"It doesn't take much to convince yourself that you're doing okay, just some discretionary income and a regularity to your days." ― Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

Having decided on at least a loose kind of schedule, I set about trying to stick to it – at least mostly. It still being pretty early in the morning, I took a couple of hours to add a few more books to the archives; I figured that I might as well start by finishing off the classic Lord of the Rings trilogy, so with that time I transcribed The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I was getting faster, but it still took a while to get through those, and I only made it through about half of The Hobbit. I figured I could finish that in my next session and maybe throw in the Silmarillion to boot. I'd only made it through a few of the various other posthumously assembled works, so I wasn't sure if I'd bother with those.

Realistically, I should probably go back to transcribing non-fiction works to cover more scholarly endeavors, but that could wait until I started to get some actual requests from patrons of the archives. Until then, I'd just give them what I enjoyed, and the things I wanted to have handy. The spectral librarian worked well to transmit those to the archives and to shelve them according to my preferences, though I felt a bit bad for the librarian to have only about 50 books to work with. Maybe I'd work through some cookbooks next; those might be of interest, and I'd indicated to Janelle that I might do so. Maybe a nice Thai one or something old school and European...

That was a project for another day, though, and I spent my last half hour or so in the library doing a preliminary search for texts on fungalmancy. I figured that. as a keyword, it was pretty specific and fairly narrow, so it might give me some pretty helpful results. I was guessing "runic magic" was likely to give me way too much to make great headway. I'd ask Hakdrilda for recommendations first. Going back over my own memory, I'd never read a book that addressed fungalmancy, and I could only recall a few passing mentions from overhearing players of a big MMORPG that I'd never played myself. I didn't get the sense that they were particularly significant in the game, either.

I could access at least one more book on the reader this week, so I tried to assess the titles returned by that search. There were only four that actually had the term in their titles: Trollish Fungalmancy, Fungalmancy in the UnderDark, Druidic Fungalmancy, and Hen'rik's Grimoire of Fungalmancy. They all sounded interesting and potentially useful, though obviously nothing directly related to the fungalmancy of void dwarves on sky islands. That was likely too much to hope for. I opted for the grimoire, figuring that almost certainly would include some specific spells that might provide more directly useful information. The others sounded more like academic overviews of a broad topic. They might include useful specifics, but they might not. Sadly, there was no preview function or even an accessible table of contents, so I was taking a shot in the dark, basically.

I didn't have the time in my schedule to read through it entirely (though I was expecting to come back to it sometime in the evening), but the introductory text seemed to indicate that Hen'rik had been a professor at a university in a dwarven academy in Itand about 700 years ago. I was getting the sense that fungalmancy was pretty obscure, and not very popular even in subterranean civilizations. Still, it also suggested that it was more useful than was commonly recognized (though that has always seemed to be the opinion of practitioners of any ignored or arcane discipline).

At this stage, we were moving fully into daylight hours, so I decided to check in with the Redcrests to let them know I was trying to move to a more defined schedule. Glynesha and Orentha were together, as they often seemed to be during the early morning hours; it seemed not to be anything formally planned, but a habit they'd adopted to discuss the schedule of the day and any issues that had arisen. Kragosh sometimes joined them but typically rose earlier to check in with the warriors manning the watch posts before heading to the practice grounds. He seemed to prefer to get a couple of hours work in on his own martial expertise before teaching the younger warriors and even children in a series of classes.

All that aside, the matriarch and her shaman seemed pleased enough to chat with me while they finished their breakfast and had some tea. There was still some grumbling about the loss of their old home, apparently, but distance from the mountains seemed to push it to the back of most of the Redcrests' minds. There was also still some nervousness about actively dwelling in a dungeon, but the youngsters had largely gotten accustomed to the feel of my domain, and the limited interaction I'd had with the majority of the avians seemed to calm most of the rest. There were still a few holdouts – mostly among the cynical elders and some of the most traumatized warriors. Even so, they seemed mostly content to wait for the other shoe to drop, rather than taking any sort of more proactive approach. Odd as it seemed, being able to point to the ways I required them to benefit me helped them stop looking for more cynical motives for my cooperation.

"So, you were thinking you'd try to set up more formal meeting times – mostly just to check in – if nothing else requires more significant attention?" Glynesha asked, mostly looking at Orentha as she awaited the passing of a response.

**That was my thought, at least. I've begun a number of other projects, so I'm feeling the lack of a more formal schedule fairly keenly. If you need my attention, you are always welcome to call for me until I notice, but otherwise, I expect I'll just drop in on you two at breakfast for a few words a couple of times a week. That sound reasonable?**

The two avians shared a glance, and Glynesha shrugged her acceptance. "Sure. I appreciate the notice, but frankly, you can drop by whenever you feel the need. We're settling in fairly well at the moment, and while there are still some kinks to work out and some routines to develop more efficiently, it's not really anything that requires your intervention. I AM a bit curious about your projects, but you're hardly obligated to share."

**Ah, well, they're all over the place really. On the one hand, I've been working on a divine quest that has involved some odd expansions in the underground. I can't share too much about that yet, but it would be years, most likely, before my success or failure impacts your settlement. I will, of course, let you know, if that changes. On the other hand, I need to work on both expanding into a true third floor and smoothing out the edges of my currently kind of patchy domain. That's pretty much all subterranean work, though. I'm working sporadically with Hakdrilda on her research into airflow in dungeons. I'm also doing some research myself into several varieties of magic – I don't suppose any of you know much about runic magic or fungalmancy?**

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Orentha looked briefly confused while sharing my comments with Glynesha. "Fungalmancy? Magic with mushrooms? No, that's a new one on me. Runic magic we're at least familiar with, but it's not something we really use. Our magic leans more towards what you'd probably consider spiritual magic, where we interact with the spirits around us to achieve magical effects. Mostly that just requires that you be able to communicate with them and build a rapport with the local spirit population."

**Oh, that's interesting. What kinds of spirits are you finding here?** I inquired about the spirits, as either I was missing them in my mana sight somehow, or something else was going on.

Orentha hesitated a moment before answering. "Ah, well not much of anything in your domain specifically – they seem not to care for the degree of control you possess over things here. But outside of your domain we're mostly encountering the kinds of spirits you'd expect – air, earth, and water are all here, as well as a variety of nature spirits. Once we've contracted with them they'll come into the dungeon, but we mostly only do that when it's necessary since they seem uncomfortable and generally less effective."

**Oh. I didn't realize. I'm not sure there's a lot I can do about it though. Do you know anything I can do to make the spirits more comfortable?**

Orentha seemed actively baffled by my interest. "Um. No?" She shrugged, "Unless you can release the mana flows here to a more natural state, but I think that would mean releasing your domain, and frankly, we'd rather have access to you than to simply make the spirits more comfortable. At least most of us..."

I kind of left the conversation on that uncomfortable note, opting to move on to work with Hakdrilda for a while. As I expected, she was generally a fan of the new, dedicated schedule, though I had to talk her down from trying to expand her hours of access to my attention and caution her that there would likely still be instances where I couldn't come.

For today's round of experiments, she asked me to work with an anemometer in the test chamber, working to determine how fast I could move air through the chamber. A series of experiments revealed that it depended significantly on several factors – the first of which being the absolute volume of air being moved. I could generate a breeze in a purely mechanical way by creating air at one end of the chamber and removing it from the other, creating something of a vacuum that would draw air from place to place. That wasn't a particularly mana efficient mode, and we found that I could also use some simple runic magic to provide movement. I had learned the requisite runes from the books Hakdrilda had provided and through absorption of some of her simpler testing devices. Interestingly, some pushed air, some pulled it, and yet others compressed it into narrower, higher velocity streams. In the least efficient version, I briefly spawned in a minor air elemental and had it move the air for me; that was too much of a strain on my mana pool though, so after a few minutes of testing I reabsorbed it.

Hakdrilda gave her assessment tersely. "Direct control over the creation and destruction of air was kind of a brute force approach, but gave you flexible, immediate control. Runic magic reduced the overall mana cost and improved efficiency and stability but took longer to set up and a higher initial investment. The air elemental was a bit of a surprise, but clearly had a much higher mana cost to create and to maintain, and it was, frankly, wasted in simply generating a breeze within the test chamber. Save that for when you really need to control the movement of air on a grander scale or when you can't attend to it yourself.

I begged off not long after the air elemental tests, as I was starting to feel the strain on my mana pool. I noticed that as my current reserves dropped, my urge to cave to some more violent dungeon tendencies came forward; while I didn't say anything to Hakdrilda, it was still concerning.

From there, I decided to work on some more basic, meditative exercises – in this case working to better integrate some of the odd extensions I'd made in the pursuit of my divine quest. I started by simply working to slowly claim surface territory on my southern edge between the cliff face and the extension I'd driven towards the mana gathering array. I'd need to work on the subterranean aspects in a while as well, but smoothing out the southern edge into something at least nominally contiguous, if not actually symmetrical, was soothing to my dungeon instincts. It hadn't seemed to disrupt the Redcrests the last time around, and the hunters still hadn't reverted to using the southern edge of the dungeon, so I didn't bother with notifying them. I picked up a few more plant species, mostly hardy, wind adapted species which could deal with the thinner soils near the cliff. Most interestingly, for me at least, I happened on a small mixed colony of cliff nesting birds. I didn't absorb the whole colony, but I did extend far enough to secure samples from at least the three dominant species.

Blueprint Acquired: Sky Island Swiftlet

Blueprint Acquired: Great Black Masked Swift

Blueprint Acquired: Crevice Swallow

These were all simple Tier 1 birds, but rather enjoyable to watch, and I took 10 minutes or so out of my day to watch them wheel acrobatically along the cliff face and out over the grasslands sweeping up insects from the air before funneling their way back to their nests and awaiting offspring. It was getting late enough in the year that the few active nests likely constituted at least the second clutch of the season, and the wheeling ball of active insectivores looked to me as though they were beginning to stage to migrate. That said, the magic of the sky island seemed as though it was going to mitigate any real seasonal shift in environmental conditions so perhaps they were full time residents. To begin with, the island seemed to slowly orbit the world at a fairly low latitude, so any seasonality would likely be mild in any event, and the magic that maintained livable conditions at this elevation likely mitigated it farther.

If anything, it seemed more likely that birds would migrate TO the sky island from points north around this time of year. It was possible that I'd see an influx of new species over the next month or two, though that was just a guess. The elevation of the island might prevent that, though, as most birds in my old world migrated at elevations of 3 km or less. There were lots of exceptions, though, so it remained to be seen. The bottom of the island got down near that level, but I was about 2 km higher than that.

Having smoothed out my border a bit (it was still going to take a few days just to tidy up the southern edge of my surface domain) and regained a good chunk of my expended mana, my mood had largely recovered.

As night fell, I settled back into my library and focused my attention first on Hen'rik's Grimoire of Fungalmancy. The grimoire was fairly interesting, if not immediately useful, as most of the magic arrays it laid out both required some species of mushrooms that I didn't yet possess blueprints for and enabled spells I had no particular interest in. While I could see the utility of having a mushroom ring that made those who passed through it both more durable and less discernible in subterranean conditions, I had no real need to cast what amounted to a version of barkskin that gave off a more fungal appearance. I did, at least, get both a sense of how the circles functioned and a few ideas for their use in a dungeon. It was entirely possible, if I could secure the correct fungal blueprints, that I could make a fungal array that would shrink adventurers down to gnome size, though it still wouldn't address the issue of their gear.

Fungalmancy was surprisingly complex, as the grimoire's spells involved not just the fruiting bodies of the fungus, but also their mycelium and their spores. A truly subtle fungalmancer had the ability to cast broad area of effect spells, given some time to prepare, as well as a range of traps with varying effects – mostly in the poisonous category, but also ones that impaired mental function in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, mana manipulation, and sensory processing. Those would be handy but likely didn't address the functions of the mana gathering array very directly.

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