A Name and a Cave

After dreaming of grand castles, giant tree houses, and great labyrinths for a few minutes, you realized you didn’t actually know if the crystal would work for you. So you switched to thinking about where you should try it, assuming it actually works. There were plenty of options, but you kept coming back to the problem that they either had other monsters or were way too obvious. Your cave, as lackluster as it may be, was the only place you could think of that didn’t have either of those problems.

You needed to start somewhere, so with equal trepidation and hope you began the long trek back to your cave.

By the time you arrived, having taken the shorter and more visible route yet again, it was the early afternoon. The sun was shining down on the forest, illuminating it well, but approaching the point where it would drop behind the mount top and begin to cast the mountain’s huge shadow out onto the trees. It was quite an impressive view, but you saw it everyday, so the crystal remained firmly in the front of your mind. Forest watching later, crystal now.

You weren’t exactly sure how to use the Claimant Crystal though, so you had to rely on your knowledge of players using magic items. They typically just held them up and shouted something stupid, like ‘Die! Evil doers!’ Which honestly sounded pretty judgmental for a bunch of massacring maniacs. It was all you had to go on though, so you stood at the entrance to your cave and lifted up the crystal as high as you could, while mentally shouting ‘ahhhh!’

It worked, a message popped up at the entrance!

Claim location: imporne_east_cave_num_21?
<Yes> <No>

Yes! Yes of course! You emphatically jumped up and slapped the yes button.

Error: Only named characters can claim land. Name character?
<Yes> <No>

Yes! But what to call yourself oh great future master of the mountain? You where stumped at first, you had always just been you, except for the few times you were ‘Eww, what’s that?’

You wanted a grand name though, something people would remember with awe instead of disgust. You could think of so many names, but none of them felt right. Most of the things you thought of people calling you where just various titles, you liked titles. Those weren’t names though. Maybe you could call yourself Solvent, or perhaps something less on the nose.

While you were fishing for names, you thought of something that some of the adventurers talked about, heroic tales. They were epic stories of ancient heroes who fought against powerful enemies and seemingly always won, no matter the odds. You remembered a few of those names, but none of them felt right. Maybe you could just be Hero, take their title instead of one of their names. You wanted something more specific though, so then you thought of what lead to this situation in the first place. You defeated the sorceress Calista Fallenstar and took the crystal from her. Hero Fallenstar, it was a bit strange, but it was meaningful to you.

So, finally having found a name, you looked up at the message. It was now displaying this.

Name: Hero Fallenstar
<Confirm>

That screen just read your mind! But, then again, it probably would have been near impossible for you to enter it yourself. So you just shrugged it off and slapped confirm.

Welcome to your new lair Hero Fallenstar! May your name ring far and wide!
You can now use the Fame and Construction menus.

Nice. Those new menus sounded useful. Hopefully they would open in the same way as your character sheet. It only took a moment to open your fame menu.

Fame: 8
Defeated adventurers +4 (6 - 2 because of no name and no lair)
Shamed an adventurer +4 (6 - 2 because of no name and no lair)
Evolve Form: 500 Fame, must be at least level 10
Liegelord 0/10: 10 Fame
?????

Well, that was sort of useful information, but there was nothing you could do with it without more fame. You could tell that you would have to fight more adventurers to get more fame. Also, it appeared that fucking Calista had been of real benefit to you. You would definitely do that again if you got the opportunity.

The Liegelord thing was kind of interesting too, as were all the question marks. Maybe each item would unlock others. The biggest issue was that you couldn’t see what the two visible items did. Oh well, maybe the construction menu will be more immediately useful.

Construction
Entrance: 10 stone, 2 ore (any)
?????

Well, that was enlightening. You tried to select the entrance, only for a window to tell you your dungeon inventory was empty. Not much of a surprise, except that you now had a dungeon inventory, which may not be a personal inventory but it was at least a step in the right direction.

You do know where to find stone and ore, but it’s farther up the mountain. If you want to try getting some to start construction, you will need to move quickly. When it starts getting dark in a couple hours you won’t want to still be out on the plateau collecting stone. The only decent option then, assuming you want to build something, is to go right now.

A few minutes later, you arrive to find the plateau apparently empty aside from the largish, boulder like resource nodes and a wide assortment of smaller rocks. You somehow know that it’s not really empty though. Something about some of the medium sized rocks puts you on edge. You need stone and ore though, and you’re not leaving until you have what you came for or it’s dark.

At first you try just hitting the nodes, but slime is unsurprisingly not very hard compared to stone. So, after a few seconds of useless slapping, you have an idea. You pick up a large pebble and slam it into the resource stone. Finally, a progress bar popped up along with an efficiency notice.

Skill level, -50%. Improvised tool -20%. Dexterity penalty -20%. Total harvest speed: 32%

Not exactly good, but it was at least possible now. A minute of pebble smashing later and a decent sized chunk of stone popped out. It was only a bit larger than the pebbles, but it somehow looked more special. Like stone instead of rock you assumed, but you could really only tell because of the item names. You touched the stone and imagined it disappearing into your dungeon inventory. It actually disappeared, hopefully to your dungeon inventory, but you had no way to check.

You continued pounding away at the stone and collecting pieces until finally it cracked down the middle. You had counted 5 pieces of stone total, so there would probably be that many from all of them, and hopefully some ore mixed in.

Eventually, you noticed the sky darkening and called it quits. You had been collecting stone at a semi-decent rate, but you did not want to risk staying out at night. The nocturnal enemies could be much worse than anything during the day. You were about to head back home, but you decided to collect more of the pebbles on the way. They were pretty useful for mining apparently, and possibly as projectiles too. They wouldn’t go in your dungeon inventory though, so you had to limit yourself to what you could carry inside yourself, which just happened to be 16, maybe there was a correlation to your strength? Interesting.

It took a little longer to get back down with the pebbles than it did to reach the plateau originally.

When you got all the way back, you deposited the pebbles in place of your old pile, and checked the construction menu. It had the same one option as before, but now it was brighter, hopefully to indicate you could make it. When you activated it this time a progress bar appeared on the wall at the outer edge of your cave. You went up to that section of wall with one of your pebbles and tried hitting it like the resource stones. Immediately, your cave snapped into a different shape. The floor and walls were straight and smooth with regularly spaced arches on the sides and across the ceiling. Your pebbles were still there, possibly neater than before, but the water spring was gone.

There were also lit torches lining the wall all the way to the entrance, which was sunken into the mountain a few feet. Your nice dark cave had just been lit up like a beacon in the early night. You sprang into action, hoping your idea would work. You reached up to the closest torch and tapped it, as you hoped, the torch went out like a usable item. Good, you thought, rushing to do the same with all the other torches. Then you waited, and nothing strange or dangerous appeared in the next couple of minutes. Safe, probably.

Now you could look at the construction menu again to see what else you could build. You doubted any future construction would be as quick as the initial one.

There were at least a hundred different options visible now, but the vast majority were greyed out. There were so many that the menu had a scroll bar, which was difficult to use of course. One of the options was another hall just like the entrance way, and you decide to work on that tonight, just to use some of the new stone and ore and try out the building system. Being a slime, you don’t strictly need sleep, but you do need an equivalent off-time, just blankly keeping watch or doing something repetitive.

You started by laying out three identical hallway pieces coming out of the current end of your entrance. The resulting entrance and hallway would be 100 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 10 feet high. It would take most of your stone and ore, but you could easily gather more. As you started hitting the wall, almost asleep already, you had two more ideas. You really needed a door and someway to hide inside of this hallway.

The first idea was easy now that you thought of it, you just found the simplest door that was made only of stone and ore and set it to be built at the entrance. It would basically be two stone doors with metal hinges and a metal fastener to close them from inside. The second idea was trickier, but you found a reasonably simple solution from the custom option on the menu. You set up regularly spaced, 1 by 6 inch seams on the ceiling that connected to a space 2 feet wide and 1 foot high that spanned the whole length of the hallway. By the end of this design, you were out of stone again, with only one piece of ore remaining. You had a start to what could be a pretty grand place though. So you set about hitting the door into existence as you zoned out and fell asleep.