The little blue slime was very confused at its current situation. It had been Samantha, a cleric in a party of adventurers. The party, The Silver Fangs, had been completing a quest in the local Dungeon when they found a new cavern that was not on any maps. The Silver Fangs knew that the Dungeon was intelligent, and that it could alter the terrain of itself, but wasn’t expecting to find a change here in the middle of the dungeon, since the lowest reaching point of it was still far below.
Samantha was worried at first about the unknown element of this new section, but a quick look at the rest of her friends filled her with confidence. They had the experience, they knew what to expect, and they were ready for whatever this dungeon threw at them. She followed behind since that was the cleric’s job.
The Dungeon had other plans, though. It became immediately apparent that this new section was a place the Dungeon didn’t want people exploring. The new hallways were suddenly flooded with monsters as soon as The Silver Fangs took a step into the unknown. The monsters were more varied than was to be expected as well. The Dungeon usually kept each section to different themes, which was why it was rather simple to complete quests that needed certain materials, as parties knew what section would have the necessary flora and fauna to get it. Here, however, the Dungeon brought together a maelstrom of every monster species that called the Dungeon home to fight against the invaders. This caught The Silver Fangs off guard, but the team eventually got over their shock and got through the horde.
The Silver Fangs decided to continue to go deeper after they had finally killed the unusual swarm, despite the message they knew the Dungeon must be trying to convey. Samantha had tended to the party’s injuries, and all of them were ready to see what the Dungeon was guarding so ferociously.
As they progressed further, new monsters emerged to block their path. These monsters were unlike anything The Silver Fangs had ever seen before, and the party deduced that they must have been newly made creations of this Dungeon. While at first glance all the monsters facing the party looked like just normal skeletons, the dark energy oozing off all two dozen of the bony frames seemed to imply large amounts of power was used to create these new monsters.
For a moment, the skeletons merely stood there, watching the party. The Silver Fangs, outnumbered 4 to 1, also looked at the new enemy, trying to determine what they could do. Samantha, who had been worried for a moment, suddenly walked up to stand next to the leader of the party, Rex, and declared to him that she would be using Purify. Purify was a spell only Clerics could use, and it worked extremely well against undead. It usually left nothing behind for them to pick up, but would finish the fight by vaporizing the foes in an instant.
With the party’s agreement, Samantha prepped the spell. The skeletons, despite the very obvious danger, just stood there. Samantha couldn’t understand why the Dungeon wasn’t attacking, until it was too late. Instead of vaporizing the skeletons, as the light of Purify traveled across the room, the dark energy around the skeletons became thicker, and absorbed the light. Before Samantha could even comprehend what the new monsters had just done, a dark reflection of Purify returned and did to Samantha what she tried to do to the skeletons.
The rest of The Silver Fangs ran away, but the Dungeon didn’t care about them anymore. Just before it let Samantha’s soul go to the afterlife, it heard something very peculiar. A distorted voice called for help. The Dungeon realized after a moment that a new Dungeon had been born, and was calling out for other Dungeons to assist it. While most Dungeons would gladly assist, the distortion that was disrupting the cry for help made the old Dungeon realize that the new Dungeon was in a dimension other than its own. It could not help the newbie through normal methods, but it could give it a small gift that it had just claimed. It took the soul that was just defeated by its new experiment, put Samantha in a vessel that could handle interdimensional travel, that being a slime, and after locating the pathway that the voice came from it hurled the slime through the temporary gateway to give the new Dungeon a minion.
The slime that was formerly Samantha did not know any of this. All that she knew was that she had died, then she was in a basement. The basement seemed to be quite large to Samantha. While it took a moment to get used to trying to see her environment with her new body, when she did, the basement seemed almost endless. She tried to hop around, examining her surroundings, but nothing seemed to make sense. While she could slip between pipes and get through other obstacles, the exit remained elusive.
After several hours, Samantha finally found a stairway that led out of this mechanical labyrinth. As she hopped up the first few stairs, though, the door at the top slammed open. Mrs. Nathstein and Professor Verte stood blocking Samantha’s path.
“I was right,” Verte said, looking smug and pulling back her green hair. “The intruder setting off the alarm in the basement would naturally try and leave the basement eventually. We didn’t need to search the whole basement to find them.”
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“Enough of your gloating,” Nathstein fumed, her grey hair almost looking silver with the light reflecting off it from the stairwell. “Let’s just get rid of this slime so we can get back to our investigation.”
Samantha realized as both of the teachers prepared spells, that she was about to die again. She tried to hop away to escape, but the ice and acid spells that hit her slime body were too much, and she found everything fading to black.
Samantha suddenly woke up. She was in a bed, but not in a room she recognized. She tried to stand, but found that her body was not cooperating. She kind of sloshed onto the floor while trying to put feet under her that no longer existed. She then finally realized that she had not been dreaming, despite waking up in a bed, as her body was still made of slime.
However, instead of being a small ball of slime, she was now around the size of her previous human form. Her upper body was also maintaining a facsimile of her former appearance, and with a concentrated effort she was able to form legs and stand up.
It was at this point strange glyphs started to appear in the air on the other side of the room. Samantha looked at them as they became more intricate, until finally materializing as a person. Samantha lost her footing at that point, and fell into a puddle of slime again.
“I’m so sorry!” Rioros suddenly said, dematerializing where she was and rematerializing next to Samantha, offering a hand to help the slime up. “I didn’t mean to startle you!”
Samantha looked at this strange person, pausing briefly before finally taking her hand to get herself back up. She couldn’t see mana directly, but she could feel a great weight of energy emanating off Rioros as they gripped hands.
“What are you? Where am I?” Samantha asked. “I am so confused right now.”
“My name is Rioros,” Rioros said, though Riley was thinking to herself that she would have liked to introduce herself as Riley, Alexos was technically here as well and was part of the introduction.
“I am the avatar of the Dungeon here.”
“A DUNGEON???!!!!” Samantha shrieked and immediately dropped her human shape and cowered under the bed. “DON’T KILL ME!!!!”
“Wait, what?” Rioros crouched down to look under the bed at Samantha. “We are not going to hurt you. I promise you are safe here. We have had issues with unexpected guests, so we are keeping an eye out for those that harmed you.”
Samantha gingerly slid out from under the bed, then looked confused.
“Why did you refer to yourself as we?”
Rioros sighed. She walked over to sit on the bed, and motioned for Samantha to come sit next to her. Rioros explained Riley and Alexos’s predicament, and how they had received a message as Samantha died in the basement that a dungeon borne monster was about to revive, and they moved the equivalent to a respawn point to the dorm room they were sitting in now, with the Dungeon Core in the desk drawer.
Samantha opened up that the death they had witnessed was actually her second death, and before she had been in the basement she was in a different Dungeon and she had very suddenly died there. Rioros was offering emotional support on the outside, but inside Riley and Alexos were having a conversation Samantha couldn’t hear.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Riley said to herself. “Dungeons ceased to exist a century ago. There’s no way her soul was suddenly sent to the future and she didn’t notice the passage of time.”
“Counterpoint,” Alexos piped up. “Alexos, in the initial moments of formation, sent out a very powerful emergency alert. When no answer was received, a second message was sent out that was stronger than the first. This second message was sent into a momentary rift that travelled between worlds.”
“So, you are saying she came from another reality?”
“Affirmative.”
“That would explain how she knows about Dungeons, and seems to have had multiple adventures in places that I have never heard of. I know quite a bit of history and geography, and nothing she has said has lined up with any location I can recall.”
Riley ended the internal conversation and as Rioros gave Samantha a rundown of their current theory Riley and Alexos had of her being an interdimensional wanderer. Samantha apparently was familiar with situations like that happening often, to Riley’s utmost confusion. Samantha went on to explain that if you aren’t fighting monsters in a Dungeon, you will occasionally find lost souls that have hopped over from another dimension because of the chaotic nature of the mana Dungeons create.
“What I can’t seem to understand is this place,” Samantha said. “You have magic that I have never seen before. The underground area I could have sworn was created by a Dungeon, the complexity of the system down there, both the magical and the metallic layout, were both like nothing I would have seen in my world.”
“Right,” Rioros said a bit uneasily as she moved to stand up. “We are cutting it a bit close, but first thing we need to do is make sure that you can fit in on Campus. We could use our magic to maintain a disguise for you as well, but there are a few issues with that, so we were wondering if you could make yourself look more human instead of us having to do it.”
Samantha thought for a moment, and after reforming her legs, tried to force her body into an even more human appearance. After several minutes of trying to force it, suddenly her slime body finally took on a human appearance, surprising even herself as she fell backwards from the previous effort but still maintained the form.
“Great, now we will need to make you a profile on the computer,” Rioros said as she motioned towards the desk with her Dungeon Core inside it that now had a laptop on top of it.
“What’s a computer?” Samantha asked, as she walked over to the laptop like she had never seen anything like it before.
Rioros sighed, and Riley felt a headache forming, even though she didn’t have a head.