The Dungeon Traveler

by Alston Sleet

  But that pushing I was doing inside my pocket dimension, this being the arbitrary name I had decided to go with instead of ‘magic pocket’, seemed to be when I gained recognition in this skill. It was only while I was doing the pushing to expand it that I got the blue-box-which-was-not-blue recognition.

  Holding my pocket dimension’s outside steady I tried pushing only on a part of the inside. Maybe shifting it in this way I could ‘tunnel’ my pocket out of the room? I had little hope, but it seemed to be working and things seemed to be going well enough. Shove, push, tunnel, direct…something.

  I became so focused, so tunnel visioned on what I was doing, that I didn’t notice how bright the room had grown. I didn’t notice how the glyphs were shining like halogen lamps overloading until the door to the room slammed open and my warden and an older man rushed into the room.

  “What did you do?!”, screamed the older gentleman as he waved his hands around with tiny sparkles of magic dripping off his hands.

  The older man was a stereotypical wise wizard. Picture any movie in which a young man goes to the elder teacher and asks for wise words of wisdom. This old guy was that man. Grey hair, long beard, big bushy white eyebrows, the whole thing. The pimple-faced teenager from earlier was screaming something about the technical details of my imprisonment but whatever they were talking about, I had tuned it out. I was focused at this point. I was lost in my efforts and barely aware they even existed. I just kept pushing, dragging something out and out and out, I was tunneling to freedom, despite the fact that I hadn’t even moved an inch and I wasn’t sure if whatever I was doing was actually going to free me.

  “It’s built up a huge amount of mana, but the containment is fine. I can’t figure out what it’s doing. There shouldn’t be this much magic being drained out and even then, it shouldn’t matter, but my [Danger Sense] is screaming!” hollered the old man as he threw up some kind of glowing barrier around my pedestal.

  I don’t know what that shield was supposed to do, but whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t supposed to do what it actually did. All the effort I had been putting into my tunneling suddenly went from what felt like lifting rocks, to a sudden fall. I wasn’t tunneling forward anymore, now it felt as if I had slowly stretched a rubber band and someone cut it without warning.

  My dimension expanded, whipping out to a distance I couldn’t even conceive of, the weird shield the mage put up popped almost instantly. The runes flared brighter than the sun, and suddenly that super long tunnel was fixed and held tight way on the other end. My end, the end held tight by those glowing runes, it was fixed to me…but I wasn’t fixed to anything but the pedestal and the room around me. Me, my pedestal, the glyphs, and the room around me -including one wizard and one apprentice- all experienced exactly what it meant to be a stone in a sling.

  The next few moments were horrific for the room and everyone in it, but oddly enough, I didn’t actually appear to be entirely in the room. First, the walls of the room slammed forward and towards my pedestal. This alone would have killed me since some of the chunks of stone were the size of the wizards head. When they reached the surface of my pedestal they inexplicably slowed down and drifted towards me and into my pocket dimension. Well most of them, the back half of the stones instantly exploded into pancaked powder. Unfortunately for my two unwilling companions, they were outside my pocket. While they slowed down when they hit the surface of my pocket dimension, they were far less robust than magically strengthened stone. Apparently, human beings under high acceleration tend to act like water balloons. They deform until a certain point, then they pop and splash!

  You have killed an enemy 253 levels above your own.

  You have killed an enemy 13 levels above your own.

  Ding!

  You have reached level 2!

  You have reached level 3!

  You have reached level 4!

  …

  You have reached level 37!

  Oooouch. Mental note, blue screen spam hurts. Where ever I was, I was surrounded by stones and not much else (besides pulped wizards). I was hurting. Nothing seemed to be broken, my gem was nice and shiny and clear (under the dust and wizard slime). All the same, I was still in pain. The stones surrounding me slowly settled down and the world became silent. Then the nice lady in the blue screen decided to hurt me even further.

  Ding!

  You have escaped from lawful imprisonment, [Outlaw] Class now available.

  Ding!

  You have caused significant public damage to a kingdom in an illegal act, [Rebel] Class now available.

  Ding!

  You have attained multiple levels using the direct manipulation of magical forces, [Hedge-Mage] Class now available.

  Ding!

  You have attained multiple levels using the direct manipulation of space, [Spatial Hedge-Mage] Class now available.

  Ding!

  You have traveled further than 100 miles using only the direct manipulation of space, [Spatial Traveler] Class now available.

  If it was possible for a stone to throw up, I think I would have. It’s deeply disconcerting to have a headache without a head. Normally this kind of pain would cause a throbbing in my noggin, a sensation that I had become intimately familiar with since I had become far too fond of alcohol of late, but this pain had no outward representation. I also lacked hands to throw over my eyes (which I also lacked) so I couldn’t moan (lacking a mouth). I couldn’t even use my normal cure, which was to roll over and try and go back to sleep.

  “Ok, that hurt, I think I pulled something”.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Unleash the Blue Beast!

  Not having eyes, it was been pretty clear to me that I didn’t see the normal way. The fact I could see in full wrap-around vision, above, below, in front, and behind all simultaneously with no disorientation had also made this obvious. All of that was weird, but my captivity had hidden just how weird things truly were. I didn’t just see all around at once. I could see all around at once, even where I should have been blocked by solid matter. I could see the slowly dimming glyphs that sat between me and the outside world. I could see a small hole in some rocks that were a few feet away. I could see the wizard slime stuck to the rocks. I could see all of this all at once with none of it hidden or blocked by any of the rest of it.

  I just couldn’t see further than about thirty feet.

  My ‘vision’ was perfectly spherical, clear, and as limited as the fine print in a cable subscription. To here, and no further.

  While I boggled at the odd delineation in my vision, the glowing glyphs finally stuttered and started to wink out one by one. This is when a tether I had never even noticed slid off of my mind. That’s when I lost my ever-loving shit.

  Remember when you where a little kid and a pet died, your Halloween candy was stolen from you by your older brother, and you were shoved naked in front of your entire senior year class? No? Me either, but that’s the level of emotional outpouring I experienced at that moment. Rage, sadness, confusion, and fear all assaulted me in one moment. Apparently one of the magical tethers was to keep my ‘Dungeon Core’ instincts silent, and that spell just faded and they just woke up.

  I don’t know what to call the phobia, but if you take social anxiety and agoraphobia and force those two fears to breed, then you would have the pale shadow of what my instincts were hitting me with. I was outside and living things could find me. The taste of pulped wizard apparently kicked this instinct into a new hyper gear even as I was licking my mental lips at the taste of people! The only saving grace was that I was under a pile of stones. If I had been directly exposed to the sky I think I would have spazzed out and done whatever my instincts had required mindlessly.

  The only thing that really kept me under control was my absolute rage at what those two wizards had done to me. The idea that I was too emotional to be instinctually emotional was a dark comfort.

  I had spent thirty-seven years of my life being the master of my own mind.
To the extent that my procrastination and poor impulse control had allowed anyways. I could remember years of working sales jobs where the manager tried to induce ‘team spirit’ and forced us to drink the company kool-aid. How they would try desperately to convince us that the company brand really was the best brand in the world; all to get us to sell more, sell harder, believe! Bull. I played the game, I parroted the lines, but I never believed them. My mind had been my own. I danced the monkey dance needed in order to get my monthly paycheck, but I was still me.

  The dead wizards had shown me how dangerous my new world was. Forget magic slinging people across hundreds of miles or squishing people in the blink of an eye. No, that wasn’t dangerous. That was just death. I’d done death, it sucked but so had most of my life, so not exactly a surprise. No, death was a gentle release compared to someone enslaving my mind and forcing me to live as their puppet. Worse, an unpaid puppet. Something no sales job had ever sunk so low as to demand. I could become an unpaid puppet: a lowly intern.

  I made jokes in my own mind, but mostly it was because I was enraged and had no way to express it. I was eating their corpses, slowly dissolving their bodies, and I still didn’t think it was enough. If I could bring them back to life just to murder them again I think I would have. Some of that might have been the dungeon core instincts though.

  It wasn’t until I started to think about my situation that I really realized how strapped down my mind had been. Beyond my new instincts, I hadn’t even considered how crazy things were. I had been mostly reacting and lashing out, now I stopped to ask a few questions.

  “What is going on? Where am I? Am I a gem?”

  True Name: Dale Erickson Ender.

  Race: Dungeon Core (Variant: Sapient)

  Class: None.

  Level: 37

  Mind: 5

  Body: 1

  Soul: 8

  Skills:

  [Mana Sensing]: Level 6

  [Spatial Manipulation]: Level 13

  And…now my good friend blue box is back. Heck, now my ‘good friend’ blue box has decided to take up residence in my brain! This box never left. It just floated around in the back of my mind, always there, being annoying. It was like my first apartment, the walls had been super thin and my neighbor had been a fan of his drum set. He was there…always letting me know…constantly.

  While spending a little time carefully considering this new information (spelled ‘cursing’) and a little more time spent strategizing (pronounced ‘pleading for my old life’), I decided that I needed to do everything I could to understand my new world.

  A few minutes of thinking and my eventual plan was as deeply detailed and constructed as any in my life. I was going to poke the thing and see what happened. With a squint of my nonexistent eyes I mentally poked the blue box around the ‘name’ concept. It seemed like the safest option.

  True Name: Dale Erickson Ender. Used, in full, as a key within the universal gestalt. Can be used to summon, control, contain, and contact an entity.

  Back up! Hard stop! If I could have skittered backward on my hands and feet I would have. ‘Used to summon, control, contain, and contact an entity?’ are you kidding me? If someone had my ‘True Name’ they could whip me across time and space and control me? Ok, new plan, I’m never going by my full name ever again. No one gets to know it, if they figure it out, they die. My instant murder plans for anyone who learned my name might have once given me pause, but my recent brush with mind control had changed a few things for me. I wasn’t going to go out of my way to pulp people and eat them, but if they tried to straight-jacket my mind, they are going to get the catapult squish!

  Given that the part that I had expected to be safe turned out to be full of so much terror, I was dreading poking any other part of my buddy Ms-blue-box. Not knowing the danger wouldn’t make the risk go away, just make it worse. So, again, another poke.

  Race: Dungeon Core (Variant: Sapient). A Dungeon Core is the geomantic heart of a naturally occuring magical construct. A living labyrinth which can spawn monsters and treasure in equal degrees. Some Dungeon Cores have existed for thousands of years and have expanded to cover hundreds of miles above and below ground. Other Dungeon Cores have been yanked from their underground lairs and been turned into magical foci for the most powerful of magical artifacts. A variant species is one which has significantly deviated from the norm.

  There we go, another round of brown trouser inducing information. This one comes with some interesting bonuses though. Thousands of years? Woot! A long life is awesome! But, being yanked out of whatever hidey-hole I build and being press-ganged into being a magical artifact was…well…brown trousers. Not to mention the idea of hiding in a hole for the rest of my existence didn’t fill me with joy. I was an artist, despite all my failings, and still had the urge to create and explore. Being an artist in a new world filled with wonders but delegated to a hole in the ground seemed like my own personal hell.

  OK, on to the more game like parts of my new existence…

  Next up, class.

  Class: None. A class directs and funnels the power of a life and how it develops. Classes are an archetype for how an entity grows. Classes can change and shift over time as one works within the remit of their class and the edges of its domain. It is possible to hold more than one class at a time. Holding classes which complement each other act to magnify their effects while also diluting progression.

  Available Classes:

  [Outlaw] - An [Outlaw] works outside the law. Bonuses to illegal acts and interactions with the shady side of society.

  [Rebel] - [Rebels] forward social change through illegal action. Bonuses to illegal acts directed against lawful political forces. Bonuses to leadership.

  [Hedge-Mage] - A [Hedge-Mage] works with the raw stuff of magic in an unstructured manner. Bonuses to acts of unstructured magic. Bonuses to magical attunement.

  [Spatial Hedge-Mage] - A [Spatial Hedge-Mage] focuses on modifying the very stuff of the universe with pure will alone. Bonuses to manipulation of space through pure will. Bonuses to learning skills involving space and dimensionalism. Bonuses to acts of will.

  [Spatial Traveler] - [Spatial Travelers] make travel through the bending of the world their focus. Bonuses to all skills involving travel. Bonuses to all skills involving the stretching or shrinking of space. Bonuses to all skills involving dimensionalism. Awards the [Far Seeing] skill.

  Please select Class/es

  Ouchies. Another spam splat into my brain. Worse, this one wasn’t going away. Well, the pain was, but the wall of concepts wasn’t. It was sitting there, waiting. I could feel it hunched up in my mind waiting to pounce and deliver another one-two punch to my brain. Maybe that was me projecting, but I could just feel it.

  Having multiple classes seemed like a good idea since the normal penalty of not having enough time to grow into all the different components didn’t really apply to something that didn’t age. Say, something like a gem for example.

  I continued to stare at my options for a while, but I decided to let that sit until I had finished looking through the rest of my ‘poke the blue box’ information.

  Level: 37 - A measure of an entities power in the world and how they have progressed in their class(es).

  Ok. So I’m level 37 in…None? Does this mean I haven’t progressed? Or maybe that once I select a class or multiple classes my current progression will apply to those classes? Or did I just miss the boat here? This ‘answer’ gave me more questions than it actually answered.

  Mind: 5 - A measure of an entities’ mind.

  Body: 1 - A measure of an entities' physical body.

  Soul: 8 - A measure of an entities’ soul.

  Wow. Less useful than the explanation of level, and I had thought that was useless. I could guess on some of this, and had. A body of one seemed pretty obvious for example. I was a small gem, relatively fragile and easily destroyed. This also probably explained my insane instincts that even now kept nagging at me an
d demanded I dig into the ground. But even then, Mind 5? Soul 8? Was this good? Bad? Average? Extraordinary? Who knew.

  When I selected my skills they just repeated the description they had given before, though it was interesting that my skills had improved and I wasn’t notified at the time. My best guess was that I was always going to have misses blue box floating around in the back of my head and I would just ‘know’ that I had improved in my skill when I bothered to check. Since I had been mentally straight jacketed before, that had been hidden from me.

  That left me with only selecting my class or classes. I already knew I was going to reject [Outlaw] and [Rebel]. I had no desire to get involved in either the shady side of the law or politics at all. In fact, I was hoping to avoid people as much as possible. I wasn’t sure if all my instincts were correct. My instinct to dig a hole and pull it in around me seemed stupid, but avoiding people? That seemed spot on.

  That left the three powerful sounding classes. [Hedge-Mage] seemed interesting, the idea of throwing out magic based purely on my wishes was awesome. I had always been a bit of a fantasy geek, I had loved the artwork of magicians throwing powerful magic spells. The problem was that I just couldn’t see myself as some magical powerhouse throwing flames and destruction as I strode forward in a grey robe and staff. The lack of staff, robe, and legs, made it a difficult vision.

  The other two though…combining those two just seemed to make sense. The raw manipulation of space plus the ability to travel and even some kind of skill, something none of the other classes had offered? It seemed perfect to me. Sure I was a wanted ingredient for magical artifacts…but you need had catch me first, and if I can just teleport from place to place avoiding danger? Yeah, perfect.

  So, with a bit of trepidation, I poked both [Spatial Hedge-Mage] and [Spatial Traveler].

  I was right. Misses blue-box had been ready to pounce.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  'Ware the Bouncy Damsel