Excerpt from Adventurer’s Guide to Dungeoneering by Clyde Looker
“Our world houses thousands of dungeons. Some big, some small, but all have common qualities. Treasure, monsters guarding the treasure, and adventurers trying to rob the dungeon of its treasure.”
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Inside the Chomper Dungeon, things were going terribly. The dungeon spirit assigned to it was completely obsessed with creating monsters with gigantic mouths. Quite dysfunctional in practice, with undersized bodies failing to support the gigantic mouth it held.
What’s the use of having a gigantic mouth if one can not use it? Adventurers simply danced around the gigantic mouth and attacked the exposed body. This, of course, did not dissuade the mad dungeon spirit. This dungeon spirit had found its calling after all. No matter how long it took, no matter what state the dungeon fell into, this dungeon spirit would continue to make monsters with gigantic mouths.
This obsession soon caught the attention of a god. Gods only existed to ensure the karmic balance of the world they oversaw. This tended to bore omnipotent beings, as the karmic balance rarely ever tipped to a point where a god had to interfere.
This mouth obsessed dungeon spirit became an amazing distraction for the god. The god could, and did, spend years watching the dungeon spirit design dysfunctional mouth monster after dysfunctional mouth monster.
One fateful night however, the karmic balance shifted greatly. An adventurer conquered the Twilight Abyss Dungeon, one of the five great dungeons of the world. In fact, this was the first time one of the five great dungeons was conquered.
This shift in karma gave the god a once in a millenia opening to influence the world how he saw fit.
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Devoro was the dungeon spirit of Chomper Dungeon. A name he affectionately chose as it represented exactly what he wanted his monsters to be. CHOMPERS! Unfortunately, his designs had been doing less CHOMPING and more...dieing.
This design he was working on now was different though. He didn’t know how he could tell, but he knew that there was something special about the chomper he was creating. Bipedal, straight posture, pale skin, white hair, two arms, five fingers on each arm, and-wait...he was creating a human.
What am I doing? Humans don’t have gigantic mouths…
Suddenly it hit him, a crescendo of creativity, and he returned to his work at a feverish pace. Yes, he was creating a human, just a human with a special feature.
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Mariella Gardiner was the type of person that people might call...easily angered. When the waitress at her favorite breakfast restaurant accidentally spilled on her favorite brown tunic, she had gone crazy. Threatened to report her and her family to the adventurers guild for “Disrespecting a 3-Star Adventurer” and she fully intended doing so after she cleared out the Chomper Dungeon.
The guild scheduled a cleaning out of the dungeon every month the dungeon was left unattended, to ensure no buildup of monsters, no matter how weak, happened. After all, even the laughably weak monsters in the Chomper Dungeon could kill someone if there were enough of them.
As a 3-star though, Mariella found a job like this not worthy of the time of someone as incredible as she. Money was money however and after blowing all of her savings on a fancy new sword she needed more of it.
She hummed an old folk song as she began her work, easily sidestepping the slow lunges of the monsters before removing the gigantic mouth of the creature from the rest of its body. Half an hour later she was three quarters of the way through clearing the entire dungeon.
As she decapitated another monster, this one standing on eight legs that still failed to support its giant mouth, she noticed a human figure huddled against a wall, intently watching Mariella with an anxious look. Mariella took this look to mean, “Please save me!” so she went to go examine the boy that would earn her some prestige in the guild.
“What are you doing here kid? Did you try and clear the dungeon and get stuck or something?”
“...”
“Kid, I asked you a question.”
“...”
“This some sort of prank kid, because if it is I will personally report you to the adventurers guild for disre-”
*SNAP*
…
*GULP*
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The waitress, nor the kid was reported to the adventurers guild for disrespecting a 3-star adventurer.