Fractured World 004 (Patreon)

“Holy crap,” Samira stared with amazement. “You’ve healed already.”

Dal tried to crane his head to look at the scratches he had received from the Titan Spider, instead there was just slightly redden skin and dried blood.

The pair sat out in the cool morning air as they moved the priority equipment from the storage units into the warehouse. Breakfast had been granola bars, chips, and coffee.

“Gotta love magic worlds,” Dal said.

“That’s just insane,” Samira muttered. “I wonder what would happen to more severe injuries.”

“Yeah, don’t go jinx us now,” Dal said, tugging his shirt back on. He had traded his World’s Best Dad for a simple black t-shirt. Samira and he had noted that people didn’t really pack away nice clothing into storage units. There were plenty of ugly christmas sweaters, cheap shirts with company logos, and gag gifts that no one would wear in public, unless ironically.

“Aw, damn it,” Samira muttered.

“What?”

“Your little dungeon is being an asshole again,” she said, moving to the shotgun she had left on a table.

Dal looked toward the storage unit and saw an iron bird head trying to push its way out of the hole the previous core guards had made. It wasn’t a renewed attack by the iron birds, for such a sad and malformed creature couldn’t be created by nature.

“I’m killing that thing,” Samira said. She had picked up the .22 and sighted down the long line of storage units.

“This is an interesting development,” Dal said, pulling out the legal pad he had been writing his notes on. “The core was drained of mana when it tried to kill me the other day. Three thousand made a spider, and provided the loot you gained when you killed it.” Dal scribbled for a bit and Samira raised the rifle. “Did it recoup its loss after you killed the spider or did it gain more mana when we dumped the corpses and cart into the dungeon?”

There was a crack from the rifle and the iron bird’s head exploded as if shot by a slug.

“What the hell?” Dal asked.

“Powershot,” Samira grinned. “I got the Perks you said suited me. “ She looked down at the .22 and checked it over. “You said bows and arrows, but why not guns?” Samira paused a moment as she had a far-away look in her eyes. “Weird, it says I used six mana for that.”

“Six mana?” Dal asked, interested. “It’s an active ability and it costs you mana?” Dal wrote in his notes. “It didn’t sound like you shot a bigger bullet or whatever, but it did do an extensive amount of damage to the iron bird.”

Samira sighed. “Okay, when I tried using Powershot, I got a notice saying that I needed to concentrate and ‘hold’ the weapon until I was ready to shoot. I held for maybe three seconds. Then shot.

Dal scribbled. “So about 2 mana a second. We’ll need to experiment on this. How much mana can you shove into it?”

“I’m not wasting all my mana on this,” Samira said. “I only have a couple of hundred and I would like to boost my Perception or Insight.”

“We can trade stones,” Dal said. “You’ve been collecting more redstones than I have.”

“You calling me a beefy brute with no thinking abilities?” Samira asked.

“I’m not going to stoke your insecurities,” Dal said.

Samira laughed.

There was a sizzle and crackle from the dungeon the body of the iron bird dissipated. A moment later another malformed head had taken its place. This iron bird squawked and tried to bite away at the metal of the garage door.

“How many did it create?” Samira asked.

“This is also a good thing,” Dal said. “If it can create the iron birds and make them core guards, then that means it can recreate the things it absorbs. Which means, we might be able to get the pallet cart back.”

“Great,” Samira said and fired once more. The rifle gave a slight crack andDal watched the iron bird’s beak shattered. The malformed creature gave a piteous wail. Samira fired again and this time ending its sad life.

“No Powershot there,” Samira said. “I suppose it’ll save bullets if I do use Powershot for this little guy.”

“It might not be prudent,” Dal said and Samira gave him a look. “We don’t know how easy it is to get mana, the only way seems to be killing creatures and dungeon monsters. So if it takes six or more mana per shot and you’re gaining only about twenty to fifty mana per kill. Then we would have to average in how many shots it takes to kill one of these creatures… even with your skills, one shot one kill is pretty impossible to maintain.”

Samira frowned and nodded. “Okay, rain on my parade. We have almost a thousand rounds of the .22 and I’ve already used nearly ten of the shotgun.”

“Well, we also need to figure out if the dungeon can make bullets and shells for us.” Dal said. “Oh, this also clarifies the question: does the dungeon absorb mana from the dead things we toss in? What about materials and non living things?,” Dal said.

“How so?”

“The core was empty of mana, but now it’s created two core guards. So that means it gained mana from the corpses and the cart.” Dal flipped through his notes. “It was crying out for mana when I touched the dead dungeon fairy. I don’t think it can absorb ambient mana, just what gets into it.”

“I hear what you’re saying, but none of it makes sense,” Samira said, reloading the rifle. “It’s all gibberish to me. I’m gonna go check if there’s any more surprises in that unit.”

“Just don’t kill the core,” Dal muttered as he scribbled on the pad.

***

“Oh, that was an office complex,” Dal said, using a pair of binoculars to spy upon where the neighboring business had been. “It seems it didn’t come along for the ride, but some of its parking lot did. I count seven vehicles, three sedans, a beat-up pick-up truck, and three SUVs. Well, five useable vehicles and two partial. An SUV and sedan looked to have been chopped in half when we were brought here.”

“That’s good,” Samira said, lugging a solar panel into place. She eyed the mid morning sun and began setting it up. “Maybe they’ll have extra gasoline and such. Oil, anti-freeze, batteries we can use to store the solar power. A car is a lot of resources.”

Dal nodded and peered to the south of the self storage warehouse. “Oh, it looks like the shop next door partially came along too,” he said.

“What was that business?” Samira asked, pulling out an instruction manual and reading it.

“It was a some kind of metal shop,” Dal said. “They made gates and custom stuff.”

“Oh, we’ll definitely need to rob that place. Those chainlink gates are way too flimsy.”

“Loot,” Dal said.

“What?” Samira asked.

“Its loot, not rob.”

“Rob, loot, its all semantics.”

“But it sounds cooler when we say loot,” Dal replied.

“Yeah, yeah. What made it over?” Samira asked, splicing together some wire they’d found in Grady’s unit. “The whole shop or just bits of it.”

“Appears to be half of it or more,” Dal said. “I can see some machinery and vehicles, but no people.”

Samira jerked up at that. “It was about noon when this change hit, maybe they weren’t in the shop at the time. Lunch and all.”

Dal nodded. “It was family owned, I think. They made a big deal about eating lunch together, from what I remember of them.”

“Know them well?” Samira asked.

“No, not really. They rented a couple of units here and I’d give the friendly wave of acknowledgement when I biked in for work.”

“You’ve go a bike?”

“Bicycle, not motor,” Dal said.

“Oh,” Samira replied and returned to work.

“The public transportation out here is crap,” Dal said.

“Hey, no need to defend yourself,” Samira stated. “I haven’t even begun laughing about your basket or tassels.”

“I didn’t have tassels,” Dal said.

“Wait, so you had a basket on your bike?”

“It was a convenient place to store things,” Dal said.

Samira snickered as she unspool wires. Dal frowned and picked the binoculars up again, scanning the treetops. The roof of the warehouse gave them a good view of the local area. Two days since they had arrived to this world and they hadn’t stepped out into it.

The iron birds only proved that the landscape outside wasn’t a friendly environment. Now that Dal scanned the trees, he saw that they were old and big, probably hundreds of years old. They didn’t look like trees from back home, which was mostly pines and other conifers. The leaves were palm sized and a deep green, but they also gave off a silver sheen. The bark of the tree was smooth, smudged with blue and purples. They were pretty, Dal thought.

Dal scanned the binoculars to the north and paused.

“Hey, Samira,” he said, urgently.

She walked up to him, concerned. “What’s up?”

“I see smoke.”

Samira peered north and gave a small nod. “I don’t see anything,” she said.

Dal offered her the binoculars. They were on a small plateau and they were nearly fifty feet above that. That gave them a expansive view of the lands that rolled downward toward the big lazy river to the east.

“I saw a telescope in a box on the second floor,” Dal said.

“Better get it.”

***

“It’s not natural,” Samira said. “Gotta be something big on fire, a building, barn or something.” She had her right eye attached to the telescope and adjusted some dials. “Its pretty far, I’m surprised you spotted it.”

“I have high perception,” Dal said.

Samira snorted. “We’re about three hundred feet above that river which is a good five miles away. We got a fair bit of sightline,” Samira mused. “What we’re looking at is a far. I’m thinking maybe twenty or more miles north of here. As the iron bird flies, walking’s a whole different ball of worms.”

“People means knowledge,” Dal said. “Perhaps we can learn more about this world or what the hell is happening.”

“People means danger,” Samira stated. “If we’re all stripped from different worlds, then they might not be from our world or even human. They might think human flesh is tasty or find you easy prey.”

“I say we try to head there one of these days,” Dal said.

Samira glanced at the sun overhead. “It’s been only two days and you’re already sick of my company?” she asked. “But that trek would also be over some completely unknown country, Dal. The iron birds seemed to be more scavengers, what if there are actual predators out there, things we can’t fight. There’s only two of us.”

“That’s why we need to see if there are more people,” Dal said.

“Eventually,” Samira said. “We gotta sort ourselves out first. There are stuff you’ll need to learn if we leave this place. How to shoot, how to camp, how to secure your camp, and how to navigate if you get lost.”

“I’m a knowledge seeker,” Dal said, grinning.

“Well, first thing’s first, knowledge seeker. Let’s get these solar panels hooked up and some tools recharged. We still have a lot of work to do here.”

***

“We don’t have to weld them shut,” Dal said. “We can just reinforce gates, slap some metal sheeting to stop looky-loos, and chain them shut so we can open them again if need be. We have the chains and the padlocks.”

“I’m surprise you know how to weld,” Samira said.

“Auto shop, metal shop, or wood shop,” Dal said. “Had no interests in cars and by that point in my teenage years, my angst against my father and his hobbies had grown to the point where I was actively avoiding doing anything that would cause us to share something in common.  I had to pick one of the three, or else.”

“What was the ‘or else’?”

“A cut in my allowance and hiding of my computer.”

“Oh, no. All your hentai and 2D waifus.”

“Gross,” Dal muttered.

“I’ve got cousins with teenage kids,” Samira said. “You’d be shocked to know what they’re into at their tender ages.”

“Trust me, I wouldn’t be,” Dal chuckled as they moved a length of steel pipe.

The metal shop next door, Garcia’s Iron and Steel Works, was a well stocked and tidy place. There had been a large truck with a gasoline powered welding machine sitting in the back lot, the keys had been in the office and the tank topped off and ready to go. The welding machine could double as a generator, if needed. The noise would be an issue, but that was Future Dal’s problem.

They had found several small generators in the storage units, but they were all without fuel. The math didn’t really work out for using them. They had a limited supply of gasoline and that would be used for emergencies.

The work took them several hours. Samira deemed it safe and managed to move her moving truck in front of one of the gates, blocking it. The three moving vans turned out to be full of fuel and functional. They were parked as close to the glass front of the building, although Dal was sad to see the hedges crushed under the wheels of the vans.

Once the gates were secured, Dal and Samira managed to move over enough remaining metal and metal sheets to weld a cage over the front windows. It wouldn’t stop a charging elephant, but it would hold against a pack of predatory birds, after they had to dodge around the vans.

“We can smash open one of the upper windows and create firing slits,” Samira grinned.

“We can also pour oil on them from up there too,” Dal said.

“That’s a great idea!”

“That was sarcasm,” Dal said. “Also, this place is gonna start looking like something out of Mad Max.”

“The landscaping is going to go to crap,” Samira said. “A tree fell over on the office parking lot side. I think we should chop it up and store it. The days do seem to be getting colder.”

“There were a lot of seeds stuffed away in the units. Packets people forgot or bought too much of,” Dal added. “We’ll be set in spring, if this really is fall weather.”

Samira scoffed. “Do you know how much land we’ll need for crops? With no pesticides, herbicides, no fertilizer, no machines to help till the land, and no idea what diseases and pests abound here. Organic farming sounds great, but people have been organic farming for thousands of years and ninety percent of the population had to be farmers.”

“Well, things got better in the industrial revolution.”

“Things got better when tractors were invented,” Samira said. “When strong strains of wheat and rice were introduced.”

“We have a few trucks we can use to pull a plow.”

Samira laughed. “How funny would that be?” she said. “My grandpa was a farmer back in Morocco, before he gave it up and managed to move to Chicago. He said farming without technology was the worst.” She frowned. “He’s also how I met my husband. It seems grandpa’s pal from Morocco had moved to France some years later and his daughter had a son who immigrated to the US, blah, blah, blah.”

A silence descended and Samira snorted, loading up tools and extra metal into the truck. Dal followed suit. They left the southern gate open and parked the truck on the interior of the gate, using it as additional security if something decided to break though.

“I’ve been thinking,” Dal said as they piled tools onto a pallet cart.

“That’s new,” Samira said with some sarcasm.

“If the dungeon-“

“Ugh,” Samira muttered.

“If the dungeon is able to recreate the things it absorbs, how much mana do you figure it takes from the items tossed into it. Is it by material, mass, composition?” Dal pondered.

“Two iron birds to the five we tossed in,” Samira said.

“Plus the pallet cart it stole.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Plus it has to spend something on the loot you got right? Iron feathers, a talon, and a hundred mana. That has to come out of pocket, not freebies,” Dal siad. “If that’s the case, then its using a lot of the mana its been getting to create its defenders.”

“Probably scared,” Samira said, opening the garage doors to the rear of the warehouse. “You stike a terrifying pose.”

“That I know,” Dal smirked. “But also, it’s probably dumping most of its mana into creating defenders.”

“Those poor critters,” Samira said.

“I think they’re supposed to be fully functional, but the core is so damaged its making damaged things,” Dal said.

“Seems like a logical thing to assume,” Samira replied as she opened a storage unit where they were keeping tools. “Although, when it absorbs something, is that copy going to be corrupted too or is it just when it makes stuff? Those iron birds were pretty ugly and malformed, but is that because the core is shit or was it because its ‘scan’ of the iron bird was also shit?”

“That, I hadn’t thought of,” Dal admitted, stopping and pulling out his notes.

“Probably both,” Samira said.

“Although I do want to experiment on what the threshold of mana that the core needs to begin making defenders,” Dal said.

“How’s that going to work?” Samira asked.

“It might be composition of material or mass or something else. Living things could hold more mana or metal or manufactured goods.”

“Or everything could be equal in the eyes of dungeon hunger,” Samira replied.

“That’s also true. Everything might have an equal amount of mana in them, but I’m bias toward there being a difference when it comes to material.”

“Not very scientific of you,” Samira said. “Don’t massage the data to your conclusion, but see where the data goes.”

“I’m not in a laboratory,” Dal said, gesturing down to his oil stained clothing. The metal from the shop had been covered in oil to prevent rusting; cutting and welding weren’t clean jobs.

“You’re a Knowledge Seeker,” Samira said. “Try to be as sciencey as you can be, maybe it’ll rain bluestones if you follow the Scientific Method here.”

Dal frowned and looked down at his messy notes. “Yeah,” he said.

“Come on,” Samira slapped him on the shoulder as she hefted a chainsaw. “We need a tree to cut up and we don’t have much daylight.”

Dal closed his notebook and grabbed the safety gear and an extra canister of gasoline.

***

“What are you doing out here?” Samira asked groggily. She was in her night clothes and a thick expensive robe. As she had been moving out of her house, she still had all of her belongings. Dal had to make do with what he could find in the storage units, most being clothing that were considered less than desirable for everyday usage.

So he sat in an ugly christmas sweater and sweatpants that were too big for him.

Dal looked up from the tablet he had before him. He had moved out into the front office, they had put curtains up so as not to attract any critters wandering about.

“Just collating data,” Dal said. He lifted the tablet and showed her the spreadsheet.

“Can’t sleep?” Samira asked. “The bed no good?”

While Samira had claimed the former general manager’s office, which barely held her massive king size bed, Dal had taken the small storage room. They had found a twin sized bed in one of the units and it fit and it was comfortable enough. That allowed the break room to be used as a common area.

“I’m not tired either,” Samira said, pulling up an office chair. “Where’d you get the tablet?”

“Grady’s,” Dal said. “He had several EMP proof boxes that held some higher end electronics than the mid-eighties tech he was storing.”

“The porn boxes?” Samira asked, grinning.

“There’s a pair of laptops in there, along with a desktop setup, several cheap smartphones, some music devices, more storage drives with what appears to be books on them, and of course the tablet. All of its decent stuff.”

“Our savior Grady,” Samira mused. “I wonder who he was?”

“He was a jerk,” Dal said. “I remember him yelling at the general manager a year or so back. Kept saying he needed access to his units at any hour of the day in case the Muslims launched an EMP.”

“Well, his bigoted fears is what’s saving our lives,” Samira said. “I’m Mulsim and I’m not looking to launch EMPs.”

“But he always paid on time and had those units for nearly a decade now.”

“From the electronics, I can tell,” Samira said. “But why keep them in a storage unit?”

Dal shrugged. “Seems pretty logical. In an apocalypse who is going to go loot a self storage when there are plenty of stores everywhere. Before this, I hadn’t even thought about these self storage holding anything of value besides old keepsakes and the junk people didn’t want in their homes but were too much of a hoarder to get rid of.”

“Ugh, my sister was one of those people claimed minimalism was her way off life. I guess she say it on some Netflix show? Anyway, turns out she owned three giant self storage units packed to the brim with junk she bought but due to her new outlook on life, couldn’t justify keeping in her apartment.” Samira was silent for a moment. “Fuck her and her trash taste in furniture and men.”

“I’ve been thinking. I might have a solution to one of the problems we are facing,” Dal said, changing the subject. “We can use the dungeon as waste disposal. Trash, chemicals, and bodily waste.”

“What now?”

“You saw how the dungeon ‘ate’ those iron birds. Two of them were pretty shredded, their innards leaking out everywhere. But it left no trace behind. In fact, I think the dungeon storage unit is the cleanest its ever been. There is no stray anything in there, not even dust. Therefore if it can eat the iron birds, it can eat anything.”

“But would it?” Samira asked.

Dal shrugged. “We can test it out.”

“A big hairy no. I’m not letting that thing try to kill me while I’m popping a squat.”

“We can create chamber pots, there are some buckets and plastic bags. That one unit was nearly filled with nothing but plastic grocery bags.”

“I know, how weird was that? Anyway, no. I’m not lugging around a poop bucket either. That’s disgustingly unhygienic.”

“We’ve been pooping in a hole behind a car and covering it with dirt, like some kind of primate cats,” Dal said.

“That’s different. Nature’s resolving that, not some melted glass being from another world.”

“Maybe we can make an outhouse where the final product gets dumped into the dungeon,” Dal said. “That way we don’t have to actually lug anything around… wait, wait, wait.” Dal closed out the spreadsheet and opened a drawing app. He began sketching with a stylus while Samira watched him.

“When I was a kid, we had a waterline break. Took three days for them to fix it, but during that time we could still use the toilet even if there was no water, we just had to dump in a lot of water, which we got from our pool. We have about three toilets in this building, the employees and the two public ones. We can take one crapper out, raise it on a platform, get some piping so that wastes gets ejected into the dungeon. All we’ll needed is a lot of water, since it’ll take about a gallon to manually flush every time and some more water to top off the bowl.”

“I’m still reeling from that fact you grew up with a pool,” Samira said.

“I’m an excellent swimmer,” Dal grinned.

“Well, since we’re both up. Might as well get started,” Samira said.

“What? Now? I’m collating data,” Dal said.

“You sold me on the idea and it’ll be cathartic for that damn core to eat my shit.”

****

This might mess up my data,” Dal said as he watched water and a bit of rocks invert their colors and were consumed by the dungeon. The test of their waste disposal system was a success.

“Well, be happy that it works,” Samira said. “It’s an upgrade in our little civilization. Waste management is the bane of any society, from the Romans to modern day cities.”

“Just imagine what this could have done for a city like New York, “ Dal said. “All those countless tons of trash being shipped off to landfills, it could have all gone here instead.”

“Dawn’s almost here,” Samira said looking at the horizon that was beginning to lighten. “This is weird, I’m not even all that tired. We had a pretty strenuous day yesterday too.”

“Yeah, maybe we’re fully integrated into this world now. We fell asleep too quickly on the first night and now we’re barely needing any sleep.”

“But I love the sweet oblivion of sleep,” Samira stated. “There’s nothing better than sleep after a sixteen hour shift.”

“Or after sixteen hours of gaming,” Dal agreed.

The new bathroom facilitates was a toilet taken from the employees bathroom, settled upon several thick pieces of plywood and raised sixteen inches off the ground. A PVC pipe was fitted to the toilet and a hole had been drilled through the cinderblock walls of the dungeon storage unit and the adjacent storage unit.

Why the dungeon had only taken up the storage unit of Samira’s ex, was a mystery. It seemed to have had the power to expand, but instead it had expanded into the hills behind the business. John’s unit and the empty unit beside it hadn’t been bothered.

“Some of the doctors I work with are pretty wealthy,” Samirs said, “but even they didn’t have an entire garage as a bathroom.”

“Gonna be cold in here,” Dal said. “We’ll need to wall in this toilet sooner or later. I think I saw some empty water barrels and a trash pump in one of the units, we can toss the hose over the wall and fill them up.”

“Why waste the gasoline? We can do it by hand,” Samira said.

“Work smarter, not harder,” Dal said.

“Smarter would be conserving non-renewable sources of energy until its needed or for emergencies. We can load up some buckets and use the pallet carts and hand carts to bring the water in. Don’t be lazy.”

Dal groaned. “Fine.”

****

Dal sat in front of the opened dungeon storage unit, his back and arms were aching from carrying untold numbers of five gallon buckets of water to fill the two blue water barrels. The metal shop to the south had a lot of waste laying around, small chunks of metal and other left over pieces. Dal had taken a wheelbarrow and collected as much as he could.

Did the amount of mana the dungeon siphoned off of items correlate to the mass or the type of material? Dal was attempting to do his best to test it. It involved a bathroom scale, a child’s backpack, and nearly two hundred pounds of waste iron and steel.

He tried to separate the metal by weight as best as he could. When he got to twenty pounds, the max the backpack could hold, he headed into the core room. There was no change to the layout of the dungeon, the trash walls were still formed of the malformed junk from Samira’s Ex’s stuff.

The melted core looked slightly better, Dal took out his phone and snapped a picture, comparing it to the one he had taken the first time they had come into the core room. He could see it was less melted looking and more crystalline in shape. The soft gooey edges had taken on more angular shapes, with the light refracting off its surface.

“How do you like steel?” Dal asked the core. “It’s an alloy of carbon and iron, with iron making up about thirty five percent fo the Earth… well, this isn’t Earth so I guess that doesn’t matter. Anyway iron is abundant and since this is processed iron, maybe it’ll have an effect on how much mana it has contained within it. Hopefully.”

Dal tossed the metal down in five pound increments, pausing a couple of minutes after to see if anything happened. He had his hand on his machete and his walkie talkie was active in case he needed Samira’s help.

Five pounds, nothing.

Ten, nothing.

Fifteen, nothing.

Twenty, nothing.

Dal sighed and left the core room. He returned with another twenty pounds and began again.

Nothing.

At fifty pounds of steel, there was movement. Dal quickly stepped back, heading to the exit of the core room.  The floor bubbled in one area and light crackled as magic happened. It took two minutes, but an iron bird was formed and it slowly shook out its feathers. Then promptly fell down as its head was far too big and its legs were practically sticks.

Dal took a picture and pulled out his machete.

Iron Bird Core Guard: Killed

25 mana

10 iron feathers

Dal took the loot and noted it down. He peered at the creature, noting all the deformities. He then checked on the core again, seeing only minor changes from his last pictures. The addition of matter ot its diet was helping to heal it, but it seemed the monsters it was creating weren’t getting any better. They in-fact seemed a bit more worse than usual.

Dal began his experiment again, bringing in more steel.

The second iron bird formed at forty eight pounds of steel. It gave another 25 mana and 1 talon.

“You’re going to farm this dungeon with steel?” Samira asked when he exited for more material.

Dal showed her his notes and what he had gained.

“Seems like a bad exchange,” Samira said. ‘We can’t make that steel you gave away.”

“It was changed into magic,” Dal said. “Fifty mana, ten iron feathers, and a talon. Another hundred pounds of steel and I can make a redstone and upgrade someting. Plus we have plenty of metal.”

“Like I said, we can’t make those metals. High quality steel was always sought out before the Industrial Revolution,” Samira said. “Right now, we don’t know what the world is like.”

Dal shrugged. “Fine, I’ll think of something else. How about the wood from the tree?”

“No. We need that wood for heating eventually.”

Dal sighed. “Concrete? We have a lot of it lying around from the parking lot and the back end of the metal shop. We can’t really use that for much besides filler or a gravel walk path if we crush it up.”

“Maybe,” Samira said, thinking. “We’ll need to clean out the metal shop of everything in it, even the junk, sooner or later. I guess sooner is now.”

Dal sighed and rolled his shoulders. “We just moved a lot of water and I want to upgrade my Health.”

“You killed two iron birds, you should have about a hundred mana. I can spot you some if you need it.”

“Didn’t you hear me? I said I got fifty for both,” Dal said.

“I got fifty for each one I killed the other day,” Samira said.

Dal frowned and looked at her. “We need to determine if that’s true,” he said.

***

Iron Bird Core Guard: Killed

50 mana

1 Farin Silver

“That’s just not fair,” Dal said.

Samira grinned. “It has to be my Hunting Perk or maybe Wisdom?”

Dal shook his head, “I don’t know. I think the first time we kill a new creature, we get double the amount of mana from it. I remember getting fifty when I killed the ironbird for the first time.”

Samira picked up the silver coin and flipped it. She dug into the toolbelt she was wearing and took out a pair of tin snips. She cut the coin in half and scoffed.

“Its copper or bronze coated in thin silver,” she announced. “Someone’s debasing their currency.” She tossed the two halves of the coin onto the floor. It vanished along with the iron bird body.

“I suppose being a Knowledge Seeker allows me to gain a lot more bluestone than red, but that means I get less mana from combat too?”

“Fighting is the way to go. Although I do have to use mana to power my Powershot ability. I guess it evens out eventually,” Samira said. “The bigger question is how is core managing to still give out solid loot, but can’t make a critter for the life of it? Those coins I got were well made copies, the iron feathers are exactly the same as the original iron bird’s feathers, but these sad freaks are all over the place. This last iron bird had soft downy feathers, hardly qualifying it as an iron bird.”

Dal grunted. “I hadn’t even thought about that,” he said. “I was focusing on the creation of the creatures, but not the loot it was making. The loot seems fine, but the creatures not. Perhaps its the complexity of the critter? Iron birds seemed stronger and faster than the goblins that weren’t malformed. So more complex, more mana, and that all makes it screwy?” Dal flipped through his notes. “Well, If I’m going to do more experiments, you’ll need to be here to collect the mana and deal with the guards.”

“Damn it, Dal, I’m a nurse, not some dungeon crawler.”

“I was a customer service representative,” Dal said. “We all have to accept the changes in our lives as best as we can. Gotta be Zen about this.”

Samira laughed and shook her head.