[center][h3][hr][b]Current Goal:[/b]
Strengthen Dungeon Defences[/h3][hr][/center]

When the rats had brought over a piece of bread, Kleine accepted it without much hesitation.

[color=EEBD65]"Oh! Why thank you!"[/color] She said to the rats. Though the more she looked at it, the less and less she wanted to touch it. After pondering for a brief moment, she hatched a plan. By instinct, she mimicked washing the bread in a water-filled basin. Of course, it was simply an illusion. She didn't have any sort of water source yet. But what she pulled out of the basin was another illusion--one of a clean bread. She "ate" her illusion and handed her portion--in the same condition she received it--back to the rats as a "thank you".

Then came the question of the hour from Sal.

[color=EEBD65]"Ah, well..."[/color] Kleine paused to think about her words, her fingers nervously tapping together. [color=EEBD65]"That was the previous dungeon master."[/color]

She paused.

[color=EEBD65]"Oh, don't worry about desecration or anything like that. Anything that was [i]them[/i] had been burnt away long ago. Right now, it's just a pile of bones."[/color]

[hr][hr]
It wasn't easy to carve out the halls of their dungeon. In fact, in their few days of labour--though, it was difficult to determine any sort of marker of time within the dungeon--it felt like they had carved out about a third of their plan. It was as though the dungeon fought back against being carved out in such a way. Every so often, when enough people would look away, walls seemed to reform in an instant. Likewise, filling in parts of the dungeon--with stone, dirt, and gravel from their digging--often resulted in the piles simply vanishing when nobody looked. Rarely, the piles of loose stone, dirt, and dust would simply be replaced by a slat of cavernous stone as if it had always been there.

The dungeon was a gaslighting mistress, apparently. And a difficult one, judging by their struggles.

First, the cabal of dungeon masters had realized something rather important: they couldn't quite move the entrance or exit. The crystal simply refused to move, while the entrance refused to be filled and, no matter where they dug--even right beside the initial entrance--a new entrance wasn't created--it was simply more rock which made little sense.

Second, the Oracle's attempts to create an octagonal shrine were... tentative, to put it lightly. Every time it attempted to fill in the dungeon room, the stone simply vanished. It was expected to some degree, but one would expect after the dozens of times it filled in the corners that there would be at least [i]one[/i] wall created. But as if penance for rolling quite well, its attempts to terraform were shot down.

Nonetheless, they had a slightly better looking dungeon. Incomplete and still needing traps and the like, but it at least had enough space where they could have their own private areas.

Exploration outside of the dungeon had been... not quite fruitful. It was simply wilderness out there, no matter how far most of them went.

Though on the last exploration survey by the rats, they had been instinctually drawn to a mysterious smell. Moving through the wilderness, they had stumbled on something rather important: an outpost of humans. It seemed newly formed as the only structures were some tents staked into the ground. Of course, they did find what that mysterious smell was: some dried meat jerky covered in spice. They managed to snag a few pieces before being chased away by a large human woman with a broom. Thankfully, they managed to adeptly dodge the broom--but they knew if that broom had hit them, they would have not been able to return home.

Muste's testing of the polymorphic amulet was. It seemed beyond his knowledge, at least for now. He couldn't figure out a reason on how or why it worked. The most he could gather about it--and some cursory studying of the other magical objects they pulled--was that "they simply did" as if the rules of the world had a bespoke section carved out specifically so that these items can function.

[hr][table][row][cell][img]https://i.imgur.com/F9XXcuu.png[/img]
[color=2E2C2C]_____________________________________[/color][/cell][cell][color=2E2C2C].
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[/color][color=EEBD65]Please do not feed your coworkers things that rats have gotten into. It's an OSHA violation.[/color][/cell][/row][/table]