Fanfic / I Woke Up As a Dungeon, Now What?

I Woke Up As A Dungeon, Now What is an ongoing^note Updated as of March 2023 Worm fanfic by Aku-Dono, published at SpaceBattles.com (here) and partially published at Sufficient Velocity.com (here).

Following Golden Morning, Taylor finds herself turned into a dungeon (the RPG kind, not the prison kind). Stuck on a fantasy world filled with adventurers, magic, and other weird things, the Queen of Escalation struggles to find her way and, of course, not die. She quickly learns, however, that survival might require far more than merely building a formidable dungeon...

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Tropes in this work:

• A Mother to Her Men: Well, bugs, and pixies, and birds, but Taylor makes a point of treating her minions very well - mainly because unlike her previous bugs on Bet, they are sentient (in that they feel emotions and have opinions).
• Anaphora: How some of Taylor's minion options are described:
  Small Lesser Ant – 2 mana, +1 upkeep
  The small, the brave, the loyal! (`･ω･´)ゞ
  
  Small Lesser Bee – 2 mana (0 impurity to research [-100% familiarity bonus!]), +1 upkeep
  Hard-working, hard-stinging!
• Animal Eye Spy: After the adventurers start taming some of the minions she creates, Taylor discovers that she can still see and hear through the tamed minions. It's unclear if this is something all dungeons can do, or if it's some quirk of Taylor's unique situation.
• Anti-Frustration Features: The dungeon system has several built in:
  • Every room in a dungeon must be accessible on foot from the dungeon's entry hall. If a dungeon puts a pit trap in a hallway, there must be a ledge wide enough to cross on one side, and if a dungeon puts a room above or below another room the system automatically provides stairs.
  • Taylor can change around her rooms, minions, and features, but only while there are no adventurers inside; she can't remake the dungeon while people are in it. However, see Loophole Abuse below.
  • Similarly, while a dungeon can create doors that require keys or puzzle-solving to unlock, those doors must be unlockable using only items or information found within the dungeon.
  • If an adventurer somehow manages to get "out of bounds" (such as by falling off the plateau that is Taylor's third floor), they are teleported back to where they left the dungeon area.
  • While you can't move down if the floor below you is full, if you try to move up when the floor above you is full you are teleported up to the next open floor (or to the surface if all floors above you are full).
  • Higher-level monsters and hazards apparently can't be summoned on the dungeon's early levels (Taylor has yet to grow enough levels to see exactly how this is enforced, but it's a well-known rule of dungeons).
  • And in addition to all the built-in stuff, the ritual system lets adventurers force changes on the dungeon if they really want to, such as creating artificial shortcuts or secondary entrances to bypass especially nasty floors.
• Anti-Grinding: At least in regards to materials - if an adventurer kills a creature which they are vastly superior to, they are unlikely to get any drops, and the drops they do get are not going to be particularly valuable.
• Assassination Attempt: The king is pragmatic enough to keep his living chambers securely on the ground, instead of higher up.
  According to tradition, it should have been at the top of the central tower, the highest point of the building, a beautiful and luxurious room with an incomparable view of the countryside, but as his predecessor had fallen to his death after a mysterious failure of the thaumaturgic elevator, Medyrsjn thought it wise to relocate his sleeping quarters to a more grounded location.
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Maryll gets distracted by everything around her, to the point where her inability to stay focused infuriates a veteran adventurer.
• Bee-Bee Gun: Taylor has a variety of bee and bee-adjacent minions:
  • Giant wasps are one of her go-to combat minions, as they can fly, have a nasty sting, and as they are "all angry, all the time" need no encouragement.
  • While regular honeybees are not as useful for combat, as they don't become aggressive unless attacked or someone damages their wax structures, they are a go-to utility minion because they can build wax structures. Moreover, the honey they produce is a useful food source for her other minions, reducing their upkeep, and turns out to be highly flammable.
  • Harrier bees can fire their stingers and become Taylor's first ranged combatants.
• Beige Prose: The Empress-In-All-But-Name had a tendency to write all her notes in an extremely brief manner, to the extent that entire books have been published trying to analyze them. She also tended to leave said notes in the margins of books she read, so much so that an entire book was written covering the bibliography of every book she wrote in.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Taylor's starting minions are bugs, unsurprisingly. Her first dungeon floor also automatically produces bugs as part of being set as an insect floor. These can't be controlled, but do provide her minion bugs (at least, the insectivorous ones) with an unlimited supply of food.
• Born of Magic: The mana dungeons release is aligned to match its minions, and very occasionally that mana will cause the spontaneous creation of a creature matching that minion type on the surface (so for example, a dungeon with a lot of pixie minions will see the occasional pixie appear on the surface near the dungeon). Unlike dungeon minions, these spontaneous creatures are fully real once created, not tied to their parent dungeon and able to further reproduce on their own.
• Bug War: The first two floors of Taylor's dungeon could be considered a small scale version of this, seeing how everything in it - including her pixies - are either arthropods or have insectoid traits.
• But Not Too Challenging: Karyn's pride causes her to flip-flop back and forth on whether she wants Taylor to go easy on the party, or all-out anything-short-of-death. She gets upset if she feels she's being coddled, but can't handle the psychological warfare and endless dirty tricks when Taylor is getting serious. Taylor finds her inconsistency annoying.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Maryll, easily. She's lazy, laid back and makes most of her decisions based on what is fun, seeing nothing wrong with befriending a sentient dungeon, and even finding Taylor's giant spiders jumping on her cute, since she knows they won't actually hurt her, something she readily accepted the moment it was explained to her.
  • This actually causes some problems, as when Ulfric, Karyn, Gwen and Maryll try a mock run through Taylor's first two levels, Maryll's inability to stay focused, take the training situation seriously or follow the orders she's given when she gets distracted has Karyn furious at her.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: Each of the seven kinds of spell crystal has a specific color, and these are occasionally used as shorthand or by people who can't pronounce the actual crystal names.
• Combat Pragmatist: As far as Taylor is concerned, good sportsmanship gets hit on the head and dragged into an alley to have its throat cut and its pockets emptied.
  Glancing up at the ceiling, she said, "That was dirty, Taylor!"
  If she hadn't realized 'fighting clean' wasn't exactly my thing, nor was it the thing of anyone who wanted to win, then she clearly needed more training.
• Comes Great Insanity: Dungeon contracts are designed for wild animals. A human who makes such a contract can grow in power unnaturally fast, nurtured by the Dungeon, but Ulfric insists that the power always goes to their head and turns them into amoral greedy killers.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: The Great Khan Khozluf receives so many implied death threats that he actually grows bored and starts rating them in his head.
• The Corruption: Implied - the planet has things on it called impurities, and awards Taylor for removing them - namely, by eating them. Taylor wonders if that means that the Planet wants to wipe out human life, or if there is something much more complicated going on.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Taylor sends a message, "Look this way, not at the portal," just before Karjn, Ulfric, and Tyr go through the portal and violently kill the people who had been chasing Jaya. Naïa, fortunately for her own peace of mind, listens.
• Crapsack World: While leagues better than the absolute hellhole of a universe Taylor came from, the world she arrived in (or at least the part where she ended up) isn't a nice place to live in - she's in a desert on the borders between two very powerful empires, who are not only rivals, but also regularly raid the area in the middle to loot dungeons, often killing them due to overlooting the place. As most of the towns in the region depend on dungeons to make a living, this has pushed most of them to the brink of collapse - the nearest village to Taylor, which can barely be considered a village, is on its last legs due to crop failure and poverty.
  • It's also implied that the two empires deliberately killed off all of the dungeons in order to keep Central poor, to act as a buffer between the two of them, which is supported by Taylor doing the math and realizing that with the mana gain from adventurers fighting minions and/or dying in the dungeon, the only way a dungeon could die from overlooting is if the minions didn't attack the invaders at all, which is practically unthinkable for normal dungeons.
  • An attempt to feed Taylor the core of a dead dungeon reveals how this could have happened in horrifying terms: when she absorbs it, she's infected with something called the Curse of the Firstborn, which causes her to lose much more mana than usual through the chests.
  • As more is revealed about the world—or at least the region of it that Taylor finds herself in—the more this trope comes into play. The two empires Central is sandwiched between are both monstrous in their own ways—one practices widespread slavery, one practices genocide, both are heavily racist and ruthless, and both treat Central itself as not only completely expendable, but as a buffer zone to deliberately cripple and oppress. Since Central is where the races from both empires intermingle, they're caught up in the horrible racism and practices that both empires do, since both empires have thoroughly infiltrated Central.
• Crazy-Prepared: Peotyr Medyrsjn, the King of Central, is stated to have "twenty contingency plans at all times, in case the first ten fail". Fittingly, what ends up killing him is a chance encounter with a half-dead mercenary killing anyone he encounters.
• Creepy Good: Even when the village is firmly satisfied that Taylor is an ally, her bugs remain frightening, by design.
  The wasp's mandibles opened. Its wings buzzed rhythmically. It was a chuckle, but the overall effect was freaky enough to make him shudder. Wasps had a resting 'I'mma rip your face off' face, and having one doing that within arm grab of himself was… unsettling.
• Cue the Flying Pigs: Ulfric declares that if Kamella can actually convince the dungeon to coexist peacefully instead of murdering all comers, then he'll shave his beard off. By the time Tyr returns to the village, Ulfric is beardless.
  "Wait, it worked?" Tyr asked in disbelief.
  Ulfric just grunted.
• Curse: Ordinarily it's impossible to over-farm a dungeon, because fighting its monsters grants it more mana. However, the "Curse of the Firstborn" causes dungeons to spontaneously manifest extra treasure chests and respawn them when they're collected, which can drain mana at unsustainable rates if overused.
• Deadly Euphemism: Getting "Eighteen'd" is a euphemism for someone being drowned on floor 18 of the Magnus dungeon.
• Deal with the Devil: Monsters who contract with a dungeon form a mutually beneficial relationship, where the contractors extend the dungeon's reach, and in turn they are strengthened when they complete its tasks. However, it is also possible for humans to form such contracts — which allows both the human and dungeon to grow very quickly. Ulfric insists that contracts are not meant for humans and that the power invariably drives them mad. The official term is "warlock" and it carries an automatic death sentence.
• Death by Irony: The King of Central has countless contingency plans and manages to evade most of his assassins and kill another, only to be killed by a random, half-dead mercenary who didn't even recognize him and was just lashing out at anyone he could find.
• Determinator: Taylor's situation as a dungeon is precarious, but that won't stop her from persevering.
  In terms of strength, I was already beaten.
  In terms of information, I knew nothing, and they knew everything.
  In terms of stealth, I was a giant green blot in a desert.
  In terms of evasion, I was completely immobile.
  By most standards, it was hopeless.
  Like I said earlier, familiar territory.
• Didn't Think This Through: Ulfric has stories of "Dungeons that fucked up" by trying to get clever without considering the consequences.
  • One dungeon had a Pixie Floor and a Shade Floor right next to each other. Since adjacent floors bleed over to each other, this creates a problem because pixies naturally glow and shades can only operate in shadows, causing the pixies to weaken the shades.
  • Another dungeon thought to link its Kobold Floor and its Slime Floor (floors 3 and 15 respectively) in order to cover for each other's weaknesses. However, doing so let adventurers skip the intervening floors, including floor 7 which was apparently one of the worst Ulfric ever dealt with, and get straight to the valuable loot on the 15th floor.
• Divide and Conquer: Taylor's second floor uses a fiendishly effective combination of ambience, infrasound, magical low-level fear, and carefully selected illusions, to split up the delvers and spook them into attacking each other. Even Taylor is surprised how well it works, having to intervene to stop the test team from outright killing each other.
• The Dog Bites Back: Great Khan Khozluf is a former slave put on the throne to be a Puppet King, ordered around by everybody in his court and receiving so many death threats that he grew utterly numb to them. When a Humanoid Abomination decided to make him its main minion, Khozluf gets revenge against his tormentors by claiming they prevent him from serving his new master — a lot of influent Khans get gruesomely killed as a consequence, and Khozluf starts to actively enjoy and relish his status as the Great Khan.
• Druid: They exist apparently, as mentioned in one of the first bits of human dialogue:
  “Druids be blessed… it’s a dungeon.”
• Due to the Dead: When the villagers relocate to live near Taylor, she's taken aback to learn that many of them have held onto their loved ones' remains, waiting to feed them to a dungeon, which is apparently their custom. While the bodies are certainly valuable resources to her, she's unsure how she feels about eating their families.
  Kamella: I prefer to look at this way: all these people who cared for and loved us are doing all they can to protect us, even in death.
• Dungeon-Based Economy: The entire planet functions this way; areas with live dungeons flourish, whereas those without eventually become uninhabitable. Also Deconstructed - the bigger powers in the region have raided dungeons for goods so many times that they apparently killed quite a few of them, which has forced several towns in the area into poverty. A later chapter reveals that no new ones have appeared for a while before Taylor's showed up. The closest village to Taylor is deliberately trying to hide her existence, since she will be of huge interest to them. It's implied the dungeons were deliberately killed off to keep Central poor, so that the two empires - the Khanites and the Velthians - can use it as a buffer zone between them. Taylor more or less confirms this when she does the math and realizes that the dungeons could only have starved like that if they didn't gain any mana from fighting with invaders, making it far more likely that they were killed deliberately.
  • Also, there's some explanation for how such a system could work - dungeons can gain mana from fighting and killing adventurers, encouraging them to offer things that might lure adventurers into them. The adventurers on the other hand gain various useful materials and items from it, and the presence of a dungeon in the first place releases mana into the environment, which magically promotes growth and life. Thus, people and dungeons normally exist in a symbiotic relationship.
• Dungeon Bypass: During her experimentation, Taylor creates a small passage connecting one of her rooms directly to her core hallway, which she recognises would normally be a bad idea — but in this case, the point is to provide a storage area plus shortcut for her own minions.
  That's why I would cram it full of wasps and spiders.
• Easy Logistics: Initially Subverted - Taylor has to use her powers to maintain everything, which takes a massive drain on her income. She later eases this by converting her floors into a specialty floors, which reduce upkeep for a type of minion and unlocks more varies of minion. For example, her 'bug floor' provides her bug minions with an unlimited food supply that costs her nothing, while also removing the bug's upkeep from her mana costs.
• Eating Optional:
  • Downplayed: Taylor's minions and contracts can sustain themselves on her mana without eating, but it increases their upkeep costs.
  • Non-dungeon life can survive off ambient mana in a pinch. It's not pleasant and leaves you weakened, but you can't actually starve to death unless you're in a very mana-poor region like post-war Central.
• Empathic Environment: Taylor is one - as her dungeon grows, the world around her changes. She started in a desert, but after after beginning to interact with people and creatures, grass begins to spring up around her and animals are attracted to her. This is later shown to be the case for every dungeon on the planet.
• Epic Fail: One of Taylor's attempted traps, a large roller, gets caught on a wire and falls down wrong, resulting in it sliding past the (thankfully friendly) party exploring her first floor and setting off every single trap along the way.
• Everything Fades: Any outside object in a dungeon, including living creatures and dungeon minions, rapidly disintegrate the minute they are left unattended on the floor or for living creatures, die. Apparently, they are made out of mana or impurities, and once they are left or die, they turn back into mana. For minions, this prevents their bodies from being hacked up for parts, unless you have someone that can use Harvest on them. And for outside objects, this prevents people from building structures or modifying the interior of a dungeon, unless you can brew an 'essence of permanence' potion and apply it to the object.
• Everyone Has Standards: Killing a dungeon or even messing with a dead dungeon's core is treated as monstrous by almost everyone. Ever Karjn, the most pragmatic of the heroes, visibly hesitates to pick up a dead dungeon's core.
• Evil vs. Evil: The two Empires fighting over Central: The Khanites are a horde of barbarians whose culture is built on slavery and Might Makes Right, while the Velthians are actively attempting a program of genocide against the Khanites. The Ariman Empire, meanwhile, is incredibly isolationistic and xenophobic to the point where any Ariman who leaves the country can never return. Central seems to be the only faction whose leaders aren't total monsters.
• Excuse Me While I Multitask: Taylor's usual specialty is still going strong. Even by Dungeon standards, her multitasking is nothing short of monstrous, allowing her to directly micro-manage all of her monsters the way she use to do her insect swarm. This mean that rather then their natural, low-level combat instincts, her minions fight with her two years and an apocalypse worth of combat experience.
• False Flag Operation: Central's King is behind a rebel movement which supposedly wants to kill him, knowing that both the Khanites and Velthians will both think that the other is behind it the way things are set up.
• Familiar: Taylor's pixie counts as this, since it isn't one of her minions, but is instead a creature 'contracted' to her. It can also leave the dungeon, something her minions cannot do yet (Taylor finds out early on that her pixie can be upgraded to lead minions out of the dungeon with it).
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Khanites and Velthians do not like each other, to the point that the Velthians are willing to kill children and toddlers merely because they have Khanite blood in their veins. Apparently, this is because the Khanite Empire invaded Velthia sometime in the past and enslaved everyone who lived there. To this day, the Khans still see Velthia as a source of slaves, even if it is now an independent kingdom.
    That the children and toddlers they put to the flame had nothing to do with the vast armies that had once conquered their lands was an insignificant detail.
  • Meanwhile, a Velthian inquisitor rescues a married couple from bandits, accepts their grateful thanks, then sees that the wife is black skinned and immediately cuts her head off.
• Fantastic Slur: Velthian extremists refer to ethnic Khannites as "black-bloods".
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • Since their leaders are named Khans and they formerly were quite an aggressive nation, the Khannites obviously have shades of the Mongols.
  • Central is often compared to pre-WW2 Poland for being a very poor country stuck between two nations hating the crap out of each other, right before a huge conflict.
  • The Ariman Empire is a little tricky. Obviously, the isolationism and mention of a Great Wall are reminiscient of Imperial China, but one resident's name sounds Arab and their physical phenotype is fair skinned and haired.
• Femme Fatale: The Velthian ambassadress has an impressive and attractive figure, with an outfit designed more to accentuate it than cover it, but the king "wouldn't bed her for all the wealth in Velthia." In fact, he has already refused such an offer, considering her "A beautiful poisonous flower".
• Fertile Feet: The effect of a dungeon on local mana is such that Taylor's mere presence causes a desert wasteland to steadily turn into lush grassland.
• Foreshadowing: Karjn is one of the few characters motivated by genuine patriotism when it comes to helping Central, with others motivated by money, revenge, or loved ones. This is because she's actually the current king's daughter and heir.
• Functional Magic: Several different types.
  • Mana enhancement and Skills are Inherent Gifts: anyone can use mana to enhance their physical abilities with the proper training. Skills, meanwhile, are something you either are born with or aren't, though they may require practice to use.
  • Evocation magic appears to be a form of Theurgy, petitioning the "spirits" to produce various effects in exchange for mana. This requires a spell crystal and the proper invocations in High Druidic, but if those parts are done correctly it seems to always work.
  • Rituals are likewise a form of Theurgy, petitioning the planet to modify the rules of the dungeon system in various ways in exchange for the ritualist doing things the planet likes. Unlike with evocation, rituals can fail even if you do everything right simply because the planet isn't paying attention or doesn't like what you are asking for.
  • We also have Alchemy Is Magic (which seems to involve brewing potions and elixirs from various plant and animal products), and thaumaturgy (the art of building fabrials powered by ambient mana).
• Genius Loci: There's Taylor, obviously, since it's a A Dungeon Is You Super-Trope, but it's also implied the planet she ended up on is this, as it rewards her for removing 'impurities', and dungeons are "born from a covenant made by the Planet", so we know it can make covenants, implying something like a mind.
• Giant Spider: Taylor possesses many, and uses them for combat and for interacting peacefully with friends. Varieties include:
  • Normal spiders, which resemble gigantic jumping spiders.
  • Webweavers, which weave both sticky and non-sticky webs.
• Green Aesop: Central is a desolate wasteland due to both Empires looting all its dungeons to death.
• Happiness in Slavery: Taylor is bemused by her pixie being keen on a contract of servitude, to the point of being willing to fight to get it.
  As I watched it toil from the entrance of my dungeon, I mused that for an intruder who had just made its way into my dungeon, threatened my existence and forced a contract out of me, that pixie was an awfully earnest worker.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
  • Pretty much every variety of pixie is considered a nuisance at worse, only a threat if they distract you from other monsters. The ones that cast illusions can only do so for a quarter of a second every four seconds and casting larger illusions tires them quickly. Meanwhile the ones that can control people by touch can only do so extremely briefly, are functionally mindless and wander aimlessly, and die upon using their ability. Taylor quickly figures out how to chain illusions to keep them up longer and that tiny illusions directly over someone's eyes aren't remotely tiring. As for the others, she can control them remotely to set traps, make people wander into traps, or simply attack their allies.
  • She also suspects that she can get more than the usual mileage from mobile grasses.
    To hear Ulfric talk, grasses were mostly good at incapacitation, and not much else. My own experience with powers that disabled or hindered opponents told me they were amongst the most dangerous that existed, if they were used properly. I had a feeling most dungeons weren't able to bring out the best from them.
    I was not 'most dungeons'.
• Hidden Backup Prince: Karjn turns out to actually be Aeresya, King Medyrsjn's daughter and the rightful princess (and later Queen) of Central.
• Hypocrite: Duke Geilr makes a plea for more aid to be sent to his people, but he doesn't actually know anything about it himself.
  He would have been more convincing, the king told himself, if he hadn't been calling out famine with a protruding belly and complaining about poverty while covered in gold and jewels.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Ulfric has killed people in his time, either to defend himself, or because he was being paid and they deserved it, or else he regretted it. Karjn is a bit different.
  Ulfric: She isn't the type to regret things, though. She'll break any rule or even kill a friend if it means her precious rebellion gets an advantage, all the while justifying it as the greater good. I know her type. I don't trust her.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Justified with Lilua. She has a particularly useful Skill but that also makes her a target for both empires. In her view, it's better to keep your head down and pretend you don't have any Skill at all rather than catch their attention.
• I'm a Humanitarian: To a dungeon, fresh human corpses taste like honey, which Taylor finds disturbing. The "impurities" in the bodies are very valuable resources either way, though.
• I Shall Taunt You:
  • Raffaa uses his Howling Rage ability to make a dire boar single him out and furiously charge at him — right through a prepared field of magical ice, where the group is able to disrupt its footing and reach its vulnerable underbelly.
  • He later tries it on Taylor's minions, but since they're controlled by her directly, she can ignore it. She can feel the impulse to attack him, but it's not overpowering.
• Implied Death Threat:
  • Headmaster Lightblade of Central's magical academy is functionally placed under house arrest "for his own protection" when he refuses the Great Khan's demands to have full access to his library, something he's told might result in his life being endangered.
  • Kamalla tries warning Shade that his questions might be unhealthy to ask when he gets a bit too nosy.
  • Khozluf receives so many from the Assassin's Guild that he starts rating them, such as considering a bead in his soup inspired but a knife hilt placed on his chest while he sleeps "crude but direct".
• Insistent Terminology: Karjn insists on calling cliff rooms "Fucking cliff rooms" and makes Gwen do likewise, due to her sheer hatred for them.
• It Can Think: Taylor provokes this reaction from Adventurers, and there is a very Justified reason why this is a bad thing - a dungeon that can use tactics is usually controlled by a warlock. This idea is ruled out early on by the natives, though, because Taylor hasn't tried to murder them all for extra mana - something a Warlock would do.
  • This trope is invoked early on, as the veteran dungeon-diver notes that a fully sapient dungeon would grow into something terrifying, if given time and mana to build up. He gets considerably more calm about it upon learning that Taylor is not an omnicidal murder machine like all other dungeons, and is actually a fairly good person.
• It Is Dehumanising: The Velthians' attitude towards any people from Khannite blood, mixed or pure. And since Khannites are not people, well, it's okay to murder them any time you find one.
  • Kamella insists upon calling Taylor "she" and "her" once she establishes her identity as a human girl who happens to be stuck within a dungeon core.
• Kansas City Shuffle: The king lights three out of five candles in his room in an unusual pattern, to give any foreign agents the impression that he's sending a message. In fact, the message is based on the position he leaves the matchbox in.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • The Velthian Empire's go-to punishment for heresy and cavorting with Khanites is the pyre. Oh, and the Empress is considered merciful when she lets the condemned be strangled before.
  • After some experimentation, Taylor realizes that the honey produced by her giant bees is highly flammable. Combined with hollow balls of beeswax reinforced with spider web and pixies that shoot fire she is able to create a variety of incendiary traps and weapons to unleash on unsuspecting invaders.
• King Incognito: Karjn is secretly daughter of the current king of Central.
• Language Barrier: Taylor, in an attempt to communicate with some of the locals, tries having one of her spiders write out what she is trying to say. As the natives speak an entirely different language than she does, they have no idea what she is writing.
  • She then attempts to communicate with them via drawing pictures. While this does end up working, it takes several guesses for them to figure out what, exactly, she means. For example, they have no idea she is a person stuck inside a dungeon core]].
    • The next interlude, however, reveals that Kamella, the adventurer who first attempted talking to her, actually did figure this out, but was not completely sure she was correct.
  • Eventually, she is able to come up with a system whereby she has minions point at words written on a wall just outside of her "disintegrate everything" radius.
  • Finally, after they rescue a little girl with enchanted glasses that can translate anything, Taylor becomes able to communicate using pixies projecting illusions of written words in full sentences.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Taylor insisting on saving a little girl who, while in an unpleasant situation isn't in any noticeable danger, in the middle of an already complicated operation ends up earning not only considerable goodwill with more important people they have to save, but also provides resources to make the operation easier. It also turns out the girl has enchanted glasses that can translate almost any language, including English, making communication with Taylor far easier.
• Lemony Narrator: The voice of the menu Taylor can pull up is written like this.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • As Taylor finds out, there is an easy way for her to generate extra mana without fighting/killing people - kill the random beasties that lurk around her dungeon, then take their corpses into the said dungeon, which eats them and turns them into mana. She also finds out that just sparring with adventurers gets her a fair amount of mana.
  • A room has to have at least one entrance/exit open or the system takes action, but as Taylor notes, and takes advantage of, that doesn't mean that she can't use her bugs to put fake walls over a door that someone is near as long as the other entrance is open. And the system only checks at certain intervals, so Taylor can briefly block all entrances to a room if need be.
    • Hallways do not have to be accessible on foot as long as the rooms they connect have a valid path for access. This lets Taylor make "bug chutes", hallways near the ceiling of select rooms that she stuffs with bugs, allowing her to rapidly redeploy her bugs or attack from the rear or sides in a way not easily counterable.
    • Once she figures out how to make wax-and-web walls, she also realizes she can selectively force people down certain paths by ensuring that there's always more than one way to get to a room, but then blocking the ones she doesn't want them to take. Because there is always a path to the room, the system doesn't punish her.
    • A room has to be accessible, but Taylor figures out that the entrance/exit can be a shortcut that leads to an entirely different floor. This lets her create a single disjointed room that can be accessed by the third floor, while her core is only accessible by a room on the second floor, hidden by illusions, and since her fourth four doesn't have a specialization, there's no clue to tell where the shortcut is.
  • Pixie floors are rare among dungeons because even the more advanced varieties of pixie are rarely lethal on their own. Even illusion-generating Luminous Pixies aren't normally seen as dangerous as the illusions only last a second or so at most. However, Taylor soon realizes that by taking advantage of her supernaturally good multitasking and control over her minions she can use multiple luminous pixies in sequence to generate constant lifelike illusions and completely deceive even experienced adventurers. Also, the illusions can be projected right on top of people's eyes, which allows her to show different illusions to different people and throw whole groups into chaos, separate them, and funnel them into traps custom-made for each person's abilities. Combined with the ability to briefly mind control people using Lost Souls and the fear aura generated by Ravens and she is able to turn her 2nd and 3rd floors into complete horror shows. During one exercise against experienced adventurers, she manages to nearly get the party members to attack each other out of paranoia, even though they know it's just an exercise.
• Love Ruins the Realm: Virtually everything about the atrocious shape this setting is currently in can be traced back to Emperor Magnyl's homosexuality and unwillingness to bed a woman even to sire the heir that might have held his realm together.
• Made of Magic: Pretty much everything in a dungeon besides the structure itself is made of mana.
• Made of Phlebotinum: Everything in this setting revolves around mana and dungeons (which produce mana). Every form of life requires mana to survive, and all the magic and fabrial-tech runs off mana. Similarly, virtually all resources are harvested from dungeons in one way or another (even the regular flora and fauna is descended from the organisms dungeons spontaneously create), and dungeons are the only safe source of mana.
• Magic Enhancement: The most basic power of humans in this setting is the ability to use Mana to enhance their personal physical abilities and make their gear more effective. Even a raw recruit like Gwen is a bit stronger, faster, and tougher than pure biology would indicate, and a veteran like Ulfric has skin like steel and can hit hard enough to pulverize a normal person with a simple punch.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Khannites and Velthians who fall in love have to deal with this. And apparently Velthian/Ahriman marriages are also not well regarded by the Velthian extremists.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Maryk and his elder sister — he's a Pretty Boy who enjoys wearing girly attire, she's got very mannish features and works as a guardswoman.
• Master of Disguise: Maryk can pass himself off as a maid, schoolgirl, farmboy, and pretty much anyone else with ease, including changing accents on a dime.
• Master of Illusion: Taylor grows interested in pixies because of this. Individually they are weak, just flashing an image for a fraction of a second and then taking several seconds to recover. But with her administration and multitasking capabilities, they become a nightmare to fight. Her first test subjects let out a constant stream of profanity as she puts tiny illusions in front of soldiers' eyes to make her bugs invisible, conceal the timing of their attacks, or disguise them as different bugs.
  Needless to say, this particular group of trainees groaned out of my entrance, covered in sand and small bugs and with mortal wounds to their egos. They immediately started tattling to their fellow soldiers while I allowed myself a satisfied chuckle.
• Meaningful Name: Taylor eventually names her contracted Pixie Puck.
• Medal of Dishonor: The Great Khan Khozluf is known as Khozluf the Feeble as he's merely a weak slave put on the throne as a Puppet King.
• Milking the Monster: Dungeons cycle pure mana back into the environment, and that mana is required for life to survive and thrive. As soon as they discover Taylor, Kamella's tribe move to her location to take advantage of the oasis of fertility she creates.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Some of the native wildlife just looks weird - there are, for example, birds with multiple sets of wings and harpoon-like tongues. The harpoon tongued birds are apparently called Loomas.
  • Among Taylor's minions, her bees resemble a cross between bumblebees and Honeybees.
• Mixed Ancestry Is Attractive: Played with. Taylor herself doesn't have mixed ancestry, but she looks like she does by her new world's standards and once she can show images of herself, several people compliment her looks.
• Mole in Charge: As far as most people know, the Centralian Resistance is first and foremost opposed to the Puppet King that the two feuding Empires have placed on the throne of Central. Only a very small inner circle are aware that the king himself is running the Resistance.
• Monster Organ Trafficking: Virtually every part of this world's economy is built on harvesting resources from dungeons: literal monster organs, loot from treasure chests, tamed monsters, metal and stone from veins, and so on. The dungeons in turn get the mana and impurities they need to grow from adventurers fighting and dying inside them, so it's a symbiotic cycle.
• Mook Horror Show: The Queen of Escalation + swarms of illusion using pixies = a very bad time for anyone who step foot upon Taylor's second level.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Karjn is loyal to Central first and foremost, and is willing to do absolutely anything that she thinks will increase Central's chances of survival - even have Taylor contract a warlock. There's a reason for that.
• My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels: All spell incantations are in High Druidic, but nobody actually speaks High Druidic, they just memorize incantations by rote. This leads to a lot of mispronunciations, and Taylor's translation ability allows her to hear what people are actually saying every time.
• Named After Somebody Famous: Taylor's first boss, a giant beetle, is named Atlas, after her mount from Worm. Doubles as both a Mythology Gag and In Memoriam.
• Narrative Profanity Filter:
  • When Taylor loses her first three ants in moments and is left defenceless, "I was pretty sure the language I was using would have caused Skidmark to blink. And possibly give me pointers."
  • The Internal Reveal that the dungeon has a human mind and memories is quite unsettling, prompting a round of swearing followed by a decision that I Need A Drink.
    Ulfric's curses this time were in low Khanite, a vernacular far too vulgar for Kamella to have paid much attention to.
  • The gauntlet of traps on Taylor's first floor (if you're in hard mode) is enough to cause substantial trouble Ebert for experienced soldiers.
    Karjn had an impressive vocabulary, though I was a little surprised that the translation effect was able to keep up.
• Nepotism: Empress Sofja actually has a good reason for choosing her childhood friend as the general of her armies. Velthian politics are sufficiently cut-throat that it's much more important for him to be loyal than competent.
• No-Sell:
  • The first time Ulfric comes into her dungeon, Taylor has her ant minion bite his leg, but she can't even make his skin bend.
  • Rafaa outright ignores any of Taylor's physical attacks.
  • Eira, a mage, doesn't even notice Taylor's attempts to control her with a Lost Soul.
• Noodle Incident: Cirys and his friends have ended up in several scrapes as they explore their home city, but "the less said about the noodle shop incident, the better".
• Ominous Fog: Taylor's second-floor global effects include a fog which forms spooky images designed to unsettle adventurers.
• Organ Drops: When Taylor eventually gets some actual information about her pixie, it includes mention of the things a defeated pixie might drop. Taylor, who is very attached to her cute little contracted creature, immediately resolves to murder anyone who tries to rip its wings off.
• Pacifist Run: Downplayed. The inhabitants of Fort Aresya have to fight Taylor's minions in order to generate mana for Taylor, but both sides take care to keep things to sparring and pull their strikes to avoid inflicting serious injury.
• Paralysis by Analysis: Once Taylor has enough resources to make her choice of upgrades, but doesn't yet have a guaranteed steady supply of resources, she quickly becomes paralyzed on what upgrades she should take. She dithers for quite some time on upgrades to let her share Puck's senses, at times insisting they're unnecessary, only to end up buying them anyway.
• Personality Powers: Downplayed with evocation magic. All evocations are aligned with one of seven personality traits (kindness, calmness, knowledge, justice, passion, determination, and bravery), and it's easiest to cast evocations aligned with your dominant personality traits. So, for example, because lightning is aligned with justice, it's easier to use lightning evocations if you have a strong sense of fairness and desire for justice.
• Poverty Food: Food is in short supply for the village, and they end up subsisting largely on the (regular sized) bugs produced from Taylor's first floor.
  He wasn't a fan of it, and he was pretty sure that nobody in the village was, but it was still better than tasting tengrape in everything.
• Properly Paranoid: Those experienced with how Taylor does things quickly learn to be paranoid of everything. Gwen insists a relatively simple climb down will probably be filled with monster pits, trip wires, and giant falling boulders. She's right on every count.
• Puppet King:
  • The King of Central is clearly meant to be this by the two empires boxing Central in. The current King has only lasted as long as he has by making sure as to delay and delay to keep from giving any ground to either, which would certainly result in an assassination from the empire that felt snubbed as well as making sure they each think his resistance movement is the other's doing.
  • The Great Khan Khozluf is similarly just a slave who was elevated to ruler of the nation so the other Khans could order him around. Everyone knows being the actual ruler just means putting yourself in the crosshairs of every member of the Assassin's Guild, so they instead used a scapegoat.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Taylor's first pixie unleashes the full force of its oversized eyes becoming sad in an effort to persuade her to build a Pixie Fountain. Unfortunately Taylor just doesn't have the necessary resources yet.
  ...but I swore I would, as soon as I could.
• A Rare Sentence: Being a dungeon brings Taylor a lot of new experiences.
  If they were going to use my magical fertilizer powers, then I was at least allowed to steal a few chickens.
  And that line went straight in the list of 'things I'd never expected to say, ever'.
• Red Herring: Even if Taylor uses illusions to hide a path through her maze, that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
  "See, if she wants to hide something, then that means there's probably something that matters this way."
  There wasn't. It was just more empty clearings and more illusions.
• Reset Button: Save for minion deaths, anything that adventurers do to a dungeon is undone/repaired when they leave. And if a dungeon has enough respawners, even the deaths are undone as well.
• Respawning Enemies: Dungeons have the option to purchase "spawn rooms", each of which can be linked to a certain number of minions. If those minions are killed, they reincarnate in the spawn room after sufficient time has passed. After Taylor gets spawners and confirms that respawned minions retain their memories and personalities, she starts allowing the inhabitants of Fort Aresya to kill her minions for loot drops.
• Rope Bridge: The dungeon system requires all obstacles to have a possible way to cross them, so when Taylor uses hallway Loophole Abuse to make a 200' pitfall with no ledge on the side, the system retaliates by adding a metre-wide strip of dirt and rock spanning the centre "in complete disregard of gravity". But that's okay; Taylor can work with that just fine. Especially when she can do things like covering the underside with giant ants ready to yank parties off their feet. Or replace segments of it with platforms that can be dropped out from underfoot, then restored before the system has time to recognise that the path is broken.
• RPG Mechanicsverse:
  • All There in the Manual: Taylor actually has a menu of sorts that tells her some information about everything pertaining to her dungeon. It's not very reliable, though.
  • Dungeon Bypass: Adventures are capable of tunneling through Taylor's walls, though she can upgrade them to stop this/make it harder. It's also possible to cast powerful spells on a dungeon to break some of the dungeon's "rules" wide open—but it works both ways, allowing the dungeon to break its own rules too. One such rule is a party size limit per floor, which in turn allows the dungeon to bring in all of its minion from all floors to anywhere else in the dungeon without penalty. Another is to create a tunnel to bypass entire floors, but this requires casting a long and difficult spell from within the dungeon...when said dungeon is pulling out all the stops to kill you with everything it has.
  • Dungeon Crawling: What adventurers do. What dungeons want them to do, since killing adventurers nets dungeons extra mana and other resources (and just fighting adventurers nets a considerable amount of mana regardless).
  • Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Taylor can put these in her dungeon. She initially has no interest in adding them, since they are an enormous drain on mana. Since dungeons get extra mana by killing adventurers, it's generally assumed the chests are meant as bait. After she decides to allow a nearby village to move closer to her, she begins adding some loot chests in for them, in trade for them regularly delving to supply her with mana.
  • The Maze: Once Taylor adds a pixie floor, greatly expands her insect floor, and starts testing the limitations of the dungeon system, she becomes this for unwanted guests. Between illusions and movable temporary walls she's also able to change her internal configuration on the fly, even with people inside, allowing her to send groups in circles while slowly wearing them down with traps and minions.
• Scylla and Charybdis: Central is stuck in this situation with the Velthian Empire to the South and the Khanites to the North - both empires absolutely hate each other, but are using Central as a buffer zone. Anyone who wants to do anything has to contend with them. And if Central were to try to arm itself, one of the two powers would crush it. In this respect, Central's position is actually even worse than Poland's in 1939—by a rather huge margin, no less.
• Senseless Sacrifice: A long time ago, a group of brave fishermen set out to kill the Mother of Scales, a giant sea serpent that terrorised boats. In the end, it cost them their lives, but they succeeded — and then a week later, it respawned, apparently having been contracted all along to an underwater dungeon.
• Stepford Smiler: Maryll reveals herself to be one when she offers to become a warlock for Taylor, admitting that she can't do much but she could at least help that way. When turned down, she initially believes it's because Taylor wants someone better than her.
• Spam Attack: Taylor is intrigued to see that even Ulfric is momentarily inconvenienced by a whole wall of pixies firing stun bolts at him.
• Strange-Syntax Speaker: The dominant language spoken in Central appears to use a Verb Subject Object sentence structure. This only rarely comes up because Taylor's translation function retcons her memories so she thinks she heard the words in the correct order for English, but if someone gets interrupted mid-sentence she will occasionally hear the words in the order they were spoken.
• Stripperific: Farlynn, the Velthian ambassador and spymistress, generally wears an outfit that can best be described as a ribbon and some lace. It's flimsy and tiny enough that it had to be specifically enchanted to prevent a Wardrobe Malfunction.
• Stronger with Age: Due to how the dungeon system works, the oldest dungeons are invariably stronger than younger ones as they've had more time to gather mana and create more floors and more minions. The oldest and strongest are at the bottom of the oceans and have things like giant sea serpents and krakens as minions.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: Taylor's ravens get an upgrade that allows them to cause a mild sense of fear by staring at someone. Ordinarily this could be handled by attacking the ravens responsible, but since Taylor keeps them out of sight, that doesn't work. What's left is a constant nervousness that lays the groundwork for a dramatically effective psychological warfare campaign.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Following a signal from the maid, the king of Central only pretends to sip his tea, after which his guests drink — and not long after, the guests all start coughing and choking and collapse, soon to be dead.
• A Taste of Defeat: Taylor is on both the giving and receiving end.
  • Early on, a group of adventurers complete demolish her ants and easily reach her core, only sparing her because dungeons are valuable and she isn't a threat. A short while later, a pixie does the same thing on its own. Fortunately, it just wants to make a contract with her.
  • When the adventurers come back, Taylor easily defeats one of them (Gwen) in a mock battle. Gwen is grateful that Taylor didn't kill her.
  • In Exploit 4.5, Ulfric leads a team of experienced adventurers in utterly annihilating Atlas, showing Taylor just what kind of opposition she'll face in the future, and how far she has to go before she can reliably stop even a single party of elite adventurers.
• Tastes Like Chicken: After noting what some of things she's eaten taste like (like, for example, grass tasting like a freshly cut lawn), Taylor notes that, rather mundanely, the four winged sparrows her dungeon form has eaten taste like chicken. By contrast, absorbing the ashen remains of deceased humans tastes delicious, which disturbs Taylor greatly.
• Terminally Dependent Society: Life on this world is completely dependent on dungeons. Not only are the resources harvested from dungeons the foundation of all economies, but without dungeons to cycle mana back into the environment plants cannot grow and the ecosystem collapses.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • The soldiers training against Taylor all realize how much worse things are going to be when Taylor gains access to pixies.
  • Ulfric and Karjn, the two experienced members of the party, both have this reaction to learning Taylor has cliff rooms. Besides the fact that scaling the cliffs is tiring, it leaves adventurers almost helpless against attacks and forces them to set off any traps they encounter rather than just avoiding them.
• Translator Microbes:
  • Deconstructed. Taylor was (apparently) given something that allows her to understand the language of the natives, as well as their writing. It works so well that she can't even see their written language as the words simply translate into English. It doesn't work both ways, though, which makes communication a problem; Taylor literally can't learn their language, because she never sees it.
  • A later chapter introduces a pair of glasses that allows the wearer to read any language. This proves to be the key to finally allowing Taylor to communicate with the locals in full sentences, by using Luminous Pixies to project images of words and having the glasses-wearer read them.
• Tough Leader Façade: Karjn goes to a lot of effort to keep up the "stoic unflapable leader" persona.
• Verbal Backspace:
  • Cynbel is tired of eating bugs, and wonders aloud when Taylor will get some cattle. Then he's persuaded to reconsider.
    Ceirynn: Do you really want to fight against a bunch of charging Brauhms under her control?
    Cynbel: I retract my statement.
  • While the party is describing what Taylor could do with a Lost Soul, Karjn chimes in then quickly rethinks her contribution.
    Karjn: Or just use the guy she's possessed and make him shank one of his friends... Although, that wasn't an invitation to do that to us. We're cool, right Taylor?
• Verbal Tic: Naia can't go a single scene without saying some variation of "Awawa" at least once, especially if she's surprised.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment: One of the useful aspects of Maryk pretending to be a woman is the ability to carry small items inside a brassiere.
• Villain Override: This is a power all dungeons have, but it normally costs mana, can only be done with a few minions at once, and leaves them briefly disoriented. Taylor, presumably due to her parahuman origins, can control any number of minions, for free, and give them all individual instructions with no loss of focus.
• Weak, but Skilled: Ulfric concludes this of Taylor. She doesn't have much in mana resources or levels (yet) but her sheer ingenuity and tactical mind means she's a force to not be underestimated. It helps a lot that she has full control of her minions, unlike most dungeons. This results in enemies that are normally best ignored becoming significant threats.
  • Small Lesser Ants don't have much killing power, but when they cover the underside of a narrow bridge without handholds, ready to grab you and pull you off your feet into a 200' pitfall, they're a threat even to skilled adventurers.
  • Small Lesser Spiders aren't much stronger, but their monster category includes web weavers, which means Taylor can entangle parties, set trip wires, hang mobile platforms with counterweights, blind scouts...
  • In addition to pitfalls, Taylor exploits her construction abilities to create force multipliers such as steep cliffs, where delvers can't really dodge her bugs; narrow passages connecting the ceilings of rooms with weak crumbly walls, so her flyers can move around freely but humans can't follow; mazes that can appear to move around by careful use of temporary illusions, and are full of sight-obscuring mist, making it easy to isolate party members; and actual mobile walls so she can control such paths a group follows.
  • Though, Taylor is reminded that her minions are still weak. When she allows soldiers to start killing her pixies, due to now having respawners for them, said pixies only last a couple seconds before all of them are killed.
• Wham Line:
  • From Initiative 6.6
  Maryk: The king is dead!
  • From Interlude 6.w regarding a Velthian spy,
  This 'Jaya', as she'd signed her incriminating report like it was a piece of homework, was in mortal danger.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Karjn calls out Kamalla for basically announcing to the Shade that they have a dungeon, a secret more important than all of them combined. As a result, Kamalla is to be Locked Out of the Loop so she doesn't spill any more secrets and Shade is given a familiar that both parties know is intended to spy on him for the rest of his life.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: Maryk typically pretends to be female in order to spy for Central's King, but his employer notices the boy is a little too into it.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Adding a room increases Taylor's mana capacity by 4, but also increases her daily expenses by 1. As a result, she becomes increasingly dependent on the villagers regularly challenging her monsters and topping her up, just to survive each dawn. Fortunately, since her growth and expansion also means she can provide them with more resources, they don't mind investing in her.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Velthians have hair of every imaginable color except natural Earth hair colors. Contrast the Khanites who all have black hair and the Ariman are apparently blonde.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Zigzagged. Gold coinage seems to have a use as currency but is mostly used as a component for rituals. And even a poor village like the one that springs up around Taylor has entire crates of the stuff lying around. On the other hand, natural pearls are stated to be very rare, yet one fisherman remarks they're as common as gold trinkets where he's from.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Amnassah Ar'hiemal left his Academy from the Ariman Empire because he wanted to further his studies in Central. Unfortunately, the Ariman Empire is infamously isolationist, so anyone who crosses the Great Wall once is unable to do it again.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Karjn states this when she learns the flower she cut was also an illusion, meaning she couldn't even rely on objects reacting to her actions to tell if something was an illusion or not.
• Zerg Rush: Despite Taylor having only weak monsters, Ulfric is intimidated by her ability to control all of them at once, which dungeons don't normally do.
  Ulfric: There's strength in numbers, and whoever goes in there hoping to hurt this dungeon isn't just going to be facing numbers, they'll be facing an organized army, working on terrain specially prepared to fight in by a single mind that has perfect awareness of every movement they're trying to make. They'd have a chance only because it doesn't have anything stronger than a lesser insect right now, but the moment it starts growing stronger…

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