He calls 112. There's a long beep that kind of fades into the background, and someone says How can I help?

"Hi, was just dungeon kidnapped. The dungeon was not very dangerous I don't think. I am at..."

He squints at a street sign. It's not very legibly lettered.

"I am at one... four, two, East, Haven, street. I – no, one nine two. East Haven street. One nine two."

I will send you help. Thank you.

"Thank you! I am happy... happy to help, I am a DRT in my country."

An esper shows up and asks him some questions and sends him home. He lies down on the pavebed and.

Pavement. He's not home yet. He gets back up and wobbles through the cramped streets, looking more at the ground than at the buildings. Eventually he stumbles through the door to his house and calls goodnight to his mum and lies down in bed.

His mum comes in and she says goodnight.

Her teeth...

His mum.

He hasn't seen his mum in ten years.

She's dead. His mum is dead.

"Who are you?"

"I'm your mother, bärchen."

"You're not."

She shrugs. Her shoulders are too long. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Why is there a dungeon portal in his bedroom?

He scrambles towards it. He must still be in the dungeon – this is the real portal. This will take him to safety.

His mum twists her neck around to watch him go. "Don't be late."

What?

He goes through the portal and he's in Seattle. He looks up at the sky, wrenching his eyes upward with terrific effort. It's grey. There's sunlight through the clouds. The buildings around him are pressing in.

He's... he should...

He's not out.

He should stay where he is.

Someone will come.

This dungeon doesn't have an official name but everyone unofficially calls it Fake Out. It's been around the block a couple of times, and it's not the most dangerous, but it's a pain in the ass to find and rescue people because it's made out of a bunch of disconnected spaces linked through portals.

(It's more complicated than that, but the more complicated version didn't make his briefing because it's irrelevant for his job.)

It's also pretty annoying to be kidnapped by, despite the lack of danger, due to the mental effect it applies on everyone that makes them feel like they're in a dream. And that's not to mention the Nightmare-lite visions it shows its victims, not selected for being awful but still unpleasant to experience in the same way multiple false awakenings from dreams are unpleasant to experience. 

Speaking of Nightmare, the anti-Nightmare is outside the portal shielding anyone who goes in. He doesn't need to go in, himself, since the effect doesn't need to be cleared for victims to be rescued, so he's just sitting there, applying shields to anyone who needs them.

James and the rest of his squad need them!

Done.

In they go.

The pockets of space mostly look like dripstone caves, but open above to a bright, cloud-smothered sky. Their walls shift in color and texture, never quite moving but never quite still; near a victim there's usually an impression of a scene: a city street, or a forest, or a kitchen. Portals hover all around, usually not within view of each other, but often one "room" will have half a dozen lurking in its various corners. Each one has to be mapped, and some of the rooms are entirely identical to each other, just to make it more confusing. The monsters change shape (slowly and badly) to look like whoever the nearest victim is dreaming about, or stagger around looking just enough like sleepwalking victims to distract rescuers.

When you're shielded against the visions and the dream-walking, the dungeon itself is kind of boring, and the rescue work is a pain in the ass. But a boring, annoying dungeon is better than a deadly one any day of the week.

Yeah. 

Well, James is DRT but he's also an esper. He's over the bitterness of not having awakened to a badass power and by now it's another tool in his arsenal. So he activates it, a short pulse to give him a low-res 3D map of his surroundings and also backlash him a tiny bit, just to see if there's anything else he might want to know about the place.

His low-res 3D map says that the current room is shaped thus, that there are portals here here and here, and that there are five dungeon cores in various corners of it.

Ughhhhhhhh. Well, it's protocol to collect all of the (fake) cores anyway, so, he'll do that and then keep going in the direction the sensors said the next victim was.

She's a woman, maybe 40, staggering around and crying, and when she sees him she flinches away and slurs "Are you my husband?"

"I'm afraid not, ma'am, but I'll lead you to him. If you'll accompany me?"

She shakes her head rapidly. "No no no nonono I don't want a husband! I don't want to see him, I don't want him! No!"

"Ah, sorry, I misspoke, no husbands are in attendance."

"Don't trust you."

That being said, she doesn't actually resist being led out. She does keep muttering "don't trust you" over and over.

Yeah. Whoops. Anyway hopefully she'll feel better once she's outside.

Probably she does! It's amazing what not being in a dungeon can do.

Another victim?

Another victim!

This one is a blonde man, mid-twenties, quite tall and softly muscled. He's sitting slumped against a wall, with a large aluminum water bottle at his side.

He's also got his still-buttoned trousers around his knees, and is listlessly fondling his half-mast erection.

He looks up as James approaches. "You're pretty," he says, confused.