I wake up with a splitting headache, all I see is pure darkness and feel cold stone under my palms. Thinking back, I remember falling asleep in my bed after finishing a programming project for tomorrow's class. My groans echo off the walls of what seems to be a giant cave of which I am currently inside. This startles me as any simple explanations of this being my garage or bathroom are crossed out. I feel panic creep up but I push it back down. I check what I have on my person and only find my comfortable home wear, luckily I still have my socks, a long sleeved cotton button shirt over a t-shirt and some cotton shorts, at least I will not feel cold. I feel the ground around myself and find it is strangely smooth, definitely artificial, I stand up, choose a direction and slowly walk.

After 20 meters or so I come up to a wall that is just as smooth as the ground. I decide to call out for help in the languages I know, which includes: English, Spanish, Russian. All I receive as a response are echoes, it feels like this cave has a very high ceiling and is definitely expansive, maybe 100 meters or so in diameter. I decide to follow the wall and hope to come in contact with a door or something.

So far nothing but questions concerning the origin of the surrounding material pop up into my head. My brain fails to come up with any explanations that are reasonable, the best guess I have is a water reservoir. I ask myself where, how, why but I can not answer these questions.

After walking 50 meters my foot hits something and I hear a series of clanks and clinks like a pile of coins would make. I crouch down and pick up a coin into my palm, it feels heavy and covers half of my palm. On the coins surface I feel a face on one side and a symbol on the other. This only confuses me as it does not support my idea of a water reservoir. I put the coin down and feel around some more, all the coins feel rough and irregular, if I had to guess they are made by stamping a mould onto the metal, or something along those lines, like historic coins you can find in a museum. The pile is gigantic, if I lean onto the pile and reach up I fail to find the peak of the pile. I decide to walk around the pile as climbing a pile of coins may not be the best idea.

Making sure I stay in contact with the coins, I slowly walk about 10 meters before finding something in front of me. It surprises me as what I feel is not the same as the wall before but is a rough surface. I run my hands over the surface, I feel ridges repeated in a regular patern. After a minute of feeling the surface the answer hits me. Scales! The material is not stone as it does not absorb heat fast enough like stone, knocking on the material proves that it is not hollow and trying to dislodge a scale is proves to be a futile effort. I decide to walk around what I guess is a giant statue or replica.

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I find what I believe are the hind legs of the statue, next I continue to step over the tail. I walk back on the other side until I come upon the pile of coins again, I continue following the pile untill I touch the wall again. I sigh and continue mapping the room, this goes on for many minutes until I reach the pile of coins. My plan to find a door failed but at least I now know that the room is a giant circle with very smooth and cold walls.

As my efforts in trying to find an exit or anything by feeling the wall is a failure, I decide to investigate the giant statue. I come back to the hind legs that would be over my own height if stretched out, though right now they are tucked in under the main body of the statue. I carry on feeling the statue until I reach the tip of the tail which seems to be a giant spiked mace a meter wide. I tried pushing the mace using my body, I nudged it just a bit. This statue is most likely some kind of giant replica of some unknown creature, most likely a dragon. I wonder how detailed is it as I think of an image of a dragon resting its upper torso and head on a pile of gold coins. I let out a chuckle as this now seems like an elaborate prank where the light turns on and I get scared to death by a giant dragon. This seems to be the most logical explanation I can come up with so far even if it is a very long stretch as I do not have friends that would do such a thing.

As I think again about finding an exit, I sigh as only 2 options are left, one possibility is a hatch somewhere on the floor and the second option is on top of the pile of coins or on top of the 'dragon'. I let out a long breath thinking about crawling about the floor, feeling for anything that is out of the ordinary, as the space I am in is not small my search may take hours and then there is the problem of how will I regulate my search pattern as not to miss any spot. The other option of climbing the 'dragon' or pile of coins in pure darkness does not sound like a good idea to me. I slump down and lean against the 'dragon', my mind still trying to comprehend what hell happened and how did I end up here... As I do not know how this happened to me and dying of dehydration is not an option, I start to crawl using a linear pattern from the wall at different distances from the coin pile. Hopefully this will eliminate missed areas due to deviation, even if I have to search the whole surface twice with the center being passed by many times.

My boring and tedious search is interrupted by a voice.