Aya sat down at the Floor 28 diner, absently running her fingers through her hair. Everyone was there, eating and chatting. She glanced at Kimi, who deliberately looked away. They hadn’t talked since the cycle began. They hadn’t had an opportunity to. Aya wanted to talk to Kimi alone, but that was taking too long. Things had to be discussed.

Aya cleared her throat. “Gir-“

“Via, what floors were the dinosaurs in?” Kimi asked, just a bit too loudly.

Y noticed, looked at Aya, and frowned at Kimi as Via answered. He knew.

“Girls,” Aya repeated. “Remember the letter we sent the Admin?”

The group instantly quieted down, looking at her. Kimi glared at her drink.

“Did he write you back?” Lily asked.

“No,” Aya said. “He spoke to Kimi and me directly.”

Again, silence. The group glanced at Kimi, who was looking at the drink like it had kicked her puppy.

“Directly?” Nikki finally repeated.

Aya nodded. “He wants us to win.”

“We can do that,” Mika said.

“Yeah, we can, but he wants us to win wrong,” Kimi snapped. “We aren’t players. We were never meant to be. We don’t do things players do, so he wants us to be as un-playerlike as possible! We screwed things up for him, so he wants us to screw things up for everyone else.”

Aya flinched. “That’s not quite how he put-“

“It’s what he meant!” Kimi yelled.

“Wait, ‘everyone else’?” Staab asked. “Who’s ‘everyone else’?”

“There are other dungeons,” Aya said calmly. “After a hundred cycles, the best players from each dungeon will be sent to a Master Dungeon to figure out which dungeon creates the best players. The Admin, our admin, wants us to…”

“Break everything,” Kimi supplied. She rolled her eyes. “He wants us to prove that the dungeon system thing as a whole is stupid.”

Again, a pause as everyone let that sink in.

Via raised her hand. “So, the Admin isn’t really in charge?”

Aya and Kimi shared a glance. It felt sacreligious to say.

“Well…”

“No.”

*****

Dear DairyDiary,

Heck, I spelled diary wrong. Dairy is just way too close to diary. I hope I haven’t mixed those two words up before, but I probably have.

Oh well. It’s not that big of a deal.

The Ad

We’re getting better at fighting with our new colors. I miss green, though. Mika and Lily (I spelled it right first time!) keep messing up and trying to use their old spells instead of the ones they have now. Mika keeps trying to cast Ice Volley, and all that appears is a cloud of mildly cold air, while Lily goes for a psychic attack aaaand then remembers she’s got charm magic this cycle, not psychic.

No one has died yet, but we’ve gotten really really close a couple times.

I think Aya’s adjusting to being black instead of yellow pretty good. As a group she and the triplets are almost doing better than we are. Kimi and Y are lagging behind a bit, but not too much. I suspect Kimi is the same as Mika, trying to use the wrong set of spells.

Via’s doing pretty good, though. I’m glad we switched, so she still has a couple good support spells, instead of having to learn attack spells. And silver magic is cool! It’s strong, even though I don’t have stupidly high levels in any of the spells. I’m going back to green next cycle, but I might try silver again some day.

Anyways, it’s been a long day. I’m tired.

Goodnight, Dungeon.