Every house guest brings you happiness. Some when they arrive, and some when they are leaving — Confucius

It wasn't much longer before I was, somewhat wistfully, watching the priests' ship recede into a cloudy gray sky. It had been a busy few days but now it was back to me being mostly alone. I could feel Hakdrilda, when I thought about it, and she was beginning to stir finally. That said, knowing I'd have to go back to communicating with colored lights and roughly 30 lines of text per day was a bit disheartening – particularly as she seemed well and truly focused on her studies and her experiments.

It was a bit too early to be sure, but I was hoping that once she'd settled in a bit, she'd snap out of her hyperfocused state and be capable of both a more regular schedule and a little more attention to her broader environment. I had no intention of impeding her work, but there was a small dungeon voice in the back of my head telling me that anyone that oblivious to their surroundings in a dungeon should be devoured on general principles – not that my instincts seemed to have much in the way of principles.

She did have at least enough awareness to feed and clean herself, though I wasn't sure if she'd remember to do dishes. I just discreetly absorbed the crumbs and scraps --just bread and jerky again, so no new blueprints; it seemed like I'd need to give her some fruit, so she didn't get scurvy. She hadn't even noticed, as she was settling in to continue working on training her translation tool. It looked like she had it about halfway there – it had clearly adapted to the system of mathematical notation, most, if not all, of which had local equivalents. (I wasn't sure about calculus or differential equations – she'd mostly gone back to the simpler Newtonian mechanics which didn't require that). Her tool also seemed to have a grasp of the basic grammar and had compiled a list of simple nouns and verbs, but it wasn't yet to the point of giving solid translations for more complicated concepts or verb tenses beyond the present and past.

I was sort of assuming I'd eventually get a translation skill of my own. Probably I needed to consciously make an effort to translate a work from English to Dwarven (Daekaran) - which is what my language skill considered her speech and the majority of the books she'd brought. I could do it in my logbook, but I couldn't simply transcribe and translate an entire book all at once. It'd be a line-by-line thing until I got the skill. I wasn't sure what the odds were of getting the skill through direct effort, but if I weren't so busy preparing for the coming migration, it would be worth an attempt. I wasn't sure if that would be considered a separate skill, or simply an upgrade to my transcription or language skills.

Having at least roughed out living spaces for the Redcrest tribe, I tried to give some thought to what they might need on the surface of the sky island. I knew they were transhumant pastoralists in their own mountains, but I wasn't at all sure they'd be able to bring any of their animals with them. At most, I thought they might bring some of their domestic rodents. At this stage of the year, it seemed likely the goats would all be too large to be carried up; presumably there'd be enough goat meat or fiber brought along that I could get the blueprint, at least.

I thought about constructing some pens for the goats in the grassland along the streamside, but that seemed likely to be both a big chore and possibly ineffectual. Goats are notoriously good at escaping and climbing, so the pens would need to be either mostly for show or expensively built to prevent that sort of thing. I'd already added some stone pens to the kitchen areas of the homes below for the rodents; that was simple enough. I'm sure they weren't exactly what the tribe was accustomed to, but the parallels to guinea pigs in the Andes seemed close enough that I used ethnographic and archaeological examples as a model.

I put in a solid variety of fruit and nut trees around the dungeon entrance – apples, pears, apricots, almonds, walnuts – as well as some grapes and a selection of herbs. I held off on vegetables and grains; I didn't want a full farm, after all, but was willing to lean into the abandoned orchard motif a bit.

I didn't push to make them all fruit either, but I did bump them to full growth and set them to stages appropriate to the season. That meant at least the apples and walnuts should still be providing when they arrived, and they might catch the tail end of some of the others. That way, even if they didn't stick around, I'd still have some elements appropriate to the theme on the surface and something to draw in the local animal population. Throw in the curly dock and amaranth, and there was a reasonable array of things to be foraged, if they went looking. I had at least thought to check on their dietary requirements before Lukash had left, and they seemed pretty omnivorous. Carnivores would have been trickier to provide for in a sustainable way.

I added an array of partially tumbled field stone walls around the orchard area – nothing more than a meter or so in height, but enough to point out the overgrown, abandoned orchard to anyone paying attention. I wasn't sure how much the birdfolk relied on arboriculture, but it sounded like they at least had enough contact with other, more settled groups to at least be familiar with the concept.

The Hawk-Eagle had returned from her survey expedition, such as it was, and I was able to fill out a mental map of the near side of the sky island that seemed likely to include all of the major occupation sites on the surface, and at least some of the smaller ones. It was certainly possible that some sites were concealed within the more densely forested regions, in particular. I spent a few moments trying to determine if any of the closer sites took the form of an obvious ritual array (mostly looking for geometric regularity, which I knew wasn't a reliable test for a variety of reasons), to no success. As you'd expect, most of the sites appeared to represent basic residential functions, with denser clusters of buildings showing signs of more specialized uses. The closer ones seemed almost uniformly to suggest ties with the Aubesan empire, and the "road" I'd spotted at the original ruin site seemed to run directly to the largest obvious surface settlement at the base of the central mountain. There seemed to be another good-sized settlement not too far to the north, along the island's edge – possibly serving as a port for the central town.

Assuming there were earlier occupations of the surface, which seemed like a safe bet, they were either covered by later occupations, buried deep by natural processes, or simply indistinguishable from my limited sample size. My guess was probably a mix of those, but it was really just a guess. I knew there was at least one subterranean occupation, and the reputed ruins at higher elevations were going to remain a mystery for the time being. The ruins on the desert side of the island were substantially different, but logistically inconvenient to explore. My best option for another occupation to investigate was likely going to be near the magical forest plots to the north. I was assuming some more sylvan species had dwelled there, but realistically, I had no facts to support that assumption. Working from fantasy novels seemed like an excellent way to fall into some truly ridiculous stereotypes. Orn, after all, did come from an urban civilization, even if they did reportedly still favor sylvan deities and had good numbers of rangers. For all I knew, it could have been a plantation for dwarves to secure resources they otherwise wouldn't have had access to.

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At some point, I knew, I'd want to expand on the surface to incorporate the larger settlements – the presumed largest town of the latest occupation to the east and the port settlement to the northeast. For the time being, really what I wanted was a better sense of exactly how many occupations there had been, and by whom. The details could certainly wait, but my next archaeological goal was going to be simply dating the gnomish city I'd found. The Aubesan empire's occupation was fairly securely dated at this point – frankly, it had been personally attested (in very different ways) by both Norfoth and the dragon.

The gnomish city wasn't, though, and in retrospect the complete absence of organic material in the admittedly brief survey by proxy was pretty telling, given the otherwise excellent preservation. Admittedly, I wouldn't expect much wood to be used in the architecture of an underground city, but some elements in the ornamentation would seem reasonable. Wooden carvings would be one way to display status in regions without ready access to the material – at least that's how it typically worked in human societies in my old world. Anything rare or difficult to access becomes a status marker, after all, particularly if it passed through the hands of skilled craftspeople first.

Maybe I'd just missed them. Maybe the gnomes had been driven out by magical termites, But maybe the organics had simply decayed or been stripped over a much longer time span. I had too little data to work with, but it seemed impossible that all of that material would be gone. I'd find it when I had time to look.

That said, I'd decided that my next major project should be completing the second floor and relocating my core. That had sort of fallen by the wayside with everything else going one – taking up some of Norfoth's suggestions and filling the last few vacant rooms shouldn't take all that long, after all. Relocating my core also bore some further thought. It apparently would be easy enough to do, once I'd decided the floor was complete, but I'd need to figure out where to put it, how to defend it, and whether or not to conceal it.

Adding traps that fit the overall theme was the tricky part. Having a rotting floor in the warehouse was simple enough, and I supposed I could trap the chests in the manor house (while bumping up the loot to compensate), but what kind of traps would one expect in a paddock? Or a farrier? Did I want to dump boiling wax on delvers in the chandlery? Probably, though presumably not in large enough quantities to be potentially lethal. Something with straps in the tannery? It all seemed a bit too on-the-nose, but given the low level of anticipated delvers, maybe obvious was the way to go? At this point, it was all pretty hypothetical, since I had no idea how low-level delvers would even get here.

I daydreamed briefly about the possibility of getting the blueprint for an airship and running a free (or at least cheap) shuttle service to cities I passed by, but that was wildly unrealistic in the near term. By the time I could arrange something like that, I'd be much higher leveled and presumably drawing higher ranked adventurers who could get here under their own power. It WOULD be on theme, at least...

Traps. Yes, back to traps. I decided I'd shoot for a Home Alone kind of approach, where the various areas would be trapped as though the residents had some advance notice that intruders were coming and had thrown together whatever they could in a few hours at most. So, yes, the chandlery had a small pot of hot wax (solid most of the time, but meltable pretty quickly when delvers arrived) precariously placed above the entry - my first trapped door beyond the false door. When I saw the title given to the trap, I had to question the sense of humor of whoever/whatever came up with the names.

Blueprint Received: Unsexy Hot Wax Trap

The tannery got a trap that was inherently unlikely to actually injure delvers, but that could cause them to question their life choices in an AOE style trap. I cheated somewhat, but an obvious pressure plate near the door, and a less obvious pressure plate just beyond it, would trigger the release of roughly 150 liters of noxious liquid from above. The fluid was based on grassland elk urine and badger musk with just enough pine sap to make it difficult to rinse off. It wouldn't hurt them, but it would be unpleasant and potentially impair the senses of more sensitive species.

Blueprint Received: Dual Pressure Plate Stink Trap

I was just grateful that the system decided to spare me a comical name for that particular setup.

In the paddock, I decided that adding a trap would only be appropriate if it was defending some specific treasure. To that end, I added a simple gold chain, two small rough rubies, and 30 silver coins to a small, lidded majolica pot and buried it in a corner of the paddock not far from the entrance to the manor. I made the location look freshly dug, and above the pot (but below the surface, obviously) I took the time to construct a classic bear trap (though realistically sized a bit small for the grizzlies on the first floor – so maybe a wolf trap?). Digging with their bare hands or stepping on it would be a bad idea, though unlikely to cause severe injury, but some reward for defeating the warhorse skeletons did seem called for. This could be taken for a small hoard left behind on the brink of a sudden abandonment of the site – or at least that was the idea. I didn't expect many delvers to be foolish enough to get caught by the trap, but it seemed like a reasonable chance they might not look below it. I didn't have access to Aubesan coinage as yet, so I simply designed my own, using the symbolism I'd invented for the entry shrine.

Blueprint Received: Classic Wolf Trap

Blueprint Received: Dungeon Coinage – Copper, Silver, Gold

The farrier room already had some caltrops to be distributed, and the manor house had a mimic in the master bedroom, so I left those alone. I considered trying to add some sort of trap to the chest in the child's bedroom, but that seemed too off-theme to me. I did decide to add another small wooden box, concealed in a cavity within a willow tree behind the manor – just to reward the more diligent searchers. I'd had to construct it myself, lacking any appropriate blueprint, so it was quite simple – not much more than rough oak scraps nailed together. I thought it looked appropriate for the hiding place for a child's treasures – and I filled it to suit that notion, mostly with smooth, colored rocks, animal teeth, and tin soldiers. Mixed in with those were some actual minor treasures – a piece of water chalcanthite, a copper nugget, two unpolished sapphires, and a single gold coin. Figuring that might be an unlikely place to search, I decided I'd need to create a little treasure map to hide under the child's bed, once I had a skill that allowed for that, or time to work on it...

Blueprint received: Rough wooden box (oak)

That mostly just left me with a few empty rooms to fill – the original three on the level by the staircase from the first floor, and the couple of rooms right before the rest area where Hakdrilda was staying. I thought that if the birdfolk held off on arriving for another day or two, I could at least get those roughed out. I was thinking a barn could be made from those final two rooms, but I was going to have to ponder what to do with the original set of three.

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