So here's the thing, when the dungeon formed in my guest room, it wasn't 100% unexpected. When the apocalypse (at least that what people online were calling it.) had started a couple weeks ago, I had begun stocking up. The last few months since the accident that had killed my wife had been an emotional low and getting preparing to kill monsters, had became my focus.

No, I hadn’t become a full fledge prepper, but I was prepared.

I'd started keeping a couple of swords and knives under my bed. My closet had a bug-out bag with a tent, sleeping bag, water filtration, stove, mountain house freeze-dried foods, headlamps, and layers of clothing. I kept a gun safe in the utility cabinet with a shotgun and some shells. I had some fly rods were tackled in the trunk of my car even though I should have moved them into a closet inside, if only to annoy the fish in the pond behind my place. Stuffed into the closet of my lanai was enough bottled water and astronaut ice cream to last through a bad hurricane season.

I wasn't just ready -- I was ready! Prepared even. But not a prepper. Ready for anything from a zombie apocalypse to randomly being Isekaied all the way out to a particularly wild Lady's Night at Fitz Irish Tavern.

As days passed, rumors turned into blogs and eventually turned into news. Mysterious goings-on was going on. according to the information and the internet. In Florida, where I lived, there were at least five fully documented dungeons. Five that we knew about. A couple more might have appeared on private property, or deep in the mangroves. And who knew what the number of rifts amounted to nationwide.

First, the unwary had gone in. Then quick-thinking web-fiction readers. Then danger seekers. Then journalists. Then libertarians and bitcoin speculators. Finally, the military decided they needed super soldiers, so Nations sent special Ops teams to gain levels. With the military giving at least tacit acceptance of the dungeon phenomenon, the Feds went all eminent domain and started grabbing up property.

A bunch of the people who went in died. But enough survivors -- known on the inter-web as delvers and adventurers -- killed a monster or two, then came back out got the [System]. Square brackets in context indicated access to new mystical functionality.

Sure, there were other ways to access the [System]. Most people bought [Crystals] on eBay and Craigslist. [Crystals] contained skills and spells that anyone could use to gain an ability. Once you had a power, [System] access was automatic. It was part of why people paid outrageous prices for the useless skills people found delving that nobody wanted to incorporate into their build. But enough scammers were selling cheap glass fakes for the secondary market not to be 100% trustworthy.

Because of this, I had planned on strapping on my sword, motorcycle leathers, and packing heat until about a week ago. I'd planned to see if I could sneak into one of the nearby dungeons. The one in St. Petersburg. Supposedly there was another in Orlando too, but rumor had it that the one Disney required you to be on the Club 33 membership list to get in.

Besides, according to rumor, the Disney dungeon had formed in a souvenir shop, it had sucked in half their inventory, and the drops mainly were Mickey Mouse hats, Star Wars DVDs, and the lyric sheets to 'It's a Small World.' You earned these prizes fighting Mickey, Minnie, or Pluto.

At least the St. Petersburg dungeon (the other nearby portal) had popped up somewhere normal. It appeared next to the University of South Florida. It was treated as a resource for students and faculty to study. You only needed a grant and time scheduled with the Dungeon Coordinator. Or, I figured, you could try to sneak in. Campus security couldn't be all that on the ball.

A week before I had planned to embark on my campus caper, a dungeon formed in my guest room.

The initial implosion that formed the dungeon sucked in the furniture, nick-nacks and dust bunnies from that room. These items would become the building blocks of whatever was on the other side of the glowing Star-gatey thing that took up an entire wall of one of the rooms of my condo.

When I first saw the dungeon I hurredly draped heavy blankets over the windows. I didn’t want my creepy neighbor Marigold peeking in.

Enough with the background. I was currently standing in my guest room, ready, prepared, and excited about my switch from clinically depressed Architectural Engineer to Adventurer. I was about to step forth on my first dive into my private and secret second life. I would begin solo leveling in my own private XP heaven.

Which was how I found myself in my living room; a sword hilt was strapped to my waist, and a leather jacket, chaps, and my old football helmet. Under the chaps were jeans, and under the jeans was an athletic cup since I wasn't a moron. I also had knee guards, steel-toed boots, and football shoulder pads that I'd kept from my glory days. The best jury-rigged armor I could buy locally.

In my left hand, I had a duffle bag with some stuff to seed my dungeon and where I could store my loot. In my right hand was the sword. According to the most upvoted thread on Reddit's r/second_amendment_outrages, guns didn't work in dungeons, so the shotgun was in the duffle bag, and the gun's Status between firearm and club waiting to be confirmed.

I was seriously ready to mess some monsters up.

In my guest room, the dungeon rose like a portal to hell, only without the hellish bits. Only the portal bits. The blanket I'd hung in front of the window billowed slightly in the draft of the air conditioning and ceiling fan. I would have to do a better job nailing the blanket's edges to the wall so my personal Karen aka Marigold couldn't see any mysterious lights the portal emitted.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Stepping across the threshold was like crossing to another dimension. In one instant, I was in a room smelling slightly of mold and body odor. (I'd canceled Maria, my cleaning lady, when the dungeon had formed and my apartment began to smell). The next instant, I was in a cave smelling slightly of mold and body odor.

It was a break in space and time that wasn't anywhere as mystical or transcendent as all the online forums were making it out to be. Which just demonstrated that people online are stupid. And, more often than not, know nothing.

In front of me were three little green creatures. Goblins, damn. They were ugly and naked, and I could see their dangly bits. I'd seen photos of goblins corpses online, that some adventurers had dragged out after a dive.

I'd heard that the Disney dungeon started with a room full of pant-less mice and a dog in the first room and they were supposedly a cakewalk to kill. There was a rumor that before the mouse killed you, he would violate you. But the internet was filled with crazy rumors, probably spread by the Russians.

I dropped my duffle bag and charged.

The warty green bastards snarled and spread out and tried to flank me. This would be a hard fight, but I lived in Florida and was prepared. Alligators by definition were green and warty.

As a longtime inhabitant of the retirement state, I was a veteran of many alligator sightings. I had survived the legions of octogenarian Swingers cruising the villages in their golf carts, looking to get laid. I had survived Covid under DeSantos. And once, at my last apartment, I had watched a meth-cooking neighbor who'd gotten fucked-up on bath salts and striped naked to attack a Grubhub driver before he'd been tased, and four police had wrestled him to the ground. Good times.

Goblins, those miserable little (traditionally anti-semitic) evolutionary failures, didn't have weapons. Just the claws and fangs Dungeon Formation had given them at birth. My sword stabbed deep into the middle one dropping it.

The amount of time, however, that it took me to skewer that first goblin gave the other two time to close in. And one on the right bit down on my leg, getting a mouth full of leather pants for its troubles.

The goblin to the left must have felt threatened, comparing my mighty man meat to its tiny ding-a-ling because it went straight for my crotch -- only the cup I was wearing stopped me from singing a couple of octaves higher. There was no way in this lifetime or the next I was planning on going Bard at level 10 (the level, I’d read, the [System] forced people to choose classes), so I sighed an involuntary gasp of relief — I don’t think I could endure a life singing castrato.

Moving quickly like a guy who'd spent 8 hours a day of his post-college life studying CAD/CAM renderings of generic suburban homes — and who had become a hermit and quit his job after a terrible accident had killed the only person he'd ever loved a few months back -- but who had been in a celebrated football player in high school over a decade earlier. I punted the goblin like it was a pigskin on game day. The goblin went long and hit the far-off wall. Three points!

A goblin scratched at me with its claws—that hurt. My leg was all torn up, and my chaps were ripped to shreds. I'd bought those the day after the guest room dungeon showed up and paid $300 for 'em. Switching my focus, I stabbed and stuck my sword into its face.

The goblin I'd punted a moment ago got up again and charged me. Couldn't it just make like its green buddies and die already? Wincing under pain of my badly wounded leg, my kicking foot went backward and showed the goblin why I'd made it to State Finals with my high school football team as a kicker. Again it flew across the room and bounced off the far wall. The stubborn little turd got up again, more bruised and extremely wobbly. Idly I thought, "Tough little guy." Probably got that way from eating babies.

Kicking Goblins was a rush, so I limped over and kicked it again. "The kick is good." I yelled, "Right through the goalposts," as the tiny green monster flew again across the room. When the goblin slid to the floor this time, it didn't get up, so I shuffled over and stomped on its scrawny little face.

A blue screen popped up.

Combat Resolved Experience: 24 points

"Fucking-A," I yelled, even though I had been expecting this. There was a massive thread about the first battle on Reddit, and I'd been tweeting at a bunch of supposed Delvers on Twitter. There were boatloads of liars and posers, but some of those dungeon delvers. Everyone geeked on about online had really been into a dungeon and weren't just losers chasing clout.

I cleared the blue screen from my vision.

Status Name: Randy Luster Class: N/A Level: 0 Points to Next Level: 24/50 Health: 43/100 Lethargy: 93/120 Magic: 130/130 Vim: 12 Vigor: 10 Bounce: 14 Fumble Fingered: 13 Clumsiness: 10 Chutzpah: 7 Clueless: 13

Interesting… Interesting… Most people got [Strength] instead of [Vim], [Endurance] instead of [Vigor], [Social] instead of [Chutzpah], and [Willpower] instead of [Cluelessness]. But from what I'd read on Reddit, this screen wasn't constant and could be edited. Our new dungeon overlords were not hugely focused on standardization. The wording changed according to which languages the delver could speak and presumably personality. One guy claimed his original [Status] was set to Klingon, but nobody online believed him. Either that, or he was such a big nerd he should be hunted and killed for the experience points.

I was shocked that my [Chutzpah]/[Social] was seven. That was a bit low—the human average for an adult being ten and all. According to the ladies at Fitz's Irish Tavern, I was charming and didn't even have to buy them too many drinks before they told me this.

It was mostly a rumor that classes weren't available until level 10. Though some people said that you got sucky choices earlier, you were required to take one at level 10. Dungeons had only been popping up for about a month. And not many people outside of the military had gotten that high. That was the way of this apocalypse. To their disgust, no true believers had been raptured. Instead, this apocalypse was all about free enterprise. Access to the dungeons most people knew about was controlled by companies, academia, and the government. And until my dungeon had formed, I thought that sucked more than a porn star.

But this was my dungeon. And sure as the shits after Taco Bell, I wasn't gonna tell anyone about it.