Chapter 50 Electricity (Patreon)

                The dungeon was very annoyed that electric essence did not work exactly like electricity. The reason for the annoyance was because if electric essence worked just like electricity, the dungeon had a few material ways to protect his essence creatures from electric shocks, for instance, grounding or insulation. The problem was that electric essence was conducted by metal, carbon nanotubes, essence, and mana. When the dungeon realized that essence in itself, including wind and earth essence, conducted electric essence, he tested it on his mana plants and found them very conductive. Fortunately, the dungeon had a nuclear electrical generator, and was able to make material electricity, and found that material electricity did not find mana or essence conductive.

                The reason why electric essence was killing his creatures was because anytime they released electrical essence, it ran rampant through their bodies and wrecked their nervous system and brains. After seeing this, the dungeon understood why the mages that summoned him seemed so happy when they realized he was a lightning core. This type of essence was very, very deadly.

                Realizing there wasn’t a material way to protect his essence creatures from the electrical essence, the dungeon began randomly putting essence channels in the arm bears, looking for the one that would allow his essence creatures to survive. Over the next handful of years, untold tens of thousands of arm bears would die as the dungeon looked for the right essence channels.

                While the dungeon experimented on arm bears, he also taught the young humans. As they grew older they started to read, learn basic math, and fell in love with simple games. The dungeon introduced them to games like UNO, American football, tag, Monopoly, hide-n-seek, Splendor, and many more. All the humans were very competitive, and the dungeon used this to encourage them to learn faster.

                One of the things that was very apparent to the dungeon was that the children were very smart. The dungeon assumed it was because they had a higher concentration of oxygen in their blood than normal humans, thanks to the spell separation. In fact, by the time the children were six there wasn’t a game of thinking or chance that the children didn’t beat the adults in. To put it mildly, the adults were very limited due to their lack of brain development as they learned, whereas the dungeon maximized the potential of the children at every stage of brain development. That said, their physical games were impressive as durability made football games far more brutal than the NFL would ever allow, even back in the seventies.

                The dungeon was so impressed by their physical abilities that he introduced martial arts to everyone, and no matter how brutally they hit, kicked, or joint-locked their opponent, they seemed unbreakable, thanks to durability. Despite the brutality of the fights, there were a surprising number of tears. Men, women, boys, and girls cried when their sparing sessions got out of hand, and the dungeon assumed the men and women were crying because they were given adult minds and bodies without maturing into them.

                Surprisingly enough, the children were voracious readers. The dungeon was able to produce any book he ever read for these humans, and the children loved the books he gave them. In fact, the six-year-olds read seventh- and eighth-grade books. That said, one of the things encouraging their reading ability was their competitiveness. They saw the adults struggle with this, so they read higher and higher level books to beat the adults who could still beat them with physical endeavors.

                The problem with having children who love to read was that they kept learning about new creatures, both real and fictional, both living and extinct, at least in the dungeon's home world. As the children learned about new creatures, they would beg the dungeon to make them, and so the human bulb began to be filled with dinosaurs, sphynx, hydras, horses, unicorns, Care Bears, and other rather friendly essence creatures. It turned out that when you were not trying to make essence creatures as deadly as possible, they were much easier to make. That was a wonderful thing since the hydra in particular was pathetically weak, perhaps that would be different if it had growth cores. The fighting ability of these creatures didn’t matter because if you promise a girl a unicorn if she passes a test or a boy a dinosaur if they read a difficult book, they become very motivated to learn.

                The dungeon wasn’t just giving them fantastical animals but also giving them electrical conveniences, like freezers, stoves, fans, and silent movies. Making a form of film was simplicity in itself, and rigging a projector was not hard as lights and a simple motor connected to an outlet was easy, but recording and producing sound was fairly difficult. That said anything requiring a battery was out of the dungeon’s hand at the moment. Not because making batteries was particularly difficult, but because a lot of battery conveniences needed microchips, tubes, or were energy intensive like a moving vehicle.

                Ernest had just turned eight when the dungeon finally stumbled across an essence channel that allowed an electric core creature to survive releasing electrical essence.

                Moments after creating it, he turned his attention to the imp, which apparently had not noticed this new essence creature. The dungeon did not know how much time he had left, so he commanded the arm bear to sit in a cart made just for it. The seat on the cart was very special, in part because it was designed for an armed bear, a creature with over a dozen arms all over its body. That said, the most important aspect of this cart was that the seat had a couple of paw holds that were wired directly to the electrical engine.

                As soon as the arm bear sat in the chair, two of its paws grasped the holds, and the cart started moving. The dungeon wanted to shout with joy, as this meant that any of his biological creatures could act as batteries. Considering that this bear didn’t even have a way to concentrate power yet and it was already moving the cart, the dungeon figured that few power sources in his old world would be able to keep up with his new electric core essence creatures. That said, the dungeon could make unheard-of materials, things he suspected would surprise the immortals over and over again.

Authors note- next week we are going sci fi, albeit with fantasy battaries.