The Dungeon of Earth

As she busied herself with bemoaning her fate, another blue screen popped up, but this time, it highlighted areas of the newly changed world.

However, only a few spots were glowing, mainly near the north and south poles, along with what was previously the northernmost part of Europe and Canada.

The dungeon type within has been automatically given.

Please choose the location of your core.

With trembling fingers, Nellie reached out towards the northern part of what she assumed to be what was North America. She tried to adjust the globe just enough that she could try selecting somewhere she felt familiar with in this rapidly changing world. Somewhere where eastern Ontario used to be.

But it did not work.

And with that, the glowing parts of the globe gave a brief flash, as if they were upset that she tried to choose a place that the glow did not encompass.

So with shaking, but oddly steady fingers, Nellie chose the spot she thought would be the safest.

In her mind, it was the generally safest spot within an area that she was generally familiar with. Well familiar with what it was before the System changed the globe.

The spot she had her mind on was the northernmost island point off of what was previously North America. It was right at the edge of the island, along the ocean. And Nellie thought that the area that she chose was a decent choice.

Within seconds of pressing that spot, she was sucked into the globe like a liquid up a straw, and then nothing. Total blackness surrounded her as she lost consciousness.

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Unnamed Dungeon, Day One

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Consciousness slowly slipped back to Nellie.

She blinked her eyes as the somewhat familiar surroundings of the brown and red flecked grey stone and the deep blue transparent solid material that was looking suspiciously like ice appeared more and more before her.

Unlike when she first appeared in the stone and ice location, it wasn’t her nebula-like core that caught her attention, it was her surroundings. Mainly because she now had a completed map-like grid of her surroundings. That she knew every inch of this space the moment she opened her eyes.

Her environment was quite weird. She was stuck in a cube of ice and brown and red flecked grey stone.

A perfect cube.

What the….? Murmured Nellie as this confused her even more. Everything she vaguely heard about dungeon cores was that they get placed into an environment, and they had to gain territory somehow.

But she was in a cube. A perfect five-metres tall, five-metres wide, and five-metres long cube with nothing past it.

It was bizarre. As Nellie walked to the very edge of her territory, all she saw was nothing.

Not darkness, not black, but nothingness.

Nellie turned away from the nothingness and began to move back to the centre of her territory. But as she turned away, something caught her eye.

Small, tiny strings, looping heavily throughout the cubed territory. It flowed with small violet sparks slowly moving from her nebula core through the cubed space and back.

Strange, thought Nellie. I wonder if this is why I can feel everything and why it’s MINE.

That increasingly growing emphasis of the cube being hers distracted her for a moment before Nellie spotted the violet sparks began to finish their rotation and ended back into her nebula.

Nellie watched as the cycle continued over and over again as the tiny strings flitted throughout her territory, with violet sparks using the strings as a guiding line before coming back to her nebula.

Before she could decide what she wanted to do with the strings and the sparks, another blue screen partially obscured her vision.

You have one year to prepare before sentient beings from your world will emerge from the System Trials.

Nellie took a couple of seconds to gain her bearings before she could even begin to understand what this was.

System Trials???? Questioned Nellie. There are systems trials??? And why use sentient beings instead of humans??? Does that mean that other intelligent species will emerge from this trial? Why only a year??

As Nellie began to be plagued by oncoming questions, one thing stood out to her and was very clear. She had only one year until these beings appeared back on Earth.

But the bomb-dropping blue screen led her to assume three things.

The first is that the System must have taken everybody and abducted them into the trials. With who knows how many will survive, or what survival might look like, the possibilities that arise from this tell a tale of either being left alone for a while or having increasingly dangerous opponents.

The second is that there is a year until the trials end. Nellie knew this gave her some time to figure things out, get started, and prepare for what a dungeon does. But how will she do that? Well, she’ll just have to trial and error it.

The third is that there may be others like her. It might be a long shot, but if her atoms and energy were changed into a dungeon core, then others may have been changed into this new species.

It took Nellie a bit of time to digest the three points that she thought were correct. But she did, and finally, she dismissed the blue screen and focused on her own circumstances.

After all, she was on a time limit before the System Trials finished and who knows what will begin to appear.

With the blue screen dismissed Nellie began poking the strings and violet sparks that circulated throughout the cube.

As soon as she poked a string, the vibrations flowed into her core, making her realize that the string was a piece of herself. Something that was like they were her physical fingertips. It made her feel immense relief for some reason as she continued to touch and fiddle with the strings.

Really, it was invigorating to Nellie. It was something that she now desired and hungered for.

She didn’t know why she felt this way. But the more she fiddled, played, and began to shape the strings, the more she figured out how to manipu\ate and use them. Nellie even figured out that if she pulled hard enough, a string would detach, and even more fun things could be done with it before she needed to reattach it.

It was addicting, playing with those strings.

For hours Nellie discovered what she could do with the strings, but at some point during this time, she unconsciously began to do something.

Without even noticing, she began to weave strings together into some kind of strange wreath. String after string, Nellie weaved together, before something began to happen.

As she added more and more strings, the violet sparks began to collect in the wreath.

An hour passed before the strings were covered entirely in the violet sparks, enough so that she could barely even see the strings.

Suddenly, the violet sparks flashed.