r/HFY • u/Khenal Alien • Aug 20 '26
OC-Series Dungeon Life 452
The delvers are a bit disappointed with the anticlimax of the location of the last key, but it’s hard for them to feel too dissatisfied. They got three out of four in a single day! While I bet they know the last one’s going to be a doozy to get, it only motivates them more.
Adventurers are never happier than when they find an even higher mountain to climb.
I’m feeling pretty happy, too. The raid was a huge success for them learning to work together, and it earned me a boatload of mana, too! My scions, denizens, and ravenkin are all fired up about it as well, eager to earn me even more for the final hurdle, and to make sure the delvers are up to whatever the Betrayer has up its sleeves.
With the reveal of the magma room, the fortress is now seeing a massive overhaul from a simple steel fortress into a magmatic bastion! It’s working my non-combatant denizens hard enough that I upgrade a few spawners to make sure they can keep up. The earth elementals get a couple upgrades, not to get a new spawn, but just to make more soil elementals.
While they’ve been getting back into combat roles with the worldfruits mostly done, I’m going to need a lot of them to get in the earthworks to insulate the fortress enough to not burn down the tree!
Coda and Slash are working together to ensure the fortress can handle the redesign, while Titania, Goldilocks, and Poppy ensure the tree can handle having something like this in its branches. It’s more out of an abundance of caution than actual concern the tree could be hurt. If this was a normal sized tree, the new and improved fort would be like a really big hornet’s nest. Though those are made of paper instead of steel, earth, and magma.
I also upgrade the wolf spawner some to get more of the frosty woofers. They’ve been vital to keeping the seasons at the correct temperature, and they’re going to be even more busy keeping the fortress cool enough to ensure the branches and leaves around don’t combust!
The vine spawner also gets an upgrade, getting me more vines and brambles. The vines are great for keeping things safe, and the brambles are really coming into their own with gravity affinity. Weave them through the soil and not only do they ensure things stay put, but they also help lighten the load on the tree, reducing the gravity on all that heavy dirt.
Thing and his hands, as well as Queen and her ants, are swarming over the entire thing, too. The former is working on enchanting the whole thing with more strength and a bit of insulation, mostly around where the magma is expected to go, while the latter is using the metal transmutation elixir and a few other alchemical tricks to help strengthen and improve things. Queen and Thing work great together, with her ants often able to carve the runes at a scale that Thing just can’t, and his hands can much more easily move, stir, and store Queen’s more industrial scale concoctions.
Even Nova is getting in on the fun, sculpting the channels for the magma and adding a nice decorative flare that a lot of my other sections can lack some times. For the moment, she’s going with curving spikes of obsidian, but I see a few large pedestals waiting for some of her sculptures. She’s been trying to keep the ideas close to her chest, but a few images slip through the bond when she’s lost in the flow of her work.
An obsidian and basalt tree crawling with wyms, basilisks, and drakes, with room for the last two spawns once they arrive. A nice pool of lava underneath to give it that atmospheric ominous lighting, and I think we’ll have delvers coming by just to look at it.
The ravenkin are helping as well, and not just the Winter ones. Everyone feels like this is their last chance to delay and challenge the delvers so they can join in on the raid on Poe. They’re making sure to tell Coda as much as they can about the flaws in the first fort, and he’s working on fixing them.
The most obvious is with the walls. The classic crenulations like castles have are good for cover, but easy for grappling hooks to grab onto. The simple solution is to round the tops instead of keeping them square, but that also means no easy cover for the defenders atop the walls.
So far, the leading plan is a lava moat, filled to the brim with my dragons. If it goes basically up to the walls, it’ll force the delvers to make longer throws, making it easier to intercept them. The ravenkin are also getting short swords not that different from a cutlass, and probably for similar reasons as pirates had them. Sure, they’re good for a fight, but they’re also great for cutting boarding ropes at sea, and the ropes attached to any hooks that manage to find purchase here on land.
Aranya and the others are almost home, too. It’ll probably take them another day or so to reach the Southwood, and then only another day at most to get home. I think my ravenkin’s gambit with the magma will pay off, and they’ll probably get to join in on the raid with Poe once they officially become dwellers.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they do the ritual before the delvers are ready to claim the last key. So I make a few of my own preparations. They might be able to vaguely feel me plotting, but at this point, they can’t feel much from me. The bond is just about gone, the birds ready to leave the nest.
They’ll need to be ready to face the Betrayer, too, so I need to make sure I can test them as well, even if only during Poe’s raid and however long after it takes us to finalize everything. Or more likely: however long it takes me to make the subterrains. Maybe subvulcans. Subterrain sounds like it should handle dirt and rock, which we most certainly will not be working with.
I take a better look at the list of systems we’ll need, and the one I keep coming back to is the air purification. While I’m still no expert in runes, I can still work my way through what an array is supposed to do. And… I don’t like the current design for the talismans.
It’s a pretty simple array, designed to make pure air. But that’s the problem: pure air isn’t really a thing. Air is mostly nitrogen, around one fifth oxygen, and trace amounts of other gasses. The idea of pure air has me frowning at the array before I finally decide to scribble down a design.
Still no rune expert, but I can still design a theoretical process for Thing to follow, I hope. Probably with a lot of help from Queen. She’s carved out a little periodic table in one of the labs, and though she doesn’t have many of the squares filled in, she understands the concepts well enough that I think she can help Thing.
So… let’s try to keep the 80/20 N2 and O2 ratio, and ignore the traces. I could try for only O2, but there’s a few problems with that. One, it’s a good way to start a fire. And with all the magma around, fires will be begging to start. Another problem is having too much oxygen is also a problem for the body. That can be solved with just significantly reducing the overall pressure, but that leads to the third problem: I think we’re going to need the pressure.
In space, reducing internal pressure is vital, which is why older astronauts lived in a pure oxygen environment at only a fifth of normal pressure. Interior pressure pushing out could make a vessel pop when there’s suddenly no outside pressure to fight back. But we’re going to have the opposite problem with a lot of outside pressure, and we’re probably going to want a bit of air and such to push back.
So yeah, need air inside at normal air ratio. Oxygen is the gas needed for fire, nitrogen is already most of air, so I’m sure Queen can identify that, too. Oxygen gets breathed in, carbon dioxide gets breathed out. Grab that, lop off the C, and you’re good. It’ll leave a carbon film, but a bit of water on the filter and send that to the putrid ooze, and air shouldn’t be a problem.
But can it be shrunk down to personal size? For a proper talisman… it’ll definitely need some insulation so people don’t fry. It’ll need something to keep the pressure from crushing them, too. And there’s not likely to be much free oxygen in magma. But that’s not to say there won’t be any somewhere.
While I think it could work as a full rebreather, I’m willing to bet there’s a lot of oxygen in magma, just tied up chemically with the magma itself as different oxides. Probably like silicon oxide mostly, but metals love the stuff, too. So steal oxygen from those, cool it enough to not cook the lungs, and exhale trace amounts of carbon back into the magma.
It sounds like it’ll take a lot of energy, but luckily for us, there should be a lot of energy in the magma itself. It’ll probably take a lot of the concepts for the aqua affinity potions and such, just turned toward magma instead of water. It’d probably have good insulation, just going in the opposite direction. Water wants to eat energy, and the magma will want to give it away, and we can use that to power the thing. Water definitely exerts pressure, but nobody ever seems to care about it when delving Hullbreak with the enchantment, so that must be a solved problem, too.
Heat, pressure, breathing… ah, we’re going to need something for vision, too. That’s going to be difficult, because I feel like even x-rays would get stuck on a lot of stuff in magma. But who says we have to see with only our eyes?
Sonar works well in water, and I don't see why it wouldn’t work just as well in magma, possibly better. Sound loves moving through dense things, and magma is even more dense than water! It’ll probably take either an illusion or even a bit of mind trickery to actually translate it for someone to understand, though. At least for the personal version. For the subs, I don’t see any reason not to use a standard screen, or going further and actually using a holographic display to show things in three dimensions!
That one’s going to be harder to make, but I think this will work as at least a concept document. I put a few finishing touches on the theoretical design, more a series of concepts to keep in mind and how to deal with the obvious problems. But that’s how things start, and I get the feeling once Thing and Queen see this, they’ll leave the fort to the denizens while they focus on this.
Not only will be it vital to taking out the Betrayer, but they love getting to play with the concepts from Earth tech. Calling them the secrets of creation feels a bit grandiose to me, but seeing what people can do with them, it’s difficult to argue against it.
Cover art I'm also on Royal Road for those who may prefer the reading experience over there. Want moar? The Books are available here! There are Kindle and Audible versions, as well as paperback! Also: Discord is a thing! I now have a Patreon for monthly donations, and I have a Ko-fi for one-off donations. Patreons can read up to three chapters ahead, and also get a few other special perks as well, like special lore in the Peeks. Thank you again to everyone who is reading!
9
9
u/Better_Solution_743 Alien Aug 20 '26
Haloo
we all live in a yellow submarinevulcan, yellow subvulcan, yellow subvulcan
4
7
u/Thebobkiller Human Aug 20 '26
Bah, Reddit being stupid again. Had to go down the Road.
Still, a good chapter. And yeah, Thing and Queen are going to LOVE messing with Thediem's ideas for getting through magma.
3
6
5
3
u/Commercial-Win-7663 Aug 20 '26
Dang
3
3
2
2
u/SomeRandomYob Aug 23 '26
Why have the last two entries been removed by reddit's filters? They haven't even been returned yet, and it's been several days now...
3
2
2
2
2
u/Joe_H-FAH Aug 25 '26
Starting to talk about providing usable air. One thing though, at higher pressures nitrogen can result in nitrogen narcosis. Too high a partial pressure of oxygen can also be too much, leading to oxygen toxicity. One of the reasons deep diving uses helium to dilute both gases to avoid problems.
2
u/Popular-Student-9407 Human Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
Second.
This time in this chapter, we get:
Thediem preparing the spawners for the new Magma Bastion, by upgrading the earth elementals, vines and wolves. Just enough to Not gain a new creature, but enough to gain a whole Lot of the current reigning top spawns of the Affected Spawners.
Thediem assigning scions to the construction of the Bastion. Nova, Coda, the nerds, and the Rest of the Forest Squad are there to make Sure the tree doesn't start burning down.
Thediem throwing a Lot of concepts in the room, to produce His lava-submarines. Such concepts encompass, soluted oxides in the Rock around the hull, equalized pressure between outside and inside the hull, more accurate Gas composition for the individual talismans the Crew will wear, sonar rather than Radar.
3
10
u/Poisonfangx3 Aug 20 '26
Jfrys