So.  My first dungeon ever, I was doing search and rescue.  You know how sometimes you tell kids to watch out for sharks in the pool?  Well, there were sharks in this pool, and people were kidnapped to "islands" of pool concrete, you know the stuff I mean.  The portal was in sight, and everyone could reach it!  They just had to cross the sections of pool between the various "islands".

The catch?  The dungeon was scaled down.  It must've been a new one, because the "sharks" were about six inches long and the sections between "islands" were about three feet wide.  By the time I'd gotten there, everyone but an elderly couple had jumped across the water, island to island while the sharks watched and glared.  One guy got bit in the ankle and he stomped the shark to death with his other foot and finished the crossing anyway.  It probably would have needed stitches if there hadn't been a convenient esper around.  I carried a plywood plank island to island and walked the couple out.  He felt like he had to pay me back somehow, so now I have the best macaroni and cheese recipe on the planet.

The core was an afterthought.  It was sitting in the far corner of the pool, we smashed it hopscotched back home.

So back like five years ago there was this dungeon that was clearly trying to do the infinite staircase thing?  Except it apparently put all its effort into looping space and only had room for like three floors.  And it hadn't put fog in to blur the distances, so you could just... lean out over the railing and see the back of your own head.  It was actually pretty neat in a trippy kind of way.

Also there were balloons?  Just, dozens and dozens of regular colorful party balloons, not balloon-themed monsters or anything, either the air kind falling very slowly down the stairs or the helium kind bumping very slowly up the underside of the flight above you.  We never did figure out what it was going for with them.

These are amazing thank you all!!! oh shit gotta go I just woke up my partner laughing ooops

This is maybe gonna sound like bragging, but I assure you it did happen and it was in fact dumb from start to finish. I’m not an esper, just got kidnapped. What do I see when I get kidnapped? A locker room. No, this is not about dumb locker room fears. It’s a super sci-fi military locker room with lots of angular metal and red glowing lines. There’s like me and 5 other guys and gals in the room, and it's super hot. Like, outdoors in the desert hot, and we're indoors and there is no breeze. So if we don’t do something, we’re gonna die of heatstroke. Sitting tight is not an option. So we go exploring.

Outside of the locker room there’s this enormous hangar with MECHS. Yep. Big ol' two-legged war machines bristling with guns, with a spot for a person in the middle. One for each of us.

And we check all the doors and walls there is no exit, except for the big doors open to the sky above the mechs, which aren’t helping with the heat. But in the lockers we find these fancy flight suits (and instead of glowing red lines all over, they have glowing blue and red lines twisting like DNA), and one of us tries putting one on and, surprisingly for something that looks like it ought to be even sweatier, they actually cool us off a bit. But our brains are still getting cooked.

So we do the obvious thing and get in the mechs. And yeah, they have air conditioning, and a lot more. The moment your weight is on the access ladder it doesn’t wait for you to climb, just zhoops you up in, and it’s completely dark in that armored torso, but that doesn’t matter because of course they have a brain interface. Or high-powered holograms like those commscreens some espers can afford, I don't know, I just know that just after the instant sensory deprivation, I could see all around me — see all around the mech, that is. Its sensors were my eyes, its legs were my legs, and all that jazz. Don't worry, this is dumb too. You'll see.

So, we're not dying any more, but there's still no exit but the roof hatch (I will neither confirm nor deny that an amount of mech gunfire was involved in verifying this). So, obvious thing to do, use our mechs to rocket-jump out of there. Wait, not rocket-jump. Jump jets. The thing where flames come out of your boots. You know what I mean. So we do that.

We all fly out in a perfect formation (possibly the dungeon was providing some autopilot) and land on one side of this even bigger desert arena. The whole thing’s ringed with enormous seats carved into stone, like it was an ancient football stadium for mechs to watch mechs play sports. But we don’t have a ball or a goal, we have guns and missiles, mines and EMPs. If there’s a sport to play, it’s bloodsport. While we're looking around, another six mechs, painted in a different shade of camo, pop out of the other side of the arena. There were some guns bristling, but we holler over the radio and of course it’s just more kidnappees. So here’s the first really dumb thing: the dungeon clearly wants to make us all fight to the death (or ejection or reactor core shutdown or something), but the only way that’s going to happen is if some idiot shot first. Lucky for us, the only idiot in here (or so we think) is the dungeon.

You might think the next line is “and so we explored the arena”, but we didn’t need to. The portal was right there. You just had to hop a gate and walk right over to the mini-ziggurat the portal was on. Sure, the gate is mech-sized and the ziggurat is human-building-sized, but jump jets, remember? So we all walk over there, hop up, and just march right on out. Except for those of us who decided to jump through the portal from ground level.

Now this is where we realize that we were dumb, too. You see, the coolest dungeon stuff is magic and, 99.9% of the time, stops working without its dungeon. And in this case, “without its dungeon” includes “outside the portal”. What’s magic about these mechs? Almost everything. So as soon as we exit the portal, everything goes completely dark. No vision, no sound, no steering. No air conditioning.

So the guys who wanted to do a cool flip and a three-point landing outside the portal? Crashed and piled up in a heap against the side of a warehouse, and lucky they didn't kill anybody. If we walked carefully out the portal? Floated down, then collapsed as soon as the legs touched ground. And there we are, blind, helpless, and starting to roast again — until someone figured out, in the dark by feel, that the hatches weren't locked without power, and could be pried open. He got out and told the DRT and the DRT got the rest of us out.

And because the mechs were 99% magic, we’re still not fighting dungeons with power armor, as cool as that would be. I hear they got a bit of tech for better electric motors, but that’s it. Oh, and all the explosives were real, so they had to send out the bomb squad to unload everything.