Now that I’d slept and eaten it was time to start doing things. I needed stuff.But what did I have, exactly? Better do a quick inventory.I didn’t have a help screen, or a catalog, exactly, but I now knew the patterns to lots of stuff. Like coridors. I knew the patterns to lots of different tunnels. Between what I’d gotten in the doctor’s office and here I could make all kinds.Some of the corridors in the halls of Mt Justice were perfectly straight with heat damage along the rock from lasers, laser eyeball damage from superman. Some of the corridors looked like someone had taken a big old fist and pushed it through the rock like he was a kid in a sandbox. I could count the knuckles and thumb impression in the walls. Wouldn’t it be funny if I ran a pattern search on the thumb print and came up with Steward Lantern?I went to summon a bit of paper to write on to start cataloging some of the stuff I knew and then got stumped . . . I knew over two hundred different kinds of paper . . . ? Where? Oh! Eew! Wrappers. Wrappers stuck in the cracks in the walls! Flash, you junk food eater! Don’t you know what a trashcan is?The sewer! Oh, god! I mean, Oh My God! The sewer had been pumped out but there was still stuff on the walls and some people don’t know how to chew their foods! I didn’t need to know that!Thank fuck that my ability to absorb things doesn’t include taste or smell. It’s just information, like a molecular analysis.I mean if I tried I could probably sort the information through my human senses . . . NO! No, no. And hell no! Staying the hell away from that! Full stop. End of inquiry!Calm down Norman. This isn’t the internet where people do disgusting things just because. It’s just a thing. It’s just unprocessed soil. It’s a perfectly normal thing and you do it every day and millions of people are employed in disgusting jobs every day. It’s just a thing. No more, no less. Yeah. I’ll absorb the sewer – Ew! The images keep coming to my mind anyway! – and make it disappear and then I’ll take what I know from it and see if I can’t lock it behind a door in my mind where it’ll never bother me.And I’ll never tell anybody about this.Speaking of, I found a batarang between two cracks twenty feet down in one of the many tunnels that seemed to loop around and not go anywhere. Drop something?I knew dozens of pens. I knew . . . all kinds of paper. Office supplies. Lots of things.I knew electronics too. Those were the first things I absorbed. All those circuit boards controlling and redirecting the electricity in the walls.Starting with a very generic bit of paper, thank you, and a normal pen, thank you, I started drawing with circles and numbers and letters for chips and arrow on the lines for direction of power flow. Power goes here, sensors here, clock, action, and done. Wow that was fast. My hand cramped. I was no architect to be making blueprints but I was pretty sure that if I handed this over to someone they could make the thing using standardized parts.Well it was more standardized now. Some of the chips were better for some things than others. The ones in the camera were better than the ones in the coffee maker. And so on.I knew over two thousand ways to put a circuit board together.I’m pretty sure that I just recreated in electronic form the trap I’d made. Now, does this mean that by absorbing electronics I could make better traps, or the other way around?To the side I made a door and recreated a few of the electronic things I’d absorbed. Sensors there, door mechanism there. I approached the door. The door buzzed, the light went on, the door opened, and after a few seconds it closed.I made a dozen more doors each with a different sensor. Heat, light, weight, motion, sound and voice activated, keypad too. I walked up to them and past them and one by one they buzzed, dinged, set off an alarm or unlocked themselves, depending.Huh. This is pretty goddamn impressive.And this was just from absorbing the walls and the stuff attached to the walls. I wonder what I'll find when I really start going through everything?But, getting back to other things.I summoned some plastics and rubber from my subspace storage, mostly the junk from outside, and broke it down to hydrocarbons to fill up the tanks and fed it to the generators. Normally I wouldn’t do this but they’re Batman-approved super-ultra-apocalypse proofed eat-anything including the crap at the bottom of a greasy fryer for fuel TM.I don’t really care how Bruce Wayne got the funding for this kind of thing but I’m glad he did, but from what little I looked up in the library it seems as if Luthor had a small monopoly on Army and Government contracts when it comes to steel plants, so he’d gone the other way with his oil wells.The generators were ceramic and composite right down to the nuts and bolts. There was maybe a handful of change’s worth of metal in the whole lash up and that was in the computer chip, i.e. one chip, that controlled the firing and ignition sequence. The spark plugs for the startup motor were quartz crystals, which pressurizes a hydraulic tank to get the big boys moving from a cold start. The diesel generator’s glow plugs didn’t even use electricity but a kinda magnetic induction from moving parts. Timing was taken care of by the niftiest quartz clock you ever did see. All the moving parts ran on camshafts and pulleys. And since they're plastic they're pretty slick already, didn't need oil and could run hotter with just an ordinary double-walled chamber to cool the engine and preheat the fuel.It couldn’t run forever but by god could it recycle its own emissions!It was time to create minions and start killing things. Dungeon Born Creatures.The cat was still ugly, unhealthy, broken and pissed off. I really had no better reason for having it other than to provide myself with a predator. I created a trap with a timing mechanism for a falling rock. I placed the cat’s box in the middle of the room and then got out of the way. Down came the rock and out came the life force!Eat em up yum! Now I had the pattern of a predator!I had a pattern for a broken animal that I wanted to make better. I tried to bring its pattern up inside my mind. Then I started looking it over for imperfections I could alter. It seemed to work too. Removing disease, fixing the bones, muscles, organs, eyes, ears and so forth. Thus I had a nice new cat pattern ready to go. I gathered up a spec of essence and infused it with a drop of life force. Then I imprinted the pattern and cast it onto the floor in front of me.The Dungeon Born Creature, or DBC, took root in that spot and started absorbing the essence from the air immediately. It also pulled in materials from my storage dimension for all the elements needed to make a working body. Unlike the plants which started out as a speck of a seed and grew using the soil it was planted in, this cat needed all the materials to make a fully grown-up body and it needed them right then and right now. Just like when I made my venison steak for breakfast.The result flashed into existence!A nice grey tabby with a white belly and chin and a white sock on his left front paw and green eyes.This was really cool. It was a living, breathing animal. Given enough time and food and it could survive outside my dungeon as a semi-living thing. Flesh would come and it would be a ‘real’ cat and it could breed with real cats and have babies. Shouldn't take long at all either. It was still just a magical construct thou. Like a homunculus.Also unlike the former animal this one came right on over and became one cuddly kitty with moans for scratches.“Such a cute, fluffy ham. Who’s a good boy? You are!”It purred and meowed some more. So fluffy!If it wasn’t for the connection I felt connecting him to my Dungeon I would never have known he wasn’t a normal animal. He was atomically perfectly the same as the animal I’d killed. Same genes. But without the horrible life-altering injuries. And I could make as many of them as I wanted so long as I had enough life force and essence.I could infuse my Dungeon essence into the creatures and mutate them. Or I could splice them with other creatures like an app breeding game of fantastical creatures like a Bumblelion . But that was for later. One step at a time and all that.Concentrating on the stone, just under the soil I had no control over, I started to shape it. It was time to create some special tunnels. Not the ones the heroes used to get into the halls of Mount Justice. These were to be the beginning of my Dungeon which would start outside of where the heroes had their hallways and rooms.A tube of rock just big enough for a child to crawl into. Dozens of them all over the face of the mountain. They would all connect to a long curving condor that circled a quarter way around the mountain. There were also a few spots where roots were allowed to penetrate into the cavern. At the end of the corridor was a room. It was warm and there was food. The room had holes in the walls and levels. I’d modeled these off a cat’s apartment I’d once saw online.This was my first dungeon and it was to be my cat’s home. When animals made their way inside it would be my cat’s job to kill them inside the mini-Dungeon, feeding me life force with every snapped neck. There were even side tunnels that were too small for the cat to get into so the rodents would have a good sporting chance. But there wouldn’t be any way for the animals to get into the mountain.Thereafter I had to set up a special hallway for humans to walk through. Built into a recessed shelf along the hallway was a special highway just for my cat to walk so he wouldn’t get underfoot. There would be special cat doors in the walls that would allow him to get from one room to another. These would also protect him from bigger predators as well when he wanted to get around and I had more creatures. The cat doors and such would also have sensors on them to not allow other things to pass through.After holding onto my cat, walking around and showing him everything there was, how to open the doors along the floor, walls, and ceiling, and taking him to his special Boss Cat room, the cat licked my nose.“Ah, but you are so grateful, and I am absent minded!” I announced as I put him down on one shelf. The shelves were made of wood with scratching posts and covered in rabbit fur, so it was as happy as a cat could be. I next summoned a pair of stone bowls. One that continuously drained and refilled itself with water. In the other I placed a single bit of fish. My cat jumped from its bed and started eating its own breakfast. “I have forgotten to give you a name. I’ll call you Felidae . When you’re done with that try to go into town and attract a few other cats to come join you here, why don’t ya? Make sure you kill all the vermin in the Dungeon and sharpen those claws.” I gave him one nice long pet along the spine and tail and then left him to it, closing the doors behind me.Returning to the Dungeon Core room I concentrated on expanding the room as far as I was able. The Dungeon Core didn’t move but the floor sunk down several feet and what was once was level with the ground now rested contentedly on a pedestal of white stone, glowing contentedly in that white and blue light. I gave it a nice pat and summoned a stone chair to sit on so I could do some more thinking.Instead of a normal chair what popped up out of the ground was something like a throne made of stone. It was twelve feet tall with claws on the armrests and footpads. There was rabbit fur, deer pelts, and cat fur mixed into the upholstery. At the top a pair of antlers from one of the deer thrust themselves out into the air. The skulls of the animals I’d so far killed decorated the sides of the high-backed chair in parallel and there were fish carved into the stone underneath the arm rests, as if looking into a stone fish tank. The roots of trees and other plants were woven in.I think it would have been taller but it was less than an inch from running into the ceiling.“That has got to be the most expensive and tacky looking Throne I’ve ever seen,” I said to myself once it had fully manifested. Underneath the ground I could feel the Mana in my walls being forced into channels that lead to the Dungeon Core and then into the chair. Like rivers going into a lake and then the ocean. “I guess this is what they mean by ‘blood for the blood throne, skulls for the skull god.’ It’s a complete list of all my kills as a Dungeon Lord! Neat.”I took a seat, and it was comfortable!More importantly I had a new perspective on my dungeon. Rather than being a human AND a Dungeon Core and being in two places at the same time I now was one being again. Again?I was the human sitting in the chair. I was also the chair. I was the Dungeon and the air. I was looking in on the human in my Dungeon while I was a Human looking back at my dungeon. I was the human and the mirror and the reflection looking back at myself.Having new magical senses to work with like this made the whole place very Peng Shui. Especially around my Dungeon Core where it glowed with different magical forces like some atomic lava lamp at a disco. It was very, very cool looking. Plus it looked insanely dangerous. Like, Eldritch levels of weirdness.“. . .”I just realized that I don’t have a body.Hmmm . . . this is strange. I feel like I should be bothered by this. I’m obviously not. I feel like I have two eyes and I feel like I’m looking at the world normally. I just don’t have any feet, or hands, or body, or a head or . . . actually now that I think of it do I actually have any limits?Time for ‘speriments!I look down at the floor. Get real up close to it and see if I can, you know, keep on going.I get real up close to the floor and find no cracks or dust. It’s very clean. But then I just sort of stop. Hua? Hm. I back up and try again. It’s not working. I look over at the wall and try to go through it. I’m stopped again.Okay, so I’m blocked. It’s like looking through a camera right up against an object or something.I really hope I’m not a floating eyeball.I turn around and then spend a few minutes just floating around? Just occupying airspace looking all over the place for a while. The throbbing of the Dungeon Core beat in time with my own heart. This thing was literally my life now. Somehow I just knew that. Not questioning that just yet.I was kind of like a ghost like this.On the other side of things I could look through my own human body like this. I’m like a warm sack of blood burbling like a Jacuzzi. There's something I'm going to call a magical core in my chest next to my heart. Unlike the tiny wisp of a thing that connects to my animals this thread is a solid glowing line of pure power going into my Dungeon Core.To test my ghost self, even though I wasn’t looking forward to it, I zoom up to the body of blood and see if I can keep going. The answer is that, yes, I can keep going.Ick!Also the body I use is filled with blood. It’s just red and glowing. If it was normal blood there would be more ick involved. Like in a horror film. But it couldn’t ‘just’ be blood. It must be mana! I have rich mana infused blood!Making a guess I look at the throbbing heart in my human chest and try to ‘know’ what it is. Then I sort of ‘knew.’ It’s Mana Blood. I’d make a fine doctor right about now.Also, I have found that feeding on either the blood substitute or my Dungeon Core directly like this has given me more power. My mystical ‘sight’ has increased by a lot. I now have microscopic vision and can see heat and infrared. My speed has increased. I can move around really fast. I even have a sense of body again. Yay! I can touch things a bit, smell things, and hear.I go back into the Dungeon Core and other than being totally invisible it’s just like taking a dip in a bath. There is no ‘me’ shaped hole in the Dungeon Core where my ghost sinks into it. I can see the Dungeon Core becoming dark and crusty around my ghost body. Like a black spot on a lightbulb. This takes a while. Long enough that I can think about what’s happening before becoming concerned.I sense this is wrong.So even though I really wanted to keep bathing in this power I get out. Don’t even need to climb. I just float out. Which is a good thing I did. My Dungeon Core is beating like a drum and it takes a really long time for it to clear itself up and burn off the crust. While this is going on I have found that I now have the ability to manipulate my environment again. I can move stones and throw them across the room. Even big giant ones feel like balloons. By the time the Core is clear again I judge that my strength has weakened by about half. Which is okay because I was never that strong in the first place.So. The Core is feeding me essence just like my summoned cat creature. Just way more power. Supposedly this is also keeping my human body alive. When I'm on my Throne all of my abilities increase and because of that I can see and move around like a ghost in an out of body experience. By dipping into the Core I get more power and can do more stuff. Probably a lot of stuff but since I don’t know what I’m doing the power is going to waste. Better be careful with that.I try to think of something and my focus is drawn to the walls of the room. So I go over and have a look. They are plain, solid, flat, boring to look at a kind of purplish where the stone had been compressed with my magic to be more solid and harder than normal stone.I needed to do something with this place, I realize. Like an itch in the brain. So far I hadn’t gotten a visit from Batman or the other underwear wearing crowd but that wasn’t going to stay that way.I’d house-jacked their old lair.When I took over the mountain lair I’d found plenty of hidden cameras and sensors. Mostly in the floors and walls that had replaced the stone with level walkways. I’d took knowledge of those cameras, combined them together in my mind and made better ones and rewired the whole mountain in the process. There were still links going outwards and they were active so I knew he could still see me and he knew now that I knew he was watching me. I expected some kind of visit soon.Now it was time to get down for serious work.At my command I summon four cats around my Dungeon Core to guard it. The four of them facing inwards at the corners so they can see each other and the thing, all with little cat beds to rest in. Four more are placed around the throne, also to guard it.As the Mana from the walls is drawn up the pedestal and into the Dungeon Core essence is released into the air. But now concentrated essence makes tunnels like veins of a living thing to the Throne. Branching off the pedestal are threads going to each of the animals I’d summoned to also provide them with power and links back to the Core and also to myself.I sense that just having these channels burned into the stone wouldn’t be enough. I’d need silver and gold, perfect conductors, to help me channel my essence and mana more efficiently.Fortunately I was already brimming with ideas!A disturbance draws my attention to the Boss Cat room. There I see my cat chasing around a small fox. Normally the cat and the fox would avoid each other. But since my cat is all grown up, has plenty of muscle, is a Dungeon Born Creature and thus has more intelligence and has been ordered to kill it’s become aggressive as hell. The fox tries to get away out the hole but Felidae jumps on from the top and sinks his teeth into its neck. There’s quite a bit of rolling around and attempt to disembowel each other but their thick fur is a hindrance to both of them. Felidae keeps on chewing and now the Fox is losing blood.Now fighting for its life things become even more vicious. They’re rolling around on the ground tearing at each other. Then suddenly Felidae manages to tear out a bit of fur and claw the neck. Blood, and a lot of it, spurts into the air.The fox manages to wipe the cat off now that he doesn’t have a good hold of its neck and tears its teeth into the cat’s face taking off a huge scab. But it’s over. The fox falls over dead a moment later.That was horrifying. That wasn’t nature. That was murder. I felt like calling the Aspca on myself!Then the life force of the fox enters my Dungeon Core and I forget about doing anything so foolish.Reaching out to Felidae I petted him while he seeking comfort in my ghostly hand. “You did real good,” I told him as the fox rots away into bones and even those disappear into smoke. “Come to me.”Felidae makes his way to my throne room. Seeing my cat so beat up my first instinct is to take him to the animal vet or something. But I knew I couldn’t do that. A hundred feet beyond the boundary of my Dungeon as he’ll start to disappear just like that fox.“Felidae, you’ve done well. I expected you to catch a few mice and squirrels and even some rabbits. But now you’re hurt. I certainly didn’t expect you to win. From now on you will be known as Felidae the Fox Killer. You are a special one of your race,” I said as the hurting animal sat before me, chest puffed out in honor despite its crippling injuries. “From now on you’re no ordinary animal. You will be a Magical Beast and someday you’ll have your own core. Be healed, advance and take your place at my side.”I directed my essence into the animal. With my magical sight it was as if the cat was taking in a long drag of smoke continuously beyond the means of its lungs.Slowly now. I don’t want to hurt him! He’s the only friend I’ve got!Felidae grew larger and more beautiful. The off-white colors in its pattern smoothed out into a symmetrical one. A pair of horns grew on its head and it grew a third eye. When the essence transfer was stable I reached down and picked up my new thirty pound cat to have a closer look at it.Felidae opened his mouth and yawned at me, showing every one of its many teeth. He seemed to be very tired now.I scratched it under its fury chin where it started buzzing like a bloody sawblade. “Well aren’t you cute! You are the best Dungeon Cat I’ve ever had,” I declared, naming its species on the spot. Then I had another thought. “Unfortunately I won’t be able to make more of you. Not unless I kill you to get your pattern first,” I said sadly.Felidae looked up from where he was lounging in my lap as I petted it. “Meow?”“Oh don’t worry, you’re my first and special cat. Besides if you’re dead I can’t resurrect you. You’d just be a different Dungeon Cat. You’d be dead. And I don’t want another Dungeon Cat. I want Felidae,” I told him and he calmed down a bit and went back to lying down and being petted. I sensed that it would take lots of pettings to get myself act into his good graces. "I'll just have to upgrade another cat and kill that one instead."And so I did.“Now, how do I resurrect someone?” I asked myself, thinking about what I’d just said a second ago. I seemed to know some other things I didn’t know about yet. But in a moment of thinking about it I did know.But more on that later.I take the other cats I summoned to guard my Dungeon Core and send one to take Felidae’s place in the Boss Cat room and gave it the same orders to follow.Unfortunately all the cats I’d summoned so far had the same markings as Felidae and I didn’t like that. Felidae was Felidae and he wasn’t a normal housecat. So I sent another dozen new ones out into the world to go hunting and try to bring back some other house cats so I could kill them and add variety to my Dungeon Housecats. They wouldn’t expire right away just from being outside the dungeon on the surface.And if they wandered too far away? So what? As long as it was nearby I could absorb its essence into my dungeon again.To my delight I found that the animals I sent out could also absorb mana from the environment and it could be sent to my Dungeon. It was a very small amount since most of it was leaking back into the environment. But it was something! The cord of mana and essence that connected them to my Dungeon also went out some distance. It even went through the four feet of soil that I couldn't absorb. Enough for them to exist outside anyway.In the grove where I had created my pit trap I created a small shelter for my cats so they could live outside. There was even a hole with a long shaft with a dead end that they could put stuff in so the dungeon could absorb it.I could also see out of their eyes. This gave me a nice surveillance system and a small army of animal friends I could count on to be my scouts in the world above.Back in my dungeon core room I worked on creating a garden. It was helped along by my animal friends above who brought in pieces of plants and the seeds of the things they found. The dungeon took these bits and pieces and smoked them and I got a pattern. Sometimes part of one, but if I had the seed or most of the body of an animal I could recreate it. I summoned dirt and planted the plants everywhere. Then the seeds absorbed my essence from the air and grew fast like in flash photography. The mushrooms grew by putting out spores and I could control where they grew by denying them essence to stop their growth. And just like that I had a garden.Of course the garden was dark, being underground. The plants and such could grow just fine with a diet of essence instead of sunlight. But I wanted some sunlamps and something else to replicate moonlight. I’ll also need something to water them and I was going to need something to remove any weeds and deadwood when something I didn’t like popped up.This is going to take a while.