IWUAaDNW: Party 5.4

I had the ability to open a second entrance myself, at a costly hundred and twenty AP. Could I use that to open a way through? The infobox also said that I could only do it in areas of the surface that were under my control, without telling me what counted as such. So far, though, what my infobox hadn’t been telling me, I’d been able to guess using the other instincts that dungeons possessed. With that thought, I started experimenting. So long as I didn’t finish the passage, then it wasn’t going to cost me a thing, right?

So for my first attempt, I selected the Create Exit reward, then tried to use it out in the middle of nowhere outside the village. I felt a sense of foreboding as the system informed me that no, I couldn’t just do that. I tried to do the same immediately next to my main entrance, and didn’t get a warning.

Okay, then. That confirmed that my experiments were valid in the first place.

I got warnings for the next things I tried; making exits just outside my control circle, near or on people who had tamed bugs––including Whys and Maryk themselves––and directly under people who were inside my control circle. Not that I really wanted to use 120 AP to maybe make someone fall down a flight of stairs, but it was worth the absolutely nothing it cost me to try it. Then, I tried making one under my contracted pixie, inside the library with Naïa.

I got a warning. My spirits fell.

Except… there wasn’t a lot of room inside the library, was there? Maybe there was just too much clutter? What if I tried making an entrance, not on the floor, but against the far wall, which was relatively cleaner than the rest of the room? I tried that.

And I got no warning.

…

Oh.

So, then. It looked like if worse came to worst… I could just build a secondary entrance myself; I just needed to get my contracted pixie––or contracted minions––wherever I needed a new entrance at.

I could even build entrances… elsewhere.

I felt a ray of hope I hadn’t felt in a while; I’d been preparing for the eventuality of getting invaded, but there had been a kind of fatalism to it; if it got to the point where adventurers or armies were coming in to kill me, then that meant the village had fallen, and the best case scenario would have had my villagers scattering into the wilderness. But if I could create an exit anywhere, then I could move them out anywhere, get them somewhere where they would be safe.

There was nowhere in Central, the Khans or Velthia where they would truly be safe. The Arimans didn’t strike me as exactly friendly, either; they had built a massive wall and refused contact with everyone on this side of it, and they wouldn’t take kindly to the sudden appearance of a secret passage from war-torn Central to the other side of their precious wall. It would be bad enough to fight two empires, there was no need to pull a third into the mess.

That left… south. Amir’ea’s book had mentioned southern islands. How far were they? How isolated? Isolated enough that Garmin’s map hadn’t mentioned them, at least.

Perfect.

Well, there was the possibility that those islands were dangerous too, but they couldn't be as dangerous as having two enormous nations bearing down on us.

But my pixie could only fly so far and so fast. Making the trip from the academy to fort Duvos was about as far as it could go. Even the little Chipchi I’d contracted with last night wouldn’t wasn’t good enough––I needed a contracted minion that could fly really long distances, and my newest little girl (who had found a comfy spot to hide in on my second floor) wasn’t built for a flight like that. I needed something like an albatross, or whatever long-range flying animals they had around here. I didn’t need to be able to see through its eyes and hear through its ears, I just needed it to fly to one of those islands.

I started digging into the bestiary.