“Are you awake yet, Dungeon Lord?”

  Jacob woke up with a start to a stone room next to a floating fairy. It was slightly larger than his hand with white stone skin, silver hair, and a simple robe that draped over almost all of its body. Sprouted out of its back were two butterfly wings made out of a dark blue gas or flame. It stood weightlessly in the air, looking at him with an obviously worried fa?ade.

  He looked around to discover that he was in an underground room carved into a perfect dome. There wasn’t an entrance or exit, nor was there any blemish on the smooth stone. In the middle of this unnatural room was a pedestal with an enormous, egg-shaped ruby pulsing like a heart with magical power.

  “Dungeon Lord, are you ready?” said the fairy but he didn’t bother looking at it.

  He looked down at himself. His entire being was made of thick shadow that was only barely translucent. He brought his hands to his face and looked through them; he bent them and moved only to discover that nothing felt wrong. He pushed his hands together and they barely resisted each other before going through.

  A million thoughts raced through his head. Was he dead? Was this all a hallucination or a dream? This didn’t feel anything like a dream, and he couldn’t recall ever being lucid in any of his dreams. If this wasn’t a dream, then what was it? Did he get pulled into another world? Was this purgatory?

  “Dungeon Lord, please answer me,” said the fairy with a stern voice, the sound waves imbued with some sort of power that influenced his mind.

  Dungeon Lord? That term was familiar to him. He grasped on to the only clue he had to explain what was going on, trying to recall why the words were familiar. Right, they came from the game called Dungeon Realm, one of his favorites despite losing a lot of interest recently. Why were those words used here?

  He looked at the fairy and suddenly his mind made a connection. The thing was just like a dungeon fairy, or as close as a physical being could be to the high resolution pixel art. If that thing was a dungeon fairy then… He turned and saw the heartbeating ruby on a pedestal, the dungeon core, and came to the odd realization. He had somehow gone into Dungeon Realm, or something like it.

  “I am…alright, Dungeon Fairy,” Jacob said, testing to see if his connections were correct.

  “Good, Dungeon Lord,” replied the fairy, validating his absurd understanding of the situation. “If you are ready, please open up your map. Just use the ability phrase [Map].”

  “…[Map]?” Jacob asked. Suddenly, a 3D holographic map appeared in front of him like a holodeck from a science fiction show. There was a blue semicircle with a shadow, fairy, and heart icon within it. Around it were tunnels and caves painted in neutral gray and full of red figures acting and roaming like animals.

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  It wasn’t the exact same as the pixel art, tile-based, 2D Dungeon Realm, but it was incredibly similar. The icons for himself, the dungeon fairy, and the dungeon core were the same and so were the colors used. Blue meant his dungeon territory, gray meant neutral or unclaimed territory, and red meant hostile enemies.

  “Please conquer these caverns, build your dungeon, then open an entrance to the surface, Dungeon Lord,” said the dungeon fairy. After the dungeon fairy spoke again, a hologram screen appeared in front of him.

  He read and reread the screen, feeling a strange sense of deja vu. This quest came from the game’s tutorial, something that he had seen only a couple of times. He didn’t use the tutorial anymore, but seeing it here provided him a needed sense of familiarity.

  He could do this quest in his sleep. He turned to look at the jagged and naturally unnatural angles and paths of the cave system around him. There were monsters everywhere, but there were empty caverns that didn’t have an entrance. Those were the ones that he needed to claim first.

  The player didn’t have the power to directly terraform the environment or claim territory though. Instead that power belonged to the dungeon fairy; all that he could do was direct and command the fairy. He knew how to do this with a computer mouse, but he didn’t have that here.

  “Dungeon Fairy, how do I mark things and command you,” Jacob asked, gambling on the knowledge that the fairy was the source of instruction and tips in the game.

  “Please use the ability phrase [Mark] to mark the environment or entities. I recommend using it with your map,” replied the dungeon fairy, its voice and movement robotic.

  Uttering [Mark], the map changed to white instead of blue. Using his mind, he created orange and yellow shapes for excavation and building respectively to test out how everything worked. The shapes appeared around him as he marked the map. He cleared all of his tests and then created a tunnel to the empty cavern near the dungeon.

  The fairy suddenly moved when he finished, floating through the air to the orange shape stretching out from the dome-shaped room. It stretched out its hands and an eldritch glow appeared, causing the stone to melt and deform like clay being sculpted by unseen hands. Slowly a tunnel to the exact measurement he had created appeared, and the empty tunnel was accessed.

  Then the dungeon fairy lowered its hand and its glow spread around it and covered it. Underneath roots of glowing light connected to the dungeon core appeared and started to grow into the newly accessed space. Jacob watched, mesmerized, as the fairy conquered new territory for the dungeon.

  With some much needed space, it was time for him to start fleshing out the dungeon.