I expected the fall into the dungeon to be nothing more than a drop of about eight feet or so. However, that wasn’t what I got when I passed through the warning. My fall turned into a sudden stop, and the opening went from above me to behind me.

The sudden shift in directional force was enough to trigger some serious vertigo. Gravity stayed pulling me down, but the wall became the ceiling, and the ceiling was behind me now. My body was moving toward my feet at the rate of speed my jump had been. However, now that the opening was behind me, my back was to the ground.

This caused me to slide across the stone floor when my back hit the ground. There was a scraping, and I felt all the impact of a bad fall across my back. Then my head found the ground and bounced, which caused my teeth to try to click. Try because my tongue was the soft padding that kept me from needing dental work.

I groaned and rolled to my side and propped myself up quickly. As quickly as I could while still trying to recover from doing a back flop onto a cut stone floor. I knew that the orcs were right above me, and I needed to be ready for their arrival.

I took in the world around me as I spun to face the opening. There was light pouring through the hole, which was shaped like the opening I jumped through but was now on the wall. The floor was cut and fitted stone like I would expect to see in a castle, and there were torches on the wall giving just enough light to be unhelpful.

I couldn’t see out the hole where I expected to see trees, and the sky beyond was just a white hole. It was odd because no matter how I moved, all I could see was white. It was glowing, and the only thing that I could describe it as was a blank white computer screen.

Then it rippled, and I saw Blink come sailing through headfirst. I watched as Blink sailed into the room and towards me. Unlike me, she seemed to be able to recover quickly, and she twisted so that her feet found the ground and not her back.

She landed, slid, and twisted to face the hole. Then she let out a low hiss. I felt across the bond a feeling of happiness. “It closes nows.”

Right as she said that, the blank whiteness turned to a gray, and I got another popup.

Full Party has entered Dungeon

Defeat this level to exit through main entrance

Or delve to the bottom to leave through exit and gain your reward.

“Blink, are you okay?”

I saw her lizard snout curl at the edges to make a toothy smile. “Blink goods, hunt grow strong.” She sent across the bond to me.

“Is there where you vanished off to before?”

“Yes, hunt good here.”

I chuckled. “How long do you think this will take us?”

Blink looked around the room a bit and shifted her weight back and forth. “Good hunt sleep good hunt.”

“So sleeping one night in here. That could be a problem for me. You tend to be able to vanish. I might get attacked by anything.” I said as I scanned the room.

Blink clicked her mouth open and closed a few times and slowly vanished. “Bait”

“Nope, I don’t think me as bait is a good idea Blink!” I growled out at the now empty room.

From somewhere in front of me, Blink sent, “Hunt, prize goods.” She then sent a feeling of growing stronger and a bright green glowing rock.

The room we were in was a large cube twelve feet or so across. If I put my back to the way I came in, then to my right was a torch, and to my left was the mirror image. In front of me was the single exit.

I could see as I looked forward that there was some light coming from down the hall. It looked like every twenty feet or so, there was a smokeless torch on alternating sides of the tunnel. How far the hall went, I couldn’t tell as there just was enough light.

At least for the lighting level, this place looked like it was the perfect playground for Blink. But unfortunately, it also looked like it was designed to kill my night vision. If I relied on the torchlight, then I would spend most of my time in the dark looking at a bright spot.

If I took a torch with me, then I would give myself away to anything in here. I was willing to bet that everything in here wanted to kill me. With the popup I got about death for the weak, it was a sure thing.

“Blink how well can you see in here?”

I got back a smug feeling. “Same.”

“Okay, I can’t see well so I am going to need you to be the scout and tell me when to get ready for a fight.”

I could only guess that Blink agreed with me as she didn’t respond. I went over to the torch on my right. I wanted to see if I could pull it out. It turned out that, yes, I could remove it. However, as soon as I did, it went out.

I placed the torch back in the holder, and it came right back on. I tried to pull up any info I could on the torch but only was told it was a dungeon torch. Which to say was disappointing would be like saying when your ice cream fell off the cone, it was sad.

Being that I had done enough gaming to understand some basic rules. So I started looking all over the first room. I was hoping to find a chest or bag or something to see what type of loot I would get.

While I might be familiar with rules that magical dungeons were to follow, it turned out that this dungeon didn’t know the same set as I did. There was no loot in the first room and no secret way out that I could find.

I took a quick inventory of everything I had before setting out for either power and riches or death. I had with me my chainmail shirt, coif, weighted skirt, buckskin pants, and my wild shaman’s moccasins. I also brought with me my short bow with 2 arrows, my short sword, dagger, hatchet, and my waterskin. What I didn’t have was the rest of my equipment, no way to start a fire, no pack, no sleeping fur, nor had I even brought my rune bag.

I figured that there were even odds that I would be able to get off a shot before whatever monsters I had to fight got to me. So I nocked an arrow and started to slowly go down the hall.

You have now left the safe room

Prepare yourself

I stopped for a moment and thought for a moment. I bet that the entrance was a place where combat couldn’t or wouldn’t happen. From what the pop-up seemed to say, it was a safe room. HOWEVER, what I needed to know were the rules of those rooms.

I tried to step back into the entrance room only to receive another message.

Safe room access restricted for 12 hours

Well, that told me some of the rules. I had 12 hours in this dungeon before I could step into a safe room. Which meant I needed to move. I wanted to finish as much as possible before that 12 hours ended.

The building material hadn’t changed any when I exited the safe room. It was still the perfectly cut and fitted large gray stones. I was honestly worried that the hallway would never end.

The flickering of the torches and the slight echo from my feet as I tried to move silently forward was enough to keep me on edge. I didn’t know if this place made monsters or if they lived here. For all I know, this was the place that the ogres came from.

It took me likely fifteen or twenty minutes of slowly walking before I noticed that the floor had been sloping down. I only saw it, however, when I looked back and could tell that the light was being cut off from behind by the angle of the floor.

It took about another ten minutes before I was at a set of three stairs that went down to a T in the hall. I had to pick either left or right, and I was willing to bet that there was a correct answer to this.

I sent out across the bond to Blink, “which way do we go?”

“Both,” was the response I got back, along with a heavy feeling of me being dumb.

“I get it you want to hunt everything, but which way to beat the dungeon?” I fired back across the bond.

“Both”

I sighed deeply. Yes, Blink could talk or think to me. She could even send emotions and sometimes images, but she was still a Ropola, a hunter and a killer. She was also going to stay as difficult as could be.

I turned left because I read somewhere that you always turned left and you would get out of any maze. So I was going to treat this place like a maze. A deadly maze but a maze nonetheless.

After another two torches, the wall came to an end with an opening to my right. I turned and peered in. This was the first chamber that I had found outside the entrance. It was about three times the size of the safe room, and the ceiling was out of sight. That didn’t mean much as the light from the torches seemed to only carry about a dozen feet.

The middle of the room had four pillars that had torches on each side. Illuminating the center much better than the edges. Between these four pillars was about a twelve-foot square space with two steps up and a giant treasure chest in the middle.

I edged into the room and kept left. I needed to move all the way around to check to see if there was anyone else in here.

I sent across the bond, “Can you see any targets?”

“Just middle,” Blink responded.

“No, not the treasure chest, do you see any thing that could hurt us?”