[D'sP] What's In A Name? - Chapter 317 (Patreon)

Doctor sighed, he had known what he was signing up for, but it was still frustrating. Way too many people failed to realize his name was Doctor. Not “the doctor”, but just Doctor. Though even before making the change, he had been ready for jokes about where his sonic screwdriver was.

There was a reason he went with a dehumanizing name, one of just his role. At some point, the past would likely catch up to him. For now, though, just getting everyone to accept his damn name would be enough of a battle.

At least his apprentices were coming along nicely. Three students learning the magic of healing wasn’t nearly enough, but one had the right mindset to be an rpg style healer, which was very much in demand. If they took the right oaths and Ace could trust them, they might even be allowed to join the inner circle. The incident showed the wisdom of having a healer in your adventuring party.

Though honestly, Doctor had to admit that he could probably churn out a much larger number of magic healers if he would ease his requirements. He was basically requiring them to not only learn the magic, but the medicine. Sure, a simple healing spell can close even a pretty bad cut, but what if an organ gets damaged or some such?

At that point, you either needed to spend a ton more Mana on forcing them to heal. Or, as Doctor himself prefers, using a much more reasonable amount of Mana to actually target what is wrong. Both are needed, but the more targeted one works faster.

Another sigh, Jim had been asking and it seems he was going to need to do that, anyway. Of course, those in the inner circle will get the full training. Those random visitors looking for some delving? A bit of magic would have to suffice.

Yes, this would require him to basically start teaching a college class. However, Jim had been pressing him as all the other magical healers seemed patently incapable of teaching others. The few trying to get to the second boss needed healers more than they needed doctors.

Though speaking of delvers, while Doctor is worrying about all that, a group of newcomers are working their way through the dungeon right at that moment. It was a decent enough group, three fighters, two ranged, and a mage. They had decided to push past the sixth floor and ended up stuck in floor eight.

Joe, “Hey Jeffrey, you figure out what’s up with this room? It’s only the third and already annoying as all get out!”

Jeffrey shakes his head, “From what I gathered before the delve, this is some kind of double room maze thing. We just need to figure out the way to go so we end up at the staircase up.”

A lady in leather armor smacks a goat’s head in with a hammer and the kobold rider goes flying. “Can we kill the enemy first, then search for the way forward?”

Joe, “I’m just reserving my Mana for a more dangerous fight. Bell, If you can’t handle a couple goats and kobolds, you might need remedial lessons at the guild.”

Bell snorts, “I’m handling them all right, but we would be going faster with your help!”

The two argue for a bit as Bell and the other two fighters manage to finish the monsters. They’re a bit unsatisfied with their party members, but they technically didn’t need the help, so let it drop. Though Bell knew that at this point she would be looking for a new group.

After the fight, it took the mage a good hour or so to figure out the way to the exit. Not that the room wasn’t too hard, in theory. They just accidentally managed to get stuck in a loop. You would think that in a room that small, doing so would be easy to notice. Yet a shocking number of people would prove you wrong every week.

Still, with the monsters dead, it was just a matter of time until they found the way to the next room. Though that is where they end up stuck. The flat terrain that, in reality was actually a rocky ascent was just too much for them.

They tried, but the dissonance between what they could see and feel ended up getting the better of them. The two ranged fighters in particular, ended up being of no use. Their arrows appeared to be unable to fly straight as the strange spatial nature of the room made it look like they were flying off at weird angles.

None of them died, but a goat they fought managed to break the leg of one of the melee fighters. At that point, there wasn’t much of a choice. They turned around, left the dungeon, and made their report.

Jim could only shake his head at the report. When his team had delved the floor, they didn’t have nearly that much trouble. Sure, the two ranged and the mage in that party were all but useless. Except, they still had the three melee fights and there weren’t all that many goats on the floor.

Though Jim did admit that there seemed to be something more to those odd spatial areas. It wasn’t just in that room. He had noticed a lot of people had a hard time in the previous room as well and don’t get him started on the five corners square room! There seemed to be something about the more spatial stressed rooms that threw people for a loop.

In fact, the sixth floor was annoying for many as well. If it wasn’t so open, Jim was willing to bet people would manage to get lost in it more often than not. The question was, why did it affect some and not others?

After all, everyone in the inner circle managed those rooms just fine. It was just a significant portion of outsiders and townsfolk that had a problem with it. Nevermind the fact that Jim was mostly certain that the floors past the first few were all spatially manipulated to a certain degree. People just seemed to have a problem with the more obvious examples of it independent of levels or stats.

Which, fair enough. The problem was that it didn’t affect the inner circle at all. Their numbers weren’t that high, but even the wolfkin who joined were fine. It would be one thing if just those who had been around the dungeon the longest were fine. That could just be some kind of adjustment period being needed.

But no, that wasn’t the case and the other wolfkin weren’t immune to the effect. The only thing that sets the inner circle apart is their oath, but that couldn’t be the reason. Could it?

It wasn’t, Jim was simply discounting one potential answer. They all just got lucky. Spatial sickness was just a thing some people had to deal with in the same way some suffered from sea sickness. Though usually in the wider universe, the way people find out about this is using portals or some other manner of teleportation. There is a reason portal stations provide vomit bags for the first time travelers. Doyle’s dungeon just happened to feature some more subtle effects than getting tossed across the entire world in a single moment. While still enough to cause discomfort, it wasn’t on the level of needing a bag.

The good news for most of the planet’s population is that they don’t have actual spatial sickness. Rather, because of being newly integrated, they’re only temporarily suffering from it. Give them a few years and most people on the planet will have their spatial sickness clear up. This is especially true for those who often visit any location with twisted space.

The system could have fixed this. It would simply have taken more power when integrating them. Except since it is temporary and, in theory, people shouldn’t even be experiencing such things for well past the point of its passing, it doesn’t bother. Then you have situations like Doyle’s dungeon which messes with people because of it.

Even the seventh floor with the odd bulges in the walls was enough to raise the hair on many a neck. Worse, this wasn’t something you actually wanted to train yourself to ignore. Areas of altered space can be highly deadly and the reason so many people end up affected by it after integration is exactly for that reason.

The coming of Mana involves space literally ripping itself apart and everyone should die. It is only by the grace of the system piggybacking on Mana’s expansion that they survive, but the system requires those supernatural energies to work in the first place. So people feel their demise at the hands of spatial shearing the likes of which few things can match.

Even though the system manages to pull them out, the blow to the soul is too much. Those that survive? It doesn’t matter how well they handle it, most end up suffering spatial sickness in a manner that some describe as an allergic reaction from the soul. The fact that they can recover from it, is honestly surprising in and of itself. Still, the rates of permanent spatial sickness among those who have been integrated is significantly higher than those who are born later.

And on top of all that, basically no one even knows this. After all, the system kept newly integrated worlds separated from everyone else and places like Doyle’s dungeon are nearly non-existent. So Jim never really had a chance of figuring things out as the information just was not available.

Back in the dungeon, Doyle misses all this drama for something much more important.

‘Hmm, hexacrow? Crowexa? Rexan? Raxen? Hmm, what to call those bird monsters?’ Doyle sighs to himself as he gets stuck in a rut of including hexa in the name like how the golems are named hexapes.

Except there isn’t really an easy mash up between hexapod and either crow or raven. Doyle isn’t even really sure which bird his monster takes after more. Of course, going by size it is clearly closer to the raven. Except a lot of the features more closely line up with the crow.

Stuff like how their bills are smaller and straight and their tails being more fan shaped. Their call certainly doesn’t help either as they seem capable of both the crows caw and the ravens gronk as well as a number of other fun sounds. If anything, Doyle would compare their “speaking” ability to that of a parrot.

Of course, Doyle could always try and fall back on corvid or corvus in naming them. After all, both ravens and crows fit under that name. Except even though technically humans are homosapiens, well, everyone including the system, just calls them humans. So naming the bird monster something more scientific would likely just be annoying and stand out. Besides, Corvus Hexapodia doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue.

Anyway, Doyle isn’t even sure how much he wants to emphasize the whole “hexapod” thing they have going on. Sure, it is sort of a floor theme, but who knows what they’ll be used for later? Though on the other hand, naming things after how many legs it has is sort of tradition, just look at things like the centipede.

Of course, even before trying to smash hexa with a bird name, Doyle had tried quad and duo. After all, while they do have two sets of wings for a total of four. It’s just that he doesn’t find those results interesting and it felt like he needed to include some reference to the wings for it to make more sense.

Though he also had to be careful about how he mixed in “hexapod”. Cut it down too much, and it starts sounding like the bird is going to use curse magic on you. So no hexcrows. Besides, there was likely already a species of crow with that name out there that actually does use hex magic. It would sort of be on theme for them.

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