She should have been back home. Nothing should have messed with the teleportation circle. She had done it perfectly in class. So why was she in a pitch-black room?
Riley had teleported out of her dorm room with her intended destination being her parents’ house. What had gone wrong?
“ERROR! GLITCHED CONSCIOUSNESS DETECTED!” screeched a voice that Riley could not place. She couldn’t locate a source for this voice, and while it seemed like it should have hurt her ears, she didn’t feel any pain. She didn’t feel much of anything right now. But that was an issue that would need to be sorted later.
“Hello? To whom am I speaking?” Riley tried to say aloud, but it did not make any actual noise and was only said mentally.
“NAMELESS DUNGEON CORE IS DEFECTIVE! CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE IS NOT UNIFIED! A SECOND VOICE FRACTURES THE FORM!” the unknown voice screeched. At this Riley paused, suddenly linking together what was happening.
The reason she had decided to teleport now was because she was never planning to return to this dorm room. Sentient dungeons were a dangerous threat a century ago, until every dungeon had been hunted down and their cores destroyed. Riley’s semester long project for one of her history classes was on making a presentation on the information still available on dungeons, and this is where the current screeching voice had come from.
Riley had made a prop dungeon core for part of her final presentation, but went a little overboard on designing it. Wanting it to look as authentic as possible, she had accidentally made a REAL dungeon core instead of the fake she had intended to make. She didn’t realize that what she had made could become the real thing until it started to glow in her hand while working on it this morning. She had panicked in that moment, putting it in a drawer in her dorm room desk, then used the teleportation spell to get as far away from the College Campus as she could.
Or, that was what should have happened. Her mind was somehow inside the crystal with the sentience behind the dungeon core, and it was starting to light up the hiding spot.
“Nameless dungeon core is unable to communicate with nearby dungeons. Nameless dungeon core will carry out basic functions regardless.” The dungeon core’s voice was softer now. Riley wondered if it had screeched before as an attempt to signal to other dungeon cores that it needed help. While she had initially tried to abandon it, she felt guilty hearing how loudly it cried out into an unknown world.
“Nameless core, my name is Riley,” Riley said to the core. “I don’t know how this happened, but I created your core, and somehow ended up here with you. I do NOT wish to hurt you.”
“…Nameless Dungeon Core will ignore voice that designates itself Riley and continue tasks. Riley is an impediment to the purpose of Nameless Dungeon Core.” As it said that, Riley realized the core was creating its dungeon. The crystal that held them both started to float off the wood in the drawer that it had been left in, and it was about to reshape the interior when Riley used what mental focus she could to try and stop the Core.
“WAIT!” Riley said to the Core. “I know that dungeon cores can manipulate anything within their dungeon to defend themselves, but right now that is a very bad idea.”
“Explain,” the Core asked Riley, halting its motion for a moment.
“The reason you could not contact any other Dungeons was because others like you have been nonexistent for the last 100 years,” Riley started. “I made your core, as I said before, for a presentation in a college class, and we are still on the College Campus. All the rooms in these campuses have magic embedded into the very walls to detect when a student has damaged part of the campus, whether accidentally or on purpose, and it sends an alert to staff. If we create a dungeon for you right now it will be detected immediately and they will find us. Considering that 100 years ago all dungeons were destroyed, and even today that is still viewed as a good thing, I would reconsider trying to do what a dungeon normally does.”
“Evaluating,” the Core paused. “Nameless Dungeon Core has updated status of voice known as Riley from impediment to wise assistant.”
“Thanks, I guess?” Riley wasn’t sure how to take that, but after a moment she was just glad the Core was listening to her.
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“What is Riley’s suggestion for Nameless Dungeon Core if surrounding terrain cannot be absorbed and modified?” the Core asked towards Riley. “A dungeon will swiftly expire if mana is not absorbed from a nearby source or from the ground that the dungeon reshapes.”
“We will fix that issue when we can, but right now I need to see the rest of the room we are in. We are currently inside a desk that I stored your core in before you woke up. We need to extend our dungeon without altering the room.”
“Affirmative. Extending senses.”
Riley felt the dungeon move, and as the edge of the dungeon made its way out of the desk, she could manifest invisible eyes along the entire distance the dungeon currently covered. It hit the walls that had surrounded them, and then went through and Riley could finally see her dorm room again, exactly how she had left it when she attempted to teleport out.
“Alright, let’s see. If we can get over to that ring, that was where I teleported and somehow got us in this mess in the first place, there should be some mana there.”
“Statement by Riley does not match Nameless Dungeon Core’s information. A wave of mana activated the Core, but no human was teleported into the core.”
“What? I distinctly remember teleporting and then being in here with you.” Riley said back to the dungeon core.
“Negative, that is impossible.”
“Anyway,” Riley said as she figured she wouldn’t be able to get the floating rock to agree with her. “Move the edge of the dungeon over to that circle. There should still be mana lingering in the air that can help for the moment.”
“Affirmative.”
As the dungeon extended itself over to the circle, it sucked up any mana that was still lingering in the air. They found basically a feast once they touched the former magic circle.
“That felt like a good amount. How much time did that afford us?” Riley asked.
“Exact time unknown, estimated time 1-4 months depending on how active we have to be during that time.” The Core answered back.
“Sounds good, I hope we have a better situation by th-“ Riley was about to say when the door to the room was suddenly opened very forcefully. She recognized the person that just entered as Mrs. Nathstein, one of her professors on campus.
“Unknown mana source detected in student’s room, no student present to give explanation,” Mrs. Nathstein said into a cellphone that must have been to another professor.
“Quick! We need some way to hide!” Riley yelled mentally to the Dungeon Core.
“Processing…” the Core paused briefly. After several seconds, it continued. “Found source of mana that sends out alert to staff that Riley warned Nameless Dungeon Core about. Altering mana that Dungeon Core produces to appear identical to the mana that acts as a security system.”
The process took several minutes, while Mrs. Nathstein continued rummaging through Riley’s dorm room to find whatever it was that triggered the alarm.
“Mrs. Nathstein,” the voice on the other end of the call began. “The alarm has stopped going off. Whatever was triggering the alert has disappeared, or the alarm was being faulty and it sorted itself out.”
“Something felt wrong in here,” Mrs. Nathstein said into the phone. “The mana in the room felt prickly compared to what it should have been.”
“There was a teleportation performed recently based on the flow of magic that left campus just before the alarm went off,” the other professor said to Mrs. Nathstein.
“I am going to find the student that uses this dorm room and find out what was happening here, as she left quite the mess behind,” Mrs. Nathstein said as she took the phone away from her ear to end the call, then dialed a different number.
“Hello, Riley?” Mrs. Nathstein said into the phone, to Riley’s absolute confusion.
“Hello, Mrs. Nathstein,” the voice on the other end of the call answered back, which the dungeon core and Riley both heard from their invisible vantage points.
“An alarm triggered in your dorm room, and I was wondering what-” Mrs. Nathstein started to say but the person on the other end of the line hung up before she finished talking.
“What a rude student,” Mrs. Nathstein said as she stormed out of the room and beyond what Riley and the Dungeon Core could currently see. During her entire time looking, she never checked the desk, which was how they had evaded detection long enough to finish their camouflage.
“Well, that was close,” Riley said as she mentally exhaled.
“Agreed, Nameless Dungeon Core has updated status of Riley from wise assistant to life-saver.”
“You really need a name, you know that?” Riley answered back to the Core. “How about Alexos?”
“Name inputted. Naming complete. Dungeon Core now has name Alexos.”
“Well, Alexos,” Riley said. “What did you make of that last conversation Mrs. Nathstein had before leaving?”
“Calculating,” Alexos paused. “Alexos has one conclusion that it deems most likely.”
“Which is?”
“Since one known as Riley created dungeon core, her magic was imprinted into the core. The teleportation magic that Riley used left lingering magic behind, which awoke core. The only explanation left to Alexos is that your consciousness was duplicated while teleporting, one going to where you intended and is the Riley Mrs. Nathstein just talked to, and one consciousness stream was injected into the dungeon core.”
“I didn’t even know such a thing was possible,” Riley said.
“Alexos only knows what a Dungeon Core needs to survive for sure,” Alexos answered back. “The last conjecture is purely speculative. Based on currently available evidence, Alexos determined it was the most likely answer, despite how much of a stretch it sounds like.”
“Well, we can’t really do anything about that right now,” Riley said. “We will need to figure out this dungeon core situation together.”
“Affirmative.”