He's standing on a cold stone floor, in a fairly dark and cool and damp room that doesn't smell at all like fire. The walls are also stone, and there's a distant scent of mold and muck. The lighting in the room's weird, diffuse and faintly green. There's a wooden door to his right that's been ripped off its hinges, one hanging open ahead of him, one firmly shut behind him, and darkness down the corridors.

And an anachronistically science fiction looking gun, not too far from him, lying on the floor, discarded next to an empty pedestal.

"What the-" Tadashi spins around, taking in his surrounds. No fire? No screams?

He looks down at his arms. No, they're slightly red from the fire and soot is covering his clothes. The fire did happen, he's just...not...in it.

He peers at the gun. The tech looks unfamiliar, certainly not anything someone in his lab was working on. "What do you do, I wonder." He picks it up.

'Oh thank fuck,' says the gun. The voice is feminine, and odd - it feels like he's hearing it, but a few subtle cues are missing, like any actual vibration. 'I thought I'd get trapped here.'

"Oh!" Tadashi exclaims upon hearing the gun's voice. Well. Some sort of neural mod? Perhaps a technopathic device? His brother, at 13, could make one, it wasn't so difficult to picture someone else doing it.

Okay. It was a little difficult. 

"Nice to meet you! I'm Tadashi. You are?"

'I'm Sara. Where'd you come from? My sensory range isn't huge like this, but I didn't really feel you entering, just appearing?'

"Nice to meet you Sara. As for how I got here, I'm not sure. I feel that 'simply appearing' may be accurate. I was...trying to save someone from a fire. But-" 

He looks around. "I think I'm somewhere else."

'Sometimes a dunj has a teleport stone or something weird, yeah, though I haven't heard about them linking to each other before. Where're you from?'

"San Fransokyo. I've never heard of teleport stones, what sort of tech are they?"

"Haven't heard of that, sorry. This dunj is nearest Verona Beach, a bit off in the reeds. Teleport stone's are pretty rare, but they usually bounce you back to the entrance to the dunj. Or I've heard of ones that drop you in traps. Haven't figured out how they work yet, but I'm pretty sure they need to be paired - a sender and a receiver."

Tadashi checks his pockets for stones, and comes up short. "I don't think this was a teleport stone situation, I don't have a pairing one on me. And I've never heard of them before today, so perhaps they don't exist...in...my world."

He takes another look at the faintly green glowing stones. "I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore," he jokes halfheartedly.

"...Like, universe hopping? I'd heard of the many-worlds theory... Are you familiar with dunjes? They're these extradimensional spaces that open up, lead into these - well, dungeons full of monsters. There's usually a core you have to get to so you can shut it down so everything inside stops attacking people. We've tried communicating with them before, but - doesn't work that I've heard."

"I've...uh...never heard of that, but I won't even try to deny that it's possible. I've never seen a world other than my own."

Tadashi blanches. "When you say monsters, you mean, like, literal monsters?"

"Like, non-sapient, really aggressive creatures - or robots, or whatever those shadow things from the ebon dunj were, or skeletons this one time - that swarm and attack people."

Tadashi’s eyebrows shoot up. “Skeletons? Wow. This is some kinda D-and-D world.” He is still terrified by the idea of actual real life skeletons walking around, possibly attacking him, but the fantasy nerd in him is fascinated by the idea. 

“I’m quite good with robots, I could probably deal with those, though I guess you don’t get a choice with what kind of monsters are in the dungeon.”

"The ones we ran into earlier were kind of stone golem themed. Slow, a bit more durable than normal, hit hard but it's easy to dodge, and with my range you should get them before they get close to you."

"I think - hm, we don't know each other well. Feels like I've got some kind of stun thing with you? Like, from 'painkilling' to 'safe general anesthesia' feels like the current range."

“That does sound more my speed. I don’t really...well, not that I ever have, but I’d rather help than hurt.”

"Yeah, I get you. I like seeing new places, talking to new people... Not really shooting new monsters."

“A gun with morals! Sounds like something I’d put together.”

"Most of us are pretty human-like, though there's some variation - you need intelligence to use the magic. Most of us were also made this way, but there's some variants - I know someone who was born human and figured out shape-shifting the other way than most of us do it. I wasn't made as smart as I am. - I shouldn't make assumptions, do you even have magic in your world? Uh, especially of the 'shapeshifting weapons' type, if you're surprised at a moralistic gun it sounds like maybe not..."

"I...uh...no. No magic. We're...uh, a science-based universe? If I had to categorise it." Feels very strange to do so, considering magic was the stuff of fairy-tales, but then again. Shapeshifting gun. "Were you a person before you were a gun?"

"I was a gun first - most of us kind of gain magic and then sentience a bit slowly? It's like you're dreaming and then you wake up for the first time."

"That makes a lot of sense, surprisingly. For me, I mean. You being a gun first is obviously not new to you." Tadashi chuckles, a little uncomfortably. "We have such a thing as AI where I come from, but humans came up with it, programmed it. I hadn't heard of a machine gaining it on their own. That's really special."

"Thanks! I think it's just normal, here. There's talks about making AIs among the humans, I think? But it hasn't gotten much of anywhere yet. Nothing sapient, at least."

"I can't say AI was my speciality, but if we get out of here I would love to help. Robotics is very much my field. I was working on- Well. I guess it won't matter if we don't leave this place."

"That'd be great. And dunj are rarely too bad - when the portal closes we should end up on the right side - well, I'm not actually sure which side you'll end up on, being foreign, but keeping a hold of me should help? I don't know if we want to hustle for the portal or try to close it from this end, though, my previous wielder should've succeeded by now if they were going to."