Behold! Our first omake. I was considering making this a canon chapter but decided I didn't actually want to lean that hard on the fourth wall.
Omake: A Stomach-Clenching Discovery
Your trip back to the parking lot takes significantly longer than the trip out did. Mostly because you're so deep in shock that you can barely make your feet move.
Some unknown period of time later, you come back to full awareness to find yourself in the driver's seat, hands clenched on the wheel so tight that you're worried it will bend. Your whole body is shaking and you're alternating back and forth between freezing cold and sweltering.
This can't be real.
Seriously, this cannot
possibly be real.
What if it is?
The alien was real, surely. What if everything she had said was real too?
Seven days. That was all you had. The world would end in seven days. Look, your phone even gave you the precise number of seconds, because there really was a timer running, counting down from seven days. Actually, counting down from 162 hours, 27 minutes, and 13...12...11..10 seconds.
You watched the timer tick down for a full minute. One second. Two. Three. Four. Grinding inevitably towards the apocalypse. Sixty wasted seconds that you would never get back.
No. No, this was too much. Your brain couldn't accept the idea of billions of deaths, inevitable and unavoidable. The worst part was that they weren't
strictly inevitable. In theory, if you could survive through eighteen floors of violence and blood then you could rescue everyone.
How much profit would there be from a reality show with an octillion viewers? Probably a lot, and every space dollar of it was one more motivation for this 'Borant' to ensure that the dungeon was unsurvivable.
Unsurvivable. By
you. If you went into that dungeon, you would die and the hope for billions of lives would die with you. Would it perhaps be better to be safe in your bed 162 hours, 25 minutes, and 42...41...40 seconds from now? Leave the rescue to someone else, and if no one managed it then you simply wouldn't wake up again. Painless. Might have to drink yourself to sleep since you'd probably be too terrified to fall asleep without assistance. Still.
You shook your head. This was too much. You were tired, hungry, and shocky. The world could wait for a couple of hours while you got yourself together.
o-o-o-o
It took 41 minutes and 17 seconds to drive back to town and find a parking place. Then another 9 minutes and 38 seconds in line at your favorite cafe and 3 minutes 22 seconds to wolf down a heavenly turkey and cheddar grinder and slurp down every drop of their fresh-squeezed orange juice. The food helped, a little, but you were still out of it.
You took 2 minutes and 6 seconds to walk down the block to Discovery Books, a cute little hole-in-the-wall book store where you had whiled away many an hour. Ross, the grumpy old owner, wasn't big on organization. The walls were lined with shelves from floor to cathedral ceiling and mobile ladders slid back and forth to allow access to the upper shelves. Standing bookshelves defined narrow alleys through the space. Books were shoved haphazardly onto each shelf without regard for category, title, or author's name. Two tables in the front had piles of books on them that looked as though someone had dumped out a wheelbarrow. The counter, with an ancient manual cash register and a glowering Ross behind it, was against the right hand wall as you walked in.
You gave him a smile and a nod and received a grunt in reply. A man of few words was Ross.
You chose an aisle at random and wandered down it, trailing one finger across the spines of the books in order to have contact with physical reality, with some trace of normality. With a world in which books existed, and were hoarded by grumpy old shopkeepers who loomed dragon-like at the entrance. If 'Marjorie' was truthful then all of this was going to cease to exist in another 160 hours, 28 minutes, and 8 seconds.
You would never be quite sure what made you stop and pull that particular book off the shelf. A voice in the back of your head, the voice of your better judgement, was screaming at you that this made no sense and that with only 160 hours, 27 minutes, and 55 seconds left before the world was destroyed, why were you idly browsing for entertainment books?
Get ready! the voice shrieked.
Buy lots of guns! Something. Anything.
You ignored the voice. You knew that it was right, but you ignored it anyway. You simply couldn't deal with it right now. Right now, you were going to buy a few books. Besides, this was useful, right? There probably weren't a lot of books in the dungeon. You would need something to read at bedtime if you wanted to sleep so that you were rested for the next day's battles. No, this wasn't wasted time, these were important supplies that you were shopping for.
You pulled the book off the shelf and glanced at the cover:
Dungeon Crawler Carl, by Matt Dinniman. The cover was a man (presumably Carl?) in a leather jacket and heart-covered boxers running away from a spike-wheeled bulldozer driven by a little green man. A fat cat ran beside probably-Carl. You smiled; it was a funny picture.
You flipped it open and skimmed a few paragraphs. You were going to buy it, you knew that already, but this was part of the ritual.
The transformation occurred at approximately 2:23 AM, Pacific Standard time. As far as I could tell, pretty much anyone who was indoors when it happened was instantly killed. If you had any sort of roof over you, you were dead. That included people in cars, airplanes, subways. Even tents and cardboard boxes. Hell, probably umbrellas, too. Though I'm not so sure about that one.
What.
It took a moment, but you finally gathered yourself enough to skim quickly through the first few pages.
Carl, last name never mentioned, was outside rescuing his girlfriend's prize-winning cat from a tree. Suddenly, all the buildings got sucked down into the ground. Shortly thereafter, a robotic voice explained that the Borant Corporation had acquired the rights to mine Earth but humans could win back ownership if they made it through the 18-level world dungeon.
What. The. Fuck.
Marjorie had been describing the plot of a novel.
Was this a space alien prank? She showed up to tell the primitive human the plot of a science fantasy novel, just to be a troll? Or, perhaps more frightening, was she being honest? Was she some bored but massively powerful being who had decided to enact the plot of a novel for her own amusement? Were billions of people really going to die simply because Matt Dinniman (whoever that was!) had written a story engaging enough to catch the imagination of a toxic fan who happened to have godlike power?
This had to be prank. The space-person equivalent of
Punk'd or
Candid Camera, where the producers gaslighted some poor victim for the entertainment of the masses.
Right?
Please?
