《Dungeon Magic》


 Chapter 1 - A gaming obsession

    It all started with a simple time waster phone game. It started out as a weird tower defense. Basically you fed loops of what the game called aether into approaching blobs to make them swell up and burst. The leftovers from the blobs then latched onto the loops and fed back into the core. These power-ups were named mana and let you make the loops wider and longer to better take out all the blobs.


    The cool part was that you could limit the width of any individual loop and it wouldn¡¯t kill the blobs, but the returning loop still carried mana. This added a little twist to the game, the optimal strategy was to run a small loop through as many blobs as possible until the core was in danger before spiking the loop and popping them all. This could feed you up to ten times as much mana as just popping the blobs as soon as they came into range.


    The problem here was that some of the blobs wouldn¡¯t pop when you used the slow strat. This lost me a few early games. The solution was actually kind of neat, you could spin a loop of aether into a copy of one of the blobs. This would limit the total aether you had available but gave you a defender.


    You could also spin aether into walls and items. The walls were useful but the items... Well, food would act like bait but anything else like gemstones or chunks of metal were ignored. The final trick was that you could tie the aether loop off and make the walls, items, and defenders permanent. This was good for the walls and bait because they would become stronger, but very bad when used on defenders because they would leave your control. At that point the defenders became just another blob, it might still attack other blobs, but it might also attack the core.


    This is how things went for months. I¡¯d play on the bus on the way to work, I¡¯d play a bit at lunch, I¡¯d play a game or two while watching TV at night in my little studio apartment. I played so much that I started dreaming that I was playing.


    The dreams were odd. None of the prompts or dialog boxes popped up, and I could only spin up things I had a pattern for, i.e. things I had fed aether into and absorbed. Even then I had to keep a small loop of aether spun into the right shape but not pushed out of the core yet.


    The first dreams were vague and indistinct. The sort of thing you¡¯d expect from playing the same game for months. Things started to change, the dreams were more vivid and easier to remember. Even stranger the new game mechanics started showing up in the phone game. Popups and dialog boxes became rare and eventually just stopped, the pre-made items and walls were the next items gone. I had to actually use aether to eat away at stone and the leftovers of the blobs to spin up in the core. The blobs were also different. They became insects and small animals. The game stopped being a simple 2d image on the phone and started being fully 3d. All of this should have been worrying, but for some reason I didn¡¯t really register that things were changing. To me, it was still just the little time waster game that I had always played.


    ---


    I¡¯ll admit that work was starting to... blur a bit. I think it was a Tuesday when Tim Miller called me into the office.


    Tim barely let the door close before starting, ¡°Mark, we need to talk about whatever the hell is going on.¡±


    ¡°What do you mean?¡±


    ¡°I just watched you on the lathe working the SE job, you cut the part 15 thou under spec and used the wrong stock, You haven¡¯t fucked up like that since we were in high school.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m sure I cut that one right, but I mean linkages are a bit complex cut...¡±This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.


    ¡°Mark, we finished the linkages last week, you were cutting for the ram.¡±


    ¡°I was? I don¡¯t remember...¡±


    I was a bit confused here. I could swear I was holding the spec sheet for the linkages but when I looked down at my clipboard I saw that a rat with a snake-like tail had just entered the range of my labyrinth. This would be the hardest battle I had yet faced. I distantly heard something about an ambulance, but that wasn¡¯t important. The rat was entering my first tunnel.


    Over the last few weeks I¡¯d found that aether loops had become less and less effective as weapons. They might pop one of the weird little green ants that I kept getting but were almost useless on one of the big red beetles that occasionally came by unless it was right next to my core, and that¡¯s not something I wanted a repeat of. I almost lost the game last week thinking I could still rely on popping intruders.


    I¡¯d seen this same rat yesterday at the edge of my range, but the entrance was a bit too small for it. I guess it had been gnawing on the stone of my entrance. I had made a template for a reinforced stone, but it was pretty expensive and I¡¯d only managed to convert the center third of my labyrinth. It was a neat little exploit I¡¯d found.


    The trick was to create a block of one substance and then carve channels that you fill with something stronger. I cheated by using synthetic ruby laced with a titanium-tungsten alloy weave. I¡¯d gotten samples of both from work...


    The rat. Right. I needed to stay focused on the important thing here.


    At this point my labyrinth was fairly simple, a single path that spiraled around in a few layers leading to a central room where my core. There were several rooms along the way filled with various defenders. These were a recent addition and I wasn¡¯t really happy with them. To widen out the hallways into rooms I had to weaken the walls quite a bit. I hadn¡¯t thought it was an issue, it just looked sloppy.


    I had placed out a trail of bait, small pieces of a sugar-like substance that I pulled out of one of the ants.


    Now, I say that this would be a fight, but the truth was that the goal was to delay. I was pulling more mana off of the rat than anything else that had ever entered my range, and it didn¡¯t even look uncomfortable with all the aether loops I had flowing through it. I added a few more and watched my mana intake quadruple. It really didn¡¯t like that. Not one bit.


    The rat was panicking a bit. I actually felt a bit bad about it, simulated as it was there was no need to be mean. Really, who would simulate that level of pain?


    I started pulling back aether loops until the rat calmed down again. I settled in for a long milking session when I noticed that the rat was eating my bait much faster than I had planned for. It made sense, the bait was set up for ants and beetles. I would just make more bait, but that was not a fast process. It took just a few minutes to spin up a new item template but anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours to fill in with aether and materialize.


    It looked like a fight was going to happen after all. I readied my defenders. I kind of liked that my early defenders had an upgrade path, if you could call it that, They were really just bigger versions of the original blobs. At this point I¡¯m calling them slimes because that¡¯s what they were. A gigantic (beetle-sized) single cell organism. They fight about the way you would expect, they wander around aimlessly unless directed and try to engulf and dissolve anything they encounter, including walls.


    The rat met the first of my defenders in the tunnel about halfway between my entrance and the first room. The rat paused and stared cautiously at the slime. The slime moved randomly as was its wont. The rat was too big to move past the slime and the slime too brainless to acknowledge the rat. The two stood at an impasse, which suited me just fine. Delay is the name of the game after all.


    After a short pause during which I gathered more mana than my first month on this save file the rat moved forward a step and slowly lifted its paw to touch the slime.


    That was the start signal, the fight was on.


    And just as quickly the fight was over. The slime tried to engulf the rat¡¯s paw the rat tried to pull its paw back out of the slime, both failed. The rat then just bit the slime and ripped it open. That was it. The fight was over.


    The remains of the slime slowly dissolved into ectoplasmic goo before evaporating into nothingness. The only thing left was a small crystallized core of twisted aether and mana. I had accidentally discovered these sometime last week. Using these cores let me cut down the respawn time down from a couple of hours to a couple of minutes.


    I sighed and triggered the respawn process. That¡¯s when everything went sideways. The rat ate the core.

 Chapter 2 - A scampering Battle.

    The rat ate the core.


    I was stupefied for a moment. I had thought the cores were system items because so far the ants and beetles had completely ignored them. I mean, a near as I can tell they¡¯re twisted balls of magic with instructions on how to grow a monster. Just a ball of aether and some left over mana from the monster that dropped it.


    My musings on the subject were interrupted when I noticed that the core was still drawing aether, and a lot of it. More aether than a slime would need. I tried to cut the flow and found that I couldn¡¯t. I assumed that this wasn¡¯t good. Early on I had lost a game by running out of aether. I was still getting a massive amount of mana off the rat but the conversion of mana to aether wasn¡¯t instant.


    The rat didn¡¯t seem to be having a good time of it either. It was shaking and growling with foam coming out of it¡¯s mouth. random muscles along its legs and back would swell up to double or triple their size before shrinking back down. Its eyes started glowing a baleful red and its fur was darkening. The scales of its tail started standing up, thickening and sharpening in the process. The rat started swelling up, growing until it completely filled the tunnel. It grew so large that it started cracking the walls of the tunnel.


    The rat was screaming and growling in pain. I seriously thought it was going to pop when it suddenly started to shrink and give off steaming clouds of free mana.


    The new rat was smaller than it originally was, maybe 2/3 the size. It had those glowing red eyes, black metallic looking fur, a spiked tale and claws that left gouges in the stone floor. It was also staring directly at my core despite the walls in the way.


    I had a very bad feeling about this.


    The rat was still drawing in aether, but no where near the amount that it had been. It was putting off a lot of mana. So much that free clouds were swirling around an sparking on the stone of the tunnel. Grass started growing out of the ceiling and the exterior wall faded into transparency. I was again impressed by the dev team on this game.


    Still, I had to keep focused here. The rat was starting to move, scampering along at quite a clip really. I took a moment to review my defenders.


    * 24 large beetles.


    * 15 small beetles.


    * Roughly 100 ants.


    * Dozens of slimes.


    It didn¡¯t look promising. The rat had torn through a slime with no problems before its powerup. I didn¡¯t expect much from slimes anymore, but even so the rat hadn¡¯t even been trying when it killed the stupid thing.


    The first order of business, set a bunch of aether streams to start collecting all the free mana. As they say, waste not want not. After that I started ordering some defenders to fall back while pushing others forward. I wasn¡¯t going to be able to pull a zergling rush, my monsters were just too slow, but I could and would get a few choke points up. Hopefully.


    As the rat rounded the tunnel into my first room I had the handful of ants present drop onto its back from the ceiling. A few of them actually landed. They immediately started biting and tearing but had difficulty even damaging the rats new glossy black fur. The rat likely didn¡¯t even notice them.


    What it did notice was the large beetle standing in the way. The rat barely even slowed before launching itself at the beetle. The beetle stood firm, positioning its horn in the perfect position for the rat to skewer itself. The rat simply batted the horn aside with a paw and nearly severed it in the process. A follow-up bite killed the beetle.


    The rat took a moment to dig through the dissolving beetle before eating its core and moving on. Thankfully I didn¡¯t start bleeding aether again. I assume that it was an interaction caused by my attempt to respawn the slime that caused this mess. Still, the delay was welcome. If it let me move my monsters just a bit further I¡¯d gladly welcome it. I prepared to sacrifice a few of my small beetles in the next room. The rest were on their way to the third and final room before my core.


    I was starting to regret my dungeon layout. It sort of looked like a strand of spaghetti that was coiled up on itself, and unfortunately not a long strand. It was just six loops around my core with three bulges for rooms. The rat was just now leaving the first room which sat at the end of the outer loop.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    I had two more rooms, one was at roughly the halfway point and the final room was sitting midway through the final loop. That would be my final stand. All of my ants and most of my beetles were slowly crawling toward this last room. My slimes were just wherever I had last left them, the rooms, near my core, a few were even in the tunnel that the rat was now scampering through. It did pause to eat their cores so it wasn¡¯t a total loss.


    The rat was still throwing off some serious amounts of mana. I latched onto it with every aether stream I had when I discovered a quirk of the game. My aether streams had a distance limit. Sure I had some large streams that reached all the way to the edge of my range. These were the ones that cleared out the fog of war around my core. The majority of my streams seemed to have max distances. I guess that if I had ever let a beetle get closer than the first room I¡¯d have easily popped it. I had a feeling that the rat wouldn¡¯t pop now. Not after its transformation.


    The rat continued to tear through my slimes on its way to the second room. It was moving faster than I¡¯d hoped but slower than I¡¯d feared. From the looks of things I¡¯d have a couple large beetles in the second room and then another few halfway to the third but most of my ants and the rest of the beetles would make it to the final stand.


    All I could do at this point was wait. The rat continued to eat the slime cores as it made its way along until it reached the second room. I had about 10 ants waiting with another 6 still clinging to the rat, 4 small beetles and 2 large. It wasn¡¯t an ideal fighting force, but it¡¯s what I had.


    As I had said earlier, the room wasn¡¯t really planned as a room, it was just an area where I had widened the tunnel so that more of my defenders could pile up on something. This made the walls uncomfortably thin and really wasn¡¯t that pretty. I had planned on tearing it all out to make something better, but had been putting it off for the last few days.


    The rat saw my defenders and stopped. It lifted its front paws off the ground as it looked them over. I¡¯m sure it wasn¡¯t impressed. There was a pregnant pause before all hell broke out. The rat slammed down and darted forward to the largest beetle. I quickly ordered everything to just attack. To fight to the death. It didn¡¯t help. The rat was unstoppable. It only took a swipe or bite to kill a beetle and the ants didn¡¯t phase it at all.


    I was supprised when one of the small beetles did manage to draw blood from the rat¡¯s hind leg. It wasn¡¯t much, and the beetle was instantly killed for it, but it was the first progress I¡¯d seen so far.


    The rat killed everything after that. It even shook off the ants and killed them. It then ate all their cores. The depressing part is that the tiny cut on its leg healed over by the time it was done.


    I was beginning to think that this would be a wipe and that I should find the contact info for the devs to submit a bug report about the weird interaction that spawned this demon rat. It was completely balance breaking at this level. I was getting plenty of mana off it, more with every step it took toward my core, but I¡¯d never been able to carry over mana to a new game in the past so it wasn¡¯t the balm to my ego that it could have been.


    The rat seemed to not want to continue on. It kept staring at my core through the wall. The very thin wall. It started digging at the stone and tearing through it with ease. As soon as it had a hole barely bigger than it¡¯s head it crawled through. I¡¯d heard rats could do that but still, that hole was tiny.


    I held my breathe as the rat started clawing at the next wall. I let out a long sigh when it made no marks on my metal laced ruby wall. This was the first thing that had gone right so far.


    The rat seemed confused for a moment. It scampered back and forth a bit before it broke out into a fast scamper heading toward my core again. It only paused to eat a few more slimes along the way. The three beetles I¡¯d been sending to the third room were now actually behind the rat and falling further behind every second.


    The rat made it to the third room much quicker than I¡¯d have liked. It didn¡¯t pause this time. It just charged in and started fighting. It was a chaotic mess. The rat and the beetles rolling over each other, biting, scratching, tail whipping. The beetles were about as effective as in the second room but there were a lot more of them and a hell of a lot more ants. A slime or two even got close enough to latch on to the rat for all of the second needed for the rat to crush them against the floor or a wall.


    The battle lasted longer than I¡¯d expected and the rat was wounded, but not seriously. It was visibly healing as well. I had enough and started looking for the exit button... and didn¡¯t find it.


    I turned back to the rat, it was finished eating the cores and had started walking along the tunnel. It was only a matter of time until it reached my core and then it¡¯d be game over.


    I decided to go out with some style. Rack up as high a score as possible. I latched every single aether loop I had onto the rat. It¡¯s slow, steady walk seemed to mock my attempt. It was even putting off less mana than before.


    I again looked around for the exit button. It was odd. I started growing concerned. Where was the exit button or the UI or my hands?


    Maybe this was just one of the dreams and I didn¡¯t have to submit that bug report after all. But now that I knew it was a dream I wondered if I could go flying. I¡¯d always wanted to play superman and fly around.


    The rat was taking forever to finish this. It was even taking breaks. I mean it only had a couple body lengths to go before it stepped into my core room.


    Dreams are annoying when they go lucid. You never have the control you¡¯d think you have.


    The rat slumped over. I was still feeding every scrap of aether I had through it but wasn¡¯t getting any mana back. I was getting a weird reddish, greenish, purple energy from it now. My core was throbbing in time with the bursts of this new energy that I was sucking down.


    The rat died.


    huh.

 Chapter 3 - Hospitals and Hospitality.

    After the rat died I broke it down with my aether loops and spun a copy of the template into my core. I got the demon rat version and not the standard which was probably hax, but I didn¡¯t care. After that I puttered around a bit repairing the damaged wall, summoning more beetles and a pair of my own rats before drifting off to sleep.


    Falling asleep in a dream is weird.


    I woke up staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. White tiles of a drop-down ceiling. One of them a slightly brighter white than the others. There were a pair of florescent lights set in their own recessed tiles.


    The sound of ticking drew my eyes to a clock sitting high on a pale blue wall. It was a minimalist design, brass numbers on a lightly polished wooden plank. It was a quarter after 5, I had no idea if that was morning or evening. A few feet from the clock was a curtain on a track separating the area I was in from the rest of the room. To my other side was some softly beeping equipment with wires coming out of it and snaking under my blanket.


    There was a button on the rail of the bed near my hand. I immediately pressed it.


    A short older man in dark blue scrubs and an ID lanyard poked his head around the curtain.


    ¡°Mr. Aaron? I see that you¡¯re awake. I¡¯m Nurse Bob Hendricks. Let me take some vitals and then I¡¯ll get Dr. Kurtis.¡±


    The nurse started checking the machines as I stared in confusion.


    ¡°What... ?¡± was all I could get out before the nurse interrupted me.


    ¡°Mr. Aaron, can you tell me your full legal name?¡± He asked.


    ¡°Um yeah, Mark Jacob Aaron. What happened?¡±


    ¡°You¡¯re at University Medical. You collapsed while at work, Dr. Kurtis will be here in a moment to talk about it¡±.


    The nurse finished writing on his clipboard and then left without another word.


    I sat in silence pondering. This last dream was so real that it actually scared me. I had felt a vague pain when the rat ate that monster core and started draining my aether. Hell I could almost see faint aether loops circulating around me as I was laying there. They seemed to originate in my chest and extend out just a couple feet...


    I was just starting to imagine the aether moving when the curtain was pulled back and a woman in her late 20s come in. She was wearing the classic white coat with a stethoscope over a white button down shirt and slacks.


    ¡°Hello Mr. Aaron, how are you feeling? Any light-headedness? Aches? Pains? Difficulty breathing?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m okay, I think... well, obviously not if I¡¯m waking up in a hospital. But yeah, I feel alright.¡±Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    ¡°Well Mr. Aaron, that¡¯s the thing. We¡¯re having problems coming to a diagnosis. Your symptoms match a few different conditions but so far all tests have come up negative.¡± She said.


    ¡°What does that mean?¡± I asked.


    ¡°Every test we¡¯ve run so far has indicated that you are a perfectly healthy 28 year old male. There¡¯s nothing that explains why you were comatose for roughly 32 hours¡±.


    ¡°Wait, 32 hours?¡± I looked at the clock again and did some quick mental math. ¡°This is Thursday evening?¡±


    ¡°Friday actually¡± she answered.


    ¡°So what now?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯d like to keep you here for the weekend for observation. There are a few more tests that we can run to see if we can¡¯t figure things out here¡±


    ¡°Okay... Is my cell phone around here somewhere? I should call Tim... I think I was in his office when I blacked out.¡±


    ¡°I¡¯ll have Nurse Hendricks bring you your belongings. He¡¯ll help you with the restroom and take you to the cafeteria to eat. After that I¡¯d like you to stay in bed here so that we can monitor your vitals for a while longer. Tomorrow we¡¯ll get you into the MRI¡±


    ¡°Yeah a restroom would be nice...¡±


    With that said the doctor left and moments later the older nurse stepped in.


    ¡°Let me get you disconnected here then we¡¯ll hit the restroom¡± He started pulling wires off of the machines next to me and connecting them to a small pack with a strap. ¡°This is a nice little unit, a battery powered vitals monitor.¡±


    As the nurse was rearranging wires his hand passed through one of the odd ghost like aether loops. ¡°Agh, got a bit of a shock there¡±


    I didn¡¯t respond because the aether loops were now a bit easier to see and one of them was bringing me a load of mana. I made an effort to pull them in closer and they actually responded.


    I still wasn¡¯t sure if the aether loops were real or not, and for some reason I didn¡¯t really want to talk about them or my ongoing game/dreams. I was beginning to suspect that I should, but found the words never quite left my mouth.


    The hospital food wasn¡¯t all that bad, at least not the stuff served in the cafeteria. After eating, I stepped outside to call Tim. The conversation was pretty short. Tim told me that my dad was flying in and should be in town Sunday morning. Other than that it was mostly just him telling me that he had been in touch with his family and most of mine and that he and my sister were going to visit tomorrow. I gave him the customary shit about his best friends sister, he responded with the customary jab about my brief hook up with his cousin, and we said goodbye. I was looking forward to their visit. It had been a week or two since I had hung out with Kasey.


    With that done I checked my email and then saw an odd notification at the top of the screen. As soon as I tapped it I found myself falling over while the world went dark.


    Everything was just as I¡¯d left it. There were no new invaders, but there was a slight buzzing at the back of my mind. When I followed the sensation I noticed a line of aether stretching off into the distance and ending just in front of one of my exterior walls.


    This time I remembered the hospital and that I was standing outside with a bunch of uncomfortable monitors strapped to me. Maybe this time they¡¯d catch something. It still didn¡¯t seem that important, which alone gave me a sort of muted worry all on its own.


    I was hesitant to do anything with the strange aether tendril. Still, it was the only thing that was interesting or different, so eventually I extended a loop of aether to touch it.


    When the two strands of aether touched it was like a packed stadium was suddenly in my head. There were thousands of chattering voices, all speaking in a language or languages that I couldn¡¯t understand. I tried to pull back from the noise but found that the aether loop, now a single strand, wouldn¡¯t disconnect.


    There was a loud roar that I thought would split my skull. Thankfully the noise level dropped to a muted whisper afterward.


    A single voice began speaking. I assume it was speech. I still had no clue what it was saying. It was rather soothing to listen to. Soothing enough to let me fall asleep again.