Funatic
patreon
Drip-Fed – Path of Responsibility 8 – Dungeon Speak
🕑 Added 2025-01-08 10:40:25 +0000 UTC
The inner halls of the Dungeon were not terribly different from the outer layers. The walls were still chitinous, the tunnels confusing, and the skittering of insects omnipresent. However, there was one difference that was as simple as it was impactful.
It was dark.
The sources of ambient light had all been swallowed up, leaving the party incapable of seeing more than the soft glow of Aclysia’s spells and Apexus’ nails allowed.
Darkness was to the advantage of the Lanaan insects. Their eyesight was poor, beyond what was immediately in front of them. That was an issue out in the planes, where incursions placed them. In the tunnels, however, where corners were many and comrades more, short eyesight meant little – and it meant basically nothing if everything was pitch black.
Even with their reliable sources of light, the group was put on the back foot by this change in the environment. Light had this pesky attribute of making the sources of it more visible than it was aimed at. This was somewhat diminished by focusing the lights into cones or making it soft enough to spread evenly, but the fact remained: what lurked in the shadows would see them before they saw it.
The Dungeon was designed with a small mercy in mind. Enemy density in the early parts of the inner layer was relatively low. A grace period that let Dungeon diving adventurers get used to the basic tactics employed by Lanaan insects before exposing them to greater challenges.
A worm the length and girth of Apexus’ arm snapped out of a hole in the side of the tunnel. Its mandibles parted four ways. Large pincers at the sides, smaller pincers at the top and bottom, all in service of grabbing prey. Strong back bristles remained anchored within the hole, ready to strain and pull the victim against the wall.
Apexus allowed his arm to be latched onto. The curved side mandibles hooked into his skin and muscles at lightning speed. Before the humanoid chimera really noted the motion, he had been forced along. Pain cascaded through his arm, focusing around the shoulder. He had been ripped along with such force that the bone had popped out of its socket. Surrounding muscle fibres had been torn like paper.
Calmly, Apexus put his unharmed hand on his shoulder and aided his regeneration by pushing it back into place. What would have been a devastating wound to other adventurers was a mild inconvenience to him.
The worm continued to hold onto his arm. Having fully retreated into the hole, only the mandibles protruded from safety and even they were mostly buried in Apexus’ membrane. In that stubborn grip laid the humanoid slime’s inevitable victory. Whenever he desired, he could have just melted those parts by thinning the membrane and letting the acidic slime fill in the gap. Apexus’ biology had become vastly more complicated over the years, but that first strength he had he could still call on in situations like this.
Given that certainty, he put the elbow of the grabbed arm against the wall – then he pulled. His biceps hardened, pulling at the base of the lower arm. The worm’s own muscles twitched rapidly, building up force to resist the pull. It was a slow struggle, one the worm was slowly losing. The first segment of its body became visible again. Sharp bristles protruded from soft flesh.
“Ya need help there?” Reysha asked, brandishing one of her knives. One swift cut and the head of the monster would be off.
Apexus denied the offer with a shake of his head. “I am learning this monster’s limits. Are you watching, my melody?”
“Closely,” the angel confirmed. Despite her mild trepidation, she was making a mental note of all of this, to be put to paper later. Another entry for the report that they would deliver to the Guild once they returned from this Quest. This monster was not even listed in the encyclopaedia, delivering intel on it could save lives down the line.
Through steady pressure, Apexus had now pulled enough of the monster from the wall that his other hand could grasp it. The bristles penetrated his membrane. A mild annoyance at first, turning out to be a much larger issue a moment later.
Apexus stopped circulation of slime through the arm the moment he felt the numbness. The skin of his shoulder visibly moved, cinching as if an invisible rope had been put around it. There was a tingle first, then a numbness. It partly spread to the rest of his body, making him feel light, while that one arm felt quite heavy.
“Beeeen… poisonnnn’d,” he slurred, the magical signals moving incorrectly from his core to the speaking plates at the roof of his mouth.
Reysha did not ask whether she should intervene again. Her dagger slammed down on the bit of the creature visible between wall and Apexus’ paralysed hand. Swiftly, she carved fully through it, causing the front end of the worm to fall on its own.
It wasn’t dead yet. Worms like it minded the separation of body segments little. In fact, the argument could be made that there were two genetically identical worms now, the headless end retreating further into the wall to regrow a set of mandibles for another day.
Apexus managed to loosen his numb fingers eventually. After that, it was just a waiting game. Aclysia’s healing magic aided the gradual dissolution of the toxins by the slime’s acidic countermeasures. While he was affected by many compounds in often similar ways as most sapient species were, his physiology did let him purge them quicker – generally, speaking.
Once that had been taken care of, Apexus devoured the worm to get a better understanding on what had transpired there. His stomach came in handy there, allowing him to digest the creature without further exposing himself to the toxin.
“The bristles are hollow.” Apexus grew one of them from a fingertip. It was a dark, slightly curved needle. Had it not been for that bend, Apexus could have made at least temporary use of it. These days, he found Growths worth of limited use quite rare. He had his own set of capabilities and organs now that created a body plan few things matched onto. “Sturdy but weak at the base… easy to regrow…”
As a temporary Growth they were imperfect, but as a permanent one he may have found what he could get out of the dungeon. The bristles themselves came without the ducts that produced the toxin, but Apexus had other uses for them even without that. For a Monk, needles were a tool. Applications were mostly medical in nature, though. Hitting meridians with disruptive Ki was difficult enough. Placing needles in the correct spots? That was borderline impossible in combat.
Still, it was the most interesting tool he had come about in the dungeon so far.
____________________________________________________________________
They continued advancing with very little issue. Reflexes sharpened from the recent training, they dealt with what was thrown at them expertly and swiftly. One day, then two days, passed. They had to spend one night in a corner of the dungeon, sleeping in shifts. Getting interrupted in that sleep by an attack of a small swarm of ant-like monsters was the only issue they really faced.
Apexus remembered the days when he had not known what sleep deprivation meant. Back when his biology and thoughts had been simple, allowing him to continue on through day and night with no rests. Acquiring permanent Growths had gradually changed that, adding hours to his day dedicated entirely to resting. He theorized that this was a simple manifestation of complex creatures. Whatever the exact source, it had topped out at some point. Apexus needed about six hours of dedicated rest a day. An amount on the low end, others often assured him.
They were walking around slowly, as per usual. Apexus dragged his fingers over a nearby wall, leaving a neutral pheromone trail. It had taken some experimenting to find a fragrance that the insects did not respond to at all. Now that they had it, it was their tried and tested way to know where they had been before, even in this complete darkness.
Korith was the head of their formation. The kobold valiantly put herself at the edge of the twilight zone. If anything charged at them, she would be the first target struck. Thus was the lot of the frontliner. Apexus held a similar position in the rear, but he had it better for many reasons.
“Oh… I think I found something?” Korith raised her voice. The group did a quick scan of their direct surroundings, then converged closely on the kobold.
On head height of the shortstack, easily missed by a person of regular height, a smooth stone surface peeked out of the gently curved wall. Symbols covered the length of it in four paragraphs, each ending in a blank space.
“A riddle?” Aclysia asked, excitement creeping into her tone. Korith and Reysha shuffled aside to let the metal fairy squat down in front of the tablet. Apexus did his best not to get distracted by the way the guardian angel’s round ass stretched the red robes. Oblivious to her allure, Aclysia inspected the tablet. “Dungeon Speak,” she stated and began to ponder.
Dungeon Speak was an umbrella term for the vast amount of languages, written, spoken, or otherwise communicated, that were found in dungeons. They universally translated well into Common, as they were not independent languages, but rather codes that were meant to be deciphered by the smart members of a party.
Dungeons had a habit of testing many skills. Codebreaking was just another one. Ironically, the more elaborate codes sometimes were picked up by criminal organizations.
Aclysia inspected the symbols one by one, slotting each shape into parts of sentence structures she knew to try and find patterns. Once she had that, she identified the vowels. “So that’s an ‘o’, which makes this either a ‘do’ or a ‘to’… that symbol is also there… ‘threat’…? Ah, I see. ‘To what kind of mechanism is a demon sworn?’ It’s four riddles.”
“…a warlock?” Korith suggested carefully. “You know… war-lock? Like… the thing you put a key into?”
“That’s so fucking stupid,” Reysha laughed.
“Let’s try it,” Aclysia said, her erudite mind incapable of producing a better answer. She wrote the symbols with her finger into the blank space, leaving trails of white light. Once she had finished the last symbol, the word flared green. “Correct.”
“Yus!” Korith allowed herself a little enthusiastic fist pump.
“3-9-27-729-19683,” Aclysia read out the next one. She tapped the blank space three times, before starting to write. “…387420489.” The field flared green.
“I’m sorry?” Reysha asked, thoroughly confused.
“It is a sequence riddle. 3 times itself is 9. 9 times the previous number is 27. 27 times itself is 729. 729 times the previous number is 19683. 19683 times itself is 387420489.”
“…I should tell you more often how fucking good you are with numbers,” Reysha said.
Korith gave up on trying to run the maths herself
Apexus hadn’t even tried.
“What has the bottom at the top?” Aclysia read out the next one.
“Your legs,” Apexus answered immediately. His first woman turned to him, blushing ever so slightly. “It is true,” he defended himself.
“I expect lechery from Reysha,” the guardian angel muttered, while doing nothing against the way the fabric of her robe had settled between the twin hills of her derrière.
The answer was, all the same, correct.
“If you drop me, I crack. If you smile at me, I smile back. What am I?”
“An egg?” Korith suggested.
“Huh? What kind of weird eggs are you looking at that smile back?” Reysha asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I dunno… I kinda got stuck on the ‘crack’ part.”
“I suspect the answer is ‘mirror’,” Aclysia said and drew the words in the symbols of the Dungeon Speak. A fourth time, the tablet flared green, then, glowed in its entirety. Stone turned to translucent light and then to nothing, revealing a compartment within. Aclysia pulled out the item within.
It was a ring of a dull metal, failing to reflect the light of Aclysia’s spell. The symbol of a spider was etched in black on a circle at the top. “Probably not for you, bubble butt,” Reysha commented when the Priest put the ring on. “Moths don’t get along with spiders.”
“Fortunately, I merely have moth wings,” the angel responded. “Regardless, you are correct,” she admitted. The item whispered to her its purpose, as new Dungeon loot often did. “I shall demonstrate what it does.”
Aclysia stood up and then jumped. Up in the air, she slapped her hand against the wall and then dangled there. Flat against the chitinous surface, the hand wearing the ring remained as if adhered to the surface. A simple thought and the magical force was released.
“Literally a Ring of the Spider,” Reysha remarked.
“You know of them?” Aclysia inquired.
“It’s one of those semi-common items-“
“The word is uncommon,” Korith interrupted.
“Shush, squishy. Anyhowzels, it’s one of those items that Rogues like to have.” She caught it when Aclysia tossed it over, then quickly put it. The size of the ring changed to fit nearly over Reysha’s gloved hands. “For obvious reasons.”
Reysha put a hand on the nearest wall, testing the ‘grip’. She did the same with her second hand, then her left foot, then the right foot, and then she was halfway up the wall. Following the curve of the tunnel, she soon hung upside down.
“Behold me, I’m the tiger spider!” She took one hand off the roof to wave. She put it back in a hurry, feeling the strain on the gravity-defying magic. It affected only her palms and soles, or the responding surfaces on the clothes she wore. Impressive as that was, there was a weight limit to it.
Letting go of the magic voluntarily, Reysha did as cats do and landed on all fours. “How come I find it and Aclysia solves it, but you get the reward?” Korith playfully complained.
“Maybe Hoard just likes me more?” Reysha responded cheekily.
“This isn’t even a Hoard Dungeon!”
