"Sickness seizes the body from bad ventilation." ~ Ovid

I spent about 6 hours simply claiming stone that would eventually become my third floor, starting first from directly below my core, and then expanding out in a soothingly even, circular pattern. It's not as though I could claim all the space I wanted on that level in a single morning, but I made a good start, expanding outwards from my starting point to claim about a third of the volume of my second floor. There were a few key areas I'd need to connect up with, notably the cliff face and the Redcrests' village on the west side, the mana gathering array to the south, the Aubesan ruins excavation to the north, and the stairway down from the second floor on the east. Pushing outward evenly from my core didn't get me to any of those just yet, though I wasn't too far off the stairs down from the second floor.

It was noticeably easier to claim territory nearer to my core, and I could feel my progress slow a bit as I moved away. It wasn't an exponential decline, or anything, but claiming land farther from the core took more mana and more time in general. The expansion was improving my mana flow and expanding my base mana pool, but until I opened up some actual rooms in that level, it was going to be a fairly incremental improvement.

I'd been just about ready to stop claiming ground for a third floor and move onto something else when I heard Hakdrilda call my name, seeking my attention. I wasn't particularly looking forward to this conversation, but it needed to be done. Either the dwarven airmage would be able to move past the idea that I could kill her fairly easily and we could resume working on her experiments, or she wouldn't, and presumably would need to depart as soon as it was practical. She apparently had a flight spell, so in the worst-case scenario where she couldn't wait for her pickup, she could presumably make her way back down to the ground and manage to walk back to Daekar. Still, I was betting that she'd get past this, knowing how long she'd waited for a chance like this one. For that matter, any other dungeon would have likely actually tried to kill her, so she'd need to get past that eventually, even if other dungeons likely didn't have the same range of lethal tools that I did. Intelligence and knowledge can be a wicked advantage when not constrained by other considerations.

In any event, I focused my attention on Hakdrilda, which I knew she could feel, as she flinched in an involuntary reaction that told me she was still struggling with the information I'd provided her. I waited, politely, for her to gather herself and begin speaking.

"Hello, Vay. I'm sorry to have made you wait for me. I hope you had other projects to occupy your time? You seem to be constantly busy."

**GREEN**

"Ah, good, good. Well, I'll dive straight down the borehole. I'm going to continue on and take my chances with your benevolence. You've been nothing but polite and helpful, and I apologize for my nervous reactions. I know that it's not really a conscious, rational reaction on my part, but something deeper and more primal. You are a dangerous being, and only more so for the combination of power and cleverness you exhibit. But so are a lot of people – hopefully including me eventually – and society continues to function. So, uh... Yeah, I'm going to stick around, and I hope you're still willing to help me with my research." She paused and scuffed one dusty boot while gazing hopefully up at the mana lights in the wall.

**GREEN**

She let out a deep breath that I don't think she'd realized she was holding. "Thank you, Vay. I truly do appreciate your open-mindedness and your willingness to assist everyone you meet. Between the Redcrests, me, and even the librarian, you must be dedicating significant time that you could be devoting to your own work." Her hands trembled a bit as she ran her stubby fingers through her long black hair. "Do let me know if there's anything else I can do to repay your help; we have a contract, but you're not really going to see much from that in the near future."

**GREEN**

I decided that likely wasn't really enough to reassure her, so I used the logbook to provide a bit more context.

Logbook: Will do. Remember, I benefit from your work, too. More so than any one-time benefit to eating you. Plus, I like you.

"Ah. I appreciate that. I'm still coming to grips with the notion that it's even possible to be friends with a dungeon. In the meantime, knowing the benefit isn't all one way helps too."

Logbook: Same for Redcrests. They feel safer by offering a benefit to me.

"Oh? What are they doing for you beyond using their mana within your boundaries? Blueprints, I guess?"

**GREEN**

"Yes, not to offend you or anything, but I can certainly see how some of them would feel safer knowing that they're contributing to you directly – like paying rent... I know you didn't ask, but I'll have to see if I can come up with anything to offer beyond laboratory equipment and some basic knowledge in my field."

Logbook: Not necessary but always appreciated.

"Ha, ha. Yeah, okay. I'll see what I can come up with. You've already gotten blueprints of pretty much everything I brought, so anything else would need to be from knowledge I carry around in my head... I'll ponder it later. If you'd like, though, we can try to pick up from where we left off?"

**GREEN**

That had always been pretty much the best-case scenario, so I was fairly pleased with the outcome. We weren't really friends, of course – not yet, at any rate – but I hadn't lied to her either. I did like her and her generally single-minded pursuit of knowledge. I'd known a lot of people like that in my old life, or at least, I felt like I had. Sharing their enthusiasms was about the only way they knew to reach out. Fortunately, I was generally happy to play along and listen and learn about whatever had seized their focus.

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For Hakdrilda, this meant that I was learning a lot about the structure of Dwarven (or at least Daekaran) academia and its limited interactions with other systems of higher education globally, as she rambled on about human and elven research into air magic and the limited accessibility of their work through costly access to the central archives. She was very excited to learn that I had an institutional reader being delivered, hopefully in the next week or two. I came to the reluctant conclusion that having mentioned it to her, I was likely going to need to place it somewhere she could access it. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that if I was going to encourage scholars to visit, then I was going to need a publicly accessible library space. That got bumped up on my list for the third floor, and I started pondering what a gnomish library would look like; next time I went to work on archaeology, I decided I'd hunt around the gnomish city for further examples of public buildings. There were, of course, no guarantees that a library (either public or private) actually existed there, but I thought the existence of a museum suggested it was pretty likely. Whether I could find one or not was a whole other question, of course.

She got back on track fairly quickly though, and while by silent understanding we weren't going to be killing things for her experiments, she ran me through her new plan for research – largely going back to her original interest in air magic applications in mining contexts. That meant that her research plan was shifting back towards ventilation circuits as modeled in her test chamber and testing static, dynamic, and total air pressure at various points, looking at pressure drops due to friction and shock losses, measuring changes in airflow as inflows are varied, and the interactions as multiple inflows are added to a system.

I won't lie; it got a bit too esoteric for me, and my contributions were mostly in my ability to smoothly and rapidly manipulate the movement of air through her models. She also had a series of experiments designed where we'd be varying the composition of the air in those models to see how the different gas densities affected ventilation systems and the pooling of various heavier gases at low points in the modeled systems. That got coupled with some psychrometric experiments where we would be adding and subtracting water vapor to adjust humidity levels while also adjusting ambient temperature levels.

That was going to take us days of work, at least in the four or five hour blocks I was willing to provide. In fact, it was likely to be a week or so to work through all of the experiments, and that assumed she didn't want to take extra time to do the analysis. Hakdrilda was, after all, stuck doing all calculations long hand and her math seemed limited to what I would have considered junior in high school level – algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, but no calculus or differential equations, and no real sense of statistics either.

There didn't seem to be a magical equivalent to a scientific calculator either, or even a slide rule, and I wasn't familiar enough with how either functioned to be able to recreate them. Well, with my eidetic memory, I might be able to reconstruct the slide rule I remembered encountering as a child (my father's, possibly?), but I'd never actually learned how to use it. From what I'd recalled, they'd vanished just as soon as pocket calculators had become available and well before I was at a stage where one would have been helpful.

We did manage to at least begin the experimental procedures, even if we didn't get very far after the extended planning session. I begged off at roughly dinner time for the young dwarf, though she seemed reluctant to stop in the face of good progress. Still, she recognized the need to eat to maintain her focus and she had enough new data to at least begin work on assessing patterns that might have practical implications.

I, myself, hadn't learned very much that was immediately useful except that the hissing noise we associate with escaping air was dependent on things like air speed, aperture size, and vibrations in the adjoining materials. That meant I might need to experiment and adapt things if I wanted my air-powered traps to be less audible. I didn't see a way around having pressurized darts make sound, but the traps in my core room could almost certainly be made entirely silent – with the trade-off of either making them slower to work or easier to notice. I'd have to give that further consideration.

I paused for a few moments to consider my next move. I kind of wanted to start my third floor, but until I'd connected the claimed region with the stairs from the second floor, it wasn't really practical unless I wanted to open at least a temporary set of stairs elsewhere in the dungeon. That seemed unnecessary, really, so I decided I'd simply spend the rest of the evening expanding my third-floor domain to connect with the stairs from above, at which point, I could start excavating stone and shaping some rooms, though I was still grappling with the look I wanted them to have. I was intending a gnomish theme, but I really wasn't clear how to make that work yet. Still, I could at least get a start and then go back to the gnomish city for additional inspiration. For that matter, it was possible the central archives had some information on the city, though I hadn't thought to check, having had more pressing priorities and no more downloads yet for a couple of days. That thought had me hoping that the institutional reader would turn up sooner, rather than later, but it was, sadly, likely still a week or two away.

By the time midnight had passed, I'd managed to expand my area of control to connect with the stairs leading down from Hakdrilda's room on the southeastern edge of the second floor. In order to do that, the area of my domain on the third floor was more oval, than circular, but not irregular enough to upset my dungeon instincts. I was still going to want to expand along the western edge to connect with the Redcrest village, as well as to the north and south to tidy up my edges, but that was still going to take several days, assuming I put in 5 or 6 hours a day of steady expansion. I wanted/intended to do that, but I knew my good intentions were likely to get sidetracked one way or another, whether by new visitors, more archaeological finds, the lure of building out actual rooms in the third floor, or some other more inherently interesting possibility.

Still, this seemed like a good point to stop in the basic expansion of my domain for the day. The effects had been largely beneficial, but I was feeling the strain on my mana pool, as even without removing any of the stone, I was still pushing to claim that much territory. It would, of course, be a terrible idea to go low enough for my darker dungeon instincts to emerge. I'd just settled Hakdrilda back down, after all, so letting my bloodlust emerge would derail that, if she happened to notice. I hadn't pushed anywhere near THAT far, but breaking for a few hours of natural mana regeneration was definitely called for.

Having decided that, I opted to return my attention to the core room/library for some additional preliminary research. I already had a mental list of titles I was interested in, ranging from more fungalmancy, to crystallographic magic, and runic magic texts; the new additions were hopefully going to add works on dracolisks, ancient gnomish architecture, and any historical works traceable to the Free City of Relkhold, or failing that, Gearringgate. I wasn't sure how likely that would be, given the age of those polities, but I was hoping they were big enough (or at least economically important enough) to have left at least some traces in history or legend. Maybe the elves had stories going back that far, but I had the distinct sense that civilizations rose and fell with some regularity here, even those whose populace weren't susceptible to all the same mortal pressures as humans. Magic, in that sense, was a two-edge sword – enabling both startling miracles and calamities manageable by lone, powerful individuals who were either violently opposed to the civilizations in question or simply insufficiently careful...

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