“Shall we start with personal stuff and then move on to dungeon information?” Mordecai began. The three of them had pulled up chairs around a small table. Kazue and Moriko looked at each other, then nodded.
“Yes please, I’d like to know what is going on in my head. And why did that concentrated tea help?” Kazue sounded frustrated, and he couldn’t blame her for that.
“Concentrated tea? That’s it?” Moriko asked in confusion upon learning that the drink was such a simple-sounding brew.
“To be clear,” Mordecai replied, “It was an extremely concentrated form of the sort of late-night tea someone uses in order to stay awake. As for why it helped, that is more than I can fully explain, or even know myself right now. But the simple version of it is that some part of Kazue’s brain is not getting enough of something it needs. When the body needs food, it gets hungry, and you find food to eat. When the body needs water, you get thirsty and go find something to drink. When the brain is low on something it needs, it seeks what will fulfill that need. Does that make sense?”
He paused for a moment and continued when they each nodded. “The flesh influences the mind. If it did not, then alcohol would not change people’s thinking or temperament. Certain training can mitigate the demands of the flesh, reducing the impact of this influence, but not negating it. And perhaps such training might help you, Kazue, except the demands of your brain are exactly what would prevent you from completing such training. It would be like taking a starving man and trying to teach him how to fast safely before you made him healthy.” Using Moriko’s training seemed like a good way to create analogies they would both understand.
“Kazue, your need can be mostly summarized as ‘stimulation’, though that’s somewhat incomplete. Or rather, stimulation is what gives you what you need, that most people produce enough of. Sort of like how there are people who get anemic if they don’t eat meat on a pretty much daily basis, and others can go without meat just fine, and yet others are sickened by eating meat. It’s just an individual need. Without knowing this was what was driving you, it’s why you often have trouble staying focused on one task or thought. Something new is always more stimulating than something you’ve been doing for a while.” He smiled slightly. “Though sometimes a situation can be stimulating enough to make up for the lack of newness.”
“But that is where the drink I made for you comes in. Instead of stimulation through action, you can be stimulated by what you eat or drink. And when your brain is satisfied, it no longer makes demands on your attention. That’s why you became calmer after drinking a brew that would have left many other people vibrating and shaking. They’d become overstimulated, you become just enough stimulated. Though I have to admit to a bit of a cheat here. I don’t have to worry about the long-term effects on your body, as any damage resets at the same time the rest of our dungeon does. Which is good, because your heart rate is nearly double what it should be right now.”
Kazue started, then felt at her wrist to find her pulse. “Huh. Why didn’t I notice this earlier?”
“Because you otherwise felt calmer, and you have no other symptoms, such as breathing faster. But this is also where I am hoping Moriko’s parents will be able to help. You will eventually be able to forge an avatar that can leave the dungeon, but there’s no practical way to make that tea outside of here, and an avatar outside of the dungeon does not benefit from that daily reset. There should be something they can provide that will help your focus without quite the same effects on your body.” He couldn’t help but grimace in frustration. “I am pretty certain that I used to know a good selection of options that I had helped develop for that avatar, but that knowledge seems to be tied with all the knowledge that led up to it, and that’s more than I can afford to unfold right now.”
“Er, Mordecai? What are you talking about?” Moriko asked while Kazue tilted her head, trying to puzzle out if this was something she should know about.
“Ah, sorry. I skipped some details there. So, going back a bit, I have mentioned before that most of my memories are not available. There just isn’t enough room in our current core for all of them. When Kazue was having trouble with focusing earlier and had her core take over for her avatar, it prompted me to take a fresh look at everything we already know about Kazue. It was a key piece that brought a puzzle together that I didn’t even realize we had. But for my available knowledge, it was only enough to recognize that something was off, and give me a trace to more knowledge. That trace led to me unfolding some of the memories of my first gnome avatar, as my attempt to recreate their generally energetic physiology and mentality was not quite correctly done and led to the same issues Kazue has. I did my best to only get the information I needed, but whatever I did to create this folded information also makes it harder to get just what I want, as everything is connected, and I can’t refold anything I make available for myself.”
“I -what?” Kazue asked while Moriko looked at him like he’d grown a second head.
Mordecai shook his head. “Sorry, I am dumping too much detail at once.” Though he was pretty certain Kazue would be able to pick up the technical aspects a bit faster than Moriko, there was a lot of background involved that neither of them had yet. “I can pull some of the memories I want, but they always come with more than what I want, and I only have so much room, so I have to be careful. That’s why I don’t know as much as I would like to help. But it’s enough for us to seek help, depending on how much Kazue wants to tell others.”
“Oh. Hmm.” Kazue thought about it for a bit, then nodded. “Yeah, I think it’s okay to tell her parents. I can see why I might not want to spread it around, but I don’t see any reason to hide it from them, especially if they can help.”
“Alright, we can work out the details on that later. I would just like to finish by noting that we should probably limit you to two of those concentrated cups each day. The same reset that will fix any damage will also prevent any specific tolerances from exposure to build up, and three cups will probably be uncomfortable and not actually be helpful anymore. It’s up to you, but that’s my recommendation."
The kitsune nodded, looked to Moriko who shrugged, and then looked back to Mordecai. “Okay, I guess that’s all I really need to know for the moment, though it’s kind of frustrating to not know why my head is , but if you figured out more in a previous avatar, I am sure we can find a way to look into it more in this lifetime.” She smiled a little and sighed. “Well, I guess onto dungeon stuff? Um, two things I think. This morning you were starting to say something about breach powers, and lately you’ve seemed focused on ‘intent’. What’s up with that?”
Mordecai tapped his chin a moment as he pulled his thoughts together. “So breaches are a little more complicated than I want to get into right now, and Kazue you should be able to figure out some of it pretty fast just by imagining someone having forced their way down here and about to attack our core. There’s a lot of defensive instinct there. But in brief, it gives you a free refresh as if it was dawn and a temporary boost in creature and trap capacity.” He paused and then coughed slightly. “Though it seems like a few more limitations are in place than I remember, such as the threat needing to actively be in the dungeon, and only being able to send overflow monsters out of the dungeon after the breach is dealt with.” Now he sighed softly. “Just, try not to use that extra capacity if you don’t have to. You either have to send them out of the dungeon to live normal lives or despawn them and keep their spirits or souls dormant until you have enough capacity to bring them out properly. Neither option is perfect, so best to avoid being in that position if you can.”
He shook off those memories and took a breath. “As for my focus on intent lately, it has to do with our more recent visit from Ozuran. He told us that he personally constructed the rules that guide dungeons. Not only does this mean that these are, hmm, ‘imposed’ rules instead of just integral to our nature, but it also means that they are not mechanically strict rules. The spirit or intent of a bargain or rule is what matters to him more than the letter. This means with the right intent you can do things that might be against a strict interpretation. My bargain with the matriarch earlier is an example.” Mordecai leaned back in his chair to look upward while he recalled his thought process.
“It was a bit of experiment, and I think it may need that step-by-step construction, but my intent was to wind up at the same place in the bargain. I took what should have been two separate trades and combined them into one trade. I wanted to trade staffs for a high-pressure water enchantment, and then I wanted to trade even more staffs to get two of the first set back with more enchantments. Previously I would have completed the first trade, which would render the first set of staves fully real, and then presented the second trade. What I did was more efficient and a little faster, and the agreement part could be completed immediately, so tomorrow morning I can give Aia all the staves at once without having to then begin a new set of bargaining. I am not sure yet of the limits of this, and I intend to settle in to meditate later this evening and see if I can commune with him about the topic, but now that I look at it, everything is ruled by intent. The table I created earlier for us all to sit at, I intended it to be part of the dungeon, and the mana that makes it up comes from the same pool as constructing any other part of the dungeon, and isn’t much more expensive than if I had just built a plain oak table of the same dimensions, excluding the effort put into designing it. But to make it more than a mana construct, to make it fully real? That would pull mana from our pool for making treasure, and it would cost a lot more. So the more we think about our intent, and the clearer we are about our intent, the more efficient we can be, and possibly the more we can do.”
There was also another thing that had started nagging at him about their powers of creation, and was part of what he was hoping Ozuran would answer later.
“I guess that makes sense.” Kazue said after a moment, and that made Moriko laugh.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it. I get why that would make more sense to you, but at this point, it’s honestly mostly over my head. I simply can’t experience the same things you are dealing with, so a lot on this topic is not something I’m ever fully going to get.” She waved her hand to clear away the topic, then took a breath. “However, speaking of wanting to meditate tonight, I wanted to ask a favor of you two.”