Having my body rebuilt took no time at all. At least, not from my perspective. I lay down, closed my eyes, opened them, and sat up as a completely different species.

I looked myself over. Same size, but my skin was gray and lumpy, like slightly burned porridge. My clothes had been replaced by a slate-blue tracksuit. My snowboots were gone as were my rings and other equipment.

I turned, swinging my legs off the cot, and my bottom twisted like clay. I poked at my wrist and the skin dented without rebounding. When I pulled on my sleeve my forearm pinched up, making it clear that the clothes were part of my body instead of being actual fabric.

My breath caught in my lungs and my vision swam as panic swam up from below me. This? This was the worst thing yet in the dungeon. I had lost my entire family and every friend except Eva. I had chopped alien beasts apart with my swordfish bill and had their blood geyser across my face. I had picked intestines out of my hair. I had slept cold and miserable. I had lost my entire world, but now I had lost myself.

"Relax," Bannon said. "You'll be fine. Deep breaths."

I struggled to comply but my lungs wouldn't work and spots were starting to dance at the edges of my vision and I was going to suffocate to death from sheer fear because I was a coward and wouldn't that be the stupidest—

Bannon's dog-like hand bapped me on the head, denting my skull in.

"Oy! Listen up, Quiet Chick! I didn't go to all this trouble getting you through the first two floors so you could flake on me now! Look at me."

My neck moved almost against my will, wide-staring eyes locking on his. The amused expression he wore felt like being poked.

"Take a breath, damnit."

I managed to suck in one shuddering gasp. The spots retreated. I breathed out, keeping my gaze on him as a touchpoint, a connection to the world of living beings. He nodded in satisfaction. "Again."

I took another shuddering breath, the sound of it raspy in my throat.

"I'm going to check your pulse now," he said. "Hold still." He reached out and pressed two fingers against my throat. I felt them sink into the flesh as he stared at his wrist for several seconds.

He took his hand back and wiped it not discreetly enough on his pants while keeping eye contact. "You are experiencing the normal signs of a panic attack as defined in the TGM9277—that's the Tutorial Guide Manual, version 9,277—subsection 41. I've seen this a thousand times. Well, more than a thousand, actually. Can't even count. I suppose I could figure out how many seasons I've been doing this but...eh, it's all good. For now, I want you to think about a beach. It's a warm day, the sun is shining down. The sand is crunching between your toes. Can you feel the sand?"

I jerked my head spasmodically, sense memories coming back of times I had visited the beach before the world ended. Before.

"You're standing below the wave line. The ocean is lapping around your feet, waves rolling in past you and then surging out again. The water is cool and when it rushes out it pulls the sand out from under you and leaves little hollows under your soles that force you to shift your balance slightly. Can you feel that?"

"Y-yes."

"Good. Now, listen to the waves. It's a steady sound, rising and falling..."

I breathed and listened to his steady, confident imagery, to the web of sense recollection that he was spinning to pull me back. Whoever had written the TGM had known what they were doing because the imagery helped.

It took minutes but I slowly got control back. Slowly, one step at a time, my breathing eased and eventually I was calm once more—at least, enough that I could think about something other than being terrified.

"Thank you," I said, having to clear my throat halfway through.

He shrugged. "Eh. It happens. More than you'd expect, actually. You and Yappy Girl have actually taken things pretty well."

I didn't know what to do with that so I ignored it. "Do I look the same?" I gestured at my face; with my grey porridge skin it was obvious that I didn't look the same overall.

He shook his head. "No. Two eyes, a mouth, but no nose, no hair, and your skin has bad texture. You'll want to fix that. The hair and nose, anyway."

"How?"

"Hey, it's your racial power, not mine. Maybe try thinking 'hair' and pushing your head out? Oh, and fix the dent."

I did as he suggested, imagining tendrils of hair growing from my scalp. Nothing happened.

I gripped my scalp with careful fingers and pulled chunks of it up, then rolled them in my fingers to make them round. That worked and once I had the feeling of it I was able to do it automatically instead of by hand. It hurt the same way it hurt when I was too aggressive at brushing out the tangles, but I ignored that and focused on getting it the right length. Once it was as good as I could manage I pulled a strand around in front of myself. Too thick to be human and the same grey as the rest of me.

I thought about my original hair color and mentally commanded the pseudo-hair in front of me to become that. To my relief, it worked. Then I changed my mind and made it blonde.

"Do you have a mirror?"

He shook his head. "Sorry."

There were no mirrors or mirror-like things in my inventory; the closest I could find was an empty glass potion bottle. It gave me a distorted view but it was better than nothing.

I carefully tugged on a chunk of my face, shaping it to be as nose-like as I could manage. My potion-bottle mirror showed me that there at least was one but that was the best I could tell. I pushed at the flesh of my face, checking how it felt when it moved. Careful exploration allowed me to tell that my new nose was too low compared to my eyes. I shifted it up, checking by hand that it was in the right place.

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"There you go," he said. "Okay, up and out."

"Give me a minute," I begged. I still looked like a gray mannequin.

He sighed. "Hurry it up. My favorite show starts in a few minutes and I'm not allowed to have it on while there are crawlers in the room."

"Just a minute, I promise." I stared at my hands. The fingers were distorted and bent from all the poking and prodding I'd been doing to my face and body. I focused, demanding that they shift back to a more human form. Nothing happened.

Oh, right. I needed to do it manually first in order to feel what it was like.

I worked on my left hand with my right, smoothing the skin and pulling the fingers straight. I managed to get as far as 'blocky with obviously fake fingernails but straight and no dents' and left it there. Once that was done the right hand went faster. Changing the color was easier; the gray washed away like dirt under a high-pressure hose, replaced by a steady wave of pale pink. It was almost but not quite my original skin tone and I itched like fire as the color shifted. Fortunately, the discomfort was momentary and disappeared once I stopped shifting colors.

"You didn't say it would hurt."

"You wouldn't have chosen it if I had."

I glared at him.

He laughed. "Get some shoes on. The AI put you in a pants and shirt so your naughty bits were covered but the rest is on you."

I sighed and went to work on my feet, brushing and poking at the skin until I had something like blocky snow boots on. I had to stop twice to breathe through the pain of shifting but I hurried as much as I could. Bannon was getting more and more impatient and I didn't want to wait any longer.

"Okay," I said. "I'm re—" I broke off as my brain finally noticed an important fact: Bannon and I were alone. "Where's Eva?"

"She finished about an hour ago. I gave her the rest of the briefing and she decided to go scout around a bit until you finished cooking. She should be in town somewhere."

A lump of ice appeared in my newly-monstrous stomach. I stood up and moved for the door.

"Hold your horses there, Quiet Chick. I need to present you."

I blinked several times, trying to bring my focus back to the moment instead of the avalanche of imagined bad futures that lay in front of me. "What?"

"C'mon." He snagged his top hat off the hook by the door, rolled it elegantly up his arm and plopped it on his head before leading me to the door.

He opened the door with a grand gesture and stepped forth.

When Eva and I arrived on the third floor we had been in a long corridor lined with frescoes in the first-century Roman style. Now, walking through the very same door brought me to a busy city street that would have fit well into an early Naturalist painting. The houses were mostly red brick with other-colored bricks worked in to produce murals that suggested rivers or trees. The roofs were slate and steeply angled with chimneys from which coiled joyful snakes of woodsmoke. Dozens of people were to-ing and fro-ing in front of me, talking and laughing or stopping to watch one of the half dozen buskers that I could see from where I stood—a trio of jugglers passing objects back and forth, a young woman in multi-layered peasant skirts playing a fiddle, and pair of acrobats. Above me soared a blue sky from which a red sun rose, drenching the scene in crimson light and long grey shadows.

Bannon stepped outside, waving me to follow. No one reacted to our presence until Bannon cleared his throat and called out in a drill sergeant's booming voice.

"Attention, please! I would like to present to you: Dungeon Crawler Katia, the Level 9 Monster Truck Driver. Welcome, Katia, to the third floor."

He stod there, one arm extended in a sweeping gesture and clearly expecting me to make some sort of response. I ignored him.

Katia: Eva! Where are you?

There was no response. I waited, heart in my throat, hoping against hope that I hadn't lost my only living friend.

Eva: Hey, you made it. I had to leave town.

Katia: What?!

Eva: I accidentally pissed off one of the city guards and had to run for it. Sorry.

Katia: Where are you? I'll come meet you.

Eva: Can't do it. In order to get away I hopped on one of the fast-travel caravans. I'm pretty sure I'm a few hundred miles away, but it was still dark out so I didn't see our path and there's no direct return. Don't worry, you'll be fine. Gotta run, I think the bandits have found me.

I could feel tears welling at the corner of my eyes, but what was there to say? I was alone.

Breathe. In. Out. In. Out. I had meditated every night before bed for three years now, I could do this. It was calming. Eva would be okay and we would find each other eventually.

I started to text her again to wish her well but decided not to; I didn't want to distract her if she was fighting. Besides, there was someone else I wanted to talk to.

Katia: Hekla? Are you there?

Hekla: Yes! Welcome, Katia. I'm glad you made it. I only have a minute—we're about to have a boss fight. How are you?

Katia: I'm okay. I'm a Monster Truck Driver. My race is doppelganger.

I struggled to stop there, to leave it on a positive note, but I couldn't.

Katia: Eva left. I'm alone.

Hekla: Oh dear. Well, as it happens, I've arranged some company for you. Carl and Donut aren't far away and they've agreed to take you into their party until we can reconnect.

Katia: ...Carl, the guy from the recap show who is walking around the dungeon in his boxers with no shoes on? The one who throws explosives around all the time and is always laughing like a crazy person?

Hekla: And Donut, his talking cat with a pet velociraptor. Yes. They may be odd but they're powerful and they've agreed to look after you. Find them and their manager, Mordecai, and let me know when you connect. I want to talk to them. Also, be careful. When I went down the stairs to this floor I was pulled out of the dungeon to be on a panel-style Q&A show. Carl started urging the citizens of the Skull Empire to rise up against their king. Prince Stalwart, the heir to the Skull Empire throne, was in orbit and he destroyed the production trailer that Donut and Carl were supposed to be in. They had switched at the last moment so a different guest was in there, a famous singer. Another group of aliens, the Valtay, destroyed the space yacht that Prince Stalwart appeared to be in, but he wasn't. His brother and the queen were, so the King is going to be furious and he'll likely have it out for Carl.

Katia: Are you sure it's a good idea for me to join them?

Hekla: Life is risk, especially in the dungeon. You're too far away to gain experience from our fights and you aren't strong enough to handle this floor on your own. You'll be safer with them until I can find you.

Katia: How do I find them?

Hekla: This level is a web of roads between towns with few or no branches on the roads. Towns are small, medium, or large and they don't have names. They'll be in the next town east of you. Be careful; there are monsters in the ruins and they are more dangerous at night. There are bathrooms and saferooms in the ruins so you'll be able to take shelter if you need to.

I paused, trying to get my head around all that, but before I could reply she messaged me again.

Hekla: I need to go, the fight is about to start. Good luck!

Katia: Good luck to you too.

I looked around, wondering what to do. My new Pathfinder skill meant that my minimap showed a much larger area than I was used to, and I could see a variety of shops. I had my narwhal tusk but no armor...maybe I should check and see if I could find some better equipment? No, I should get on the road. I only had a few dozen gold on me, my share of the loot from various kills back on the second floor, and I doubted that would get me anything valuable enough to be worth the time that shopping would take. I didn't know how far it was to my destination or how long Donut and Carl would remain in that town.

I squared my monster-girl shoulders and set off for adventure. This would be fun, right?

Right?