American Soldiers Come Calling

[Tier-Group 34, Lifelong-Learning Wing, Small Training Room]

That day, a rare race came to the Library-City Dungeon. A bipedal, brawny rabbit, dressed in brown Western-style clothes, a rare sight in this world.

"A rabbit… I take it?"

"Name's Dave. And yes, in these parts they call us rabbits."

"So then, is it a post with the knight order that you're hoping for, here at the Library-City Dungeon?"

"The Foxes, and, er, what was that other animal… at any rate, I hear those furries are running a cafay. So we'd like to open up a Rabbit Cafay of our own."

"A café, you mean? And why, of all things?"

"Because it seems that in this dungeon a fellow might one day live the civilized life I knew as a kid, a single-family house with a lawn and a yard, a car of his own, burgers and ice cream. Sad to say, far off to the west, 'Umeda, the Mercantile City,' had no land to speak of for buying a house and no cars to be had, and on top of that rabbits were despised, hunted down, trussed up and dragged about. It could never be a place to settle."

"Ah, in the old song too, the rabbit gets chased about. 'Umeda, the Mercantile City,' though. That's a long way off."

"A thousand miles, I'd reckon, near enough."

"Umeda, the Mercantile City, is sixteen hundred kilometers off, then. And these burgers and ice cream, they're otherworld dishes?"

"That's right. For generations my line were dungeon monsters, living that very life, a single-family house with a lawn and a yard, a car of our own, burgers and ice cream. But somewhere along the way the dungeon collapsed, and we've been wanderers ever since, down to this very day."

They had once been summoned as the dungeon monsters of a US military-base dungeon, and after the dungeon's collapse the Named ones had gone feral. As a rule the males were mostly American soldiers. The females were famous as bunny girls, though there were never many of them. In either case, male or female, they took the form of large, bipedal rabbits.

"The makings of a burger are wheat and beef, and ice cream is milk and sugar, so as long as we breed up cattle, or buy them in, it should be manageable."

That said, in this region cattle were exceedingly few, and not raised for eating at that.

[Core Room]

"Another 'survivor of a collapsed dungeon,' is it. There are a lot of those. Catfish, herons, and now this."

"This time it appears to be a dungeon that collapsed not so very long ago. And its level of technology was somewhere around the mid-twentieth century, I should say. It seems to lie even farther off than Umeda, the Mercantile City, so we can hardly go and survey the site."

"He said 'for generations,' but don't Named dungeon monsters have no lifespan?"

"That depends on the dungeon's specifications. As a rule animals do have lifespans, so in the case of a Beast-type dungeon monster there are many cases where it's more advantageous to keep the lifespan, let the generations turn over, and refine the breed. Plants, by contrast, often have no genetically programmed lifespan, so an Asura-type dungeon monster has no need to set one at all."

"But annual plants and the like have lifespans, don't they."

"In most cases the mechanism is that they flower and bear fruit and wither once the nights grow longer, or shorter, than a certain threshold. In the case of an Asura, a one-year lifespan would leave it unable to acquire any real knowledge, so even an annual-plant Asura ordinarily never has a lifespan of merely one year."