Rats are incredibly fertile – which is why some silly alchemists sell their blood as a…ahem…cure for intimate problems – and the randy blighters will spawn an entire family tree before you can blink.
Soon enough, Alibub’s dungeon was crawling with them. Seriously, he must have had almost a million rats in there. When an overseer went to evaluate him, he could barely move around the place, and he developed a lifetime phobia of vermin. For a dungeon to scare an overseer, it has to be BAD.
Alibub then opened his dungeon by digging his way to the surface. No prizes for guessing what happened next.
Yup. A million rats scurried out of the dungeon and sought freedom. They prowled over the nearby plains, through a forest, and then they reached a town called Penketh. They decimated the farmland on the town boundaries, and then the sea of vermin flooded into the town itself.
It was a horror show. Coming from a dungeon core, that is quite the description.
So that’s why the overseers designed a limit on what a first level core can make. The assumption is that by the time a core reaches, say, level 10, he’ll be wiser, more disciplined, and you can trust him to handle more monsters responsibly.
Right now, I had a choice to make. I wanted to start enticing heroes down here, and I needed something capable of killing them. Spiders, beetles, and leeches weren’t great for that.
I had to be a little more patient. I needed more resources; more essence, more stuff to craft with.
I knew what I had to do.
I gave a command to my inner core.
Create kobold.
I felt a pinching sensation in my core as 35 essence points left me. Tendrils of light illuminated the room, settling in the center of it near my pedestal. They whizzed around and around, eventually forming a shape.
Kobold created!
You have created your first monster! Your crafting fixtures list has been updated.
Dungeon Requirement [Partly] Satisfied!
Requirement: 1 Monster, 1 trap
Satisfied: ½
With a whoosh and the smell of spent essence, the shape took life and became a little creature standing before me.
“Pleased to meet you!” I said, glad to use my voice again.
Kobolds are weird creatures. They look like child-size combinations of a dragon and a wolf, except with humanoid forms. In other words, arms and legs, but no wings. And without the ability to breathe fire.
Actually, it’s only their faces that resemble dragons.
I knew a fair bit about them thanks to my academy bookworm days, and kobolds came with a reputation of being difficult to get along with. They were renowned for being intolerant of any race but kobolds, a trait that led to the great Kobold-Human war of 10D3S2056. (We really need to simplify our calendar system.)
Now, I didn’t want such a thing as intolerance here in my dungeon. Sure, this was going to be a place where hundreds of heroes met their deaths. It’d be filled with spikes, lava pits, mantraps. But there was no place for prejudice in my lair.
However, kobolds came with a couple of other traits that made them perfect for places like this. For one, the little dragon-things were insanely territorial. Seriously, I would advise any travelers that if they are ever walking in a forest and they see little weird twig sculptures hanging from trees and hear lots of strange chirping sounds…run! They should run as if their life depended on it! Which it probably would, because they had likely wandered into a kobold clan’s nest.
As well as that, kobolds are crafty little creatures. They are especially adept at making traps, but they can turn their hand (or is it paws? Claws?) to other stuff, too. For a core whose only hands were spiritual and could only do stuff like digging, a kobold was useful to have around.
This one was as tall as an adult human’s waist, and rather slender. Its muscles were toned, but it didn’t look strong. It was wearing a loincloth around its midriff and it had a pack on its back.
It sniffed the air now, its wolf-like snout pinching and unpinching, its dragon-like eyes scanning the room.
“You create?” it asked me.
Its voice was rough, almost gravelly. To a human, it would have sounded like a chirpy snarl. As a core, I had an inherent ability to understand the tongue of all animals and creatures.
That language ability in itself was a good reason for never leaving the dungeon. I hated to imagine walking through a muddy field and hearing all the worms talking to each other, the mice gossiping, the birds screaming stuff. Nope, that’d get annoying.
“You create?” it asked me again.
“Yes, I create,” I said. “I mean, yes I created you. Your name is Tomlin.”
This was an important thing to do when you made a creature. Creating a monster bound it to me and naming it strengthened that bond, making a link of loyalty between me and my creation that was almost impossible to break. Plus, it was much better than saying “Hey, kobold number 1. Hey, kobold number 500.”
“How?” it asked.
“How did I create you?”
“How Tomlin?”
“Ah, you mean how did I choose your name.”
“Yes. Thank.”
“Well, Tomlin, have you ever heard of the Soul Bard series of books? No, I guess you haven’t. If you have the ability to read English, or you can learn it, I’ll try and get a copy for you once I have a surface liaison. Anyway, Tomlin is the Soul Bard’s best friend. His loyal compadre. The first critter he meets when he leaves his village on his big adventure, and they stick together through everything.”
“You Soul Bard?”
“I wish, Tomlin. I’m just a core
