The sky grew dark as the day came to an end. Alix had arrived home after a rather physically active day and honestly just wanted to rest. However, a certain companion was rather upset about his living circumstances and would not rest until the girl fully understood his greivances.
"This was not the agreement! I should flood this place for you going back on our deal! Demon's are more honorable than you!" Mo shouted. After leaving the park Alix went to a store and got him a fish bowl. Not the requested tank but a decently large fish bowl. So obviously, the fish was not happy and expressed such the entire way back to the girl's home. "Well I need to be able to take you to school with me and carrying a tank on my back would just be uncomfortable."
"But I was promised a tank! This is a borderline salad bowl!" Alix rolled her eyes. "You were asking for too much anyway. Be glad that I even got you this I could have just stuffed you in a jar." Fear flooded the fish's eyes. "Y-yer jokin', right?" Alix ignored him while wiping off a jar that she just so happened to have in her room. Mo became uncharacteristically silent at the sight.
"Why are you talking to yourself?" Alix turned at the sound of the voice. "And where did that fish come from?" Alix's mother stood leaning against the door frame. "I am not talking to myself and I brought him from the lake." Alix answered both questions with no hesitation.
"...I see." Sala sighed, "My daughter can be so strange sometimes." She stared at the fish in the bowl quizzically. "Wasn't that lake empty or something? I thought that was why no one visited it."
That's right. It was a well known fact within Nogreni that Lake Opin was a lake that had no life within it. Now, it was not always like that but one day some few years ago all of the fish in the lake had completely disappeared without a trace. The people stopped visiting the park thinking that it was some sign of disaster or a demon's presence but no truth ever came to these theories and thus the park simply fell into obscurity.
"It is now. This was the only fish there from what I could tell. Now that I have removed him the lake is now completely void of aquatic life."
"Hmm." Sala grunted with slight amusement. "Well as long as you understand that I'm not taking care of that fish do what you want with it." Alix nodded to her mother. She wasn't planning on relying on her mother for this anyway so this would pose no problems for her in the long run. "Alright. Then I'll leave you to it." Sala started to leave the girl's room taking one last glace in just before leaving.
"Mo are you really still sulking? You really are such a drama queen." Sala smiled to herself seeing her daughter talking to the fish. She turned to face a picture that was on the wall just outside of the girl's room. 'Just like old times. Right, Breine?' The woman left her daughter's doorway and the painting of young Alix smiling brightly, Sala Ren crouched down beside her smiling warmly whilst embracing the girl and a man with brown hair fixing his clearly worn out glasses awkwardly.
...
Alix lay still. Darkness was all that the girl could see. This should make sense seeing as she had laid down to fall asleep and yet, something was off about the sensations she was feeling. She was laying in her bed and yet it felt as though she was standing straight up. Her sheet were warm and dry so why did she feel so cold and why did the ground feel so damp?
'A dream? Or maybe a nightmare?' Alix tried to gleam anything from the darkness surrounding her. Her eyes were open she could tell that much, so it must just be that dark here. 'If only there were some light.' Alix reached her arms around her and found a wall. It seemed that she was in some sort of stone construct as the wall felt rough and as cold as the floor. Though the wall was also damp and she could not understand why.
'Am I underwater somewhere?' Alix slid her hand along the wall as she moved forward into the darkness. She moved for some minutes while taking in any information that she could gleam from the minimal sources that she had.
For one thing, this place, wherever it was, clearly was not mortal made. The material did not feel like anything that she was familiar with, though she was not one to work in construction so she could not be sure without seeing the wall. Just an educated guess based on the situation.
After walking for some time, Alix felt her hand leave the wall. It seemed that she had entered a room. She carefully took a step forward which seemed to have triggered some sort of automated activation sequence as the walls of the room began to light up. Crystals on the wall shone with an orange hue revealing the space around her including a giant pair of doors and a statue in the center of the room.
The walls and floor were an ashen blue and seemed as if they were made to absorb light. This confirmed for Alix that she was in fact in a dungeon, or at least was dreaming about one. Dungeons were the homes of demons stationed in the mortal plane and were usually made of materials from there home dimension. Alix scanned the room for anything else but didn't see anything other than two other pathways into leading to the room.
The girl decided to examine the statue in the center of the room. The statue seemed to depict a demon with four arms two of which were raised above its head as if to celebrate something and the other two extended outwards holding a glass orb of some sort. Alix felt a compulsion to touch it. Call it an act of bravery or naivete but she placed a hand on the orb. Once her hand was upon it the orb began to glow brightly and the giant doors began to open.
'Some sort of key?' Alix moved away from the statue and toward the door. On the other side of the door was something that she could never had expected. It was a lab of sorts. The right side of the room was filled with various giant containers holding liquified mana and a viscous black liquid known as ether.
In contrary to the right, the left side of the room was filled with shelves stocked with jars of various sizes and holding a variety of objects within them. 'What is this?' Alix tried to understand what the lab was for but could not even begin to guess. The contents of the jars seemed random and unnatural. Alix moved to examine the contents closer but stopped as she heard heavy foot steps approaching from the end of the room.
When she turned towards the sound she was greeted with a pair of doorways. One had no door and was merely an entrance. The other was being blocked by a door made of some sort of gold-like metal. Alix tried to pinpoint where the footsteps were coming from but couldn't so she just ran to the other side of the room and hid behind one of the containers filled with ether.
Just as she hid a long, robust green hand grasped the top of the doorless entryway. Alix's eyes widened with shock as the hand pulled the rest of its body through the door. Out of the entryway came a tall, stocky, luminescent creature with oblong features. One arm was large but the opposite was thin. It's legs were robust and yet it's feet seem to reveal some sort of bones. Its face looked as though it had melted at some point in time as one of its beady black eyes drooped lower than the other.
The word fear could not describe how the girl felt at this current moment. She was speechless and yet intrigued. She wanted to run away and yet she wanted to closely examine the creature. It was the sort of monster that she had only read about inside of books and the ancient texts left by her father. It was a monster of the Cryptid category. Monsters that seemed to have no solid basis and seemed to merely exist.
Cryptids are some of the most dangerous types of monsters only below the Cataclysm category. They were extremely rare and yet she was currently staring at one in her dream. Why? She had no clue. What was it doing in a dungeon? How was she supposed to know? All she knew was that she wished that she could take a closer look at it.
The monster moved to the left side of the room where all of the shelves sat. It began to grab some jars from the shelves. She couldn't see what it grabbed but it seemed like it knew what it was doing. She wanted to get a better look so she took a single step forward. She did not get much farther than that though, for as soon as she placed her foot down the monsters head turned 180 degrees directly in her direction. Alix stood frozen as the monster seemed to scan the area around her.
Her heart nearly leapt out of her chest when the creature began to move in her direction. Despite its awkward features the monster seemed to move quite smoothly and quietly. The girl tried her best to control her breathing but was finding it quite difficult. The monster moved closer and closer until it was basically a breath away from the girl towering over her.
Alix closed her eyes as the the strangely constructed creature peered directly at the spot she stood. Its head extended from its thick, flabby neck and got right next to the girl's face. It reached out thinner hand to touch the girl as sweat ran down her face. She was suddenly regretting her wish to get a better look.
"Kiano! Hurry and bring my materials!" A voice called out and seemed to echo within the girl's mind as it did the open chamber. Alix felt herself be yanked by something she looked to the source and saw that it was Mo's silver string. She was rapidly pulled back to the direction she entered from getting one last glance from the cryptid before flying back down the hall. Alix felt herself flying fast and turned around to see where she was being pulled only to see a wall.
'Well, it should just be a dream. So I should be fine. Right?' Alix flew at the wall extremely quickly and even though she was convinced that this was a dream could not help but wince when she collided with the wall.
She shot up in her bed. Drenched in sweat. Alix looked at Mo who was sleeping peacefully in his fish bowl. The girl breathed a sigh of relief as she slowly calmed herself.
"Had a dream about a dungeon and a cryptid. Nothing strange about that." The girl felt her chest and noticed that she could touch the string that came from her chest. She held it tightly while looking at her sleeping fish friend.
"Guess you saved me from my nightmare, Mo. Thank you." With that the girl laid back down and began to fall back asleep.
She still had school the next day after all.