Soulforged Dungeoneer

So let's skip ahead just a bit so that I don't have to repeat myself quite so much. I mean, I know, why stop now? But let's try.

So we know more or less where I was going, and after a bit of that breaking myself down a little I went back to big ol' Kalamitus' room to see what advice he had to give me about doing the same thing with skills and class stuff, and wouldn't you know it, to a certain extent I already knew what he was going to say, because as I just established, I kiiiinda already did that, at least with Telekinesis. He did have a couple little things to say about Merry fiddling with her stuff, but I could summarize that as "have a bunch of experience on-hand to feed her while she's working on it" which I didn't, currently, have an amazing supply of. And his advice on the class stuff was basically just that listening to Merry would be a lot easier than trying to prepare for it beforehand.

He also gave me a little advice directly about entering the fairy dungeon, which... again, I could repeat myself by telling you and then showing you, but that sounds just a little tedious.

So, like, two days after negotiations finished I was satisfied that he was satisfied, that I knew enough not to completely self destruct, even as I wasn't particularly satisfied myself. Because, you know, as much as there was kind of a build-up to these things--having first gotten a fairy pass from Pearland's administrator, before I knew what the hell they were--I still kind of felt like there had to be yet another surprise waiting in the wings that made this "Fairy dungeon" even more magical than everyone had so far said. I mean, regular dungeons you came out with superpowers, in a world where that hadn't been a thing before. And fairy dungeons were super-secret things, so that had to be even more of a gamble, right?

The point is, Kalamitus had a portal to the fairy dungeons in has basement. Literally, the elevator in the tower had buttons for basement levels, and it was one of those. Considering the first floor of the tower was in a chasm in the earth the bottom of which was full of lava, that seemed to be a pretty clear "Going to hell" thing, right? At least, literally, an "Underworld". That did little to assuage my fears that I was somehow unprepared for whatever the hell I was going to encounter.

Said basement was basically a big room--and I mean large, as large as the room that held Kalamitus; I guess all tower floors were the same size, really--with a bunch of those velvet ropes suspended by poles that you see at, like, banks, movie theaters, that kind of thing--the kind that are anything but actual barriers and are really only there to turn what might otherwise be a very unruly long line of people waiting into a nice orderly one. But instead of being arranged like a maze, like they do at a theater when they want to make room for a hundred people to wait in line for popcorn using a twenty-by-ten foot square of floor that they weren't doing anything else with, this had a single straightforward path and then a whole lot of circles around it that were accomplishing nothing the fuck at all.

I actually stood there for a long moment, wondering if maybe this was actually some kind of spiritual or magical defense thing, but as far as any of my senses could tell, no, it was just unnecessarily dramatic. No energy ran through it, no little pieces of paper with magical squiggly lines, no runes carved into the poles, just big fuzzy ropes. I walked down this corridor like I had been mistaken for a movie star, expecting people to be standing around with antique cameras with big flash-bulbs on top, shouting over one another with pointless questions in the hopes it would be their own question that would get answered, so their pointless tabloid rag would be the one with a somehow-exclusive quote even though everyone there would write it down as though they were the one to ask it.

And at the center was something I'd seen, and even gotten close to, a number of times in different dungeons: a fairy dungeon entrance. Maybe it was special, but it sure didn't feel like it to me, even with all the velvet ropes. It just made me feel awkward, like a whole ton of expectations were being laid on my shoulders and nobody was explaining what they were or why.

Or, well, there was one obvious expectation: come back alive. Cheery, right?

This time, though, I actually touched the damn portal, and when I did, my fairy pass materialized in my hand, by which I mean I found myself holding a rectangle of fake faux-digital magical matter, as though the UI window itself had been plucked out of non-reality and placed in my hand. Before I had a moment to take a closer look--because it looked so thin I'd cut myself on it, which disturbed me--the disturbance in space that made up the fae portal suddenly vibrated and bounced open like... well, let's go with a mouth. Sure, that's what I was thinking at the time. A big mouth that was being forced open by something large, all at once. And immediately, the pass in my hand went back into nowhere-space, wherever the hell it came from, and I could only forget about it and move on.

What awaited me on the other side also reminded me of big buildings--specifically, the dim, dank maintenance places that they just hung an "Employees Only" sign on, locked the door, and then never improved, because as long as it didn't affect paying customers, there was no reason to pay for light bulbs with a slightly higher wattage or anything. Paint? Air conditioning? Labels on doors? Only when necessary, which was to say, not nearly enough. Maybe the first ten feet of it would be painted or paneled, so that when an employee opened the door it didn't look like an eyesore for guests, but it didn't last beyond that. Hell, it reminded me of that place in Armand Bayou where the lady Administrator had adopted that aesthetic on purpose, with the old library lady hiding in it, except that this didn't feel like it was a whimsical, deliberate addition.

It just wasn't cared for.

So after steeling my nerves, I stepped into it, and the first few steps hardly seemed to matter at all, but the further I went down the hallway, the more everything started to feel like something was off. But... in that way that those maintenance rooms always do, right? Like this place with peeling paint and dim light bulbs isn't the place that's wrong. This is honesty--this is the truth of the place. If the people in charge could make everything this chincy, they would. That shining exterior... that's the lie they put forward for paying customers. That's what's wrong, and wrong is how we want it to be, because the truth sucks.

A little ways down the hallway was a slight bend, and when I rounded that bend, there was a fairy smoking a cigar and sitting at a desk, with his feet up on it, somewhere between relaxed and bored as hell. He wasn't a complete mockery of how you envision fairies, the way Herman was; he didn't dress in twenty different pieces of nonsense costume. As I looked him over, he had maybe three accessories, if you count the cigar (which, like... I assume? yes?), the other two being a pair of nice leather shoes, like... you know, you might envision a businessman or gangster wearing, kind of completes the image with the cigar, in a way, right? And also a full head of bright, neon pink anime hair. Like, long, waist-length after it's put up in a high ponytail, while his bangs had those two neat little columns of hair framing his face, trimmed to end just below his chin, which had around a two-day stubble beard that was definitely not pink and was much more in the "gangster/disaffected businessman" persona type of image. Even his wings seemed much more fairy-normal than Herman's--more like a veiny leaf pattern than anything.

I blinked at him as soon as I saw him. He looked back at me and said nothing. I approached the desk and stood in front of it. He looked at me and said nothing. Long moments of awkwardness passed in which I mentally conferred with Merry, and she just basically shrugged, because she sure as hell didn't know any more about this than I did.

"I'm trying to get to Pearland Dungeon," I finally said.

He took a puff of his cigar, pulled it out of his mouth, and gestured with it to a door that appeared to his right. His voice, when it came out, had that throaty, chain-smoker quality to it that you would expect. "Through there."

I paused, considering what I'd been told. "I need to come out before floor 20."

He just grunted. "It's on 12."

I actually had to spend a moment mentally debating whether it was the right thing to do or not, to say thanks to this guy. Because, like... he was doing something for me, but it was also clearly not a job he enjoyed? I'd worked in jobs where people thought that I appreciated them saying, 'Thanks' when all I really cared about was getting to the end of the day, and in the end, while it was not an insult or anything, it just ended up feeling like, 'This is a person who doesn't understand.' Me being nice to them wasn't an option--if I didn't, I'd be punished or fired. I would have probably done the right thing anyway--probably--but there was a corporate decision hanging over my head that if I didn't, I might as well just leave.

"Thanks," I said anyway, and moved into the door. Behind me, he just grunted.

The door opened up into what might as well have been an elevator, if elevators were made of black, light-absorbent silk and nothing else. The floor sagged under my feet, pulling the bottom corners of the room out of square, but something pulled back, so that it maintained a basic approximation of a cube. The door closed behind me, leaving me trapped in pitch black.

Now, it's worth saying at this point that I'd had my telekinetic sense going since I got in, and everything up to this point was close to what it looked like. The reality behind the dungeon started cracking the further we got from the entrance, which wasn't all that surprising, really. This room, though, was different, because it was pretty clear that the one thing that had never wavered before in any dungeon I'd been in was gone here.

There was no end. The thin silk that trapped me in darkness only hid it from my eyes, not my telekinetic sense: the tower had been suspended in the middle of nothing, only pretending to be fixed in bedrock. Here, in the place where I stood, there was no outer layer of bedrock in all directions as there was in every dungeon, limiting you to only seeing the place itself. Instead, although my senses couldn't reach, I got the vague impression of millions, billions of places hanging in the void.

And I was suspended on a rope bridge over nothing, with no solid, fixed-in-place supports should that rope snap. If I fell... well, I wasn't sure what was underneath my feet, exactly, but it felt like a big mechanical something that would no doubt grind my bones into atoms and reform them for someone else as a sword, sex toy, or head full of fucking obnoxious anime hair.

The room swayed after a moment, and I fell, though I swear it's not because I lost control of my legs. No, it just kind of turned out that my elevator was really a cable car, and it started moving off in some random direction through the void, transmitting the force of that motion through the squishy, floppy walls, which made it damned impossible to do anything physical to stay on my feet. I could no doubt have used telekinesis, but... well, I wasn't sure whether this whole "fairy dungeons break your skills" thing was deliberate or just a fact of this place, so I didn't want to try, not yet.

The cable car made its way towards a big cylinder hanging in the void, one that I would doubtless have preferred seeing to feeling, because it was a little hard to stop noticing the void with my telekinetic sense. With my eyes, I could have focused on just what I was seeing, but the telekinetic sense had always been the kind of thing that fed you a whole bunch of extra information, and usually, I appreciated that--it kept me grounded, gave me a sense that the world was always solid. Now it was telling me exactly the opposite, and while it wasn't exactly making me freak out, it also was definitely not comforting.

When the car got to the station, the silk cube settled down onto the inner wall of the cylinder, and the solidness of that at least gave me something to stand on. Then, a door appeared in front of me, and outside of that, a brick wall with a door on it. It was all, I could tell, a facade, but I stepped out of the elevator anyway, looking at the signs above the door.

At the top, just painted on the wall, was the main label in large letters: "TRANSFER STATION". Below that were two electric signs, with the word "TO" painted on the wall between them. No surprise, those signs said "GALVESTON WHARF 25F" to "PEARLAND 12F". Below that was another bit of paint saying "KNIGHT ON DUTY", and another electronic sign saying (though at the time, I couldn't read the script, let alone know how to pronounce it), "Chyllu-llamaia," in big, cursive letters, that seemed like they were written with some kind of pen or crayon designed to change colors as you wrote with it.

I shrugged, knocked politely on the door, and opened it without waiting for a response.

Now, see, I could see immediately that this room was intended to be the place where the whole "hanging above the void" thing was revealed, because the whole cylinder of the room was either open to the void or made of something clear and glassy, with another circular brick wall on the far end with another door on it.

Halfway through the room, suspended in midair about a third of the way up the cylinder, more or less, was a desk, and behind the desk sat a rabbit-fairy woman, who was (and I say this with no shred of joy at all) the closest thing to another Herman I had yet encountered.

It was clear, first of all, that much like Herman and his spider body, and I guess Merry and the Caesarian one, her basic form was a combination of literal-rabbit creature of some kind and humanoid-fairy. This was not a "sexy lady in stockings with just bunny ears and a fluffy ball on her butt" rabbit-woman. Instead, her entire lower body might as well have been a big fluffy rabbit, to the point where she definitely was not supposed to be able to walk on her back legs like a human would; she did have big floppy rabbit ears on top, but those might as well have been an accessory, because the rest of her upper torso was humanoid, save for the airy fairy wings fluttering behind her back--wings that, as far as I could tell, were supposed to be depicting a small town being carpet bombed with napalm. Or possibly, it was just an abstract art that involved a lot of fire? Hard to tell.

Her breasts, not that I cared (and I've said before, they aren't generally my thing) were enormous--like, impractically big, if you catch my meaning, and her top was made of several layers of silk that seemed like they were supposed to be right at home in a stereotypical middle eastern harem, but for the rabbit butt beneath them. She had tattoos up and down both arms, even though one of those arms looked like it was a cyborg prosthetic--gleaming steel, with exposed little piston rods that adjusted whenever she twitched her fingers or wrist. Attached to her non-cyborg wrist was a bracelet, and hanging off of that bracelet was what I could swear to you was a miniature star, by which I mean a ball of burning plasma that felt both ancient and like it would continue to release deadly amounts of heat and light well after I had died, even if that were a thousand years from now.

Around her neck was a necklace of skulls, and on her head was a circlet that appeared to be an actual living snake that was being constantly tortured by being impaled on a crown of thorns, but was not allowed to die.

In her hand was a hookah, from which she took a long drag--long enough that I was immediately impressed by her lung capacity, because, like, she just kept breathing in. And when she took it out of her mouth, the cloud of smoke that she blew out made it clear I hadn't been imagining it--it poured from her like a burst steam valve on... I dunno, some big steam engine. The point is, it came out fast, was thick enough to be entirely opaque, and didn't stop for a good while once she started.

After that, when she finally got all the smoke out of her lungs, she made a single, delicate little cough, and in the high pitched voice of a voice actress trying to pretend to be an innocent, cute, harmless little rabbit in a children's cartoon, she said, "Hey fucker, it's time to pay the toll. Try not to die too quickly, because we're well below quota around here."