"The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office." ~ Robert Frost

  I did, of course, have a huge backlog of books to read – all of which were relevant, as far as I was concerned, towards the progress of my divine mission and, really, just understanding the situation I was currently muddling my way through. At the same time, I needed to transcribe books for my new scholar contacts and try to reach out to expand my network of correspondents.

  I was also excited by the idea of using my new avian blueprint to provide a means of direct speech with my non-telepathic visitors. I suspected that it was going to be an odd affectation, or at least feel like one, for a good while, but I was much more comfortable with the notion of a talking bird than I was of trying to puppet one of my more humanoid creations. Speaking through a cave goblin or a kobold didn’t seem like it would go well, even if their vocal cords were potentially capable of speech.

  I decided to start with getting my more scholarly obligations out of the way, and I spent most of the evening transcribing and uploading two new works and notifying the two professors that I had done so. The math professor was somewhat easier to work with, though I did have to spend a bit of time pondering where exactly to start her from. She was obviously beyond standard arithmetic, and it seemed like she had a good grasp on standard Euclidean geometry – though the name was different and the theorems weren’t quite identical (and I had to bless my newly eidetic memory for being able to determine that). I wasn’t sure but thought she probably had trigonometry down as well. At the same time, I wasn’t quite sure she was ready to jump straight to calculus or differential equations. As a result, I opted to give her a copy of my old algebra textbook, with apologies if I was going back too far.

  The Professor of Natural Philosophy was a bit trickier, mostly because that discipline seemed broader and less well defined. He’d seemed interested in the plate tectonics part of the Earth Science textbook, but I got the sense his interests weren’t primarily geological, but part of a broader interest in the workings of the natural world. Since he’d gotten the earth sciences text already, I thought perhaps I would offer him an Ecology textbook – with the caveat that with the active intervention of deities, he might be looking at very different processes at work. I suspected that most deities weren’t going to be intervening in the more basic systems governing planetary formation, but tweaks at the level of individual species were much more likely. I could see evolution being used as a means of working on environmental systems generally, but I could also see individual deities intervening in that broader pattern to direct things or protect specific creatures – and magic threw a lot of potential confusion into those processes even without direct intervention. If nothing else, I’d guess he’d be interested in the discussions of how the interrelationships between plants, animals, fungi, and the natural environment explained some of the distribution, abundance and behaviors of those communities. I’d guess that the prevalence of specific mana types would tend to exacerbate those patterns, rather than supersede them entirely.

  I hadn’t taken a formal ecology class at any point, but I’d been interested enough to pick up a used copy of a textbook at one of the used book sales characteristic of university towns. I hadn’t actually read through it that closely, but with my eidetic memory just having flipped through it in its entirety had been enough.

  By the time I’d uploaded those and sent a brief communique to the Professors Keradji, wherein I’d also requested they connect me with other researchers (who weren’t their direct competitors, and ideally ones interested in either the sky islands or obscure branches of magical research like fungalmancy or crystallographic magic) I was into the wee hours of the morning, and for once had no particular commitments to meet in the morning. I gave myself a few hours of leisure reading time. A significant bonus of the loss of any need to sleep meant that I didn’t feel bad about staying up through the night to read for my own entertainment.

  That said, I hadn’t actually downloaded any works that were intended purely as entertainment. Still, reading some basic works on dragons while keeping an eye out for Mayphesselth’s name and exploring the options available in terms of avian monsters and documented dungeon traps felt like leisure reading, in that it often involved entertaining anecdotes and nothing directly critical to my main quests.

  When dawn rolled around, I decided that I should probably come back out of my core room and get back to the actual, physical work of progressing in some fashion. I was feeling exploration more than construction today, and I thought I could probably work on consolidating my domain a bit by expanding in ways that filled in some of the gaps I’d developed and potentially answered some of my lingering questions about what else was in my immediate vicinity.

  I thought I’d begin with something unlikely to upset the dracolisk – though I had several enigmas out that way that needed to be addressed. Instead, I returned my focus back to where my initial exploratory tunnel had intersected the one leading to the gnomish city. I’d followed the tunnel uphill, but hadn’t gotten around to seeing where the downhill section led. I assumed it would likely end in some further gnomish “ruins”, but whether that would be an outlying settlement, some sort of production area, or simply an outlet to the outer world, I hesitated to guess.

  It continued straight at the same relatively gentle downhill grade for a hundred meters or so, before curving gently back towards the cliff edge, passing below my third floor, or at least my intended third floor. I’d have to keep it in mind if and when I got around to starting a fourth floor. It was deeper than the mana array and the curve was a fairly subtle, gradual thing. Otherwise, I wasn’t finding much in the tunnel itself, aside from a stray lost coin and dropped nails wedged into crevices along the way. I was beginning to think that it would simply dead end near the cliff face; it was close enough to my dungeon that I would have expected to notice any actual opening – or at least, the Redcrests would have found it and mentioned it to me by now. They’d made reference to at least a couple of other openings into the sky island below the surface level, but significantly farther to the north and south and mostly down a ways below even this tunnel.

  I supposed that the entire island was likely riddled with tunnels and caverns, though presumably not to an extent that would make the whole thing unstable. There were quite a few passages and open spaces, but if my experience was representative those spaces were vastly outnumbered by the regions of solid rock. I was, of course, opening up new spaces myself, but the magical reinforcement that was part of my hardened dungeon stone left me confident that I wasn’t about to cause any major collapses.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  I continued to advance along the tunnel, claiming and reinforcing the walls as I went, all while pondering the spatial layout of this section of the island. It was nearing mid-day by the time I followed this end of the tunnel to its final terminus. It rather suddenly opened up into a squared off room with finely polished walls, dominated by a massive set of arched steel doors on the far side that had clearly slid open along wheeled tracks at one point.

  They were clearly non-functional at this point, but I had no need to actually open the doors, as I could simply absorb them and push through. Still, they gave me a blueprint for the doors, and the name was pretty indicative of what I was going to find on the far side.

  Blueprint received: Gnomish Hangar Doors (Steel)

  ***************************************************************

  Professor Ahmed Keradji was preparing two mugs of kaffe as part of his standard morning routine when the archival reader in the office he shared with his wife chimed gently. He sighed to himself and glanced through the door at their workspace, which was a strong indicator of the natures of his wife and himself.

  On the one side, his desk was nearly buried under haphazard piles of books and scrolls, with the early morning sun shining through their shared window and illuminating his comfortable yet rather ragged chair. The shelves and other spare surfaces of his side of the room were cluttered with additional scholarly works, as well as the souvenirs and samples he’d brought back from decades of fieldwork. Each held a story, and periodically he’d take one down and reminisce, not so much seeing the item itself, but bringing to mind the people and places where he’d spent his days – students and colleagues, jungles and deserts, living creatures and fossilized remnants of prior eras.

  His wife’s space was a direct contrast to his own – spartan and orderly, artfully decorated with paintings and textiles dominated by rigidly geometric patterns. There was a large slate dominating most of the wall, currently tidily covered in the precise, tiny, chalked handwriting of his wife. He could make little sense of the formulas thus presented, but he could see that she’d been grappling with the notation provided by the arcane texts the dungeon had provided. She’d tried to explain it to him, but he hadn’t paid quite as much attention as he probably should have, being caught up in his own assessment of his own set of borrowed works. Her chair was a rather sturdy, if unwelcoming piece of solid woodwork – one that she claimed helped keep her awake and focused through its sheer discomfort. As she’d aged, she’d added a pillow as the only nod to the aches that had come with experience.

  He took all that in at a glance, but his real focus was on the slowly blinking light atop their shared institutional reader, taking pride of place on a low table between their desks before the window currently showing the sun rising over the city of Talendra.

  His fingers twitched with the need to see who had contacted them. Between the two of them, they had a substantial network of colleagues who might be reaching out, but he was anxious to see if this could be news from the dungeon. They’d been excited to receive a response from the dungeon just the other day. It had been rather noncommittal, but the response meant that it HAD received the upgraded reader and received their requests. And frankly, the promised timeline of works for each of them within a week was much shorter than they’d been bracing for. Of course, that meant that every time the reader chimed, one or the other of them was dashing over to check. It was, frankly, both a bit undignified and a little embarrassing, but since they shared their anxious eagerness, neither particularly cared.

  Still, Ahmed forced himself to look away, unwilling to break routine to the point of failing to produce the kaffe that powered their scholarly efforts. He filled the mugs with the steaming liquid and doctored them to the specific tastes of he and his wife – three heaping spoons of sugar and a dollop of cream for himself, and a simple pinch of salt for his rather stoic wife. He placed them on a small tray, along with a small selection of cut fruit and pastries, and carried it silently into their darkened bedroom.

  His wife still awoke, as she always did, propping herself up on her pillows with the small smile he always looked for. “I say it every day, Ahmed, but much as I love it and you, you don’t have to bring me breakfast in bed.”

  He quirked his own grin at her, admiring her silvering tousled hair. “I do, though? I wouldn’t know what else to do with my mornings, and there’s no place I’d rather be.”

  She tilted her face for a gentle kiss, which was happily provided as her husband crawled in with her. She looked him over, noting the twitch of his eyes in the direction of their office. “Did I hear the reader chime?”

  He smiled ruefully. “You caught me, Raina. It did, indeed, chime just as I was finishing up our tray. I wanted to run off and check, but my priorities aren’t QUITE that skewed. It can wait until after I have breakfast with my lovely wife. Even if it might be the dungeon with the works we requested, it can wait for half an hour.”

  She smiled back at him, with a twinkle in her clear, gray eyes, surveying her twitchy, slightly pot-bellied husband of many years. “I’m glad to see such patience in you.”

  He cocked his head quizzically as she continued. “You won’t mind when I claim the reader first, after all!” she teased.

  He sputtered in mock outrage. “What?! You know how this works! Mornings are mine; Nights are yours. And we fight over the afternoons!”

  She snorted. “Sounds about right. Well, let’s eat our breakfast, and I’ll at least join you in the office to see what message we’ve received. It’s probably not the dungeon anyways. It said a week and it’s only been what, a day and a half?”

  He kissed her again. “Deal, wife! We’ll finish up breakfast, then feed our minds!”

  She laughed. “You silly man. What would your students say, seeing you acting like such a playful child?”

  He sneered pretentiously. “Not a thing, if they know what’s good for them! Anyways, it’s nothing they haven’t seen before.”

  She chuckled at his antics before returning her focus to her kaffe and her pastry. Joking aside, the two academics finished their morning meal rather more quickly than usual, and through silent consent dropped their dishes hastily in the kitchen on the way to their office, still in their nightclothes, slippers shuffling audibly against the bare flagstones of the kitchen.

  Raina slipped into the seat before the reader, taking advantage of her husband’s long-ingrained chivalry. She moved briskly through the menus, reaching the correspondence page in a matter of moments. “Ah! It IS from the dungeon. It’s so glorious having a correspondent that doesn’t need to sleep at all!”

  Her husband shook his head, slowly. “And what does he have to say, my nocturnal wife?”

  She turned her face to grin up at him. “He’s uploaded a book for each of us. Neither title seems to translate well, which is probably a hopeful sign that we will be getting some new insights – if we can make sense of them!”

  He cocked his head. “Algebra and Ecology? Those don’t even sound like the same language.”