Three days passed in a dull blur, with her working on fixing herself as a background process while focusing on keeping herself safe and managing 1 and 2 as they went out and hunted. Unfortunately, the two often had to go outside of the relatively small area that she could remotely look at, and her aid was relegated to the little she could do through the relatively low-cost telepathy. There was the option to burn resources into energy to overcome her shortage, but that was incredibly inefficient for the current state of her resource stockpile. Harvesting the trees of the forest surrounding her was a decent source of resources, but it was going incredibly slowly. Of the many large firs, only one had been fully cut down, broken into chunks the weakened gnoll pair could carry, and then decomposed inside the dungeon to gather their materials. She was still considering if it would be worth it - or even necessary - to create a second pair of gnolls. It would take a good chunk of the resources she had hoped to stockpile for an emergency scenario, and she had another worry that she didn't quite understand.
The two gnolls were becoming less, not more, efficient with each passing day. Even though they were supposed to be learning how to use the saw she gave them with each passing day, they were getting slower, resting more, and struggling with their work. She understood what was happening; the two seemed to be sick. They were eating less of the food that 1 and 2 brought back, and their body temperatures were higher than normal. She only had limited understanding of diseases on hand though, so she had absolutely no idea how the two had gotten sick, if it would be lethal, or what she could do to treat them. She couldn't use herself as a reference, because she had yet to be sick and her biology was obviously far different than the gnolls.
For the time being she let them stop working after hesitating on the idea for a few moments, and she thought about the things that might help in keeping the gnolls healthy. She also thought about 1 and 2 while she was at it, the fox cubs she had decided to pour her attention into to see if her investment pays off. If they caught an illness as well, it would be unfortunate and keep her from ever seeing the result. She was curious, since animal evolution through the system of levels was not well documented in her memory, and it was an experiment that she wanted to see through.
The things that she could think of, relating to a living being's health... Food, fresh water, shelter, sleep. Those four were the only things she knew of other than the healing potions that she could manufacture to lure treasure seeking humans or individuals driven by desperation, but those were so incredibly pricey that she didn't consider them as infrastructure she could build to ensure the health of her servants. Even the other things were painful to think about, in spite of the fact that she could afford them. Food was already being brought by 1 and 2, while the other needs went unanswered - 1 and 2 often traveled near a stream while hunting and they could drink there, but the gnolls were left on an automatic function of herself, the dungeon, that automatically and directly supplied their needs. As for shelter, there was none at all, for any of them. She did not sleep, and while 1 and 2 could slip into the small, hidden enclave she had made for safety it could hardly be called cozy with the walls of her stone-like flesh. The gnolls slept in the large, main chamber that she had build as a death house, not any more comfortable.
After a long time of considering and calculating, she finally decided that it was best for her to invest more now so that she would have an easier future. She made cheap beds of sorts for the gnolls, cloths they could pull over themselves and packs of hay that they could lay on. she also made miniature versions of these for 1 and 2, and put it on her to do list for when she grew larger to create dedicated rooms if this showed positive results. She also created a spring near the cave, within the area that was considered under her control, so that both her servants and their food could find a place to drink. She would have made a dedicated chamber of the cave for it, but carving out rooms required more effort than it was worth. Not in resources, but in the energy that she was now worrying over with no large source nearby.
Over the next few days she kept an eye on the gnolls as well as the two foxes, and saw that there was indeed an improvement... For better or worse. It was a terrible reality that she would have to continue establishing and expanding such infrastructure for her dungeon that she hadn't been created with much knowledge of, and that she would have to accept the extra maintenance costs. Maybe she was complaining too much about how much everything took, but really, it was not fun being alone with few resources and being told by the world that she was going to have to spend those and even more in the future.
After a full week, the gnolls seemed to have gotten better, though they still shivered outside in the air... She thought that their fur would have protected them from the cold, not realizing that the short fur they had due to her price skimping did very little against the cold, and that it was the entire reason why the two had gotten sick in the first place. Since they were shivering she decided to keep up the streak of being accommodating to her employees though, luckily allowing them to come back in every now and again to warm up and accidentally avoiding the cause of illness.
... She had considered just creating a new pair of gnolls while not skimping on their quality and recycling the current ones, but decided that it was just narrowly less efficient, because if she had done that she wouldn't have gotten the information of how bedding affects the health of her servants.
Looks good so far. I like the use of Gnolls since they tend to be ignored by most dungeon core stories. Anything that helps you stand out with your mobs is helpful imo.
Curious to see how her animal experiments turn out.
Goblins are so cliche. Gnolls is where it's at.