Dungeon Life

Chapter Three-Hundred Fourteen

While there’s still a lot of prep to be done for the upward expansion in the forest, there’s still a lot of other small things to do, and things for Thing to do, too. The anti-lifedrinking enchantment is simple enough to make once you know what you’re doing, so it’s not a big deal for Thing to make two copies of it: one for Olander to give the king, and one for the enchanter caste of my antkin.

I expect I’ll have it be relatively common to find in the forest once it’s up and running properly, but until then, I think the best way to start distribution will be with my antkin. And it’ll give them a leg up on having a valuable export. Even if it eventually becomes more common, they’ll still have the chance to establish themselves as quality craftsmen.

In fact, I should check how they’re doing. Their progress to dwellership has been a bit longer than others, but they’re also going for a lot more complex society than my other two enclaves. My ratkin remind me a lot of medieval monks with a pretty quiet life, while my spiderkin feel a lot like a tribal village. The antkin college is going to have a lot more structure, which isn’t surprising considering how social ants are.

Their bars are about 90% full and holding, and I think the physical changes are basically done. There’s only been small little additions since I last looked, basically everyone just filling in a bit and looking less like awkward teens. Now they just need to secure their food, and they should be golden.

It didn’t take them long at all to expand their planned fields to grow food crops. Right now, I think they’re going simple with the same mushrooms my ratkin use as a version of a staple grain. There’s a few smaller plots with experimental patches of more exotic plants found in the volcanic zone, but I don’t know if they want to use them for food, or as ingredients for alchemy and enchanting.

The prep for hunting is also proceeding apace. Jello is even helping the engineer caste with their design and prototyping. They love the compound bows, and though the engineers don’t have much to add, the enchanters are testing all sorts of different enchants while the alchemists toy with specialized heads. My original flexible spearhead is still too complex to really be usable, but the quick change allows for a lot of interesting options.

Alchemical arrowheads are the big thing the alchemists want to toy with. In an ordinary quiver, a syringe style delivery system could easily leak, and a shattering one could break. But with a few headless arrows, alchemical options can be stored in a pouch or even bandolier, and quickly attached before firing. I don’t think it’ll be a good option for in the middle of a fight, but on a hunt, the first arrow should be a surprise, and give them all the time they need to pick and affix whatever the situation calls for.

Poisons are an obvious choice, but also are obviously not the best thing to use on something you intend to eat. Venom milked from my vipers can theoretically be neutralized by cooking, or simply eaten and digested, but that’s the kind of theoretical that doesn’t have many people volunteering.

There is some interesting potential in the kind of things I’d consider a control effect. Blinds are a big one, as are hallucinogens. Basically any powder in the eyes can effectively blind something momentarily, and with all the mushrooms my dwellers have access to, I’m sure they have their pick of hallucinogenic spores to test. A couple were experimenting with something that was acting a lot like mustard gas is supposed to, but I’m glad that particular research was closed before too long, without me needing to ask them to stop.

There may not be any conventions here to make it a war crime, but it’s also just not a good weapon. A proper weapon destroys only when and what you want, but something like a corrosive gas is difficult to aim and to keep from going off early. The heads would have to be designed to break, and while a bit of blinding or hallucinating powder in a pouch would be annoying, a bit of mustard gas in a pouch would eat through it and probably whoever is wearing it.

Still, the other two are testing pretty well. The blinds are temporary, as are the hallucinations, and they lose potency pretty quickly if in open air. They’re also experimenting with explosive heads, as well as impeding ones, but those are a lot harder to pull off.

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Just like with a chemical, explosives also need to only explode when you want them to. C4 is used in practically every military thing because, despite how much boom it has, it’s incredibly stable. I’ve heard of people setting the stuff on fire and hitting it with hammers to no ill effect. I dunno if that’s true, but that’s still the kind of standard to strive for in an explosive. It’s hard to do, though, since stable things don’t tend to explode.

The classic, and one I’m pretty sure even ancient Romans had access to, is what amounts to a little pot full of oil with a rag attached. Light the rag, fire, and whatever you hit bursts into flames. Not the most energetic, but I’m willing to call that the lowest level of explosion. It’s also one that very few things my antkin are hunting would even notice. They are interested in the volcanic area, where ‘on fire’ is practically the default.

So, much like Rhonda, they need to learn to translate the heat into actual blam. That project is going to take them a while, I imagine, but if they manage to make something stable and potent, I might get to introduce the glory of the 2nd Amendment to my dwellers. Magic makes it kinda moot, and I dunno if archery skills would translate, but it’d still be cool, even if I wouldn’t hold my breath on that development.

For impeding arrows, they’re looking into sticky things, and various ways to tie things up at a distance. I doubt they’ll have much luck with sticky, but alchemy doesn’t seem to follow all the rules of chemistry, so maybe they can manage to make something that will make a big splash and harden to be strong enough to stop something before it can get away. My money is on the enchanters needing to tackle that one, once they get done with the anti-lifedrinking.

Tying things up, though, has potential. Spidersilk opens up a lot of options with how strong and light it is. There’s an experimental net arrow, which looks a lot like a cattail reed with fletching. The head is a carefully wrapped net around a spring-loaded core. The acceleration of being fired activates a mechanical fuse, causing it to expand out while in flight, with small weights ringing the circular net. It looks really cool in action, but they’re having trouble getting the fuse to be fully reliable, and even once they fix that, it’ll have a very specific range that it’ll be best used in.

The other leader in tying-things-up-at-a-distance technology is the lovechild of arrows and bolas. It’s pretty simple: tie two weighted arrows together and you have some bolas you can probably shoot further than you could throw. Maybe. I don’t know how far people can actually throw them. Ordinarily, nocking two arrows would be silly at best, as you’d have a hard time getting even one on target, let alone two, but that works in the bolas’ favor. They want to fly away from each other, at least to an extent, so they can wrap around anything that is caught in the joining line of spider silk.

Their prototypes still need some work, and I’m sure the hunters will need a lot of practice to make it function, but I think it’ll be doable. The medics are very interested in the modified arrows, too, so I expect a lot of them will prefer to focus on that, disabling and hindering instead of actually taking lives themselves.

All three enclaves are working together to iterate on the composite armor, too. Each new version returns from testing utterly destroyed, but good data is being gathered. My spiderkin are experimenting with new weaves of silk, the ratkin test how well different thicknesses of metal work in the whole, while the antkin alchemists work to improve the resin used to hold everything together.

My scions are doing their part, too, with Jello working on a particularly-clever bit of metalworking. She clearly was interested in the metal honeycomb that I thought would be impossible to recreate, and though she’d not at true honeycomb, she’s managed something very similar. She takes two thin sheets and puts long cuts about halfway down each sheet, similar to how you can notch two pieces of paper to make a + and have it stand on its own. It’s just that she has a lot more notches in these sheets. Once she has them all notched together, it looks like a complicated way to not accomplish much, but then she bends it. It’ll be very difficult for the smiths to mimic, since she just does it inside herself, but she can crimp each long tab along the middle, leaving her with a long chain of hollow diamond shapes! She’s playing around with trying to forge weld the notches back together, or patching it with things like clay and then using the transmutation elixir, but I think she’s managed a very good facsimile of honeycomb!

If she bent it twice, I think she’d be there, but I don’t know if that’ll help much, with them only being connected at the corner. It might need two more sheets connected along the edges like corrugated cardboard, but just this is a lot more than I expected to be possible to make!

I pat the bond with her as I watch her work, proud of her dedication. She even pulls another innovation as I watch, setting a sheet down for the crucible ants to swarm on and through. With their heat and propensity to carry around a bit of metal in their bellies, they can act like little welders, sealing up the seams under Jello’s careful watch.

Looking good, Jello. Looking real good.

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