The rockslides are slowly getting into position and actually sending back reports now, so Honey and Leo are turning their attention more towards that than trying to wring more from Merric and Lechula. Not only do they get to go through the scout reports, but they also are getting adventurer reports to organize, too.

Teemo is more than happy to help be an interpreter, and not just because it lets him hang out with Yvonne. Fluffles wanders by a few times, getting a few more pointers on fate magic from Teemo when there’s no reports to be made. I make sure Teemo tells him to spend whatever he needs to practice. Something like Teemo’s Butterfly Effect could be great in the chaos of a pitched battle.

When Fluffles isn’t getting pointers from Teemo, he’s practicing with Rocky, Slash, and Nova. Rocky is having a lot of fun sparring in general, but especially trading blows with Slash. My earth elemental still prefers playing his axe to swinging it, but I didn’t make it an axe just to look cool. Even if I do think it looks really cool.

Rocky is helping him look cool swinging it around, too. My boxer might be more focused on punches, but he still understands melee fighting. It probably also helps that he has kinetic affinity. I wouldn’t be surprised if Slash picks it up by the time we make our move, too. Rocky seems to be trying to hammer into Slash’s head the idea of momentum, and how much more an axe has than a sword.

He’s also getting Slash to take advantage of his unique biology with his swings. A human can only bend in so many ways, but Slash’s joints are basically an illusion. His hip bones aren’t connected to his leg bones, because neither technically exists. Slash toyed with just spinning his wrist like a helicopter at one point, which earned him a lot of grunts and a big lecture. I don’t think he was quite in trouble, but he hasn’t tried that again. No, now he’s starting to swing his entire torso around when he swings.

It’s like a lot of movies where the fighters spin to get more force on an attack, but it’s a really stupid thing to do for a person. Never turn your back on a foe, after all. But Slash doesn’t really have a back, and he can keep his head locked on target as he swings a full rotation to really build up steam. He’s tried doing his best top impersonation, but he can’t quite get going quick enough to make it viable. While he’s still a big pile of rocks, the rotation still leaves him open to hits, so he needs to save that trick to take advantage of someone being off balance. He can miss with a swing and a foe can move in, only to be taken by surprise as the axe swings around full circle to hit even harder.

Slash has only landed it on Rocky when they were working it out, but it’ll still be a good ace for Slash to have up his sleeve. Nova is also having some interesting progress.

She’s been trying to hone her ambush techniques, but my gathered scions are too experienced for her. Slash can feel her in the earth, as can Rocky, and Fluffles can just stay high enough to be out of her reach. So my shy little wyrm has had to get creative, and I’m liking her creativity.

She’s been making little magma sculptures of the other denizens, practicing her art. She seems really interested in the basilisks, too, which I don’t blame her for. I wonder if she’ll change into them as she gets stronger, or if she’ll mostly stay as a wyrm if she doesn’t get some title that makes her do an ascension like Fluffles. She’s been trying to make her little figures move around, instead of just being still, and after toying with a few while watching Fluffles and Rocky, she seemed to get an idea.

She pulled up a lot of magma and formed it around herself, managing to look like an even more intimidating basilisk. Rocky, of course, was all about sparring her new form, and has been grunting advice to her between spars. He’s still able to pick her magma apart with sheer kinetic force, but Nova is improving quickly. She’s moving the magma quicker, recovering more of what’s lost instead of having to melt new stone, and generally making a really cool fighting style that’s all her own.

I just wonder if she’ll get fire or earth affinity first. I think one will follow the other pretty quickly, but I still don’t know which will happen first. Magma has a lot of heat in it, and with how much heat she must be throwing around to melt the stone, she’s gotta be close. On the other hand, Rocky pressing her has been forcing her to keep ahold of her magma for as long as possible, especially when Rocky starts using his thermodynamic techniques to pull the heat right out of her element.

Back on the home front, things are proceeding apace, which is great. I haven’t been paying too much attention to the quarry in a while, but taking a look, it might become my busiest section! The lighthouse is going up quickly, now that the kinks have been ironed out, and I think Rezlar is working to stockpile as much limestone as he can while the winter stays mild. It feels like Hullbreak is expecting a big storm, but I can’t get much detail without Teemo to go ask. It might be a blizzard, it might be some nasty ice storm or something blowing in off the ocean, or it might even just be me not understanding the feeling through the bond.

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I’m inclined to think something will be on the horizon, though. The civilian delvers have a certain urgency to their movements that the adventuring ones don’t. What adventurer delvers didn’t head out to go poke the Maw are instead having a ball in the labyrinth. It’s my strongest section yet, and a lot of groups have been defeated either by the traps or the denizens. The basilisks are not easy to beat. Being beaten and taken back to the entrance just seems to encourage them, though. I think my next expansion, I’ll aim for a classic crawl: lots of tough fights, chests to find, things like that. The special attractions are all well and good, but a classic room-by-room slugfest is a classic for a reason. The manor is the closest I have to that right now, and that’s definitely aimed for newbies. The more experienced delvers are going to want a tougher version of that to go along with the other delving activities.

That means my next expansion will probably be out past the cemetery, into the woods surrounding the town. Considering I want to get my ant enclave up and running closer to the volcanic area, it’d work out well for both. My ants will be able to develop without delvers constantly running around, and the delvers will get to have a more normal experience without having to worry about terrain hazards.

Of course, I doubt a forest expansion will just give me a proper structure with rooms and such. I idly consider a tower or maybe a castle, and rub the bond with Coda to see if he has any ideas. I get a few vague notions back from him, but I don’t press. He still has the lighthouse to finish, and I’m not going to be expanding until after dealing with the Maw anyway. It’s a good idea to be prepared, though.

What would I put in a classic dungeon crawl? I’d definitely like a variety. I might even try to design it to let me theme sections of it, though that might be a bit ambitious. I already have themed sections, I don’t know how well it’d work to condense them enough to fit into a crawl. Eh, I can run the numbers later. I should first see if I even have enough denizens to make theming worth it. Sure, I have a lot of them, but not a lot of them are specialized towards fighting.

Let me see… the widows and the twinsnakes would be easy inclusions. They’re both pretty significant encounters. While I kinda think of them as wandering minibosses in the tunnels and caverns, they could be more regular encounters in the crawl. Ah, the classic RPG staple of a boss later becoming an ordinary encounter. Definitely going to have them in there.

The basilisks would have a home in there, just need to make sure the structure is fireproof. My wyrms will probably be sticking mostly to the labyrinth, so they can easily tunnel wherever they need to go. While I’m sure the crawl will be littered with shortcuts so my denizens can get into what rooms they need, I think the wyrms will feel better burrowing than crawling through a shortcut.

Tundra wolves… might be decent in there? They’ve been great scouts in the winter, but I don’t know how well they actually fare in fights. They seem tough enough, but they just haven’t had enough encounters with delvers for me to get a good feel yet. They’re a definite maybe, and probably near the top of my list of spawners to enhance for something like a crawl.

What about my undead? I haven’t upgraded them in a while. The zombies and skeletons are focused for resources, not fighting, though. Tougher versions could be a good thing to put in the crawl, hard to say. What kind of dungeon crawl doesn’t have at least a few undead to have to slog through? The hands would probably be good in there, after another upgrade. I’m pretty sure I’ll get stronger magical hands with the next upgrade, and they’ll be great to mix in with everything else.

Oh man, theming will be a lot easier once I get that climate control option from the Southwood, too. Make the hot section hot, the cold section cold, the undead section dark and foreboding… I’ll need to try to save up enough to be able to expand and get the upgrade at once, if I can. Hopefully the Maw will have plenty of mana for me to take, even after sharing a bunch into the ally fund. I’ll also need to budget extra for whatever spawner I get, too.

Maybe I’ll get a plant denizen of some kind? Creeping vines, lumbering treants, things like that. I let my mind flit through a couple possibilities, though I don’t chase the threads far. The Southwood has a bunch of different things, even if the foxes and bears are the most useful in this situation. Heh, maybe I’ll get regular old worms. I could even focus them for combat, just to play against the type and be weird with them.

Teemo chuckles at my musings, but doesn’t comment. It’d be pretty unlikely for me to get regular worms as a denizen at this point, I’d think, but who knows? All I know is it’s fun to imagine several large worms poking out of the ground, one with a shield, one a sword, and one a helmet, and the three acting like a single fighter. I even poke Teemo with the idea to see if Nova or Slash would be able to do something like that with their affinity.

Probably not, but you never know until you try. Weird innovations come from weird experiments like that, and can be the sort of thing to ensure we win the war with the Maw.