The First Monster

[Tier-Group 3, Control Room]

"Summoning a monster is written up as the very first thing to do in 'Dungeon 101,' too. In this dungeon's records, the aide-de-camp scribe-dono was summoned at the same time as the original monster was set."

In the illustration in 'Dungeon 101,' what's being summoned is a paper clip with eyes stuck on it.

"That's a subtly infuriating design, this thing."

"In this way, even when a simple inanimate monster is summoned in the tutorial, it appears to be set up to hold the minimum intelligence and conversational ability needed to serve as a guide."

Because it was the English version. That said, the fatal problem lay not in the design but in the feeble AI, so it would have come to the same thing whether it looked like Sun Wukong or not.

(Now that you mention it, I'm a stand-in for a thing like that…)

"So the very first thing really is monster summoning, then."

(Dungeon structures differ between the tower type and the cave type, and there are cases where it's the monsters who dig directly rather than a dungeon function. And there are surely cases where no traps are used at all. But a dungeon with no monsters whatsoever is the exception among exceptions.)

The Library-City Dungeon employed many humans, Asura, and Beasts on fiefs or stipend rice, but of course there were the Shiso (Asura) and the Master's retainers, and the rats doled out to some of the Beasts were dungeon monsters too.

"Incidentally, according to the book, in pirate-ship dungeons the guide role is often a parrot. Sometimes a parakeet or a gray parrot, of course. A gray parrot can use simple English and manage greetings and the like, but as it is, it would surely fall short as a guide."

"What in the world was this dungeon's guide supposed to be, I wonder."

(Library PR newsletters and such often have a character drawn on them, but… if anything, I rather feel the Master is the one who corresponds to that.)

"Various possibilities are conceivable, but nothing can be said for certain."

(As an extreme example, the 'Encyclopedia Dungeonica' records a case where the guide is John as a child and the adjutant John as an adult. This is probably owing to the fact that the skull of John the Baptist, who was beheaded, is held by several churches at once. With monster summoning, as opposed to reincarnation, that sort of thing is possible too.)

This, transmitted to Japan, became the tale of "the skull of Lord Yoritomo in his childhood." Incidentally, because the further-shortened form of the feminine of "Johannes" in Mountain-Dutch comes out as "Hanna," the otherworld Kansai-area private railway "Hanna Electric Railway" (its trains being European-made, among other reasons) uses a Mountain-Dutchman as its mascot character.