"They must be!" he says, while he's casting something pretty long and involved, and then it goes off—

And everyone relaxes. "This fucking dungeon," says Tristan, taking a couple of steps to the side to lean on—

—a slime, quickly placed and reshaped to mimic a solid wall.

- okay that makes her laugh.

"What's so funny?" asks Simone, checking a bruise Etienne picked up.

"The wall is a slime! Everything solid is a slime arriving just in time to complete the illusion!"

Tristan pulls away from the slime and eyes it suspiciously.

It relaxes.

"...now that we have time to breathe, when you say, euh, everything, you mean..."

"They were intercepting your weapons. Whenever one of you got hit, that was a slime. The floor is real," she concedes. "But if there's like stairs or rigging you could be climbing the slimes will form up to match it just before you get there, I bet."

Philippe eyes a random spot in the room suspiciously then walks over to it and places a foot on—

—a slime, box-shaped.

"This, too, is a slime? It looks like an old box to us."

"There was nothing physically there till you got close enough and then a slime scooted over and turned cubical!"

"...connard. So what is real? The walls are also slimes? How big is this room?"

"It's hard to tell, it's dark. I think sizable but not huge, based on how our voices echo..." She reaches for the nearest real wall.

Mmmmmnope, here's a slime quickly becoming a wall before she can reach the darkest spot she can see.

"Slime in my way," she grouses. "- does that look like anything to you?"

"A wall, yes. I'll summon a big mage light, it should work for you, probably?" he suggests, starting to cast before he's done talking.

"Yeah, I don't think I've got anything big enough to shine to the corners but I bet you can."

Cast cast cast...

...the room is huge. There might be some magic or something preventing the echo that this room would imply, but it's very, very, very big. There's a stone cylinder coming down its very tall ceiling from which the ladder they climbed down emerges, and from here she can see other slimes peppering the landscape (as well as the occasional treasure chest), but otherwise it's just an entirely featureless stone room.

"But, wait, if everything we see is fake then... why are we alive?"

"The room is actually a lot bigger than I thought it was. It's got a support pillar, it looks honestly too big for only one support pillar. The treasure chests are real though I assume if I make for them slimes will make my life difficult. But I don't think it'd take more than... ten minutes to walk end to end? - I think this is sort of the fundamental question with dungeons. It's not like it seems to do them any harm when people die in them and they have some ability to calibrate their power, why not just curbstomp everyone, why drop loot? And this one is just... executing on that same mystery, but..."

"But they do kill people. Those skeletons were trying to kill us. An inexperienced party would have died. It is choosing to... present exactly the level of difficulty it presented and not any more or any less. When if what you say is true it could have presented much, much more."