Museum Core Chapter 5: Zoological Expansion

Expanding his power out into the hallway was just as easy as everything else had been, once he figured it out.

Despite that, however, Thomas could tell that he was rapidly approaching the limits of what he could reach. The energy he’d received from the lizard was being … not consumed, exactly, but nonetheless becoming unavailable for his use. Perhaps it was being tied up in maintaining his territory, or maybe he’d simply gotten a boost to his claimable area when he’d killed the monster and was currently spending it?

He might have also gotten a boost to his mana pool after the deed, but he wasn’t sure, he hadn’t had a good overview of its size pre-kill.

Elias would probably know whether the mana pool was automatically boosted, but he wasn’t here. That was likely for the best, though, they both needed some time to cool off. Well, Thomas needed time to cool off. Elias, on the other hand, needed some time to reconsider his position and hopefully learn to be less of a stubborn ass.

And until he returned, Thomas could focus fully on the new creatures he was gaining.

There were quite a few big creatures in the hall with his core, including several whale skeletons hanging from the ceiling, but there were limits as to how lethal those creatures could be.

For example, the prehistoric deer megaloceros was massive and looked intimidating as hell, but barely fit in any corridors and didn’t have much real power compared to, say, an elephant. And while the elephants were damn strong, they didn’t fit in a whole many places.

There were others with decent power too, like the almighty moose, something that any Canadian could tell you was damn scary, but it was still not comparable to a grizzly in his mind. And there was a grizzly a-a-almost within reach.

Thomas’ power flowed down the corridor connecting the Hall of Mammals to the gallery and then into said gallery, with the “camera” he saw out of following closely behind.

Even so, he didn’t see the sabertooth tiger, he felt it as it entered his domain. The bones were old, so old, barely even bones anymore, merely being stones that had replaced biological waste bit by bit over the course of eons, but they still worked for the purposes of gaining minions, apparently.

To his eternal shame, Thomas ended up overdoing it a little when absorbing the creature, his power tearing a massive chunk out of the wall alongside the sabertooth fossil and eating most of the nearby stuffed wolverine.

Never mind, his main target had been absorbed, and it wasn’t like the little “critter” didn’t have a place in his roster.

Wolverines could be nasty, capable of taking down even a moose and, allegedly, one had once killed a polar bear, though that last story was more than a little sketchy.

However, they weren’t the only incredible creatures in their family.

Giant river otters lived in the Amazon rainforest and regularly chased off caimans and jaguars.

European badgers had a fearsome reputation for aggression, and wild stories abounded about how when they bit down on someone, they never let go until they felt bone crack, which supposedly led to huntsmen binding pieces of bark to their legs to trick the creatures into letting go early.

The marten, which was merely the size of a Jack Russel Terrier, could nonetheless bring down deer and monkeys. Though for humans, their most terrifying attribute was their tendency to crawl inside car engines and tear the absolute fuck out of the wiring.

Even the smallest of this little family of murderous intent, the stoat, was a terror to behold. They only hunted rabbits and hares, sure, but considering that a stoat could comfortably rest in a human hand, even rabbits were giants compared to them. Those little buggers replayed “David vs Goliath” on an almost daily basis while in the role of David and won basically all the time.

Anyway, point was, mustelids were awesome, the wolverine would come in handy, and the moment Thomas’ influence reached the museum archives, he’d tear them apart until he had a complete set.

As cool as it was to get both the sabertooth tiger and the wolverine as monsters, it was the rush of knowledge that accompanied their absorption that really knocked his socks off.

Sure, Thomas had run around collecting interesting tidbits and factoids most of his life, constantly searching out new interesting topics to explore, but before today, it’d always taken days or weeks of study to gain even a fraction of the information he’d just gathered in a split-second.

And when he looked for it, he found a similar breadth of information on every previous creature pattern he’d gained, it was only now that he’d gotten halfway decent at absorbing patterns that the information automatically came along with the creature creation pattern.

If he wanted to, he could absorb every scrap of information swirling around his core into his consciousness, gaining the complete anatomical, ecological, and sociological breakdown of their existence, downloading it straight into his mind.

He teetered on the edge of going through with it, but after a long moment of internal struggle, he decided to put that off until later. As he had done with so many other things lately. This whole Dungeon Core business was absolutely stuffed with new shiny things he desperately wanted to let himself be distracted by, look into, investigate, quantify, understand. But he couldn’t. Because as fascinating as this whole thing was, his life had also become vastly more dangerous.

And, unfortunately, at some point down the line, he’d have to deal with the fact that he was no longer human, merely a hunk of sentient rock, but then again … oh, was that a jaguar?

Even as he moved on to the outermost edge of his new maximum range, gaining the patterns of several big cats while deliberately not absorbing the accompanying information packets, some distant part of his mind was dimly aware of the fact that he could only ignore that issue for so long. Chasing after the next shiny thing would only work if there was a shiny thing to chase.

But right now, he had an entire museum’s worth of shiny things to go after, including dinosaurs and, if he remembered right, there was an entire vault full of gemstones on the second floor somewhere.

With his new patterns, he began to reorganize his defenses.

The lightbulbs in the mammal gallery had still been working when he’d extended his influence, but he swiftly absorbed them, plunging the corridor into darkness.

Every absorbed taxidermied creature was replaced posthaste, but the glass shielding them from the general public was not, putting anyone who entered within striking range if any of the creatures had been real. And then, he added a few more stuffed creatures for good measure.

Ideally, he’d have replaced one or more of the stuffed creatures with a live one and told it to stand still until it was too late for an invader, but that would not work. At all. He could give that order, sure, but it was a living being that would have to obey that order, and that was highly unlikely to work for more than a few minutes.

At the higher ranks, maybe there was a creature of supernatural fortitude that could pull off that trick, but no single animal he currently had would work.

But all that being said, the stuffed creatures were just there as cover for the wolverines, which could hide underneath and behind the exhibits, ready to tear into the calves and ankles whenever the opportunity presented itself. Either that or use the heads and backs of the exhibits as a springboard to go straight for the throat.

Either way, invaders would be forced to creep through a darkened corridor with rabid wolverines nipping at any bit of exposed flesh whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Then, they’d have to go up the stairs onto the mezzanine, which was largely the same except with a few wolverines and a boar added for good measure.

It was the last two rooms that experienced the biggest makeover. The second-to-last room, the one with the rhino and arsinoitherium, gained not only a hippo and a sabertooth tiger but also two jaguars in a very special place.

The entire ceiling had been covered in whale skeletons and life-sized plastic models of living whales, but Thomas had been forced to eat some of the lower-hanging ones for space.

However, he’d left the higher ones alone. Initially, the idea had been to use them for decoration, but right now, they served perfectly well as bases for the jungle cats. They were powerful creatures, with jaws that could bite straight through the skull of a caiman, and built for dropping down and chomping down on any unfortunate creature that entered its range.

Ah, what the hell, he still had some mana left, so he added two more jaguars to the boss room.

In theory, he could have put all of his creatures in one room and have them zerg-rush any invaders, but it was a bad idea.

Firstly, having that many creatures in one spot all but guaranteed that they’d interfere with each other, making them less effective overall.

And secondly, bunching them up risked getting blown apart by a single attack.

Hopefully, these new defenses of his would come close to the meatgrinder he imagined them to be.

Yet, he couldn’t help but feel like he was forgetting something.

He was currently in the process of absorbing every exhibit he hadn’t touched thus far, just so that he had those creatures if he wanted them at a later date, and once he was done with that, he’d start fully absorbing the information packets, since he was blocking those for now. They were fascinating, sure, but “information overload” had an entirely different meaning when the information was being slammed straight into your brain, er, … mind?

Either way, after that, he was planning on just resting and recovering his mana, hopefully to the point where he could see what his maximum was.

Hm …

Discounting things like actually being hurt, this feeling of having forgotten something important was quite possibly Thomas’ least favorite sensation.

Monsters taken care of, defenses taken care of, and Elias was gone, which meant that whatever questions Thomas had for him, they’d have to wait. And he’d cleaned up both the mess he’d been greeted with upon waiting up and the one the lizard had been turned into …

Thomas sighed a mental sigh. Two things he was most missing was being able to actually sigh, and facepalming.

But at least he’d figured out what had been bugging him. He might not be able to summon the lizard, it was too intelligent to be made into a subordinate just yet, but he could observe its pattern.

A being from a magical world, what could be cooler?

Thomas projected his mind back into his core and dug through his patterns until he found the relevant pattern, though it felt strangely “grey” to his senses, and poking it with his mana produced absolutely no response. Without Elias’ warning, he’d have probably tried to figure out a way around that blockade, but he decided to believe the fairy about the limitation.

His perception flowed through the energy pattern, penetrating the exterior and looking around its insides. The information packet flowed into his mind, talking about worlds of unparalleled wonder and magic, deep, ancient, rainforests filled with countless species, including a civilization that built countless ziggurats and carved kilometer-spanning runes into the jungle.

This was the home of the lizard people, where they lived in the rivers and swamps, deadly predators that threatened all but the strongest creatures in those places with their natural weapons.

After what felt like hours, the flood of information petered off, eventually allowing him to once more pay attention to his surroundings. He’d been so utterly consumed by looking through his new knowledge that he’d lost track of everything else.

That … could be dangerous if that happened at the wrong time.

Yet despite the enormity of the knowledge he’d gained from the “information about pattern” info pack, what really interested him was the core of power he’d found when physically examining the pattern.

It was a dark green orb that was both located inside the heart of the lizard and somehow also spread throughout its body, granting power to its holder. It stank of rot, death, and mud to Thomas’ senses, but he could tell that there was more to it than just deadly energy.

Somehow, he could tell that it represented the entirety of the creature’s supernatural abilities, from its ability to coat its claws in venom to its nasty bite, which seemed to be a supernatural version of the Komodo Dragon’s abilities. It also stopped mud and other forms of muck from sticking to the creature, reduced drag when moving through water, and so on.

So apparently the patterns also held an anchor for the creature’s “superpowers”.

That part made sense. Well, actually, Thomas had no idea how any of this made sense, but it tracked with everything else he’d learned, so he’d leave this as is.

What was weird was a second core, one barely visible behind the first one, which simply felt like a lizardman.

It seemed to just say “This is what I am”, and that was all. It didn’t do anything, it was just there.

Yet … that was the information packet, wasn’t it? A magical core that held the information about the creature, representing the very core of its existence.

A magical creature having something like that made sense to a certain degree. It was weird that they’d carry it around inside them, but ok, magic was magic and Thomas was very new to that arena.

But everything else, all the earth-based creatures, they’d also given him information packets. So did that mean they also had these cores?

Still, he never would have found the one on the lizard if he hadn’t followed the bigger one, so it was reasonable to think that he’d have missed them.

A little bit of searching later, he’d found it on the sabertooth, and from there, it wasn’t that much work to realize that all creatures had them. That, and a second, practically, nonexistent, core that Thomas felt that, eventually, he might be able to turn into something akin to the lizard’s “swamp warrior” ability.

Was that a dungeon thing, or had there also been some kind of magic Earth the entire time?

Elias should know. Hopefully.

… Aaaaand he wasn’t here. Fuck.

Initially, it had been a relief to have a little space from the fairy, but it was rapidly beginning to grate on Thomas to not have him around to bug with questions.

Suddenly, he realized something entirely unrelated, the thing he’d forgotten to do, the itch that had been bothering him this entire time.

He’d dreamt up the idea of calling people into the museum for shelter, if there was anyone still out there. The windows were sadly completely covered in vegetation, but judging by the various bloodstains, there had been people around at some point.

Making a beacon was simple, he absorbed part of the roof and created a metal platform underneath, then piled recreated wood underneath, followed by small wood shavings and finally, a chunk of dark carpet.

Igniting the whole affair was fairly simple conceptually, but took forever to do. He recreated a magnifying glass that had been a part of an exhibit and had the jaguar hold the lens in its mouth until the sunlight eventually ignited the carpet. That was decidedly not something that the big cat’s physiology had been designed for, so it took some doing, but eventually, it worked.

And then, Thomas had another idea. One he should have had before.

He couldn’t facepalm, but he had the nearest blue duiker smack his core for him.

Absorbing the greenery covering the windows wasn’t in the cards, living creatures resisted him, but he’d been thinking of this far too linearly.

Instead of outright absorbing the mess, he could just tear a hole in the roof and send one of his creatures out, so that was what he had the jaguar, which was already up there, do.

And then, he had the duiker smack his core again.

He could see through the eyes of his creatures, so when he sent the jaguar to clear the windows, its vision told him everything he’d have been able to see through the windows.

Everything in sight had been covered in green vegetation, with only a few skyscrapers remaining, everything else had been subsumed by a jungle. But he could see enough to tell that he was still in London.

In the end, he decided to just send the jaguar out to start finding the limits of his influence.

He could feel his control of the creature slip the further it got, but in the end, he couldn’t find its limit just on the roof of the Natural History Museum and there wasn’t a good way to get down.

So he decided to just leave it there, a scout wasn’t a bad idea.   

And that was that. Everything done.

What now?

None of his normal pastimes were available.

He couldn’t really do much in the way of artistry with his Dungeon powers at the moment, there were no books in range to read if he could even figure out how to read as a Dungeon. There wasn’t even Elias to talk to.

What now?

If what Elias had said about how the Dungeons only really became sapient at C-Rank was correct, there might be a reason for that. Having all that intelligence without the ability to do much with it was a recipe for soul-crushing boredom.

Playing around with the various creatures, trying to create new structures but ending up with literal trash, all of those were things he did to distract himself, but being locked into this tiny sphere without the option of moving out of it sucked.

It reminded him of being stuck in a hospital bed, complete with a catheter and all the other “bells and whistles” that let him be stuck in that prison of blankets and pillows for days on end. Except he didn’t even have any roommates or nurses to talk to/bother.

In the end, he wound up switching between micromanaging the jaguar he was making clean vegetation off the roof and examining the information packets.

The former was monotonous, but at least it served a purpose, and while the latter would have been fascinating under ordinary circumstances, being forced to do an activity to keep oneself entertained wasn’t exactly conducive to its enjoyment.