The Dungeon Child

I sit with my legs crossed, my hands relaxed on my knees and my eyes closed as I breathe in and out, allowing mana to flow in and out of me in steady waves. Since my first attempt, I've greatly improved on my technique when it comes to making an area a part of my dungeon. Provided I succeed, it should be relatively easy to create a dimensional pathway between this room and my own.

Emphasis on relatively.

At any rate, I take great pleasure in erasing and recreating Dillon's clothes, minus the germs and the dirt and the worryingly unidentifiable filth covering them. And of course, I rebuild them in his cabinet in an organized fashion.

Sending a pulse of perception throughout the dungeon-converted room, I find a small beetle, enticing it towards me with a spike of mana, and then seize it for my control. Seeing as it is neither a spider nor a boss, I name it Minion and shoo it away. Minion's sole purpose, in this case, is to keep a literal eye on Dillon to make sure he doesn't tell anyone.

Watching Minion trundle away underneath his unmade bed, I smile grimly. That beetle has no idea of the sheer amount of disgusting that had been under there a mere half an hour ago.

Whatever it was that Dillon had returned to Richter, it left a moderate amount of mana behind, and it's all too easy to convert it to my own uses. Otherwise, I most certainly would be unable to perform this level of conversion and recreation, but as it is, I'm actually left with a decent amount of extra.

With a frown, I open my eyes. Is it possible that, as a dungeon, my concept of what makes a large amount of mana may have been skewed? Perhaps my standards for mana consumption and overall pool levels are higher than most. It would make sense that a hundred-floor dungeon with as many visitors as I once had would consider, say, a million points of mana to be ordinary, but a human?

A human would probably find it astronomical.

It's both comforting and disturbing, paradoxically enough. It means that the mana I'd been gathering, mana that I'd considered to be infinitesimal, is actually more than proportionate to my size and age. It would also mean that it would be a long, long time before I felt comfortable with however much mana I could attain, and therefore would limit my power. I would definitely be unable to summon, say, a six-hundred-foot boss spider.

A sound filters into my consciousness, and I look over at Dillon as he sits up with a groan, rubbing his head. I can understand why his head would be sore - there wasn't a lot to cushion his fall when he'd passed out. Rising to my feet, I ask imperiously, "Are you ready to have a conversation?"

Shaking his head, he unsteadily gets to his feet and waves a hand at me. "Yeah, sure, Mom. I-" Looking directly at me, he screams with an unexpectedly high pitch and jumps away from me with more athleticism than I would have credited his skinny, pale body to be capable of exerting. "YOU!" He shouts in a wavery tone, and I sigh deeply.

"Yes, Dillon, it's me. Are you ready to talk?"

His eyes flick to the door, and I quickly say in my most dangerous voice, "Don't even think about it. The only reason I haven't enthralled you to my whims is because it would make your mind a lot duller, and I need your mind."

Dillon's voice rises in a shriek as his eyes widen. "You want my brain!?"

I close my eyes in irritation. "No, Dillon, I want your intellect. You are one of the few people who I know of who might be open towards talking about magic on a deeper level, and Charlie, while pleasant to talk to, doesn't have the drive to learn more about it."

He calms down slightly, still watching the door. I make Minion come out from underneath the bed, his squat little body swaying from side to side as he sits in front of the door. Dillon's eyes widen further somehow. "What the-"

I wave a hand casually. "It's a minion. I infuse small animals with magic and force them to follow my demands, although most of them end up doing what I want all on their own."

Dillon's mouth opens and words start streaming out like a waterfall. "Is it difficult? Do you have to know their biology to do it? If not, how do you know they'll follow your orders? Is it a mental command or do you have to verbally tell them what to do? How much magic do you have to use? And is there a measurement for magic? How much do you have?"

I don't bother attempting to sort out the rushed mess of questions, instead cutting straight to the chase. "Dillon. I have questions as well and seeing as I'm the one in control here, I think you should answer them first."

He snorts loudly, his eyes looking around at breakneck speeds as his brain grinds through questions I can't even begin to guess at. "Yeah, okay. One at a time, I get it."

Frowning, I ask curiously, "You seem to have calmed down quite a lot in a very short amount of time. Why is that?"

He grins. "That's a question, for the record. Anyway, I'm still freakin' terrified of you, but I'm more interested in how you're doing that than anything else."

I blink, startled. "And that works?"

Wagging a finger at me, he says with a grin, "Hey, one at a time, remember? My turn." Rubbing his hands together, he puts them against his lips, staring at the ceiling for a moment. I'm a little impatient to wait, but it's important that he feels as though he's important, even if he isn't.

Finally, he asks, "How did you learn magic?"

An easy answer, but one I'd preferred to keep to myself for a while. However, I am nothing if not honest. Except to the Mother. And Charlie. And everyone I run into. Except for those people, I tell the truth constantly. "I came here from another universe, I believe. My turn."

That one statement seems to have blown his brain, but he manages to hold in his questions. Seriously, I ask, "You're not planning on telling anyone about this, right?"

He waves a hand contemptuously. "Yeah, no. I just used a faulty laptop on a live stream yesterday and got interrupted by my little sister. No one's going to take me seriously after that. Besides, as I said before, you scare the living crap out of me."

I nod thoughtfully. "Thank you."

He gives me a pointed look before asking, "How did you get from your universe to ours?"

Frowning, I ask, "You seem to be taking my word on this quite strictly. I could be lying."

He waves it away. He seems to do that a lot. "Eh, you don't seem like the lying type. Besides, I don't have much of a choice either way. Now, my question?"

My forehead scrunches. "Honestly, I have no idea. I was minding my business, managing my troops and my domain, and then I died. After that, I just ended up here as a newborn infant."

He nods a few times, pacing back and forth. "You seem pretty powerful to me, so that probably means my theory about exceptionally powerful individuals possessing the required power to break through the Barrier to also be correct. Man, I'm on a roll!"

I narrow my eyes. "What barrier?"

He points at me with a grin. "That's a question! And as for your answer, I looked around in a lot of old stories - like Chinese, Saudi Arabian, Egyptian - all sorts of stuff, and I found some references to a thing called the Barrier. Some cultures also call it the Veil, but Barrier sounds way cooler, so I use that. The point being, it's the layer between universes. I'm not sure whether all of the infinite timelines are part of a multiverse, or if there are infinite multiverses and finite universes in each one. That'd mean the multiverse Barrier was proportionately difficult to break through, though, so I try not to think about it. Make sense?"

I shake my head confidently. "Not even remotely, no. Please explain."

He frowns. "Does that count as a... eh, what the heck. Okay, so basically, you got this Earth and the one you came from, which presumably wasn't called Earth. Picture the universe around your Earth as a sort of expanding four-dimensional bubble, and that bubble is right next to ours. Sometimes, a puncture is formed in the bubble, and something or someone is sucked through. Due to its four-dimensionality, instead of having to go to the edge of the universe and popping through to the edge of the next one, the point in space at which you puncture the bubble is the same relative point in space at which the puncture exits, give or take a few hundred miles. Is this making any more sense?"

Despite my mounting confusion, I shrug. "It makes enough sense. What's your question?"

He rubs his hands together in anticipation again. "Easy one. You said Charlie knows about this?"

I nod. "Yes, I told her some of it and gave her magic as an experiment. My turn."

He stutters, leaning forward. "Wait, WHAT!? You can give-"

I interrupt, glaring at him. "It's my turn."

He swallows it back, looking unbelievably excited and uncomfortable at the same time. Satisfied for the time being, I tell him in a level tone, "Don't tell Charlie anything about any part of this conversation. I will tell her you know about our secret, and that will be all the info-inf-information discussed. Understand?"

He nods mutely, and I gesture to him generously. "You may have a question."

Blurting out his question with all the restraint of a five-year-old, he asks, "Can you give me magic?"

I snort amusedly. "Can I? Yes, of course. I can grant a moderate amount of mana to all of my minions, although it would likely involve messing with your heart a bit. Not that I'm willing to do that to you, of course."

His face falls in crushing disappointment, and I sigh to myself. This is going to be a long night.

Or at least I thought it would have been. Someone knocks on the door, and I dismiss Minion instantly. Dillon walks over to it cautiously, calling, "Who is it?"

Mom speaks loudly from outside. "Dillon? Do you know where Jason is? We can't find him anywhere and Anna's getting a little worried."

He throws me a worried look, and I gesture positively. Opening the door, he says with a ready grin, "Yeah, Jason and I were just catching up, hanging out, that sort of thing."

Mom walks in with a frown, which disappears as she takes in the room. "Dillon, you cleaned up? I'm impressed! I didn't think you had it in you!"

Dillon makes a face. "You didn't think I had it in me to clean up my room?"

She smiles at him with her teeth gritted a bit. "Exactly." Turning to look at me, she crouches and says with a gentle frown, "Jason, you were scaring your mother! Why didn't you tell her you were coming up here?"

I open my mouth to respond and then close it slightly as I realize that I had no good reason not to tell the Mother and that I caused a not-insignificant amount of stress because of it. Hanging my head, I say in my best apology voice, "Sorry. I won't do it again."

Ignoring Dillon's thunderstruck expression, I walk past him and out the door. Mother is waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, and her worried look gives way to relief and then morphs straight to mild anger. Not for the last time, I'm struck by how expressive human faces are. "Jason! There you are! Why didn't you tell me you were going to hang out with Dillon? I was worried!"

I stand in front of her, a few steps up from the ground so that I'm more or less on eye level, still hanging my head. "Sorry." It's a genuine apology. The Mother has proven to be an incredibly valuable ally, to say nothing of the phenomenal emotional support she grants. I still haven't figured out why she loves me so much, but I'm willing to accept whatever I can get.

Or at least, willing to accept it from her.

She shakes her head, then wraps me in a hug. "I forgive you. I just get worried, you know?" I nod into her dress, wrinkling it a bit, and she tousles my hair, pushing me away so she can look into my eyes. "It's really hard to stay mad at you. It's one of the things I love about you, but sometimes I have to give tough love, all right?"

I blink, unexpected crying coming to my eyes. There has to be a better word for those drops of liquid, but I don't know what it is yet. "Okay."

My voice is remarkably small when I respond, and she gives me another hug, setting her chin on top of my head and gently rubbing my back. "Are you ready to go home?"

Theory springs into my mind, and I smile. "Yes."