Chapter 3 Part 4: Exploring Part II It was after the second hour mark—Abigail said it out loud because she knew ignoring time would make the walk back feel like a betrayal later—that they hit their first dead end. It wasn’t a wall in the corridor. The corridor ended in a door. Abigail’s pace slowed as if she were approaching an animal that might bolt. She aimed her light at the seam and then at Ethan, as if to say, Of course it’s a room. Ethan smiled faintly behind his ear protection, a small crack in his seriousness. “Go ahead.” They opened it and stepped in. This room was longer, more like ten by twenty. Still worked stone, still plain, still no furniture, no altar, no inscription. Just space. And three slimes. They were clustered near the far wall, not spread out like the earlier two, and for a second it was enough to make the room feel smaller. Not because three slimes were truly dangerous to them now, but because three targets meant three decisions, three angles, three chances to waste a shot if they rushed. Abigail’s light snapped from one to the next, assessing color before the fight even began. One was green. One was blue. The third was purple, deep enough that it looked almost black until the beam settled. Abigail’s eyebrows rose. “Okay,” she said, and it wasn’t fear, just the sharp note of new data. “That one’s… not in my mental list.” Ethan didn’t comment on the color. He was already moving his feet to give them both clean lines. Abigail did the same without being told. They picked an order, adjusted their spacing, and did not let the slimes close. Abigail took the purple slime first, not because it was more dangerous, but because she didn’t like unknowns on the field. Ethan took the green. The blue was last. Three shots. Three cores shattered. Three brief bursts of blue motes. Then silence again. They took the time in the room to do what a dead end forced them to do anyway: stop, breathe, and make sure the notes lined up. Abigail paced the room’s perimeter while Ethan bagged the manacite beads, and she wrote down the room’s dimensions with the kind of annoyed satisfaction someone got from proving a rule existed. When they stepped back into the corridor, the dungeon was the same as it had been before they opened the door. No tracks. No residue. Nothing to suggest the slimes had ever been there except their own bags of manacite and the memory of gunshots. They retraced their steps. Not all the way back to the entrance chamber—just back to the last junction where they’d had more than one unexplored option. Their marks on the walls made it possible without guessing, even when the corridors tried to blur into each other. Abigail checked her notebook twice, once at the midpoint and once when they reached the junction, and when the arrows on the stone matched her notes she let out a short breath that sounded like relief only because it had been withheld. “Okay,” she said. “Next one.” Ethan looked at the available paths the way he looked at trails in the woods: not mystical, not ominous, just choices with consequences. They took the next route clockwise from the one they’d already charted, staying consistent because consistency was the only thing that turned a maze into a map. The slimes didn’t thin out. If anything, the new branch felt slightly more populated, but not in a way that could be called a trend. Two singles showed up within the span of one corridor run, then nothing for a long stretch, then another door. Abigail’s head turned toward it before she was even fully stopped. Ethan saw it and sighed lightly. “You’re going to open every one.” “If it’s here, it’s here,” she said. “And if we ignore it, we’re pretending it isn’t.” The room beyond this door was small, another ten-by-ten, and empty. Abigail still paced it. Still measured. Still took pictures. She didn’t get to be vindicated by a slime cluster every time, and the fact that the room was empty didn’t make it less important to her. If anything, it made it worse. An empty room was the dungeon refusing to reward curiosity with immediate payoff. They moved on. After that, Ethan stopped once and pulled a different box of shells out of his pack. Abigail noticed immediately. “Switching?” “Just to compare,” he said, not making it bigger than it was. He held up the buckshot, then glanced down the corridor where their lights ended. “Cleaner. But we have to be more deliberate. See what it feels like.” Abigail nodded. “Do it on singles.” They did. The next slime was brown, and Ethan took his time with it. He didn’t slow because he was scared of the shot. He slowed because buckshot demanded intent. A narrower margin meant you couldn’t be lazy, and laziness was what the dungeon was quietly trying to coax out of them with repetition. The shot hit true. The slime’s core shattered cleanly. The kill felt different—not more satisfying, just more controlled. Abigail wrote a note without looking up. “One shot,” she said. “More precision.” “And less forgiveness,” Ethan replied. They kept the buckshot in rotation for a while, enough to build a comparison in their bodies rather than in theory. It didn’t change how often slimes appeared. It didn’t change how much attention they had to spend. It changed what happened inside that attention: more aiming, less reliance on spread. The dungeon did not care. By the time Abigail said, “Two hours,” again—this time with the weight of someone thinking about the return walk—they were far enough in that turning around felt like a separate task rather than an undo button. Their notes were longer now. Their bags held more manacite. Their shoulders felt the weight of packs and the constant pressure of helmet straps. They came to another door. The room beyond it was small, roughly ten meters on a side, with four slimes occupying the far half of the floor. Each reacted to the sudden light in its own slow way, bodies deforming as they began to move. Abigail swept her beam across the room and registered four slimes by color: green, blue, brown, and orange. “Same split,” Ethan said quietly. They stepped just far enough inside to clear the doorway and both fired. The green slime ruptured immediately, its core shattering as blue motes dispersed and faded. At the same moment, Abigail’s pellets tore through the blue slime, deforming its body without striking the core, and it continued to move. The brown and orange slimes kept advancing as the blue recoiled and flowed back into shape. Abigail fired again, correcting her aim, and the blue slime shattered into blue motes as its core broke apart. At the same time, Ethan fired at the brown slime, tearing through its mass without finishing it. Ethan fired again, his follow-up shot striking the brown slime’s core and breaking it apart into motes of blue. While Abigail shifted and fired once at the orange slime. The shot struck and deformed it, tearing away part of its mass, but it held together and continued forward. Its surface drew inward as it closed the distance, tension building across its translucent body. A thin lance of fire snapped forward without warning. Heat washed across Abigail’s face as the projectile scorched the stone a short distance to her left, leaving a blackened streak before dissipating. Abigail laughed, sharp and startled. “Okay—so they can do that.” They fired together. The orange slime burst apart under the combined shots, its core shattering as blue motes briefly washed through the room and faded. The room settled back into stillness. Ethan scanned the space, then the doorway, then the corridor beyond before lowering his shotgun. “We’re still standing,” he said. Abigail lifted her phone and took a picture of the scorched stone while the mark was still fresh, while Ethan crouched to collect the drops. He paused. “Abby.” Abigail turned from the wall and stepped closer, angling her light down. Near where the blue slime had fallen sat the familiar pinpoint of manacite—and beside it, a small translucent pouch, gelatinous and intact, faintly tinted blue. She crouched immediately, fatigue forgotten. “That’s not manacite,” she said. “That’s something else.” Ethan bagged both items and stood. Abigail straightened, already working through the implications. “That’s a new drop,” she said. “And it came from a normal slime.” Ethan checked his watch. “Two and a half hours.” Abigail glanced once more at the scorched mark, then down the corridor beyond the door. “Another thirty minutes,” she said. “That will make it three hours in, and since we know the way back, we’ll cover it faster than that. We backtracked after every dead end, so we’re closer than it feels.” He considered that, then nodded. “Okay, thirty minutes.” Abigail lifted her light and stepped forward. The dungeon offered no response.

Chapter 3 Part 2: Confirmation, and Next Engagement Standing in front of the portal, they took a moment to start their helmet cameras recording before firmly strapping them on. The transition still refused to announce itself in any meaningful way. One step forward, the black surface swallowing the world ahead of them, and then stone underfoot again—cool, even, and faintly textured. The pressure behind Ethan’s eyes returned for an instant before fading, leaving the chamber to resolve around them with the same quiet certainty it had the last time. Abigail did not move forward immediately. She stopped a few steps inside the room and lifted her phone, panning once in a slow, deliberate arc as if confirming that the space itself had not shifted when they weren’t looking. The obelisk stood exactly where it had been before, rising from the center of the chamber like a black shard driven into the floor. The soft blue lines tracing the stone were unchanged, and the far door remained closed, featureless, and inert. “Same,” she said quietly, not as reassurance but as a confirmation. Ethan nodded and adjusted his grip on the shotgun before angling toward the obelisk. They approached together, boots clicking faintly against the stone, the sound feeling small and quickly swallowed by the sheer volume of the room. At arm’s length, they stopped, close enough that the obelisk’s surface reflected nothing of them at all. Ethan reached out first. The moment his palm made contact with the obelisk’s facet, the familiar translucent display bloomed into view. His eyes moved quickly, scanning carefully rather than with any sense of curiosity. His name, race, and unchanged class status were exactly where they had been before. Health and mana values were the same. There were no new entries, no subtle shifts that suggested anything had happened in their absence. “Nothing changed,” he said after a moment, lowering his hand. Abigail stepped in immediately after him and placed her palm against her own facet. She leaned closer this time, lips pressed together as she read more carefully, taking an extra second to confirm what she already expected to see. When she straightened, she exhaled once and nodded. “Same as before,” she said. “Party’s still intact.” That mattered more than the numbers. She took several pictures without comment—one straight-on, one angled, and one wide enough to include the surrounding chamber for context. Ethan did not object. This was what they had deliberately decided to make part of their routine: confirm, document, and move on without lingering. “So our party didn’t reset,” Abigail said as she lowered her phone. “Not per entry, at least.” “And it doesn’t care that we left,” Ethan replied. “We’re still in it.” They both looked toward the far door, its surface unmarked and unreadable. “Then this is the one where we actually see how the floor behaves,” she said. Ethan nodded once in agreement, and they turned away from the obelisk together. They stopped in front of the door and pulled it open together, the stone doors shifting aside with the same muted resistance they had felt before. Beyond it stretched a corridor carved from the same gray stone as the chamber, its dimensions matching what they had already measured the night before. When they passed through, the door slid shut behind them with a soft finality that made the space feel narrower despite its size. They paused and listened, but the corridor offered nothing in response. “Alright,” Abigail said, already moving, her tone practical rather than cautious as she fell into step beside Ethan. He lifted the shotgun slightly, barrel angled downrange, and led the way forward. The stone underfoot was seamless enough that judging distance by sight alone was difficult. Their lights cut clean cones through the unlit passage, and about 20 yards ahead a translucent orange goo slid along the floor. Ethan raised a hand and stopped causing Abigail to stop as well. Abigail’s eyes widened a fraction. “Okay, that’s new.” Her voice turned quick with the kind of excitement she usually reserved for being right. “Orange. Fire?” Ethan kept his shotgun up but didn’t rush the thought. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s just orange.” “Everything in this place is a logic problem pretending it isn’t,” she said, and then she shifted her stance to give him room. “Same rules either way. Core.” Ethan nodded, adjusted his ear protection once more, and shouldered the shotgun. The slime rippled as the light stayed on it, its mass bunching and releasing in uneven pulses as it started moving toward them. Ethan fired. The blast thundered down the corridor, contained but forceful even through their ear protection. The spread tore through the slime’s body, punching dozens of tiny holes straight through it and splattering gelatinous fragments across the stone. The creature recoiled, collapsed inward for an instant, and then pulled itself back together. The damage wasn’t enough to take it down. Ethan blinked once, surprised despite himself, as it shuddered and kept coming. “Huh.” “Didn’t hit the core,” Abigail said immediately, using her radio so Ethan could hear her clearly with the ear protection on. “Yeah,” he replied the same way and then adjusted his aim. “I guess none of the shot hit it.” The slime surged closer, a thicker pseudopod beginning to form as its surface roiled. Ethan fired again. This time the body ruptured around a darker center, and the core shattered cleanly. Blue motes burst outward and faded as quickly as breath on glass. They waited a beat, then stepped forward together—cautious, but not hesitant. Abigail swept her light low across the stone where the slime had been, then crouched only enough to angle her phone camera close to the floor. “There,” she said, pointing. A tiny bead sat against the stone, barely more than a glowing pinprick of blue. He knelt and used the tip of a knife to nudge it into a small bag, treating it like the hazardous material it still might be. “Manacite,” Abigail murmured, saying the word the way she did when she wanted it to stick. “So it really is one per kill.” Ethan sealed the bag and tucked it away. “That’s three for three,” he said. “Not enough to call it a rule, but it’s a start.” She made a small, annoyed noise at that, but she didn’t disagree. “Either way, birdshot’ll do it,” she said, glancing back down the corridor, “but only if you get lucky.” “Or close,” Ethan said, echoing her earlier phrasing as he reloaded. “Wide spread, low reliability.” “But forgiving,” she countered, and tapped the side of her helmet light. “Which matters if there’s more than one.” They moved on and came to the spot they had fought yesterday, where the left wall opened into a side passage. Ethan slowed out of habit, and Abigail’s light tracked across the opening. “Interesting,” she said, cocking her head sideways. “There is no shot laying on the ground, and there are not scratches on the wall.” She quickly went into her photo album from yesterday and looked at the picture she took of the manacite drop, then exclaimed excitedly, “It repaired itself! Look there were birdshot pellets on the ground and scratches on the wall yesterday.” Ethan nodded along, though not as excited. “If it repairs, that means explosives may not help make permanent shortcuts, not that we know where we are going yet anyway.” Looking down the passage to the left and seeing it turn again to the left near the end of her light, Abigail said, “Left-hand rule says we take this passage." “We take it,” Ethan said, already reaching to the side pocket of his pack. “I just hope it doesn’t repair this before we come back.” He stepped up to the corner and drew a simple arrow on the wall pointing into the left-hand passage. Beside it, he added a rough “1.” “First decision point,” Abigail said after he was done, taking out her notepad to start a rough map. “First decision point,” Ethan echoed. They checked their spacing, then turned left together and moved into the side passage.

Chapter 3 Part 3: Exploring Part I They moved into the side passage without slowing, the turn carrying them into another stretch of worked stone. The walls and floor were unchanged—gray blocks, clean seams—continuing forward under their lights. Their helmet beams stayed angled deliberately, one higher, one lower, cutting through the darkness in overlapping cones that kept the ceiling and floor equally in view. Abigail walked with her shotgun ready, the notebook stowed. When they reached the first junction, she stopped long enough to take it out, note the angles and distances, then put it away again before they moved on. Ethan checked their spacing once, a quick glance to confirm position, then returned his focus forward. A few minutes in, Abigail paused to take a photo of the corridor ahead. When she lowered her phone, the empty signal indicator caught her eye. She frowned, toggled airplane mode once, then put it away. “No signal past the turn.” That matched what they’d already seen and tested, but the confirmation still mattered. It was one more thread cut. Not a dramatic one—neither of them had expected to be calling anyone from inside—but it narrowed the world down to what they could carry. For the next stretch, they fell into the routine they’d decided on the night before: move, note, mark, move again. At the first junction, Ethan put a second arrow on the wall with a quick motion, the line simple and unambiguous. Abigail watched him do it, then wrote down which way they’d gone and how far they’d come since the last mark. No special term. Just ink that would still mean something when their brains were tired. The dungeon offered them nothing in return. It didn’t react to their lights, their voices, their boots. It didn’t hum, didn’t shift air, didn’t change the texture of the stone underfoot. The only thing that made it feel alive at all was that it kept being there, endless straight corridors connecting at right angles like a grid that refused to admit it was a grid. They’d made it through two more intersections before the first slime of this passage showed itself. It was lodged partly into the corner where wall met floor, as if it had been poured there and decided to stay. Under their lights it was unmistakably colored, translucent but not ambiguous. This one was pale yellow, like old lemonade. Abigail stopped hard enough that Ethan’s shoulder almost bumped hers, and her beam steadied on it. “Yellow,” she said, voice bright in the way it got when her brain latched onto pattern. Not excitement like the first time, not disbelief, but the quick, almost involuntary need to label. “Lightning? Light? Something like that.” Ethan didn’t answer immediately. He watched the slime’s surface tremble, the way the mass drew itself forward in slow, deliberate deformation. “Or it’s just yellow,” he said, the same caution he’d used when she’d called orange fire earlier. “Still a core.” Abigail nodded, already shifting her stance. She brought her own shotgun up, buttstock settled, barrel steady where the light made the slime’s center easiest to see. Ethan didn’t take the shot from her. He angled slightly to give her room and kept his own weapon on the corridor beyond, ready in case “one” turned into “more” without warning. Abigail slid one side of her ear protection back into place with her wrist, a practiced motion that didn’t require her to look away. The other side had been riding slightly off, enough to hear their steps and the soft scrape of pencil on paper when she wrote. She seated it fully, then took a breath and fired. The blast slapped the corridor and came back at them a heartbeat later, the sound contained but still brutal. The slime ruptured around a darker center, and when that center shattered the rest of it lost cohesion instantly—blue motes, then nothing. Abigail held position for two more seconds before lowering the muzzle. Then she slid one ear cup off again, not all the way, just enough to let the world back in. “You see the drop?” she asked. Ethan moved in first, not because she couldn’t, but because this was the division they’d settled on: one watches the space, one does the handling. Abigail kept her shotgun up and tracked the corridor and the corners with her light while Ethan knelt, found the faint blue pinprick, and nudged it into a bag with the tip of his knife. They moved on. After the first few encounters, repetition began to blur together. A slime would appear, they would stop, they would shoot, they would bag the tiny bead of manacite. Then there would be nothing for a while—straight corridor, the same stone, the same angles—long enough that the mind started to wander, long enough that Abigail had to consciously pull her attention back to estimating distance instead of letting the corridor fade into background. Then another slime would be there, close enough that it felt like the dungeon had listened and chosen its timing. They saw colors that made Abigail talk under her breath even when she didn’t mean to. A muted green that made her flick her light across it twice as if verifying it wasn’t shadow. “That one again,” she said. “Air? Wood? Whatever it is, it’s common.” A deeper blue that wasn’t the blue of motes, but the body itself, cold-looking under the lights. “Water?” she murmured. Ethan grunted in acknowledgment, neither agreeing nor dismissing. He wasn’t trying to solve her puzzle. He was trying to survive long enough to let the puzzle matter. Their first small cluster came in a place that justified it. A stone door stood in the corridor wall, narrow compared to the big double doors in the entrance chamber—one person wide, tall enough for Ethan to pass without ducking, plain and unmarked. It stopped Abigail’s forward motion the way a stop sign would have stopped a car. “A door,” she said, like she couldn’t believe the dungeon had finally admitted rooms existed. Ethan angled his light across the seam where it met the frame. There was no handle in the human sense, but there was a simple recess, functional. He didn’t reach for it until Abigail’s shotgun was up and covering. They opened it together, not from fear but from habit, and stepped into the room. It was small by dungeon standards, but it was a room—flat floor, worked stone on all sides, their lights sliding over empty space that was still space, not corridor. Ten meters by ten, maybe. She paced two steps inside, the beam sweeping, already measuring in her head. Two slimes were in there. They hadn’t been waiting in a cinematic way. They were simply there, bodies pooled against opposite walls, colored differently enough that Abigail’s brain tried to name them even as she shifted to fight. One was red. Not orange—red, clearer and more saturated. The other was a dull gray-brown that reminded Ethan of the first slime on Chairman’s shoulder, and Abigail made a small sound of recognition that was not fondness. “Earth,” she said, and then, more honestly, “Or something like it.” They didn’t give the slimes time to cross the room. Abigail took the red one. Ethan took the brown. Both of them reseated their ear protection fully before firing, both of them moved their feet to keep each other’s lines clear, and the room filled with the same contained thunder twice in quick sequence. The red slime took the first shot cleanly, core shattering on the first blast. Ethan’s brown one burst but pulled itself together for a fraction of a second before the second shot finished it properly. They waited. No third slime slid out of a corner. The room didn’t do anything clever. Abigail lowered her shotgun and slid one ear cup off again. “That,” she said, looking around the empty space, “is going to keep happening.” Ethan gathered the manacite while she paced the edges, counting and writing. When she reached the door again, she hesitated, looked at the bare stone walls, and took a few pictures that included the doorway, the corners, the floor. Not for aesthetics—so future Abigail would believe past Abigail had actually seen a room. The next hour passed in pieces like that. Corridors that took little time on paper once the pattern was clear. Intersections where Ethan made a mark and Abigail wrote an entry. Single slimes that were handled almost automatically, with Abigail and Ethan alternating shots so neither became “the shooter” and the other became “the assistant.” Colors that repeated often enough to feel like a population rather than a parade—greens and blues and browns appearing again and again, punctuated by something new that made Abigail’s pencil pause. A pale white slime that was difficult to judge until their lights hit it directly, and then it stood out like fog. “Light,” Abigail said, quiet. “Or… something that wants to be.” Ethan didn’t argue. He simply watched the way it moved and treated it the same as the rest. One shot, core, blue motes. After about an hour, Abigail checked her watch without being prompted and let out a slow breath. “Been in here a while,” she said. Ethan nodded. He didn’t need the number to feel it, but the number helped put structure around fatigue that wasn’t fear. Fatigue from holding the same vigilance without interruption. They kept going anyway.

@dwarf said in Chapter 3 Part 1: Longer Exploration Prep: they forgot glowsticks… modern explorers always carry 'em cuz flashlights can break/discharge, but chemistry always works oh, and sidewalk chalk - to mark their path on walls/floor so they can backtrace in a hurry if necessary (tho i’ve seen folks drop glowsticks at each intersection too, to mark their path) -D I tried to limit the shopping to obvious things they needed to get that they did not have. I didn’t feel like making an exhaustive list. As for glow sticks, i thought about them, but they can’t be used for exploring, not bright enough. great for marking the path. but single use items add up. That includes ammo which will be brought up in story.

@dwarf said in Chapter 2 Part 2 – First Steps Inside: glad they switched back to american measurement nobody knows what this MEATRIC jazz is all about Everything in the dungeons will be in metric, but I intend to keep them using casual conversation numbers in standard because that is what they would do normally.

Random note: I really like how well the AI is performing because I disallowed internet lookups. I even forgot i disallowed and asked for something and it refused me. [image: PIor5o5.png] [image: 493eDES.png] [image: l8ZXIU0.png]

@dwarf said in Chapter 2 Part 5: Going Through the Door: @daermadm said in Chapter 2 Part 5: Going Through the Door: “The slime began to approach, moving in a way that was neither a walk nor a slide.” this shouldn’t be in quotes - its not speech somewhere nearby, there’s a confused Orc wondering what the hell just assploded down the hall… so far, i’m liking the flow of the story that came from a pass where the AI said WTF were you typing… i think you mean this and gave me that line back. i copied pasted the quotes on accident.

@dwarf said in Chapter 2 Part 3: The Obelisk: an AI can misspell things ?? that’s odd that would be be. I use the AI to improve my poor writing, but it is not written all by AI. I really should add a full editorial only pass.

@dwarf said in Chapter 2 Part 1: Measuring the Gate: did they geiger counter the marble ? i dont remember 'em doing that. They did it off screen, i didn’t feel the need to it multiple times. I knew i was going to use it here, so I skipped that bit in the garage in chapter 1. and when did they name it Manacite ? Abigail assumed the drop was manacite after reading the text in chapter 1 part 4 [image: avbQAyU.png]

@dwarf said in Chapter 1 Part 5: Processing and Cover: this rewrite is much more legible and easy to follow better flow too Next up will be diving into the dungeon. going to implement a 10e-ish type of system for this story

China deploys humanoid robots to the border with Vietnam T-1 anybody ?? https://burstcomms.com/china-border-robots/

Ethan carefully pours the faintly glowing sphere from the ziplock bag onto a blue shop towel. It rolls half an inch, then settles, pulsing softly like a lazy heartbeat. He leans in with a magnifying glass, arm fully extended, face angled away as if the thing might suddenly spray acid. After a long moment, his shoulders slump. “It just looks like a glowing ball,” he says after a moment. “It is a magic stone,” Abigail says immediately, arms crossed. “Monsters always drop mana stones in anime.” Ethan lowers the magnifying glass and gives her a flat look. “You cannot keep using anime as peer-reviewed research.” She shrugs. “Hasn’t failed me yet.” “That’s not a counterargument,” he mutters, but he nudges the stone with a screwdriver anyway, just to be sure it doesn’t suddenly do something dramatic. It doesn’t. Still glowing. Abigail grins and hops into his chair, plugging her phone into the shop computer. Videos and photos begin transferring onto the screen. “Okay, Professor Skeptic. Let’s look at the gate again.” She pulls up the clearest image of the crystalline frame, zooming in on the etched text. Ethan leans over her shoulder, squinting. “I see English. Japanese. Probably Chinese.” He hesitates, pointing at two others. “This one’s like… Arabic-ish or something. And this other one’s like Eastern European—whatever that’s called.” Abigail snorts. “Those are Cyrillic languages. But yeah—those last four?” She gestures at the remaining scripts. “They don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.” Ethan studies the image a little longer. “They’re all arranged the same way,” he says finally. “Three lines, placed in the same position on the frame. Whoever put them there clearly wanted every version to line up.” Abigail nods. “So the intent’s the same, even if the writing isn’t. One message, translated for whoever’s reading it.” Ethan taps the English section and reads it aloud. “Gates arise by unseen will. Step beyond to grasp the strength within. Manacite gathered, its mystery untold.” The garage is quiet when he finishes. “Plural,” Abigail says. “Gates. More than one.” Ethan nods. “Yeah. Not ‘this gate.’ Gates.” Her fingers are already moving. She opens social media, news sites, forums—anything even vaguely conspiracy-friendly. Dungeon. Gate. Blue crystal portal. Nothing. “…Nothing,” she says after a minute. “If someone else had found one, it’d be everywhere by now.” “So… are we the first?” Ethan asks. “Or just the first anyone’s discovered?” Abigail glances back at the inscription. “By unseen will. That’s… not great.” “No,” Ethan says. “That sounds intentional. Like something decides when these show up.” “Something made it,” Abigail says slowly. “Or something set rules and walked away,” Ethan replies. “Automated. System-based.” She hums. “Or it’s watching.” “I really hope it’s not watching,” he says. “Same,” she says. “That’d be creepy—and not in a fun way.” She tilts her head. “But step beyond to grasp the strength within?” A grin spreads across her face. “That’s basically an invite. We go in, we get stronger. Levels. Skills.” Ethan exhales slowly. “Or we die.” Abigail shrugs, still smiling. “Sure. Just a minor risk.” He looks at her for a long second, unimpressed. The smile only widens. “And the last line,” he says, nodding toward the workbench. “Manacite gathered, its mystery untold.” His eyes drift back to the glowing sphere. “That’s this.” Abigail swivels the chair toward the stone. “So we killed a slime, got manacite, and discovered the world’s first dungeon.” Ethan watches the light pulse for a moment. “…We are really not ready for this.” Abigail laughs. “Speak for yourself. I’ve been training for this my entire life.” Ethan smirks, then lets it fade as his gaze drifts toward the open garage door. “What?” she asks. “That thing glows,” he says. “Just the frame, but you can’t miss it at night.” “It’s in a ravine on your family’s property,” Abigail says. “There are no trails. No reason for anyone to be there.” “I know,” he says. “But it’s still a permanent light source. Fog. Snow. Someone flying a drone someday.” She leans back. “Okay. Fair.” “And it’s not subtle,” he continues. “Five meters wide. Three tall.” “So… what. We report it?” Ethan rubs the back of his neck. “I don’t love that idea.” “Me neither,” she says. “Best case? They fence it off and we never get near it again.” “Worst case,” Ethan says, “they classify everything, take the manacite, and we’re stuck signing NDAs until we’re forty.” She snorts. “Assuming they don’t just decide we’re a liability.” “Exactly.” The garage hums quietly around them. “I don’t trust the government with something like this,” Abigail says. “Not because I hate them. Because this turns into concrete and acronyms.” Ethan nods. “And tanks,” he adds. “And tanks.” She looks back at the screen. “So if we don’t report it…” “We hide it,” Ethan says. Abigail raises an eyebrow. “You’re aware it’s the size of a box truck, right?” “I’m aware.” She nods slowly. “So the goal is simple—hide the glow and make the whole thing as boring as possible. No signs, no trails, no posts, and definitely no people poking around.” “Including friends,” Ethan says, “at least until we have a better idea what it is.” She grimaces, but keeps going. “For today, we can grab tarps in town after we drop off Chairman for processing. The big ones—semi-truck sized. A few of those should cover the frame well enough.” Ethan thinks it through, then nods. “That’d work short-term.” “They’re fast,” she says. “Tie them off to the trees, peg them down into the dirt. Ugly, but effective.” “And easy to pull down if we need to,” he says. “Exactly.” She straightens. “Okay. We hide it. For now.” “For now,” Ethan agrees. “Until we understand what it actually does.” Her eyes flick to the glowing stone. “…We’re still doing it, though,” she says. Ethan exhales slowly. “Yeah. We are.” He glances at the stone again before looking back at her. “But we plan it out first. No rushing in, no assumptions. Whatever that thing is, it’s not something we treat casually.” Abigail nods. “It’s a dungeon,” she says. “Not a whatever. And we definitely need to plan things out.” She hesitates, then adds, “For example, in most anime, modern firearms either don’t work at all or only work on weak monsters.” Ethan snorts quietly. “This isn’t an anime.” Then he sobers. “But you make a good point. We don’t know how anything in there reacts to normal weapons yet. Could work. Could be useless.” “Which means guessing is a bad idea,” Abigail says. Ethan nods. “Yeah. A really bad one.” Chapter 1 Part 1 Chapter 1 Part 2 Chapter 1 Part 3 Chapter 1 Part 4 Chapter 1 Part 5

@dwarf Ok that makes more sense, and how ive been playing it. But i couldn’t remember if that was the agreed upon way, or not.

@dwarf Wow they channeled Dwarf pretty well there!

we need to introduce this dude to Jamos BEER VACCINES !! https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vaccine-beer-polyomavirus-chris-buck

Without breaking out my spelljamming docs to compare with myself, I see no major issues that would cause me to object to this.

[image: Vl9lvbR.jpeg]

By the time they reached Chairman’s body, both of them were grateful for something familiar—even if it was still wrong in its own way. The spot where the slime had clung was now bare hide, softened and pitted from acid. Resting on that damaged patch sat a blue, BB-sized sphere, no more than a millimeter across, pulsing faintly like a trapped spark. Abigail crouched. “That’s… definitely not biological.” Ethan knelt beside her, careful not to brush the hide. “And it didn’t melt the deer. So the acid was selective.” “Drop item,” she murmured, testing the term. “Even though we don’t actually know what dropped it.” “It came from the slime,” Ethan said. “That’s enough of a working theory.” She arched a brow. “That’s not how science works.” He ignored her and used a fallen stick to roll the glowing ball off the hide. It clicked—solid, inert. No hiss, no burn. “Good sign,” he said. “Not touching it anyway.” She dug a small ziplock bag from her pack. “Use this.” He flicked the shard inside. It glowed steadily against the plastic. Abigail sealed it. “One mystery ball. Loot level… question mark.” They both turned, almost involuntarily, toward the ravine. The faint blue of the crystalline frame seemed to cling to their thoughts. “It reacted when we got close,” Ethan said softly. “Yeah,” Abigail replied. “And we definitely can’t let some hiker stumble on it first.” That sealed it. They hauled Chairman toward the four-wheeler, working in practiced silence. Heavy, awkward work—but grounding. By the time they had the buck strapped down and were driving back toward Ethan’s place, the portal felt like a fever dream sitting just behind their shoulder blades. After the long haul back to the barn, the bleeding-out, and the quiet routine of getting Chairman ready for processing, they ended up in Ethan’s garage with the glowing sphere resting on the workbench—impossible and out of place in the familiar space. Ethan leaned on the counter. “We should start researching now. Carefully. No posting, no keywords that scream ‘please monitor my search history.’” “Agreed.” Abigail hopped onto the edge of the bench. “We’re eighteen, first-semester SWIC students, and somehow this is what we’re doing before lunch.” Ethan snorted. “Could be worse.” She gestured at the shard. “Debatable.” He tapped the bag lightly—barely a touch. “First step: figure out if this thing is dangerous. I don’t want to find out it’s radioactive after you’ve been carrying it around.” She nudged him gently. “Four years together, and this still isn’t the weirdest situation we’ve been in.” “This is absolutely the weirdest,” Ethan said. “Yeah,” she admitted, smile lingering, “but the universe dropping a portal on your property is kind of a sign.” “A sign of what?” “That we should figure out what we’re dealing with before anyone else does. It’s a dungeon.” “Really? Dungeon?” Ethan sighed, and Abigail smirked at his tone. “Well, we’ve got a few hours before we need to run the deer in,” Ethan added. “Might as well use them.” She grinned. “See? That’s the right attitude. Productive panic.” He shook his head but didn’t argue. They both glanced at the glowing bead in the plastic bag—a tiny, impossible artifact sitting in an ordinary garage—and the day seemed to tilt around it. Their world had changed at dawn. Now it was up to them to decide what came next. Chapter 1 Part 1 Chapter 1 Part 2 Chapter 1 Part 3 Chapter 1 Part 4 Chapter 1 Part 5

@dwarf said in Fallout TV Teaser Announces New Amazon Series Based on Hit Video Game: season 2 drops in ~2 weeks I doubt I’ll watch as it comes out. I’ll most likely binge after it is fully released. looking forward to it.