About Original Monsters

[Tier-Group 3, Control Room]

"Original monsters fall outside the scope of the introductory manual 'Dungeon 101,' but according to the 'Encyclopedia Dungeonica,' they're for fixing a dungeon's theme and giving it individuality. In the example given, for a pirate-ship dungeon, instead of the run-of-the-mill human pirates you make them octopus-fiend pirates. In that case, any already-summoned Named pirates can be converted into the corresponding original monster."

Mint's explanation continued.

"Can be?"

"By deliberately not converting one, you can reproduce something like: it's an octopus-pirate pirate ship, yet the adjutant alone is a human pirate."

"And what about the case where the officers are octopus-pirates and the underlings are human?"

"Replacing things with the original monster isn't strictly obligatory, so the octopus-pirates would be original monsters and the underlings the conventional main-line monsters, I'd say. I haven't read the 'Encyclopedia Dungeonica' closely enough to know the method for setting them up when used in combination, though. Naturally, replacing them so that the conventional monsters can no longer be summoned is the lower-cost option."

"In the octopus-pirate case, it isn't only the Named monsters; it seems off to me that the Dungeon Master's pirate captain wouldn't have to become an octopus too."

"There, system-wise, there are various methods: making the adjutant Named monster appear outwardly as the captain, and so on. The fact that in this dungeon the Master is a Beast probably had some meaning in the tutorial, too."

(I really can't see any connection between the Master and a library, you know. It's not as though it's the city mascot. Was it a pickpocket, or a squirrel, I wonder?)

By the conceit that she "is qualified as a secretary," Marie held the policy-aide secretary qualification, and since one of the conditions for that qualification's selection, hiring, screening, and certification, passing the civil-service examination, was part of her "setting," she naturally possessed broad knowledge. But her setting had her originating from Matsuyama rather than Ōmiya, and she was of course not an otherworld reincarnator, so her knowledge had a fair number of rough patches.

Incidentally, the reason the total years of her "career" by the setting come out plainly impossible is that, rather than being some specific otherworld reincarnator, her career was pieced together to merely seem plausible, with further bits tacked on after the fact.

"So then, this dungeon's original monster is the Shiso (Asura), but Director-dono, does anything come to mind?"

"Hmm, how was it again. I have no memory of it… Right, I'm fairly sure I looked at a list of monsters and thought there were no monsters in a library."

The cause was that it had misidentified the entries as the Dutch-roll monster Haneda Brian, the gray monster Oguri Tadamasa, and the like, but that was lost in the far reaches of oblivion.

(It's true that "monster" renders into Japanese as kaibutsu, "freak," but still…)

"And then, I figured I needed someone to manage the library… I can't recall it."

Mistaking shisho (librarian) for shiso (perilla), and willing into being that he needed a hisho (secretary), he had ended up summoning Marie, whose setting made her species Shiso and her qualification secretary. That much, however, could not be gleaned from the records. And for the oddly credentialist Core of a Library-City Dungeon, one that requires a Master's degree for master-user authority and so on (though etymologically the guild "master" came before the academic Master's, of course), the question of what counts as a secretary's official "qualification" comes down to a legislator's policy-aide secretary qualification.