A standard first exploration dungeon team should have the following components:

A sensor

A healer

A bulwark

Ranged damage or control abilities

At least one man, one woman, and one Adar, as some effects target them differently.

The Adar is also necessary for locating the dungeon, and due to treaties.

A proficient mapper

- The Adventurer's Guild Handbook

==Tarrae==

Sitting outside the dungeon for days on end had proven to be an exercise in tedium. Though it had allowed me a chance to work with each member of the party in turn, and as a group, I was more than ready for it to end.

We had cleared away the snow from the stone as soon as we arrived, Anaath had pinpointed where the dungeon would emerge, and set up camp. We cleared an area farther away as well. We used the farther, and larger, cleared area for practice. Fortunately I was able to provide heat and light in abundance, but the wind still cut through our clothes like a sword, particularly when anything stronger than a gentle breeze came our way.

We had passed the foothills to get here, but a relatively gentle valley slope had raised us up until we were at the foot of the mountains themselves. The view was breathtaking behind us. Rolling hills dropped until the endless flat salt plains. This time of year it was all shades of white. When Thaw came to an end the salt plains would be a vast shallow sea, no more than a foot deep in most places.

Fortunately, we hadn’t needed to go up any farther than this. There might be passes through the snow, but even mounted on slogi it would would be almost impossible for my current team to make it through them so deep into Freeze. Maybe in mid-Thaw.

Regardless, it hadn’t proven necessary.

However, there was still the waiting. And patience was not my best quality. That was probably why I had ended up as an adventurer instead of as a merchant like the rest of my family.

Oh well, that was ancient history.

At least my parents weren’t disappointed and worried anymore. Well… not as worried. I wasn’t sure anything would stop Mother from worrying. I had survived and leveled up just fine in the end, though. I was even trusted to lead the team out here!

Though disentangling myself from them, for a second time in the same morning, had proven difficult after they learned how far I was going. And that it was a new dungeon… well, they weren’t pleased. At least Mother hadn’t been going on about how I needed to get married.

Eh, most new dungeons were less dangerous than trying to avoid that topic with Mother anyway.

I likely had nothing to worry about.

The world chose that moment to shake.

The stone nearby shifted as a vibration filled the air and the rocky surface of the mountain became a large flat semicircle.

And then nothing happened.

“Okay everyone,” I said, “time to pack everything up and get ready.”

Each of us packed up our individual items, as well as helping with the two shared tents. We had unpacked more than we usually would, since we had been here for a few days. Even with that, it only took us minutes to pack.

And then we waited. First in eager anticipation, and then as the minutes rolled into hours, we waited with both increasing impatience and less vigilance. By the time the entrance formed out of the blank wall we were all sitting against the stone, our gazes lazily moving to look at the blank wall every so often.

And then with surprising suddenness the stone shifted and gave way to gleaming metal.

Two statues appeared.

On the right was a woman and on the left a man. Each was larger than life.

The gaze of the woman caught my eye. The lines of the statue suggested a fierce determination. She was rougher, but felt more honest than the polished elegance of the man.

“I wonder what they are supposed to mean?” Norana said.

“Eh, what does it matter? Unless it affects us it might as well be blank stone,” said Anaath. A characteristic gruffness in his voice.

I wasn’t sure why, but Anaath had seemed bitter since shortly after we arrived. It was a strange contrast to how eager he had seemed before. I thought he might just hate waiting. Hopefully, he would cheer up now that we were going to enter soon.

“Well, I am interested,” she said. “Besides, some historians will likely want to come take a look at them at some point. Every new dungeon that isn’t just an empty cavern with a few monsters attracts some curious people.”

“Looking at those,” Soara said, as he smiled with shining eyes, “this, is more than just a beginner dungeon. Not that that is a terrible surprise after it tunneled through massive amounts of rock to get to us here. I know this a relatively narrow spot in the Lances, but we still have to be a good thirty to forty miles from the other side. And Anaath said it was closer to the other side.”

I smiled too.

“Yeah, hopefully it is exciting, but not too dangerous.” I said, “I would hate to start exploring and need to send for a higher leveled team because the place was too much for us.”

There were murmured agreements, and then we waited a bit longer. Only a few minutes passed, my eyes continuing to examine the statues, before the blank wall between them rippled. In a moment it had faded away, revealing a tunnel that lead upward with a gentle slope. A moment after that a pattern of curving vines and angular leaves grew around the entrance in green stone with golden filigree.

The tunnel was filled with a source-less light, and had overlapping bands of stone. It started out in shades of a deep mossy green. The parallel bands reached up from both sides at an angle and stretched overhead before stopping and reversing at sharp acute corners. Overall it created a zigzag pattern overhead that moved forward as far as the eye could see. The whole tunnel disappeared into a single dot far off in the distance, the lines of the tunnel stretching off until they appeared to meet.

I didn’t need to create any lights, so we stood and entered cautiously. Norana hefted her shield and lead the way. Behind her was Soara, each of his steps echoing with a heavier thump than you would expect as they rang off the walls. Each thump carried back through the stone to his feet. As the healer, Anaath took the next position, and I followed, a spell held under tight control and ready to be unleashed at the appearance of any enemy.

A minute into the walk Soara spoke up.

“This area is a safe zone. So environmental hazards only. Haven’t sensed anything so far.”

I nodded, letting my spell dissipate into nothing. A lance of burning light wouldn’t do much against a pitfall or a pool of water.

Another slow minute of plodding and Soara spoke again.

“Halt. There is a room up ahead on one side. No sign of anything alive. Pretty sure there is a door that you can use to get in. There is some kind of shaft beneath part of the room. I think I can sense water in the walls too. Something that isn’t stone and is thicker than air anyway.”

“Okay, slow approach then everyone.” I said.

I readied a different spell, preparing to partially evaporate any bolts of acid or other substances and hopefully redirect them.

“Watch out, something in the stone! Directly ahead, twenty feet out!” Soara’s voice rang out loudly in the quiet tunnel.

A section of stone flowed upward in a disconcertingly unstonelike manner. It revealed the head of a male human made from grey marble. The stone smoothly parted as more of the man’s body rose up revealing a body clothed in a white shirt with very short sleeves and with pants made of a thick blue cloth.

The weave on both types of cloth was very tight, so much so that I couldn’t tell apart individual threads at all. Wait… was that shirt made of some kind of silk? My parents could sell that type of cloth for a fortune.

When the man was finally fully revealed (and with bare feet for some reason), he smiled, revealing teeth of perfect white stone, glittering in the light beneath equally shiny blue eyes. He took a step closer to us…

And reflexively I fired off the spell in my hand.

A burning coruscating ball of light fired from my hand. It hit the center of the stone chest straight on, burning the cloth around it to black ash.

The stone man blinked and focused his eyes on me with a raised eyebrow. He brushed away the ashes, showing tiny cracks in the stone beneath. The stone fixed itself before my eyes, restored between one breath and the next. The black ashes faded away and the white threads of the shirt grew back together, repairing the missing section.

“Right, don’t engage,” I said, after it showed no signs of aggression.

The eyes of the man, statue, golem thing turned away from me, looking toward a section of the wall. A handle protruded from that section of the wall.

Slowly, with a degree of growing incredulity, I watched as the statue demonstrated how to use a bathroom before stepping into a wall and disappearing.

“What the hell was that?” I said.

“Honestly,” Anaath said, his usual roughness overridden by surprise, “I have no idea.”

Norana repeated the same bewilderment as ourselves, but Soara seemed even more excited than usual.

Well… at least there were working bathrooms here. Probably, we still had to make sure it wasn’t a trap.

And we did, slowly over the course of the next few minutes, testing the toilet, the water, and the walls. Nothing.

Nothing came of us using the bathroom either, though I tried to take the drying cloth and some of the thin linen. Both dissolved into nothingness as I stepped outside the room. Not really a surprise, but I had to try. They both reappeared back in the bathroom like they had never left.

As we continued back up the tunnel, the stone rough underfoot, we soon came upon another bathroom. We checked it out carefully, but it proved identical to the first.

We did the same at the next one.

After that we ignored them. We would check out any bathroom we needed to use in the future, or if Soara detected anything different. Otherwise, it would take us forever to get anywhere.

We moved ahead, walking slowly as the tunnel shifted from deep green to shades of turquoise and then back again, over and over. An endless parade of slowly shifting color, an empty tunnel, and equally empty bathrooms passed by.

It was hours of this. We slowly climbed a slight incline deeper into the stone of the mountains. Dark must have come outside long ago, but the light of the tunnel never changed.

Finally, when I was about to just give up and camp in the tunnel, we saw something different. The end of the tunnel was coming closer. What exactly lay beyond was impossible to tell, it looked almost like a black wall, though faint hints of some light or color suggested a large dark and open space.

Finally, we arrived, taking our first steps into a room filled with starry darkness.