The Dungeon Child

I... am feeling better. Much better, in fact.

Regardless of that particular piece of information, the Mother has elected to keep me home instead of taking me to school. Ordinarily, I would be studying whatever inane projects the teachers would have decided to assign to me, but I am instead flopped on my bed, relaxing outwardly while internally focusing deeply.

My core-self is carefully maneuvering and precisely engineering a series of traps near Pop's room. Some might call these traps, most of which are primarily a nuisance, a level of petty that one might consider absurd. I am not one of these people by a long shot and am ensuring that the traps are maximized in both their efficiency and their efficacy. Most of these well-designed traps are heavily dependent on Theory's ability to remain unseen by Pops.

Turning my attention away from those, I begin my difficult experimentation regarding dimensional manipulation of my room, and the dungeon home in general. Focusing on the toilet, I direct my attention towards the disposal pipe and create a castaway portal. It's neither easy or fast, but it was really only a matter of time when it comes to an objective that I have set my sights on.

I'm beginning to truly appreciate the heightened prowess that the core-self is capable of. Only a few weeks ago, it would have taken me quite some time to build a portal at all, not to mention an enormous amount of invested time and space, and probably a few failures along the way. As it is, I'm not detecting any instabilities at all in the wavering gateway, small it may be.

My attention is broken suddenly by the door opening, and the portal disappears before I can finish making it permanent. Opening my eyes, I glance towards the doorway, tensing as I do.

Pop is standing in the door, his eyes a little brighter than usual and his shoulders raised a little higher than usual. There's even a crooked grin on his face. Behind him is a bob of blond hair, and I frown mildly. "What's going on?"

WIth that strange grin on his face, Pop tells me, "Hey, Jason. This is Merle, aight? She's gonna be your babysitter while Anna - I mean, your mom - is gone. We're going to go take a little drive, all right?"

My eyes narrow to borderline slits. "Mother did not tell me I would be having a babysitter." It's almost insulting - no, it definitely is insulting - to think that she doesn't trust me to be capable of handling myself. Moreover, if her sole purpose in being here is to assist me in my day-to-day needs, why would they be leaving? It doesn't make sense.

Shrugging, I shake my head and lie back down, and I can see Pop's frown with my dungeon sense. Turning back to Merle, he says with an even cockier smirk, "Well, you heard the kid. We're all good to go."

Her giggle is neither infectious nor amusing, but he chuckles along with her as they head downstairs and out the door. I decide to most assuredly ignore every part of that conversation - I don't know why Pop would need to tell me that the woman is a babysitter. If she won't be interacting with me than there's basically no point in introducing me to her.

Squeezing my eyes shut, I return my attention to the dungeon, and more interestingly the separate piece of dungeon far off in the distance. Looking at it, I find my view inside Dillon's room. He's sitting at his chair with a screen not entirely dissimilar to Pop's, watching it quite intently and staying perfectly still.

There's a cup on his desk, one half-full of a brown liquid. As with most objects that I encounter for the first time, I analyze its makeup and commit it to memory as best as I can. It's impossible to tell when something might be useful, after all.

At any rate, I erase the liquid inside the cup, converting it to mana, and then perform an action which I definitely wouldn't have been able to do as a dungeon. More because I wasn't allowed to.

I lift the cup.

Dillon glances at it briefly, then looks back at his screen. A slight wrinkly appears on my forehead. He looked right at it - did he just not notice?

His head snaps back towards the cup, and then he jumps out of his chair, tripping on it and falling over backward. I'm amused, to say the least - I may be appreciative of Dillon's assistance, but I most assuredly still dislike him. He screams at the cup for a few minutes and then is told to 'shut up' by his Mom. Looking around wildly, he grabs a pillow from his bed and hurls it at the cup. I catch the pillow midair and drop it to the ground, and his panic mounts further.

I could probably mess with Dillon for a long time without getting bored, but tricking Dillon into thinking that his room is infested with poltergeists is not my reason for checking on his room. Instead, I set the cup down and started focusing on both my room and on his.

The optimal choice between the two rooms and one of the only similarities is a closet. A single door in the wall framed by fancy wooden trim. Now for the hard part.

Concentrating mana at the edges of both my door and his, I begin to infuse the trim with it on a higher level than anywhere else in my room, and the respective houses start shaking. Upon further consideration, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise that Pop had to leave - it would not have been easy to perform this task with him present.

Dillon is now screaming very loudly and very shrilly, to the point where I almost think that it's Charlie. Unfortunately, I haven't heard her screaming, but since it's clearly Dillon whose mouth the sound is coming from, I can tell who it is.

The energy builds to a crux, and light begins to stream out of the edges of both doors. Dillon's screech peters out to a hoarse rattle as his eyes widen to saucers, and a smug smirk crosses my face. It never hurts to terrify people who I consider to be a potential threat, after all.

Bringing beads of space from one end to the other, I trace lines from my door to his, folding through a sort of space in spaces to do so. As I'm stabilizing it and finishing the final touches, Dillon jumps to his feet and sprints for the door, throwing it open.

Naturally, it hugely disrupts my hard work, and the light sears the room. My eyes snap open as my sense disconnects, and I glance over at my own closet door. There is a wide gray rectangle emanating from the base, and the carpet is gently singed at the tips.

Sighing, I fix them, and sit up. Time to try again.

This time though, I'm going to find a way to ensure that Dillon can't mess it up.