castleinthemist | Dungeon 001 [Open to all]

It was dark, darker than the thought it was going to be. Why did he feel so heavy and cold? Was this really what it all was supposed to feel like? He wasn't sure. Hermit felt his tail twitch and slowly opened his eyes. Why could he still move, that made no sense. Unless...unless he wasn't dead. Yellow eyes snapped open to see he was inside something dark. He jolted to his feet and pressed tiny paws against the cold stone. This wasn't where he normally woke up so where was he. He tried to push but nothing happened.

He felt the wall with his hands, moving slowly as he followed it. It was round and there was something in the middle. But as he moved the ground shook and moved. He was inside something that wasn't very stable at all. Why was he even here? Was this some new part of The World, was this heaven or was it hell? Either way this isn't what he had wanted. He went around and around for what felt like forever in the darkness. Just how big was this room? In this inky darkness he had no idea if he'd gone around more than once or if he was still going around the gigantic room. He needed light. He held out his hand and in a flash of purple, that could be seen from the outside through the cracks of the sarcophagus, a twig appeared. He poked the wall and suddenly green data spread over the entire sarcophagus and vanished, deleted from existance. Standing in the small alcove was a small black and white cat boy in green armor holding a black stick.

His yellow eyes scanned the sarcophagus room, tail twitching behind him. This couldn't be heaven or hell...could it? So it had to be The World. But why was he still here? He sniffled, feeling the tears well up in his eyes.

"It isn't fair...why? Why am I still here?"

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Cordelia smiled, glad that it was being appreciated. "Is it a magical weapon, then? Some kind of wand?"

It didn't look like one, but then, he was clearly a cat-person, so maybe cat-person's magic wands all looked like that.

"And thank you, I try my best."

"Kind of. Back in The World, it let me do almost anything I imagined. And I still have it so I can probably just delete the shadow creatures if I meet any. I'll be fine."

He smiled happily and stepped a bit closer to Cordelia. "Then...can we be friends?"

"That sounds pretty useful! Delete...do you mean destroy?"

Odd wording, in her opinion.

"Friends? Uhm, I would be honored!"

Mostly since Cordelia pretty much had no friends due to being a princess, and getting friends HAD been a goal of hers, so someone asking so openly pretty obviously got a yes.

"Yes, destroy. I make them vanish forever with my stick. The World was a computer game so everything was data. There I could delete things with a poke. Here I guess I can so something similar."

The boy's eyes lit up and he smiled wide with a slight blush on his white cheek fur. "Thank you."

"A...computer game? What is a computer?" Cordelia asked. If it came from the verb, she wondered, was it a kind of calculator? But what had that to do with games? Strange.

"And you're welcome. I apologize for being a bit ignorant about concepts from your world, though...my world is apparently very different from the worlds most people come from. We still have kings and queens, but it appears most other arrivals do not."

"A computer is a machine that does many things. My world was a World inside a game, that's all. Think of it like a fantasy story you can interact with and make a character in. Kind of like that."

"I...see." She tried to understand it, but wasn't that successful.

"So...it's like a novel, but with the people in it actually being real and making their own decisions, right? Wouldn't you hate your author, then?"

Some authors sure were rather mean to their creations, after all.

"Some people do. Only the authors are the moderators. But most of the time they leave everything to the players. There is no set plot. Only many adventures to go on.

And then there are the PKers, Player Killers. They go around killing other players for fun."

"Uhm, I can't have understood that properly, people actually enter these stories specifically to kill people in the story? Isn't that...illegal?"

It sounded like murder, to her. "Why would they do that?"

"People who die don't die forever. Just their characters and then they respawn, or get resurrected if that helps. And they do it for fun. The people in The World don't actually exist. They are just characters made by them from in the real world. That's all."

"Eeeeh?"

...

She took a moment to stomach that. That was a really, really strange world he came from, where people survived being killed.

"I...I see... I hope none of them comes over here, people just killing for fun would be a big, big problem."

Hermit nodded, his ears drooping.

"It is...

In The World, no one felt pain or death. To them it was fantasy, a game of pretend.

...But not to me...

It hurt when I was stabbed and when I died. And I died a lot..."

"Oh my go..."

She slumped. "I'm sorry to have talked about it, it must have been horrible."

She couldn't understand the details of his 'game' very well, but she understood being hunted and stabbed, having experienced a lot of the first and some of the later herself.

"If I see any people like that I'll make sure they won't get to you."

Which she meant. She hated people like that, after all.

Hermit's eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open slightly. He was surprised she would say something like that.

"R-Really? But what if they try to hurt you?"

"I'm a princess, I learned to defend myself." She answered, not sounding as if she was joking.

But then she was from a time period similar to the european middle ages, where a noblewoman often *was* expected to take command of soldiers to defend a castle.

"So don't worry about me. I'd be fine."

Hermit sniffled a bit. "But...why me? I don't understand..."

"I dislike people like this." ...She noticed she was maybe getting a litttle scary, and shook herself out of it. Enough of those thoughts...!

"And, uhm, it's a bit part of my duties, protecting people that are in need to, and such?"

While technically true, it was still a rather naive outlook. After all, in reality, it often didn't quite work out like that.

Hermit's surprise soon faded and a happy smile again took it's place. He was happy to hear that, glad that there were kind people here after all.

"Thank you. That means a lot. I'm glad you're my new friend."

"No, I thank you...you're really welcome." Cordelia said, smiling.

...That did bring her to a question she had wanted to ask for a while now.

"Uhm, I apologize if this is rude but...are all people cats where you come from...?"

No, I was the only one. My avatar was illegal. Everyone else looked human.

Avatar...?

Oh, I see. That's how you would call the people-into-the-story person, right?

[Cordelia had very different connotiations for the word 'avatar', surprising her quite a bit at first, but she made the connection quickly enough.]

That's right. And no one has one like mine.

Dungeon 001 [Open to all]

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