The Dungeon Child

I stare in disbelief at the small spiral of flame dancing over her palm, my mouth hanging open slightly. Charlie's face is lit up from underneath, beaming happily.

I blink as my brain catches up, then point at it. "Stop! Stop doing that!"

Her face breaks into startled confusion, and the fire flickers out. Concerned, she asks, "What is it?"

I gesture to her hand wildly. "How were you doing that!?"

Forehead furrowing, she generates the fire again. "This? You gave me magic!"

Stunned and a little surprised, I ask with a bit of heat, "Yes, but how are you making fire?"

She looks down, and makes the fire dart around her hand in a small loop. "I just wanted fire."

My head hurts. She's not chanting any spells, she's not making any specific construct gestures, and yet her will is simply being made manifest while using a shockingly marginal amount of mana. Using my mana sense, I analyze the fire carefully and am once again stunned.

She's not just making a simple lick of fire - she's converting the heat falloff that should be scorching her palm and redirecting it back into flame while simultaneously maintaining its substance with mana. Fire always needs something to burn, and she's using the faint traces of mana I gave her to feed it, controlling the oxygen airflow around it to direct it in whatever direction she pleases. I’ve already tried a similar spell, but it consumed more of my mana then I was capable of delivering - there were simply too many proceses that I had to focus on maintaining.

I slam my eyes shut, a serious headache beginning to make itself known. Not only is she doing all of that, she doesn't even know she's doing it. Charlie's a remarkably intelligent child, no doubt about it, but there's no way she's aware of the sheer intricacy of the magic she's performing. I can only assume it’s an automatic process, but that raises more questions than I can keep track of.

Opening my eyes again, I ask, "Why fire?" It's not possible that I happened to give magic to a pyromaniac in the making, is it? Her personality thus far hasn't exactly indicated such a volatile side of her.

She shrugs. "It's the first thing I thought of. In all the stories Daddy likes reading, the wizards always learn a fireball spell first."

I shake my head. What sort of ridiculousness is this? A fireball spell is a bomb waiting to happen - why would anyone choose it for their first spell?

Suddenly, what she said catches up with me, and I lean forward intensely. "Wait, there are wizards?"

She laughs, a clear sound. "No, silly." A thought strikes her, and her expression turns contemplative. "Well, maybe. I didn't know magic was real until you showed me."

Extending my thoughts, I forcefully yank the mana fueling her fire towards me, absorbing it and extinguishing the flames. She frowns, a curiously adorable look. "It went out!"

Holding her hand out, her forehead furrows from her concentration, but no fire appears.

I have literally no idea what's going on at this point, but I might have a theory. "Do you feel empty?"

Charlie's face screws up in concentration, and then she looks at me strangely. "Yeah! Like a little hole in my heart. How did you know?"

I raise an eyebrow. "Heart?"

She nods, indicating the small of her chest with a finger. "Yeah, my heart! You know..."

She trails off, trying to think of a way to describe the object in question. A flash of realization hits me. "You mean your core? The red thing?"

Her face breaks into a smile. "Yeah! That. It's a heart!"

I file the information away: apparently all humans have a core. That's one question explained, at least. Only a couple hundred to go.

Crossing my legs, I sit down thoughtfully. "So, what do you remember about when I gave you mana?"

She's still unsuccessfully trying to make more fire, and looks up distractedly. "What?"

I repeat my question, and she frowns. "What's mana?"

I resist rolling my eyes. At least I’m not the only one with a lack of knowledge on basic information. "It's like magic fuel. What do you remember?"

She nods understandingly. "Magic fuel. Like gas for magic?"

"Charlie. What do you remember? It's really imper-imp-"

She catches on to what I'm saying and finishes for me. "It's really... imperative?" I manage not to scream at myself for being so clearly inferior in vocabulary-related capabilities, though she doesn't pick up on my feelings. "Oh. Well, you touched my head, and then everything went fuzzy, and then I could feel a little ball, like the sun but smaller."

A surprisingly succint explanation. I'm extremely relieved that she has no recollection when it comes to my enthralling of her - it's not something I have any intention of doing again, except maybe on Pop. I wouldn't mind if what was left of Pop's mind was focused on obeying me, although the substantial amounts of liquor he consumes might make the process significantly more difficult.

That aside... "It sounds like you have a mana pool. Is it filling back up?"

She turns her attention inward once more, and then frowns deeply. "No. Should it?"

That's extremely interesting. I was aware that humans had a more limited ability to purify and condense mana as opposed to dungeons, but I hadn't thought that they would outright be unable to regenerate it. Or is it because I gave her magic, as opposed to being born with it? Is it because of this world’s miniscule amount of ambient mana? Almost as a second thought, I give her a decent portion of my own mana reserves to her heart, avoiding her head. Squealing in excitement,she starts summoning fire again.

I'm still thinking about mana regeneration. Of course I know how to generate mana - it's literally the first thing a dungeon learns how to do. It's not a simple process, but it's made easy with time and habit. Drawing the excess energy from all actions performed by everything, whether that be the marginal energy from a faint breeze or the enormous input from the decomposition of an adventurer, is something all dungeons do with shocking efficiency.

Leading me to an interesting conclusion: that if l am indeed the only dungeon human - a dungeon child, technically - in this world... then I am a walking, breathing source of magic.

For most, I imagine it would be worrying. For me, not so much. Even as a dungeon, my upper floors were visited frequently by citizens of the world above. I even improved those floors for their visitation - the more foreign creatures in my dungeon, the more mana generated and the more power I gained. It was the extraordinarily powerful adventurers that were difficult. Emptied treasure troves, slain defenders, small artworks and destroyed architecture - the list of things that had to be repaired and replaced after their invasions was endless. It was always worth it, of course - the many lures I had to make in order to draw in adventurers were worth their weight ten times over. Expansion is always the innate, instinctual drive of a dungeon, and I'm confident I was one of the very biggest.

Charlie pokes my shoulder, and I'm yanked out of my memories abruptly. "What is it?"

She holds both her hands up. Minute streaks of lightning begin to crackle between her fingers, really nothing more than static electricity feeding back into itself in a loop. It'd use up all of her mana in one go if she used it on something, so it's not especially practical. It's impressive regardless. "I can make lightning now."

I sigh inwardly. This was, indeed, a terrible idea, if not an informative one.