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A big dungeon opens in Missisauga. It's laid out like a sprawling spa with more than a hundred rooms. There are massage tables and hot tubs and mani-pedi stations and acupuncture setups and yoga rooms and saunas and microdermabrasion. Everything smells like steam and essential oils. There are background rhythmic chime and gong sounds and vocal crooning. Cute little water features in the corners of many spaces supplement the music with burbling and splashing over smooth stones. The lighting is low and warm; the carpets are thick and fluffy like they're brand new and no one even considered the possibility, during rug shopping, that they might one day have to clean aloe lotion out of the fibers; the color palette is chiefly soothing cream and natural wood tones, with coppery metals forming abstract sculptures and light fixtures, prevented from aesthetic monotony by each room having a distinct pastel theme color for accoutrements like the towels and the mats and the hot rocks, rose or sage or honey or seafoam or apricot or lavender.
The monsters - mostly made of plush terrycloth, but with a lot of pockets inside their folds that their skinny arms can double back to retrieve things from if someone seems to need a cuticle trimmer or a tweezer - change colors to suit, when they move room to room. Their hands in particular are mostly human except that they have six fingers and their knuckles work in both directions, still perfectly good at giving massages and buffing nails.
The massages don't even hurt. As long as you hold perfectly still, and don't provoke them. If you provoke the monsters, they will apply a painful paralytic shock. To help remind you to remain in place. You get to try again when your muscles unlock a couple of seconds later. As many tries as you need.
They let the victims breathe - let them breathe normally; quick panting or deep sighs can get them zapped. They let them open or close their eyes. If they happen to be placed in the yoga room, they can - they must, in fact - flow between positions as shown by the monster instructor, slowly, slowly. Otherwise they must be still, and relaxed, letting the warmth and the pressure and the pampering sink into them as though they were planning on this spa trip, as though they are simply happening to choose not to complain about having been in a single position for an hour, four hours, ten, layers of tasteful polish building up on their toes a dozen deep, the top layers of calluses giving way to pink soft skin and the pumice showing no signs of stopping.
(Sleeping is allowed, if you want to try it and you don't happen to be in the yoga room, or in a position where you can't drift off. If you don't move in your sleep.)
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It's not this dungeon's first time on the block. They have a pretty good report on it from a previous appearance in Chengdu. The monsters don't attempt breach, but they are fast to close distances on their quiet cotton-loop-feet, their needles can go through most conventional armor and definitely any that you'd be able to pilot a drone while wearing, their knowledge of pressure points extends to finding weak spots in any more elaborate rig, and they're profoundly aggressive to intruders, who have no licit position they're allowed to be in and will be continually zapped until it kills them. You need espers, and they need to be stealth espers.
Toronto has a couple of those.
