Chapter 103: Slapstone

Note: Sorry about the late chapter. Just realized this morning's chapter didn't go through.

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“So do you think that’s why it’s so nice here?” Lily said. “I mean with all the different trees and plants and all. It’s that delta soil thing you were talking about?”

Arthur did. But he also didn’t. One of the hard parts about being from a different universe was figuring out when he actually knew something and when he just thought he did.

“Maybe? Where I’m from, it’s like that. But I wasn’t a river scientist or anything like that, so I might have misunderstood how those things worked. Plus, it might be different here. For all I know this came to be because a dragon used to make their nests here, or because there’s a big giant magic ruby buried under the soil, or something like that.”

Lily took a sip of water, and Arthur’s words ruined her efforts. She spit most of it out and coughed on the remainder for a few seconds.

“Really, Arthur? You had to come up with some magic reason the plants were green and the best you could do was a big ol’ giant ruby?”

“That’s the thing!” Arthur was excited rather than offended. This seemed like a good way to explain one of the harder-to-talk-about parts of his life. “You and everyone grew up around the system and magic. So you have this intuitive sense of what’s possible. I didn’t. So big giant rubies that can improve soil make just as much sense to me as anything else.”

“Really? You think so?” Lily asked as she got her coughing under control.

“I do. If you had to pick a magic reason why the trees are so pretty, what would it be?” Arthur asked.

“I don’t know. Probably something to do with the demon war? Lots of weird stuff went on during the demon war. It seems like they blame a lot of things on that.”

“See, that’s useful for me. Now I can say ‘oh, it’s probably the demon war’ when this kind of stuff comes up. Maybe it’ll work and I don’t have to look like a doofus. I don’t like looking like a doofus, you know.”

“Everyone else likes it though.” Lily capped the water bottle Rhodia had made her and tossed it on top of the cart. “It’s very entertaining. Oh, hey, there’s Milo. We should ask him the same stuff. About the plants and delta and all.”

“I think Kout would probably have a better idea of it.” Arthur looked at the small badger demon, who was standing on top of the hill that Milo was mining. “He’s a scavenger and all.”

Lily nodded and ran forward towards them, outpacing Arthur and his cart. She reached Milo several seconds before he did. When Arthur finally struggled up, she had done most of the work of bringing Milo up to speed on their conversation.

“And then Arthur says, you know, an Arthur thing,” Lily said, gesturing with her arms. “That there’s a big giant magic ruby under the ground.”

“A ruby? Really?” Milo laughed. “Show me where it is, Arthur. I’ll dig it up.”

Arthur found a relatively flat spot of ground to stop the cart and started brewing Milo’s tea. “It was more of a guess for the conversation. But I’ll let you know if I see part of it sticking up.”

“Anyway.” Lily bounced. “Why is it nice? One of you has to know.”

“I don’t know. The river. That’s not a bad guess. Or the great demon war,” Milo said. “That’s always a good one when you don’t know what’s going on.”

“That’s what I told him,” Lily said with a laugh. “What about you, Kout? Any guesses?”

Kout scrunched his badger face a little. He wasn’t a quiet person, but Arthur had found his conversational style involved a lot of thoughtful pauses. Since he usually leveraged the extra time into raising the value of whatever he eventually said, nobody really minded waiting. Eventually, his face relaxed, the thinking-work apparently complete.

“Trapped dungeon,” Kout said. “If it’s not the river, or the great war, I bet it would be a trapped dungeon.”

“Oh, huh,” Milo said. “That’s smart. Maybe.”

Arthur looked from face to face, expectantly. “You’re gonna have to help out the Earthling here. And don’t even start on the whole you-should-know-this. Nobody has ever mentioned this before.”

“No, this one is special, I think,” Lily said, a bit uncertain. “I don’t know this either.”

“You wouldn’t. I mean, you could, but it doesn’t come up very often,” Milo said. “It’s like… Okay, normally, when a dungeon spawns, it’s in a cave. Or just out in the open. They can technically pop up anywhere that there’s space. And usually, if there’s a dungeon in a particular area, that’s it. There won’t be another one for miles.”

“And dungeons circulate majicka,” Kout said.

“They do,” Milo continued. “That’s important. They gather majicka from the surroundings in ways nobody seems to understand. And some people think they get extra majicka from somewhere because they seem to do more than they should with the majicka they draw.”

“It’s like a big mixing spoon,” Kout added.

“Right. That’s how I heard it too. The system spawns a dungeon, it takes in a bunch of majicka from the surroundings plus maybe some extra from who knows where, and then gives it legs. They become monsters. Either people hunt the monsters, or the dungeon eventually has a break and the monsters go walking around. Eventually, someone like Karbo finds those monsters, he stomps on it, and…”

“And all that majicka gets released in a new place?” Arthur asked as he offered Milo tea.

“Right. And that majicka lands there.” Milo grabbed his tea from Arthur and drank down about half of it in a single, long gulp. He tended to take his boba iced, even in the cold. “This is all guesses, by the way. Nobody really knows for sure. But some of it’s true. And trapped dungeons are part of how we know that.”

“I still don’t know what that is,” Arthur said.

“It’s like this.” Kout took Milo’s shovel from him and traced out a square in the ground. “A dungeon spawns somewhere with a clear path to open air.”

“So if it’s a cave, there has to be an opening to the outside world. Or it’s already in the outside world,” Milo said.

Kout took a rock and dropped it in the center of the square. “What happens if there’s a rock slide that completely covers the dungeon up?”

“A bunch of rocks get teleported into the dungeon?” Arthur offered.

“Sure,” Milo said. “But maybe the rocks pile up all around it anyway, tons and tons of them. Or maybe the dungeon’s in a cave and the tunnels collapse, or something like that.”

“That happens? Why don’t the monsters just bust out?”

“Sometimes they do.” Milo grimaced. “It’s not pretty when it happens. It’s like a mini monster wave, all from one point. If it’s out in the middle of nowhere, it’s no big deal. But if it’s by a town, that’s scary.”

“Other times they don’t,” Kout said. “They get dug up later, maybe when someone’s mining a mountain, or if someone starts a quarry. It’s not a beast wave then.”

“The opposite,” Milo said. “They find a bunch of monster corpses that spawned and starved. Or they find monsters greatly weakened, where a single warrior can clear an entire wave.”

“The majicka.”

“Right, that whole time, the dungeon’s been drawing in majicka, plus whatever extra majicka they supposedly get, and then dumping everything in that one spot. Wherever they sit, everything is better. If it’s a mine, all the rocks are stuffed full of potential. If it was a mud slide or something, all the ground is greener for miles and miles around. The benefits radiate out.”

“Why not do that on purpose?” Arthur asked. “It sounds like the ultimate fertilizer generator.”

“Because you can get the same benefit by just sending hunters and warrior classes in the normal way, without the risk of the trapped dungeon popping like a bubble and spewing out danger in a way that isn’t controlled,” Milo said. “They aren’t exactly common, and I think it would be hard to trap a dungeon even if you could.”

“Huh,” Arthur said. “Well, here’s hoping whatever’s trapped stays that way.”

For the first time since the conversation started, Arthur took a look around. Milo had been cutting big trenches all over the place since they reached the settlement, but this particular dig didn’t look like the others. Arthur could see where Milo had dug a trench initially, before he started to widen it out, only to stop at a reddish rock just a foot or so down from the surface.

“What’s that?” Arthur said, pointing. “Looks like you found something. Ore, finally?”

“Oh, yes! I forgot with all the magic ruby talk. It’s not ore. It’s better.” Milo grabbed an almost perfectly square chunk of the rock from the ground, then gave it to Arthur. “Not better for me, but better. That’s Slapstone.”

Milo was so visibly proud of his find that Arthur could tell, for sure, that there was no chance the smith was going to explain things. Kout caught Arthur’s confused Earthling look and came to his rescue.

“It’s a natural resource. When you break it, it breaks in straight lines. When you leave it sitting with other pieces of Slapstone, they slowly seal together. You can make solid stone buildings with it, with no mortar.”

“Oh.” Arthur’s eyes widened as he took in the possibilities of a rock that wanted to be both bricks and mortar. “Oooooh. How much of this is there?”

“Tons.” Milo beamed. “Tons and tons. Kout’s scavenger-senses are going crazy over this whole area. It won’t last forever, but until we run out, this’ll be like having a quarry specialist on staff. It’s that good.” Milo took back the piece of rock from Arthur and cradled it in his hands like it was his first-born child. “This is going to be enough for the rest of our houses, plus all Mizu’s well linings, plus a bunch of other stuff. I say we get everyone out here, we cut it, we haul it back and use it until it’s all gone.”

“We shouldn’t save some? For… strategic purposes, I guess?”

Milo shook his head. “Nope. It seals back together, remember? When we haul it back, we’re going to unpack it into instant buildings. This is a town in a box, Arthur. I can’t believe how lucky this is.”

Arthur and Lily both tried and failed to be quite as excited as Milo was, the Earth-ness of the one and the childlike lack of experience of the other held them back. Lily did have thoughts, though.

“You shouldn’t uncover it like that,” Lily said.

Milo looked at her and blinked. “Why not? We have to get it out.”

“You do, but look.” She grabbed a stick and started swinging it like an imaginary pickaxe at the ground. “This is hard. Awkward angle. But if you swing it to the side, like this, it’s easier.”

“But the rock is down.”

“It’s down because you haven’t cut a big, wide trench yet. You can do that first, then mine it from the side and the top as you go. And once you have the trench, you can knock the dirt that’s on top into whatever cart you want to use. It’s on a hill, so it’s not like you have to haul it back up or anything.”

Kout and Milo looked at Lily, at the rock, and then back to her, their mouths hanging slightly open.

“She’s right, you know. We are being stupid,” Kout finallys aid.

“Don’t say that right in front of her!” Milo said. “She’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

As Milo and Kout sat down to draw new plans for bringing the stone out of the hill, Arthur and Lily gave the last of their semi-enthusiastic congratulations before moving on to give other people their drinks.