--- Rania ---

They were on their way through the feywild to meet Dov's parents and put a stop to the war, when they once again came upon a large iron gate blocking the path.

"Oh, look! They are back!" Said one of the Mystical Gate Guards.

"Not these people again! I hate them and I wish never to see them again." Said the other.

"Hey! Would you like to go on the Adventure of Doom now?" Asked the first.

"The fun adventure that teaches us more about ourselves? I would love to!" Responded Dov.

"That sounds like it will take a lot of time. We are kind of in a hurry to stop a war right now." Atrog interjected.

"Oh no, don't worry! The Fun Adventure of Doom will take place entirely within the feywild, so you won't lose any time at all!" The first guard responded.

"Do we have a guarantee of safety?" Asked Balron.

"Of course! This is totally just for fun!" The guard responded.

Balron looked at Rania for confirmation, and she nodded. The fey seemed genuine to her.

"Do we get paid extra for this?" Asked Lynn, while looking at Rania.

"Um, I don't know? But every cool adventure comes with treasure, I think?" Rania responded with a questioning look at the Mystical Gate guard. He nodded vigorously. Phew, she was glad to see that. It would have been so embarrassing if it turned out that their adventure didn't have any loot after they hyped it up so much.

There were no more objections, and so teams Nundru and Delta set out on the Fun Adventure of Doom.

They were soon joined by two new fey, one old and one young. Technically they both could really be any age, but the older one was wearing a beard and a monocle, which was really a very direct fashion statement. It meant that he identified as an old person. It turned out that they were both Dungeon Builders, and the adventure they were going on was the younger one's journeyman's Test. He looked both nervous and excited, and Rania really hoped it was going to go well for him.

The older fey was very polite and he said that his assessment would depend largely on her own. She found that very flattering, but also kind of weird. Why her specifically, and not her friends? They were going on the adventure, too!

She could think of two possible explanations. Either he recognized that she knew a lot about adventures because she read so many books about them, or he cared about her opinion because she was a shaman and the others were not. That second one would be rather judgmental and offensive towards her friends. Rania knew that it was impolite to assume bad things about strangers just because you did not understand them, so she chose to believe that it was the first explanation instead. He probably just liked how many adventuring books she read. It basically made her an authority on adventuring.

They soon came upon the dungeon. It was a military facility and not a real dungeon, of course. Those had gone out of fashion a long time ago. The facility was a copy of a building in Oruk, recreated in the feywild and then modified to have more traps and loot.

"...and if I pass the test, then we will swap the building with the real one and I will have made my first mark on the world!" The Apprentice Dungeon Builder said excitedly.

"Wait, you want to put a death trap from the feywild into the material plane? That sounds very unsafe." Said Balron.

"Of course. We do that all the time. They are dungeons. They are not meant to be safe." The Senior Dungeon Builder responded.

"You mean to tell me that there are many buildings in the country that are deliberately designed death traps made by fey? How did I never hear of that?"

The Senior Dungeon Builder smiled. "I am so glad to hear that you have never noticed it before. That means we designed them well. Tell me, have you ever noticed any chests full of loot placed conspicuously in a room after you just overcame a major challenge? With no explanation for why it should be there?"

"I can't say that I have." Balron responded after a short while of thinking, and the old Fey's smile brightened.

"Actually, my parents said that stuff like that happened a lot." Dov added. "They figured that it must have been some weird cultural norm of whatever society used to live in the ruins they plundered. They made a lot of jokes about it."

"Ha! Then my trainees listened well to my teachings! We will take no shortcuts here, not like those hacks in the Cursed Lands! All of our loot has plausible reasons for being there." The Senior Dungeon Builder enthused.

"So all of those buildings I have been exploring were set up that way on purpose? To challenge us?" Balron asked in disbelief.

"Probably not all of them. But many, yes."

"So all this time, I have been testing my skills not against security left behind by our ancestors, but by things you fey put in there on purpose?"

"Yes. Although we do try to keep all of our traps historically accurate. The buildings contain only traps that could plausibly have been built by the original creators."

Then Balron began laughing. He had to sit down for a few minutes, and we were all worried about him.

"It's fine, everyone. It's just a lot to process, that's all. This has given me a completely new perspective on, well, everything, really. I think I will take some time to fully come to terms with this. But don't worry, it won't distract me from our mission."

A few minutes later Rania overheard the young Dungeon Builder whisper to his friends: "Do you think that counts as teaching people more about themselves, even though we aren't inside the dungeon, yet? Giving someone an epiphany like this is worth a lot of points on the test."

Rania hoped it counted. Balron seemed to be in high spirits, and the young fey did deserve some credit for arranging all this.

They soon came upon the dungeon, and Rania put her game face on. The young fey had a lot riding on this, so it was very important to take the dungeon seriously.

They entered the dungeon, and immediately came under attack.

There were traps. There were monsters. There were puzzles.

There were puzzles that were trapped and threw monsters at you if you got them wrong.

And the puzzles even made sense and had a logical reason for being there! It was awesome! They were all having a blast fighting through the dungeon.

Throughout their dive through the dungeon, Balron struck up a conversation with the Senior Dungeon Builder. At first Rania thought that was impolite because he should focus on the mission that the young fey had put so much effort into. But then she realized that Balron was a scatterbrained professor, and getting distracted by talking about stuff he found exciting was a previously established character trait of his, so it was fine if he did it.

The Senior Dungeon Builder was really excited by the discussion, too. The two of them were talking about security, and traps, and monsters, and lots of related stuff. It was really technical though.

"That here was a Trismegian-style security rune. Are you sure those should be here? This facility has heraldry of House Jaine, and they tended to use Polarian-style runes instead due to licensing issues." Balron said after disarming a trap.

"You noticed that? Amazing! I'm afraid I can't explain why it was there, but let me assure you that this was on purpose. Telling you the reason for it in advance would be a spoiler. I hope you don't mind?" The Senior Dungeon Builder responded.

"Then I look forward to finding out what is going on here. And don't worry, while I don't understand what exactly you mean by 'spoiler', I am familiar with Non-Disclosure Agreements. I suppose this is a similar situation."

The two of them went back and forth like this the whole time they were in the dungeon.

They even decided to stay in touch after the adventure. Whiskers could use her status as Balron's familiar to travel between the material realm and the feywild to deliver messages between the two.

They were already planning to set up a student exchange. Fey could work as research assistants for Balron, and Balron's students could go on expeditions in the feywild to earn extra credit.

Those were all plans for later, of course. Balron explained that he planned to adventure with them for quite a while, but not permanently. He said that adventurers who don't retire early usually die. Rania was saddened to hear that. She liked adventuring with Balron and didn't want him to retire, but she also didn't want him to die.

It was quite a conundrum, and so alien to think about. The adventurers in her book never retired just because they were afraid of dying, but she now understood that real people thought differently.

Maybe if adventurers died less often they would be more happy and there would be more adventurers? It was a strange insight, and something to think about later.

For now, Rania was just happy for Balron for making a friend. He seemed to be enjoying himself even more than the rest of them.

Even her Sidekicks were enjoying themselves.

"This is so much better than having to fight a fucking Old Power." Pymion remarked.

None of them were having much trouble with the monsters in the dungeon, so this was basically free money for her Sidekicks. After all, the dungeon had been designed before they all killed Cilia, and at this point the Law of Adversity had empowered them far beyond the dungeon's original challenge rating. Luckily the Senior Dungeon Builder said that this would not reflect negatively on the journeyman test, so it was just great for everyone around. Except for the monsters of course. Those were having a pretty bad time.

Rania paid special attention to Aranea during their fights. It was the first time that Aranea got to fight with all of them since she became sapient. She was roughly as strong as one of the Sidekicks now, but not as strong as Rania herself or her other team members. Rania sometimes held back a little during the fights, to leave some monsters to Aranea as a challenge. Her new adoptive little sister would need all the opportunities she could get so that she could catch up to the rest of them.

Rania was always worried whenever she let a monster pass for Aranea to kill. What if she overestimated her little sister? Aranea was clearly the best spider, that much was certain, but what if a monster got lucky and she got hurt anyway? Rania could never live with herself if one of her friends got hurt because of her, even if it was with the best of intentions.

It did not take them very long to reach the heart of the dungeon: The administrator's office of the facility. Rania was eagerly anticipating what sort of cool loot they would find, but to her surprise they found a map instead. A treasure map!

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

It was so cool! The Apprentice Dungeon Builder had gone all out, and made this a multi-stage adventure. And the map had a totally logical reason for being there as well. It didn't look out of place at all.

So they all took off again to follow the map.

The others said the map was hard to read, but it seemed perfectly straightforward to Rania. She even ended up helping a traveler they encountered in their travels. The strange green-haired swordsman had gotten lost while trying to find his way to the grocer and ended up in the feywild. Rania was pretty sure that he wandered in from another narrative by accident. Unfortunately, their crossover quota was already filled, so she couldn't let him tag along and just pointed him in the right direction. Pebble also commented that they could get into legal issues if they let him join, too. She shuddered at that. She did not want to get on the bad side of a fey lawyer.

They continued onwards, and that was when tragedy struck!

They were ambushed by unicorns on the road. These particular unicorns were mutated by an Orukian bio-weapon to make them highly aggressive. Unicorns possessed magics that made them great at avoiding threats, and it turned out that those abilities also turned them into highly efficient ambush predators and harassers when their sense of aggression was artificially altered. Atrog explained that the military used to drop dozens of them behind enemy lines during the Great War, where they would disrupt supply lines and force the enemy to divert a disproportionate number of troops to deal with them.

Even normal unicorns were really nasty critters, in Rania's opinion. They had a supernatural sense to detect virgins, for some reason. It was super creepy. Rania had never found out what the design intent behind that species was, and she was kind of afraid to ask.

They fought the unicorns off easily enough, but then something surprising and utterly unexpected happened: They got ambushed again, this time by elementals!

It was so weird. Rania was quite sure from all the novels she read that there was only supposed to be one random surprise encounter at most in between plot-relevant events, so she had let her guard down.

A lot of different elementals were attacking them. All of the usual ones were present: Air elementals, earth elementals, fire elementals, water elementals, and so on. There were even some rarer elementals, like a bubblegum elemental and a strontium elemental. This was quite unusual, because different types of elementals normally didn't work together very well.

That was when she realized what was going on: The elementals were being led by a Surprise Elemental! That was why there was an unexpected second ambush, and why they managed to get the drop on her. They had the elemental of surprise on their side!

She still didn't know why the Surprise Elemental was able to lead the other types of elementals, but she supposed she shouldn't be surprised that the Surprise Elemental would have surprising abilities.

They eventually defeated all of the elementals, but unfortunately they suffered a small casualty in this fight: The elementals re-killed one of the undead horses pulling Boomwagon the First. Fortunately they had a few spare horses folded up in the trunk, so they just had to pause for half an hour while Galanys unfolded the horse and cast a necromancy spell to animate it.

But when they finally arrived at the destination on their treasure map, Rania knew that it was all worth it: There was a dragon here, guarding a treasure hoard!

So cool!

"Greetings, mortals!" The dragon roared at them. "I am Zephyrion."

He looked young, and kind of unusual. But luckily Rania knew what was going on there: This was a young Genesis Dragon.

"Greetings to you too, mortal! I am Rania!" Rania greeted back.

"...Did you just call me a mortal?" He asked in confusion.

She felt some concerned pings through her telepathic bond, but the others trusted her enough not to interrupt.

"Of course! You die if you get stabbed hard enough and you don't come back from the dead. Most things are mortal like that." She explained sagely. "You can trust me on this. I'm an expert on things being mortal. My whole family is so mortal, we are named after it."

The dragon looked at her strangely, then he started laughing. "Indeed! Most things are mortal in that sense. All things die eventually, and new things arise in their place. It is the circle of life! Tell me then, what brings you here?"

"We found this really cool treasure map that said we should go here, so we did. Are you going to fight us? Fighting a dragon is a classic but I kind of don't want to fight you. This is your treasure hoard and it would be really rude and I think also kind of unethical to attack you for it. I learned that from books! Also, you probably don't want to fight us either, because Genesis Dragons are usually pacifists."

"Haha, you are quite direct, little elf. And you are correct as well. Tell me, how did you know what I am? My kind went into dormancy shortly after the world's creation."

"Oh, that's because I have lots of cool but unspecified mentors in my backstory who told me all about dragons. Dragons are super cool and highly relevant for all adventures and adventure-related activities, so I simply had to learn all about them. Naturally that included learning all of the ancient lore forgotten by mortal kind."

"...you just picked up ancient lore forgotten by mortals? From your mentors? Who are unspecified parts of your 'backstory'?”

“Yes.”

”Are you messing with me?"

"No."

"...you aren't lying. I can tell. But don't you think that is weird?"

"No."

"...I see."

"Well, I'm glad we could clear that up." She said when the dragon finally accepted her explanation. Honestly, why were people always so suspicious of her backstory?

"*It sounds like you understand a lot more of what is going on here than any of us do. Would you mind explaining?*" Atrog asked her telepathically.

"*I have a better idea!*" She responded.

"Just to make sure that my mentors didn't tell me anything wrong, could you explain to us what exactly a Genesis Dragon is and how cool you are?" She asked Zephyrion.

"I would love to!" He responded eagerly.

Classic dragons. They would take any opportunity to brag and show off how awesome they were.

They spent the next two hours or so listening while Zephyrion explained everything there was to know about his species. He was so enthusiastic about it, it was kind of adorable. Rania got bored after a while, but the others listened patiently because apparently this was all new to them.

"...and that is why it would be antithetical to my nature to fight you. Normally I would just tell you to leave and command nature to expedite the process if you refuse. But you have all proven entertaining so far, so I will propose an alternative: We will hold a series of competitions. On my honor, if you defeat me then you may take two items from my hoard. But if I win, then I will demand an Oath of Service from each of you."

"*We should consider this carefully and...*"

"We accept your terms in the spirit they were given!" Rania immediately agreed. She understood how the dragon thought, and there was no real risk here. If he won, he would probably demand that they go on another quest. It was really a win-win situation. Either they got the treasure right away, or they would get a cool side-quest first. This was going to be so much fun!

The dragon smiled, and presented his competitions. He had over a dozen different games and challenges for them!

There were tests of speed and strength, feats of magic, and tricky puzzles.

He even had deep philosophical discussions with them in between the bouts and dispensed sage wisdom. It was really cool, although she had to admit she had already learned a lot of that wisdom from fortune cookies before.

There were also riddles about life and death, but they disagreed on their solutions. The Genesis Dragon was super into the whole concept of death and rebirth and how the world should be ended and created anew. It sounded pretty terrible to everyone else, but those were cultural differences, she supposed.

Rania knew what to do here: She took out the books about ethics that Atrog gave her and used them to clear up cultural misunderstandings. She patiently explained to the dragon that people generally agreed that dying was bad. Therefore, by induction, the end of the world was super extra bad. Maybe he could stick to only the life-making part, and skip the life-ending part altogether?

Zephyrion didn't really know how to respond to this and he decided to count this as a win for them.

Rania was really happy about that. It was the first time ever that she had won a competition through logic and reasoning! Normally she just won through stabbing and shooting. This was a new experience for her that felt different, but nice.

At some point Galanys could no longer suppress her curiosity and she started interrogating the dragon.

"So you really don't fight at all? From what I have read it sounded like all dragons were quite aggressive and prone to fighting. What do you do if someone simply attacks you or tries to steal from you?"

"I can and do defend myself when I need to, of course. I just choose to avoid combat when I can. I'm a lover, not a fighter." He responded.

"Oh, is that so? I did hear rumors that dragons can polymorph into humanoids when they want to. I bet you can't look as pretty as my girlfriend, though." Galanys challenged.

In response, Zephyrion polymorphed himself into a very handsome elf.

Rania knew where this was going. She was pretty sure that Galanys and Dov were about to do things that wouldn't be appropriate for all ages. So she stopped paying attention to them in hopes that the audience wouldn't notice what was going on. Otherwise the story's age rating could go up and that would invite disaster on them all, for anthropic reasons.

She loudly asked Atrog if he wanted to play cards with her, and he agreed. Pebble and Aranea also joined the game. Unfortunately Aranea was quite bad at it and Pebble kept cheating. Balron did not want to play because he wanted to talk to the Senior Dungeon Builder some more.

After a few hours, Galanys and Dov showed up again and explained that they had won another competition. And also that Dov was totally going to make ranked, competitive sex an actual thing at some point by introducing a tournament for it, complete with leaderboards and everything.

Zephyrion looked exhausted, but not upset that he had lost another challenge. He declared that he had now lost enough competitions that the victors were clear.

They had won!

Zephyrion was a gracious loser, and he allowed them all their pick of his treasure hoard.

There was so much treasure here!

The dragon explained that many of these items were created by the friends of the young Mystical Gate Guards. There were apprentice crafts-fey working together with the Apprentice Dungeon Builder and Mystical Gate Guards. And they were all friends and helping each other out.

It was so cute and wholesome!

"I know right? My friends are the best! We met because Silent Martha said that friendship was awesome and encouraged all the young fey to make friends! I don't really get her reasoning for it though. She said something about how friendship erodes the foundations of society by encouraging cronyism." The Apprentice Dungeon Builder commented when she asked.

Rania also didn't really get Martha's line of reasoning, but she supposed that was a cultural difference she could live with. Much better than the baby-based diet the hag used to have.

Then Zephyrion announced that each of team Nundru and team Delta would get to pick one item. She thought that was great, because it meant that her Sidekicks were developing their own narrative arc separate from herself.

She didn't try to find out what her Sidekicks got, because it would work better that way.

Galanys kept prodding and poking everything to figure out how it worked, but Balron asked her to stop until after he cast some divinations and set up wards. They thought long and hard what item to pick before they finally made their decision: A really cool sword. Not only was it super sharp, but the crafts-fey had gone all out and invented a cool prophecy for it!

It was a really flavorful magic sword that fit Atrog perfectly. Unfortunately, other people would just have to take her word for it, because Zephyrion made them all promise never to reveal the prophecy to anyone else.

"What happens in the feywild stays in the feywild." He said.

Rania was pretty sure that the Unspoken Plan Guarantee actually didn't work on prophecies, so she was a little confused by that request, but she took the promise seriously nevertheless. So she made sure to treat the knowledge as an infohazard and scrub it from her own brain, so that not even incomprehensible eldritch beings from beyond time and space who might be reading her mind at that very moment would be able to figure it out.

The others told her that being able to quarantine part of your own mind as an infohazard was not a thing that a Perfectly Normal Elf could do. She found this quite upsetting. Dov mentioned that she could do that because she was a Davlash, but elves normally could not. But then Galanys pointed out that this could be a special ability of Rania's that was tied into her Secret Origin Story. That made sense, and it made Rania more excited than ever to learn more about her own backstory.

The cool sword was not the only thing they gained. Dov was happy that she got some of Zephyrion's genes. Genesis Dragons were a mythical species that most of them had never even heard of before, and she was excited to find out what kind of abilities she could gain from them.

But of course, Balron was the one who found the greatest treasure of all. For him, the real treasure was the friend he made along the way.

Soon after they made their pick, Zephyrion bid them goodbye, but not before exchanging contact details with Dov and Galanys.

This concluded their Fun Adventure of Doom.

After the adventure, the Senior Dungeon Builder asked her for feedback. She rated the adventure nine out of ten dragons and eight out of ten princesses. She had to subtract a few dragons because parts of the adventure felt kind of scripted, though encountering a literal dragon made up for a lot. She subtracted a few princesses because the treasure was almost all mysterious instead of a good mix of mysterious and normal. Forgetting to give any gold at all was a beginner’s mistake that really pushed her rating down. But overall, she was still very impressed.

She especially liked the sword that came with a prophecy. For a first adventure, it was excellent.

The fey were all super happy to hear her praise and told her they were going to take her feedback to heart. The Senior Dungeon Builder then announced that the younger one had passed his journeyman test, and everyone cheered!

He deserved it. He really did.

This adventure had been a lot of fun for her. The fights and the loot were both great, but to her surprise she noticed that what she liked best about this adventure was how it was very straightforward and morally clear. There was just them, a treasure they were hunting, and Bad Guys between them. And the Bad Guys were just monsters, so she didn't need to feel bad about killing them at all.

And the final fight against the super strong dragon had been no fight at all! The challenges had been more fun than a fight would have been, in her opinion.

She really wished adventures were like this more often.

Adventures should be nice and not have any moral ambiguity that would make the adventurers feel bad. The opposite of this stupid war they were in, really. That was just Good Guys against other Good Guys, just because one Bad Guy was really good at lying. It would be great if wars worked like this adventure too, and had no deaths among the people who didn't want to fight. Suffering was bad, and there should be less of it. It wasn't a difficult concept to grasp, really.

Rania sighed. This was all wishful thinking. It would be nice if things were different, but there was nothing she could do about it.

After all, she was just a Perfectly Normal Elf.