Dungeon Life-Chapter Four-Hundred Forty-Two

Thankfully, Queen didn’t immediately invent a moab, so things are already going better than I feared. In fact, she’s focused on mass-producing healing and buffing potions as her effort to prepare for the Betrayer. She’s not ignoring it, of course not, but her experiments to figure out the actual chemistry are very much small in scale, and she’s getting a lot of help from Honey for it, too.

Poppy is also interested, though I think (and hope) her interest is more for the nitrogen involved. Plants crave nitrogen even more than electrolytes, at least certain plants. I think peanuts put nitrogen back, where most plants suck it up. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Poppy starts making magical mutant peanuts. She might even try to cross-pollinate them with the fool’s coal and just grow grenades. At least, if I remember how peanuts and nitrogen both work correctly.

I’m almost disappointed they’re not blowing things up, but that’s because I’m trying not to think about pink elephants, I mean the impending attack. Explosions would definitely keep me from worrying about the thing I’m supposed to not worry about, by giving me something I probably should worry about.

So instead of actually doing nothing, I’m going to do some subtle things that hopefully won’t go throwing everything out of whack. Upgrading my spawners was my first instinct when Tiny told me to not worry, but I think getting new denizens would definitely alter things. So instead, I’ll just… browse the upgrades, see if anything catches my eyes.

If that gives me a good set of things to choose from in an emergency, that shouldn’t tip our hand, right?

Definitely.

Right now, my bees, snakes, and plants are all ready for their capstone spawn, but I don’t think they’ll be too useful if things suddenly go south. Getting them now would let them plan and prepare, but that’d go against what I’m trying to do, so they’re out of the running for upgrades, at least for now.

Luckily, I have quite a few spawners that are at tier three, and are waiting for their tier four. Bats, slimes, and my magma dragons are easy to eliminate as emergency upgrades, too. Dragons are just too expensive, and I only got drakes recently. Bats and slimes are out because they’re not really designated for fighting. My bats mostly work on enhancing my herbalism nodes, while the slimes mostly do the same for the mining ones.

But the others have some real promise. All three undead spawners still have their fourth type to unlock, and I think all three of them could be great in an emergency. My current fungal zombies are basically walking goey explosions of status effects, but looking through the options, I’m very much liking the look of the rotpatch zombie for the tier four. They are perhaps the quintessential annoying undead in a game: the one that raises the ones that you defeat. It’s basically a mycelial lich, able to knit back together the defeated zombies and send them on their way. Seems like a great one to have in an emergency.

Skeletons have some fun options, like the skeletal adventurer trap, but I don’t want to be taking big bites out of my delvers. Besides, with me focusing on status effects with my undead, I really like the look of the sundew skeleton. They get a bonus for other insects, which will go great with some armory bees, and they have sundew tentacles to ensnare and glue foes. Should be great training for the delvers, and also a good option for dealing with any least and their ilk that may show up.

And to finish the set, my crawling hands have lich hands. They’re basically the magus hands on steroids. Interestingly, while the magus hands have basically random affinities, the lich hands will have fate and gravity, unless I spend for something else. I think they’re going to be terrifying enough with just those two, though I expect they’ll focus mainly on gravity. It looks like they’ll spawn pretty slowly, especially when compared to my other hands, but if I need to, I can spend some mana to force some spawns.

I also have my bears, wolves, and earth elementals at tier three, and they all have a lot of options for their next spawn. Take the wolves, for example. They’re already specialized for ice magic, but there’s a lot of wiggle room there. There’s blizzard wargs that are basically walking AoE spells, borealis wolves that step a bit on the toes of my illusion foxes, and alphas that are focused on providing massive buffs to other wolves of all types. I like them all, really, but I’ll have to settle on one. Settling can come later, though. I think they’re a good set to keep in mind.

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Bears also have a lot of options, like the dire grizzly. They’re actually a little smaller than the normal dire bear, but the dire bear looks like a teddy bear compared to the dire grizzly. It has the kind of dangerous look that would make wolverines think twice, and are very much not a slow and lumbering thing to harry and bait to defeat. I could also get black bear swarms, which is hilarious in concept to me. Something the size of a black bear should not come in swarms, but the option is right there.

And then I can build-a-bear my own gravity variant. That option has me more tempted to upgrade right now than anything has in a long time. I start to look through the options before stopping myself. I definitely wouldn’t have a gravity bear ready on my own without thinking about Tiny’s warning. Designing and having one ready to go would probably be a bit too obvious to hide. Reluctantly, I step back from the bears and take a closer look at the earth elementals instead. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

I also have the option to create a gravity variant, but that one's easier to ignore, since I like my earth elementals a bit more resourceful, even though I specialized them for melee. The most obvious upgrade is the landslide elemental. It looks a lot like the soil elementals, but with more rocks in them. They can shift the rocks around to deflect attacks, or absorb blows like the soil ones, and they have some general earth shaping abilities. I like the utility of them, too. I bet they’ll make the floating islands a lot easier to build.

There’s the cliff-face golem, which isn’t a golem, but it looks a lot like one. It’s surface looks like barren cliffs and it has incredible durability. Not to mention they’re big. Like big enough to look Sue in the eyes. Fighting them will probably involve as much climbing as fighting, I’d wager.

And lastly for the elementals, is the gorgefist slammer. They’re not especially tough, but they pack a *wallop*, hard enough to create fissures in the ground for foes to fall into. And with a bit of earth affinity, they can seal them back up, leaving whatever’s inside at the full mercy of the elemental. They could be fun, but so could the others. Really depends on if I want offense, defense, or utility. I’m tempted to actually get the landslide right now, since they would fit so well for the floating spheres, but I don’t want to take the chance, especially since I can probably make something even better if I want to focus on the islands for them.

As for spawners still at tier two, I have my fey and foxes. I’ve already specialized my foxes into magic for illusions, but I haven’t decided what to focus my fey on. The bark pixies and sprigs are great for general invader control, but I honestly don’t know what direction to take them in, and there are a lot of fey to choose from. Magic will tend toward the smaller varieties like fairies, where melee will center around the creepier things like wyrds and ents. Resources look like brownies and the like, helpful little fey. I kinda like the uncanny look of the melee variants, but the magic ones pack a lot of power into a small form. I probably won’t go for the resource specialization, just because my bats are already helping along the herbalism nodes.

The foxes have boreal and mirage variants, which mix illusions with a bit of ice or fire, respectively. There’s a ton of tier 3 foxes with elements that I can take without having to give the entire spawner the element, which is cool. I could even make a gravity-flavored one, which is tempting. An event horizon fox sounds really cool, but I don’t know if I want to toss that concept around, at least not for a tier 3 denizen. Maybe call it a distortion fox, instead? There’s umbral foxes, glare foxes, fog foxes, echo foxes… I could spend all day just going through the fox variants.

And then there’s my newest spawners: constructs and dinosaurs. They’re both only at tier one, and I’ll probably not upgrade the constructs in a panic anyway. I still need to design the next tier. I know I want to give them a similar ability as Doppler has to integrate with the poppers, but I haven’t taken the time to really sit down and think about what I want from them.

Dinosaurs, however, are easier, since I set out a whole bunch of them right at the start, and I think I want to go with dilophosaurus for my next spawn. Specifically dilos, the small ones with colorful frills, poisonous spit, and a penchant for ambushing saboteurs in their own jeep. Real ones were way bigger, had no frills, and probably didn’t spit at things, but what’s the fun in that?

They’re not swarm spawns, but they should spawn pretty quickly, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get a bunch of them if I need them in a hurry. And maybe they’ll be just as good in real life as in the movie for stopping sneaky jerks that need a good stopping.

I check how much it’d take me to upgrade against how much I have saved up, and the finances are looking pretty rosy, so that’s good. I should be able to take the dilos, or pretty much any two other spawners without even looking at the ally pool. Now I just need to find something else to occupy myself with so I don’t go crazy waiting for the shoe to drop.