That can't possibly be it.

You take the moment to breathe a bit and assess your wound. It doesn't look like it's getting worse or spreading any farther, but... you also have, like, negative medical knowledge. You can't even stand needles, you've definitely never looked at acid burns before.

You start checking the walls, the floor, even the ceiling for switches. Panels. Buttons. Plates. Anything. You jiggle the torches on the wall.

Nothing.

You hear a very muffled "I have a right to know" from somewhere in the walls.

You're pretty sure you'd rather dive down that hole than get another cluster of fibers shoved up in your skull, but you do have one other card up your sleeve.

You take a deep breath

and take the house key out of your pocket.

"Video game logic, don't fail me now," you mutter as you try to shove your key into the door's lock.

. . .

It goes in.

It turns.

It fucking CLICKS

and your key dissipates into nothing like a puff of smoke, or a smear dragged across a windshield. Boy, do you hope that doesn't carry over to real life.

You push the door open and step out into the next block. You take a glance down the hall to your immediate left.

"I have a right to know," says a creature dangling itself down from the ceiling.

Nnnnope. You swing right and head into another corner room, where you come face to face with

another

god damn

meat tube monster.

"I..."

it pauses

"...have a right to know."

If you didn't have an irrational hatred of that phrase before you stepped into this nightmare, you'd definitely be walking away with one.

The ceiling's higher here, but this thing takes up a third of the room just by existing and it's as tall as it wants to be. Jumping over it is a gamble, and you imagine the other one's on its way behind you.

"Was this a trap?," you ask, like it's going to answer. "Did you assholes set up an ambush?!"

All you get in response, of course, is "I...

have a right to know."

You tighten the grip on your torch. You tried diplomacy with these things and you paid for it. You were hesitant last time, and it got you killed. You know full well they're adequately affected by fire. You take a deep breath.

"I..." the creature begins. The pause in particular somehow amplifies how much the phrase pisses you off. "...Have a right to know."

You hold the torch out, and you step forward. "Go back in your hole and get the hell out of my way." You can hear a shuffling, scraping from down the hall. The other one, as you suspected, is following.

"I..."

Your hands grow cold, a little numb.

"...Have a right to know."

You march forward, heart feeling like it could explode out of your chest. You place yourself very near to swinging distance--and more importantly, a safe distance from the door. The other one should be sneaking through the barred window any second now.

"I..."

It doesn't back off. You thought being more aggressive might scare it away, but it stands firm. ...But it doesn't get closer, either. It simply holds its ground. You feel a throbbing in your lower back, heat rising in your face. The cadence and tone are off, but that pause--

"This school is a safe place, Ms. Stevens," the principal began. "Parents take comfort in knowing that. There are... things out there, things that a child shouldn't have to be exposed to." He stood, staring across his desk into your soul with dull, gray eyes. "If you and Lora have engaged in behavior not befitting this school, then as the principal--as the man who has to face those parents, knowing what kinds of other kids THEIR kids are sharing a classroom with--well, I..." He inhales sharply.

"...Have a right to know. I... have a right to know. I..."

It steps forward, at you, the fiber cords beginning to unsheathe from its foremost end.

"...Have a right to know."

"No

you

fuckING

DON'T!"

You lunge. You swing wide. The front of your gaunt nightmare springs backward to avoid, the rest of it uncoiling around you at a distance--trying to pin you in. You don't care; you'll incinerate this thing even if it means going down with it. You continue pushing forward, shoving your torch straight into the monster.

"I..."

"If my own daughter is out there acting like... let's be honest, like some kind of queer, then I--"

"Have a right to know."

You swing everywhere. At everything. The creature tries to act as a cage and you light that cage on fire. It abandons the strategy rapidly, choking out its same verbatim line as it fumbles for the nearest escape, lacking the spine or brain to so much as try and grab you while it's on fire. The other crawls up from behind you; you spin, hurling the torch. It spirals through the air, the tip exploding into flames as it slams almost directly into one of the new monster's eyes.

"Plaire. Seriously. If you and that Lora chick are... y'know, then I'm not gonna judge--but as your best friend I think--"

"I have a right to know."

You run at it, as hard as you can, the adrenaline almost evening out with your hurt leg. The monster goes for a panicked offensive in response, thrusting a thin limb forward, tentacles flailing, but you slap it away with your shield and leap.

Off your good foot this time.

You swing once on the way up, slashing straight through one limb to clear your path. You slash an additional three times on the way back down, cutting through an additional two. The monster begins to repeat itself, again, and you just... start stabbing. Over and over. Screaming. You slam your shield into it, you stomp on it, and you plunge your taped knife into it until it stops moving.

You leap one more time, forcing yourself into a somersault mid-air before slamming down, ass first, with an impact that shakes the whole god damn room.

The world falls silent, save for your own heavy gasping. You smear the blood off the knife onto your jeans, stuffing it back into your belt loops. You start to get back up and retrieve your torch, but quickly decide that maybe you should stay sitting for a minute.

"You know why that house key trick worked earlier?", you huff out among many heavy breaths. "B... because this... this is my house. This is MY house, ASSHOLES!"

You collapse backward, surrounded by gore.

You are so fucking tired.

You just... lay there for a few minutes.

You're not actually sure you can get back up.

. . .

After a little struggling, you manage to start pulling yourself to your feet. You realize very quickly that this isn't just exhaustion; you feel light headed.

...More than that. You feel light everything. It's like someone turned down the gravity, and you're being gently tugged toward the ceiling. You feel... emptier. Less.

You take a cursory glance at the viscera for any dropped loot, but the meat tube monsters don't seem to have left much (aside from a mess). You pick your torch back up; somehow, against all odds, it is still going.

The flame does feel weaker, though.

You take your time looking into the cells of both the previous hallway, and the next one. You see a few of the needled flatworms wandering across the floor or crawling up the walls, but without substantial size or a numbers advantage they seem to ignore you entirely. Most of the cells are empty, save for empty bookshelves and more broken, dirty beds. You see a number of corpses with similar growths and holes to the bloated, worm-filled bodies of earlier--but these corpses look... deflated. It's like the worms, uh, ran out of food and abandoned ship. Some of the corpses are in armor, but it all looks very large and very heavy.

In the previous hall, you find one cell with a huge, open hole in the ceiling. You can't tell what's up there through the bars, though, and you're hesitant to just walk on in and have a look when something could just as easily come down the hole.

You also find a cell with some kind of... chained... cocoon in it. It hangs from the ceiling by chains, and is wrapped in chains. Or is made of chains. You can't really tell, but it's larger than you are.

In the hall beyond the corner room, it's a lot of the same. One of the thoroughly used corpses has an actual sword near it, but it's chipped and rusted--maybe decent if you lost your knife somehow, but it wouldn't be your first choice of weapons. One of the cells has an enormous hole spanning most of the floor, not unlike the one you saw in the connecting hallway a while back. The most northwest corner room has a large number of barrels in it, almost covering the floor entirely.

Two doors that look like cell doors actually lead to a set of stairs, which then lead downward into the darkness of the floor below. That's the way you'll need to go to keep pursuing the triangle marker.

Another cell that grabs your interest looks like someone renovated it into a small office--you see a desk, some kind of shelf, a small chest. However, when you try to open the door, you discover that it's locked. You're on the outside of this one--instead of a flippable panel, the keyhole is located under the big metal pull ring. ...You're sure there's a proper name for those, but you have no idea what it is.

You lean against the door for a minute. It feels like a little more of you is being torn away, moment by moment. If the worms' acid doubled as some kind of poison, you think you'd have noticed sooner. Do you have a time limit...? You know you haven't been down here anywhere near 8 hours yet.

"Oh, no," you mutter to yourself, trying to force a joke. "It's like one of those mobile games. Th... they're gonna make me buy more actions."

You look at your torch, which seems to be fading as rapidly as you are.

...In fact, looking down the hall every torchlight seems to be receding. You thought it might just be you, but all of the light in the prison you can see is steadily dimming.

On the one hand, there has to be some way to get more time, or mana, or SP, or... whatever it is that you're running out of. You can reach the stairs now; there may be a checkpoint down there.

Something.

Anything.

On the other hand

you are so very tired.

You find one of the empty cells and you have a seat on the floor.

You very quickly begin drifting off to sleep.

You wake up feeling sore, with a faint burning in your calf. It passes quickly.

It's about 8:30 am.

With any luck, going out peacefully means your progress in the prison is saved. It should definitely mean not having to deal with an additional Dark Plaire, if this whole stupid dream dungeon is any kind of sane.

You start by checking your leg. It's fine.

You fish your clothes out of the box next to your bed. Your jeans are untouched by dream acid. There's still a house key and a potato in your pockets. The other no-show potato is still in the box, as well.

"Alright," you mumble sleepily to yourself, "that's a start." Items in your pockets come with you, and items used in your dream are still here in real life. That means your key is reusable, but only once per night. You're not yet sure if other keys (or even duplicates of THIS key) would have the same effect, or if it'll work on every door, but your house key definitely has some kind of tangible effect on at least one actual lock in the dungeon.

You're also now aware that the game you play most before bed grants you abilities. Magic Mustachio just gave you jumps and a ground pound, but that's pretty much what that game is about (power-ups not withstanding). You're also not sure how much those jumps contributed to you having to tap out early. False Plaire got a dodge roll out of Crush Souls, but that's still just physics screwery--nobody's throwing any fireballs as of yet. You might just need a different game... or maybe the game buff has limits on what it can grant.

You realize that you're getting really into analyzing the game mechanics of your repeating magical nightmare and you still have no idea why it's even happening. Stress doesn't do this, unless you've evolved some kind of metaconscious turbo stress.