IWUAaDNW: Exploration 2.1, Exploration 2.3, Growth 3.8, Party 5.4

[QUOTE]
· Light Sources – 10 AP
Lights that make adventurers less scared, so they go deeper and die more. Also makes your minions fight a bit harder.
[/QUOTE]

—IWUAaDNW: Exploration 2.1



As they started carefully walking down my entrance, he nocked an arrow on the string.

I also got ready for battle, hiding most of my wasps and spiders in the monster alcove, keeping only a about a dozen of them in the entrance hall, along with my ants. I had other ants already climbing down in front of my core room to form a chitinous wall in case they didn't get the message.

"Awfully dark down here, isn't it?" Kamella said. "Should I fix that?"

Bob furrowed his brow and nodded. "Do it."

She nodded, reaching into her pouch and pulling out some kind of yellow crystal. She took a deep breath, held the crystal in front of her and, after a moment, opened her hands. The crystal kept floating in place.

"Spirits of knowledge, bless our path with your sight," she chanted. The crystal burst into light, was surrounded by a circle framed with tiny words--Light, path, protect, purify--for an instant before a sharp light filled the tunnel, illuminating it and a small portion of my room. Somehow, their own bodies were not throwing any shadows.

"Urgh, what the fuck," Cirys complained. "Where did all those bugs come from?"

—IWUAaDNW: Exploration 2.3



The room past the water room had been my first attempt at making a room that wasn’t the smallest possible size, just to see if it gave me more mana reserves. It had not, but it also hadn’t cost me any additional upkeep, so that made it a more convenient way of acquiring space to build into than making a hallway. It was, otherwise, completely ordinary, with loamy, insect-rich ground, walls and ceiling just like the rest of my first and only floor. Because so much of my time had been spent sparring with the locals, I’d actually started using my mana to make rooms instead of relying on my ants. They mostly worked at night, when the village was asleep and I was free to build up.

The makeshift adventuring party made it about mid-way through the room before they faltered.

“It’s… really dark in here,” Cirys commented. “Can’t you make torches, Taylor?”

Gwen glared at him. “Cyr, just… please don’t bring her down on us again?”

“Ah… never mind! Uh, love the decorating. It’s very, uhm… buggy, but, I mean, it’s a good look, really brings that whole ‘dark and creepy and you could get attacked at any moment’ vibe, you know?”

I made my wasps buzz again. He blanched.

“Shutting up, now.”

“Thanks, Taylor,” Gwen chirped.

No problem.

“He does have a point, though,” she added. “We’re going to have to burn through our torches down here. It’s just too dark.”

Sadly, I had other priorities, but point noted. It wasn’t a very expensive upgrade, in any case.

And torches they burned, for a certain definition of torches. I mean, the kind you see in movies are always those massive sticks with burning swabs at the end. Now, I wasn’t sure how much of that was Hollywood magic, but I certainly hadn’t been expecting them to pull out what looked like red sticks of chalk about the length of a hand. They had a single hole at one end from which a rope hoop was hanging, and another rope wrapped around something black at the other end.

I watched curiously as they slung the hoops around their wrists––the kids had to twist the rope and wrap it around their smaller wrists a second time––and pulled at the other rope, which they dropped to the floor. With a sound like a match being struck, the red chalk sticks started glowing, just enough to illuminate an area about ten feet wide around them. There weren’t any flames involved, but I saw little bits of black dust start dripping from the sticks.

Huh. I guess a world whose economy and ecosystem centered around exploring dark places had smart solutions for lighting.

[...]

They ventured down the hall. At the first curve, which still had a pitfall occupying most of the floor, they stopped.

“Samel, are you noting this down?”

“Un,” the boy noised. “Big hole in the floor.”

“A pitfall,” Gwen corrected. “About… uh… fifteen feet deep?”

Roughly, yes.

“And full of bugs, of course,” Cirys grumbled.

Gwen ignored him, raising her arm so her torch would illuminate the wall opposite the ledge that allowed passage to the other side of the pitfall. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted the ceiling-bound crack that led to my bug reserve hallway in this room.

—IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.8



My point was that, if parts of the bridge were made of, for instance, disguised slabs of wax and spider web, attached to the land bridge by solid hinges of spider web and suspended by draglines along the ceiling, nearly invisible due to the darkness and the thin mist my second floor was causing to happen everywhere on my first floor, then so long as the slabs could hold the weight of the adventurers, everything was fine.

[...]

I brought down an actual napalm ball and dropped it on a patch of ground near them, then shot it with a fireball from a nearby will o’ wisp. The sticky puddle immediately caught on fire, filling the air with a thick caramel-smelling smoke and lighting the room with a two feet tall orange-white bonfire. There were several raised eyebrows, and a grimace from Gwen.

“That’s… huh.”

“So we’d be on fire right now if you were serious, huh?” Ulfric grunted. When I flashed a thumbs up in response, he smirked. "Not bad."

He glanced at Gwen. "Don't look at it too long. You'll need to get used to the darkness again."

[...]

Maryll peered down the slope, standing on her tiptoes and holding a hand over her brow for some reason––seriously, it was pitch black down there––and made an inquisitive sound.

—IWUAaDNW: Party 5.4