NOVEL NEXT Cycle 26 (1)
Dear Diary,
We got to floor 100 yesterday. With my new staff I can teleport three times as far as before, and the cooldown for spells is half of what it was, so I can heal everyone back up to max HP almost faster than they can lose any. The armor is really helpful, too.
The floor is covered in gold and gems, like, mountains of them! I saw the nose of the dragon who guards them, and she’s huge! I’d say maybe twice as big as Lewis? I’m not sure, because I didn’t see all of her. She was sleeping under a pile of gold.
Anyways, we found the buttons. Aya said not to push any, that we should just leave. And I mean, it’s her job to know things. So I was on her side. But Staab and Kimi were both super insistent that she tell, and then Lilly, Mika and Y said they’d all keep coming down until they pushed the end button, and everyone was mad at Aya, so she told them which one it was.
They pushed it.
Well, Staab pushed it first, Lilly second, and Mika and Kimi both say they pushed it third. I think they pushed it at the same time.
So yeah. The cycle ended, they were all happy about it, and we were going to celebrate as soon as Staab got down.
But he never came.
Kimi went to check the exit after a couple hours, and she couldn’t get through.
So we’re stuck here again. On floor 93. All by ourselves.
Lilly is upset. She spent all day waiting at the entrance for Staab to come down. She tried teleporting through the barrier and knocked herself out for a couple minutes. It's fine, she woke up, but she’s still there, crying.
Aya is mad. She says that by pushing the button we pissed off the Admin, so he trapped us here to make sure we couldn’t get down to the last floor again. She’s been sulking in her house all day, and made a huge banner that says “I told you so”.
Mika is… She’s been writing music. I can’t tell how she feels, since some of the guitar sounds have been happy, some mad, some sad.
Kimi is super upset. She’s been screaming at the exit, throwing things at it, trying to burn it down… I’m kinda worried about her, actually.
I’m sad, but we survived alone here for twenty cycles. We can do it again. And maybe we can talk the Admin into letting us through. Hopefully. I don’t know.
But anyways, since I was the only one this morning at her shop, I was the only one to meet Via!
Via is our new catgirl, she’s replaced Dorothy at the inn. Her color is silver. It looks grey to me, but she insists it’s silver. She used to be a siren on floor 23, but they didn’t like fighting, so she thinks the Admin broke the group up to get new sirens in who would attack.
She didn’t stay long, just long enough to eat a pizza with me. I explained about how everyone was upset, and she said she didn’t want to meet everyone when they were mad. Which I totally get. So she went back to the inn to remodel it and get used to having legs again.
I didn’t tell her about the marble races… I’ll make some hot cocoa and take it to her to tell her about the marble races.
Goodnight, dungeon.
