty easygoing, but Shizoku was often kind of prickly. Though Kazue was interested in a shift of Derek's personality; he seemed a little more confident and he hadn't become flustered when he met Fuyuko. Kazue suspected that he had figured out what Shizoku was up to, though she wondered what had clued him in, he seemed rather confused by her previously.

Now that they had started on the dungeon, she had plenty of time to finish organizing her thoughts about where she wanted to go from here. There were a couple of things that she needed to check in with Mordecai and Moriko about, but they both proved fairly content to let her go on with her plans.

And really, she didn't have a lot she needed to do at the moment. Most of their mana was tied up in backfilling their territory to eliminate the geometric gap that their growth had caused. Mordecai had done some more work in measuring the mana demands and he wasn't terribly happy about a prediction that his work created; now that they had breached whatever it was that normally compensated for imperfect shapes they were going to have to make every now zone fit without any 'indents' and generally make it smoother, and they were going to eventually need to be more spherical. The only thing keeping it from eating at their ability to form rewards and respawn their inhabitants was that those two pools were tightly segregated.

This would explain why environmental dungeons tended to be spherical, and the two of them had committed themselves to becoming a hybrid design, so they had to pay the extra cost of more territory.

But with no other sort of growth to plan for, Kazue needed to entertain herself somehow, and even her illusionary pseudo-avatars only helped so much. She'd been able to tie the illusions to her mental state thoroughly, but they didn't provide actual feedback and still took up her focus in order to know what was going on. Which could be embarrassing if she accidentally left one on while focused on the area of a different platform. Not that she would ever do anything like that of course.

When the three teens cleared the theater zone and had been gifted their prizes, Kazue had the director let them know to head down to the rest area of the library zone, where one of Kazue's platforms waited. The trio showed a little bit of uncertainty but went along with the flow, even if their prizes had left them feeling suspicious.

Once they were at the rest zone and had approached the platform, Kazue activated her illusion and beamed at them. "Good job so far, but what sort of challenge do you think you are really up for? Because I think you three should try and push all the way through on this path."

"Which certainly explains our 'rewards'," Shizoku said dryly, "Survival and basic crafting tools don't really fit for a theater level."

"Exactly! Now, I know that for the most part, Derek and Fuyuko have been training their combat skills, but Fuyuko also managed a good portion of her trip alone, and Shizoku's patron is a forest spirit, so I imagine you can deal with the wilderness pretty easily. In addition, if you are here then Derek's obtained a certain amount of control over his elemental abilities. This should give him the chance to practice to overcome new challenges. So, my proposal is that I drop off all your old gear here, to go with your current and future prizes. I'll have to also get the okay for an indefinite travel time; getting through might take a lot of work, possibly even a couple of weeks. So first, are the three of you up for this?"

She gave them time to discuss the idea, and Fuyuko had a question "So, ta be sure, while I'm doin' this, I don't have ta do the rest of the schoolin' you guys had in mind?"

Of course that's what she was worried about. Kazue grinned at the girl, "No worries there at all. This sort of thing is important too. Additionally, a contractor can't get the same sort of interaction with their dungeon's challenges, so doing this before you become one is better for you and for us."

Derek was more uncertain, "Um, I don't think my parents are expecting me to take that long, and the group we traveled with might be done before that."

Kazue nodded, "We were thinking of sending a messenger to your parents, and if they need any help while you are gone they could cover your work. It might be a good experience for a couple of our inhabitants." It was also technically more dangerous than anything they might do in the dungeon; if there was an accident when they were outside of the dungeon's territory, they wouldn't be coming back. Their souls would join the normal flow of life and death instead of resting in the dungeon's core until they were respawned. But it wasn't a risk any larger than every normal mortal faced in the outside world.

"Additionally, and we want to be clear that this is a separate offer, we were thinking of offering you three a sort of exchange program. You would spend a month here, working and training alongside Fuyuko, and then she spends the next month with one of you. There's some concern about the long-term effects of a young contractor spending all their time in their dungeon's territory, so this should offset that issue for her. Naturally, this requires getting permission from Derek's parents and from Shizoku's grandmother first, but I think she will be fine with some extra training for Shizo."

Shizoku glared at Kazue's illusion. "Really?"

"It's such a cute nickname," Kazue said with a grin, "but I guess it takes someone special for you to let them call you that." Someone like Derek, apparently. But that part was best left unsaid. "So right now, you guys should settle in and get yourselves some food. It's not quite up to the fare you had topside, but we have enough for you to cook something satisfying. And maybe if you are lucky, you can find your way to one of the cafes in the library tomorrow."

She sent some bunkin to collect the items, partially to maintain the charade that the wagons weren't already inside their territory, and had them delivered by the time the trio had made their dinner. They were not the first and not even the last to arrive that evening, but the dungeon had been expanding the space as needed to accommodate the influx of people. Sure, there were some days when it was just empty, but those were becoming rarer.

With how busy the dungeon had become, they were also taking advantage of Kazue's three-section library on some days, and the teens were going to face one of the useful aspects of that flexibility. Kazue made sure that they ended up in the exhibits section. This had been the hardest to flesh out, but now they had plenty of puzzles to solve. The other two sections would have been relatively easy for the book-smart witch to power through, the exhibits section was going to require all three of them.

It had become more of an interactive museum as Kazue had developed her initial concept, filled with displays ranging from historical value to pieces of art to educational pieces on magic, alchemy, or technology.

The trick was that some of these displays and interactive pieces were wrong or broken, with enough information to both notice that there was an error and to then figure out how things were supposed to be. Given the complexities involved, Kazue waived the normal limitation of needing to not talk to get the best rewards. Besides, that only really fit the normal library areas anyway, exhibits and displays were something you were supposed to talk about.

The first one was alchemy-based, though with a new formula and some exotic ingredients to ensure that Shizoku couldn't just spot the problem and fix it immediately. The first part of the puzzle was that several ingredients were not in the correct locations. But as an educational display, there was of course a description of each ingredient, not just a name.

Following the instructions blindly would have resulted in a foul-smelling mess that would have spattered everywhere and been hard to clean off but was ultimately harmless. Shizoku's experience and suspicious nature helped her notice that one of the ingredients was wrong, and they worked together from there. Derek's elemental abilities were great at teasing out subtle properties of minerals while Fuyuko's keen nose was adept at distinguishing all the subtle scents involved with the herbs that Shizoku was not familiar with. The result of this particular formula was several balls of strongly cinnamon-flavored, alchemically infused chewing gum, along with a copy of the formula.

The sharp scent and flavor could be used to ward of minor noxious scents and even reduce the effects of airborne toxin for up to an hour, but it had a second use as well. If one carefully blew a large bubble until it popped, that thinning stretch would set off another reaction that released a small cone of fire in front of the one blowing the bubble, though it got weaker the longer you'd been chewing the gum and would no longer work about the time that the flavor faded. Not something they would give a normal young teen, but these three were also training for combat.

After they had claimed their prize, the trio had some exploring and reading to do before they discovered their second puzzle: A crystal and mineral display that had been 'vandalized', complete with a bunkin playing the part of an overwhelmed and distraught curator. Some stones had been put in the wrong location, while others were simply missing. Derek was the best at finding the missing pieces, but there was a lot of area to explore. After that, they had to identify the correct stones. The twist was that some of the stones were dyed or heat treated to enhance their colors or mask their flaws, while others were samples of fakes. They had to become amateur geologists and gemologists to use the available tools and references to get all the samples into the correct displays.

As rewards for their hard efforts, they were given some small, semi-precious gems along with a pair of spectacles that could help decipher written languages you didn't know, a hand-held magnifying glass enchanted to enhance its magnification, and a less powerful monocle-style eyepiece useful for examining small items while handling them.

A little while after they'd completed that puzzle, Fuyuko stumbled onto the 'gift shop' without realizing that she'd been following clues when she'd been tracking down a story thread through multiple displays. But they were challengers right now, so nothing was free here aside from water from a drinking fountain. Taking the water with you required buying a flask.

Of course, Kazue liked to provide quality products. They were a little more expensive, but there were some flasks available that had minor enchantments to provide a light flavor to any water they held, while also being able to hold more water or other drinks than they should be able to.

Shizoku sighed and paid up; they did have some water flasks in their gear, but none of them were enchanted and it was a useful item to have, and the spiced packets of jerky and nuts were a fun treat, along with a few bags of candy.

The third display was a clockwork tellurion, or at least, the display for it. The pieces for it were scattered along with the remains of several crates that had been used for shipping the parts, along with the parts for some unrelated machines. There were assembly instructions, though those had been mixed up as well. Fuyuko took the lead on this particular mess, even if it was painfully obvious that she was shaking some rust off long unused and only partially remembered skills.

Assembling this monster took the rest of the day. It didn't help that some of the shinier pieces were being played with by some faeries, which had not been part of Kazue's design. The trio were exhausted by the time it was done, but were rewarded with some very nice pocket watches. The silver-plated timepieces were built to be both sturdy and precise and were enchanted on top of their quality materials and designs.

Of course, there wasn't a proper place to rest in the middle of the zone, so the three of them found their way back to the gift shop and were able to talk their way into being allowed to camp out in the backroom of the store for the night.