For all the teams except a couple idiots, the first night passes peacefully. Those idiots, on the other hand decided they didn’t need to stick close to their camp or the whole team decided to start exploring right away. What they found was that while there weren’t monsters nearby, that didn’t an there was danger.
So died to simple things. For instance, going into a military base with little thought? Well, the security system isn’t going to turn down the free kills. And of course, those in areas that looked more run down need to be careful when exploring the buildings. Sotis the floor will just decide it can’t support you and give out.
Not that all the idiots who decided to explore in the dark ended up dying. However, the attrition rate for the first day was going to be hard to beat without monsters assisting. Though speaking of monsters, it is on the next day that they make their presence known.
Jim is actually the first to spot them, though that is mostly because his team was placed in one of the more dangerous areas if you don’t count being placed near a military base. His team had finished breakfast and as a group were checking in all four directions, when he noticed movent down one of the massive tunnels.
Not believing that the group would be placed that near another group, in one smooth motion he grabbed an arrow, knocked it, drew the string back, and released. The only mark against the shot was in his hurry, the string got a good thwack across his arm guard. Still, the arrow flies mostly true, if with a good bit of wobble and strikes the monster Jim had barely been able to see.
This didn’t kill it, but saved them having to go that far into the darkness to find out what it was. After all, having been struck, the monster and his five friends decided now was a good ti to charge the group. As they burst out into the better lit section of the tunnel, it is revealed that the monsters seem to be a strange mix of centipede and ape.
Head of an ape, except the mouth is turned ninety degrees and the teeth all seem to able to shift around on their own. Their backs, though it is hard for the other’s to tell at first, are covered in sothing like an exoskeleton. Though likely most freaky was the limbs.
There were the four main limbs you’d expect, but then a bunch of smaller limbs in between. Each set is a little bit smaller the closer they get to the middle of the monster’s body. It’s like soone saw one of those scifi movies where a bug people have so vestigial limbs under their arms and went wild with the idea.
Also, they most certainly weren’t vestigial. While the main limbs did most of the work, except for the innermost limbs, all of them were helping them charge towards the group. Suffice it to say, they were a wee bit nightmare-ish. Jim didn’t let this bother him as he successively sunk five more arrows into them before they reached the group.
And from there, the fight was honestly anticlimactic. Not only did Jim’s party have four more people than usual, but whatever these monsters were, they clearly didn’t match up to even the tenth floor monsters in their own dungeon. Sure, they weren’t weak monsters by any ans, but being outnumbered and weaker than every mber of Jim’s team? Well, that’s just a foregone conclusion.
More important was what they dropped, or specifically, the fact that they did drop loot like a normal dungeon monster. Which, after a quick sanity check, proved to be masterwork. Sure, they weren’t dropping magic powered motors or anything, but one of the monsters did end up dropping a section of that Mana cable. Suffice it to say, Kelly was quite happy.
Though not all groups had such an easy ti with the monsters. Over with the second team, they almost lost two people to their first encounter. That was mostly because the monsters managed to ambush them.
However, even that was a pretty good outco. Many teams lost soone in the first encounter despite the first monster group every team encountered were about the sa level of strength and similar in numbers. It’s just that most teams weren’t quite up for a handful of floor ten equivalent monsters.
In fact, the only other team that had no trouble with their first monster fight, was the monster team. Though counting them is kind of cheating. After all, the kobolds had been advanced to the max level for Doyle’s 16th floor. That ant the kobolds literally doubled the monsters’ levels.
Of course, this first fight was just setting the bar. While there wouldn’t be any weaker monsters, there were definitely stronger ones and they had all the goodies. But not the knowledge.
Over the next couple days, the teams spread out and explored, running into monsters and collecting loot. It was just that all the loot was simple parts. So while they would get a piece of Mana cable, it would never be attached to anything. To actually find gadgets and knowledge, they had to explore the buildings. More annoying, stuff wasn’t left in its proper place. For instance, books could be found all over the place, but when the third team found what seed to be a library, it didn’t have more of them in it than any other building.
It was clear that to find out what happened, they would need to truly explore this place and not get lucky. Though for the teams that did try to look, the first hints of what happened weren’t hard to find. While the system and dungeon had done what they could to remove any references to who and what the original species that lived here were, they quickly found so very censored versions of their history.
In particular, there wasn’t even a hint of what had been happening even ten years before the coming of magic. It was pretty darn odd to everyone who actually bothered to read the books. Because they were books written by whoever had once lived, well not here, but in the original place that here represented. Though conveniently translated. Anyway, attempting to read so of the books was futility itself because the system hadn’t changed what was within. Rather, anyti sothing that wasn’t ant to be known ca up, the words simply hadn’t been printed. So books had more white space than text.
Though in the end, it isn’t the pre-system history that most teams care about. Sure, there were a few action archeologists that were disappointed, but what mattered was why such a species fell. After all, they had literally gotten to the point where not only did they manage to cover their planet in a city, but handle all the problems that co from such a thing. Stuff like keeping the air breathable, having enough food, and making sure the world doesn’t overheat. Yet they fell.
More to the point, they fell despite the fact that it seems they hadn’t lost their technological base. Because if the books were anything to go by, they had made it at least fifty years past magic’s arrival. And it wasn’t like they went the way of the idiots who had originally controlled Bennett town. They didn’t reject the system or magic.
In fact, they embraced magic. It provided so many interesting things. Just the spell “eternal light” had revolutionized certain sectors. Of course, when just cast as a spell and not enchanted on sothing the light isn’t actually eternal. However, they knew that, with the actual ti they last being in the decades or centuries, depending on the casters power and skill level. Still, that was more than long enough and instead of replacing the eternal light, you could just refresh the spell. While durations wouldn’t stack, taking a spell with only a year left and overwriting it to last a couple decades is just fine.
And of course when the second team found a wand of eternal light, they were overjoyed. That is, after they figured out what it was and how to use it. Well, they found the manual for it. Seems it acted like how most wands in the roleplaying gas they rembered worked. Just a simple length of wood with ten charges of eternal light and then the wand falls apart into dust once those charges are gone.
Though also going by that manual, this wasn’t actually a true wand and couldn’t act as a caster implent. The main difference being that the wand was simply made with specially treated magic wood and didn’t need to be of masterwork quality. A wonderful example of magitech that skews towards the magic side of things. Of course, what it gains in cost savings and the ability to produce in larger quantities, it loses in utility. As not being an actual implent ans it can’t improve the accuracy or potency of any spell cast through it.
Which, to be fair, isn’t all that important for eternal light. The wand was purely a thod for janitors to put up or refresh any lights and had a set duration of fifty years. No reason to make it more accurate when refreshing a spell instead of straight casting it. A simple refresh skips targeting completely and it isn’t like the pre-existing eternal light spell is going to resist the refresh.
Of course, the most important bit of information the team picked up was a warning at the back of the manual. It was a simple enough ssage. “WARNING: Attempting to learn the spell from this wand will use charges and has a chance to destroy the wand no matter how many charges are left.” This certainly motivated them to try and find more of the wand so they could attempt exactly that. Oh, and as a side benefit, the manual also included a thod to detect how many charges a wand has, even if it didn’t have a way to detect what spell the charges were.
In fact, the only reason they were sure that it was a wand of eternal light is because it was a magitech wand. While a true wand could be made of anything, magitech wands need to be made of specific materials to store the spells. And honestly, it seed that information gathering spells were going to be the main gain from the trip.
Because while the other team didn’t find a way to detect what kind of spell a wand might have, Jim’s team managed to dig up a manual for how to gather basic information on the spell in a magitech wand. It wasn’t quite an omnipotent analysis spell as is familiar from gas and stories. Rather, it was a very personal spell. When a person first starts out casting it, the spell can only identify the basics of what a magitech wand contains. Simple stuff like the intent of the spell.
However, as magitech wands require very specific materials to work, once a person identifies one with the spell, the specific make-up of that magitech wand is saved. This knowledge sadly can’t be transferred because it cos from a person’s soul interacting with the wand and is thus unique to the individual. On the upside, even if you don’t figure out what the wand does, future uses of the will always be able to identify that specific type of wand.
Downside of that, even if a magitech wand has the exact sa spell in it, if the materials used are too different, the spell will note them as being different wands. Though that mostly cos up once soone starts dealing with people beyond their world. What is available will vary from world to world, after all. Can’t exactly use dust from the wings of a luminous moth if they aren’t present in your world and it isn’t like there is only one correct way to make a magitech wand.
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