Ruined Temple near the Center of the Jungle Continent

After a great deal of thought, you decided that you'd settle near the center of the Jungle, inside of Amazon territory. True this would put you pretty close to the strongest power on the continent... However, the way the Amazons were structured meant that you were unlikely to bring any REAL attention from them until you'd risen to be an actual threat. AND they were currently locked in an escalating conflict with the Imperium from across the Western ocean, a good distraction for you. You figured you'd pick on the non-Amazon villages at first and work to gain a power-base. Plus, the pervert in you kind of wanted to start off next to the strong women that you intended to dominate.

However now that you had the geography down, you needed to focus on the actual environment you'd rule from. Establishing a base and production buildings was important, and of course you needed something to fit the theme. After scrolling through the options, and examining the incredibly efficient editors that the game/life combo had available, you decided to create a large custom Temple, based stylistically off of Mayan temple structure, the main building being about as tall with numerous buildings around. However, both to avoid keep the point cost down and to stay with proper stylistic themes, you decide that the Temple will be abandoned, ruined, and fallen to time and decay.

You began to work on the details and decided to make it built from a grey stone, rising up in the Mayan pyramid style with a wide straight line of steps from bottom to top on the South, East, West, and North sides. However it is easy to step off of these steps and onto the long flat walkways about the temple exterior, every two stories or so, not including the base. You heighten and enlarge the building a bit to make it about thirteen stories tall, with an enclosure at the top to act as a shrine and ritual area... Possibly a throne room dependent on how things go. You then double-check the interior and start adding rooms, hallways, and putting a few more doors in from the outside at the walkways. You knew you were going to be doing a LOT of walking around this temple, and you wanted at least some shortcuts here and there. Finally, you got the basic design of the temple down... and now it was time for the style.

You collapsed about half of the rooms you'd put in, and filled numerous others with vegetation of varying kinds, going for more or less a grab-bag of jungle plant-life. You spread cracks all over the temple and took chunks out of the stairs and walls, then added in creeping vines, moss, fungus, intruding into the stone and growing on it both. You collapsed the roof of the top enclosure, then got rid of the rubble to make an undesired skylight, and you didn't stop there... Bones. Bones EVERYWHERE. Old dusty skeletons, some caught up in vegetation, others just lying in rooms or halls, still others scattered about the steps and a bunch crowded around the very base of the temple, pouring out across the jungle floor and crushed right up against the stone. While you might have been a bit... overzealous with the distribution of skeletons, they did have a purpose beyond just a coolness factor. This was both your home base, AND you were a necromancer... you were pretty sure they'd come in use, if not as a last ditch defense or a surprise reinforcement army, then some other way.

With a rather large number of points saved from making your home a ruin, something you'd change over the course of the game, you started to look at the options for things that were actually useful about it... You almost immediately started to curse when you saw the MEDICINE LAB option in the menus. You had COMPLETELY forgotten about making your Witch Doctor good with plants and poisons! That was exactly the sort of thing you should have been good at! ... Well, you hadn’t finalized anything, you could go back right? … Well, you could, but you’d just barely been able to afford the Master bit and you did want to have control over your slaves… … Fuck it, you'd just have to learn in-game. With a grunt of annoyance you moved on from the option and continued to look the menu over. After a bit of examination, you decided to make a few high-cost purchases, going for quality over quantity, and then just fixing up the rest of the Temple over time.

For starters, you designed and put an Idol to Hamandara, King of the Dancing Dead, up in your shrine. This creepy skeletal entity was a Gubanjaru, or in your new world, a 'Chief' of Evil Spirits. Considering your stat selections and main focus, he was almost certainly your main source of power, and deserved special recognition right at the start. Also, further going down this road, you developed a 'Sacrificial Altar' and placed it in the center of the Temple's top shrine. After doing so, you thought for a moment, went back to design, and covered it with dried blood stains... then spread more dried blood stains here and there throughout the Temple. Finally, you put in a 'Bone Pit' dug in at the base of the temple, with multiple hallways connecting to it, likely a place where the remains of slaves would have been thrown. This one you specifically designate as a 'recruitment room' to purchase units from. Last, but not least, you designated several rooms near to the temple's Shrine as 'Holding Pens' for your slaves. You weren't entirely sure how you'd manage their design, but you figured this was a good start, let the programs of the world make their suggestion.

Finally, with all this done, it was time to move on to unit creation... Where you got something of a surprise. You blinked in fact, and double-checked, to make sure you were reading it right... And you were. Apparently, your lifestyle choices had caused the game to reevaluate the laws of cost and expenditure. Instead of gold, resources, pretty beads, or some other form of proper currency, the cost to recruit units was measured in... Souls. ... … Hm.

You had to spend Souls to acquire units. To a degree this made sense, what with all the dark creepiness stuff you had going on for you. Still, you didn’t imagine that that was tradeable… Might make transactions with other cultures hard. Perhaps you could do something with the Slaves? … Maybe. It was something to think about at least. Anyways, you were starting off with 200 Souls, according to the reading. A good start, but considering you needed to spend them to make units and upgrade buildings, you imagined that that would be going down pretty quick here.

You looked over the unit options, and the pure number of classes FLOODED your vision. Basic Melee, Basic Ranged, Worker, Versatile Basic, Siege , Aerial, Skirmisher, Scout, Healer, Officer, and on and on. You quickly shook your head and tried to focus on the three main TYPES instead of each individual class selection for units... It looked as though, mainly, there were Units, and Heroes, for each selection in this menu. You'd check on the Heroes later, for the moment, you decided to just create two basic units, and visit the Bone Pit for more unit creation options later.

For your first, you actually selected WORKER, and put in ‘Slaves’ as a unit. Immediately, people popped up of varying colors, nudity, and… attractiveness. You frowned. Okay… these people weren’t good looking. They weren’t all ugly, but they didn’t all look good either. THAT would get tiring rather quick. Nudity lost its appeal fast when people didn’t look good enough nude. After just a moment of thought, you went back to the world creation menu and made a few alterations. You increased the general attractiveness of ALL peoples by a large margin… there was still variability, not everyone would be a stunning beauty, some would be a bit more homely than others, and scars and disfigurement would still happen, and be a matter of individual taste for attractiveness. But for the most part, everyone would look better. You also did a bit of bosom work for the women, and made a more… even distribution of chest sizes, all the ranges included, Double-Ds being as possible as mosquito tits… What? You liked variety.

With that done you went back to your slaves and smirked, seeing now that all the options were significantly more attractive. For a moment, you toyed with the thought of having only female slaves, making them all women just to satisfy your perverted whims… But actually, you decided to keep it as something of an even split. Why? Well, you needed Souls, and for that you’d probably be sacrificing slaves, and it would be easier to sacrifice men than it would women. Also, you couldn’t do things like arrange a gangbang with no other men, or breed more slaves with JUST your cock. And fucking a hundred or so different women, amount rising? Unlikely to happen unless you made super-stamina potions or something.

In any case, you decided to keep it at a more or less even ratio between men and women, for now. For equipment you just kept them naked, and when looking over their traits you put ‘Enslaved’, which clearly identified their position in your hierarchy, ‘In Awe’ which would make them view you as more than human, which would make it easier to keep them afraid of you and in your thrall. And then ‘Substitute Currency’… making it very clear that you could turn these Slaves into Souls, or even trade them with other cultures, making them useful beyond just worker material. And to be fair, they weren’t good workers, most of their stats were kept pretty low to make them only worth one Soul. Still, this was a good start you felt. As an afterthought, you made sure that their skin colors ranged from very dark to light dark, keeping them regional, likely from nearby villages or the like.

With the units created, each at the cost of one soul, you purchased a 100 of them, giving yourself 100 Slaves to turn into Souls or vice-versa, and 100 bodies to work with at the start. Actually… that gave you some ideas regarding the sacrifice altar… it’d be pretty annoying to have to sacrifice one at a time. Moving back through menus AGAIN (curse your indecisiveness) you made some alterations to the altar and turned it into a Sacrifice Pit, which opened up in the middle of the shrine and you could shove slaves into, instead of having to cut them with your own knife… Probably for the best really. If you had to sacrifice attractive big-tittied slaves very often, you’d probably develop some kind of weird fetish.

And with that FINALLY done, you moved on to creating actually useful members of your military. You have NUMEROUS ideas for units already. However most of them you can think of will be high-expensive, or need additional altars, or some other form of ‘too early’. For the moment, you REALLY should focus on just the most basic of things, and for that, you turn to your classic love, the Undead. With that focus in mind you pulled up the menus and started fine-tuning, making the melee grunt who would, at least at the start, form your armies.

Your first undead unit wasn’t actually a skeleton, despite how many bones you wound up scattering all over the place. Instead, you wound up creating a type of zombie undead unit, The Hollowmen.

A Hollowman was an undead whose life was drained entirely by you with your Life Drain spell, then, had a spare Soul bound into them to make them a permanent unit. Their skin was grey, and taut, drawn tight over their muscle and bone as nutrients and vitality was sucked completely from them. Their eyes were turned to dust in their sockets, and now they have deep sunken eyes of glowing lime green, the necromantic energy animating them and showing through the eyes. With either no hair, or little wisps of dead strands here and there, they looked mostly shaven, like yourself, but were also a bit shrunken from the draining, and generally looked like starved, emaciated, grey-skinned dead people... which was pretty fitting all things considered.

You decided, as the name might have suggested, that these were entirely male, due to your desire to NOT look at dried up emaciated undead women all day. Then, looking over your stats, you actually made fairly few changes to the weak base model the game came up with. The undead type had far more hit-points than a normal human model would, you noted, invulnerability to effects like Fear, Sleep, Poison, etc, and slower reflexes and less intelligence than a human. And that was fine... with a low-tier outfitting of Wooden Spears, and a simple black loincloth to compliment, you made them a pretty weak starter unit, hoping to take advantage of the Undead's natural toughness and resistance to most effects rather than making your first units powerful. You were pretty much going for high numbers here, about 50 with a one Soul per unit... You destroyed fifty lives to get fifty soldiers… … Kind of a sobering thought actually.

Shaking your head, you refocused on your main objective. You had TWO main groups of units, 50 spare Souls, and a base of operations. Now? Now it was time for an actual named character/fucktoy. With a deep breath, you opened the ‘Lesser Heroine’ option menu, and started to work on your next highly detailed masterpiece…