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Previously: Update 1
Last time: while shopping in The Mall, we find two magic lamps! Magic lamps can be blessed and rubbed to potentially provide a wish (its an 80% chance when blessed). One key thing about magic lamps has changed from vanilla: They cost a whole lot more, having a base price of 1000 zorkmids (as opposed to 50 in vanilla).
I don't have the cash to buy one (you can see our on-hand cash as $ along the bottom). Neither do I have an effective means to steal it from him right now. But I can go get one quickly.
As I head back upstairs I run into a monkey. Monkeys can steal your items and try to run away, but unlike every other item-stealer, can't teleport away from you after stealing. They're a minor annoyance at best.
Our little dog is confused from hunger since we left him. Pets need to eat too! He would have eventually gone feral (become a peaceful monster rather than a tame one) after being hungry for too long.
The only food I have with me are my lembas wafers, so I throw one the little dog to feed him and keep him tame. He's very important to me right now.
When you descend stairs with your pet next to you, They follow you downstairs. The two of us make the trek back to the mall...
I lead the little dog over to the lighting store and block him in. Pets can pick up and drop items, so using the little dog and some time we can loot shops by having the dog pick up items and carry them out to us.
The first lamp is looted relatively painlessly
The new monster next to us is a plastic golem, one of the new SLASH'EM golems. They're made out of credit cards.
All golems drop a set of what they are made of when they die. Shops are cash only and don't accept credit, unfortunately. The only use for credit cards is as a basic unlocking tool.
The short monster next to the watchman is a homunculus, one of the minor demons. Their melee attack can put you to sleep, but this one dies before it has a chance to do that.
I eat the fortune cookie he drops. Fortune cookies have a random rumour inside of them. This one we already know, obviously 
Bring me the lamp, damn you! 
Gray oozes are pretty slow, but can rust armour if they hit you (we don't have any armour to rust). Their corpses are acidic, meaning you take some acid damage if you eat them, but with regeneration I don't really care. They have a small chance to give you poison, cold, or fire resistance. This one gives us nothing.
The mushroom east of us is a shrieker, hitting them causes them to shriek, which awakens nearby monsters. They're worth a fair bit of experience (killing that one gets us level 6) and have a decent chance of giving you poison resistance from the corpse.
Rabid rabbits are fast and fairly heavy hitting (and have a poisonous attack). This one almost manages to knock us out of wolf form before I kill it
The little dog still hasn't brought out the lamp It did kill a scamper, though. This is our poison resistance in action - the corpse is poisonous, but we don't care.
FINALLY. The square just inside the door of the shop doesn't count as part of the shop, so any items dropped there are free game.
Our first elf! Elves are good eating (and can provide sleep resistance) and usually come geared up with armour and weapons. They can be fairly dangerous, because they usually come in groups and ignore Elbereth. This elf is alone and dies without incident.
This one doesn't leave a corpse, but does drop a pair of randomized boots. They're very likely to be elven boots, which provide stealth when worn. Snow boots have the added minor bonus of giving you better grip on icy areas.
On my way out of the mall, I check in the armour store. The little dog moving reluctantly means the item underneath him is cursed. As a lycanthrope I can get away wear-iding cursed armour a lot easier than any other race, because I can simply turn into a wolf if its bad. When I shift form, any cursed armour I'm wearing is destroyed, and any weapon I'm wielding is dropped. Thankfully, lycanthropes will take off uncursed armour automatically and will never destroy them by shifting.
SLASH'EM adds a bunch of southern marsupials to the game. The wallaby next to us is reasonably dangerous, but I make quick work of it.
I also read the spellbook (another SLASH'EM change: you will always successfully read any uncursed spellbook, regardless of difficulty). This one is Teleport Away, a very very useful spell, but we probably won't ever be able to cast it.
The little dog also looted us a pair of boots from the armour shop, I'll have to check what they do soon.
Now for the good stuff. I head upstairs to a nice quiet corner, change back to have use of my hands, and #dip the magic lamp in the holy water we started with and....
Both of the lamps say "Interesting...." when I try to dip them? I'm pretty sure this means both of them are already blessed 
I want to be 100% sure before I use them, though. The easiest way to check BUC status is dropping things on an altar. We haven't run into any yet, but I know where one is.
Heading back to the Mines, I find a piece of graffiti on the floor. It reads, "They say that chaotic characters never get a kick out of altars." Nethack has two sets of rumours (true and false ones) that random floor graffiti can pull from. Fortune cookies use the same sources. This one is one of the false rumours. Don't kick altars, unless you like pissing off its god.
We found the first set of stairs down in our first trip down the mines. I want to descend quick, so I head down without exploring further.
The second mines level is a dark level, so you can't see further than whats around you. In retrospect, I could have lit up one of my lamps (magic lamps are an inexaustable source of light) but its not a big deal.
A fairly tough series of monsters sees a pony able to knock me out of wolf form. Ponies are another one of the starter pets (for knights and yeoman) and are a fair bit tougher than little dogs/kittens. So I [E]ngrave "Elbereth" into the dust to scare it off and give me some breathing room.
To explain what "Elbereth" is: its the name of some elf goddess in Tolkien works. In Nethack, standing on an engraving of her name scares off most natural monsters and prevents them from meleeing you. There are several monsters that don't respect Elbereth - all @ (like the muggers and elves we saw earlier) as well as some very dangerous endgame enemies. The way I have this one engraved is just by writing in the dust with my fingers, which degrades quickly. Almost any action can cause it to change and thus stop protecting me. Luckily, the pony was almost dead and I kill it as it runs away.
While I'm in lycanthrope form, I remember to check my #techniques. They're another SLASH'EM specific thing that can be activated to do a variety of things. For us, right now we have:
- Turn undead: This is in vanilla Nethack as an extended command that priests and knights have, which gets rolled into techniques in SLASH'EM. It can damage or pacify undead, but leaves you helpless for several turns while you use it. Not really worth it.
- Weapon practice: Gives us some training in our equipped weapons. Helpful for raising skills of your weapons. I use this with the dagger I have equipped.
- Eviscerate: a Lycanthrope only technique, if we don't have a weapon equipped it turns our fingernails into claws for a few turns, which do a whole bunch of damage. Useful in a pinch.
This stops our training and doesn't give us any result from it. Oh well.
Undead Slayer sickness-resistance in action! I don't have to worry about how old corpses are when I start munching down on them, which is nice for a starving class like me.
Paper golems drop unlabelled scrolls when destroyed. You can use magic markers to write on them and turn them into other scrolls. We've seen a couple of magic markers so far (one in the hardware shop, and one in the general store in the mall) but we don't have any identified scrolls to turn them into. They'll be very useful later, though.
Exploring a bit more, I see some elf zombies pop up in the distance. Undead Slayers are warned of undead, so I'll automatically see any undead on the map wherever they are. Zombies aren't very dangerous, but there are lots of nasty undead monsters later in the game, so this only gets better from here.
As I'm luring them back to the stairs, I also run into a baby red dragon, yikes. Elf zombies will follow me upstairs though, so I can separate and kill one thing at a time.
The first zombie gets me sleep resistance. Zombie corpses are always aged and will cause you sickness normally, but I don't care.
"some rumbling in the distance" means there's a boulder trap on the level somewhere. Step on it, and a boulder tries to run you over. Easily disabled by destroying or moving the boulder.
A bit more exploring gets us level 7 and intrinsic speed. But back to the issue at hand, those damn dragons.
Some monsters can run away upstairs if they're hurt and on the stairs. I go up and kill the dragon right after, then keep exploring Mines:2 when
Trap doors are a random trap than can potentially drop you several levels. This one just drops us one level, to Mines:3. This means the next downstairs we find will bring us to our goal, Minetown.
They don't call it the Gnomish Mines for nothing.
Right next to the downstairs: Another magic lamp!
Those doors confirm it: Welcome to Minetown! Among other things, there's a guaranteed altar and lighting shop here, as well as potentially more shops.
NEXT TIME, ON SLASH'EM:
Update #3