I Am a Dungeon Master. As Yet I Have No Name

[Core Room]

"I am a Dungeon Master. As yet I have no name. I have not the faintest notion of where I was born."

So declared the Dungeon Master, saying something that would surely be a problem in a world where copyright lasted forever. It seemed to have a general fund of knowledge rattling around in its head, though whether any of it was actually useful remained to be seen.

There was no point in mewing and crying about it, so first it took stock of the situation.

A dungeon, it knew, was an entity that drew its energy from the emotions and lives of adventurers. That much was lodged in its memory. And a dungeon "Master," surely, meant one who held a master's degree in the study of labyrinths. The same way a factory engineer or a construction-site foreman (usually) holds a master's in engineering. A Pocket Monkey Master would be zoology, so that'd be a master of science. As for an Idol Master, was that fine arts, or religion?

Looking around, the place was not at all the "dim, damp place" one pictures for a dungeon. It had the air of a perfectly ordinary little office. A few desks and a conference table, with a sink tucked into one corner. By no stretch did it feel like a "labyrinth." And the Dungeon Master itself was the master of this place. There was no sign of any teacher or live-in student.

The only labyrinth-ish object in the room sat upon one of the desks: a square pedestal of stone the color of mingled white and green, roughly 30cm to a side and about 6cm thick, with a silver metal sphere of perhaps 20cm in diameter resting on top. Whether this world even had the metric system, it could not say.

Along the walls stood empty filing cabinets, bookshelves, a whiteboard, and the like. There were two doors and one large window. Light shone out of a crystal embedded in the whiteboard, and the word "menu" floated upon it. For placing food orders, perhaps.

On the office bookshelf stood several dozen thick volumes, each marked

Encyclopedia Dungeonica

It picked one up and looked it over but… there were words here and there it could make sense of, yet as sentences it could scarcely read a thing. Whether because it was illiterate, or because it had simply forgotten how to read and write.

Beside them was a thin book labeled Dungeon 101 which, of course, it could not read either.

Looking out the window, a vast wasteland stretched away. The sky was a uniform gray, the ground dim and barren, with nothing growing. Would these so-called adventurers really come to such a desolate place?

It opened one of the doors to find a comparatively large room. Desks and chairs lined the center, and empty bookshelves ran along the surrounding walls. In front of the door was a counter, and beside the counter a glass door leading outside.

So this dungeon was a library. No, on this scale, more like a reading room. Not that there was a single book in it.

As for what lay beyond the other door, it was the residential quarter. Besides a shared dining hall, kitchen, bath, and toilet, each private room also had a small kitchenette and a shower room. Quite a high standard, really. But to a Dungeon Master who neither bathed nor used flush toilets, the whole thing was so much useless lumber.

The kitchen had a refrigerator, stocked with vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, eggs, milk, and the like, along with black coffee, canned beer, energy drinks, and the alcoholic beverage "Fahrenheit -321°." Beside the fridge, rice and seasonings stood in a row.