I was wrong. Although dwarven technology is present, it hasn't yet integrated with the tower's body. Is it inefficient or merely un-powered? --73.7 Seconds Post-Integration.

  He froze in place. "On a scale of one to ten, with one representing 'this can wait until the morning' and ten being 'get your arse down there, now!' what degree of 'I need your help' is this?"

  SIMP was silent, though Clark knew that was only because they were glaring at him. Somehow, they were glaring at him. "A nine," SIMP said.

  He groaned. He wanted to sleep.

  But it was his position. What he promised he would do. "I guess I can get a coffee. Give me a minute to shower again before I leave."

  "Sure, laddie."

  Clark showered and reflected on how he liked SIMP better when they weren't demanding him to do everything in the moment. A tiny bit of give and take was all he needed to feel less a slave and more a partner. His own immaturity notwithstanding.

  Cleaned, he asked SIMP to set a path to the nearest cafe so he could pick up a coffee. He also sent voice messages to Theo and Hera, asking them to join him on his outing. If shet hit the fan, he would need their help.

  An hour later, his work mates met him at Silly Bean, a specialty cafe recently opened on the floor which offered ornate and unusual beverages.

  Clark's drink was called 'Mud Hut.' It was half coffee, half hot chocolate. He took it with sugar, milk, and creamer. both normal and a hazelnut creamer. It came in a glass mug whose uppermost half had been dripped in chocolate, then drizzled over in caramel. Topping the drink was a pile of fluffy whipped cream drizzled over with a smoked caramel drizzle and rainbow sprinkles. Oddly, the drink came with a brownie and a piece of sponge cake shoved into the whipped cream. The drink was far too complicated for his liking, but he got his money's worth.

  For his friends, he ordered simple drinks. Lemonade cocktails with green tea as he did not know what their preferred refreshment was.

  Theo sniffed his drink suspiciously while Hera drank hers down without hesitation.

  "Lovely!" Hera yummed as she finished her drink. "Thank you, Clark. Now, what is this about the pod?"

  "SIMP as said they've made a breakthrough. So, we all should be there."

  Theo moaned. "But at this hour? Gods! I'm beat..."

  "I know how you feel. I've only just got back from my League tutorial. I want to be in bed myself, but we've committed ourselves to helping SIMP. We can't refuse the call just because it's late."

  "Fine... but how are we getting back to the pod?"

  "SIMP has located a crevice leading to the pod. It will only be stable for a short time, so we need to move while it's up."

  Theo finished only half of his drink by the time they left for the crevice. The crevice was somewhere on the seventieth floor.

  When they came upon a sloping crack which descended into the tower's depths from between clothing displays, Clark confirmed that the crevice would take them to the pod.

  "That crevice?" SIMP replied. "No. Our crevice is over in the next department. We're close!"

  "Good thing I didn't take that one, then. Yeesh!"

  A moment later, they found the crack which would take them to the pod. "Good news," SIMP continued. "It looks as though that other crack is only a tertiary connection to this larger one. It should go away by itself soon."

  "So, there's no corruption at its root, then? The crevice is caused by what?"

  "Emanations from the dwarven pod, I would guess. You remember how I explained the growth rate of crevice paths leading to and from the pod?"

  Clark searched his memory. He did recall SIMP's explanation, how the pod could be acting as a frustrating factor on stray plague particulate. "Yeah, I do. This will take us there, then. Theo, Hera, to my front and back respectively, please."

  Together, Clark and company made their way into the crevice path. Like every such crevice, the route was narrow, rocky, and unpredictable. Quaking occasionally set them to alarm, fears of a route collapse always on his mind. Though SIMP told him a collapse was next to impossible if not outright impossible, Clark still feared it happening all the same. Besides, 'next to impossible' wasn't 'impossible,' was it?

  At the route's end, he breathed in a huge gulp of fresh air. Or what passed for fresh in the dungeon interior.

  They emerged into an unremarkable place in the dungeon interior. Its surfaces were smooth and of a mechanical nature. Engine blocks silently pumped up, down, and to the sides. Able to (faintly) detect points of magical leakage now that his aura had manifested and grown some lately, Clark easily led his group around those points of 'strange gravity,' such as what he and Theo had discovered when they had blown a hole in the wall.

  With his (mildly) enhanced senses, they made great time. Only an hour had gone by when they arrived before the dwarven pod.

  "Honestly," Clark said. "I'm a bit surprised to see it again. I half-expected getting back here to be one big goose chase."

  "You are too pessimistic," Theo chirped. "Always looking for the bad in the good. Sometimes things are just how they are, simple as that."

  He stopped before the structure. "Just how I am. If you're pessimistic about things, you can at least prepare."

  "Perhaps," Hera now said. "You should keep in mind the other side to that kind of overpreparation, Clark."

  "Overpreparation? What do you mean?" he asked.

  "This pessimism of yours can lead to insight if you allow yourself to dwell on the subjects. Yet in always looking upon life with suspicion, you invariably waste time you could have otherwise saved if you merely marshaled ahead without the negative thinking."

  He understood what Hera was getting at. "I supposed you are right..."

  Not wanting to admit his way of thinking might be flawed, he took the lead from Theo and entered the pod structure. He didn't like admitting he was wrong. Which was beside the point anyway since he still considered his kind of critical thinking as needed. Someone had to be the worry-wort.

  Once they were inside the structure, its translucent walls giving them both a spook as well as a clear line-of-sight outside the pod, he asked SIMP about their findings. Theo and Hera shared his interest.

  "Firstly, let me explain why it has taken me so long to penetrate the dwarven pod's security," SIMP began. "Dwarven security is top-notch engineering and programming. Without getting too detailed, I will say this -- the pod's security protocols were more intensive than I imagined. Every time I made progress, a firewall shot up preventing me from going any further, so--"

  "Sorry, SIMP, but what is a firewall?" he asked.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "A firewall is a defensive measure in programming. It is meant to keep out those who are not meant to have access. As I was saying, every time I thought I made progress, a new firewall popped up. To suppress this security measure, I needed to blanket the wall with an amount of my magical essence. Once the firewall subsided, I advanced, only to encounter a new firewall."

  This time, Theo interrupted. "This is too abstract. Put it in terms I can understand!"

  Sighing, SIMP replied calmly, more calmly than they usually did with him. "It was like this: imagine you are going on a walk. While out for your stroll, a small child comes up to you and asks for directions to the nearest candy shop. You patiently give them directions. The child runs off, so you resume your walk. You take no more than a couple of steps when another child runs up to ask you for directions. This time, they want to know where the nearest park is, so you tell them. You resume your walk: another two steps, and, you guessed it, yet another kid runs to you wanting to know where something is... it was like this for me as I was calming the firewalls protecting the dwarven structure. This is why it took me months to clear the security instead of the partly few days I thought it would take."

  "Darn on a barn," Clark said, fidgeting. "That must've been annoying as heck! And then some, right?"

  "It certainly was, Clark... to say the very least. Such frustration is a thing of the past, though. I have bypassed every one of the several thousand security measures and lodged myself deep within the core of the machine."

  "What have you found?"

  "I have found both a lot and not as much as I would like to have found. Let me tell you the 'not as much' part first. I did not find in the machine's memory files anything like a purpose. Nor who built it or why it was built originally. What I did find, however, was that this machine was specially made for the conditions of Augustford Central and the dungeon."

  That confused him. "What do you mean? That whoever built it had in mind functions for both the store and the dungeon? What would that mean?"

  "I don't know what it means but it implies that the structure's purpose is multi-faceted. That it does not involve only one aspect of our home but all aspects. Obviously, this breadth of purpose would require immense skills in numerous fields of study and industry, which only the dwarves would possess. Now, let me speak on those aspects of this structure I discovered. Secondly, I discovered that this structure has lodged within its command console a hollow space. I am trying to find a way to bring to the surface this hollow space. So far, I haven't discovered a way how, though I have detected strange vibrations from within this hollow space." SIMP explained.

  "Vibrations? Theo asked in an exasperated way.

  "Like strange termites chiseling away at a tree. Every clink of their mandibles one such vibe."

  "Oh... that's mysterious. Any ideas on what could be making those vibrations?"

  "None. I will need to do more investigation. That hollow space is only the second-most discovery I made. What I found which is far more noteworthy to our efforts at finding the dungeon core is the fact that the pod connects to every major store and dungeon network, including the leylines."

  Clark perked up again. Every system? "That means we can, like, hijack security cameras and stuff?"

  "Right now? No. In the future, potentially..."

  Hera whistled, so impressed she was. Though her whistle was far less audibly acrid than Salsa's whistle.

  "That's impressive. What does that mean for us right now? If the pod connects to everything, then how can we use that to our advantage? Oh, and how can it connect to everything?" Clark was happy he was asking the hard-hitting questions.

  "I don't understand the mechanics let alone the logistics of how it connected to Augustford Central. Obviously, such a feat would only be explainable by the dwarves themselves. How we can use that to our advantage would be another whole complicated matter. To simplify this highly complex issue, though, I can say that to turn this fact into a boon, we would need to find a way to activate these latent connections, then use that activated latency to siphon information from the connected systems, perhaps even more than information at a later date."

  "More than information? What do you mean?"

  "We might be able to gain access to those systems, I mean. What we would do with that access, I do not know. But these connections and leylines run throughout the entire store and dungeon. This is an unprecedented gift for us if we can figure out what to do with it."

  Figure out what to do with it? That was a mind full. "How would we begin to figure that out? We would need to discover the state of how the connections exist, or existed, right? Then how to reactivate them. Not to mention the knowledge of how to do that... ugh... sounds like a lot of work."

  "It would be a lot of work. That's the point, though." Hera said. "But work we will be glad to have done. We should make more of an effort with our readings. Those books are the closest we have to understanding the past."

  Chit-Chat followed on how they might most effectively alter their schedules so as to increase their reading load. Theo suggested they simply buy some energy drinks and read late into the night. Hera suggested reading some during our lunch and small breaks. A little bit of reading here and there, she argued, would add up. Clark liked both ideas and figured each could be incorporated. "SIMP. I have a question: why don't you know more about the Dwarves? You're the Spiritual Consciousness of the dungeon and it seems like dwarves are rather important. Shouldn't you know more about them and be able to tell us instead of us reading book after book?"

  SIMP was silent.

  Not just for a while or a short time, either. Longer than Clark ever before heard them be quiet. "SIMP? I didn't mean that it an angry way..."

  Had he upset them? Had SIMP thought his words were meant in anger or biting sarcasm?

  "SIMP? Is everything okay..." he said again.

  Moments passed, then. "Yes... everything is fine. I lost myself in thought. Your words touched a soft spot in me, Clark. To answer your questions -- yes, I should know about the Dwarves. Unfortunately, I do not know about the dwarves. Why I don't, I do not know. During my silence, I was trying to discover why I held a lack of information on the subject."

  "I take it you couldn't find the answer... I'm sorry. What would be the implications of you not knowing?"

  "I am not sure. It could mean memory loss. Or perhaps, more disconcertingly, an entity has tampered with my memory. It could also mean other things... deeper corruption, terrible considerations like that."

  "Do you think one is more likely than the other?" Clark didn't know how to navigate this situation. He was but a raindrop in a vast accumulation without knowledge if he were a drop within a surging river or an ocean.

  "Right now, I don't know anything... more investigation is needed..."

  Quiet washed the group over. Theo clearly didn't know how to approach the subject any more than he. Hera appeared in deep contemplation. How long passed he couldn't say as he too was attempting to grasp how to help SIMP. It was Hera who broke the tension.

  "SIMP?" Hera asked, softly. "You are going to be all right. I know you are going to be."

  "Thank you, Hera." SIMP sounded less stressed.

  "Yeah," he joined Hera. "You will be fine, SIMP. You have I as your champion and Hera and Theo as your sub-Champions! Together, we got this in the bag! If anything is harming you or has harmed you, we will defend and heal you no matter the threat. That's our promise as your ward!"

  In an instant, the conversation turned. Away went the sorrow. Replaced with team spirit and friendship forged under exploitation.

  "...to get back to our original reason for being here," SIMP said after some commiseration. "The dwarven pod. What should we do now? Hera: I agree with your assessment. Continuing to read the dwarven related books should be your first priority. As you guys continue your readings, Clark, I need your help with scouting that corruption nest we discovered a few months back while scouting on the fiftieth floor. Corruption of that size is a clueing us into something and we need to find out what. With your recent League training, I feel your self-defense skills have improved to the point where we should be doing more scouting, more often than we have been."

  "Aye. I can do that, SIMP. Perhaps we should resume that exploration tonight? We ought to get back to scouting it as soon as possible since it's been at least a couple of weeks since we were last inside the dungeon's interior."

  "I agree. Thank you, Clark. Theo, can I ask you for a favor?

  "Verily! What can I do for you, my good spiritual sir!?" Theo replied with a dramatic air.

  "I would like you to keep your ear to the cobblestone and keep a lookout for information relating to Tower abnormalities. Unusual instances of plague rot, highly Imbued individuals taking an interest in an aspect of the store which seems aloof, anything which could conceivably be part of a conspiracy. I have a feeling that somewhere out there, someone, another Lifer, perhaps, knows something about the source of the plague and why the dungeon core is missing. If you hear anything, please let me know."

  Theo took a half-bow. "I will do that for you. Well within my skillset, so it ain't a bother."

  "Thank you, Theo. Hera, on my behalf, could you keep me updated on the pulse of the religious movement in the tower and what people are thinking?"

  Hera smiled. "Good as done, SIMP. We can talk while you and Clark are hunting through the tower tonight, assuming you can spare the attention."

  "I can. Thank you, Hera. On top of my regular duties as the Spiritual Consciousness, I am going to begin my next phase of cracking this dwarven pod. I said earlier there are strange vibrations coming from the command console here. I intend to break into the last line of security this pod has and uncover what is making that sound. I will continue to try and uncover how to reconnect the pod to the various networks within Augustford, but this is far more abstract, and I cannot promise actual progress. Bear with me, please."

  Everyone shook their heads. Everyone affirmed their support of SIMP, and of him. Everyone had a smile on their face, even if it was only a slight grin, like in Theo's case. Clark felt blessed. He had such wonderful work friends, such wonderful friends.

  With the group knowing what they were to do, Hera and Theo left and returned to their dorms, to either study or sleep.

  "Please give me a moment to buy some dandies and another black tea," Clark asked of SIMP, knowing he would be now expected to fulfill his promise and get to scouting the dungeon interior.

  "I will bring you back to that Bean place. They had some tea fusions I think you will like."