Wandering Dungeon

Ow! my head. Garrett moaned. What Happened?

Garrett tried to rub his head but couldn’t move his arms. He couldn’t even feel his arms. He couldn’t feel anything. He opened his eyes and saw a greenish glowing fog all around him. He started to panic, the feeling of claustrophobia slowly crept through him. Something was wrong though.

He knew he was starting to panic, that his heart should be racing, and that he should be sweating. He felt nothing. No heartbeat, no sweat, no physical feeling of anything against his skin. Garrett looked down to where his body should have been and saw nothing. He felt the sensation of moving but nothing else. Am I dead? Garrett thought. Is this heaven or hell, or maybe limbo?

Garrett took a deep breath to calm down and found that he wasn’t breathing. He realized that he hadn’t taken a breath since he woke up. Oddly this calmed him down.

If I don’t need to breath, I guess there is no risk of suffocating. With that worry out of his mind Garrett decided to look around. At first all he saw was the ever-present green glow, but after a bit he saw something else. It looked like a wall of glass, perfectly smooth and clear. He looked out through the glass and saw only darkness, utter and empty darkness. He followed the glass.

There has got to be a door or something to get out of here. Garrett thought. Or at least

tell me where here is.

Soon he saw another wall of glass joining the one he was following. When he got to the corner of the two walls he looked out and saw the same darkness from before. Garrett kept going along the new wall and soon found another wall of glass. He started getting worried that he wouldn’t get out of here.

I wonder, since I don’t have a body if I am stuck moving just this one direction. He mused and decided to try going up for a change. To his amusement it worked. He flew up along the wall just as easily as he had before. His amusement was cut short when he ran into another wall of glass. The feeling of claustrophobia kicked back in and he started going faster and faster. He ran into another wall of glass, and another, and another. No matter which way he went he ran into a wall of glass. His panic escalated and he started to hyperventilate. He realized again that he wasn’t breathing and calmed down.

He took another look around and analyzed his surroundings. He went around and counted the walls this time. He counted twenty glass walls without a hole or crack to be found for him to escape through. All he could do was wait and see what would happen. He lost track of time. Months, years, minutes, or seconds. Time meant nothing in the unchanging fog of his crystalline prison.

At some point Garret noticed that the walls of glass seemed to be getting closer. It was a subtle movement at first that sped up to a slow crawl over time. Garrets claustrophobia kicked in before he could remind himself that he didn’t need to breath but he wasn’t sure he couldn’t be crushed. Garret started panicking more and more as the walls got closer and closer.

When he could see the walls all around him he reached out and tried to hold the walls at bay and was surprised when he felt resistance. A spark of happiness flashed through him at the sensation before a thought struck him. If he can feel the glass he can be crushed by it. He once again started to push at the encroaching walls. He felt the resistance again and began to push as hard as he could. The walls continued to close in, steadily shrinking Garrets glass cage. The pressure grew stronger. Garret strained, the fear of being crushed pushed him to his limits.

With a sudden popping sensation, the pressure was gone. Garret looked around in surprise. He could still see the green glow around him but at only a fraction of the brightness it was just a moment ago. After being in the bright glowing mists, now he felt nearly blind. Garret looked around trying to make sense of what just happened.

A glint of green caught his eye. He looked over and saw a bag lying on a rocky floor. He could see some coins peeking out through the open mouth of the bag. Some were gold, some silver, but most were copper. He also saw a few rough looking gems. Garret instinctively knew that the crystals were a low-quality quartz but was unsure of how he knew that, like a memory just out of reach. A slightly brighter green glow was coming from the bag.

Garret wondered how he was going to search the bag with no hands but then he remembered how he had felt resistance on the glass walls when he had focused on them. He focused on the bag and felt a slight resistance, but not enough to move the bag. He tried focusing on the bag again to no avail. Frustrated he tried again and again, focusing on the bag from different angles. No matter how hard he focused or from what angle he couldn’t get the bag to move.

He glared angrily at the bag while it just lay there with no response. Stupid bag. He growled and imagined picking it up and shaking it angrily. The bag jumped up into the air and shook around violently, coins and gems clinking

loudly. Stunned Garret just floated there for a moment and stared blankly at the bag floating in the air.

He imagined the bag moving back and forth slowly and to his delight the bag followed the picture in his head. He laughed with glee and made the bag dance to his whims. Up and Down, side to side, circles and loops. He tossed the bag and watched it arc away from him.

When the bag was a few feet from him he felt a strong force pull him in the direction that he had tossed the bag. When the bag crashed to the ground and came to a stop and Garret was again within a few feet of the bag the force disappeared.

Odd. Garret thought. He tried floating away from the bag and got a few feet away before feeling the force again. It didn’t pull him towards the bag this time it just stopped him from moving away. He tried a different direction and felt the same force when he was a few feet away from the bag. He tried again and again, even going up, but nothing he did allowed him to move more than a few feet away from the bag before being stopped by the force.

Garret huffed angrily and floated over to the bag. What’s so special about this bag? He wondered. It only had a few coins and some quartz. He picked up the bag and turned it upside down. The coins and quartz crystals spilled out clinking across the cold rocky ground, followed by a glowing green crystal. Garrett’s attention was drawn to the crystal. He felt a familiarity and bond with this small crystal. He studied it and found that it had twenty perfectly even triangular facets. Garrett realized that this is what he had been trapped in. Although he had been afraid when he was stuck inside this small crystal, he felt no fear, or anger. He knew deep down that this crystal was a part of him.

He slowly reached out with his mind to pick up the crystal but nothing happened. He tried again and again. Nothing. He could feel the resistance and he tried every way he could imagine to move the crystal that was no bigger than an acorn but to no avail. The crystal stayed where it was, mocking him. He sulked about this for a while.

To take his mind off the small crystal, he started playing around with the coins and crystals from the bag. He picked up one and spun it around him, then another, and another until he had ten coins and two crystals orbiting around him. At first he had them spin the same direction but soon decided to try something more complicated. First he tried spinning them in different directions then at different speeds. Soon he had them dancing around him in what looked like a chaotic maelstrom but Garrett knew where every coin and quartz crystal was at any time.

Garrett grew bored of just spinning the coins and moved on to making shapes with them. First a circle, then a square. He tried doing different shapes and even made them move. For a while he even had a conversation with a face made of coins with the two quartz for eyes.

When he ran out of conceivable shapes and grew bored of talking to himself he wondered if there was somewhere he could store the coins and quartz that would be safe if someone ever decided to come into the small bubble of green light he was trapped in. Suddenly all the coins and crystals floating around him vanished with a light green flash.

Garrett was surprised to say the least. He wondered about where the items went and he knew that they were safely stored in a place that only he could access. He wondered how many coins there were and instantly he knew that there were seventeen copper coins, three silver coins, a gold coin, and two inferior quartz crystals. Excited with how easy and instinctual this was he focused on the coins and gems lying on the ground around him and thought of storing them. With a quick flash of green light, the rest of the coins and the few gems vanished, all except the glowing green gem.

Garrett thought about what to call this new place he stored things in but simply calling it storage felt off. A small name floated from the murky depths of his memory that felt right. Garrett decided to call the place that he stored away his items his inventory.

Now that his playthings were put away, Garrett figured since he was outside of the crystal maybe he could see something besides darkness outside of his little ball of light. He floated away from the green crystal as far as he could go and stared out into the darkness beyond.

He couldn’t see anything but a deep pure blackness like when he was trapped in the crystal. So he decided to just float around and enjoy the feeling of floating. He found this quite calming and exciting no matter how long he floated around; like a child swimming through water.