The Problem with Summoned Monsters

[Core Room]

The Library-City Dungeon, now unable to summon Shiso (Asura).

"If we can't summon a machinery engineer, Mint is going to be cross with me. Is this, I wonder, a system malfunction?"

"It's hardly a personal computer; the dungeon itself wouldn't have an OS or anything like that, would it."

"Master, a Dungeon Operating System would make it a DOS, but indeed, a relic of the last century like that exists only in a museum these days."

"As I recall, you punch the commands in from a keyboard, was it."

"The only one who could handle that is Mint, surely. Operating this Core does, after a fashion, go by a 'graphical user interface,' but according to the Encyclopedia Dungeonica the controls differ by dungeon. This dungeon being a library, it presumably conforms to the sort of controls you often find on an OPAC, that is, an Online Public Access Catalog. Although it is neither online nor public."

"I see. If this were an underground labyrinth with goblins and zombies coming out of it, I suppose you'd summon them with a magic circle, would you."

"Who can say. It's not even clear such dungeons exist in the first place. A dungeon basically summons the items and monsters suited to it from one, or a single cluster of, otherworlds, but this dungeon derives from a world with neither Asura nor beastfolk in it, and yet the Master is a beastfolk and I am an Asura, so there must be some special reason. That the unique law is so absurdly powerful as to forbid all unauthorized entry is a mystery too."

That it is a Shiso rather than a librarian is the Dungeon Master's fault, but why the Dungeon Master should be a beastfolk in the first place is unknown. If you went "Good enough!" in a library, a great many of the holdings would likely go missing.

"Absurdly?"

"It's flatly impossible to clear by any orthodox method. The problem with the summoned monsters may be the price paid for that."

"So at present the only things we can summon are pests and vermin: deathwatch beetles, booklice, silverfish, and the like."

"The summoning list doesn't so much as include the Master's retainers."

"Retainers?"

"In general, 'retainers' means the attendants who serve a buddha, or the animals that act as a god's messengers, but in the dungeon's case, according to the Encyclopedia Dungeonica, in a pirate-ship dungeon where the Master is the pirate captain you can summon pirate underlings, and in an old-castle dungeon where the Master is a vampire you can summon small-fry vampires; basically the Dungeon Master's retainers are summonable. 'Underlings' might be the easier way to put it."

"My retainers, then."

"It needn't be a construction site, and if there were a factory-employed machinery engineer among them, Mint too could… It may be just as well we can't summon them. It would be a nuisance to have a rash of workplace accidents because someone went 'Good enough!' Retainers automatically become the named-ordinary type; they have intellect but cannot leave the dungeon's sphere of influence, and they have no access privileges to the Core. But they do come back to life when they die, so if dungeon energy were squandered with every workplace accident, the dungeon could go bankrupt."

"Named-ordinary?"

"It means every one of the pirate's underlings has a name. Of course, with a pirate it's one thing, but making a monster of scant intelligence to begin with into a named-ordinary won't let it hold a conversation. And there are limits on numbers besides, so forming an army would be out of the question. Incidentally, this dungeon cannot set named-ordinary monsters… Ah, so that's why we can't summon retainers either."

"Or perhaps we're caught on some release condition or other. Increase the residents, expand the dungeon, or, just as Sapien-sensei was saying, increase the books."

"Normally, if the number of monsters is in the single digits, you'd have one or two named aides and the rest nameless. You only need middle managers once the number of monsters grows much larger. This dungeon's all-named arrangement must be the unusual one."