"Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work." ~ Peter Drucker

  I had, in all seriousness, been mostly reacting to things as they cropped up, and I knew that wasn’t going to really end, just because I continued to run across the unexpected. I had no idea what a normal progression looked like for most dungeons, after all, but the various inspectors continued to tell me I was an outlier in a variety of ways.

  Some of those ways were simply due to my unique nature. I was a sapient dungeon; I was a divinely placed dungeon; and I was a reincarnator. None of those things were wholly unprecedented, just rare – taken together, I was apparently unique.

  Other aspects of my outlier categorization were the result of my patron deity and my location on the sky island – both of which were distinctly abnormal from my limited research. The effects of being on the sky island were easier to categorize. Being more mobile meant I was harder to access, though on a longer time scale accessible to a broader array of higher leveled adventurers. Not knowing who my deity was or what she wanted from me was more challenging. I was starting to get a sense, I thought, of what she expected me to do, but not how or why, really. Nor was it clear why she hadn’t just told me what to do in the first place. I shut down that line of thought, though, as it wasn’t particularly productive and usually just made me feel frustrated.

  The sky island itself was a major factor having been sequentially occupied for many millennia, and with my divine quests requiring me to seek out those occupations, my growth pattern must seem strange – even if most of my visitors have little conception of the things I haven’t shown them.

  All in all, I was finding myself pulled between a variety of drives, some more critical than others. I decided to list out my priorities as the first stage of planning.

  A couple of them were downright fundamental to my continued existence and needed to be placed first. Those included fulfilling the divine quests assigned by my deity – whoever she was – and satisfying the basic dungeon drives that would prevent me from descending into apparently instinctual bloodlust. Even now, the temptation to just kill everyone who came in remained, if pushed to a back burner and deliberately ignored. Doing so would be simply foolish in the short term and likely catastrophic in the long term.

  The next tier down included tasks that would be useful in the long term but weren’t immediately pressing. That included further exploration of the sky island in general, making improvements in my second floor, expanding my knowledge of some of my newer skills, helping Hakdrilda with her research, and subduing some nominal threats in the regions adjoining my domain.

  The lowest tier were just things I wanted to do and that served very little constructive purpose. I deeply enjoyed observing the local birdlife, but I simply didn’t have time for it. Checking out the literature of my new world mostly fell in this category as well. I’d enjoy it, I’d learn some things, and it might give me some useful pointers – but it was unlikely to be a major help anytime soon.

  I heaved a mental sigh as I tried to turn that set of musings into some sort of actionable schedule. I supposed I should spend some time consolidating my gains to date; the divine quest takes priority, but it’s apparently not terribly pressing. More to the point, the awkward expansion is setting off my dungeon instincts and limiting my mana flows. That suggests I need to continue expanding in ways that fill in some of those areas I skipped over. And if I do it right, it might help me explore further and fill in some blank spots on the mental map. I’d always enjoyed clearing the fog of unexplored areas in the sandbox rpgs I’d favored, and this felt a lot like that. I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t find anything of particular significance, just so that I wouldn’t keep adding to my list of things to do, but it seemed likely I’d find something, given the unexplored hallways and secret doors I’d already ignored.

  At the same time, I did have obligations to Hakdrilda and the Redcrests and the Central Archive – each of which I needed to allot some time for. The Redcrests didn’t seem to need much, and many of them were uncomfortable with my attention – not Orentha or Glynesha, but many of the more nervous types. I should likely schedule times with Hakdrilda and set aside a specific transcription block for the archives. It would be nice if my distributed consciousness would let me do both at once, but for the time being, at least, I couldn’t do more than passive monitoring without focusing my attention on any specific thing.

  That left me with a good chunk of time to accomplish more immediate dungeon building tasks. I figured that I could bang out some revisions to my second-floor traps in fairly short order, then go back to working on the third floor. If I combined that with filling in some awkward spaces and following up some loose threads, that should keep my dungeon instincts under control. It might or might not progress my divine quests, but I wanted to be in better shape before I tried confronting even the void creatures in the creepy dwarven site or whatever had pelted my wizard’s cat with psychotropic mushrooms, much less whatever powerful entity was currently in control of the central core area.

  The thought of quest progress had me go back over my extant quests, looking for ones that would be relatively simple to complete and ones that I had simply neglected to consider for a while. Tracking down other mana arrays was going to need to wait, possibly for a good while. Expanding on the surface was easy enough; I wasn’t actually sure why it hadn’t triggered already until I reviewed the exact wording. Turns out that I had failed to extend my surface domain the required 8 meters above the surface – I'd been settling for about five or six meters (just enough to contain my orchard trees). A couple of hours of claiming air should trigger that one if I read it right. I wasn’t feeling the need to increase the traps on my core, and it was too early to drop it a level.

  If I reach out through the archives, then connecting with at least three new scholars should be easy enough, though it might depend on what the system considered “establish communication” or “scholar”. I was assuming it at least required an exchange of information going both ways and probably people with the title of “scholar”. I’d need to answer the equivalent of some emails for that one, but it should be a matter of minutes when I next worked with the reader.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Similarly, I must be close on the next steps of the transcription quest and the expansion of my collection. Another session or two in the core library should bang those out.

  If I could take out the void creatures in some fashion, then absorbing one of those structures should also finish a quest for me. Actually, probably two since that would presumably identify a new occupation for me. That bumped them up on my hit list a ways, though I still wanted to consolidate first.

  The various naturalist quests were mostly hard to do below ground, though if I were attentive, I might manage a couple of them when claiming air above ground or if I went back to the room where my cat had had such a rough time. I could force him back, but I didn’t really want to torment him, even if he was just a created thing.

  Last on my list was Aven’s last quest. Given how far I had to go on the third floor, starting the fourth floor was still basically a pipedream. I wasn’t feeling any immediate need to consult with the fairy at this point anyways, but I did enjoy its company. Perhaps it’d come back to visit of its own volition...

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  Pondering what to do next was all well and good, but it was time to put some of those plans into action. As long as she was still free (not that I couldn’t reach her generally), I reached out to Orentha to see if she wanted to schedule a regular check-in meeting.

  The Redcrest shaman hadn’t been back in her own space very long, but she didn’t seem particularly irritated to have me reach out. She shrugged at my suggestion of a regular meeting. I got the sense that she didn’t see the need but was too polite to say so.

  **Well, I’ll check with Glynesha and Kragosh, but I don’t think we need to do anything quite so formal. Talons crossed for luck, but so far, things have been progressing fairly smoothly and we’re in good shape for the winter. And the winter is traditionally a slow time for us, anyways. Mostly we hole up in our homes and craft in preparation for the spring and summer. Kragosh will have people training regularly as well. No offense, but unless you need something from us (which we’ll happily do what we can for you), most of the tribe will be happier if you keep your distance a bit – at least until the first couple of Kragosh’s trainees want to try their hand at an actual delve. I’d expect at least a couple of weeks though before they get permission for that.**

  I tried to convey a welcoming warmth, though emoting anything but bloodlust seemed a bit tricky as a dungeon. **Well, no worries. Just give me a heads up to expect the visit, and I’ll try to do my best to have appropriate rewards ready for them. In fact, if you have a sense of what kind of loot they’d be likely to favor, I’ll see what I can do to provide it – within limits and in proportion to the challenge, of course.**

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  Hakdrilda was next up on the docket, and she was rather more pleased sounding at the possibility of regular working hours.

  “I’ll take whatever time I can get with you, frankly. That said, honestly, we’ve managed to get through most of what I’d initially planned on, and given that it’s been a month already, my pickup should be turning up any day now. I’m tempted to stick around for more research time, but I have enough to work with and I don’t really want to negotiate for more time with Mayphesselth – surprisingly reasonable as she may have been.”

  The time had been slipping away from me and while I’d known she had been wrapping up her current experiments for the last day or two, I hadn’t quite realized she’d be departing so soon.

  Logbook: Understood. How about I give you as much time as we can manage for the next two days?

  She grinned up at the mana lights. “Oh, I’m going to regret this I know, but I’ll take you up on that. If I can focus properly, I can probably stay up for most of that. It certainly won’t take me long to pack, so whenever my ride turns up, I should be able to close up shop here in an hour or so. I’ll probably try to come back next time the sky island comes around for some follow up, if that’s okay with you? Might even have some company if my research gets the response I’m expecting...”

  **GREEN**

  “Alright then.” She dusted her hands against her sturdy trousers, then ran her thick fingers across her practical braid. “I suppose we should get to it.”

  She marched into the lab space I’d set up for her those weeks ago and began pulling instruments back out from the mostly packed bags resting on the lab bench.

  That began an hours long session of work, interrupted only by the hasty construction of a sandwich around dinner time, consumed over her notes while planning the next stage of a multipart round of tests involving the motion of air at various levels of pressure and with distinct compositional patterns when subjected to explosions in a contained space. I’d made the mistake of mentioning the quartz crystal of minor explosion and that had led to this particular experiment. I could certainly see the functionality, as I’d assume mining with explosives was something the dwarves had presumably been doing for years.

  Hakdrilda had given me the sense that it was too costly for regular usage and was typically used only in limited contexts where it was the only practical choice. We spent some fun hours tracing shock waves and compression fronts with colored gas and toying with ways to direct and mitigate the more hazardous effects. That included the blast noise, though with the minor explosion crystals available the sound was pretty manageable. She also had me vary the stone being blasted, as well as the shape and placement of the crystals. As it turned out, I couldn’t really change the shape of individual enchanted crystals, but I could vary their scale a bit (maybe 10%) and how multiple crystals could be connected. In fact, it gave me a few interesting ideas for ways to incorporate those effects into some less destructive traps. I could see the blast noise being effective against races with sensitive hearing, and the compression waves, if strong enough, having some useful effects – particularly if I could tune them to be silent in the audible range of most sapient beings.

  That wasn’t really what Hakdrilda was shooting for, of course. Her focus was mostly on limiting various hazards to miners when they were blasting. Currently, they adopted a somewhat brute force approach of protective headgear and a wide evacuation range, but less disruptive techniques might be possible with a better understanding of how it all worked.

  The restrained thumps from our contained explosions and Hakdrilda’s pleased cackling continued well into the night, coming to a close in the wee hours of the morning when I’d had to stop Hakdrilda from prematurely detonating a crystal twice in a row. She’d nodded acceptance that continuing in her unfocused state was a bad idea when working with explosives and went off to bed. But only after making me promise to return in five hours to continue our work.

  That gave me some time to return my focus to my core room and see if I couldn’t wrap up a couple of quests while working with my new reader. I had some books to order, some to transcribe and upload, and some emails to send off – as well as a parting gift or two to produce for the departing airmage. Now, I just had to figure out what those should be...