"Silverfish" Sounds Like a Pretty Cool Name

[Core Room]

A dungeon ought to have monsters. Until it summoned some, there was nothing to talk about. But how on earth did one go about summoning a monster? For now, perhaps it would think the matter over while eating something sweet. There hadn't been any sweets in the fridge, so it seemed they weren't kept in stock.

And so, when it touched the item "menu" projected from the metal sphere onto the whiteboard, several entries lined up on display: feature, artifact, creature. Where in the world did one order dessert? There was, it recalled, a nasty vegetable called an artichoke, so the second one was out. The third was probably "cream-something," and therefore a sweet.

When it touched "creature," a list of sweets came up. Illiterate as it was, even it could make out "name" and "cost."

At the top: "librarian." Riburarian? Library-an? Horse? Surely there'd been one called "Haneda Brian, the Monster of the Dutch Roll." So this wasn't cream but creature, that is, monsters, which meant this was the monster list. Haneda Brian was unquestionably a monster. There'd been others too, like the gray monster Oguri Tadamasa, but it couldn't find them on the list.

Perhaps the precise measurement of dungeon energy was difficult, for the consumption cost showed not as a concrete number but only as a bar's length and color, with no units. Still, there was no doubt that Haneda Brian was the highest-cost entry on the list. After all, it was a Triple Crown horse that had also won the Nakayama Grand Prix.

At the very bottom of the list, the cheap monsters, were "woodboring beetle," "booklice," and "silverfish." A woodboring beetle, that would be a wooden beetle? Booklice… book rice? Some kind of edible book? Silverfish had a cool-sounding name. That said, since its required cost was practically zero, it was probably a weak monster despite bearing the title of "monster." If one could put such weak monsters to clever use, that would be worthwhile, but nothing came to mind. The silverfish especially, being a fish, could only shine in a body of water, and there wasn't so much as a pond anywhere in the surrounding wasteland. Cheap enough to bear a monster's byname, yet presumably just a small fish, so it must be something like a betta.

If Haneda Brian was a horse, then there ought to be some human riding it, a jockey or a knight or the like, but the name list gave no way to pick one out. A knight was "night," wasn't it? Or maybe by individual name… it had a vague memory of humans who rode horses, ones called "Taketoyo" or "Ikenie" or some such, but nothing of the sort turned up.

Also, since this was a library, there ought to be a library staffer to manage the collection… huh, what was that called again? It was "secretary," surely… or was it "shiso"?

The other worlds from which this dungeon summons its treasures and monsters are many, and among them are worlds that differ in all sorts of ways, where Balnibarbi and Fudaraku sprawl across the North Pacific, where the wild-extinct Steller's sea cow and the great auk live in the zoo, where two world wars fizzled out and never happened, and so on. Differences in a few proper nouns are trifling things.

That said, so-called fantasy-type monsters and items cannot be summoned at all in the initial state.