“I’m going to sincerely hope I never fall in,” Rowan says, shaking his head and backing away.
[They are friendly to you,] Hebron’s voice interjects in our minds. [They would not attack you.]
“This is possibly even more disturbing than the fact that Drake eats those things.”
Using the centipedes as a trap greatly decreases the amount of essence I’ll have available to spawn a dwarf, but I can always retrieve some of the cores if necessary. Maybe if we’re lucky we’ll even find an Elite monster we can add to Hebron’s defenses, assuming we run across one that wouldn’t simply kill us painfully. Having another person here would also help. Three can do a lot more than two, after all. Two is barely even a party.
“Let’s go get that boulder and see if we can find a few more giant centipedes,” I say.
“I suppose just having Hebron spawn material for a statue would defeat the purpose of gathering essence,” Rowan grumbles. “No, I’m not going to complain about you whimsically calling for a rolling boulder trap and then me having to push a large rock through the caves. Much.”
“You pushing the boulder is actually putting essence into it,” I say. “Not much, but if you rolled the same boulder up a hill over and over for ages, it might become interesting.”
“I am glad the ground is mostly level, at least. I suppose it’s good skill training. Doing even mundane things in a dangerous situation gets way more levels than safe in our Hearths.”
There are no orcs outside today, and I do a careful sweep through to make sure I don’t pick up any hostile auras nearby before we get to work. There might be consequences once they find out their people are missing, but it’s probably not that rare to lose teams in these caverns. Right now, the area is quiet and we’re able to roll the big rock into the dungeon without further incident.
Killing a few giant centipedes along the way isn’t an incident, but lunch and gathering trap fodder, even if I do earn myself some fresh cuts in the process.
I take the centipede corpses to the kitchen and work on butchering them while Rowan is getting the stone in place in the workshop. No sense in letting perfectly good meat and crafting materials go to waste. I extract the monster cores and toss them into the centipede pit.
By the time I’m done, Rowan has gotten the stone in place on the spawning platform. I thank him and get to work on sculpting. My tools are crude and my skill is ‘Poor’, but I’m patient and determined. The initial boulder only contains 5 essence, barely more than the smaller rocks and probably only because of its size and contact with Rowan. With each tap of my chisel and hammer, though, I watch the essence value tick up on the display.
I meticulously drew diagrams of the dwarf statue in my notebook, but at Rowan’s silently judgmental look at my artwork, I have to admit that no angle looks the same. No matter. I let emotion and desire guide my hands.
I spend days working on the statue, taking breaks to eat, sleep, and make cautious forays to patrol, hunt centipedes, and gather materials.
I think I might be close to unlocking Survival (Hunting). I’ve taken to using a knife and just healing up any cuts afterward. I might be getting close to unlocking a poison resistance skill, too. Their poison is painful rather than particularly debilitating, so I just take it as [Pain Tolerance] training.
I could work on this forever, trying to get every detail perfect. It is not great stonework, but it looks like a dwarf. The essence meter continues to tick up with every tap. As I brush off some dust and think I might actually be finished, I receive a notification confirming it.
My soul tingles at the rush of experience. Before pulling the lever, I go to retrieve Rowan, who is in the guard room watching the door. I show him the notification.
“Congratulations,” Rowan says, coming back with me to the spawner. “Let’s see what he looks like to give you such a nice skill.”
“It’s a lovely new skill,” I say. “I’m going to be getting a fair bit of use out of this, to which I mean get more Fair items.”
“Please don’t try to pun. It hurts my brain.”
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“Sorry,” I say. “That might be the fault of the auto-translator straining itself.”
“Sure, blame the auto-translator for your terrible puns.” Rowan goes over to the pedestal. “What’s the essence counter at? Ah, nice, that bumped it up to 6703.”
“I think we’ve got the rest of that covered.”
I start gathering up the items that aren’t currently on the platform because I didn’t feel like carving a statue in the middle of a pile of junk. My notebook, most of the stone tools, a lockpick from my bag, carapace bowls full of grape juice and life-aspected water, a rope made of roots, a chess set, and a toy boat. Still a little bit short, so I add a screwdriver from my bag as well.
The meter ticks over.
Make sure only intended items are on the platform. Pull lever to activate.
Rowan and I share a grin and he bids me to do the honors. I pull the lever.
Aether coalesces on the spawner. Essence sublimates and gathers into the dwarf statue as the items dissolve. Color spills across the statue as stone turns into flesh. A pale face with dark red hair. The process takes my artwork in the broad strokes and smooths out most of the flaws or at least makes them look like natural scars and crevices. The tunic I carved him in is green and his boots are a little rugged from my uneven carving job.
The first words of the new scion of Hebron are in English: “Duuuuuuude. I’m a dwarf. Awesome!”
His aura marks him as a reincarnator, of course. That’s probably necessary to spawn as an adult and I don’t know why I might expect otherwise. Can they reincarnate dwarf souls directly? I have so many questions and none of them feel the need to sit down and explain them all. (Not that hovering crystal spheres ‘sit’.)
“Do you speak Common?” Rowan asks.
“Sounds like it,” the dwarf says in Common. “’Lo folks. Apparently my name is Basalt Hebron Tempest Tiganna and I’m a [Dwarf Handyman].”
This guy came out already speaking Common? So unfair that I have to deal with this but a dwarf spawn gets it dumped into his head right away. (Then again, all the notes that went into him were written in Common, so that probably counts.)
“I’m Drake Corwen, and this is Rowan Talgarth,” I say. “Both ‘Tempest Tiganna’ too. Are you from Earth? I was an engineer from California in my first life.”
“Yeah,” Basalt says. “Was nobody important. Just a regular American dude trying to get by.”
“Would you rather go by your name from your first life?” I ask.
“No way. My name was boring. ‘Basalt Hebron’ is a good dwarfy name.”
“Fair enough,” I say. “There’s… a lot to catch you up to speed on and you should probably do the tutorial at some point and get used to the system.”
“Yeah, I’m looking at it. So what is this, anyway? Was my brain stuck in a jar and uploaded into an online game after I died or something?”
“Reincarnation, or an afterlife,” I say in English, since this won’t make sense to Rowan. “I’m not quite sure myself. I suppose it doesn’t matter which since Earth is long gone anyway. We’re playing RPGs to entertain aliens for eternity. This might be hell but it’s been a fun one.”
“Coooooool…”
I switch back to Common. “Let’s take you on a tour of the place while we give you the info dump, shall we? Oh, and be sure to grab that axe in case we’re attacked by orcs again.”
Basalt picks up the axe and looks at me. “Dude, you’ve practically guaranteed we will be attacked by orcs by the end of my tutorial.”
I blink. “Dammit. You’re probably right. Did you start off with any skills?”
Basalt nods. “Yeah, a bunch. Mostly ones in Crafting, Mechanics, and Maintenance. Also Enhanced Heart (Rapid Healing).”
“Ah, great, I was hoping you’d wind up with that when I included life-aspected water.”
It’s good to know that my hypothesis on what sort of abilities he might start off with panned out. I wasn’t even sure he’d wind up with any at all but it didn’t exactly cost me anything extra to test it that I wasn’t putting in anyway.
He holds up the axe to examine it. “Pity I didn’t get any skills for using this.”
“I’m sure you’ll unlock one soon enough,” I say. “Alright, in this room, we have the weird magic grapes. Eat them when you get hungry. They grow back fast. Your only other option for food at the moment is giant centipede meat and we haven’t found any edible mushrooms yet.”
“I’m guessing you don’t normally live here.”
“We… got a little lost,” Rowan says. “Nobody was normally going to let an 8 and almost-15 year old at Basic rank off on their own to explore forgotten ruins.”
“Wait, you’re 8?” Basalt sizes me up to be about the same size as him. “I thought you were like, a beardless dwarf or a halfling or something.”
“This was supposed to be a nice hot springs vacation to meditate and train some skills,” I say. “My mom, cousin, and friend were back there. We just got separated from our higher-level chaperones.”
We reach the burbling fountain in a room that looks like a scene from a slasher movie. The water is still crisp and clear, at least.
Basalt’s eyes fall upon the bloodstains on the floor. “Man, tell me that’s orc blood.”
“No, it’s mostly mine,” I say.
“[Rapid Healing] I assume? Don’t think a normal person your size can survive that much blood loss and look as springy as you.”
“I hadn’t even realized I was losing that much. The orc was an Elite. He barely cut me but it just kept bleeding. Higher ranks get a lot of bonuses and I don’t know what sort of skills he might have had. Fortunately, the traps did massive damage to the orc party. We added some more since then. Check this out.”
I flip a lever, and the floor in front of us falls away to reveal a pit crawling with giant centipedes.
“Man, I wish I’d had this sort of security system at my last job,” Basalt says. “Dump junkies and screaming Karens into the bug pit.”
I close the pit again.
“Anyway, we’re kind of stranded here until my family sends a rescue party and finds us,” I say. “And I’m pretty sure none of them have ever been down here before. I have no idea how long it might take them to get here. And we’ve already been attacked by orcs once. It’s only a matter of time until they strike again.”
I pause dramatically, looking toward the door. Everything’s quiet. For the moment.
I move the tour into the guard room. “Right, and here’s the peephole to look out and see if we’ve got company.”
We look out to discover that we do not currently have company.
“You guys are making me nervous,” Rowan puts in. “And it’s not like the orc horde is going to dramatically time their arrival for the moment we walk in here. I will just go back to keeping watch.”