Mist of Shadows
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Dungeon Myst Part 10
🕑 Added 2023-09-19 03:30:11 +0000 UTC"Incoming slimes!" Myst shouted as he flew towards the edge of the platform and pulled up the build menu. He quickly placed twelve five foot squares of float stone next to the narrow platform of float stone with the wells and hit the button two seconds before his mana regenerated, making his total jump almost to his max. He quickly placed another twenty eight five foot squares next to the previous squares and hit the button.
"Calm down," the mage complained as he walked out of the workshop, annoyed that his research had been interrupted.
"No time," Myst replied as he used his possession ability on the first slime beast. "I've got too much mana regeneration."
"No such thing," the mage replied as he blasted the other slime beast with a firebolt.
"There is when you get 'lucky' and double your mana regeneration then get a buff that you can't get rid of that doubles your mana regeneration yet again. I'm generating two hundred and eight mana a minute right now, it's annoying," Myst complained as he opened his mana menu and added gem-covered agate slimes until he had enough ingredients to increase his capacity.
The mage shook his head. "You should have increased your capacity."
"I did!" Myst snapped as he added one of the mana granting crystals that he'd extracted from the poor magical rabbits that had been turned to stone before they could even cast a spell and hit the button, boosting his capacity by fifty points and creating another slime.
"Apparently not enough," the mage argued as he torched the slime.
"I was fine until the slime I was possessing started self-destructing and I had to drop it," Myst argued as he went back to adding large sections of platforms, immensely glad that he'd spent the last couple of hours collecting stone statues and making float stone while trying to farm enough mana scales to boost his capacity and regeneration.
"How screwed are we?" the mage asked as he absently blasted the slimes with firebolts.
Myst glanced at the buff that doubled his mana regeneration. "As long as you can keep the slimes under control for the next eighteen minutes, the buff should vanish and my mana regeneration should drop back down to a hundred and four which means I won't be quite as worried about going over my cap."
The mage glanced up at the night sky. "I should be fine unless you make an army of slimes, at which point I'll drop a fireball on them. Fireball always delivers!"
"Wasn't planning on it," Myst replied as he pulled up the details for the magic school. "I need to figure out a way to harvest lumber faster."
"There are spells," the mage admitted. "Of course, it's a lot easier to just train more woodcutters."
"It's on the list," Myst replied as he added all of his lumber and twenty seven units of tainted lumber to make up the difference. "Sadly the number of things on the list keeps growing," he complained as he added the last seven units of tainted stone he had.
"At least we have somewhere we can cut down trees that isn't infested with druids," the mage replied.
"True," Myst agreed as he added ninety five slime statues to get the five hundred units of stone he needed. He placed the school on the newly constructed floating platform and hit the button, causing another window to open showing several options for reducing the construction time. 'Each magic user assigned to building the school cuts the time required to make it by an hour and I can spend mana? That's surprisingly reasonable, probably has something to do with my specialty.'
He quickly assigned both of his gremlin magic users and the rabbit magic user to help. 'I have five slots and I need the mage to kill the slimes. Time to cheat.' He used the mana granting gem he'd extracted from the stone statue of the mage on his Gadget knockoff, giving her an affinity for Fire and Air and twenty points of magic then assigned her to help build the school. 'At least it doesn't seem to care that she's only five inches tall. Then again, it didn't care that the rabbit was a rabbit either.'
Myst used one of the magic gems he'd extracted from a petrified rabbit on the undead knight, giving the knight an Earth affinity. He assigned the knight to the last slot then dumped enough tainted crystals to reduce the build time to ten minutes and hit the button, creating a blue slime beast that was twice as large as the rest of the slime beasts he'd seen. "Shit!" he sputtered when the slime beast reached out and devoured him, causing him to reappear next to his core.
"Die…" the mage trailed off as his firebolt washed over the blue slime without causing it any damage. "That's cheating."
"No shit," Myst replied as he used possession on the magic slime. "Considering the sheer number of slimes that I created, the chances of making one of these has to be less than one percent."
"Or they're generated when you make a building," the mage suggested.
"Maybe," Myst replied as he placed another row of float stones to burn mana. He focused on the new green slime and hit the devour button and quickly slurped down the green slime, finding that it tasted a bit like limo jello. "That makes things easier."
"What abilities do you have?" the mage asked warily, wondering how they were going to kill the vile creation since it was fireproof and thus an abomination before the eyes of the gods.
Myst checked the creature's stats. "Ten points of magic, immunity to acid, disease, fire and poison and vulnerability to cold. He also has a fire breath spell that looks interesting."
The mage glanced at the magic school that was being built. "You're going to have to teach me that one when the school is done."
"That's the plan," Myst replied as he opened up the page for housing so he could look at the various options. 'Can demons even benefit from housing boosts?' He mused as he tried a couple of options, finding the house option didn't give nearly enough happiness to make the cost in resources or area worth it. 'At least I can stack the apartments.'
He selected the apartment template then selected the race specific trait for gremlins and put a block of apartments a couple squares over from the school. 'One building can hold one hundred gremlins? I guess that makes sense when they're tiny.' He added a couple of dozen statues to pay for the apartment complex then hit build and assigned a bunch of crafters to build it.
Myst turned his attention back to expanding the platform and snacking on the slimes his mana created. 'I could get used to this.'
0o0o0
Harry jumped when the bell rang, having been too interested in Vanessa's lecture to pay attention to the clock on the wall.
"That concludes my lecture on legal obfuscation," Vanessa offered as she walked over and disabled the explosives on the door. "Of course, if you leave now, you'll miss the unofficial lecture that Ms. Quinn has volunteered to give over the break in exchange for me giving her some free legal advice."
"You charged me a dollar," Harley complained good naturedly as she headed to the front of the room, leaving the chair next to Harry vacant.
"Charging a dollar results in less paperwork and makes everything official," Vanessa replied as she pulled a pair of Groucho Mark’s glasses out of her pocket. "If anyone asks, I left to get coffee," she told the class then slipped the glasses on.
"No problem," Harley replied as she pulled a flash drive out of her bra and walked over to the computer desk.
Vanessa walked over and sat down next to Harry. "What did you think of my lecture?"
"It made sense and was interesting, which is more than I can say for most of the teachers I've had," Harry offered, trying and failing not to stare at Vanessa's over the top fake nose.
"I try, it's mostly about connecting with your students," Vanessa explained as she turned to look at Harley. "What are we going to learn today, miss teacher?"
"Homemade explosives," Harley replied as she pulled up her slide show. "Everything from having fun with stumps and pyrotechnics to making sure witnesses can't talk."
Vanessa shook her head. "Try again."
"Right, everything from blowing up stumps and disarming explosives so that unscrupulous people can't silence your testimony?" Harley asked with a smile.
"Better, continue," Vanessa told her.
Harry listened to the surprisingly detailed lecture on making and disarming explosives while they waited for the next class.
0o0o0
Myst stared as the school foundation building changed into a twisted agate tower that leaned to the left, making him think of the Leaning Tower of Pisa mixed with something out of a horror movie as the agate stones glowed with a disturbing purple light and seemed to twist when he wasn't looking directly at it. He glanced at the popup notice informing him that he'd unlocked a couple of options for his future schools, namely the School of Dark Magic and the School of Twisted Delights. "Weird."
"What did you get?" the mage asked enthusiastically.
"Not sure," Myst replied as he pulled up the options for the school. "It has ten slots for students and three for staff."
"Could be worse, you could have started with five students and one staff," the mage offered, looking forward to increasing his collection of spells. "The teachers should influence the subjects that students can take and how quickly they learn. Can you recruit magic users?"
Myst sighed when he noticed the list of possible actions the school gave him. "Sort of. I was expecting something nasty considering the curse and the fact that I used tainted mana to speed up the construction but I wasn't expecting options straight out of a dark lord's handbook."
"Oh?" the mage asked.
"The least objectionable is probably the option to recruit an underage mage from the surrounding area for fifty gold. It's also grayed out, probably because we don't have a way to get to the island. Option two, the school can sacrifice ten random townsfolk to recruit one magical student."
"Blood ritual?" the mage asked thoughtfully.
"No clue," Myst replied, wishing the system gave him more information. "It just says that drastic measures are used to awaken the student's latent magical talents and that nine random townsfolk without magic will die."
"With the exception of the crafters, do you really care?" the mage asked.
"Not really," Myst admitted as he placed another twenty platform sections to burn the mana he'd just regenerated. "I wouldn't use the option if it was risking actual people but we're using gremlins and mindless undead and we can probably talk all of the gremlins into rolling the dice so they can get magic."
"Most likely," the mage agreed as Myst devoured the slime that his spell created. "What else does it let you do?"
"You can sacrifice fifty townsfolk to summon one insane, yet useful magical teacher. Teachers and current students are immune from the lottery," Myst explained.
The mage shook his head. "That's going to be less useful as we pick up magic users and special minions."
"Absolutely," Myst agreed as he looked at the next option. "I can also spend five hundred mana to promote a magical festival that will result in every girl over sixteen that attends the festival having a one in six chance of having a pair of twins after nine days. Unfortunately using the ritual will increase unhappiness in the city as no one likes nine day pregnancies."
"That sounds like a useful way to increase the population and there are ways to counter unhappy populations," the mage pointed out.
"Especially if we use it while the population is limited to gremlins," Myst agreed, not seeing a problem with using the festival option once he had enough mana and a decent collection of magic users in the population as people didn't have to attend the festival. "The last option for recruiting teachers involves large groups of people singing and dancing to summon fae teachers."
"With the exception of sacrificing fifty random citizens to summon an insane teacher, you have some decent options. Can you expand the school?" the mage asked enthusiastically.
Myst checked the school's upgrade options. "I need to fill the teacher slots and at least half of the student slots before I can expand the school the first time."
"Can you reassign the roles?" the mage asked.
"Not sure," Myst admitted as he tapped the first teacher slot and read the description. "Yeah, I can reassign people." He tapped the first student slot. "Okay, you need at least one teacher per five students and the more teachers you have the better the students will learn or I can basically cheat and spend chunks of mana to speed up teaching. Students can learn spells from the teachers as well as skills, while teachers can do research to learn new spells or patterns for magical skills. Do you want one of the teacher's slots?"
"Yes," the mage replied without hesitation. "I want to do research on the mana scales and tainted crystals to see if I can figure out how to make proper storage crystals."
"Sounds good." Myst assigned the mage to the first teaching slot. He assigned the mouse girl and the rest of the magic users to student slots then, for the hell of it, assigned the magical rabbit to the second teaching slot. He chuckled when he read the note that popped up about the rabbit's lack of intelligence decreasing the average learning speed of the students. He looked at the rabbit's only available option for researching spells. "Huh, the rabbit might be able to create a spell for summoning a different clothing item but there's a decent chance that the spell ends up broken or cursed and it will take six months or six thousand mana per attempt."
The mage glanced back at the school. "That sounds like something to mess with when you can afford to dump a couple of thousand mana into their research every couple of hours and you don't have a bunch of projects running. You can always have someone else research his mistakes to see if they can make something useful."
"Probably," Myst replied as he pulled the rabbit out of the teacher slot. "If I had five hundred gold, I'd pay people to sing and dance so I could get a fae teacher."
"You have extra mana, recruit some gremlins," the mage suggested. "Considering the curse that warps everything you might get some decent minions."
"Or I'll get something dangerous," Myst replied as he pulled up the workshop and queued up twenty gremlins, spending the two hundred mana. 'At least all of the progress bars are filling at the same time which means I can summon twenty a minute until my mana drops back to something more reasonable.'
Myst dragged the school menu off to the left top side of his HUD then dragged the workshop menu to the top right, letting him see both menus. He pulled up his minion list and looked at the crafters. "This would be a lot easier if I had enough magic stones to convert all of the crafters I want to keep."
"Obviously, but we don't always get what we want," the mage argued.
Myst assigned the skeleton knight to one of the teacher slots then assigned the rabbit to the third, mostly because he was curious about the upgrade options. He hit the upgrade button and looked at his options. "Classrooms take fifty units of wood and a hundred units of stone. Each of the upgrades increases the maximum number of students by five."
"Does that get around the limit on one teacher per five students?" the mage asked.
"No but I can build a teacher's bedroom for fifty wood and two hundred units of stone which increases the number of teachers I can have by one. I can also build an underground arena and a magical forge."
"Is that random or does that have something to do with the fact that you taught the knight advanced blacksmithing?" the mage asked thoughtfully.
"It's probably related to the skill," Myst said as he selected the magical forge option. He tossed a bunch of shattered rabbit statues into the box for the stone, five units of iron for the anvil and a bunch of tainted crystals for the fuel then hit the button to start creating it. He wasn't particularly surprised to see the frame of the knight's portrait turn red, considering the knight's advanced blacksmithing skill. "Yeah, the knight's frame turned red when I built the forge, you'll probably become unavailable when I start building the arena."
"I'm looking forward to having an arena to practice in but we should probably wait until the knight is available considering the portal is still open," the mage admitted reluctantly.
Myst checked the arena upgrade, noticing that he needed fifty units of wood. "I should have enough wood by the time the forge is done."
"What are you planning on doing with the blue slime?" the mage asked.
"I should probably see if I can build a monster pen so I can farm tainted crystals," Myst replied as he pulled up his building menu and looked at what it would take to enclose a section of ground. "Okay, that's surprisingly easy, I just need to toss minions at it."
The mage laughed. "That's generally the best way to test anything."
Myst set up the twenty foot wall around a fifty foot square area. He assigned the sculptor to build the wall then selected the option to make the wall a class project and assigned the rest of the students to help so they'd get experience with their magic skills. "Using the students decreased the wall's possible stability, do you want to supervise?"
"No but I will," the mage complained, figuring it would be a good chance to get to know everyone even if he'd rather be working on research.
Myst assigned the mage then hit the button to start the project causing the mage to head towards the log bridge and stop when he reached it. "Problem?"
The mage turned to look at Myst. "You're going to need an actual bridge before the students get here unless you want to start losing students who can’t spontaneously develop the ability to fly or teleport."
"Good point." Myst pulled up his options for bridges and used a couple of slime statues and mana, creating a nearly invisible stone bridge that moved and twisted back and forth like a serpent, making it look like a nightmare to use. "Sorry, everything I make is tainted right now."
The mage scowled as he sent one of his skeletal minions to use the bridge, curious how far they'd get. He stared in shock when the skeleton walked across the shifting and twisting bridge without a problem. "Interesting."
Myst glanced over the notices for the unlocked features on bridges he could make now that he'd discovered them and pulled up the bridge's information. "I don't think I could make a safer bridge, you literally can't fall or get knocked off the bridge."
The mage studied the bridge that seemed to fade in and out of view when it wasn't twisting and moving around. "It certainly looks dangerous."
"That's probably the point," Myst admitted as he watched the mouse girl dart across the stone bridge without a problem. "The log is a death trap that looks reasonably safe and the stone bridge looks like a death trap and is completely safe."
"I'm not sure the log looks safe but it certainly looks safer than the bridge," the mage admitted as he stepped onto the bridge, finding it surprisingly stable considering the far end shifted with the platform that was floating up and down. "Let me know when the knight finishes the forge."
"Sure." Myst turned his attention to his new gremlins and gremlin-like creatures as the mage crossed the bridge, noticing that some of the minions were named. 'Jack the Stripper? Giggles? Duchess of Death? Honey?'
He queued up another twenty gremlins and devoured the slime then pulled up Jack's sheet. 'This warped gremlin expresses his insanity by stealing clothes from females, causing unhappiness in his victims and resulting in his victims eventually becoming violent nudists if their unhappiness reaches a critical level. Yeah, if he didn't have magic and Advanced Thievery I'd probably kill him for being a pain in the ass.'
Myst looked at Giggle's sheet. 'Demented gremlin that delights in skinning people, generates a 'free' stack of leather every week, unfortunately you also lose a random civilian every week. Yeah, fuck that. I don't care if he has advanced skinning and leatherworking,' he assigned the demented gremlin to start training the other magic using gremlins, hoping his insanity wasn't contagious.
'Duchess of Death, necromancer?' Myst mused as he pulled up her sheet, a touch surprised to see a female gremlin in a mud stained dress. 'This gremlin is obsessed with plants and growing things to the point where she doesn't care about causing chaos or pranks, unfortunately her innate death magic is hard on non-magical plants, causing them to wither and die if they're around her too long despite her advanced skills with farming and herbalism. We'll just have to find some magical plants or find something to suppress her death aura.'
Myst replaced the rabbit with the Duchess then checked the school's upgrade options to see if swapping teachers changed anything. 'Magical Solarium? Yeah, apparently the rabbit is basically worthless as a teacher, not surprising considering it's basically a pet. I need dirt, seeds, glass and stones or wood depending on what I want the walls out of. I should be able to get dirt from the dungeon once the crafters have finished cleaning up the trash piles which means I just need to find some seeds.'
He closed the rest of the minion sheets and looked at Honey's character sheet, not sure what to expect. 'This twisted gremlin is cheerful, dislikes pranking people and loves building beehives. I should probably teach her woodworking or carpentry if she's going to make beehives but maybe tinkering covers it?'
'Screw it, I'll worry about it later,' Myst mused as he assigned her to the school. 'You've got life magic, maybe you can pick up some spells while I finish things.' He glanced through the rest of the gremlins and assigned the three nameless gremlins with magic to the school as students, filling it up. 'Okay, five points of magic and one affinity, nothing particularly impressive but they've got magic.'
Myst queued up another twenty gremlins and devoured the slime spending the mana created then pulled up the housing information, curious how many times he could stack the apartments before he ran into problems.
0o0o0
Harry glanced at the clock when the bell rang, wondering if it was running slow because Harley had managed to cram an impressive amount of information into ten minutes. "Now what?"
"Any last words?" Vanessa asked as she pulled her fake glasses off.
"Can you fuck me before you pull the switch?" Harley asked with a leer.
Vanessa shook her head. "I meant about the lecture, not your actual last words."
"Oh right. No, I think I covered everything," Harley replied as she headed back over to her seat. "What did you think?"
"If that lecture was for my law class, I'd have to give you a B+ on presentation and a C- for failing to adjust the questable legality of the entire lecture," Vanessa said thoughtfully.
"Presentation?" Harley asked, agreeing with the C- part of things.
"Your shirt isn't tucked in, if you're going to be casually sloppy, you need to undo a couple of buttons on your blouse. If you're trying to be professional, you should have at least one more buttoned and your shirt should be tucked into your skirt," Vanessa suggested.
Harley reached up and unbuttoned another button. "Like that?"
"Better," Vanessa agreed. "As everyone should be aware, but I'll repeat for our guest, welcome to my Sex Education class. I still need permission slips from Barbara, Ivy, and Kara before you can take advantage of our guest."
"Permission slips?" Harry asked, wondering what he'd gotten himself into.
"The school charter requires signed consent forms for any sort of interaction with outside help," Vanessa explained as two redheads and a blonde walked up to the front of the room with sheets of paper. "Can you grab the Education Paddle from my desk while I file everything?" she asked Harry as she walked over to the filing cabinet by the door to the resource closet.
"Sure," Harry replied as he grabbed the wooden paddle from Vanessa's desk that someone had written 'Board of Education!' in large block letters, hoping that she wasn't planning on using the board on him.
Vanessa looked over the group and stopped on the girl that had cursed last class. "Ms. Black, you 'forgot' to put money in the swear jaw last class, please come up to the front of the room. We can start with a refresher course on spanking safety and how you're supposed to avoid the spine."
"Blast," the curvy dark haired girl 'complained', not even bothering to hide the smile on her face as she hurried over to the front desk, placed one hand on the desk and pulled her skirt up, giving everyone a nice view of her bottom and what she wasn’t wearing.
Vanessa smiled as she collected the paddle from Harry and walked over to where Ms. Black was standing. "Hmm, this is a bit of a safety hazard, both hands on the desk. Ms. Granger, can you hold her skirt up for me, I'd hate to have her get hurt because she didn't have both hands on the table."
"Of course," the bushy haired girl ran over, stepped to the side so that she wasn't going to block the teacher's swing and pulled Bella's skirt up.
'That looks like Hermione, can't be though since she didn't recognize me,' Harry mused as he watched the scene, glad that his pants were on the baggie side.
"The trick is you need a good solid hit without hitting her spine, but you don't want to hit her so hard you cause serious injury," Vanessa explains then uses the paddle to give Bella a swat. "Are you going to watch your language miss?"
"Yes," Bella replied with a giggle.
"Are you lying?" Vanessa asked.
"Yes," Bella admitted. "Shit!" she blurted out when the teacher hit her a lot harder than the first time without any warning.
"We're going to have to do something about that mouth," Vanessa said then gave Bella three more swats, making sure the lesson sunk in. "Are you going to keep lying?"
"Not today," Bella replied quickly.
"Do you want someone to kiss it better?" Vanessa asked with amusement.
"Yes!" Bella squealed as she wiggled her behind.
Vanessa smiled at Harry, who almost looked like he was going to volunteer then focused on her other assistant. "Granger kiss it better then she can sit on the table and you can show Mr. Potter how to tongue fuck a girl while I explain the biology of pleasure and pain. If you do a good job, you can be the first on the list for getting fucked by Mr. Potter."
"Yes!" Ms. Granger squealed, then bent down and kissed the red marks that were already starting to appear on Bella's behind.
'Best teacher ever,' Harry thought as he watched the show.
