Chapter Four-Hundred Twenty-Four (Patreon)

What can he do to help?  I watch Noynur and his resolve, awkwardness slowly growing in the pit of my not-stomach.

“Uh… Boss isn’t sure,” Teemo finally says.

“Whatever he has planned, I know I can help,” calmly insists Noynur.  All I can think is to let him down gently, Teemo.

My Voice gives an awkward laugh.  “Yeah… that’s the thing.  He’s got some ideas in the works already, but a plan is a bit of an exaggeration.  He doesn’t really do plans.  He gets crazy ideas and somehow makes them work.”

“I’ll swear a geas, if that’s what it takes!”

“Seriously!  He’s not a planner, alright?  He improvises!  The enemy can’t plan for what you’re going to do if even you don’t know what you’re going to do!”

Noynur stares at my Voice for a few long seconds.  “...you’re serious.”

Teemo nods.  “I am.  He prepares a few tricks, sets a few traps, leaves his options open, and then hits where it’ll hurt the most.”

The large orc frowns and folds his arms, closing his eyes to think.  He stays like that long enough that I wonder if he’s fallen asleep, before he finally speaks.

“I’m not sure if that’s genius or madness.”

Teemo smirks.  “A bit of both.  He says no plan survives contact with the enemy, so why even bother?  Better to let the plan sort itself out from the bits and pieces scattered around.”

Noynur grunts and opens his eyes.  “Fine.  What can I do to be one of those scattered pieces, then?”

“Well… it’s never a bad idea to delve more and get stronger.  Comparing notes with Honey would probably be a good idea, too.  Maybe Zorro also.  We need information, but unlike other foes, it doesn’t look like we can really eavesdrop on this one.  We have even less of an idea where it is than we did with the Maw, at least at first.”

The orc grunts again.  “I’ll talk with Honey.  A lot of my notes have been pointing toward something for a while now, and I’ve been suspicious it was the kobold’s Betrayer.  Maybe we’ll be able to track it down, or at least piece together how it works.”

“Cool.  I’ll make sure she has a popper swarm to translate.  I need to work with the plants to make sure they’re ready for Boss’ next expansion.”

“You’re going to expand even with this threat?”

Teemo barks a laugh.  “Delving’s how you guys get stronger, and expansion is how Boss gets stronger.  Trust me, Boss knows what he’s doing.”

Noynur doesn’t look too convinced, but he stands, looking eager.  “If you’d direct me to Honey, first?”

Teemo hops onto his shoulder to do just that, and I take the chance to check in with the floating island research.  There were a bunch of different ideas floating around, but now it seems like there’s two viable candidates.  The first are effectively floating stone bowls with everything delve-y in the bowl.  They’ll be pretty simple to make and pretty stable, basically a cheap and effective method, but not perfect.

The biggest flaw is that, though it’ll minimize the potential for someone to fall off, or to lose pieces, it doesn’t eliminate the chance.  The other design does, but the islands are going to be a lot more expensive to set up.

If the first idea is floating bowls, the second is miniature planets.  For safety, I don’t think they can be beat.  ‘Down’ is the floating sphere itself, so there’s literally no way to fall off.  The problem is that we’ll need to spatially expand them a lot more.  While it’ll give us even more surface area using an entire orb’s surface, if we don’t make the apparent horizon far enough away, it’s going to be havoc on the equilibrium of delver and denizen alike.

The hard part will be finding the sweet spot of cost and space.  I’m planning to have my dinos be the main attraction on the islands, and they’re going to need room to roam and to fight.  I might even put my dragons on some of them.  If the strong delvers want a fight, my next tier of dragon ought to be able to give it to them.

There’s also the matter of how to get to the islands.  The obvious way would be to take a bit more inspiration from Yggdrasil.  The small worlds won’t be in the branches themselves, but a shortcut from the branches to one or more of the islands would be a pretty close approximation.

It also might let me put some tunnels through the islands and get even more delving space per.  In fact… I think I need to upgrade my plants.  The amount of spatial compression I’m gonna need will be a lot simpler with stronger plants to manage it.

It’ll also give me a chance to design a gravity plant, so why not?  I start going through the menu options and start eliminating things as I design.  Carnivorous plants are right out.  A Venus gravity trap would be really cool, but it’s not what I’m after right now.  I also take trees and bushes off the list for now.  I might be able to work with a spreading root system, but there are easier ways to get a plant that covers a lot of ground.

I also strike tumbleweeds off the list.  While they grow into nice dense mats before they curl up into the rolling balls, I grew up around a variety that has little caltrop seeds.  That well is poisoned for me, no thanks.  Besides, I’d have to worry about their life cycle.  I don’t think it’d be a good thing if they all started tumbling at once.  It might make the entire island tumble to the ground!

A creeping vine will work just fine, even if it’ll be similar to the living vines the spawner already produces.  So I of course start differentiating them.  Thorns are always a fun addition, and it’s pretty cheap to give their little climbing tendrils a bit of strength to grab delvers that think walking on the grass is a good idea.  I add flowers and fruits to the vine, a nice little temptation for the delvers to want to tussle for.

They come out a bit gnarlier than I was hoping for, but considering the only delvers who’ll be on the islands are the ones who can clear the canopy, I’m not worried about anyone getting in over their heads.  The Creeping Crusher Vines are looking good, so I finalize and upgrade, and watch a few slither out of the plant spawner.  If the normal living vines are like garden snakes, the creeping crushers are like anacondas.  Poppy immediately calls one over to examine, and I can feel a lot of excitement from my little living vine scion. She sends one off to Coda’s workshop before drawing the first one into her experiments with the bowl-style islands.

It’s weird watching the vine shrink down as it follows Poppy’s instructions on spatial expansion, but it does help give me an idea of just how much more powerful these are compared to the spatial vines.  It makes me very optimistic for the sphere-style islands Coda’s working on.

Doing that didn’t take too much out of me, so I take a look at how much it’ll cost to get the next tier of dragons, too.  While I don’t do much in the way of planning, I don’t need a plan to know I’ll be relying on my dragons to ever assault the Betrayer.  I take a peek at what the next version will be, and I don’t see any reason to change anything.  The price tag is a bit steep… but they’ll make good bosses for the labyrinth until I can get a lava island going.

I pour mana into the greedy spawner, maybe looking forward to getting a dragon that’s mostly normal.  I make sure to have Teemo grin in triumph for me as the first drake exits the spawner.  Usually, when I hear drake, I think of a pretty tanky lizard.  These ones are more like alligators.  I’m pretty sure all my magma dragons are going to be good swimmers, just through magma instead of water.

Like the wyrms and basilisks, the scales look like cooled magma, with a molten glow between the scales.  And like my wyrms and basilisks, they have the freaky four mandible mouths to open way wider than they need to, in order to consume their prey.  The new drake putters around the spawner for a few minutes before it takes a shortcut to the labyrinth, looking for a good spot to claim for a little lair.

While it does that, I look into the spawner and wince as I realize I’ve probably made a mistake.  While I’m happy with the drake, I can’t upgrade any further without specializing the spawner, and it’s cheaper to specialize the earlier I do it.  With me waiting… well, forgetting, to upgrade it, it’s going to cost me an arm, a leg, and my firstborn to specialize, not to mention the cost of upgrading it later.

It’s difficult to be too upset, though.  The magma drake is pretty cool, and I already know my aranea are going to be putting up quests to fight it.  With any luck, that’ll tide over the strong delvers until I get the next expansion done.  Or at least keep them satisfied until I finalize the canopy.

I had been wanting to do a raid boss in the canopy for a while, but hadn’t put much priority on it because I wasn’t sure anyone would be strong enough for it.  But the regulars are making good progress on the tree already, and the Calm Seas will want something seriously strong to fight.

I go over my options and see what I can do.  More upgrades for my spawners will have to wait for now, but I can still plot out the keys to the boss arena.  In fact, if I do it right, I can even force the two guilds to cooperate if they want to face Fluffles, or whoever else feels like being a raid boss.  Nothing like fighting one of my scions to bring delvers together.