"... done this how many times, Tanth?" a voice is saying.

Yarold feels as though something is wrong with his arms. Scratch that, as though something is wrong with his brain.

"I just worry, Kose. That last one ..." a different voice responds.

He lies still, letting the sensation wash over him -- the sensation of a room. It is old, and square, and stone.

"I'll be fine. You get out of here so I can wake it up," the first voice replies.

He listens to the sound of footsteps, and then he jerks to fuller alertness as though he just downed a cup of black tea.

He peers around himself, taking in more details of his environment. The stone is carved with symbols that he feels as though he ought to recognize. There is a woman clad in leaves standing over him, pale purple wings spread behind her.

"Hello!" she chirps, and puts a face to the voice he heard before.

"Are you ...?" he asks, although he doesn't know where the question is going. "Am I ...?"

Her smile remains painted across her face.

"You're a new dungeon, and I'm your dungeon fairy," she says, as though that explains anything.

"A dungeon ..." he murmurs, taking in the stone walls around him with a new understanding.

"Yes! And I'm here to guide you through becoming the best dungeon you can be!" she replies. "But I'm sure you must be disoriented. Let me know when you're feeling more settled, and I'll talk you through inspecting your domain."

Yarold tries to close his eyes, but he can't. Instead, he just lets his awareness of the room ... unfocus, a bit. He stays like that for a minute or so, before re-focusing and inspecting everything in greater detail.

There isn't much to see -- old stonework, covered with lichen. A spatter of rust stains the ground before the plinth on which he sits. His own form, a floating tetrahedron of brilliant blue spinning gently an inch or so above the stone. This feels right, although he is not yet used to a lack of limbs. The woman, smiling and watching him. She stands a little under two meters.

Her wings curl behind her, competing with the many rings she wears for the position of most striking part of her appearance. A mole sits by her left eye.

"Alright," he finally says. "I think I'm ready. What is the first step?"

He feels like he knows. He wants to stretch a limb he didn't used to have, as though uncurling after a long nap. He wants to extend his sight beyond his room, and take in the earth around them.

"If you direct your attention to a particular part of yourself, you should be able to examine it in more detail," she explains. "With practice, your perception of individuals and areas can become more acute. Try examining this necklace."

She holds out a necklace, dangling it from her hand on a long silver chain.

He focuses his attention as she described. In his mind, the necklace comes apart. At first it is a singular thing, and then it is a separate stone and setting. With more focus, he sees that it is a wrap of silver wire around a polished quartz stone, and he can see the individual stresses in the metal and the flecks of impurities that give the quartz its speckled appearance.

There is something else in the rock, though. A thing which is more like light than like stone, and more like an edict than either -- a bundle of cause-and-effect woven into the stone, trapped by the layers between refractive domains of the quartz.

He wants to look deeper, but even this passing glance has given him a headache, and he reluctantly zooms back out to consider the whole room again.

"I see," he says instead, letting his metaphorical eyes relax from the strain of considering the necklace. "What is that, trapped in the necklace?"

She tucks the necklace back between the leaves of her dress.

"That is magic! Dungeons can produce magic items and effects for various purposes. That one was a gift from one of the previous dungeons that I was partnered with," she explains. Her voice has the cadence of long practice, as though she has said these things many times before. "Part of my job is explaining magic to you, but that can wait. Now that you know how to examine things, you should learn how to claim territory."

"Try directing your attention through the door and up the corridor. Be sure to stop once you reach the surface," she warns.

He follows her direction. Pushing his attention through the doorway feels as though he is pressing against a curtain, or a bubble. This is the stretch he's been craving since he woke up. He lets himself expand; the resistance slowly grows as he makes his way up a roughly-dug corridor. The corridor slopes gently upwards over the course of about ten meters. There are wooden supports spaced along it to hold up the roof.

By the time the corridor terminates at a low stone lintel, he has to shove quite hard to push any farther. He holds it for a moment, and feels his attention ... settle, for lack of a better word. He turns back to the woman in his room, but he can still feel the corridor in the back of his mind.

"Alright, that seems straightforward enough," he says. "But, look, I feel like we're skipping some important parts. I'm Yarold. What's your name?"

An emotion flashes through her eyes too fast for him to catch. Anger, maybe, or panic.

"Oh! Of course, how silly of me," she replies. "I'm Kose. It's good to meet you."

"How did you come to be a dungeon fairy, Kose?" he asks, casting his attention back up the corridor. He examines the shovel marks in his walls and the boot prints on his floor.

"I just woke up beside my first dungeon," she replies with a cheerful tone. "Dungeon fairies are tied to our dungeons -- when it's time for us to move on, we wake up beside our next one."

"I see," he replies. "And you've lived in different dungeons your whole life?"

"I have," she affirms. "But that's enough about me -- we'll have plenty of time to get to know each other once everything is set up. There's one last thing we should talk about, now that you've claimed your first territory."

Yarold has never considered himself an unusually insightful man, but this whole situation strikes him as a little off. He idly compares Kose's shoes -- delicate leather sandals -- to the prints outside the door to his room, before returning his attention once more to his pedestal.

Kose hasn't been wrong about the way his new ... dungeon powers ... work, though. Stretching himself to add a new corridor felt right, in a way he cannot explain.

"Oh?" he asks. "What's that?"

"Monsters!" she responds. "Dungeons can do many things, but one of the most fundamental is summoning monsters. To the point where you'll probably start feeling a bit itchy if we don't take care of that soon."

Now that she mentions it, he does feel as though his corridor is missing something. Not urgently. It's missing something in the way that his apartment was missing something before his boyfriend picked up a set of watercolors for the hallway. The corridor is fine, but a gauntlet would be better.

"Alright," he agrees. "How does summoning monsters work, then?"