> Academies are places of learning. Thus those attending feel as if they are expected to learn, and there is nothing quite so dreadful, in the minds of most young people, as doing that which is expected of them. Thus I choose never to expect any of my students to learn.
>
> - Headmistress Roberta of The Center for Higher Education of Crystaline Spheroids.
I'd love to tell you that my degree in Advanced Kreature Mechanics was why I was so highly qualified to be a Dungeon Core. I can't however. AKM is widely known to be the degree for legacy students and the buds of legendary (read: rich) crystalline spheroids at CHECS-U, and anyone in the program spends most of their days at the Academy coasting through the courses secure in the knowledge that Bob (as the Headmistress prefers to be called) has never failed a single student from the program. Unlike the other aristo-cores and newly rich quartzes, however, I made note of a rather interesting fact. CHECS-U declares post-graduation casualty rates for every degree program other than AKM.
My peers dismissed this as being an obvious consequence of the fact that AKM was for legacies.
'Surely,' they claimed, ' this is simply because our esteemed lineages are so far and above the rest of the student-body that everyone knows our casualty rate must be truly minuscule!'
Idiots the lot of them. Relying upon their inherited wealth and ancestral lattice patterns, as if their paltry lineages would guarantee them success. I however would not be so foolish. The Academy itself of course was useless to me, any knowledge available to the plebian masses was surely beneath my notice and utterly useless to one such as myself. My ancestral line budded forth from the very crystalline spheroids that once spawned countless dragonlings, drakes, wyrms, and other dragonkin. Not even 23 generations back my house's founder had himself been birthed from the fluid of a dragon, a pure draconium crystal. The sheer instincts and evolutionary perfection achieved by the lattice patterns comprising my magnificent spheroid (perfect to within .001% tolerance, in case any of you wondered what I'm packing, so to speak) would guide me to the highest levels of achievement. I could have wasted my time at Academy studying evolutionary trees, taking minion loyalty seminars, or just living it up with the other gems, but instead, I looked to myself and perfected the art of listening to my instincts.
That's why I'm so highly qualified to be a Dungeon Core, and when the results of the Core Aptitude and Regional Placement test came back it showed. I was assigned to Placement Agent Danztile Iridium. At first, I too was shocked. A high-order metallic crystal is not at all what one would expect for a top-tier PA. All the most famous and prestigious agencies are run by magicite crystals like myself, although it isn't unheard of for a famous Core to be represented by a mundane crystal of the higher tier. Usually, the latter case would be an optical quality carbon lattice, or even one of the rarer silica crystals (beryl, corundum, and the like, never a quartz) but a proton count of 77 is a bit much. It is good that he was of pure composition, not that I'm one of those purity snobs, impurities are what give sapphires that smooth, sultry, calm, and rubies their sensual coloring.
Regardless of my musings, the sheer contrast to my expectations of prestige was initially confusing, until I realized what it meant. An unknown Agent with no known major clientele. A prestigious, nay, miraculous crystal striking out as a new Core. I had been given a secret Agent. Rumors abounded at CHECS-U about Cores so successful that they had to hide their techniques away from the world in order to preserve the delicate Balance of the System. I had dismissed these as mere flights of fancy, but what if it had instead been myth became legend, became rumor. Clearly, the Powers That Be, upon discovering the magnificence of my CARP test, had decided to intervene and hide away my exploits to come so that none may steal my devious designs and throw the Balance askew.
Tomorrow would be the day. My interview with my brand new secret Agent. My Placement interview. The beginning of my grand Dungeon.
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I have been waiting for 17 minutes. The room is bare, not even a room truly, but a cubicle. I wasn't aware they still had cubicles.
"Rather odd to be meeting my Secret Agent in a shared workspace." I mused aloud.
True to the form, Danztile's workplace truly appeared to be a hastily rented-out office. No furnishings on a plain desk The stool upon which I sat at the very least had a thin fabric cushion to protect my exterior from scuffs. Although I do wish whoever had built the space bothered to spring for velvet. I fully expected to be escorted from this initial meeting place to a properly furnished meeting room once Danztile arrived, although I could not for the life of me determine where the hidden entrance would be. Top-notch security.
My hopes dimmed as Danztile rolled into the cubicle. Rolled. Not floated. Not carried in by a loyal minion. No teleporting in with a flash of light. Rolled.
"I'm so sorry for the wait sir, I was unfortunately caught up with a previous client, whom I was meeting in a different workspace, due to scheduling conflicts with the rentals, just give me one moment and I'll get all my files set up." Danztile chirped in an obnoxiously upbeat and peppy tone.
Danztile was grey. Opaque, as expected of a pure metallic crystal. Distinctly and visibly elliptical, although thankfully not so much as to be an ovoid, remaining firmly in the category of us superior spheroids. Perhaps within 5% tolerance, safely in the single digits at least. Despite some clear effort having been made to polish up, scuff marks were clearly visible across her entire surface, no doubt from all that rolling. I as she began to set up her information monitors I thought I even glimpsed a small scratch near her rightmost vertex. Gracious and noble as I was I suppressed my revulsion. How dreadfully low class to even have a vertex, but scratched?
I coughed politely. "Pardon, me but I couldn't help but notice you seem to be having some trouble with your monitors, are you perhaps low on mana from relocating your previous client?" Monitors barely take any mana, but floating can take some effort, especially for a heavier core, and iridium is infamously dense. It would have been quite rude to call her out for rolling, however.
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"Oh!" she startled slightly, having been absorbed in the monitors now surrounding her. "No I'm quite alright, I prefer to use external mana sources and physical interfaces due to my low capacity to conduct mana." She wobbles slightly in embarrassment, the motion made quite more apparent due to her... oblong features.
"Please excuse my bluntness, but isn't the ability to conduct mana highly important for Placement magics? I wouldn't want to have an issue with my relocation." I ask beginning to feel slightly annoyed at Danztile's perky attitude.
"I understand completely but rest assured mana capacity is far more important for the spell in question and I have that in spades!" she says with a slight wiggle. "I know most high-class magicite cores like yourself don't usually pal around with good old shiners like me, so I'll just fill ya in to set your mind at ease. I'm an iridium salt, so unlike most metal spheroids I've got some conductivity kinks, but I've got the tools to get you where you're going!"
With this last statement, she produced a keyboard and began to roll across the keys. Each click and clack another spike into my brain. This was my Agent? A salt? Rolling around like it's her greatest pleasure in life? A new sound. Humming? I simply sat in silence processing what was going on.
"Oh my goodness! What a handsome young man we have here!"
Finally the compliments I had expected.
"Only a smidge over 1% deviation, you must have an excellent exercise regimen!"
...
She makes a small little giggle "Why if I were a few hundred years younger... anyway according to your file you're a pure magicite core with a degree from CHECS-U in Advanced Kreature Mechanics-"
"I'm sorry but are you sure you have the right file?"
"Oh yes, quite sure hun."
"You must be mistaken, my deviation is less than .001%"
At this, she gives me a very pitying look. "Young man, I know you kids these days have a lot of pressure on you to keep yourself looking perfect, what with the models and the entertainment programs these days, but 1.2% is nothing to be ashamed of!"
"1.2% Impossible!"
"It's alright to have a little bit of a lump, I've got some vertex myself you know, and let me tell ya a lot of real shiny cores like a bit of parabola in the budding room."
"Ma'am I'm sure they do but I'm not a smidge over .05% and that's that."
With this, she rolls in a small circle and sighs. "If you insist honey." There are a few suspiciously unconvincing clacks of the keyboard. "Anything else wrong with your file?" She gives me a look.
"Yes actually." A small beat passes.
"Which is?"
"I have a small impurity."
"What kind of impurity?"
"Draconium."
With this, she gives me another much sterner look. "Now young man, it is one thing to fudge some tolerance numbers here and there, but to lie about your magical composition when I'm about to perform some serious spacial magic on you is dangerous in the extreme."
"It's true!" I protest, "My family has had draconium in the family going 23 generations back."
Danztile sighs and opens a few new tabs on her monitor. A moment later she wibbles back and forth a small amount humming to herself slightly. "Yeah, your family history does indeed have draconic lineage, but your parents' lattice is already nearly completely devoid of draconium impurity. The composition sample from you that was tested when you graduated from the Academy showed no signs of any draconium at all."
That... was much harder to argue against. Also completely impossible. I myself had felt my own draconic instincts. The deepest desire for mana, for gemstones, the most beautiful and sparkling of rubies... ahem. Things that it could be argued any young core feels to be sure... but I was different, I was sure of it! The test results, however, were a damming sign. It's impossible to fake such results and the tests are extremely accurate. The only way the results could be wrong was...
"Perhaps the draconium I inherited is just unusually concentrated, the sampling process could simply have failed to get a representative slice?" I asked almost pleadingly.
There's a brief pause. "It's possible," she admits, if slightly begrudgingly. "I will warn you however that if I change my spell to account for such an impurity and it doesn't in fact exist, any small error in the process will be amplified thousands of times over. There's no reliable way to predict what the effects could be."
"Do it," I say without hesitation.
"Young man, for a new dungeon core, one that hasn't even earned a name, this is a very dangerous prospect. I have a near-perfect record with my spells but it only takes one small mistake for everything to go horribly wrong. Are you absolutely sure?"
"Yes. I am."
"Well alright then." Danztile pauses as if to say something more, but simply does a quick spin in place. "I suspect that if I gave you recommendations on where I could send ya, you would just blow past them and insist on someplace else you got your heart set on, so we might as well skip to that."
I think I may have detected a slight note of resignation in her voice, but since she's finally acquiescing to my superior knowledge of myself, and my deep-set skills at listening to my instincts, I simply brush past it. With a quick flash of agreement from me, she begins to cast her spell.
Slow as the windup may be, due to her... unique composition, I must admit I'm impressed at the raw quantity of mana poured into the outlines of the spell. I can even detect the warps of runes writing and re-writing the very fabric of space itself, not in the telltale spurts and spats of mana leakage, but the steady pulse and hum of extreme power.
"Alright young man, the spell is ready. I'm sure you have studied all this quite well, but it is my solemn duty as a Placement Agent to remind you that the System will bind and restrict you once you have reached your new home. You will likely find yourself unable to cast spells, unable to move unaided, or indeed at all. The System will enforce certain rules upon you and your ability to shape the world around you to preserve the Balance. You in all likelihood will not be able to contact the homeworld for quite some time. This is your last opportunity to elect to stay."
She hums to herself for a small moment. "Yup, that's all the official warnings and whatnot taken care of. If you don't mind I do have a piece of my mind I'd like to share with ya. You should try and pick somewhere quiet and out of the way. You've got ambition young man, and the crystal to back it up, but with your frankly below-average test scores, you'd be best to get some experience under your belt before making waves ya hear?"
Seething at the clearly false and biased test claiming my finely honed instincts were somehow below-average, I growled out: "Azim City."
"I'm gonna need you to spell that."
"What?" I ask, taken aback.
"You think this keyboard is for show young man? I got the conductivity problems remember? I need to type the name into the monitor and then transfer it into the spell from there. I do it my own slow way and you'll be smeared the whole way across the time-space continuum between here and there. Now doesn't that sound fun?"
I was beginning to detect some sarcasm in her voice there. "A-Z-I-M"
"A-Z-I-N?" Danztile asked.
"M!" I roared back.
With a slight startle, she hit the key she'd been perched right next to, letting out a small shocked "Oops."
"Oops?" I asked.
She didn't say anything. Only sat there, wobbling slightly.
We sat there for a moment waiting.
"Is anything gonna happen?" I asked, cautiously.
There was a huge explosion.