I Think I Found a Friend!

“Hey! Hey, you! Hey!”

Chloe wrapped her hands around the bars, staring into the room. Torches lined the walls, and gold coins were everywhere—still, a girl about her age, with a black dress, long white hair and holding what looked to be a powerful grimoire, was standing in the center, looking at the runes on the wall. Ignoring her, of course.

“Hey! Mage girl! I’m talking to you!”

The girl still paid Chloe no mind.

Growling now, Chloe gripped the bars tighter and tried to pry them out of the doorframe, yanking with all her might, even stepping onto them and hanging off of it! No bite.

This bites.

Bite, bite, bite. Chloe wanted to bite something. Her Retriever instincts could smell no hostility from the girl ahead; only indifference.

Chloe growled and barked and thrashed against the bars, but still, nothing. “I have to keep going to find the Ronin’s Ruby!” Chloe said, playing the one and only card in her hand; the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth. “This is only level one! And I KNOW there’s more to this dungeon! You gotta’ let me in so I can keep going deeper!”

Eventually the white-haired mage girl turned to her and said, “Keep trying, dog girl. You won’t get in here.”

“Oh yeah?” Chloe said, finally stepping away and putting her hands on her hips. “Then how did YOU get in there? With a magic spell of some kind?”

The girl looked incredulous. “No. It was open when I got here…”

Then she fell to her knees, tears in her eyes.

“…and it closed when I stepped inside! I’m stuck!”

Chloe felt a sudden surge of guilt. “Oh. Really?”

The white-haired girl stopped, and looked up at her.

Chloe then pointed at her and said, “Wait, you’re lying! You just want the Ronin’s Ruby all for yourself!”

“Waaaaah!” The white-haired girl started crying again.

Chloe ran her knuckles across the bars. “Crocodile tears!”

“No, seriously!” said the other girl. She flipped through her grimoire rapidly. “I can’t find a spell to open or remove the bars! And I can’t make heads or tails of the runes on this wall, either!”

“Well, that’s quite a pickle,” Chloe responded, believing her now. “You really have nothing? Not even a fireball to melt the bars away or something?”

The girl shook her head.

“Well, what kind of spells do you have in that book, then?”

Flipping through it still, she said, “Healing spells, and uh, dream spells, and uh, teleportation spells—”

“WHAT?!” Chloe put her arm through the bars, pointing ferociously at the girl. “Just teleport out of there!”

The girl looked up, dumbfounded. “Oh yeah!”

Chloe couldn’t believe it. “There’s no way you didn’t think of that.”

The girl finally stood and held out her hand. A luminous blue glow emerged from her body, surrounding her and filling the dungeon with light. Her hair lifted from her head, her eyes shone with the brightest of blues, and she said, “Teleport—thither!”

Pop!

The girl was suddenly behind Chloe, out in the dungeon hallway that led to the coin-filled room.

“Hey, I’m free!”

Chloe sneered. “See? You just needed little ol’ me to come help you out!”

The mage girl smiled, wiping her tears. “I guess I did. Thank you.”

Chloe gave her a da’w, it’s nothin’ look and put her hands on her hips. “Well, I am a genius, after all.”

“I’m Luka,” said the mage girl. “You?”

“Hah! I’m Chloe Wolfhound, humble adventurer, in search of—”

A metal-on-stone scraping sound cut her off. Startled, the two of them looked back into the room, having noticed that the bars had started to pull back into the ceiling, allowing free entry once more. Chloe and Luka looked at one another once, then barreled inside together. As soon as they were both in the chamber, the bars came down again, closing them in.

“Hah! No issue there,” Chloe remarked. “You can just get us out again if we can’t find our way forward.”

“Uh, there’s just one problem,” Luka said. “I used a bunch of spells on the floors above this. I’m—I’m out of mana!” She fell to her hands and knees again, positively blubbering.

“Wait, don’t cry!” said Chloe, removing her backpack. “I have snacks! I use a sword, so I don’t know much about magic; but won’t food help with your mana?”

“Not from my school of magic, I’m a Projection Class Witch!”

“Which means?”

“Which means the only way to restore my mana is for me to get a full nine hours of sleep!”

“WHAAAAAAT?”

Luka kept crying and slammed her fists on the cold dungeon floor. Random gold coins jangled with the vibration of every hit.

Chloe put her face in her hands and sat on the floor, taking off her backpack. Might as well keep myself occupied, she thought, and without much thought she withdrew a femur from her wares and started chewing on it, trying to think of a way out.

Luka looked up. “What are you doing?”

“Thinking,” Chloe said through her bone-chewing, and it came out a bit like “Shhingking.”

Luka shut her eyes tight. “We’re doomed.”

Chloe wasn’t listening. She was too engulfed in the bone she was chewing on.

So we can only go into the room one way, she reasoned. But the rest of the dungeon is DEFINITELY past this room. Why else would there be weird runes on the wall? It’s gotta be some kind of message, it’s just gotta be!

Of course, I could have gone east when I came to the riddle-telling gargoyle, Chloe remembered, but I went west. And I could have gone down the stairwell on the LEFT side of the room with the angry pixies, but I went down the RIGHT side. Maybe if I go back and go down another route I’ll get to an easier room? She wasn’t good at puzzles, after all.

Oh, right. I can’t get out unless Luka has her mana back.

Hmmm. This was a tough one.

Chloe stood and went to the wall with the runes. This massive labyrinth, known as the Dungeon Complex—a thousands’ year old, thousands of rooms-large three level dungeon bastion of underground ruins in the Middleborn Kingdom, a whole continent away from her homeland of the Sunflower Empire—was home to, as far as she understood, the history, culture, and languages of many lost civilizations. No one knew how the architecture, burial sites, and man-made rooms of so many distinct places had come to be organized in a single underground dungeon, and Chloe was no linguist; she had gone down into the complex looking for only one of its many hundreds of reported treasures: the Ronin’s Ruby, a lost treasure from the Atama Archipelagos. She was adept with a sword, and fast—with all the skills of her lineage, that of a Labrador Retriever. But she had done almost no more studying than the bare minimum.

So I have NO idea what this wall says.

She finally dropped her bone and ran her finger over the runes. They formed clear sentences, sure, but she couldn’t read a lick of it.

Still, Chloe thought, there IS a chest right below it. It was only somewhat hidden by a large pile of gold.

She looked back over at Luka. “How did you miss this?”

But Luka was lying on her back, fast asleep; a bubble from her nostril growing larger with each exhale.

“Tah! I’ll do it without you.”

She knelt and opened the chest.

Suddenly, a horrible woosh of dark energy burst from it; floating around her in cold tendrils, taking form corporeally above her. A horrible specter, with zombified, claw-like hands protruding from a ragged black cloak loomed near the ceiling, cackling hollowly. It wore a draping, torn hood, and beneath it Chloe could see open rows of rotting teeth.

“AHHHHH! LUKA LUKA LUKA!!!”

Chloe scuttled away at lightning speed, backing into the bars that had entrapped them in the room. The specter loomed large, rattling chains stuck on its wrists, making horrible, guttural sounds as it floated toward her.

“NOO! I HATE GHOSTS, I HATE THEM!”

Chloe climbed over a mountain of treasure and cowered in the corner, drawing her sword and swiping at the specter pathetically as it hovered toward her, slow and menacing.

“LUKA! LUKA LUKA! WAKE UP! HELP!”

But Luka was out cold, totally useless.

No, no, this can’t be how I go! Chloe’s eyes were swimming with tears. “Get away from me!”

The specter reached out, chains dragging over the coins with a jangling metal-on-metal sound that sent shivers up Chloe’s spine, raised her hackles and made her tail stand erect. The torches in the room suddenly all blew out with a chilled wind, and Chloe could hear the laughter of a hundred spirits bouncing around the horrible phantom’s empty rib cage. The darkness overtook her, but then her dog-like sense of nightvision kicked in, allowing her to see most of the room in simple graytones.

Fright filling her bloodstream, she summoned her courage. “I don’t care if you’re already dead! Die again!”

With a sudden burst of fearlessness, she lunged and swiped, pushing the specter back—the tip of her sword slashed through its cloak, tearing a large gash into it. Her blade bounced against the specter’s exposed ribs, revealed now through the hole in its cloak.

It stopped in midair, looking down.

Chloe realized something. She stood up straighter. “Wait, hold on—you’re made of bones?”

It titled its hooded head, staring at her incredulously.

Suddenly, all the fear Chloe had felt washed away. An evil smile crept across her face, and she sheathed her sword, eyes gleaming like diamonds in the dark. She held up her hands in the same claw-like manner the specter had done when it was summoned. “Gotcha now.”

…

Luka awoke. The torches were still burning, and Chloe was still sitting beside her, staring at the wall.

“H-how long was I out?”

But Chloe wasn’t listening. She was totally zoned-out, chewing on a bone, “Hm?”

Luka stood. Then she noticed a scattered humanoid skeleton on the ground, torn asunder atop a torn black cloak.

“EEEEEEGH!” She hopped away, suddenly quite awake. “Who is that?! What the Hells happened?!”

The skull—quite far from the body, in fact entirely across the room—turned toward her and unhinged its jaw. It sighed. She squealed again, opening her grimoire, hoping to have even the slightest amount of mana to banish the thing into the one of the Ten Hells of the Elseworld.

“Don’t mind him,” Chloe said, gnawing on a rib bone. “He was nothin’.”

Luka just stared at her, entirely unsure of what to think or say.

“Oh, look at this! It fell right out of him!” Chloe said with her mouth full. She held up a scary-looking key, shaped like a skull and clearly made of bone.