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Chapter 7

I found myself in a tunnel, surrounded by uncomfortably warm lava and the pungent odor of sulfur. Since I felt it so strongly, it must have been at least at boiling blood levels of heat. My body didn't feel much of anything, after all.

A sign in a cheerful palm tree-themed font informed me I had arrived at the Labyrinth of Lava. A sign taped to the first sign added: 'Under Construction!' I was starting to feel like I'd be getting my intro from a talking fruity umbrella drink.

"Hi! I'm Agony! I'll be your guide for this tutorial," a cheerful voice said suddenly. I jumped in surprise. A small humanoid, made of lava, hovered in front of me. Its face and body were a combination of black stone, glowing fiery heat, and adorable. I dubbed him a Lava Sprite in my head but didn't say it aloud.

"I'm… still working on a name. It's a pleasure to meet you, Agony," I said. I'd forgotten about my lack of a name. I could have called myself anything from Barbie to Janice, and it would have been fine. Only it wouldn't have been sufficient for me.

It didn't feel right to pick something mundane. I wanted my new name to sound badass. Actually badass. Not edgelord-ish like 'Mistress Nightshade' or some other vampire-romance OC name.

"No problem! Would you like to start the tutorial or skip it?" Agony asked, his smile seeming strained.

"I'd like to start, please," I said, confused by the option to skip. I'd had to start it, so it didn't make sense to skip.

"Really? You'll still get the basic items if you skip," Agony said with narrowed eyes. It was like he thought I was teasing him.

"I want to learn how to do this right," I explained, projecting confidence. It was something I was good at despite not feeling much of it. If most people skipped, then Agony probably didn't get many chances to teach. I might be in for a rough ride.

"We're going to get along," Agony said after a slight pause. A glowing smile cracking the blackened stone of his face.

"Follow me!" He shouted and started flying down the lava tube. He brought me to what he called the core room of the pre-fab dungeon. Once we were in, he started the tutorial with a cheerful burst of video game music.

The similarity to Sim and Tower Defense games was intense. A fact that made things easy to follow, even when Agony went too fast, which was most of the time. He zipped around like a kid showing off his treasures to a new friend. I floated after him as quickly as I could, happy to be the friend.

"You can buy terrain tiles in your shop. Buy four of whatever you like to hit the goal, then I'll show you a trick," Agony said happily. Hovering in a bouncy way as he waited for me to comply.

I did as he said and started examining tiles. Most had small flame icons in the upper right corner. That indicated they created a heat hazard of varying degrees of severity.

Looking at the tooltip, a chart appeared. It indicated how severe a status ailment it caused vs. levels of elemental protection. That was definitely something I needed to keep in mind.

Wanting to keep this purchase simple, I looked at the layout then bought four tunnel tiles. They were squares measuring forty feet on a side. I cringed a little, not seeing an elegant way to arrange them. Once I was done, a burst of sparkles went off with a text scrawl, letting me know I'd hit my goal.

"Okay, now go into your map and select 'grid view,'" Agony said. I tried to comply but couldn't find what I was looking for. I was in the map view, but nothing said grid or gave any indication that it was a feature.

"I can't find it," I admitted after looking a few times. There weren't any icons or buttons, nothing to give me a clue why I didn't see what I was supposed to be.

"Oh...Try thinking 'view options' instead. You might be in lite-mode," Agony said, and I tilted my head in confusion. The interface had settings. I'd never considered that, despite its similarities to a game interface. It made sense to me after some thought.

Nothing happened at first, but I didn't give up. I cycled through alternatives, all the while my focus growing in frustrated intensity. It was something that was supposed to be there. I wasn't going to tuck my tail between…

I wasn't going to curl up in a ball in defeat. My new anatomy really didn't mesh with some human standard colloquialisms.

Doubling down on my focus after that distraction, I felt a painful popping sensation. Like how ears would sometimes hurt after a severe altitude change. It was sudden and sharp, causing my vision to go fuzzy but gone in a single burst.

"You okay?" Agony asked.

"Yeah. I think so… I just felt something weird and painful for a second there," I answered honestly.

"I don't know much about DM anatomy. How do you feel now?" Agony asked, flying around my shoulders to study me in concern.

"Fine? More weirded out than anything," I explained as I did a quick inventory of myself. Nothing felt different, though I couldn't say that was normal either. At least not yet, my body worked fine, but I still needed to adjust.

"Oh, but the map options showed up finally," I said as I noticed them. An expanded menu offering different viewing options awaited me. I'd have to go through them all later, but I checked the grid for the moment.

An overlay appeared, slicing the dungeon and the surrounding area into neat squares. Only they weren't 40x40 chunks like I'd bought in the store. Depending on what I chose, they went as small as one foot. The areas I owned also highlight red if I zoomed out past a certain point.

"You sure you're okay to continue?" Agony asked.

"May as well since neither of us know what that was," I said and shrugged. Finding out I'd lost my name and the related identity had been overwhelming. So much so that I'd felt like I was on the verge of something awful. That it petered out anticlimactically had to be the suppression function at work.

This time I felt the incident was mildly worrying. It was a turn of events that I found almost comforting. It seemed like not all my negative emotions would be subject to censure. Though they weren't convenient, they were still a part of me.

"Pick a square from outside the dungeon. A mana glyph with the cost under it should appear. You can buy it for that price. It's also added to your store," Agony said. He was going along with my wishes though he still looked concerned.

I nodded as I followed his instructions. I appreciated him respecting my choice. I knew too little about myself to think ruminating on what happened would give me a revelation.

It was easier to keep going, so I selected a section like he'd told me to. An uneven patch of hexagonal basalt pillars appeared in a corner when I dropped in my new tile.

Since it was still selected, I rotated it a few times until I liked the aesthetic before deselecting it. They looked like broken steps connecting the lava tube to the core room.

"Can I edit them on a smaller scale or only as the forty by forty I bought them as?" I asked. It was good to get large patches for a low price but harder to develop a good layout.

"You can't move a section smaller than one by one, but you can edit features on any scale. Try playing around with the basalt a bit," Agony suggested. I didn't need much encouragement to get artistic and got to work.

"So how do I-" I stopped as I looked at a pillar, and it highlighted. I couldn't twist it or anything drastic, but I could raise and lower its height and increase its width.

The other parts of the formation reacted elastically to accommodate the change. It was trippy to watch but fun.

"Oh felicity," I said happily and laughed. The words took a second to sink in. That was not what I'd meant to say.

"Auto filter on the tutorial. I have a potty mouth. According to the customer experience surveys anyway," Agony explained. I hadn't even got the question out yet.

"Really?" I asked, taken aback by the idea. The system had an active profanity filter and customer experience surveys. I wasn't sure which thing was more bizarre between the two.

"Really," Agony said gloomily, "but let's move on. Play with the tiles a bit more."

I nodded and started earnestly trying to make the basalt look imposing. It was already an improvement over the simple slope it had replaced, but I knew I could do better.

Like jagged teeth around a maw at the entrance, I varied the heights and angles. Before, an average person would have been able to use it without difficulty. Now it looked sinister and inconvenient.

Finished and feeling happy with the design, I looked to Agony, hoping for approval.

"Niiice," Agony said with a smile. I felt relieved as he offered me a fiery fist bump. I accepted with a shadowy knuckle. I felt an urge to spruce up the design of the entire dungeon but had to stop myself.

I had a thousand mana to play with, which seemed like a lot. The trouble was that after doing some mental math, I realized that making my dungeon too big was a trap. The larger the floor plan was, the more difficult it would be to populate.

It wasn't a bad idea to use exhaustion to soften someone up, but it was a delicate balance. Especially since I could only afford so many monsters and traps. Too much space meant dead spots where they could take time to recover.

I needed to try and balance challenge density against size. A problem that was complicated not only by cost but by the placement restrictions.

A light repeating crossbow trap could be tossed in anywhere. A hallway-style dart trap wasn't as straightforward. The sections had to be continuous or have five feet of clearance between them. Other traps couldn't be within a specific range of other hazards.

Monsters likewise could have complex needs. They varied from room size to the minimum population of a subordinate species. They weren't easy to predict either. Fire rats, a trash tier monster, needed fifteen minor rats to have a rat boss.

It was an intricate process to address all the prerequisites. Still, I enjoyed the puzzle rather than crumbling under pressure. I knocked out several of my objectives while I contemplated how best to keep myself safe.

Lost in thought, I bounced several feet into the air when a siren wailed. It was loud enough to burst eardrums, and a red light strobed with each screech. RED ALERT was my first thought.

"WHY!?" I asked Agony as I blocked my ears. Unfortunately, I didn't sense anything with them. Jamming my shadowy fingers in them didn't lessen the sound.

"Mute alarm!" Agony shouted at me, his little hands over his stone ears. The siren drowned at his words, but I read his lips and gave the command. The sound went away, although the strobe effect continued.

"Order and tax law!" Agony growled. I gave a start but found it cute after that moment of surprise. That fact I decided to keep to myself, as he looked pissed enough already.

"Put your map in share mode." Agony said after a few minutes of tapping his ears and adorable cursing. I thought the command and an icon of a person with a plus sign next to it appeared. Lite mode sucked ass. I took Agony's advice and thought "standard mode" to change it over.

Nothing happened. Either I'd revealed everything hidden or wasn't thinking of the correct thing. It was something to figure out once whatever had set the alarm off was dealt with.

With the map visible to both of us, I spotted a cluster of red-tinted tiles. They were flashing, but I didn't understand what the problem was. Agony changed the map view, and a 3D model appeared. The problem was a lava flow I'd placed into part of the labyrinth to break up the monotonous stone corridors.

"Okay, so rule... something or other. This is a game. It has to be possible for heroes with luck, pluck, and nothing left to lose to make it through," Agony explained. He tapped a lava tile, and a tooltip was revealed. Inside the tip window were more detailed statistics.

"This stuff is too hot to get past even with maxed-out fire resistance. You can still use it, but the placement made the labyrinth impassable. That triggered the obstruction alarm," Agony said. He pointed out in the expanded description the tile was a barrier type. It was impassable even with maxed-out fire resistance.

I nodded along with the explanation. After getting to know the rules for monsters and traps, I wasn't that surprised. It was weird that the terrain conditions weren't labeled more clearly. On the bright side, it wasn't as much of a problem now that I was aware of it.

"So long as it's in any kind of build alarm state, heroes can't enter. Worse, you have to act fast. If you don't address it before the timer runs out, there's a penalty. Also, any people inside will be ejected without harm," Agony added. He pointed to what I'd mistaken for a regular clock in the corner of the map screen.

"Noted," I said, wide-eyed and eager to never experience that again. I added "figuring out how to block my hearing" to the growing list of things I needed to figure out how to do. It was right below figuring out how to experience a higher level of touch sensitivity.

"It's alright. Better it happened now than when you're on your own," Agony said, and I nodded in complete agreement.

"Seems like a good trick to use if a party is too strong," I commented.

"Oh, no, you do not want to do that," Agony said quickly.

"Why?" I asked. Agony looked at me with a sad smile, then grimaced. He tried to speak, but nothing came out.

"Are you okay?" I asked, uncertain of what was happening to him.

"I can't comment on content outside of the scope of the tutorial," Agony explained. He looked away from me and crossed his arms like he was pouting. It was adorable, but I felt bad for him. I wasn't exactly fond of how the system censored me either.

"Thanks for trying," I said, reaching over to pat his head. The tip of my finger felt warm where it touched his hair like flames.

"Just... make sure you don't do it during a raid. Other times it's fine. Okay?" Agony said. It looked like he'd strained himself to say it.

"I won't," I agreed. I shivered as I recalled that the system didn't take kindly to those who didn't play along. The Hood had warned me about that, and I could see this counting as poor sportsmanship.

"Okay, finish up the rest of your goals. We'll get started on the second half," Agony continued. I nodded and got down to business. The goals were all interface-oriented. Nothing I learned was revelatory.

The real value of it was Agony's help rather than the tutorial content itself. Despite my initial misgivings, Agony was a good teacher. Without him, it would have taken hours to sort out my various fuck-ups and the vaguely worded goals.

Agony was patient and kept his sense of humor even when explaining something for the third time. The only thing he wouldn't help with was strategic advice. I felt like that should have been within the scope of the tutorial. Thinking about it, I remembered that the Hood had said I'd have complete creative control.

Strategy tips shouldn't have been a violation, but it was the only reason that jumped to mind. That and the system being a bag of dicks for no reason. That was also possible, but I hoped not.

I filed the tutorial issue under 'things that seemed strange.' A list that was growing by the minute and unlikely to stop.

I could have asked Agony about it but felt reluctant. The question seemed like something 'outside the scope of the tutorial.' He could have declined to answer even if I did, but I felt like he wouldn't. We hadn't known each other long, but he'd been helpful.

"I'm done," I said finally. I'd been allotted a pool of mana and some starter items to work from. Strictly from a spending perspective, it didn't take me long to use up my resources. What I'd spent the most time on was the creative arrangement.

Once I spoke, a prompt appeared, asking me if I wished to continue. I selected yes, and a small clock appeared on the map outside of the dungeon's entrance. A cluster of what looked like fantasy-themed bathroom sign icons was next to the timer. I looked questioningly at Agony, who grinned.

"No point in making it if you don't test it," Agony explained, then cackled like a cartoon villain. The timer hit zero, and the icons were inside the dungeon. He touched one, and an infobox appeared. Closing it, he selected the entire party, and a new option appeared, track.

"Hey, uhm… Are they actual people?" I asked. This was a tutorial, but I didn't want to make assumptions. I was a dungeon core aligned with chaos standing in a lava dungeon, after all. More familiar logic didn't exactly apply to my situation anymore.

"I mean, that kind of depends on your definition of 'actual' and 'people,'" Agony said before giving a slight shrug.

"Sapient lifeforms," I clarified.

"Oh! Yeah, totally," Agony replied with glee.

I was still trying to absorb that information when Agony did something to the map. It changed from an overhead view to high definition surveillance footage feed. I could see the hero party now instead of abstract tokens.

I got to watch in glorious technicolor as they tore through my labyrinth like it was made of paper.

"MOTHER OF FELICITY'S!" I was shouting unimaginatively as they murdered their way to the core room and shattered it.