When years of your life have been leading up to a single moment, there can be no unforeseen asterisks. No hidden clauses or unexpected fees. Everything must be perfect, and Lionel J’Khall had been working towards just that.
The murmurs of the Neo Nexus Auction Hall seeped through the ceiling above his head, an ambient hum of hushed deals, muttered calculations, and the occasional sound of someone realizing—far too late—that they had just made a very expensive mistake. The 248th Season of Delving and Dungeoneering was near, and the scavengers had gathered.
It was always the same. A chance to rise in the ranks. A chance to strike gold. A chance to buy something deeply, catastrophically cursed in an effort to make a quick profit. Or just to have fun.
Distant, pulsating music reverberated through his chest.
Lionel loosened his bow tie and kept moving, hunched slightly to avoid colliding with the network of hissing pipes, valves, and suspiciously unlabeled levers crisscrossing the service tunnels. These passages were technically meant for licensed engineers only—gnomes, dwarves, and other creatures small enough to fit into spaces where health inspectors feared to tread. But what Lionel lacked in official documentation, he made up for in a stubborn refusal to let bureaucracy stand between him and a good deal.
He paused to brush back his hair and adjust his expression, guided by the buffed surface of a nearby hatch. Everything about his appearance was carefully curated, from the creases of his shirt to the angle of his collar.
If there was one thing his family had managed to teach him, it was that the first step in controlling what others thought was to control what they saw. Both in business and social interaction, it was the one who prepared the most who stood the most to gain, and today, Lionel was going to win it all.
Years of research. Months gathering funds. Days sifting through the most promising whispers among the mildly influential (the truly influential, of course, rarely dealing with rumors—they simply adjusted reality to suit their desires). Somewhere in the auction halls above his head, hidden among the overpriced artifacts, counterfeit relics, and entirely-too-haunted Dungeon cores, was an opportunity. A true, undiscovered gem.
And Lionel J’Khall was going to find it.
He just had to make certain that there were no unforeseen footnotes for which he hadn’t accounted. No tiny, innocuous-looking clauses that would, upon closer inspection, turn out to be a carefully concealed, metaphorical bear trap. Or, worse, an actual bear trap.
He would only get one shot at this.
But surely, fate wouldn’t be cruel enough to play a prank on him.
…Right?
***
Meanwhile, in a certain world, attached to a certain gremlin girl, a great many unforeseen things were happening all at once.
First and foremost was the sudden, inexplicable deluge of household objects being unceremoniously hurled from Stairwell 4C’s third-floor window.
A bed frame here, a pair of slippers there, along with some hair-loss shampoo and an entire collection of vintage LP records. Some items were less aimed than others but considering the sheer number of undead crowding the street below, it was far more impressive whenever a perfectly polished, custom-made bowling ball managed to miss every single one of them and hit nothing but the ground. One might argue this was statistically improbable.
At least if you didn’t know the gleeful, overly eager girl darting back and forth between the local apartments.
Chucking things out the window was fun. Twice so as the aim of the recklessly thrown make-do projectiles was, surprising even the perpetrator herself, somehow improving.
Annabell had always whole-heartedly believed that throwing things was a game of chance, and that hitting a target consistently existed purely as a theoretical concept, like responsible budgeting or the suggested serving size on snack packaging. And yet, with every expertly flung bedside lamp or surprisingly aerodynamic hairbrush, her shots were starting to land with uncanny accuracy.
Experience gained…
Experience gained…
Zombie slain…
Experience gained…
Of course, whenever it looked like she might be making a dent in the swarming horde, freshly risen corpses would take their place. Corpses that were not quite the same as their predecessors.
This was the second unforeseen thing happening. Where once the majority of health bars within the growling and shuffling street had indicated a largely level-one crowd (a glorified tutorial for any half-competent adventurer), they were steadily being replaced by level twos. And soon enough, level threes and beyond had begun rattling their unnervingly reinforced limbs against the entrance, which, despite its valiant efforts, was not actually designed to withstand an evolving apocalypse.
This left large gaps in a timer that was getting tired of being ignored, causing it to jump at unexpected intervals.
Safe Zone Invasion Imminent
Time Remaining: 8:04:18…
Time Remaining: 7:14:53…
Time Remaining: 6:34:26…
Time Remaining: 5:29:33…
Now, an observer—the sort of person who spent a little too much time pondering the vast, uncaring mechanisms of the universe—might have suspected that the Dungeon itself was beginning to fight back against its gremlin adversary. That it was growing, shifting, and actively evolving in a determined effort to repel the intruder.
This, however, would be a highly unlikely and deeply pessimistic take.
Dungeons, in general, were passive affairs. They were not in the business of forming grudges. Most were simply places where mindless mobs gathered, drawn to the quiet pulse of an unclaimed dungeon core. At best, they were static footnotes in local history—waiting patiently for some overconfident adventurer to swing by, loot everything that wasn’t nailed down, and leave behind a slightly wealthier Delver, a drained core, and a crumbling ruin.
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For a dungeon to turn Wild—which is to say, for it to become slightly sentient and, crucially, mildly annoyed at anyone who thought to invade it—a series of deeply improbable events would have to take place.
First, someone would have to possess an illegally acquired Dungeon Core, designed for low-tier dungeons yet with none of the safeguards meant to keep it from spiraling out of control. But where would you even get such an obviously reckless thing? On some mysterious “black market” spread liberally across the Underfold’s many layers, where such cores are cheap, mass-produced, and readily available for any drooling imbecile who might stumble across them? Preposterous.
And even if you were to overcome this first, daunting step, said core would then need to be inserted into an uninitiated world—one with absolutely no magical potential yet billions of sentient life forms to feed its evolution. Something with a name that was probably deeply synonymous with “dirt” or “soil”. Ever heard of such a highly-unlikely-to-exist place? Didn’t think so.
And even if you did, one would then need to completely misinterpret the dungeon’s initial readings—glancing at its unimpressive F-Grading and failing to realize that this rating was being stretched across millions of square miles of slowly mutating dungeon earth, where separate instances where rapidly being formed in every nook and cranny.
Finally, for a dungeon to truly go Wild, you’d need one last, critical ingredient: some reckless Delver to poke, prod, and generally agitate the local dungeon fauna—without any plans whatsoever to leave.
This might cause the core to do something deeply unnatural for a dungeon, which was to stop being a nice, passive, geographically-spread-out deathtrap and instead start paying attention. It might gradually refocus its eldritch efforts on a single, stationary intruder. The world itself would begin to shrink, pulling together like a drawstring bag full of existential regret, until it was no longer a sprawling, infinite labyrinth but a single, dense, highly unpredictable entity—perhaps about the size of a city.
But, of course, for all of that to happen was frankly absurd.
After all, who in their right mind would willingly take up residence inside such a dungeon?
Which is why the odds of Annabell Smith’s entire old world—now a newly-formed, wildly ambitious dungeon—deciding to fixate entirely on her were about as high as her winning twenty coin flips in a row.
***
“Wallace, look at this!” Annabell crowed.
She had, in a shocking twist of fate, temporarily tired of throwing things out of the window. It turned out that, yes, even hurling household objects at the undead lost its novelty after a solid afternoon of dedicated effort. (Who knew?)
She now sat cross-legged in what was technically still a hallway, though by this point, it bore more resemblance to the aftermath of an exceptionally ill-planned estate sale.
Another five apartments had lost their doors. Clothes, socks, and various bits of tableware lay strewn about in suspiciously deliberate trails, as though a rather localized hurricane had passed through, pausing only to loot anything that wasn’t nailed down. One unfortunate undead resident had even been caught in the crossfire, and was last seen spiraling out of a third-floor window while still neatly wrapped in its shower curtain.
Now, however, Annabell had found a new source of entertainment.
“Look, I could win, like… I don’t know, twenty coin flips in a row with this,” she said gleefully, turning over her favorite shiny coin in her fingers, basking in the glow of her developing abilities.
It turned out that after one reached level five—thanks to an impressive combination of zombie-culling, creative ballistics, and sheer bloody-minded determination—one’s base skills started to get a little… strange.
Name: Annabel Smith
Class: Gremlin (Level 5)
(Congratulations! Your life choices have led you here. The System is both intrigued and mildly concerned. Keep up the good work.)
Active Skills:
- Shiny Acquisition! (Now with extra pizazz! Results may vary. Objects may or may not actually be shiny.)
- Emergency Escape-Deluxe (Cartwheel unbound by the cardinal plane! Also unbound by common sense.)
- Surge of Inspiration! (Warning: Now contains even more questionable decision-making. Use at your own risk.)
- Gremlin Engineering! (New!) (Chaotic creation or master of destruction? Only one way to find out! No refunds.)
Passive Abilities:
- Questionable Logic (+3 range to chaos rolls, -3 to sanity checks. You see patterns where there are none. The universe does not approve.)
- A Child’s Palate (Random boons from junk food. Random banes from anything suspiciously green. Cabbage counts as a debuff.)
- Gremlin’s Jury-Rigged Arsenal (A true Gremlin doesn’t need “proper” equipment. A true Gremlin makes do with whatever’s lying around—and sometimes, whatever’s meant for an entirely different purpose.)
Social Bonus:
- Mischief Approved (+10 to confusing others, -5 to being taken seriously. Not applicable in court.)
- Totally Not Voices in Your Head (New!) (Occasionally receive advice from objects that have no reason to answer. They are usually wrong, but convincing.)
General Skills:
(Sorted randomly. Because, well, Annabell.)
- Blunt Force Damage: 8 (Things break. Usually not the breaker. Usually.)
- Door Smashing: 2 (There is smashing a door, and then there is smashing a door… We are still working out the details.)
- Projectile Weapons: 6 (Anything is a projectile if you throw it hard enough. And if it wasn't before, it is now.)
- Accuracy: 4 (A respectable number. Too bad it only applies when you are not trying.)
- Flinging Large Objects: 5 (See above. The key difference is property damage.)
- Collateral Damage: 8 (Formerly known as AoE. The world is your splash zone.)
- Crushing Unsuspecting Heads: 4 (Would be higher, but zombies don’t suspect much to begin with.)
- Bane of the Undead…
- …
(Believe it or not, this list goes on for quite some time. Your foes are deeply confused and mournful about it.)
Core Stats (Chaotic)
- Might: 7 (3-10) – Subject to sudden and unexplainable bursts of “Oh no.”
- Dexterity: 4 (2-6) – Graceful, in the way that a landslide is graceful.
- Endurance: 3 (2-4) – Not built for prolonged survival. Built for prolonged nonsense.
- Intellect: 4 (1-7) – Could be a genius. Could also lick a lamp post in winter. It’s a coin toss.
- Charisma: 4 (3-5) – Persuasive in the way that a cat knocking things off a shelf is persuasive.
- Active Gremlin Factor: Wild Card! (Chaos rolls on stat checks, because of course they do.)
Was there any logical, linear progression to Annabell’s increasing strength? Maybe. But a deeply ingrained habit of pressing any and all available buttons ensured that, if such a linearity did exist, it was being thoroughly buried under an avalanche of nonsense.
Which meant that only now was she beginning to grasp the extent of her newly upgraded abilities. One of them in particular. Shiny Acquisition!.
Not only could she suddenly sense the location of every single coin on her person—down to their orientation in the lint-clogged depths of her pockets—she could now summon and direct loose change within a ten-meter radius. She was, in essence, a magnet for shiny things. Gremlin by night, loot goblin by day.
The possibilities were endless, her current plan: foolproof.
For the past few hours, one thing had been gnawing at the edges of Annabell Smith’s hyperactive brain: the gathering loot lying on the street below. Coins and zombie teeth, dropped by the fallen. Her loot. Loot that should be in her hands, where it belonged.
And now, at long last, the System had given her a way to claim what was rightfully hers as she eagerly waddled off to locate several rolls of duct tape and super glue.
The world was about to become a far less predictable place.
Safe Zone Invasion Imminent
Time Remaining: 03:44:21…