"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

As it happened, Aven had missed quite a bit. Catching the sardonic fairy up to the current moment took the rest of the afternoon. Some of it was pretty standard (the second dungeon inspection), some of it was anticipated (the goblins' return), but the parts that really drew Aven's focus were the less usual bits (mostly the Redcrests, but the airmage to a lesser extent, as well as the gnomish city and the progress to my main quest line).

**So, is it just a set of kind impulses that are pushing you into this? Or do you have some sort of secret goal in mind for these long-term visitors? Don't get me wrong – I can appreciate you wanting to come off as welcoming and helpful, but it's not really the standard dungeon approach. I'd assume your instincts will start suggesting you devour people once they let their guard down – so be careful with that. You could string them along for a few weeks and probably kill almost everyone in their sleep – especially if they take you up on using up all their mana before bedtime.**

Aven wasn't wrong. My instincts did seem to push me in darker directions, though a steady mana flow and attention to my mana pool ameliorated most of that. I considered that option, darkly, for just a moment, then dismissed it.

**Nah. There's not much of an upside there for me, really. Sure, I'd get a short-term boost, but I'd lose favorability with the Guild, I can't trust the dragon wouldn't see it as me breaking her promise they could stay, and if I didn't get all the Redcrests at once, I'd just be making enemies. I'm also not sure that their prophecy isn't tied to my own main quest lines, yet. I could see the deities cooperating in that way. Otherwise, it's a lot of strange visitors in short order to be a pure coincidence. More to the point, that unreasoned violence is not me, and I don't want it to BE me. I'm afraid being sapient and living with my actions is going to require me to fight my dungeon instincts, at least on some things.**

Aven just nodded. I got the sense that the little dungeon fairy didn't really share my ethical concerns, but the practical ones made sense. **Well, it's good to have these ethical considerations laid out in advance. Trying to make these decisions when faced with your hungers and a tempting opportunity could easily lead to regrets – and payback.**

From there, we turned to more practical, everyday considerations, and I asked his opinion about my theme and my plans for Hakdrilda and the Redcrests.

Aven didn't see much issue with my basic plans (which is as far as I'd gotten, really), aside from the fact that it would take away from my efforts to expand the dungeon and pursue my quests. Those were significant concerns, but simply having residents would help with overall growth, and they could possibly be enticed to assist with some of my quests – at least potentially.

**It's really too early to tell, Vay. Once the Redcrests arrive, you'll get a better sense as to whether they might be helpful for advancing your quests or not. You wouldn't be the first dungeon used for training and crafting purposes; that's not all that unusual, though divinely placed dungeons tend to be more specific in their training functions, and regular dungeons don't typically have the ability to work with experts to design those functions. You'd be a real draw if you were more accessible.**

That was good to hear, and it led me to a question I'd wanted to ask for a while. **What are the chances that I'll eventually get the capability to make myself more accessible? Are teleportation gates a possibility? Or some sort of shuttle service?**

Aven snorted, a bit derisively. **Not anytime soon, at any rate. Teleportation magic is a huge energy drain, especially over longer distances, and there are additional complications that come with the movement of the sky island. Not to mention that dragons are reported to hate teleportation near their home locations – you'd want permission, and I wouldn't even raise the subject until you have both made it a practical possibility and you've improved your relationship with your big lady friend at the top of the mountain...

A shuttle service might be more logistically feasible, but unless you wanted to subsidize the cost of it, as well as getting permission from the dragon and whatever city you're shuttling people from, it's not likely to be a practical option for a good while yet.**

Another poorly considered dream, shattered. Ah, well. Who knows? Maybe the main quest line will involve me getting to pilot the whole island around. I can only imagine the various polities' reaction to that! Here comes the massive flying island dungeon for a visit! That seems like it would provoke violence from somebody – May, if nobody else...

Aven interrupted my musings to return the focus to my theme. **I like how the second floor came out, though it's kind of pushing you towards skeletons, and I know you weren't comfortable with that. Is that going to be an issue for you, moving forward? Especially as you get deeper and need stronger monsters? You'll get a difficult reputation if you start leaning into stronger forms of the undead?**

I hadn't really considered that, but Aven had a point. **Yeah, I'm not sure how I'll proceed exactly. I suspect I'll switch over to something less directly representational of the past inhabitants. I'll keep the archaeological theme, but maybe shift more towards abandoned ruins filled with air-themed monsters? Keep the scenery and the loot topical, if I can, and switch up the monsters. It's not ideal, but you're right – I really don't want to start focusing on stronger undead types. On that note, I've been asking people for advice on that gnomish city. How do YOU think I should approach that? I think I'm leaning towards making a scaled-up version to keep it accessible. I've had literally no visitors who'd fit in the actual city, unless you want to count the ground squirrels, and shrinking the adventurers seems to be impractical for a variety of reasons.**

Aven smirked, briefly. **Yeah, funny as that might be, not many people would willingly delve a dungeon that strips them of their gear. I tend to agree that scaling up is likely your best choice, though you could leave some outlying areas of the floor small in order to give the right impression. Maybe throw in some visual representation to suggest they're being shrunk – even though they aren't? Might need illusion magic for that one, though. And you'd ideally want giant forms of smaller animals to sell the theme – giant centipedes and bats or the like. Just do the best you can, I guess, but keep it functional for standard-sized adventurers would be my advice.**

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Some good ideas in there, but a worry for another time, at the moment. I don't have the skills or the blueprints I'd need to pull that off even moderately convincingly – though I suppose I could work with some optical illusions. Start them off with some blinding visual effects to mimic magic, then leave them in a giant-scaled room, then move into a normal sized room with gnomish themes. Could work, I guess, if a bit crudely; possibly once I had a chance to experiment with runic magic, I'd be able to come up with something more polished.

Aven decided this would be a good moment to reset the books on his dungeon fairy quest.

Quest Reissued: Complete 7 Quests and Begin Fourth Floor; Reward: 2 Tier 3 Creature Blueprints and 1 Magic Item Blueprint

**I'll try to focus on adding more air-affinitied blueprints for you – no guarantees, though. Depends what you've already got and what I can find to offer you... It gets harder to stay on theme as the rewards get bigger.**

It seemed fairly clear that Aven wasn't really planning to stick around this time. He could tell that I was busy, and while the existence of dungeon fairies wasn't exactly a secret, it wasn't something to be advertised either.

**The dungeon priests would have been okay; we work with them pretty closely at times, both serving the God of All Dungeons. But the Avians and the dwarf don't really have any need to know about me; we appreciate your restraint in discussing us, generally. We've had a variety of attempts by adventurers to exploit our existence at various points, so now we mostly try to stay invisible to regular adventurers. And you're doing just fine. It looks like you're starting to make real progress, even if it's in a completely abnormal way; that means you don't really need my advice or direction. Just keep on doing what you're doing, and that emergency contact offer still stands.**

The tiny fairy grinned with its shark-like teeth, faded to practical invisibility, locked down its aura, and flitted off. I could just barely tell, by maintaining rigid focus, that it took a quick tour of the new areas – including the Redcrest area and the gnomish city – before winking out of existence (or at least, out of the range of my senses).

It was past dinner time, by that point, and both Hakdrilda and the Redcrests were doing their own things. Hakdrilda was trying to prioritize her experiments and assessing which ones she could do without my active participation and attention. The Redcrests were mostly clustered around a central fire pit, discussing the events of the day and deciding how to divide up the work for the dragon. A few of them were also tossing around ideas for possible training areas; it seemed like I might need to encourage them to think a bit bigger, but I'd wait for their formal proposal in the morning. I'd have to start small in any event.

Leaving them to their varied deliberations, I set to work on constructing a test chamber for Hakdrilda. She'd given me her blueprint, so I could do the basic construction aspects of it fairly easily. Clearing a space adjacent to her room was simple enough, and I could do it silently without even physically connecting it just yet. I'd left space for an antechamber, but most of the time spent early on was on painstakingly smoothing the granite walls of the test chamber to a high gloss; the cheating nature of my matter conversion skill enabled me to achieve tolerances that would have been essentially impossible in my old world. It didn't seem like she intended any large-scale test objects, so the space really wasn't that big – taking the basic form of a 1 meter X 1 meter X 3 meter rectangular space with heavily reinforced walls. There were carefully sized fittings also to be created that would allow for anemometers, pitot tubes, tracer gas supply, as well as things like temperature and pressure gauges. I couldn't easily produce any of those things, but it seemed likely that she was going to provide examples of all of those things eventually. There was no door yet, much less any kind of viewports, but I assumed she planned for me to add them later. That would likely take some time and experimentation on my part. I suspected that I would be able to manage temperature and pressure directly as part of my domain, but I wasn't entirely sure how that would work. Something else I'd need to practice, I guess.

Having done as much of that as I could without further discussions with Hakdrilda, I spent some time building an antechamber/dedicated workspace between the test chamber and her main living/working area. It was mostly quite simple – some appropriately sized lab tables arranged along the walls not bordering on the test chamber along with some stools and cabinet space above and below the lab tables.

As a final step, I added a thick, highly polished oak door between her main room and the antechamber, complete with a heavy bar to lock the room down. She was long asleep by this point, so the door would presumably be a nice surprise for her when she awoke.

I spent a while reading about divine dungeons and air affinity dungeons, with a particular focus on the three dungeons that fit both categories. It was quite interesting, though it didn't offer any concrete benefit beyond a couple of points of lore, and some sense of the range of both types. The relevant works were a bit limited, focusing largely on the scale and contents of the dungeons – and in the divine dungeons' case, their associated deities and primary functions (where known). From the air affinity dungeons, mostly I got a sense of the range of creatures that typically were found – covering a broad range of flying creatures as well as elementals and other typically insubstantial or intangible beings. The divine dungeons seemed to mostly fall into a few categories – ones there to help train devotees of the deity (often clerics and paladins, but occasionally crafters, depending on the deity), ones placed to address a specific problem (most commonly a blighted area that the deity bears some responsibility for), and ones that serve as rites of passage for the relevant religion (mostly among orcs and other tribal peoples). There were a number of dungeons with more idiosyncratic missions and ones where no obvious purpose was established, and it may be that I fell into that category. My sense was that I fell in the problem-solving category, though I wasn't yet sure what problem that was going to be.

I pondered that for a while, but once the Redcrests began stirring, I decided to check in with them to see how they were settling in. I wasn't sure if any of them were going to head back to the main tribe, but it seemed like Lukash and two others were headed back to guide the main group while the elders and leaders remained to hold down the fort, so to speak. The younger ones departed shortly after breakfast, and I spent the rest of the morning speaking with Glynesha and Orentha and getting some preliminary concept sketches for their training areas. It looked like they wanted mostly to focus on air magic, flight agility and precision, and archery on the one hand, and a variety of crafting areas on the other hand – most notably smithing and leatherworking, but also alchemy and featherworking. I assumed they might branch out later, but that seemed like a reasonable summary of their primary talent pools.

From what I could gather, it seemed like many of those spaces were intended to be placed on the surface – notably the flight course as well as the smithing and leatherworking areas for practical reasons. The archery and magic training areas were anticipated to be offshoots of the main living area below ground as were the alchemy and featherworking areas, where control over ambient conditions were more important.

I didn't actually start building any of them yet, but I did ask them to prioritize which areas they wanted built first.

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