IWUAaDNW: Discovery 1.2, Initiative 6.3

[QUOTE]
· Move Core
The Core Room can be moved to an empty room. Costs 5 mana multiplied by the destination floor. Can only be done once a day.
[/QUOTE]

—IWUAaDNW: Discovery 1.2



The exit, it turned out, was a square hole in the dirt very similar to my main entrance on the surface. A flight of dirt steps, packed earth walls with wooden support structures.

A default level without any specialization.

They gingerly came down the rickety wooden stairs that separated my third and fourth levels, then… stopped.

“…The fuck?” Karjn asked. She stared at Ulfric. “Is it here?!”

Ulfric tested by flashing mana in his arm, then frowned and did it again.

He nodded. “It is, but…”

He looked around.

It was a blank room, if you ignored the annoying berry tree that popped out in a corner because of the third floor's global effect.

There were no other paths.

Just… an empty, bare room, with nothing in it except the stairs going back up.

Karjn took a few steps while looking around, then said, “…Okay. What. I’m lost. Are the walls fake? Did she make a bunch of flashers down here without a specialization or something?”

Ulfric was already testing the walls. He ran his hand across the packed dirt, then frowned. “This wall feels real. I’m going to guess the rest of them are real, too.”

They were.

“…I repeat, the fuck. Taylor, how?”

I considered withholding the answer from them, but in the end decided to share, if only to find out if they would think of a problem that I hadn't thought about.

[...]

I couldn’t use illusions to give Karjn a clear answer down there; my luminous pixies couldn’t reach down these particular stairs. I did send a little raven down to caw at them, though, and gave them a quick map of the level by digging into the hard dirt with my raven’s beak.

It turned out to be harder than I’d expected, so I brought in a few fleshpeckers down to help out.

On the left of my map was a group of three rooms. My core was over there.

On the right side of the map, completely disconnected from the rest, was a single, lonely, empty room.

This room, to be exact.

“...Okay. How.” Karjn asked flatly. “How did you do that. Levels have to be connected, right? All rooms have to be accessible?”

Ulfric had a deep furrow in his brow as he looked at the map.

I drew a quick flight of stairs in the other section, then drew a “2” on the upper side of those stairs.

“That means ‘two’,” Eira noted.

Ulfric’s eyes widened. “A shortcut.”

Karjn turned to him. “A shortc––You mean she…”

“She connected her fourth to her second, then… then she separated this room from that shortcut and put her core in the other section.”

“Doesn’t that mean people can just skip her third floor to reach her core, though?” Eira noted.

“With the way her second floor is?” Karjn shook her head. “She can hide her shortcut super easily, and if someone stumbles on it and gets back, she can just change the second floor layout to hide it even more. So long as her fourth floor has no specialization, there won’t be a sign of it anywhere on floor two. That’s… fucking clever.”

The fact that people could tell that my core was on the fourth floor was unfortunate, but it wasn’t an insurmountable problem.

“She can also create more disjointed levels like that, there’s nothing stopping her from using that trick over and over until she’s the most confusing and unmappable dungeon in the world. And with the mind games she can play on us…” he shook his head. “Dig ten, twenty levels down, and I would not want to have to explore this place, weak minions or otherwise.”

Karjn nodded. “And she can use more obvious disjointed level sections to make people think the way through is on any floor other than the second, all the while harassing them with mindfucks and tricks… and if they find the way through, she can just move her core to another section of the fourth floor that has to be accessed through elsewhere. Hell, she can even do that while they’re inside and about to find it. It’s… absolutely, gloriously fucking evil.” She grinned. “I love it.”

That was the plan, yes.

—IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.3