Dear Diary,

Kimi and Aya left. Not permanently, but for long enough that the players noticed. They didn’t get into trouble or anything, at least not yet, but it was still bad.

I understand why they did it, why they wanted to see Y and the ants, but they should have waited. We aren’t like Staab, who can vanish off his floor and no one notices. We aren’t things that the players fight. We’re people who have to interact with the players. Especially Kimi. Her shop is the most important shop on this floor. And sure, Mika can pretend to be the shop owner for a little bit, since Kimi has one of all her items on display, but what if the player needed five of something? How is Mika supposed to get it? And none of us have access to the information Aya has, so anything the players asked Lilly just had to guess.

Aya is usually smarter than this. I kinda wonder if Kimi used charm magic on her. I’d be surprised, but I don’t know why else Aya would agree to it.

Anyways, they’re back now, and everyone is mad at them. Especially Lilly, who really really wants to see Staab, but hasn’t because the players are here.

There are more players than ever here. Either they’re getting stronger, or they’re getting smarter. Usually we get around thirty individual players come through, but this time we’ve had almost fifty. It looks like there are more groups, so that might have something to do with it. Lilly says that, strategy-wise, starting solo but joining a group halfway down would be smart. That way the players as individuals get all the XP for the early floors, letting them level up faster, but on lower floors they join already strong players to fight the strong enemies that are hard to beat solo.

I still kinda wonder how strong we are compared to the players. I mean, they reset to basically zero each cycle. We aren’t meant to fight, so we don’t. By the time they get here they’re about as strong as they’re going to get, so seeing how strong I am compared to Ox or someone would be really interesting.

I can’t ask, because that would be rude. Besides, the players aren’t supposed to know we have stats. I might ask Staab, though, since he’s supposed to be one of the harder to beat enemies. There aren’t a lot of people on his floor, so they’re stronger than the kobolds would be. If I ever see the yetis again I might ask them, but then they’d have to hold a formal meeting to decide if they should tell me or something.

I probably won’t ask the yetis.

Oh yeah, I didn’t mention it, but the player we took the key from was in Ox’s group. There were three players in the group, they were the first ones here. We didn’t take Ox’s key because he had armor on that negates stabby damage. Since our lotus does stabby damage, he would have died of boredom before anything else. The third party member was the one I took the key from originally, so we knew her key was a duplicate. That’s why we chose to attack the otterkin guy.

I don’t know why I feel like I had to explain that. Oh well.

Goodnight, Dungeon!