Graverra finds she still can’t quite sleep through the entire regeneration period, even if she’s shortened it some for them. Hecrux still seems perfectly able to, so she lets him. She gathers up her things and slinks back to her chambers. Better able to converse with the skull she’d left there and with a few things she’d like to look into now without the eye of the primary core.

“How goes the dungeon building, mistress dungeon core?” There’s still something to Capo’s tone that makes Graverra think he’s using the title sarcastically, but she’s decided she doesn’t care.

“Much better!” She tosses the blanket onto her bed - there didn’t seem a point in unsummoning it to gain back fractions of mana and she’s probably want it again soon, anyway. The grimoire she goes to set beside Capo. “We have mobs now! Two mastiffs, they’re undead, and a slime, but I am going to find a way to get rid of the slime just as soon as I’m able. I think that’s fair because there’s a huge gob of just… flesh… out in the courtyard anyway and now the ceiling of the crypt is too.”

“That sounds… interesting.”

“I can try to show you! I think…” Graverra stands at the table and pushes both the book and the skull aside to make room. Even if it costs a bit, Graverra summons for herself a large crystal ball - with an ornate stand, of course, that’s half the mana cost after all. There’s a flicker of attention drawn to the fact that the primary core goes active for a moment after this, but the moment the two whole mana is recovered, he returns to his inactive state.

“Well, this is already looking a helluva lot better than booting me out into the middle of it.” The skull remarks.

“I’m not sending you out there yet… Probably.” It strikes Graverra as potentially funny to hide just Capo the skull in one of her newly acquired caskets for some poor adventurer to find… But as a trinket, she’s not sure if that means they could also just walk out with him. As annoying as he could be, she is still rather fond of him… And she won’t be able to make another companion for herself beside Hecrux until after the dungeon is placed, she’s fairly certain.

Capo grumbles at this, but there isn’t really any further argument.

With her crystal ball in place, Graverra leans in a little closer to focus on it, the way she’s grown used to channeling dungeon core options through her grimoire. There’s no sense of vertigo to begin with, but that’s because she’s fairly certain it isn’t working. There is some fear, thankfully not voiced by her skull companion, that maybe she would have needed to build a more mana infused ball to get this to actually work…

“One more won’t kill us…” She reasons with herself and reaches out to the crystal ball to try channeling the raw magic into it that way. She over estimates, feeling her mana reserves drop by five rather than just the one she had meant to.

“Oops…” The same tug on her attention comes from the primary core switching over from inactive to active. Hecrux’s voice sounds in the room next,

“Graverra…”

“It’s nothing! Don’t worry about it!” She guesses, since he is the primary core after all and way more familiar with looking in on certain parts of the dungeon, that there were ways for Hecrux to find out what she was doing in there, but part of her was still embarrassed to want any sort of aid with it.

The bed curtains ruffle with the primary core’s sigh, but he registers are inactive again a moment later.

“Cores are weird…” Capo mumbles and Graverra frowns. He’d just been the one telling her she ought to do with her share of the mana what she pleased… Well, she had that specific thought, but Capo had implied it too.

When she looks back to the crystal ball, though, she’s delighted to find it focused on the primary core’s lair.

“There we go! Now, watch this,” She sets to work moving the view to the entryway of the dungeon. Then the vertigo does set in, causing Graverra to lean fully on the table and need a moment before straightening back up.

“Oh… Hm.” She hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to the entryway. Even with her extra moss and vines, and the addition of the meteor chunk, it really still looked too similar to the dungeon she had stumbled into. It was also dark. She hadn’t realized they would have to worry down to that sort of detail… But then she guessed that’s why they had so many more rounds of building to get through. “Well, it’s still more than just one hall.”

Graverra starts their view, moving down the dungeon a bit slower than a walk, some to stave off the motion sickness, but also she felt she needed to start taking some notes on the changes she’d need to make.

“Oh, bleh.” Graverra remembers what they’d placed first, just as the crystal ball crests the first set of stairs. “I guess we can be glad we aren’t actually walking this…”

“That’s your gob of flesh?” The skull scoots itself a little closer to the crystal ball.

“Oh, no.” Graverra picks up the pace a bit to get them into the courtyard. Again, they’d need to figure out better lighting… And she thinks she would prefer a iron gate to let in there. “This is the gob of flesh.”

She parks their view point in about the center of the courtyard, beside the fountain. She’s pleased to find that from what she hopes to be about average height, the effect of the flesh oozing through the pillars looks even better than how it had been drawn on the map or seen when watching over the dogs. Which, speaking of…

Graverra turns her attention to Moggiard once again. Thankfully, rather than zoom into place, the view simply changes to the mastiff settled down beneath some of the broader leafed plants.

“Big dog…” There’s some trepidation in Capo’s voice, but Graverra can’t imagine why.

“Mhm! There’s two!” She switches their view then to Dralzekk, similarly lounging in some hidden corner of the courtyard. “I’m not going to try and find the slime. If it isn’t in the fountain, then that’s Hecrux’s problem.” She knows it is just by virtue of being one of the dungeon’s cores, but she still doesn’t care for it existing at all.

Graverra continues going over the courtyard from her more adventurer’s perspective, pulling out her grimoire to begin taking notes in earnest, sketching out some ideas to pursue later. A slow float through the crypt proves every bit of atmospheric as she had hoped - though their mob cap concerns her again. Especially with no way of knowing if they could level up before the dungeon is placed…

Dungeon Will Be Placed In… [325:06:33]

“I’ve been standing here for six hours?!” Graverra slams her palms on the table at this realization. “Time in here can’t be real…”

“Honestly mistress, you oughta be thankful for it. What’ve you got? Two regular weeks? Fair chunk of time to wait between building…”

“I know.” She picks up her grimoire, about to go get started on exactly that - more building. “If I were me, I’d want to subject somebody else to all this too…”

The distinct feeling of mana being spent and a lot of it has Graverra startling, as if she’d just heard a loud noise. “And he’s started without me!”

She dashes the short distance to her door and manages to not stumble her way over the change in floor texture, but doesn’t quite stop short enough not to run smack into the dungeon core.

“Eugh!” She falls back with a bit of a bounce. She’d forgotten the blanket…

“There you are. I would have thought you’d be more eager to keep going.” Hecrux doesn’t give her more than a glance before carrying on.

Construct 108 Dungeon Segments for 864 Mana?

[Y] / N

“What are you building without me?!” Graverra whines without getting up.

“The entry hall of your castle.”

“Well, good, but I think we need to do some more planning. Because I was looking around down there and-“

Hecrux turns to give her his full attention, finally. “Did you go down there?”

“No, I just… looked, because I’m a core now and this is my dungeon and that’s just what cores do, right?”

“Right. I would not go walking through the dungeon with your avatar, however.”

“Why? The mobs shouldn’t attack us… should they?” She had considered it already, the walking down there, just to see. And now that she’d been told not to… Well, she’d better make sure she was being told no for a good reason.

“They won’t, but you wouldn’t want anything else that close to you, a core.”

“You let me in.” Maybe someday she was going to get the truth about that. Whether by Estremon finally explaining how Graverra had fallen down there in the first place, or Hecrux being honest about why he’d chosen to keep her, she wasn’t sure yet which would be more likely.

“I was taking a calculated risk.”

“Well, there’s no adventurers down there now.”

“There weren’t supposed to be any down there before.”

Place 8 ‘Basic Interior Pillars’ for 1920 Mana?

[Y] / N

“Hecrux! How much have you spent already?” Even as she asks, their remaining reserves are called to mind.

Total Mana Reserves: 3866

“That’s already like half of everything! We don’t even have lights!”

“We’ll get some back!” Mana, he clearly means. A moment later, the cost of some of the roofing and walls filtered back in, made back by being replaced with more flesh. “And we don’t need lights yet. We can cover more of that towards the end.”

“We only have four more mobs. And three more traps!”

“I’m not going to put any in here. It seems forcing adventurers to walk, unbothered, for a while serves to agitate them. They seem to be more apt to mistakes after that.” There’s still not a very reliable way to read the dungeon core’s expressions, but Graverra swears he would be smirking at her if he could.

Graverra crosses her arms with a small hmph. “Then what are you going to do with the rest of it?”

“Well…”

Place 30 ‘Large Interior Stairs’ for 450 Mana?

[Y] / N

Place Fleshy Mound x2 - Cost: 1500 Mana?

[Y] / N

“And now you may do some finessing. There’s some more of those twisty iron things that might look nice for the stairs and get that metallurgy progressing.”

Graverra scowls. The vague sense she already had of the changes was nice, though once again would need access to some higher leveled items which they would get to eventually but…

“What happens if nobody else likes it?” The question had plagued her since they had begun in some form or another, but she had never been one to listen to thoughts like that… Usually.

“What do you mean?” Hecrux’s brow furrows, but it seems to be in thought, not annoyance.

“I mean… We’ve been trying so hard to level things and we don’t even know what we’re aiming for and what if it is still dependent on the whole how much damage we do to adventurers thing,” She actually wasn’t sure that was how it worked either, but to be fair, it had been some amount of amorphous time since they’d had that initial conversation about her being unable to leave the dungeon alive for his sake. “And then we’ll have this whole half finished, still waiting on higher-level stuff, dungeon and no one will run it and- “

“It’ll get done, Graverra, you’ll see.” He hovers lower and bumps into her in what she’s sure he thinks is meant to be a reassuring gesture. Later she’d have to bring up the concept of human appendages again. “Only a few more rooms, I think. Then we can focus on the details.”

Graverra hugs her grimoire and thinks of her lists. She guessed they’d always have time for them later, with how impossibly long this seemed to take. And short. The unpredictable amount of time, despite the pretense of the timer and deadline, was getting to her…

“Alright.” She summons back her blanket to sit on before laying out her grimoire once again. “Show me those railings- That’s what they’re called, you know? Railings. I thought you had access to… everything.”

Hecrux squints. Dare she think sheepishly? “Not quite everything. The finer points of humanoids haven’t quite come back to me yet…”

Graverra frowns. That was the other thing, the way they just kept dancing around things like that ‘yet’ and what it really meant. The spiderwebs hanging from the brim of her hat waver as she shakes her head to clear it.