Several seconds post frantic box creation, the invader arrives once again, visibly excited. At least, Avery figured that he was excited, there were a lot of sharp teeth showing. It was possible they were just hungry, and ready to kill anything that drew near. That wouldn’t be too bad, considering the lack of real defenses her dungeon had. Maybe a feral beast that didn’t care much for exploration would be a good addition to the first floor, especially if it spent most of its time out of the dungeon where she wouldn’t have to be responsible for its upkeep.

Ability to 'Contract Wandering Monsters' will unlock after completion of the tutorial.

Well, Avery wasn’t ready to give up that delicious mana regeneration bonus yet. Maybe once she had a full maze worth of corridors, and put the map in the secret corridor that lead right back to the entrance. It could use traps too. She had seen rotating sawblades and swinging axe traps, which could lead to an interesting straightaway...

“Hey ghost, I’m not gonna get distracted this time. My purpose in life it to get answers, and I’m going to get them.”

“Every time you open your mouth you make me angrier. I was trying to think!”

“That’s like half of the point. I have to go through this checklist and see if you, as a ghost, meet the requirements to be considered sentient and sapient, and whether there’s any marked degradation from when you were alive, followed by a investigation into how you came about and whether or not it’s repeatable and if there are other major changes. Personally I’d prefer to get the boxes ticked off without the metaphorical ticking off happening, but I’ll settle for a minimum of things being thrown around.”

“What part of ‘I don’t want you in here’ and ‘I’m not dead’ are you not getting? Yes that body is mine, but I’m still using it. That book lets me reenter my body, and in theory I’ll be perfectly fine once I heal up. It’s just going to take time to heal, so I wanted my parents to know I’d be a little while.”

“Well, I didn’t do that.”

“And why not?”

“First off, you didn’t give me any directions, and second it’s been like an hour. That place is pretty far off for manual transportation, and it was annoying enough getting up and down those switchbacks to make sure the place actually existed.”

“Why would I lie about something like that? It’d be easy to check and you’d not trust me afterward.”

“Like I was saying, I don’t know what level of intelligence you are. For all I know, you’re a ghost parrot, mimicking words that you’ve heard back at me that will give you the reaction you’re hoping for, or just not smart enough to think through the consequences of your actions in pursuit of your short term goals. In your case, that seems to be getting any who enter your place of haunting, which I think was called a genus loki or something like that, to leave by any means necessary.”

“What you’re thinking of is a Genius Loci, which is the spirit of a place itself. That’s not a ghost either, and I am not a ghost! Why am I even going along with this, I could be doing more excavation right now.”

“Ah, but I have something I can offer you now. Several of my compatriots are rather effective healers, and if you want to have your body repaired as soon a possible, it may behoove you to help me do my job, which would allow me to help you. Help me help you, ghost of this cave I made.”

Avery pauses for a moment. Considering how crushed her body was after all the rock smashing, having a cleric take a look at her was actually on her to do list. Her plan had a few holes in it, like how she was going to move a mountain of copper down and up the plateau, and it relied on being able to have a usable body at some point anyway in order to do the moving, but it was almost feasible when she looked at it sideways with her eyes closed. Still, if this invader could do something to cut the legwork out of getting herself walking again, it might be worth pushing down the loathing she felt across the surface of her facets for the moment.

“Fine, but I want some evidence that you’ll be able to make good on your promises. Show me your healer, and I’ll sell out the city.”

“That’s a bit overdramatic, but it works.”

Moving over to the box, the invader twists his hand in the air, and several wooden circles flush with the finish and nearly indistinguishable from the casing turn with it. However, nothing happens. With a confused look on his face, the invader steps forward, closer to the box, and gasps in shock.

“Oh no, the bugs got out! Those were features! Not good, there’s nothing I can do about that. Actually.”

The thing looks closer at the motionless insects on the ground.

“Yeah those are dead already. Poor dumb buggers. If only they stayed in the box. Why couldn’t they just stay in the box? Now I have to wait for the ship to get back. I guess it can wait. I’ll talk to you in the morning ghost. Hopefully I can find a decent place to sleep in that deep foreboding darkness back there.”

“Hey hey no, don’t do that, I haven’t finished building.”

“Look, it’s night, I can’t call for backup, my transport is still off somewhere or other, probably lost and burning down the countryside, and you’ve been most uncooperative thus far in regards to getting this paperwork done, so I need to sleep in this spooky haunted cave before I get distracted and start wandering off again.”

“Oh no you don’t, just go to sleep outside, up on the top of the plateau, where you can relax and see the stars as they swirl around and lull you to a contented sleep. The floor in here is just hard, cold stone anyway. Plus, I’ll murder you in your sleep.”

“To be perfectly clear, I’m fairly certain that regardless of your ability to move massive quantities of stone in short periods of time, you wouldn’t be able to do anything that actually harms me. Thus far you’ve shown no typical ghost-like attacking behaviors, no floating objects or even materialization of spooky phenomena along the lines of bloody walls or headless apparitions. Just a disembodied voice that yells about wanting me out, which is bottom tier haunting, frankly.”

“Hey, hey. Hey. Just because you’re completely right doesn’t mean that you can still do whatever you want.”

“That’s kind of what it does mean though.”

“Yooooou… Hey, maybe I can fix your box if you leave.”

“And how, praytell, do you anticipate that being possible? Not even I would be able to repair this kind of thing. Granted, that’s because it involves procuring tiny living creatures and making sure they don’t die while grafting them into position, but still.”

“I literally cannot do anything at all while you’re in here, but if you sleep outside of the dungeon you won’t be draining my mana, and I can potentially use it on that instead of wasting it on your upkeep.”

“Oh, spooky ghost powers that only work when no one is looking. Why didn’t you just say that in the first place. Dungeon though, what are you even doing in there? I don't think I like the idea of a ghost trapping people in cells and then, providing upkeep? What exactly are you talking about here?”

“No, there aren’t any bars or anything to keep people locked up. That’s just what you refer to this type of structure as. Dungeon, full of monsters, they survive off the ambient mana of the location, that kind of thing. You cost me forty two mana per hour to have you in here with me attending to your physical needs.”

“I don’t have any of those though. Ok, well, yes, I do, but I can ignore them indefinitely with no possible repercussions at all.”

“All I know is what happens when you’re in this place, and that’s that you drain mana, which is the same as any other monster being in here.”

“Are you calling me a monster?”

“Maybe. I don’t know! Get out of here already!”

“Aha, but now I have something else you want. Just answer my questions first. Would you consider yourself to possess the capacity to reason, where you can induce facts about situations regardless of never having come across it before, and do you consider those in the city to have a lesser, equal, or greater capacity than yourself?”

“Fiiiine, I would, and equal to lesser depending on the person. Now get out.”

“Next question-”

“You have more questions?! How much do you need to know to understand that getting out of the dungeon is in your own best interests?”

“My purpose is to gather information and then report it, and my reporting tool isn’t working. Therefore, I have all the questions.”

“But I just told you I might be able to fix that when you leave!”

“That’s just added more fuel to the burning questions pile. For instance, why do your ghost powers only work when there’s no one around, were you originally bad enough at keeping secrets that I can figure out your weakness just from standing around and listening, and what would you see in a reflective surface.”

“I’m going to ignore most of that because they were actually good questions, but did you just ask if I’d recognize myself in a mirror?”

“Kind of. It’s one of the basic questions on the checklist, mainly meant to determine if a particular creature can discern itself as a discrete entity separate from the world around it, but in this case it’s more along the lines of ‘can a ghost with no physical form perceive some form of themself through reflection’, which would have interesting implications regardless of the answer.”

“Yes, I can tell I’m me in a mirror, and when I have my body again I’ll still be able to, but I don’t have anything reflective here with which to test that other part. Maybe if you were able to get something from my home, I’d be able to tell you.”

“Oh, do I sense a side quest?”

“Of course not. Well, yes. But not that yet. You didn’t tell my parents I’m not going to be there, and by now it’s too late for that, but if you leave a message from me and bring back one of the shiny black rocks from the barrels full of them, I can make it worth your while.”

“Sure, I’ll wander into the city full of potentially hostile potential sapients that could turn on me at any moment and rip me limb from limb to go on a vaguely defined fetch quest on the behest of a disembodied voice that has already threatened to kill me. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all.”

“I’m serious though! Most of the people in the city are fairly harmless. As long as you don’t mess with the guards, or try to get into the inner city after hours, or go into a pub, or bump into anyone, no one would even know you’re there! And once I have an example gemstone, I can use it as a template to create flawless stones, definitely. “

“Very tempting, I’m sure, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass on that. I don’t need rocks, no matter how shiny they are.”

“Everyone needs gems! All right, maybe not everyone, but anyone who uses magic oh right, you have that naturally occuring ability and don’t use any kind of actual magic. That’s one of the points toward you being classified as a monster, by the way.”

“I am not on trial here! And for all you know, I could harness whatever magic your rocks can do no problem.”

“Oh suuure, that’s why you haven’t even asked about what type of shiny stone it is yet. You don’t even know what makes them special!”

“Well maybe, just maybe, it’s not important enough to devote my superior intellect toward. I have all this ‘natural power’ after all, and it’s not like I can’t just use it in place of a rock.”

“Clearly you wouldn’t be interested in a magical power source that can overcharge abilities like that then.”

“Of course no- Fine. I’ll be right outside waiting for that note. Write me some directions this time too.”

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Over a hundred gold pieces worth of coins, a potion, and a scroll. Ham had made bank, and not even had to use any of his resources to do so. He still had unlimited magical power, and in fact felt more in tune with the power of death after causing these goblins to rot down into worthless corpses. No doubt he was even more powerful than ever. Deciding that greed was good, Ham flips a coin to decide which way he was going to explore next, straight ahead from the door he came in, or left. The coin comes up straight, and like a sign the door is unlocked. Twisting through the halls, and ignoring the decorative spirals down the sides, until he comes across an archway directly opening into a wide room, with more skeletons chained to the walls, and a massive swarm of spiders that roll toward him in a wave.

Rather than attempt to fight the mass of arachnids with pick and fist, Ham channels the power of entropy though his body, letting it explode out of him indiscriminately. A large number of the tiny creatures die from the blast of negative energy, but enough survive to cover the necromancer’s legs in fangs and skittering limbs. Ignoring the discomfort the swarm would bring a person, Ham runs another charge of energy through his body, grasping at anything that might be a spider, but is unable to catch any of the scurrying creatures.

Abandoning the tactic of ‘crush the spiders’, Ham flees across the room, spiders in pursuit. If he had some sort of poison, he might be able to splash a good portion of the swarm, but as it stood he would be unable to finish off what spiders remain in the swarm before succumbing to their own poison, weak as it was. From the bites he received running away from them before he could outpace the spiders, his muscles were already being eaten away by their liquefying venom. That was the kind of insidious damage that simply pumping raw energy into didn’t do anything to fix. Passing through an archway on the opposite side of the room, Ham breaks to the right and charges down the hallway, intent on leaving the spiders behind.

A bend in the hall later, he looks back and determines that the spiders decided to not follow him out of their home territory. Ham was safe for the moment. Deciding to be a bit more cautious for the moment, having taken his first real bit of damage from this dungeon, he quickly removes the normal damage caused by the innumerable bites and moves forward quietly, choosing to not go down one path of hallway that smelled terrible. As he comes to a portcullis made of wood, Ham stops, hearing an odd buzzing sound. If it was another swarm of some sort, especially a flying one, he would just turn around and walk away.

Instead, looking through the holes in the wooden object, the necromancer spots a flying wooden humanoid searching the room. About the same size as one of the spiders from earlier, it looked to be a puppet of some sort, flitting about looking for things. After it sets off an arrow trap and is flung halfway across the room, the projectile not doing much damage to a small target that moves with the arrow, Ham realizes that he is not the only one currently attempting to loot this dungeon.