“Berta, Carles, I don’t see any enemy. You can come out.”

After inspecting the area, Matta makes a gesture for us to come. I want to see it as soon as possible, so I rush into the cave when he gives the green signal.

“Woaaah…!” I exclaim. “A fantasy, magical cave… Amazing!”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cave this vast. It’s almost like an underground, secret, tiny world full of wonders. We’ve been to many dungeons, but I don’t think I’ve ever been in one that fits the ‘fantasy’ word as well as this one.

Look at those giant mushrooms! Some of them are as tall as a house!

And those smaller, glowing ones, with various shapes and colors! They not only provide enough light to light up this enormous cave but also help bring everything to life.

While observing the scenery, something moves, catching my attention.

I immediately turn my head to it, not expecting to find a yellow gummy-like gecko staring at me, standing still on a rock right next to me.

“Hey there, little fella…” I extend my hand towards it, but it runs away. It quickly moves in a zigzag, twisting its body between mushrooms until it finds a crack to hide in. “... never mind.” I shrug.

“Pfft! Ahaha! So pathetic.” Berta mocks me, shaking her head. “To think you can’t even catch it…”

I turn in her direction, ready to retort. But when I see she’s holding a bunch of geckos in each of her hands, the surprise makes me stop. She squishes them, making their heads bulge as if they were going to explode. Then she stops exerting force and they return to normal.

What!? When did she have enough time to catch so many!?

“...whatever.”

I shrug, ignoring her stupid laughter and returning to observe the cave.

Now that I take a closer look, there are other creatures too. There are some… red flies? There’s a sheep too. And is that a turtle…?

Will they be as interesting as what we’ve seen so far? I’m looking forward to it.

My eyes stop on the underground lake. Unlike the rest of the cave, which is illuminated by the glowing mushrooms, the lake has a mysterious purple glow. It looks as if the light came from the water itself.

The lake splits everything into two roughly equal parts, but I can see some places to cross it. That’s good. We won’t need to waste time going back and forth if we decide to explore every corner.

From this single spot, I can see the cavern’s walls in all directions, though with a slight difficulty. I’m sure that the cliffs, the various obstacles, and the lake will make it very hard for us to traverse.

The giant mushrooms, apart from looking awesome, hinder our vision and create lots of hidden spots. I’m sure you can walk over them, turning them into the perfect sniping platforms.

But it won’t work against us! Because we can fly!

“Flying is so good! This, plus the dragon breath is why dragonborn are so op!”

Finally, there are traces of human-made structures. Like those weird rock formations on top of that cliff, the stairs over there, or that hole drilled into the rock.

“Everything’s so… weird. It looks amazing and the fantasy element is undeniable, but if you examine anything, one by one, it all looks unnatural. As if a mad scientist created everything.”

While exploring dungeons, we’ve been in cemeteries, forests, canyons, temples, towns and cities, caves, underground fortresses, wastelands, factories, and a whole lot more.

But this is the first time we’ve been in a mad scientist’s lair! A new experience with my friends!

Well, with Matta and… that, that… fool.

“And talking about Matta, where did he go?”

Ignoring Berta, who laughs like a maniac every time she squishes the poor geckos, I go looking for Matta. He disappeared somewhere while I was distracted.

Luckily, it doesn’t take long to find him. He was a few meters away, inspecting a weird rock formation, very similar to the one I saw on top of the cliff.

“Hey,” I call, “did you find anything interesting?”

“Hmm… not really.” He shakes his head. “I was curious about this, but there doesn’t seem to be anything here. No traps or monsters, just a few rocks.”

“I see…” I nod, not interested in a few random rocks. There’s something more important to discuss. “The map warned about mushrooms, but it doesn’t say anything about these, right?” I ask Matta, pointing at the nearest one. “They shouldn’t be dangerous, right?”

“If they went to the point of warning about mushrooms, they should warn about these too if they were dangerous, don’t you think? So I guess they aren’t.”

“All right…” I exhale, relieved.

My biggest concern right now was this one: if the mushrooms in this dungeon are dangerous, what should we do about this room, that’s filled with them?

But Matta’s usually right. If he says they aren’t dangerous, it means they aren’t.

“Do we start exploring?” I ask, itching to start.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t… Wait, where’s Berta?”

“She’s…” What should I tell him? That she’s acting like a fool? “Ah, here she comes.”

She flies in our direction, her hands still filled with those gummy geckos. Is it me, or does she have more than before?

“Heyaa! Did you find anything interesting?” She asks. “I sure did. Take a look, Matta. They’re so funny!”

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She gives a black one to Matta before looking at me and making a smug face. Matta feels the gecko’s texture, then squishes it a bit.

“Hehe, so squishy… Is it made out of jelly? I didn’t know the game had monsters like this one.”

I observe everything with a blank look on my face. When Berta watches my expression, she reluctantly adds.

“All, right… I’ll give you one too... But only one, ok!? And you have to thank me for being so magnanimous!”

“Umm… thanks?”

See? A child. Both in aspect and mentality.

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The arrow flies past my head and strikes Matta on his back.

“Ambush!” He shouts.

Then, he looks around and jumps behind the closest rock he finds. Berta and I react slightly later and imitate him. I hide behind the same rock as him, but she ends up taking cover on the other side of the path.

“Can you see the attacker?” He whispers.

I shake my head. “No, I can’t see shit from here.”

We wait, but no attacks follow the first one. No enemy shows up, either.

“Do you think they ran aw– what’s she doing now?”

I stop in the middle when I see Berta frantically waving at us from the other side of the path. When she gets my attention, she makes a posture as if she were shooting with a bow, then points at something. She repeats the same gestures a few times.

I follow her finger and see the cap of a giant mushroom.

“An archer…?”

“It must be, right?” I say.

Matta and I exchange a glance. We nod. Immediately after, I start flying to that mushroom.

As soon as I do, two more attacks come at me from that direction. I avoid them with a somersault. When I get high enough, I see a small, two-headed creature aiming a bow at me.

“Only one enemy!” I shout. “I’ll deal with it.”

Before the monster can release another arrow, I use my dragon’s breath and reduce it to ashes… to a corpse, because the game always leaves behind the corpse, regardless of the cause of death.

I land on the mushroom’s cap and watch everything from above. “I can’t see more enemies… Anyway, let’s do what must be done.” I push the monster’s corpse, making it fall to the ground.

Matta and Berta come out from their hiding places at my signal and run to where it fell.

When I land next to them, I can hear Matta talking to himself. “A mix of Goblin and Imp,” he inspects the corpse. “Hmm… from how it attacked us, it’s an ambusher. It being so weak must mean there are a lot more of them. Keep your eyes open for more ambushes.”

“Heeee? I don’t like ambushes.” Berta crosses her arms.

I pat my chest. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” A shiver crosses my spine when she glares at me with a sticky gaze, so I add something more. “No child will be left behind!”

“I’m not a child! I’m older than you!”

“You’re older, but still behave like a child…” I shrug.

“Are you talking about yourself? Ah, how lame, to talk about yourself in the third person… Ahahaha!”

“I sw–”

“Oh, look at that!” She flies away before I can retort.

I follow her figure with my eyes until she lands right next to a… cat? No, a cat with tentacles? What the hell’s that thing!? She comes back, holding in in her small hands.

“Isn’t it cuuute?” She rubs her cheek on the weird creature. “I won’t share it with you even if you ask.”

No, I’m fine, I don’t need you to share that thing with me…. But this doesn’t mean I’m not curious. I bring my head closer and Matta does the same.

From head to tail, it’s undeniably a cat. It has the same pointy ears, whiskers, shiny fur, slender body, and long tail. But instead of legs, it has eight tentacles. But they aren’t disgusting or slimy because they’re covered by fur. It looks weird, but at the same time, weirdly cute too.

“Ehehehe…” Berta laughs foolishly.

It’s at this moment that something buzzes past my ear, and I reflexively clap my hands together.

*Swooosh!*

The fly I just killed explodes in a burst of fire, burning all of us. Luckily, we don’t take too much damage from it.

“What?” Matta is surprised and falls to his butt. “What was that?” He asks.

“I just killed a fly,” I answer. “A very weird fly.”

He smiles. “A fly that explodes, after a cat with tentacles? Hooo… I wonder what else we’ll see today.”

“You, you, you, YOU!” Like a broken record, Berta keeps repeating the same word. “You, you, you… You killed Mishy! Brute! Murderer!”

It seems that the monstrous cat died after the explosion. No, wait! You named it!?

I scratch my cheek. “I’m sorry, ok? It was a reflex act. It wasn’t my intenti– Bugooh!” She throws the dead cat at my face.

Ignoring us, Matta takes out her map again. “We can go this way, then cross the lake and come through that path… we’ll cover most of this area. Yes, let’s do it.”

----------------------------------------

We find a few more of those Goblin and Imps monsters, but as I already predicted, with this much room for us to fly, they can’t effectively use the cover against us or hide on top of the mushrooms; so we easily kill them and continue moving.

“Are you done, Matta?” I ask.

We’re now on top of a cliff, where we saw one of those weird rock formations. Matta wanted to investigate it after the failure with the first one, and since it was right next to the path, we had no reason to say no.

“...hmmm… yes. Nothing again.” He lowers his head in shame. “Maybe I’m not good enough?”

“Maybe there isn’t anything,” I say to cheer him up.

“You’re right. They should be decorations.”

“Ahahaha! Everything looks so small from here!” Berta swings her legs, sitting on the cliff’s edge. “Those giant mushrooms look so small.”

For a while, she kept pestering and blaming me for everything. She only calmed down when she found another one of those cats. Now, she’s protecting it as if her life depended on it. She doesn’t allow me to get closer than five meters.

I leave them both behind and go explore the surrounding area.

“Come on, weird creatures. Surprise me with something exciting!”

When I turn to the right and look behind the colossal stalagmite, as if answering my prayers, I find the weirdest creature I’ve ever seen.

It’s a shrub… with lots of eyes. It’s exactly like a desiccated shrub you could find in any wasteland, but it has eyes instead of leaves. Lots of them.

“I feel observed. Haha!” I joke, slightly intimidated by so many eyes looking at me.

Distracted by the extremely creepy shrub, it takes a while until I notice the other monster, only a few more meters away. The monster slowly turns around, the turtle’s head pointing in my direction.

Dark skin, with purple dots on its skin and shell. And talking about a shell, it’s so thick it must be impenetrable.

They looked so small from afar, but it turns out these turtles are quite big… At least two meters and the mushroom on their back is even taller. I thought the mushrooms were part of the environment, but it turns out they grow on the turtle’s back.

The turtle opens her mouth wide and light starts converging. It looks dangerous.

I need to avoid this!

I try moving to the right to avoid the attack, but my Champion doesn’t respond. Why can’t I move? I can’t talk!? I’m paralyzed! When did I get paralyzed? And how!? This isn’t good, I can’t evade the attack!

A light beam engulfs me and the weird shrub with lots of eyes.

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“DON’T LOOK, IGNORE IT! If you feel your skin being prickled by the stare of a hundred eyes, don’t turn around, ignore it. As with most of the stuff in this damned dungeon, you better stay ignorant than suffer the consequences.”

- Extract from the Chapter ‘Unexpected dangers’ from ‘How to Stay Sane in The Mad Rat’s Lab’.