Discovery 1.1
Aku-dono
[REDACTED]
Special thanks to Arkeus, Stewart92 and DCG for their feedback.
Dungeons are a litRPG trope, not an original world. The system, characters (other than those from Worm) and world are original creations.
---
I Woke Up As a Dungeon; Now What?
Discovery 1.1
I’d never been a very religious person. I’d never truly believed in God, or in any kind of afterlife. That being said, there had always been a little part of me that had asked ‘what if?’, that had hoped that the stories of Heaven and Hell were true, that those I’d met who’d deserved fire and brimstone were getting their due (there were quite a few of those), and that those precious few who instead deserved peace and rest were looking down on me and smiling from Heaven.
And that, maybe, one of them was my mother, whom I would finally be able to ask if she was prouder than me than I was of myself.
That is, if I was even qualified to go to Heaven. I was pretty sure killing a toddler was pretty much like buying a one-way ticket to the deepest circle. And if it wasn’t, there was probably a laundry list of all the crap I’d done as a Villain, then as a Heroine.
But in truth, I didn’t expect to find anything after my death. I expected... nothing. Just oblivion. A loss of awareness, a painless disappearance as my brain shuts down, and then... nothing.
Turns out I was wrong.
Turns out that, after I died, I woke up to find I was a room and a hallway.
No, that last line wasn't a mistake.
---
It was probably only due to all the weird shit I’d experienced that I’d only spent a few minutes freaking out, and most of that was from realizing I was sane again, and that Scion had been defeated, and yet I wasn't anywhere I'd expected to be. It said something about me that waking up as a floating, barely glowing ball of... whatever I was now made of, without limbs, without a face, without eyes and yet capable of seeing, only made it amongst the top weirdest things I’d ever experienced.
I took stock in my situation. I was in a clearly artificial cave made up of a single room and a hallway, both walled, floored and roofed with raw yellowish-brown dirt that somehow didn’t collapse under its own weight. The hall was about thirty feet long and ended with the powerful glare of the sun illuminating a short flight of stairs. The room was almost perfectly square, about 16 feet a side, and in the middle sat a simple granite pedestal, barely more than a stone cylinder with a square tile on top. There was a little grey sphere about the size of a tennis ball hovering about a foot above the pedestal, glowing with a light of its own. It was the only source of light down here.
My name was written on that pedestal. “TAYLOR”.
Thoughts rushed through my head, not many of them coherent. Had I somehow woken up as a disembodied soul in my own tomb?!
Somehow, I just knew how to move around. It took me a second to rush through the hallway into the harsh glare of the sun, and I got my first look at the lands outside.
The first thing that struck me was the cracked arid ground, covered with dead plants and a thin layer of dust. This land had been alive recently. Piles of bricks, corners and walls of long-abandoned houses, sparsely littered the area. A village, or the outskirts of one. A farm, probably, and not a modern one. There wasn't a sign of life anywhere, except for a small path of packed earth that snaked carelessly past my tomb(?) about a hundred yards away. There was almost no wind, and what breeze blew by carried with it clouds of sand and dust that went right through me.
The hole I'd just left was exactly that; an unmarked hole into the ground without a notable feature marking it. Kind of a weird thing to do to a tomb, come to think about it. Why spend so much effort digging a hole and building a tinkertech tombstone if you're not even going to make it noticeable?
...wellp, I wasn't going to learn anything down in that hole, so I was better off finding some kind of civilization. I made to go towards the road--
--and found myself ricocheting backward like a bouncy ball hitting a wall. It hurt, even though I didn’t even have a real body.
A bit of experimentation later, I found that I was, in fact, stuck here. There was a small dome about ten yards wide centered around the entrance to my tomb(?) in which I could fly freely, but if I tried to leave it, some kind of force pushed me back into the hole with a flash of pain. Metaphorically wincing, I accepted my fate (for now) and returned downstairs to explore further.
The walls were featureless and boring. The floor was surprisingly clean, for all it was dug directly in dirt; either this place was brand new, or someone had taken pains to clean it. While they were at it, couldn't they have put stones or something--
UPDATING
And suddenly I had a vision of this same ground, covered in rough stonework, bright red. Something was telling me that I couldn't do it. I didn't have enough... energy? A moment later, the illusion vanished, leaving the dirt ground exactly the way it was.
What... was that? Some kind of visual preview of the change I had just thought up? Then...
I focused on the walls, tried to imagine them reinforced with wood planks
UPDATING
And there it was again! The room's walls were now covered by bright red boards and columns, all of which seemed to have had better days in a past century, and that feeling of lacking came back. Within moments, the red planks disappeared, leaving me alone in the dirt room.
...did I suddenly end up in a virtual reality world? If that was it, then I was going to resurrect Leet just so I could kill him, because this kind of shit was right up his creek.
What is it that I was missing, though? I--
Mana
...this shit was getting old, really fast. Mana. Magic power, extracted from... living creatures, especially humans? Oh hell the fuck n--
ABSORBING
UPDATING
What the FUCK!? Okay, whoever was in charge of this shit game, I wanted OUT. What was that--
And suddenly, once again, I knew; an ant had died from exposure in the stairs in front of the hole, and I'd somehow absorbed it. And somehow, in doing so, I'd become a bit... more?
Ants were familiar territory for me, along with spiders, flies, worms and all the other little critters I'd spent the last four years controlling with my mind. But somehow, even though I'd always had this ability to micromanage every single part of every single insect in my swarm, I'd never before had such a clear perception of what an ant actually looked like, down to the fur-like keratin strands on their legs, to the pores that let them breathe, to the chemical receptors in their antennae.
There was an ant floating in front of me, about the size of a large dog. It was green, and I felt like if I just tried, I would--
The ant was no longer green. It was black, it was moving and real and I couldn't control it. I immediately flew as far from it as I could, dashing across the room into furthest corner. Ants were almost blind, it couldn't have spotted me, right? I...
I was in no danger. I somehow knew this, just as I somehow knew this ant was called 'small lesser ant', just as I somehow knew every other fucking thing in this fucking fucked-up virtual game--
"Okay, I'm done, shut the fucking game down already!" I called out.
No response.
Well, obviously.
So, to recapitulate: I was in a man-made hole, in a desert. There was a pedestal with my name on it, and an ant now skittering about trying to find something to do, I guess? I had the ability to apparently spawn giant ants with my mind, and wouldn't that have been a useful ability before this, and apparently the ability to personalize the room as I saw fit if I got enough energy, which I needed to absorb from living beings, because of course powers can't be fucking nice for once, and I was... alone.
What had happened? I remembered asking... strongly asking Panacea to break my powers. I remembered definitely not asking the world's heroes and villains to unite their power to fight against Scion. I remembered winning. I remembered... things. Bits and pieces, disjointed images and feelings and oh god how close had Scion been--
I remembered... I remembered...
We're so very small, in the end...
I remembered her.
Fucking Contessa.
Because of course that walking mass of human-shaped unfairness was alive after all this shit, and she'd done... had she--
Had she shot me?
Huh.
She had. In the head, too. I guess this really was my tomb.
And my tomb was in a video game world.
Oh my god, if God turned out to be fucking Leet, I was going to kill him, usurp his throne so I could resurrect him, then kill him again.
There was a chitter. The ant was right below me, staring curiously. I frowned.
Well I got the feeling it wasn't going to hurt me (could I even be hurt like this, other than by bumping into invisible walls?), and I had created it, so it was basically my minion, so... Could I control it?
I could. It was as simple as turning on a switch. I felt it willingly submit, felt its admiration through its own body. Her own body. I could see through her eyes, hear through her feet and hairs, smell through her antennae, and none of those feelings felt strange in any way. I guess not actually having a body to be disoriented by was a perk of this whole thing? I was willing to trade it back, though.
I tried to control her into making her leave the dungeon, but the moment her antennae crossed the line, they started losing cohesion. I retreated. No good on that end, either.
I was going to have to wait for things to fall into my lap, like a spider in her web. Damnit.
Maybe I could use the ant to dig other entrances?
No go, I felt. Another thing I wasn't allowed to do. The digging part felt good, though; I guess I had do have just one entrance. One entrance into a hallway, and onto a single pedestal with my name on it... and a glowing crystal...
Hm, if this was a video game thing, then... could I game over? What would happen? Was I willing to risk the possibility that it wasn't a game?
Yeah, I wasn't that lucky. I was going to assume that having my pedestal thingy broken was really bad. And it was... awfully exposed, like that. I mean, sure, they'd have to climb down the stairs, but if someone did show up, then they'd have a free shot at my glowing thingy without having to cross the hall. If they were a good shot, I was willing to bet it wasn't going to lead to good things for me. I had a feeling that my ant wasn't the strongest creature ever. Something about how it was called 'small lesser Ant'. You never hear about 'small lesser Wuffikins, destroyer of worlds', I mean.
I felt her indignation at that thought. She could hear me? She was smart enough to be feel indignation?
Huh. Interesting. I'd never had smart minions before.
Smart... non-human, willing minions, that is.
Could I block the path--
Ow. No, I couldn't. Okay. There needed to be an unrestricted path between the entrance and the glowy thingy. I figured that meant digging a massive hole between the glowy thing and the entrance--
UPDATING
...huh, that could work, but I needed more of that mana thing to make it, and as I inspected the flat red area in the hall, I noticed there was a walkable ledge that could be used to avoid the pit. Something to note for whenever I got what I needed.
Hiding the entrance was a good way of never having anything stumble inside to die in my hallway, so that was out. Could I move the crystal, then?
I could, but obviously I'd need more room to do it. I needed to dig. And I... had no energy to dig with. But maybe I could use my ant?
Lesser Ant Special skill: burrow
I could! It was going to take a while, and a lot of work, but I felt my ant's eagerness at actually being put to work. So, how was I going to do this thing...
---
In the end, I ended up building a mental map of the room I wanted to make, a room roughly the same size as the one I'd just made, a short distance away. It took a lot of time; my ant could, surprisingly, carry an entire square feet’s area of dirt in a single bite, but only after spending several minutes gnawing at the dirt. Then she needed to travel back to entrance, where... well, the dirt magically disappeared. Plus one point in favor of this whole thing being a video game of some sort.
I ended up releasing my control of her after the first trip, and she continued the task with an eagerness that was honestly adorable. Even though she was a black ant the size of a golden retriever, she was actually quite cute.
By the time it was done, the light from down the hallway had gone out and turned silver. It only took a thought to move the pedestal over to the other room, leaving the previous room completely barren. As I did so, I felt some kind of drain, like I was coming down from the world's least intense sugar high. It was like I’d just run a drill organized by a very vicious sergeant. Is this what spending mana felt like? Or was it because I’d spent most of it in one blow?
Discomfort was the body’s way of informing you that you’d overdone it. Apparently being a disembodied night light with supernatural renovation powers came with its own limits.
With that, the glowy thing was out of direct danger, but it was still a work of less than a minute to cross the hallway and reach it. At least now they would have to fight their way through my ant first, though. Nothing that would stop someone like me from doing just that with a stick, a bit of motivation and an actual body, but it was a start. I didn’t even know if I was in danger in the first place. For all I knew, there could be nothing but animals left alive in this world.
For all I knew, there were tons of humans living here and every single one of them was a Jack Slash. Not something I was willing to gamble on.
I instructed my ant to dig another room. It wasn’t like digging cost me any effort, it just worked my minion, and she was happy to help. In the meantime, I decided a break was in order and flew outside.
And I stopped, and just stared at the sky.
Brockton Bay hadn’t been the largest city on the east coast; it hadn’t even been a particularly large city. But it had been a city, and in one of the most developped place on Earth Bet. Even when I’d gone camping four years ago, it hadn’t been far enough from the city to escape light pollution. I had never a sky as unpolluted as this world’s. I knew about it, of course; the sky full of stars, the milky way, mind bogglingly large across the blackest darkness of space—but actually seeing it for the first time took my breath away. Staring into that beautiful endless expanse, I finally allowed myself the luxury I hadn’t taken since the day the world started to end.
I was... I was allowed to rest, right? To just... unwind, and finally think of everything that had happened to me, and to the world, and to everyone I knew?
Yeah. Yeah I could.
So I did.
The nice thing about being a disembodied night light with no lungs?
You can just keep screaming for a long, long time.
I think I freaked my ant out a little, though.
---
Dungeons are a litRPG trope, not an original world. The system, characters (other than those from Worm) and world are original creations.
---
I Woke Up As a Dungeon; Now What?
Discovery 1.1
I’d never been a very religious person. I’d never truly believed in God, or in any kind of afterlife. That being said, there had always been a little part of me that had asked ‘what if?’, that had hoped that the stories of Heaven and Hell were true, that those I’d met who’d deserved fire and brimstone were getting their due (there were quite a few of those), and that those precious few who instead deserved peace and rest were looking down on me and smiling from Heaven.
And that, maybe, one of them was my mother, whom I would finally be able to ask if she was prouder than me than I was of myself.
That is, if I was even qualified to go to Heaven. I was pretty sure killing a toddler was pretty much like buying a one-way ticket to the deepest circle. And if it wasn’t, there was probably a laundry list of all the crap I’d done as a Villain, then as a Heroine.
But in truth, I didn’t expect to find anything after my death. I expected... nothing. Just oblivion. A loss of awareness, a painless disappearance as my brain shuts down, and then... nothing.
Turns out I was wrong.
Turns out that, after I died, I woke up to find I was a room and a hallway.
No, that last line wasn't a mistake.
---
It was probably only due to all the weird shit I’d experienced that I’d only spent a few minutes freaking out, and most of that was from realizing I was sane again, and that Scion had been defeated, and yet I wasn't anywhere I'd expected to be. It said something about me that waking up as a floating, barely glowing ball of... whatever I was now made of, without limbs, without a face, without eyes and yet capable of seeing, only made it amongst the top weirdest things I’d ever experienced.
I took stock in my situation. I was in a clearly artificial cave made up of a single room and a hallway, both walled, floored and roofed with raw yellowish-brown dirt that somehow didn’t collapse under its own weight. The hall was about thirty feet long and ended with the powerful glare of the sun illuminating a short flight of stairs. The room was almost perfectly square, about 16 feet a side, and in the middle sat a simple granite pedestal, barely more than a stone cylinder with a square tile on top. There was a little grey sphere about the size of a tennis ball hovering about a foot above the pedestal, glowing with a light of its own. It was the only source of light down here.
My name was written on that pedestal. “TAYLOR”.
Thoughts rushed through my head, not many of them coherent. Had I somehow woken up as a disembodied soul in my own tomb?!
Somehow, I just knew how to move around. It took me a second to rush through the hallway into the harsh glare of the sun, and I got my first look at the lands outside.
The first thing that struck me was the cracked arid ground, covered with dead plants and a thin layer of dust. This land had been alive recently. Piles of bricks, corners and walls of long-abandoned houses, sparsely littered the area. A village, or the outskirts of one. A farm, probably, and not a modern one. There wasn't a sign of life anywhere, except for a small path of packed earth that snaked carelessly past my tomb(?) about a hundred yards away. There was almost no wind, and what breeze blew by carried with it clouds of sand and dust that went right through me.
The hole I'd just left was exactly that; an unmarked hole into the ground without a notable feature marking it. Kind of a weird thing to do to a tomb, come to think about it. Why spend so much effort digging a hole and building a tinkertech tombstone if you're not even going to make it noticeable?
...wellp, I wasn't going to learn anything down in that hole, so I was better off finding some kind of civilization. I made to go towards the road--
--and found myself ricocheting backward like a bouncy ball hitting a wall. It hurt, even though I didn’t even have a real body.
A bit of experimentation later, I found that I was, in fact, stuck here. There was a small dome about ten yards wide centered around the entrance to my tomb(?) in which I could fly freely, but if I tried to leave it, some kind of force pushed me back into the hole with a flash of pain. Metaphorically wincing, I accepted my fate (for now) and returned downstairs to explore further.
The walls were featureless and boring. The floor was surprisingly clean, for all it was dug directly in dirt; either this place was brand new, or someone had taken pains to clean it. While they were at it, couldn't they have put stones or something--
UPDATING
And suddenly I had a vision of this same ground, covered in rough stonework, bright red. Something was telling me that I couldn't do it. I didn't have enough... energy? A moment later, the illusion vanished, leaving the dirt ground exactly the way it was.
What... was that? Some kind of visual preview of the change I had just thought up? Then...
I focused on the walls, tried to imagine them reinforced with wood planks
UPDATING
And there it was again! The room's walls were now covered by bright red boards and columns, all of which seemed to have had better days in a past century, and that feeling of lacking came back. Within moments, the red planks disappeared, leaving me alone in the dirt room.
...did I suddenly end up in a virtual reality world? If that was it, then I was going to resurrect Leet just so I could kill him, because this kind of shit was right up his creek.
What is it that I was missing, though? I--
Mana
...this shit was getting old, really fast. Mana. Magic power, extracted from... living creatures, especially humans? Oh hell the fuck n--
ABSORBING
UPDATING
What the FUCK!? Okay, whoever was in charge of this shit game, I wanted OUT. What was that--
And suddenly, once again, I knew; an ant had died from exposure in the stairs in front of the hole, and I'd somehow absorbed it. And somehow, in doing so, I'd become a bit... more?
Ants were familiar territory for me, along with spiders, flies, worms and all the other little critters I'd spent the last four years controlling with my mind. But somehow, even though I'd always had this ability to micromanage every single part of every single insect in my swarm, I'd never before had such a clear perception of what an ant actually looked like, down to the fur-like keratin strands on their legs, to the pores that let them breathe, to the chemical receptors in their antennae.
There was an ant floating in front of me, about the size of a large dog. It was green, and I felt like if I just tried, I would--
The ant was no longer green. It was black, it was moving and real and I couldn't control it. I immediately flew as far from it as I could, dashing across the room into furthest corner. Ants were almost blind, it couldn't have spotted me, right? I...
I was in no danger. I somehow knew this, just as I somehow knew this ant was called 'small lesser ant', just as I somehow knew every other fucking thing in this fucking fucked-up virtual game--
"Okay, I'm done, shut the fucking game down already!" I called out.
No response.
Well, obviously.
So, to recapitulate: I was in a man-made hole, in a desert. There was a pedestal with my name on it, and an ant now skittering about trying to find something to do, I guess? I had the ability to apparently spawn giant ants with my mind, and wouldn't that have been a useful ability before this, and apparently the ability to personalize the room as I saw fit if I got enough energy, which I needed to absorb from living beings, because of course powers can't be fucking nice for once, and I was... alone.
What had happened? I remembered asking... strongly asking Panacea to break my powers. I remembered definitely not asking the world's heroes and villains to unite their power to fight against Scion. I remembered winning. I remembered... things. Bits and pieces, disjointed images and feelings and oh god how close had Scion been--
I remembered... I remembered...
We're so very small, in the end...
I remembered her.
Fucking Contessa.
Because of course that walking mass of human-shaped unfairness was alive after all this shit, and she'd done... had she--
Had she shot me?
Huh.
She had. In the head, too. I guess this really was my tomb.
And my tomb was in a video game world.
Oh my god, if God turned out to be fucking Leet, I was going to kill him, usurp his throne so I could resurrect him, then kill him again.
There was a chitter. The ant was right below me, staring curiously. I frowned.
Well I got the feeling it wasn't going to hurt me (could I even be hurt like this, other than by bumping into invisible walls?), and I had created it, so it was basically my minion, so... Could I control it?
I could. It was as simple as turning on a switch. I felt it willingly submit, felt its admiration through its own body. Her own body. I could see through her eyes, hear through her feet and hairs, smell through her antennae, and none of those feelings felt strange in any way. I guess not actually having a body to be disoriented by was a perk of this whole thing? I was willing to trade it back, though.
I tried to control her into making her leave the dungeon, but the moment her antennae crossed the line, they started losing cohesion. I retreated. No good on that end, either.
I was going to have to wait for things to fall into my lap, like a spider in her web. Damnit.
Maybe I could use the ant to dig other entrances?
No go, I felt. Another thing I wasn't allowed to do. The digging part felt good, though; I guess I had do have just one entrance. One entrance into a hallway, and onto a single pedestal with my name on it... and a glowing crystal...
Hm, if this was a video game thing, then... could I game over? What would happen? Was I willing to risk the possibility that it wasn't a game?
Yeah, I wasn't that lucky. I was going to assume that having my pedestal thingy broken was really bad. And it was... awfully exposed, like that. I mean, sure, they'd have to climb down the stairs, but if someone did show up, then they'd have a free shot at my glowing thingy without having to cross the hall. If they were a good shot, I was willing to bet it wasn't going to lead to good things for me. I had a feeling that my ant wasn't the strongest creature ever. Something about how it was called 'small lesser Ant'. You never hear about 'small lesser Wuffikins, destroyer of worlds', I mean.
I felt her indignation at that thought. She could hear me? She was smart enough to be feel indignation?
Huh. Interesting. I'd never had smart minions before.
Smart... non-human, willing minions, that is.
Could I block the path--
Ow. No, I couldn't. Okay. There needed to be an unrestricted path between the entrance and the glowy thingy. I figured that meant digging a massive hole between the glowy thing and the entrance--
UPDATING
...huh, that could work, but I needed more of that mana thing to make it, and as I inspected the flat red area in the hall, I noticed there was a walkable ledge that could be used to avoid the pit. Something to note for whenever I got what I needed.
Hiding the entrance was a good way of never having anything stumble inside to die in my hallway, so that was out. Could I move the crystal, then?
I could, but obviously I'd need more room to do it. I needed to dig. And I... had no energy to dig with. But maybe I could use my ant?
Lesser Ant Special skill: burrow
I could! It was going to take a while, and a lot of work, but I felt my ant's eagerness at actually being put to work. So, how was I going to do this thing...
---
In the end, I ended up building a mental map of the room I wanted to make, a room roughly the same size as the one I'd just made, a short distance away. It took a lot of time; my ant could, surprisingly, carry an entire square feet’s area of dirt in a single bite, but only after spending several minutes gnawing at the dirt. Then she needed to travel back to entrance, where... well, the dirt magically disappeared. Plus one point in favor of this whole thing being a video game of some sort.
I ended up releasing my control of her after the first trip, and she continued the task with an eagerness that was honestly adorable. Even though she was a black ant the size of a golden retriever, she was actually quite cute.
By the time it was done, the light from down the hallway had gone out and turned silver. It only took a thought to move the pedestal over to the other room, leaving the previous room completely barren. As I did so, I felt some kind of drain, like I was coming down from the world's least intense sugar high. It was like I’d just run a drill organized by a very vicious sergeant. Is this what spending mana felt like? Or was it because I’d spent most of it in one blow?
Discomfort was the body’s way of informing you that you’d overdone it. Apparently being a disembodied night light with supernatural renovation powers came with its own limits.
With that, the glowy thing was out of direct danger, but it was still a work of less than a minute to cross the hallway and reach it. At least now they would have to fight their way through my ant first, though. Nothing that would stop someone like me from doing just that with a stick, a bit of motivation and an actual body, but it was a start. I didn’t even know if I was in danger in the first place. For all I knew, there could be nothing but animals left alive in this world.
For all I knew, there were tons of humans living here and every single one of them was a Jack Slash. Not something I was willing to gamble on.
I instructed my ant to dig another room. It wasn’t like digging cost me any effort, it just worked my minion, and she was happy to help. In the meantime, I decided a break was in order and flew outside.
And I stopped, and just stared at the sky.
Brockton Bay hadn’t been the largest city on the east coast; it hadn’t even been a particularly large city. But it had been a city, and in one of the most developped place on Earth Bet. Even when I’d gone camping four years ago, it hadn’t been far enough from the city to escape light pollution. I had never a sky as unpolluted as this world’s. I knew about it, of course; the sky full of stars, the milky way, mind bogglingly large across the blackest darkness of space—but actually seeing it for the first time took my breath away. Staring into that beautiful endless expanse, I finally allowed myself the luxury I hadn’t taken since the day the world started to end.
I was... I was allowed to rest, right? To just... unwind, and finally think of everything that had happened to me, and to the world, and to everyone I knew?
Yeah. Yeah I could.
So I did.
The nice thing about being a disembodied night light with no lungs?
You can just keep screaming for a long, long time.
I think I freaked my ant out a little, though.
---
Last edited:
⌒) Shhh! Top secret, no tattling!
