Monroe

Chapter Three Hundred and Twelve. Urban planning.

Dungeon 801972G610N497ISS6PM18D.

Capacity 27%

Estimated time until overflow 182 solar cycles.

User tier seven, semi-evolved. User grouped with eleven other sapient beings, tier six.

Dungeon set to Tier Eight, Level Thirty-Eight.

The System notification appeared in his vision.

New Quest!

The tunnels beneath the great city of Krestor have become infested with uncontrolled magma elementals! They threaten to destroy the foundations of the city, causing it to fall deep into the planetary mass!

Destroy ten of these elementals to receive a reward!

Discover where the elementals are coming from to receive a reward!

Discover why the elementals are attacking the city's foundations to receive a reward!

Stop the elementals from destroying the city's foundations to receive a reward!

"Well, at least we know what to expect," Bob sighed.

"The quest reset, including the counter for killing elementals," Dave grinned.

Bob checked the general monster eradication quest.

Quest Advanced!

"I bet you can't kill just one."

Disperse ten manifestations of equal or greater level than yourself. Complete.

Disperse one hundred manifestations of equal or greater level than yourself. Complete.

Disperse one thousand manifestations of equal or greater level than yourself. Complete.

Disperse ten thousand manifestations of equal or greater level than yourself.

Reward : One thousand energy crystals.

He hadn't expected it to reset, but it was worth the few seconds to check.

"Alright, we know what we're doing and more or less what to expect," Bob began. "We don't know if this will be exactly the same, so let's take it slow and careful."

"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast," Mike agreed. "I'm feeling more confident with this armor, but there's no need to rush things."

Bob nodded approvingly. "Let's get in formation, same as before, when I spot them Dave and Bailli can pull them in."

The Dungeon run had gone slightly quicker and quite a bit smoother than their first time through it. They'd fully cleared the elementals, and Bob had stabilized the portal, allowing them to kill the 'Mad Eire.'

There was no reward list, instead rewarding them with six hundred crystals each.

"Well, we can hypothesise that first clears are important," Bob mused.

"We each picked up seven hundred and eleven crystals each from the quest rewards," Dave said, "that's eighty-five hundred crystals, which isn't bad at all. I mean, it's less than we used to pull, but it's definitely better than just grinding it out in the Arcane Depths."

Bob nodded. He needed a bit more than forty-three thousand crystals to reach the tier seven cap, and then another forty-nine thousand to push over to tier eight, then he could reincarnate. At seven hundred crystals per delve, he'd need a bit more than a hundred and thirty delves. At five delves a day, that was twenty-seven days.

He knew that it wouldn't happen that smoothly, but doing the math gave him the goals he needed to work toward.

"I think we should clear this Dungeon a couple more times, just to confirm its behavior," Dave suggested. "We have a few working theories about these new Dungeons, so let's hash them out before we run off to any others."

"How far away is the next Dungeon?" Jessica asked.

"About six hundred miles to the east," Bob replied. "Another seven hundred to the west, then eight hundred to the north."

"Before we get too caught up in the joys of delving and our sweet, sweet loot," Jack began, "we should consider if this is the place we want to build New Jack City."

"We aren't naming it New Jack City," Amanda sighed with a shake of her head. "Although this place seems pretty good."

"The truth is, we don't have enough information to make a truly informed decision," Mike said. "On Thayland, we had people who told us what to expect, weather and climate-wise. There were historical patterns and trends, and while they didn't document them that way, they still had the data, and knew to heed it, which gave us what we needed to know. Here?" It was his turn to shake his head. "That river could flood these hills every spring. It doesn't look like it does, but how do we know?"

"Too right," Jessica agreed. "Playing devil's advocate though, we aren't looking to spend years observing the planet, yeah? I'm super keen to evolve into tier seven, then push to the cap so we can all reincarnate together, but to do that, we need to have a home base, and this seems just as likely as any other."

"I'll admit I'm more than a little concerned about the ecosystem here, or lack thereof," Bob admitted. "But Jessica is right. We could spend years observing. We have that time," he grinned, "and I'll admit, I do find the idea of investigating an entirely different, unexplored planet very appealing. However, we do have goals, and those goals require us to reincarnate, then level back up. As a group, at tier eight, I feel confident that we can avoid the nastier elements of the societies we left behind when we return. So let's plant our flag."

"Been practicing that one?" Jack asked.

"I have," Bob admitted. "I knew this conversation was going to come up."

"It sounded good," Amanda assured him.

"Ok, while the name is still up in the air, Jack, you've built a couple of cities, where we do we start?" Bob asked,

"From the bottom up," Jack replied before he tapped his armband, which projected a three-dimensional image of the bottom story of a building.

Jack tapped his armband again, and the image expanded, then it began to build up, and Bob realized that the bottom story was actually some sort of storm drain slash sewer system.

"We start by digging out the footprint for our little town, then we make sure we have adequate drainage before building out our cisterns and waterways." Jack tapped the relevant parts of the map, which highlighted themselves in red. "While we have a lot of ways to get rid of waste, the fact of the matter is that doing so centrally is more efficient, and those same arrangements will also ensure we don't get flooded out of our new homes."

Bob looked more closely at the image. It was five hundred feet across by a thousand feet long.

The group needed ten houses. He'd quietly asked everyone who they wanted to bring back to their new home, and come up with another sixty houses, so seventy in total. Assuming each house had a thirty by thirty base, and doubling that for yards, then using the same square footage again for roads, and the area that Jack had planned out was double what they would need, and the yard and street allocations were beyond generous.

"That's a little big isn't it?" Bob asked.

"That's what he said," Jack smirked.

"Bit of an overcompensation, yeah?" Jessica said teasingly. "Bob's right, that's something like three times the space we'll need, even after we fetch our mates."

"Future-proofing," Jack replied, his tone now serious. "Expanding the town after we've built out the infrastructure is not easy." He sighed. "Believe me, I've had experience with it. Better to plan for a few generations ahead at the beginning, than to be caught scrambling later."

"How about we build it out for a fifty percent increase," Bob suggested. "Enough room to grow a bit, but with the understanding that this is a huge, empty planet, with all the room you could ask for to build."

Jack sighed and conceded. "Fine," he grumbled.

Bob stretched, rolling his shoulders as he looked down at the massive pit they had excavated.

He'd privately thought that they were getting a little bit ahead of themselves by building so soon, but Mike was the only other who wasn't eager to get off the IDSS Freedom. The lure of being off the ship was strong, and he couldn't help but wonder just how stir crazy everyone would have gotten if they'd ended spending a couple of years looking for a planet.

He'd suggested putting the plans together, but he'd clearly failed to understand just how badly the crew wanted to stop having to rely on the Freedom.

After they'd agreed on the plans for their village, everyone had turned to him, at which point he'd reminded them that with the reduction in spellcasting values, it would cost upwards of a hundred thousand mana crystals if they wanted to use magic. He'd then pulled out a shovel, and demonstrated just how easily they could dig a hole, even with their reduced strength attributes. His reduced strength attribute anyway, as Jack, Mike, and Elli demonstrated what a focus on strength could accomplish. Wayna joined in as a massive badger, and with all of them working together, it had only taken them two days to excavate the area.

Bob hadn't been about to slack off, so they'd delved the Dungeon four times each of those days. The scenario had remained consistent, and practice had pared down their time to just under two hours for a run. Those eight runs had generated almost seventy thousand mana crystals, and the entire groups was feeling a lot better about the reduced coalescence of crystals, as the rewards for clearing the Dungeon came very close to making up for it.

Harv was burning through their crystals rapidly, converting the earthern walls and floors into granite. Transmutation was an under appreciated school of magic, with most people only seeing the repair spell. While Bob would freely admit that the repair spell was cheat magic on par with summon mana-infused object or regeneration, his discussions with Trebor had revealed that Transmutation was the magic required to make golems.

He'd quietly filed that away as something to explore later. More specifically, he'd told Trebor to remind him to take him down that rabbit hole in six months.

His mirror protocol had become more useful with the System update. Trebor could, at his direction, manipulate his interface, which didn't sound like much more than a convenience, but Bob now had a minimap in the upper right corner of his vision which pulled data from his armband, which in turn pulled data from the other armbands.

Bob was not proud. He could freely admit that the people at DARPA who had designed the receivers to read mana patterns, and then feed mana back into them to weaken, strengthen, enable, or disable the patterns were absolutely brilliant. But what was the work of a genius, is soon the work of a tinsmith, and Bob had spent more than a few hours carefully inspecting just how they worked.

Ultimately, he'd been able to link a transciever to his matrix. For anyone else, this wouldn't have much, if any, benefit, but Bob had Trebor. The link allowed Trebor to access his armband, and with it, the rest of the limited network. Bob theorized that when they stopped back on Earth, assuming people had gotten together and repaired, rather than wrecked, the place, that Trebor should have access to the internet.

"Messing with your interface again?" Jessica asked as she walked up next to him, pushing a tendril of hair away from her face, the hard labor having caused a few strands to escape her ponytail.

"Just considering how many crystals we're burning on a sewer system," Bob replied dryly. "I know that ultimately, there isn't a good argument for spending crystals on sanitation, as this will be more effective in the long run."

"Especially considering that whoever is living here a couple of hundred years from now might not have someone with the skills to handle it magically, right?" Jessica said.

"Or not easily," Bob agreed. He'd thought of quite a few ways to handle the waste situation with magic.

"So, we're pretty much guessing on the climate, but once Harv has the leach field sorted, we're thinking you can use a few rituals to grow an orchard around the edge," she smiled. "Jack explained that we don't want trees on top of the field itself, but the edges are fine, and it would be nice to have some fruit trees from Earth growing."

Bob shrugged. He was fine with taking advantage of the Garden on the Freedom, but this was another example of the rest of the group preferring to spend more time on the ground.

"Sure," he agreed.

Further conversation was interrupted by the enthusiastic arrival of Monroe, who bounded up behind them and pounced on Bob.

Bob was prepared for the feline of mass destruction, having been warned by his mini-map of the big floofer's approach, but Jessica had been caught entirely by surprise and had been standing just a little too close to Bob to avoid Monroe's arrival.

With a yelp, she stumbled and fell into the pit.

"You ok?" Bob's question was muffled by Monroe's tail, which the big cat had wrapped around his face.

He couldn't hear her answer, as Monroe had turned on his purr motor, and in his newest incarnation, the economy-sized kitty was loud.

With a mental nudge, he convinced Monroe to return to his tier five tiger-sized form.

Now able to see again, he found that Jessica had hopped out of the pit and was shaking her head as she looked at him.

"You two are adorable, but he's one heckin' chonker," she said, dusting her hands off on her pants.

"Aw Lawd, he comin!" Dave said as he walked up, accompanied by Amanda, Bailli, and Erick.

"He's not a chonk!" Amanda disagreed, moving up next to Bob and digging her hands into Monroe's ruff. "You're a big, strong kitty, aren't you?" She cooed.

"I don't know that I want to tier Icy up," Bailli confessed, shifting her hair so that it fell over her left shoulder, revealing the blue-eyed white kitty sprawled around her neck and across her shoulder. "I mean, she sheds everywhere, and I can't imagine if she was his size."

"It's a challenge," Bob admitted. "Frequent brushing helps, but I do spend a bit of time working a control air spell to clean up all the spare fluff."

Monroe chuffed at the word 'Brushing' and tilted his head to look at Bob expectantly as he hopped off his shoulders, resumed his full form and sprawled out on the ground in front of him.

"He's looking for his rake," Dave chuckled.

Bob shook his head, and cast his summon mana-infused object spell, adding the threads to convert the pattern to a persistent effect. A blueish-black slicker brush, the size of a garden rake, appeared in his hands, and he began to apply it to his feline overlord, who purred happily, stretching and tearing furrows in the soil as he flexed his happy feet.

Erick winced. "Maybe keep Icy as she is," he agreed, watching as Monroe's claws, which were now six inches long, dug into the dirt.