The Dungeon Fairy: Two Choices: A Dungeon Core Escapade (The Hapless Dungeon Fairy Book 2) by Jonathan Brooks (free e books to read .txt) 📗

look familiar; it was a large, spherical-shaped room that was probably 200 feet across if she was measuring distances correctly – and it was completely bare of any type of decoration.  The only distinguishing difference along the perfectly smooth stone walls was what appeared to be a tunnel carved into one section, leading off to…somewhere.  She tried to push her awareness down the tunnel, but she quickly found that the whole of her world was confined to the one strange room.

It probably has to do with how hazy and wavy everything in here looks.  It was like looking into rippling water running down a stream; everywhere she looked was slightly distorted, almost…warped.  Is this what those accounts of Cores trying to access bottomless bags meant by warped?  Or is this just an extreme version of it?

She had no way of answering that, and there was nothing she could do to break out or see anything beyond where she was.  In fact, she couldn’t even pull up either her Core or her Dungeon Assistant Status screens; when she tried to pick a creature to create, and then a trap to place, nothing happened.  Using her Fairy Mana to do anything – if she still had some, that was – produced no results, either.  What is going on?

There were only two things that she knew for certain: One, she was still a Dungeon Core; viewing herself from the room, she could see that she appeared as normal as usual, though every single crack in her form was entirely gone, repaired after whatever it was she had gone through.  Whether or not everything else was the same still, though, wasn’t something she could tell quite yet.

The other thing that Tacca knew was that her Bond with Shale was still intact.  She could feel it still there; it was like standing in an otherwise empty room with your eyes closed, but you could somehow sense that someone was there with you.  While she was aware of it still existing, she couldn’t pinpoint exactly where he was and couldn’t communicate with him.  It was as if the outside world ceased to exist out of her little bubble.

That’s actually a good description, I guess.  I know about other dimensions and how we as Dungeon Fairies can move in between them, but also that it is something that is very rarely done – because it is very dangerous.  Could this be some sort of…pocket dimension?  Her thoughts went a step further.  Are those bottomless bags tapping into another dimension as well?  Is that why Dungeon Force and the “synergy energy” react with it so strongly?

She had no answers for any of that, and there were too many unknowns for her questions to be anything more than conjecture.  As everything she knew about alternate dimensions she had read in a book that may or may not have been trustworthy – as she had found it in the library section that was usually reserved for more questionable material – she didn’t really know enough about the subject to be confident in her assumptions.

It also didn’t help with figuring a way out of her predicament.

If she had been able to experiment with Dungeon Force or Fairy Mana, albeit that being a bit dangerous with all of the unknowns, she thought she might be able to find a way free.  As it was, she was a floating Dungeon Core in the middle of a spherically shaped room with no ability to do anything.  I guess that this beats being in that vast expanse with no physical presence and my soul being stretched and shaped in uncomfortable ways.  She could at least look around here…at stone, stone, and more stone.  Even the tunnel was made from stone, though it was extremely dark, and she couldn’t see more than a few feet. Normally, light levels didn’t matter much to her because she could perceive everything in her dungeon with or without light; that she couldn’t see down the tunnel, likely meant that it wasn’t part of her dungeon.

She didn’t know precisely how long she was stuck in that room, looking at her Core and the stone walls, before something started to change.  It was easier to keep track of time there than it had been in the featureless expanse, but without much in the way of external stimuli, it was hard to know exactly how long she was floating there alone.  Her best guess, though, was that it was anywhere between 2 and 3 months.

The waviness in the room started to fade gradually, and definition came back to her world that Tacca didn’t even realize she was missing.  The stone of her walls quickly became much clearer, she could see just a tiny bit further into the tunnel than she had before, and even her Core appeared different.  Where she had seen the cracks having been repaired and completely gone before, now she could see that her Core had some additions to it.  While not damaged, per se, there were faint etchings in the crystal-like outer shell of her form, lines that crisscrossed perpendicularly and covered the entire Core. She had no idea exactly what that meant or what it was supposed to be, but it didn’t seem to be harming her.

After what she guessed was about a day, the waviness in her room faded to the point where it stopped – and it stopped abruptly.  Like a bubble *popping*, the world slammed into her consciousness so quickly that her mind staggered from the overwhelming onslaught.  The first thing she picked out from all of the information flowing into her was that she was located in her dungeon still, right where she had been when facing down that purplish, monstrous person.  She couldn’t be exactly sure, but it appeared as though the explosion had been so powerful that it had eaten away all of the stone (and everything else) in