I had a late night. All my nights were late these days, it seemed, but this one was for a reason more satisfying than usual. I was working on my book, my magnum opus, a grand work designed to explain the ways of the world in an easy-to-understand and entertaining manner, with a novel-worthy story worked in between. I must have fallen asleep while writing it, and for quite a long time.
I felt strange when I awoke...and I was not where I had slept. I was resting on an oddly carved stone pedestal. It looked almost like it had been grown from the earth, except for the dull white gem on top of it. Wherever I was, it was someone’s basement. The walls were perfectly smooth stone, the ground more of the same. There was only one entrance, but it stood wide open.
I didn’t need to look around to tell that no one is in the room, so I set off, moving forward towards the entrance. There was a short hallway that I crossed in almost no time at all, and then I was at the staircase. And that was when I noticed there was something weird about how I had been moving.
I should have felt a slight tug from an old wound I had gotten...somewhere, but there had been nothing. I looked down at my legs, and saw they weren’t there. Nor were my arms, nor my torso.
I took all this in in a weirdly detached fashion. I could still move, still feel, still see. All my senses and my mind still seemed perfectly functional. The experience was too alien for me to really panic. It was like some strange dream, even if I felt perfectly awake. I decided I would assume I wasn’t dreaming.
If I was wrong, there would be fewer consequences from that assumption. I hoped.
I kept walking and ascended the staircase, and then stopped. I was surrounded by ruin. The ground was bone dry, cracked dirt except for a few shaded patches that retained some fragmentary dampness, but all was lifeless. Dusty, worn tombstones and broken statues surrounded me. In the distance, I could see a stout stone wall, the kind you saw on castles, that had a dozen breaches in it in one direction and caved-in houses in the other. The streets were strewn with broken barricades. Occasionally larger, thoroughly destroyed buildings or blank patches stood out from the general desolation.
A city had died here, first in war and then in starvation.
I shivered. It wasn’t the first time I had seen such sights...but this was something else. There was no one else. I couldn’t even see any insects, nor any skeletons.
“Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair,” I whispered, and then I took a step forward.
The ground did not crunch under my feet. No clouds of dust were kicked up where I stepped. The world continued on, seemingly not noticing me. I took another step, and another.
I was perhaps twenty feet from the hole in the ground when I struck something and rocketed backward, flying through the air and landing on the pedestal I had awoken on.
It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, but it didn’t hurt, exactly. It was more like my tummy got a little upset. I gritted myself and sped forward, moving as fast as I could. The walls blurred past me. I was up the stairs in an instant. I hit the invisible barrier and was sent back, exactly the same as before.
I tried everything I could think of. I went up, lifting myself off the ground. I went slowly, moving barely an inch over the course of an hour. I went at every angle I could.
There was a bubble of twenty feet from the hole, and there was no way I could escape it.
At some point, I realized I should be getting hungry and thirsty, but there was nothing but a vague sense of satiation.
It was at this point I began to worry. I was trapped as a bodyless ghost in a tiny space amidst a massive, desolate ruin. No one would come, nothing would change, not even me. It would be like the hell of solitary confinement I had experienced before, but somehow even worse.
I screamed and screamed, and slammed myself against the barrier again and again, trying to push through with sheer willpower. But as with so many obstacles, this was not one that could be overcome through simple determination.
Day turned into night and back into day without me breaking from my mad frenzy. I no longer had the limitations of flesh - something I had wished for so many times before, to better share a fire with a dear comrade or finish a gripping story, now given to me in the most twisted way possible.
Finally, I gave up and let myself rest on the pedestal.
“What the fuck is going on?” I demanded.
And then my question was answered.
I heard a voice speak, so large and loud that I could not understand a word it said. It was like being buffeted by the winds of a hurricane, but I did not move. There was a sense of arcane amusement, and then for the first time since I had woken up, I felt pain.
Stolen novel; please report.
It took a long time for the hurting to stop. My entirety thrummed with agony. It felt like spiked wedges were being driven into my brain, again and again and again, without respite.
But finally, my awareness returned to the world around me, with one change I immediately noticed.
There was a floating wall of text in front of me.
> Information
>
>
>
> Mana: 2/3 stored, +2 daily income, -0 daily upkeep
>
> Life: 0
>
> Experience: 0
>
> Theme: Undead
>
> Floors: 1
>
> None
>
> Undead: 5 Random Basic Undead Unlocked from Theme
>
> Undead Mastery Level 9: Unlocked. 90% reduction in Life costs for Undead. No further mastery is available.
>
> Control Minions: Unlocked at max level.
>
> Basic Hall: 1 mana. Must connect rooms.
>
> Basic Room: 1 mana. Increases mana capacity by 1.
>
> Core Room: N/A
>
> Move Core: 5 mana. Can only be done once per day.
>
> Shaping: 1 mana/hour. Make changes to your rooms.
>
> Bigger Rooms: 1 Experience to unlock.
>
> Boss Room: 2 Experience to unlock.
>
> Gauntlet: 2 Experience to unlock.
>
> Loot Room: 1 Experience to unlock.
>
> Faster Shaping: 1 Experience to unlock
>
> Spooky Cemetery: 3 Life to research.
>
> Specializations: None
>
> Sub-themes: None
>
> Basic Zombie: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
>
> Basic Skeleton: 3 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
>
> Rotting Beast: 5 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
>
> Crawling Claw: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep, no needs.
>
> Graveyard Bat: 1 mana to summon, -1 upkeep. Needs roost for shelter and rotting flesh for food.
>
> None
>
> Pit Trap: 3 mana, 1 to reset, 3 to repair.
>
> Tripwire: 2 mana, 1 to reset, 2 to repair.
>
> Spooky Skull: 3 mana, 1 to reset, 3 to repair.
>
> None
>
> None
>
> None
It was overwhelming to look at. I scrolled through the tabs, unfamiliar with the terms used. Oh, I had seen them all, and even used many of them before...but presented to me as a floating insubstantial presence, they made no sense.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked again.
Despite the pain saying it before had caused me, it was the only thing I could think to do.
This time, the answer I received was both more helpful and less painful.
> You are a dungeon. Grow strong, grow deep, strive. Give life and take it.
Getting knowledge downloaded into your brain by something incomprehensibly vast and powerful still hurt, but it was more like a six out of ten, as opposed to the ten out of ten from before.
Since this seemed to be the only viable way of gaining information, I decided to try again.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Nothing happened.
With that option exhausted, I looked through the categories one by one. Some of them, like Minion Upgrades, contained nothing, just blank spaces. Some had options or statuses inside them. Those I left alone for now. One category, “Special,” simply refused to open.
I looked at my mana score. It seemed if I didn’t do anything I would go over my limit, so I decided to start testing things.
I tried to make a room off to the side of the one with the pillar. Nothing happened. I tried again, moving it forward so it was in the short little hallway. This time, I saw something: a cube appeared in my vision, glowing green. I could move it a little in two dimensions - one on a line in between the pillar room and the stairs, and up and down. Trying to bring it in line with the pillar room or the stairs made it vanish, and so did raising it up or down too far. I couldn’t make it appear on the surface either within my prison either. There was a feeling like I was being blocked, like a puzzle you can’t quite remember the solution for. When I tried to place it outside the bubble, nothing happened at all.
Further experimentation revealed I could change the dimensions. There were limits in size, upper and lower ones, and I could only make rooms with four walls.
After a while, I decided enough was enough. I was almost ready to make my first room.
But first, I decided to have a bit of caution. With a thought, the wall of text appeared again. It might just have been my imagination, but something about the way it hovered reminded me of those cartoon butlers who are perfectly polite and perfectly mocking all the time. Like Jeeves, or Alfred.
I scrolled through the options, found the basic room one, and mentally poked at it. It took a few tries until I got it right.
The text box changed.
> Basic Room: 1 mana. A basic room. Rooms must have a hallway between them. Each room adds 1 to the Dungeon’s mana capacity.
While this still left me with more questions than answers, some things made sense. I couldn’t place it next to the pillar room or stairs because there wasn’t a hallway. I couldn’t make it too high or low because...reasons, but I suspected it had something to do with the (my?) Dungeon having only one floor.
Of course, that didn’t explain basically everything else, but I would take what I could get until I could figure out why I was a Dungeon, how I was a Dungeon, and what that meant.
I envisioned my first room. I set it to be small, about five feet by five feet, and it was maybe half a foot lower than the hall. The cube stayed green in my vision, and nothing happened until I mentally commanded it to appear.
There was an instant of hesitation, and then I suddenly felt like I had just run a race. It was good, a sense of exertion I hadn’t been able to enjoy in a long time. And as I was enjoying my exertion (despite not having a body), the room was appearing.
The stone simply melted away to form a passage about six feet high and two feet long, gently sloped down, and then into a room.
It was a box with smooth stone walls, a smooth stone ceiling, and a smooth stone floor.
I honestly don’t know what else I was expecting.