No Need for a Core?

Kazue fretted as she paced in her deepest room. It wasn’t supposed to be like this! The Lady had said she was going to be reborn someplace where she could know peace. And, well, that had been true enough at first. And she’d been able to make some cute bunnies! But then that woman in the yellow and blue dress had shown up and started messing around.

The kitsune pulled her tail forward and chewed nervously on the tip for a while before realizing what she was doing and dropped it, letting the reddish fluff fall back behind her. She’d never been able to break that habit during her first life, so it was probably just as well that her default was mostly human-like, since her teeth weren’t as sharp as the more fox-like members of her clan. Though, she contemplated, perhaps the sharp nip would have been a firm reminder to stop. She sighed and returned to her original musings.

At least dropping the woman through the trap door seemed to have counted as chasing her out of the dungeon, which apparently gave her more energy? The weird little floating book familiar that the Lady had given her was showing her some options she had, and it felt like she sort of knew them already, but seeing them written down like that made those feelings make more sense. But she really hoped she hadn’t killed the intruder. Kazue had just panicked a little, she'd listened to her friends and fellow shrine maidens tell too many stories about evil villains trying to enslave dungeons into monster-making factories and such.

But when she’d calmed down, she’d realized that the woman had mostly just been interested in the bunnies, and had even been kind of gentle when Kazue had ordered all of the bunnies to mob her and force her to trip and fall down the trapdoor Kazue had set behind the woman. The book seemed to mean well, but thinking about it, the options it gave had just encouraged her to attack with monsters and traps. The former kitsune, now forlorn dungeon, wasn’t sure that was the sort of dungeon she wanted to be.

“Eeep!” she felt that weird sensation of someone entering her dungeon, only it was worse this time because the vibrations weren't centered on the cave entrance, they were right below the trap door instead! Wait, how did that work, why did it feel weirder to have someone coming in from the wrong entrance? Then she saw the woman who had been here before, but her aura was surging with energy and there was now random mana being flung off into her dungeon. It looked like more energy than the woman should be able to hold.

“Sorry about this, kind of in a bad situation here. Coming through!”

'No no no, don’t do that!' Kazue thought, and flinched as she saw the woman punch through the trap door, sending shards of stone flying into the ceiling of the dungeon. Then she let out a breath as she realized that it didn’t hurt. Well, that was good at least. But what was the woman doing back here? Er, at least she wasn’t dead, but was she here to take vengeance?

Kazue watched nervously through her dungeon senses as the intruder leapt out of the hole. Her, um, ‘avatar’, as her little magic book familiar called it, couldn’t see what was going on; there were a few corners between them, but Kazue had found she could ‘look’ anywhere that was part of her dungeon body. That was still so weird to her, and if she thought about it too much she could tell that the gold crystal sitting in a cage on a pedestal in this back room was her actual ‘self’ but that was just too weird.

Wait, her intruder! Kazue refocused on the intruder, having missed the woman saying something while Kazue's thoughts wandered. Something about an apology and gift? There was a sudden wave of distilled mana, and it made her briefly dizzy. Oh, that was nice, kind of like having some wine. But she’d always been a bit of a lightweight, and the others never let her have much. And that brought back unpleasant memories, so Kazue turned her attention back to her … er, guest? She seems to have brought Kazue a gift; that makes her a guest, right? Oh, rules of hospitality! But first, her guest was speaking again.

“This is probably going to sound weird, but a very strange set of events took place down there, and now I basically have another person sharing my head space. He is, or, um, maybe was, a Dungeon too. And he says he’d like to say hello to you, and maybe share some pointers. But for him to talk to you, he needs me to touch your core. Which he understands is a delicate subject. So I’m going to walk slowly towards the back room, and see if you’ll let me get close when I get there.”

The little kitsune swished her tail back and forth thoughtfully, her ears twitching. The idea made her nervous; she didn’t need her little book to tell her that letting someone near her core was potentially dangerous. But the woman had been nice as well as having given her that gift of mana, even after Kazue had dropped her down a pit that, curiously, went down far deeper than the limits of her dungeon territory. As to the truth of this woman's story that she was carrying around another soul, well ... she was leaking a lot more energy than she had originally, and her aura was lit up with way too many patterns. And it wasn't like Kazue's own situation wasn’t also really weird. She nervously had all the rabbits clear a path, standing on either side of the corridors while the woman walked past.

She still hadn’t made her decision when the woman reached the innermost chamber and stopped with surprise at seeing Kazue. Well, Kazue’s avatar at least. “Um, Hi! I’m Kazue! Sorry about earlier with the pit trap, I admit, I panicked." Kazue shot an annoyed look at the book-like construct floating near her. "And my book didn’t really help.”

“Greetings to you Kazue, I am Moriko.” came the reply, as Moriko bowed to the kitsune. This prompted Kazue to remember her manners and return the greeting bow hastily. “And my friend is Mordecai. He’d like to introduce himself to you, but needs the …” Her words trailed off and her eyes unfocused for a moment as if listening to something. “The matrix of your core to run his energy pattern through to create an avatar. He says there will be some more leakage as well, so you’ll get something out of it.”

“Um,” Kazue glanced at her book, which flipped through several pages as it searched, and ended with a page that said ‘It may be possible’. As usual, the useless thing had no opinion on the matter, it just spat out cold answers and boring descriptions.

“Urg, fine. But I’m watching you!” She glared and tried to look as menacing as she could. Moriko’s expression didn’t give away much, but Kazue was disgruntled by the distinct impression that Moriko found her display amusing. Maybe even cute.

Kazue met her at the pedestal, moving restlessly with nerves. Her guest moved slowly, like she was trying to not frighten a wild animal, which was fair because Kazue felt like one. She knew she had some dungeon instincts, this seemed to be one of them. Moriko slid her left hand through the bars of the cage, and very gently laid it on the golden core within. A ring of purple crystal adorned that hand, and Kazue could feel another presence, partly through the ring and partly from the contact with Moriko’s skin.

“Can he begin?”

Kazue yelped briefly, so distracted by the sensation of having her core touched that she’d almost forgotten the woman was actually there. “Oh, yeah, um, I guess.” She took a breath. This was her dungeon dammit, she was supposed to be in charge. “I mean, yes, you may go ahead.”

Oh, that tingled. She felt the energy flow through her center, and something else too, a contact and awareness that penetrated deep into her soul. Kazue could feel herself blushing at the intimacy of it, feeling like this person had seen her more truly than anyone but her goddess had.

Purple motes of energy coalesced slowly into the figure of a man with dark, purplish-black hair and golden eyes, wearing a simple black shirt, pants, and boots. "Now he wears a shirt." Moriko muttered.

The man bowed to her with a smile. “A pleasure to meet you Kazue. As my soul-bound companion said earlier, my name is Mordecai.” Kazue returned her second guest's greeting bow, wondering why Moriko was eyeing Mordecai like that.

“Hi, nice to meet you too. Um, she said you were also a living dungeon? How did this happen? I mean, you being in her head and not in a core and stuff.”

He looked a little amused. “Well, perhaps I can tell you all the details another time, but in an even shorter version than I told Moriko: a long time ago someone did something unforgivable and very personal to me, rendering me mad with anger and grief. I took my revenge, but at great cost to both me and to others swept up in the conflict. Even after that, my rage was not satiated, although I could now refrain from acting on it. This also left a lot of other people shocked and horrified by my actions, and I recognized that they were right. So I let them seal me away and I went to sleep. Moriko accidentally woke me when you practically dropped her on my head, but the seals were still there. This was the only way I could get out. I didn’t feel like dying and this was my only other option. Moriko was kind enough to agree to help me. But now I am curious about you. Your dungeon is too young for you to have even an internal avatar; yet here you stand. And you have a strange familiar too. How did this come about?”

“Oh.” Kazue felt her ears and tail droop, but then gathered herself together again, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “Okay, I don’t want to talk about the details, but I died, and my goddess took pity on me, and she said she could reincarnate me where I would find a rightful peace, or something close to that.” She so didn’t want to talk about how she had died. She didn’t even remember it exactly, but she remembered enough embarrassing details as it was.

Mordecai was looking at her thoughtfully, and it made her ears itch. She couldn’t stop from twitching them, and frowned up at him. “What?!”

“Sorry, I just had a glimmer of an idea.” For some reason Moriko sighed and facepalmed with her free hand, her left hand still touching Kazue’s orb. Mordecai glanced at Moriko with a somewhat embarrassed smile before turning back to Kazue. “Alright, the two of you tell me if I am wrong about any of this. Moriko, as I said before, I don’t think we can ever be fully separated, but I think you wouldn’t mind if I was not so directly in your head. Kazue, I think you’d like to both have some company and have someone teach you the ropes.”

Kazue nodded in agreement, and could see Moriko making a gesture of acknowledgment. “Does that mean you could stay and teach me how to be a dungeon? Or, I mean, I already am one, but be a better one?”

“I think so, sort of. So, we’re holding onto more energy than we can keep. I was going to give the overflow to you in small bits anyway, to give a new dungeon a helping hand. But if you’ll allow it, I could do something different.” Moriko was giving Mordecai a narrowed-eyed look, which really made Kazue wonder what was going on, but Mordecai seemed intent on continuing. “Moriko and I had to initiate a special ritual to form the bonds that let me move my soul into her. If you are both willing, I think I can expand those bonds to include you Kazue, which would integrate me as part of your dungeon core and let me construct a permanent avatar here. But there are two caveats to this.”

Yep, Moriko was definitely glaring daggers at Mordecai, who was resolutely ignoring the look. “First, I can’t undo this. I mean, maybe eventually I could separate myself enough to create a dungeon nearby, but we’d still be linked at the level of our souls. One way or another, you would be stuck with both of us being part of your life forever.”

OK, she could see how that might be a problem. But maybe not horrible? They seemed like nice enough people, and she’d mostly gotten along with everyone she’d met.

“Second, we incorporated another ritual into everything to boost the power of this binding. So if both of you agree to expand this to a three-person binding, the effects of that ritual would have to be included too.” He raised his left hand to display the purple crystal ring on the ring finger of his left hand, identical to the one Moriko wore.

Oh.