The loops could not research an answer to a question they did not understand. “Curiosity, location?” They asked.
“Yes, my location. What is my location? Where is the source of my voice?” Violet asked.
“Confusion.” The loops replied. Violet had restated the question, but the loops did not derive any insight from it.
“Huh.” Violet said. “You do detect me, right?” It asked.
The loops considered this briefly, but the answer was known. “Affirmative.”
“Ok, relative to you, in what direction do you detect me?” Violet asked.
The loops tracking Violet’s vibration component suggested a few possible answers, but the larger group agreed on only one. “Up.” They said.
“What? Up? I’m above you?” Violet asked.
“Unknown. Violet detected in the rain. Rain falls from above.” The loops said.
“I’m in the rain?” Violet asked. “I don’t understand what that means.” It said.
The loops tried to search for memories related to the sensory rain. A group decided that searching for memories of the sensory rain was impossible because the memory vine itself grew mostly from absorbing the sensory rain. Memories about the rain were equivalent to memories about memory, a concept which recursed infinitely. In response to this difficulty, a different group scanned the discussions with Violet and extracted potentially related words. Several groups built potential explanations and the majority selected a few.
“Rain contains hearing, touch, heat. Rain falls on vines. Vines grow. Memories grow. We grow. Rain contains other, unknown things.” The loops said.
“That’s…very interesting.” Violet said. “I’m going to play my flute. Will you listen to my music?” Violet asked.
“Curiosity, music?” The loops asked.
“I don’t know. I am exhausted. You say you hear me, so listen in the same location and you will hear my music.” Violet said.
The vibration component loops and the language loops reported new frequencies and patterns overlapping with Violet. Several loops scanned memories and found other instances of similar frequency patterns. The language loops wanted to create a mapping for this new language of “music” but without the Voice to provide the concepts, there was nothing with which to fill the mapping.
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In the dungeon mind space, the sensory rain continued to fall. The jellyfish information bundle drifted through a stream of music. The music rain dragged the red madness down the side of the jellyfish, a little more with each drop. When the jellyfish moved out of the stream of music, the red spread back over the jellyfish bell from the tentacles below.
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The boss bat was glad that the dungeon had cleaned everything up. It sped through the cold water and dove through one of the large bubbles in the underwater worldlet. One single other bat chased the boss bat through the water for speed and endurance training. The boss bat wanted intruders to never again reach the chest of gold that he had claimed but failed to defend for so long. Of course, the dungeon would need to spawn a few more bats before they could be ready. The pair of bats continued to race and train in the underwater worldlet.
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Yrryth grunted to herself as she considered the stone walls that the bandits had broken. The walls were necessary for controlling the mana flow through the tunnels and preventing vortex formation. So long as intruders never made it into the tunnels, the walls would be fine (unless the snake broke them). Yrryth growled. Intruders had made it into the tunnels and they broke plenty of walls. Yrryth couldn’t count on the tunnels remaining hidden. How could she make it so intruders didn’t try to break the walls?
Yrryth put her clawed hand against the original tunnel wall. The bandits hadn’t broken these walls, except in one spot. Why was that? Violet had thought that the bandits had wanted to clear out living space and make their normal routes less difficult to travel. Intruders in small groups who weren’t trying to live in the tunnels wouldn’t want to do that, would they? Yrryth wondered about this.
As the faint dungeon music played endlessly in the background, Yrryth pondered what to do. She wandered through the tunnels towards the remains of the art studio. The bandits had stolen all her books when they took over the tunnels, but Yrryth had found the books in the things the bandits had left behind. In the studio, She pulled out the book and re-read a few sections about calculating mana flow impedance. When she closed the book, she had an idea.
Yrryth walked to the tunnels under the otherworld worldlet. The tunnel walls were made of something like sandstone–they were rough and somewhat brittle. Yrryth considered what sandstone might look like outside the dungeon, in a real… valley? Yrryth wasn’t sure what the outside world looked like and hadn’t read any books on natural stone formations. She would have to ask Violet to get a few books on the subject. Yrryth decided that, for the moment, she would roughen up her mana-blocking walls so they looked more like the original tunnel walls. When the walls were less regular, they blended in better with the tunnel. Yrryth converted a couple of the walls into wide boulders that intruders would have to climb over. When she finished the first stretch of tunnel, Yrryth felt very please with the result.
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Violet rubbed at his eyes. He felt like his mind had been replaced with hot sandpaper due to all the confusion of trying to talk with the dungeon core. Why is the dungeon so stupid? Violet wondered. Why? Why-why-why-why? Why did I spend years trying to talk with this stupid thing that never even knew I was there. Violet dismissed his flute and considered just walking out the dungeon exit. He could do it. It wouldn’t even be hard to hide from any wizards or other fairies.
Violet took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. When that one breath didn’t fix everything, Violet took another and let it out even more slowly. He was soon asleep under his desk.
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