Arrival
After stepping through the portal in the Dragonlord's courtyard, Sozolan and I found ourselves falling through a massive black cavern. We fell pretty far, but thankfully our fall was cushioned by some invisible magic and we landed safely. Kali, Ascii, and Paris were nowhere to be found, and instead we found ourselves together with a one-eyed human wearing very strange clothes called Maximilian and a short, portly human with a thick accent called Borun.
The floor of the cavern we landed in was made up of several islands of sleek black slate, the gaps in between them extending deeper than we could see.
After looking around for a while, we noticed in the distance what looked like a door, so we jumped between the islands and made our way towards it. We noticed a strange phenomenon in the cavern that I can't quite explain, it was almost like the air was lighter in several places, helping us jump farther, even crossing chasms that should have been impossible to jump across.
When we reached the door, we heard a weird ringing from the other side. The weird thing was that instead of being part of a wall, the door was standing freely in the middle of the cavern, one side of it labeled "push" and the other "pull".
The Lobby
We opened the door, and found ourselves in a grey stone room. In the center of the room was a small table, and on it was the source of the ringing - a "phone". Maximilian activated it and started talking to the director of this place, who claimed to be stuck on floor 13-A with some elephants on the loose. She warned us not to trust the stairs, and to be very careful with the "elevator".
This world seems to have some very advanced forms of magic, with "phones" that allow instant communication across "wires", and "elevators" that use contained lightning elementals in order to move things up and down. Turns out that Maximilian is originally from this world, but he doesn't know enough about magic to really explain how any of these devices work.
Detours
Before we went upstairs, Borun decided he was thirsty, Sozolan wanted to see more of this world, and I wanted to find some books to explain how the phones and elevators worked. And so, as a native to this world, Maximilian took us shopping.
First we want to a "pawn shop" to exchange some of our currencies to the local money, which seems to take the form of neigh-indestructible yet sweet and nutritious paper. Then we met a "taxi driver", who is a person who drives people around in a "car", which is a type of robot shaped like a carriage. The taxi driver was actually a human skeleton called Benny, who told us that he himself was on the run form the Department of Natural Mysteries.
We talked to Benny for a while, then went to an alcohol shop and a book shop. In the alcohol shop we picked up a large amount of beer and wine, and in the book shop we picked up an "engineering manual", a "how-to book", and an "encyclopedia". I have no idea what they actually contain, but I can't wait until I get a few hours to just sit down and read them. I can't believe how accessible all this magical knowledge is in this world!
Another book we bought was called "Tales from Everwhere" written by one "Chris Ternions". The book seemed to contain all of our adventures in chronological order, which is both terrifying and intriguing. This revelation also prompted Max to claim that he's dreaming and we're all figments of his imagination, which doesn't make sense because (A) it's not how dreams work, and (B) even if it was, he's clearly not a Seer so he shouldn't be able to drag us into his dreams even if he was dreaming.
Back in the DNM
We headed back to the DNM, then got into the elevator. Apparently the elemental trapped in the elevator is very sensitive to contact on the knob sticking out of the chamber wall, and he started hitting Sozolan and me after we tried touching it. He also refused to take us to floor 13-A, instead taking us to floor 20.
On floor 20 we found four spirits playing a game of cards. They refused to help us find our way to floor 13-A, and instead made some jokes at our expense. We engaged in a brutal pun war, at the end of which all the spirits vanished and we were left alone with a human frozen in a block of ice.
Borun lit a small fire, which triggered several "sprinklers" (small rain-making devices attached to the ceiling). Maximilian disarmed the one directly above the frozen figure, and so Borun managed to finish thawing him out.
The person's name was Steve, and apparently he's a test subject here. Turns out this world is almost exclusively inhabited by humans - not because non-humans were eradicated, but apparently they just never existed in the first place? I'm not quite sure how humans came to exist here if there weren't spirits around to create the first ones? Anyway, the only place where non-humans exist in this world is within this one building, which seems really messed up.
Anyway, Steve helped us convince the elevator to take us to floor 13-A.
The Director
On floor 13-A we met with Orla Tivest, a quarter-elf from another world who got stranded in this world over a decade ago. She's the director of the DNM, where they contain and study dangerous non-humans. We asked her if she knows how we got here or how we can go back, and she told us that we suffered a "shift event", which is a periodic and spontaneous crossing between worlds. She says that similar events have been happening for some time, yet this one was somehow special. One year ago a person stormed into the DNM and proclaimed that there would be a massive magical anomaly, and he mentioned "Tales from Everwhere" - the same book that we saw in the shop.
Orla also said that the people at the DNM had been working on some teleportation device that might be able to take us to other worlds, so we're going to try and make our way to subfloor-Θ, whatever that means.