Monster Mansion 2 by Dante King (best way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

good for sleep or for waking a person up. And each one seemed to have more powerful properties if they were combined.

“Damn,” I said, “I thought they were just nice to look at. Turns out I should be able to craft potions with them!”

I had no experience at all at crafting potions, but I was willing to give it a try. I gathered a few handfuls of different plants, aiming for ones that showed generally healing or restorative properties on my stats screen. When I got a chance, I would experiment with making new potions with them. In time, I’d get by flora Whelps busy creating new plants for new potions with their special Bloom ability.

We did one more thing before going back into the mansion. At Kyrine’s request, we all walked right down to the outside gate. She began to look as if she was under strain as we approached, her face going pale and sweat starting to bead on her forehead.

“Are you all right?” I asked her quietly.

“It’s… the dungeon core. I’m getting too far away from it, and it’s painful. But I should be able to walk to the gate at least. I want to try.”

We got to the tall, wrought iron gateway, beyond which was the leafy, quiet suburb that disguised the mansion. Kyrine put her hands against the railings and leaned up against them, staring through the bars.

“That’s it, is it? That’s the world outside the mansion?” she asked breathlessly.

“Just a small part of it,” I said, “but yes, that’s it.”

She took a deep breath. With an effort, she pushed her right hand out through the bars.

Or at least she tried to.

It was as if there was a force field up against the outside of the gate. Her hand came up hard against it, and she yelped as if in pain and leaped backward.

“I suppose that’s as far as I can go,” she said. “Well, for now at least. We’ll have to wait and see what happens in the future.”

As we walked back up the drive toward the mansion, the tension on Kyrine’s face visibly eased, and she walked taller, smiling and chatting with the agents.

Of all the things that I had seen since joining with Kyrine, getting her outside the walls of the mansion was probably the thing that I liked the most. We really were going to break rules, I thought. There would be the new age of dungeons, and we would make the rules.

Back in the mansion, Kyrine decided to go get a rest. She promised Amanda that she would work on her guest quarters later on, then faded from sight. I felt her retreat to the dungeon core, and as she joined with it my awareness of her went quiet.

When I got back to my workroom, I picked up the new phone Kyrine had made for me. It was an exact duplicate of Astrid’s, including all her data and phone numbers. When I’d first borrowed her phone—not long after we’d first met—Astrid had asked me not to look at the pictures.

We had slept together now, and I figured there was nothing of her I hadn’t seen, but I decided to respect her privacy all the same. Tempting as it was to open up the pictures folder and have a quick look, I resisted the temptation. Instead, I navigated to the phone’s settings and performed a factory reset.

I took a little while setting up the phone. After weeks of candles, enchanting tables, potions, swords, and dungeons, it was pretty cool to hold a piece of ultra-modern tech in my hand again. It was a nice phone. Once I’d set it up, I even logged into my social media accounts and browsed my Twitter and my Facebook for a little while. It didn’t take long for me to appreciate just how much more interesting my life was now.

Resisting the temptation to post a photo of my new enchanting table on Instagram with #dungeonkeeper, I keyed the only number I knew by heart into the phone, and saved it as “Uncle Phil.”

My Uncle Phil had raised me, along with his wife, Aunt Betty. Phil was a cool guy, an easy-going, wise, take-no-crap kind of dude. He and Betty had raised me well, and when I’d first come to the mansion and been shown what my new role as Keeper would entail, Phil had helped me to put my doubts to rest.

He didn’t know exactly what it was that I was doing, but he knew it was to do with the government and that it might involve killing bad guys at times. Phil was ex-special forces, and he had found it easy to resolve my doubts about killing.

“Will it help keep the country safe?” he had asked.

When I’d agreed that it would, he’d replied, “well, there’s your answer. Sometimes doing your duty isn’t glamorous, but someone’s gotta do it. If it’s you doing it, that’s an honor.”

That had set my mind at rest.

I hit ‘call,’ and the phone rang twice before he picked it up.

“Hey, who’s this?”

“Hey Uncle Phil, it’s Jeremy.”

“Hey! Good to hear from ya! Your number came up as withheld—this a new phone?”

I smiled. “Yeah, I guess that’s going to have to be the way of it for the moment. No incoming calls here.”

“You're still doing that hush-hush government job, then? How’s that going?”

“Sure, I’m still doing it. It’s going pretty good, actually.”

“Good to hear, kiddo, good to hear.”

We caught up for a bit, and I leaned back in my comfortable chair, pleased to have a phone that would work in the office. It sure beat having to walk out to the end of the garden any time I wanted to make a call.

“Listen, Phil, do you have the number for my old boss at the enchantment shop? I