Using The Strange Dungeon Stone – Chapter 166

The answer is simple enough. Just use the outer surface of the floor as the floor. On the sixth floor, that area had been set aside for the farms and was honestly way too much room. Though even if he had wanted to use it more actively, it wouldn’t have worked as well. After all, part of the way the floor was supposed to work is every tile looks almost the same. A curved floor would put lie to this and Doyle wasn’t sure he had enough control of the gravity to tweak things so a number of flat plates could be used.

But for the seventh floor? That isn’t a problem. In fact, it is a benefit. Because no matter which direction you go, it will always be uphill. Maybe not as strenuous as actually climbing as the gravity will be adjusting but that will probably cause its own set of problems. In other words, perfect for a floor meant to mess with the delvers. And back of the napkin math. Well, that took much too long.

Doyle felt lucky he even remembered how to do it. First was to get the diagonal distance of the 135 meter square. Simple enough, square root of two times 135 and it comes to about 190. That is the diameter of the sphere and after you raise it by the power of two, you can multiply it by pi for the surface area of the sphere. Or in other words, a bit more than 114000 square meters.

In other words, more than enough space to play with. The question is how to play with it. One way would be to just leave the center empty so you can see everything. Doyle crosses that one out right away, if only because anyone with flying magic or similar would trivialize it. So that left various methods of blocking.

And with that in mind, Doyle begins to fill in the floor with stone. There is, of course, a good bit more space he could technically use. After all, the 45 small rooms thing is a loose measure and the floor size has been growing and even just a meter more pumps up the size by a couple thousand. Doyle however leaves this extra space as a buffer between the void and dungeon proper.

Once things are filled in, Doyle has a giant stone ball inside a stone sphere with the distance between the two being about 12 meters, so just a bit under four stories. Or rather, if the sphere of stone was perfectly centered that would be the case. Instead, Doyle has that sphere wobbling around a little. At the lowest point, the sphere is still six meters away from the ground, but having the ceiling reduced by half should freak out a few people.

Mind you, the sphere isn’t moving fast. In fact, Doyle spent way too long dialing the speed in just right. But after consulting with Ally the effect it had was well worth the effort. It moved just slowly enough that if you knew it was obvious but otherwise, you would easily miss it. Ally was on the floor a good ten minutes trying to figure out what was going on before she realized and once she did, she couldn’t ignore it and described the experience as oppressive.

But that was just the ceiling. Doyle wanted to keep playing up the tone of the floor. If the sixth could be seen as exploring the meaninglessness of exploring a repeating infinite space, this one would be focused entirely on the feeling of oppression. The idea of something weighing down on you and grinding away. Some of it was already built into the fact that everything was uphill but Doyle felt he could do better.

The only question was when to stop and not how far he could go. It was only the seventh floor, after all. So the next thing Doyle adds to the floor is walls, tall enough to just barely not scrape against the sphere. And while he didn’t want a maze or labyrinth for the floor, he did want something special.

Up until now, even the more cave-like areas followed a grid pattern and being honest with himself, later floors would be following that pattern as well. Something in his head had just always liked fitting things onto a grid. Maybe the various city builders and colony games were to blame since they generally worked on square grids or some other strange thing. Whatever the case he was purposefully breaking that pattern for this floor. No sharp corners, no 90-degree angles, everything was non-euclidian in the traditional sense of the word.

A fancy enough word that had taken on a much warped meaning when all it means is curved space. Like if you drew a square on a balloon instead of a flat piece of paper. And what do you know, that is exactly like what he was doing right now. Everything taking on an organic curvature through excessive use of the golden mean. So outward from the entrance, the main wall spirals outward until it hits the halfway point.

From there Doyle spirals it back inward to reach the exit, turning the entire floor into a giant spiral. But just that isn’t oppressive. No, to fulfill his goal, Doyle needs to add even more curves. Especially in areas where it should exist. While he wasn’t going to use spatial warping to increase the distance between the entrance and exit, that doesn’t mean he can’t apply some interesting effects.

But before that, he builds a city. Or at least what if you squinted could be described as city-like. Stone buildings with one or two stories fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle begins to fill in the area. The only problem people will have is that once again, Doyle avoids straight lines as much as possible and completely removes the concept of a 90-degree angle from his building repertoire.

Walls randomly bow in or out, curve in strange manners, and walls can randomly end up as floors from a simple twist of architecture. The only thing that saddens Doyle about this display is he doesn’t quite have a fine enough gravitational control or else things would have gone full on M. C. Escher. But this is where his spatial warping comes into play.

The simplest example comes from a small rpg story he had heard. The party was examining the building and the game master slipped into the description of the build something about the fifth corner or some such. One of the players noticed it and took sanity damage because a square building can’t have a fifth corner. Doyle was going to do something similar.

By sliding in just a bit more space, a circular room could have more than 360 degrees. What was a wall that bulged outward changed to appear as if it was flat until you tried to run your hand along it and realized there was more space in that area than possible. Of course, Doyle wasn’t capable of going too far into the trope of things being bigger on the inside. Each floor is already that in a nutshell and if his spatial abilities had allowed more, the floor would just be bigger.

Though that did give him an idea for later. While he didn’t want to try it on this floor, if an entire floor represented the most he could expand space, then why not move it around? Doyle promises himself to try something with that on the next floor. For now, he stuck with the small effects. They would be more effective for what he wanted, anyway.

And so he continued shaping the floor into a nightmare for whoever had to explore it. Sure, they would be able to map out the entire floor, but Doyle was willing to bet that even with a paper map people would still get turned around. There just wasn’t any helping it when you just couldn’t properly draw the rooms on a flat piece of paper. He might not have warped every single room, but it was a close thing. Though the most fun came from figuring out how buildings would connect in a vertical fashion.

Sure, stairs work and even abandoning that for a ramp would be easy enough. Instead, he pulled out all the spacial tricks to be had. Space warps in odd ways such that even without a true gate people still will get confused on how they got into one of the upper rooms. It definitely didn’t help that windows could show off scenery in the oddest of ways. From upside down, to angled as if viewed through a periscope Doyle made sure things were suitably odd.

Odd really is the best word to describe the floor. Doyle even gets the feeling as parts of his memory aches that not everything he had done could be comprehended by a normal human. He even doubts that most dungeons could handle it as this might fall back on his dungeon type of diverse strange caverns.

But he had decided to use strange dungeon stone and it hadn’t come up yet. So what could he have planned for it? Well, now was about the time to put it in place. See, there was one feature he was missing to get proper water works set up. Doyle completely lacked a method of having water pour out infinitely from a source.

Sure, his third floor played with this by having water trickle down from the upper sections of the floor to the lower areas. But that water flow was at best a trickle. Anything more was just out of reach for him, so no waterfalls or rainstorms. The strange stone provided an interesting solution. He didn’t need much, just a double handful of marbles.

What the marbles put out wasn’t simple water, though. Rather, they wafted out a heavy fog that spread. With the few marbles strategically placed, Doyle was able to cover the entire floor in drifting clouds of fog that could thicken or clear up in moments. Obviously, this wasn’t enough to properly fill the floor but that is what he wanted. But he couldn’t stop there.

Fog already messed with how sound propagated, dampening it and making it harder to hear distant noises. So Doyle added a twist to this, connecting it right into the nature of the fog itself through the strange dungeon stone itself. Now the thicker the fog was, the stranger it would act. Reducing only certain noises, shifting the direction a noise seems to come from, and even just canceling one noise out despite being closer than some other sound.

And when these oddities combined with the strange geometry of the floor a truly haunting soundscape formed. All it needed was extra sources of noise to make the best use of these changes. The first sound was easy enough. From the roofs Doyle grew out small spikes, shaped as if the stone itself had melted in those locations. Though he avoided making them look like stalactites. One in place the spikes did their job and provided paths down for any condensed water from the fog so as to provide the constant sound of water dripping.

Next, used the strange dungeon stone for one of the classic and cheapest uses. From the top of the tall walls, he placed strips of the stuff that would rise up at random if covered by thick fog and the sphere was close enough. Close enough for what, you might ask? Close enough for it to scrape against the sphere itself.

This didn’t create that nails on chalkboard sound, but rather a creaking noise as the sphere itself slowly raised or lowered. Like a tree being bent to the extreme except with stone. Doyle felt this almost completed the soundscape. There was just one more noise he felt the floor needed and it required an instrument quite uncommon. And that instrument is the hurdy gurdy with its low droning tones. In the same style as how a bagpipe is a continuous sound, the hurdy gurdy does a similar thing but for string instruments.

Akhier

Also if you want to read more, my Patreon ( 167 and 168 ) has two free chapters, two more chapters for only a dollar, and even more beyond that for the early access tiers.