Felicia had not become the efficient and clinical business minded person she was without a lot of effort. The biggest hurdle that had stood in front of her road to success was accepting that the majority of her struggles would be mental. The human condition craved a physical fight, a battle against something real. The modern society of Earth did very little to cater to this primal urge, instead offloading the majority of its challenges to the mental realm. Felicia had consumed every single book, article, and other forms of media pertaining to the mind and spirit for months before settling on the system she was employing. From the haze of quick tips and poorly researched conclusions, she picked of few oft-recommended techniques and perfected them. She had chosen a few neurolinguistic programming practices in combination with a mind castle as her method of coping with discipline and stress. She had partially brainwashed herself to draw joy from work and satisfaction from tasks well done. She had built herself a pristine and majestic piece of architecture, each alcove and room housing a memory or appointment. And now her castle was falling apart

The foreign force had pierced through her skin with horrific violence. She had felt a physical and mental pressure on her very being and soul the moment she woke in the forest. This slow, insidious, and suffocating front had accumulated into a wave smashing into her body and mind. And Felicia was not having any of it. Instead of standing there and watching as countless hours of hard mental work went to waste, she started to fight back. She imagined her walls strong, forced the piles driven deep into the earth into being, and the very foundation supporting the structure to the front of her mind. She used every trick in her book to fight the foreign force that was flooding through her mental space.

Flinging her eyes open, Felicia stood up. Fury scrawled across her face in hard lines. She strode over to the small gem hovering in the middle of the room. The little light coming through the doorway reflected and refracted into her eyes as she grasped for the slowly rotating thing. She felt some resistance holding her hand back, and even might have felt a few bones snap here and there, but she honestly couldn’t really care. She was unsure what she was doing, but felt it needed doing regardless. Her entire being - years of blood, sweat and tears - were represented inside that mental construct. An eternity of suffering, aeons of uncertainty and self-doubt were shoved inside its walls and twisting stairs. And this insignificant piece of rock was wrecking it.

“NO! You’re mine! NO NO NO!”

The skin covering her fingers burst as her hand slapped the crystal with the fury of a thousand suns. The moment she made contact with the clear and faceted stone, her mind stilled. The waves of unknown power rushing through her body and mind seized as she pulled on the small rock.

“NO! They promised me easy meals, NO NONONONO!”

Felicia squeezed. Her blood dripped to the floor as the crystal in her fingers quaked and creaked. The immature voice stopped its tantrum and ceased yelling into her mind. She opened her mouth a few times, flapping like a fish. A million thoughts rolled through her head, such a volume of things she wanted to say that she instead said nothing. Instead, she sat down. She was still reeling from having something else inside her mind. She was no stranger to dark and unwanted thoughts, but this… This had been something different. The moment she told the badly articulated voice she accepted, the pressure around her had built up and smashed through her skin. It had moved through her spine and skull, sucking her consciousness into the mental realm she had been building. The bastion of her self-control and discipline then started crumbling, waking the shocked woman from her slumber. Here she sat, her entire body and mind aching, her hand a mangled mess and clutching at a diamond the size of a grape.

“Why?” she heard the whiny voice say. “They said I would get food and easy prey and I could grow. Not this…”

“Who?” The word spewed from between her lips.

“They!” replied the voice with pure exasperation and indigence. “The shiny man came and told me. I said yes and slept.

Cradling her bleeding hand, Felicia is not sure how to react. The voice is obviously immature. The words that aren’t slurred are mispronounced, like a baby still learning to speak. And the voice seems to be coming from the stone in her hand. She knew this, on some level, else she wouldn't have snatched at it just now. The voice gwent silent, the rising fear she heard in the tones the obvious reason why it has chosen to stop speaking. Distracting herself from the growing pain in her hand and body, she decided to take the initiative. “What are you?”

“I’m me.”

“Right.” Felicia takes a deep breath. ”I am a human. You seem to be some form of stone. What are you?”

“Oh. I’m a dungeon.”

“You are a dungeon.”

“Yes, I’m a dungeon.”

“Do you hold prisoners?” asked Felicia, falling back on some half-forgotten medieval documentaries.

“What?”

“Are you an underground building from which it is difficult to escape?”

“No. I’m a dungeon. I eat and grow.”

“What is your purpose, as a dungeon?”

“Eat and grow.”

“No, that is a basic necessity. What do you want to do later?”

“Eat and grow more.”

The diamond in Felicia’s hand started creaking ominously as her patience was tested by the moronic answers. “So in five years, when reviewing what you have accomplished, you will be happy if is just sais; eat and grow.”

“I think so? Maybe kill some people, that would be fun.”

“You think killing people is fun?”

“Yes.”

Accidentally rubbing blood into her eyes, Felicia wondered what she was doing. “Right. I want to make a call. Where is your phone.”

“What is a phone?”

“You told me I could make a call.”

“Yes. You can shout now. Then you let me heal you, you will get coffee, and I will eat you, as we agreed.”

“I want to make a telephone call. I don’t want to call someone by shouting. And you will not eat me.”

“NO! I will eat you! You promised me, and now we have a contract. You will call, I will first aid you, and I will give you coffee. This is what we agreed upon. This will happen.”

“No.”

“YES! YOU WILL LISTEN!”

The wave of - something - flooding into Felicia’s head was crystal clear. The oppressive rush of faintly sensed energy no longer had a muddled front or vague purpose. Instead, Felicia could feel the power forcing its way through her skin, arms, bones, and organs. She wondered herself why she had trouble with this power moments before. Simply willing it to stop was so easy. Forcing it back into the small gem was not hard at all. Felicia observed something peculiar as she reversed the flow of power. Her hand ached less. The pressure felt like water, cool and refreshing as it seeped through her battered limb. Instead of stuffing it back inside the gem, Felicia wondered what would happen were she to let it soak into her wounded hand and aching digits.

“GIVE IT BACK! GIVE ME MY MANA BACK! THE SHINY MAN GAVE THAT TO ME, GIVE IT BACK!”

“Who is the shiny man?” she partially focussed on the whining voice as the power healed her hand at a visible pace.

“Bad man, I thought. Then he gave me stuff and told me I could eat more somewhere else.”

“What did he give you?” she asked.

“This!” At the triumphant cry, a turtle popped into existence right beside Felicia.

She stared at the slowly blinking beast. “A turtle? Why did the shiny man give you a turtle?”

“To eat and grow!”

“Right… What is mana?”

“Stop using it! It’s mine!”

“Right… Did you make the turtle from mana?”

“Yes. The turtle is mine too.”

“Right…” Out of her depth by a long shot, Felicia decided to take a step back. She put the gem on the floor and noticed her hand was completely back to new, only faint white marking indicating the limb had been a mangled mess minutes before. She then backed away a full metre and sat down. She closed her eyes and went through the last day like a machine. She categorised each occasion and placed each noteworthy event inside her mind palace. She filed away the important meetings she would need to schedule and diners in which she would need to forge new business connections and opportunities. Then she followed the long day to the turning point, the moment where she woke up in a forest while she was stuck in traffic mere seconds before. The events that followed after this dramatic shift in tone were hard to put in their proper place. None of the pre-planned storage areas in her mental architecture even accounted for events like these. Not even the cellar - the place where she put all the anomalies - had enough room and space for these bizarre happenings.

So she did something she had hoped to never need to do. She put her current mental construct in long-term storage and built a new one. A few facts were apparent to the woman. She was probably not on Earth anymore. The foreign energy that the crystal called mana was probably not some hyper-advanced form of nanotech that worked intuitively. The foreign flora and fauna outside this alien looking little house all were enough for her to get the picture. Her heart figuratively bled as she mothballed literal years of work in order to most efficiently take on this new challenge that now loomed above her. The desire to return to Earth was there, but muted. She had friends and family to return to, but wasn't in a great hurry. Instead, she found the thought that some other incompetent idiot would be taking over her job and role to be intolerable.

Felicia snapped her eyes open. She found herself in the weird little hut still. She saw the small little diamond lying in front of her, a meter away. She did not, however, see any of the blood she had been spilling.

“Where's my blood?”

“I ate it.”

“Right…”

“It was tasty, give me more!”

“No. Or rather, what would you do for more?”

“Kill you. OW! THat hurt! I’m sorry, I didn't break our promise, please give me back my mana!”

“Right…” Felicia closes her eyes again. She felt ready to face this new challenge for an entire ten seconds there. Indexing all that happened so far had given her a veneer of confidence. The small conversation with the crystalline idiot wiped that away. “What do you want, outside of eating and growing?”

The silence hung thick in the air. It wasn’t until Felicia took the stone in her hands again and started caressing the geometrically perfect lines that the voice resumed. “I want to be enticing…”

“Big word. Do you know what it means?” She found herself slipping into her hard-won managerial role again, trying to coax valuable information out of her dumb and incompetent subordinates.

“Yeah! I know it means that people want me, but can’t get me.”

“And what effect would that have?”

“I dunno.”

“How would you do that, then?”

“By giving them stuff while killing them!”

Her eye twitched. “What stuff?”

“Loot.”

Breaking the silence again, Felicia asked for some more clarification. “And how would you kill them?”

“Yes! With you! You kill them. Then I get the stuff. Then I give the stuff. Then I make more of you, and you kill them.”

“That…” Felicia tried very hard to find the correct words. Most subordinates do not appreciate the hard truth when they are confronted with it. What she really wants to tell them always needs to be wrapped in praise and lofty words. But alas, she found her linguistic skills incompetent in the face of this particular case. “… is the most idiotic thing I have ever heard. Are you a retarded piece of mentally deficient shit on the bottom of my shoe? Has what you call a brain ever had even a single intelligent thought?”

“Wha?”

“What’s your five-year plan? How do you plan on balancing the pull of given rewards with the danger or these murder attempts? Temporary gain put away into static storage compared to an increased risk of death? That's a sum even the dumbest of beggars can make. How would you prevent a single entity from claiming a monopoly on you, thus dictating your entire market and all that you are?”

“Uuhm.”

“From your vapid reply, I understand that you have not yet thought about these things. Let alone the completely and un-ironically retarded piece of shit business plan you just told me, have you looked outside?”

“Outside?”

“Yes. There is a massive wall around you. You are locked in.”

“Yeh. The shining man told me he’d protect me from the bad guys.”

“Did you verify his claim?”

“Verify his what?”

“I guessed not.” Felicia rubs her eyes again. She notices the lack of blood covering both her hand and face once again. It takes the magical disappearance of her blood to move her thoughts away from the massive amounts of incompetence this little stone in front of her had been spewing. “DID YOU EAT MY FUCKING CLOTHES?”

“They where delicious. Why can’t I eat you? I want to eat you!”

Then Felicia felt it. The ripples of power all around her. She felt them like a long-lost limb, some level of reality that she had never noticed until this moment. And she felt the hunger it had. The desire to eat her very flesh, bones and skin. The sheer ravenous need to consume all. And she was having none of it. “Stop,” she commanded it. And it did. The sheer absence of the desire to eat left her feeling a bit hungry. Now that she thought about it, she was starving. “What do you do here anyway? Even you wouldn’t be stupid enough to sit back and wait for stuff to wander in, so how do you eat?”

“I wait for stuff to wander in.”

“Right. Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m going to look for food, new clothes, my purse, and maybe I’ll go kick a badger.” Felicia looked at her upper arm. The toothmarks were no longer bleeding, having faded into faint scar tissue as she kept toying with the energy she stole from the stone. “Also, you need a name.”

“Ah, yeah. I can’t go outside.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t go outside, duh…”

“Right.” Felicia then grabbed the stone, ignored the panicked yelling emerging from the shiny object and stepped into the fading sunlight.