Dear Diary,

I took a gamble and made the cordon bleu sauce thing for the cooking competition. It turned out ok, but I know I could have done better. I should have gone with the meatballs.

I mean, I still got third place, but I could have won with meatballs.

Nat got second place. She made a simple pesto that was just amazing. I think making it a light dish was what got her extra points. I mean, the judges had to eat twelve pasta dishes and that can’t have been easy.

Well… ok, it couldn’t have been easy for Mar. The ants can eat any amount of anything, and I think it wasn’t hard for Lewis until the very end. He is a dragon, after all.

Anyways, the winner was a kobold named Gin. I’ve seen her around, but not much because I guess she cooks for herself every day. Thinking back, mostly I just remember her asking for plain ingredients. She made fettuccine and a yellow cheese sauce with bacon and mushrooms in it. I’m pretty sure the sauce was supposed to be a macaroni and cheese sauce, but we don’t have the right tools to make macaroni. It was super thick, and she baked it for like ten minutes before serving, so yeah that’s an adjusted macaroni and cheese. I wouldn’t have thought of putting mushrooms in it, but apparently (oh, she diced them) they added just the right variation in texture to put her dish over the top. Like, I would have used ham. But then ham has salt in it, so that combined with the bacon and cheese might have made the dish too salty.

After the competition, Nat and I asked Gin to cook with us on a regular basis. She said not every day, but twice a week or so she’ll come over and take the lead in cooking.

I’m gonna learn so many new recipes from her, it’ll be epic.

Anyways, not much else happened today. It was great.

Goodnight, Dungeon!

The Admin grumbled to himself, searching through Floor 99. He didn’t expect to find anything; he was only doing this on the basis that he hadn’t found anything else.

Suddenly he saw it. A tunnel. Barely big enough for two ants to walk side-by-side, but it was there. He traced it up to one of the giant tunnels on Floor 98, and down into the cavern that was Floor 100.

The ants. The damn flying ants had pressed the button.

He sat back, glaring at the tunnel. He wasn’t sure if he was more annoyed at the ants, or at the fact that Carl had called it. A part of him was tempted to tell Carl the ants hadn’t done it, just to avoid the neckbeard’s preening.

Maybe he could avoid ever mentioning the matter again. That should work.

But first things first: what to do about the ants. They were a hive mind, made up of three siblings. Jenny, the oldest, had control over the queen, while Peter and Paula, twins, shared control over the rest of the hive. They worked very well together, and it would be detrimental to split them up. Hive minds were tricky to create; splitting a good one up would be almost sacrilegious.

Although… Perhaps the threat of being split up would stop them from leaving their floor again. At least for nine cycles, at which point they’d become a different problem.

But he’d decided to not worry about that.

He cracked his knuckles, sighing. He could always just swap them for a different hive. The closest one was on Floor… 89. A swarm of giant mosquitoes. Perfect. They’d keep their biting and flying, but lose the tunneling ability. The mosquitoes didn’t have a queen, so their dynamic would change a bit, but it shouldn’t be different enough to cause problems.

He began typing, setting up closing the tunnels and the hive mind swaps to be applied at the next cycle reset.