A quest set in the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. You are given 7 days notice that every structure in the world from chicken coops to cars to Buckingham Palace will be sucked down into the ground and you will need to fight your way through 18 levels of dungeon in order to reclaim your world.
One expects to see strange things in the woods after leaving the trails behind, but perhaps not 'alien with picnic basket' strange.
Hiking on thoroughly marked trails is boring; the ground is curated, tended, all traces of wildness carefully swept away with a factory broom by the constant reminders of 'civilization' in the form of trail markings, foot bridges, and other humans. What should be communion with nature becomes a pale and bloodless shadow that does nothing to recharge the batteries after a hard week's work. No, the only way to hike is to leave the trails behind as quickly as possible.
The Asquagonick National Forest is 2,000 square miles of wilderness preserve with a dozen miles of hiking trails nibbling at the edges. If you started at the eastern parking lot and spent three or four hours worth of sweat and shoe leather it was possible to get to a hilltop from which you could look out across vast swaths of trees but couldn't see or hear any trace of civilization, including planes overhead. There wasn't even cell reception, although that mattered less when you didn't bring your phone with you in the first place.
There were surprises everywhere when you hiked like this, if you paid attention to your surroundings. Birds, brown and red and grey, nesting in hidden crevices far above the ground. The faint rasp of a snake moving off at the sound of your footsteps. Claw marks on the trees where a bear had climbed up in the course of its morning constitutional. The oddly pleasant stench of skunk weed in a marshy low-lying area, and a minute farther on the sweetness of honeysuckle.
Granted, all of those surprises fell within certain bounds. Catching sight of a rare bird? Absolutely. Breaking out of the tree line to find a wide river with three otters playing grab-ass on the bank? No worries.
Finding a clearing full of gopher holes, blackberry bushes, and a space alien with scones and clotted cream? That was a smidge outside the bounds of the plausible, yet here you were.
"Hello?" Taylor called, uncertainly. The alien looked exactly like what movies and TV had led Taylor to expect: chest high on him, sallow grey skin, stick-thin limbs and body, and a big oval head with enormous black eyes. Three fingers and two mutually opposed thumbs, which was not per the standard media depiction, but that was minor. He (she? it? Go with 'they', Taylor thought) was sitting cross-legged on a white-and-red checkered blanket with an honest to god wicker picnic basket next to it. Two mugs sat next to a bone china teapot that steamed on a small trivet. There was a baker's three-layered display stand filled with scones, cookies, muffins, and various jams and spreads and butter. A generous bowl of fruit was laid out; the local ant population was sending cautious scouting missions after the fruit, but the alien kept brushing them away.
"Ah, finally!" the alien said, waving Taylor over. "I've been waiting. Sit, sit. Have some scones, or croissants. Don't worry, I don't bite." They opened their tiny and toothless mouth wide, emitting a series of clicking buzzes that were maybe their equivalent of laughter or maybe curses and mockery in an unearthly language. No way to tell.
Taylor studied the alien for a moment, then looked around the clearing. No spaceship, and also no camera crew waiting to jump out and say "Punked! Haha, this will be worth a million views!" Knee-high grass and a few bushes here and there. The sounds of small wildlife, probably voles and shrews, moving quietly about their little lives in the grass. And an alien. Or maybe a hallucination? He couldn't think of any reason he'd be hallucinating, but that did seem a lot more likely than discovering that extraterrestrials existed and they liked blackberry jam on their croissants. Maybe he'd gotten in a car accident on the way to the trail and was currently lying in a hospital bed?
Somehow, he couldn't bring himself to believe that. Thinking about hallucinations was what a sensible, intelligent, rational person was supposed to do in remarkable situations like this, but he couldn't hide from himself; he was only considering the idea because that's what you were supposed to do. In truth, he believed that this was really happening.
Slowly, he moved forward and settled on the blanket opposite the alien. It stared expectantly until he took a plate and a croissant. The croissant was warm and flaky and buttery. The alien's mouth widened out into a fat oval that hopefully was their equivalent of a smile.
"So..." Taylor said. "Alien."
"Indeed! I'm sure this is a bit of a shock, but don't worry. I come in peace." They raised one hand, fingers and thumbs pressed tightly together. "Take me to your leader," they intoned solemnly, before breaking down into more of those clicking buzzes. "That's a joke. I don't actually intend to talk to anyone but you."
"Oh." Taylor paused, considering which of his billion questions should come first. His brain was having trouble sorting them. "What should I call you?"
"Ah, yes, names, of course." The alien cleared their throat. "Let's go with 'Marjorie'. I like that name and my current reproductive role is close enough to your concept of female that we might as well go with it. I know how much importance you humans place on knowing the details of each other's genitals." They—no, she—nodded seriously.
"Uh...right. Nice to meet you, Marjorie. Why exactly are you here?" This situation, while undoubtedly real, was also completely surreal. It was making it hard to frame a conversation.
"I am a member of the Belanian University Psychology Department," she explained. "We're doing a study, 'Strategies for Productive Information Sharing Under Emergency Conditions'. The goal is to identify ways that professionals in stressful environments—emergency workers, disaster repair technicians, that kind of thing—can convey information quickly to civilians in order to elicit positive and organized action."
"...What?"
"I'm sure you've seen it here on Earth. Whenever there's an emergency situation, many people act counter to their own interests. What they should do is go to the safety locations that the emergency workers are directing them to, or move away from the oncoming storm, or what have you. Instead, they freeze up, break down, become combative, or take some other non-productive action. We're experimenting with different strategies for conveying information that will help people get through those non-productive reactions as quickly as possible so that they can then move on to productive action."
A cold hand wrapped itself around the pit of Taylor's stomach. It didn't yet start to squeeze, it simply let him know that it was there.
"And why are you doing it here?"
"Oh, the Ethics Board," she said, waving one hand dismissively. "We can't very well engineer dangerous emergency situations in order to test our theories, now can we? Fortunately, the Crawl provides an excellent opportunity. We know about it well in advance and there's exabytes of data available already. We can take our time locating ideal candidates, plan our approach, and then follow up afterwards. Plus, all the locals are already nanochipped and don't have standing in the courts, so we can gather first-person data without worrying about privacy laws. And once the crawl per se starts we have panoptic viewing to observe outcomes." She clasped her hands. "It's so exciting!"
"Wait, what? What is the 'Crawl'? And did you just say that I've got some kind of chip inside me? And—"
"Yes, yes," Marjorie said, waving a thin hand dismissively. "Don't worry, I'm about to explain all that. Why don't you eat your croissant before it gets cold?"
He looked down in dull surprise. On one hand, the world was feeling off-kilter and unreal. On the other hand, he was suddenly aware that it was well past time for lunch and he actually was hungry. Plus, the croissant looked and smelled amazing. He tore a piece off and sampled it; it was absolute heaven. Jam was unnecessary and Nutella would have been sacrilege.
Marjorie watched his reaction with approval for a moment, then spoke. "Dungeon Crawler World is what you would call a reality television show. The audience is small, only a few octillion people, but it's an extremely dedicated fanbase and some of the fans are quite wealthy, or even heads of state. It runs on planets that have been resource optioned—"
"Wait, 'resource optioned'?" Taylor could feel his eyebrows go up at that clearly-a-euphemism term.
"Yes. You know, strip mined for their valuable elements, that sort of thing." She pulled a small tablet computer out of thin air, made a note, and pushed it back into thin air where it promptly disappeared. "I told Kevin that his 'soft ramp' strategy wasn't going to work," she said, sounding satisfied. "Leads to the subject focusing on all the wrong things. All right, switching tacks: a week from today your world is going to be collected. That means all structures will be sucked down into the ground and the people inside them killed. There's nothing you can do to prevent this, so the question is how you are going to prepare for it."
Things were getting more surreal by the moment. Somehow, it all felt far away. "Wait, what? Everyone will be killed?"
"Yes. Well, not everyone. Only the people who are inside at 4:23am. This timezone, obviously. It will be daylight in large parts of Asia, so there will likely be two, perhaps three hundred million survivors worldwide."
What.
"Now, whenever a collection occurs, galactic law requires that the inhabitants be given an opportunity to reclaim their world. The Borant Corporation are the ones with the rights to Earth and they have chosen the 18-level Dungeon Crawl option. All human survivors from the collection will be given the opportunity to go down into the dungeon and fight their way to the bottom. If you exit the eighteenth floor then control of Earth will revert to you and all galactic presence will be removed from the planet.
"I'm talking to you about it because our profiles indicate that you are the type of person who will choose to go into the dungeon instead of attempting to survive on the surface after the power and communication grids are eliminated, all shelter and production capacity has been destroyed, and the vast majority of tools, medicines, and stored food are eliminated.
"You will have a week to prepare for this. I suggest bringing weapons and other items that will help you in combat situations; the dungeon is teeming with hostile monsters, since the entire point of Dungeon Crawler World is for the fans to see you in exciting and dangerous situations."
"Wait, but—"
"Bup! There will be 150,000 stairwells leading into the dungeon, and half as many on each floor down. Each level will be open for a certain amount of time—five days for the first floor, increasing for each successive floor. When the timer runs out, the floor will collapse and anyone still on it will die. You need to find a staircase down to the next level and descend before the collapse or you will die." She conjured a piece of paper from nowhere and laid it in front of you. You glanced down dully; it was a high-detail map of downtown with a square box drawn in the middle of Elm Street on the 400 block. The marked area spanned the road from side to side and an arrow indicated which way the steps would lead. "This is the precise location where the nearest stairwell will appear. Remember, 4:23am, one week from today.
"You can bring whatever you like into the dungeon and you don't need to worry about carrying capacity. This season Borant has chosen to provide all crawlers with altspace storage; anything that you can lift off the ground for about four seconds can be placed in your inventory, just like I did with my datapad a moment ago." She conjured and vanished the device again to make the point. "Items in your inventory are time-locked, so food will remain fresh, etc etc. Items can be pulled out into your hands with just a thought.
"Now, the inventory system isn't enabled until you get into a dungeon and find a game guide. You'll need to account for that. If you bring more than you can conveniently carry then you'll need to think about how to transport it to the stairwell; the dungeon opens after the collection and during the collection any vehicle with a top on it will be sucked down. You can transport things using a convertible so long as you leave the top down and remove the trunk lid. Alternatively, you could use a tractor with a flatbed trailer, or that sort of thing. Don't use that Nissan Altima of yours or the vehicle and all its contents will be vanished, and you too if you're in it at the time.
"You may feel free to bring food and medical supplies, but I wouldn't worry about it too much. There will be saferooms available that provide food and places to sleep, and there are bathrooms scattered liberally about. As to medicine, when you enter the dungeon you will be immediately cured of minor ailments such as diabetes, epilepsy, cancer, and if you are taking any sort of ongoing medicine regime then you won't need to take it from then on. You will also acquire a passive regeneration effect that will fix minor injuries—basically, your natural healing is sped up quite a lot. Scrapes and bruises will be gone in a few hours, broken arms will heal in a couple of weeks, and so on. It won't regenerate missing limbs, eyes, that sort of thing, but otherwise you're fine. 'Magic' healing will be available as well which can deal with injuries much more quickly."
"Excuse me, 'magic'?"
"Yes, that's what it will seem like to you. It's really just advanced technology...I believe one of your kind had a phrase about advanced technology seeming like magic to primitives?"
Rude.
"Anyway, you'll acquire 'magic' of various other kinds as well. Health potions will heal your injuries instantly, shoes might grant the ability to walk on walls or teleport short distances. You'll find spellbooks that will allow you to 'cast spells' to attack, defend, and so on. Too many options to mention, but assume that if you can imagine it then it will likely be available somewhere in the dungeon. You may or may not gain access to it, but it's probably in there.
"Finally, communication devices will be disabled in the dungeon but also aren't necessary. There will be a chat system that allows mental communication to anyone in your party and anyone with whom you have bumped fists."
She fell silent, watching for Taylor's reaction. For his part, he ate the croissant and waited for his numb brain to unjam itself.
"You're really going to kill seven billion people just so you can do your thesis experiment?" you ask at last. The cold grip on his belly was turning hot, a churning acid that threatened to spill forth and send him leaping across the blanket at her.
"Oh, not I. No, the Crawl is happening no matter what I do or don't do. My colleagues and I are simply taking advantage of the opportunity. It's quite exciting, honestly—our research could end up saving so many lives that your language has difficulty describing it!" She paused. "And, now that we're past the initial part of the briefing, I can tell you that the vast majority of people won't actually die in the collection. Yes, a few hundred thousand will be killed because at the moment of collection they were sticking their head out a window, or were working underneath a car or whatever. Those people will be cut in half and will bleed out.
"As to the rest...so long as their brain is collected, they have a chance of surviving. They will be placed in storage until the crawl ends. A handful of them may be repurposed to be mobs or NPCs in the dungeon, in which case they could actually die, but that's exceedingly rare. Perhaps a dozen or two across the entire duration of an average crawl." She shrugged.
"If I die, will I be placed in storage?"
"Oh, no. Crawlers die for real. Also, once the crawl ends everyone who was collected is usually recycled, although some may be retained for use in future crawls if they have particularly interesting skills or personalities."
"By 'recycled' I assume you mean 'murdered'?" The words were hot and tight, the desire to claw out those massive eyes rising.
"I'm here to give you the best chance to save them," she said, ignoring the question. "You need to focus. Essentially the entire human race is depending on you. If you can make it through the crawl then all of the collected people can be restored. Billions of lives depend on how you prepare over the next week and what you do when you are in the dungeon. Now, would you like some tea?"
He stared blankly at her. She raised the teapot inquiringly and he numbly held out his mug. She filled it and he absently took a sip. Once again, it was perfect. Annoyingly so; how was it that a murderous alien could provide better tea and croissants than decent humans?
"Are you going to give me any proof of this?" he asked. "How do I know you're not full of it?"
Marjorie cocked her giant head. "What reason would I have to lie to you?"
"I dunno. Maybe your thesis is really something like 'Strategies for Pranking People from Low-Tech Worlds'. Or maybe you're just a troll."
"Neither, I fear. I'm sure you would prefer to find me a liar, but I'm afraid that I simply am not. Everything I've told you is true."
"Do you have any evidence? Like that datapad. If you give me that thing, I can show it to people to convince them."
Marjorie shook her head firmly. "Absolutely not. That would compromise the experiment by introducing external elements. No, you'll need to convince people on your own merits."
He found himself wishing that he had brought your phone. A short and surreptitious video recording would go a long way towards making this plausible.
She glanced up at the sky for a moment. "Oh, bother, there's my ride. Let's see...I've given you the precise time and location where the stairwell will open...ah, yes." She waved her long fingers left to right. "There. I've set a countdown timer on your phone—yes, yes, the one that's in your car back in the parking lot. It's counting down to the precise second that the stairs will open. Don't lose that map that I gave you. It's to scale and it's got GPS coordinates at the bottom just in case you need to use a navigation system. What else...? I told you about the fighting, and the medicine, food, bathrooms, inventory...yes, that covers it. Good luck!"
"Wait, I—"
It was too late; Marjorie was gone between one syllable and the next, leaving you with nothing but a picnic, the quiet songs of courting birds, and seven days to prepare for the apocalypse.
Welcome to Dungeon Crawler [Name TBD] Taylor! You will play as a human, [Name TBD] Taylor, who chooses to go down into the dungeon in an attempt to rescue Earth from disaster. This is, obviously, a fanfic of Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. Knowledge of DCC canon will mostly but not always line up.
This quest uses approval voting, so you may vote for as many options as you like. There are several things to vote on; please use the indicated tags so that it's easy to separate them in the vote tally:
[x] (Name) [put name here]
(EDIT: The name 'Taylor' was chosen and the chapter has been edited from second person to third in accordance.)
[x] (Gender) Cis male
[x] (Gender) Cis female
[x] (Gender) Trans man (i.e. f2m)
[x] (Gender) Trans woman (i.e. m2f)
[x] (Gender) Non-binary
This poll asks for the broad-strokes build you would like your character to have. A knight would fit in the "Melee, Strength" category, a swashbuckler would fit in the "Melee, Dexterity" category, and the rest should be obvious. This vote will influence the main character; if you vote for 'Melee, Strength' then the MC will be big and strong and have some combat training. If you vote for Mage then they will be less athletic and more bookish, and so on. I'm not sure what 'Weird' will turn out to be but I'm sure I can find something interesting.
[x] (Companion) None
[x] (Companion) Your 72-year-old divorced mother, Allison. Out of shape and with a bad smoking habit
[x] (Companion) Your 74-year-old divorced father, Daniel. Athletic for his age but has poor vision, very poor hearing, and a bum knee and shoulder
[x] (Companion) Your best friend, Thomas. He's your age (34), relatively fit, but a pothead with no ambition. (EDIT: Thomas got renamed to Drew because having two main-cast members with names that start with the same letter is a bad idea.)
[x] (Companion) Your 46-year-old older sister, Danielle. Athletic (soccer player) but very bossy and impatient
[x] (Companion) Your 14-year-old niece, Calliope. Athletic, smart, a good kid who looks up to you
The quandary: If they go into the dungeon they might die for real and they will definitely experience pain and fear. If they are at home during the collection then they will experience no pain and will not have to endure the suffering of living in neolithic conditions on the surface or potentially dying in the dungeon. Some of them may choose not to go into the dungeon even if you approach them, either because they don't believe you or because they would rather not.
Your parents don't get along, so bringing both of them will result in strife.
Remember that approval voting is a thing, so you can vote for multiple companions.
[x] (Gear) Heavy Combat
[x] (Gear) Combat + Utility
[x] (Gear) Light Combat, Heavy Utility
[x] (Gear) Write in
What gear do you bring into the dungeon with you? There are three suggested loadouts to keep things simple or you can put together your own list. The options are:
Heavy Combat: You'll spend all the money on body armor and heavy weapons. You'll have a hardshell riot suit, a riot shield, a Barett 0.50 snip
Taylor's trip back to the parking lot took significantly longer than the trip out did. Mostly because he was so deep in shock that he could barely make his feet move.
Some unknown period of time later, he came back to full awareness and found himself in the driver's seat of his ratty old Nissan Altima, a loyal, albeit steadily more senescent, friend since the long-gone days at college. His hands were clenched on the wheel so tight that he was worried it would bend. His whole body was shaking and he was wobbling back and forth between freezing cold and sweltering.
This couldn't be real.
Seriously, this could not possibly be real.
What if it was?
The alien was real, surely. What if everything she had said was real too?
Seven days. That was all the world had. Everything would end in seven days. Look, his phone even gave 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. Which was interesting, since the timer app had only been designed to accept two digits for hours.
Taylor watched the timer tick down for a full minute. One second. Two. Three. Four. Grinding inevitably towards the apocalypse. Sixty wasted seconds that he and the world would never get back.
No. No, this was too much. His brain couldn't accept the idea of billions of deaths, inevitable and unavoidable.
Except they weren't strictly inevitable. In theory, if he could survive through eighteen floors of violence and blood then he could rescue everyone. Somehow, that made it worse.
How much profit would there be from strip mining a planet? Probably a lot, and every space dollar of it was one more motivation for this 'Borant' to ensure that the dungeon was unsurvivable so that no human could take the planet back from them...granted, a reality show with an octillion viewers probably wasn't chump change either, so the longer they could stretch it out the more money they would make in ads for space thighmaster machines or alien viagra or whatever they advertised over their snuff-film TV show.
Still. Unsurvivable. By Taylor, a poor dumb human who thought that alien technology was magic. If he went into that dungeon, he would die and the hope for billions of lives would die with him. Would it perhaps be better to be safe in bed 162 hours, 25 minutes, and 42 seconds from now? Leave the rescue to someone else, and if no one managed it then he simply wouldn't wake up again. Painless. Granted, he'd almost certainly be too terrified to fall asleep without assistance. Fortunately, vodka was cheap. Or maybe he'd buy a really nice bottle of Scotch, since it would be the last thing he ever spent money on.
He shook his head. This was too much. He was tired, hungry, and shocky. The world could wait for a couple of hours while he got himself together.
o-o-o-o
It took 41 minutes and 17 seconds of time-remaining-before-the-apocalypse to drive back to town and find a parking place. Then another 9 minutes and 38 seconds in line at his favorite cafe, followed by 3 minutes 22 seconds to wolf down a heavenly turkey and cheddar grinder and slurp down every drop of fresh-squeezed orange juice. The food helped, a little, but he was still out of it.
He bought a mocha and unstacked one of the patio chairs so he could sit. It was November and too cold to be sitting outside, which meant that no one was anxious to argue with him for the seat. It was a violation of social norms to be pulling the chairs from their hidden-away stack around the corner of the building, but fuck social norms. They would only matter for another 160-ish hours.
As the food settled itself in his belly and the winter cold etched itself slowly into the exposed skin of his hands and face, Taylor's brain slowly came online again and he was forced to face one bedrock truth:
He believed.
He believed that the world really was going to end in a little under a week. That billions of people were going to die. And that he was essentially unable to prevent it.
Not entirely unable. Advantages of being a silver-plaque Youtuber: he had a platform. He could speak into a camera and 217,536 (as of 9am this morning) people would hear his words. A little over 217,600 by dinnertime tonight if the slope stayed steady.
What would he even say? 'Everyone, please be outside at 2:23am on Friday because aliens are going to make the world collapse'? He would be laughed off the internet.
Maybe he could be tricky about it? Tell everyone that it was a social thing, like the ice bucket challenge. Some kind of protest, or a bonding experience. Or that there was something cool in the night sky.
Would it even be a good thing to do that? All buildings would collapse. That meant no shelter, no stored food, no electricity, no internet, no tools, no fuel, no medicine. People would be instantly reduced to a neolithic civilization. No, wait, garbage dumps. They would have metal and stuff that could be turned into useful tools. Open-top dumpsters probably wouldn't collapse, so there might be some edible stuff left from when the restaurants and bakeries dumped their overage at the end of the night. That wouldn't last more than a day or two, and then people would be back to the hunter/gatherer stage.
How many people these days had the skills for hunting and gathering, especially in a Midwest winter? For that matter, what was the carrying capacity of this area? Marjorie had pointed out that it would be daylight in large parts of China and India, so there would be a couple hundred million survivors worldwide. How many of them would be alive two weeks later? Humanity was facing a mass extinction event. As were dogs, and cats, and zoo animals. Although many of them probably didn't have ceilings on their enclosures, so they would survive the Collapse only to starve to death without their human keepers.
He snorted, lips twitching in a grim smile. One tiny fragment of pewter lining: this would pretty much fix the carbon emissions problem and stop climate change from getting any worse. Sure, humans would keep burning trees for fuel and that would put some CO2 in the atmosphere, but it shouldn't be enough to matter given how heavily the population was going to be culled.
What if he tried to put the word out and he ended up getting arrested before the week was up? Public nuisance, or making terrorist threats or something.
Taylor shook his head. No. He wasn't going to do that. No public mentions of aliens. He wasn't even sure if the moral thing to do was to let people have the comfort of their beds and wait in storage until they could be rescued, or to 'save' them by convincing them to be outside where they would then need to either risk their lives in the dungeon or suffer through living on the surface. It was all too easy to imagine people cursing his name for making them survive the upcoming Collapse.
Which led immediately back to the question of what to do for himself. Obviously, he was going into the dungeon. Leaving aside the whole 'potentially save humanity' thing, he would much rather take his chances of dying in battle than the certainty of dying on the surface. What was the best possible case if he stayed on the surface? He lived out his natural life, survived another fifty years in grindingly primitive conditions. Far more likely he would die of infection, or starvation, or disease, or the aliens finished strip mining the planet into dust and he died choking in the void of space. No, since he was going to die either way he would much rather get superpowers and die with his spirit unbroken, his neck unbowed, and control of his own fate.
Marjorie had mentioned that the show had a few octillion viewers. A lot of reality shows had some sort of audience participation element—fans could vote to save someone from being voted off the island, or whatever. Taylor was a professional YouTuber with a silver plaque; he knew how to gather and keep an audience. Granted, he wouldn't have the chance to edit and fine-tune his script for maximum impact and appropriate density of wham lines, and he wouldn't have his entertaining intro/outro framing to establish branding. Still, he could make it work.
Marjorie had mentioned that he could bring whatever he wanted without worrying about weight or volume, so figuring out his gear would definitely be important.
He pulled out his phone and checked his bank balance. His fingers were cold enough that the screen had trouble reading them, but scrubbing them on his jeans for a minute warmed them up enough to make it work.
He frowned. That wasn't as much money as he would have preferred. Okay, important thing for today: figure out how to make more money very quickly. Credit cards, definitely. Payday loans? Pawn shops? Sell his identity online? What should he bring with him? Guns, definitely. Weren't there laws about waiting periods? He'd need to get that started today.
Damn, there was just too much that had to get done today.
o-o-o-o
Turns out, credit card companies are willing to give you a credit card number in under two minutes as long as you can show decent income and an absence of previous bankruptcies. Six of them had been willing to pony up before they all collectively noticed that he was taking out too many credit cards, at which point they slammed the door in his face. Still, that was two hundred thousand dollars worth of credit that he was never going to have to pay back.
At least, he hoped he was never going to have to pay it back. Come Friday, either seven billion people were going to be dead or Taylor's life was going to be absolutely ruined. It was a truly grim thing to realize that even for a moment you had been rooting for the deaths of billions. He shied away from the thought, but the selfish part of his brain had still had it.
By the time that was done it was past four. He eyed the clock nervously even as he started making lists of what to get now that he had essentially unlimited money. Marjorie had said that he wasn't going to be space- or weight-limited as long as he could pick it up, meaning he could go nuts. Guns, natch. Bullets. Tools.
Taylor, aka YoYoYoDIYDude, ran a somewhat schizoid YouTube channel. On the one hand there were the yo-yo videos in which he did show-offs and instructionals. On the other hand there were the DIY videos where he showed and taught the process of building everything from a deck to a tree house with full plumbing and electric. Many people had told him to split his videos into two separate channels, but so far the sheer dichotomy seemed to be working for him. The one thing he had always regretted was that professional YouTubing was enough to cover the mortage and leave a bit to keep the lights on, but not enough to buy some of the tools he would have preferred.
With an essentially unlimited budget and the knowledge that he wasn't ever going to be able to buy tools again, it should be understandable that, after rampaging across the internet shopping sites, he had a slightly manic gleam in his eye as he pulled into the parking lot of Home Depot. He had $216k of credit on his cards, 7630 pounds of payload in his freshly rented Ford F-350, and five hours before the store closed. If he'd been wearing sunglasses he could have dropped a Blues Brothers quote, but instead he dropped his inhibitions.
"Hey there...Rusty," he said to the store rep, quickly checking the man's nametag. "If I buy stuff today, can I put it aside and pick it up in a few days?"
Rusty smiled a customer service smile. "We usually do that for online purchases, sir, so I don't see why not. What are you looking for?"
Wordlessly, Taylor passed over an 8.5" x 11" college-ruled notepad covered in neat pencil marks. Rusty skimmed down the page, eyebrows rising. "Wow. That's...a lot."
"Keep going," Taylor said, gesturing for Rusty to turn the page.
o-o-o-o
Taylor and Rusty trotted around the store, filling carts and then wheeling them over to a storage area to wait until Thursday. Halfway down the plumbing aisle, Taylor's pocket started buzzing.
He pulled it out and checked, then sighed. "Would you excuse me?" he said to Rusty. "I need to take this."
"No problem," Rusty said with a smile. "I've got the list." He hefted the notepad. "I'll finish up here and meet you in aisle 19."
"Thanks." He turned away and answered the phone, putting it to his ear. "Hey sis."
"Hey," came the frazzled voice of his older sister. "I need a favor."
"Doing fine, thanks. I'm at the store picking up some materials. Slept a little rough last night, but I had a great hike this morning. What's up with you?"
Danielle sighed. "Damnit, Taylor, could you—" She sighed again and her voice suddenly filled with forced and utterly insincere cheer. "Hi there, Little Bit. Sorry to hear about the bad sleep. Something wrong?"
The insincere and pro forma question made the world suddenly turn sideways. What did he even say? 'Yes, something is wrong. The world is ending in a few days and you can either risk your life with me in the dungeon, or wear caveman chic for the rest of your life, or die instantly in your bed. What's your preference?'
"Got a hypothetical for you," he said.
"Damnit, Taylor, I just need...ugh. Fine. What's your hypothetical?"
"Imagine that the world is ending in a few days and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. Almost everyone is going to die and all buildings are going to be wiped away. You can die in your bed, painlessly, or you can live on the surface like a caveman for the rest of your life, or you can fight for your life in an alien arena and if you survive then you get to put everything back the way it was. What's your preference?"
"Seriously? Where do you even get this stuff? Have you been doing LSD or something?"
"No, nothing like that. It came to me while I was hiking."
"Sometimes I think you should see a shrink, Little Bit. This is morbid even for you."
"Hey! I'm not morbid."
Danielle had mastered the truly dismissive snort of older sisters everywhere. "Oh please. The last hypothetical you asked me was if I would choose to take a pill that would make me immortal but no one else could have it so I would watch everyone around me die as the centuries ticked by, but I would have time to do and see everything I wanted to."
"That's not morbid, it's an interesting thought experiment. It makes you confront your priorities."
"Could we confront my priorities some other time? I've got a video conference in two minutes and I still need to ask that favor."
"Answer the question and I'll say yes to whatever the favor is."
"Ugh, fine. Uh...I guess I'd want to die painlessly. I'm going to die no matter what so no point stretching it out."
He nodded, a little sad. "Okay. Love you, sis. So, what's this favor that I've agreed to?"
"I need you to watch Calliope for the weekend. I'll drop her off on Thursday at four, pick her up Sunday at seven. Joe dropped a trip lead on me with no warning."
"Hiking or rafting?"
"Rafting. Some corporate retreat bullshit."
"You'll be staying in the cabins, right?"
"Does it matter? Look, can you take Calliope or not?"
He laughed. "Yes, of course. You know she's fourteen and old enough to stay home on her own, right?"
"It's Calliope. Last time I left her alone was the Zipline Incident."
"Point. Sure, no problem. Seriously though, you're staying in the cabins, right? Not tents?"
"Yes, we're staying in cabins. Jesus, Taylor. Four o'clock on Thursday, right?"
"No problem. I love you, Danielle."
"Yeah, love you too. See you Thursday." There was a click and the line went dead.
Taylor stared at the phone for a minute, then put it in his pocket and went over to aisle 19.
o-o-o-o
By the time Home Depot closed, the storage area was packed high with carts of tools, parts, empty jerrycans, bar metal, sheet metal, heavy-duty plastic dropcloths, ropes, chains, padlocks, and everything else he could think of that might even possibly be useful. Rusty and four other employees had been variously amused and annoyed that Taylor had insisted everything be loaded into the truck to make sure it would all fit, then unloaded and put back in storage. It didn't all fit, but the truck plus a rented trailer could handle it with a little bit of room to spare.
That was the fun part of the day. Now came the bad part. He stuck his earbuds in and dialed, then pulled out of the parking lot and headed home while the phone rang.
Drew picked it up on the fourth ring. "Yo, Tay. How's it going, man?" His voice was, as expected for after work on a weeknight, blurry from dating Mary Jane.
Drew was the only person allowed to call him 'Tay'. Twenty years of friendship and more than a bit of youthful shenanigans (lighting fires in the woods, exploring where they shouldn't have been, mild vandalism...) had bought him that right.
"I've got a hypothetical for you," Taylor said with no preamble.
Drew laughed. "One of these, huh?" He paused, probably to take another hit on his blunt because when he came back to the phone his voice was tight with breath being held. "Hit me."
Taylor nodded even though he knew his friend couldn't see it. "The world is going to end on Thursday—well, Friday morning. If you're under a roof you'll die, painlessly and without warning—except your brain gets put in storage so you could in theory be revived. You've got three options: die under a roof with a vanishingly small chance that you'll ever be brought back, live on the surface with no buildings, no tools, no trace of civilization, or go down into a dungeon where you'll get superpowers but you'll probably die fighting monsters and this time there's no chance of being brought back. Which do you choose?"
Drew laughed explosively, the smoke audibly rushing out of his lungs. "Oh, man, that's dark even for you. Usually your shit is more like 'you get to create a new society' or 'do you take the immortality pill' or 'what do you do with a trillion dollars', or—"
"I know what I've said before," Taylor said, cutting him off. "Three options. Which do you choose?" He merged onto the freeway, hands tight on the wheel.
"Oh, the dungeon, man. No question. Fuck camping for the rest of my life and with the other two I'm dying either way. Might as well get superpowers, right?"
"Dying under a roof will be painless," Taylor reminded him. "And there's a tiny, tiny chance that you'll be revived."
"Eh. Derring-do and adventure or going out like a cow?" He took another hit and came back with the holding-my-breath voice. "Fuckin' easy choice, man."
Taylor nodded, tension that he hadn't realized he was carrying leaving his shoulders. He wouldn't be alone. "Sleepover. My house, Thursday. Be there at seven and bring all your clothes, including the winter coat."
"The what now?"
"Trust me on this, okay? Just bring them. Suitcase, laundry hamper, tie them up in a bedsheet, whatever. Doesn't matter, just bring them." It wasn't going to be an issue; Drew lived in a cracker box of an apartment and had to do laundry every week because he believed in a minimalist lifestyle.
"Dude, you're weird."
"Yeah, I know. I've got to run, okay? I'll see you Thursday. Do not flake on me, man. I've got something to show you and it's only happening once. Be there by seven, okay?"
"Sure, man."
Taylor hung up and goosed the gas a little. He wanted to get home and back on the computer. More lists to make—tactical plans, inventory of anything he might have forgotten, and so on. Also, he wanted to get to bed early. Tomorrow was going to involve a long drive and then a longer day.
o-o-o-o
He sighed and turned the car off, letting his head thump back against the headrest and his eyes fall closed. He needed the world to go away for just a minute.
Three seconds later, the imagined tick...tick...tick of the timer on his phone made him open his eyes again.
As a lifetime liberal, Taylor had no experience with guns and therefore had never needed to interact with gun laws. Turns out, Illinois frowns upon the civilian ownership of firearms. Something about lots of kids being shot in the streets, apparently. Regardless, there were background checks, license requirements, and more. It wasn't likely to happen in seven days, especially since he had other things to do.
The solution to this problem, as any good mass shooter or hopeful world-saving badass would know, was to spend five hours driving down to Missouri. In Missouri the gun laws could be written on a cocktail napkin with room left over for the lyrics of 'America, Fuck Yeah!' Basically, if you could see over the counter and you had a fistful of plastic then they were happy to give you all the lethal ordinance you wanted.
Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. If you were a resident of Illinois then your state's government was still going to do their best to throw up roadblocks. You couldn't, as Taylor had assumed, simply drive over to Missouri, plop down your cash, strap up your shiny new killing device, and saunter home to Illinois for lunch. No, you needed to have a background check and then the guns must be shipped from Missouri to a licensed gun store in Illinois where you could pick them up a few days later. Granted, the background check consisted of one phone call that took about three minutes.
"Waste of time," the store owner said. "They pass 92% of these things, so they don't make a damn bit of difference. They should take them seriously, and mandate a skills test before purchase. Weed out the crazies and the idiots."
Taylor looked at the man in surprise. He was forty-ish, wearing a camo shirt, and had a neatly-trimmed black beard. There was a belly but not much of one and his arms had definition.
"You want background checks?" Taylor asked.
The man—Joe, he had introduced himself as when Taylor nervously stepped up to the counter and eyed the displays with evident confusion—smiled. "What, just because I'm an FFL I must be a doomsday-prepper militia wackjob?"
Taylor blushed and didn't ask what 'FFL' stood for.
"I like guns," Joe said. "I like hunting, I like target shooting, and I like knowing that me and my wife can defend ourselves if we get attacked by some knucklehead. I'm glad Missouri puts freedom ahead of government micromanagement. Doesn't mean I want toddlers and domestic abusers to be waving around a handgun in one hand and a long gun in the other."
"No, of course," Taylor said. "Sorry. I just—" He stopped talking before he could dig himself any deeper. "Sorry."
"S'okay. Look, you clearly don't know squat about guns. When somebody who doesn't know squat about guns rolls up and wants to buy, quote all the guns endquote, I get nervous." He gestured to the counter where lay six machetes, six tactical vests ("Not bulletproof. Nothing is bulletproof"), half a dozen semi-automatic shotguns, half a dozen .45 pistols, and enough ammunition to fight a medium-sized war. "You ever fired a gun before?"
"Um...no?"
Joe nodded, unsurprised. "I'm happy to take your money. I'll sell you whatever you like and wave you on your way, but I'm pretty sure you'll kill yourself or someone else within a month if I do. Not deliberately—you seem like a decent guy—but if you don't know nothin' about trigger discipline, safety, handling, or cleaning then you're a hazard to yourself and others. I've got a range out back; how about I have Frank mind the counter while I give you a crash course? It won't be enough—there's no such thing as enough firearms training—but it'll at least ease my conscience a bit."
"That would be fantastic," Taylor said gratefully.
o-o-o-o
The last days of the world unwound around him, simultaneously racing with skin-scorching speed and crawling maddeningly slowly. The timer on his phone kept counting down, second by merciless second. Sleep was fitful and broken, leaving him more tired in the morning than when he lay down at night. He released videos on schedule but kept them simple; all three were yo-yo show-offs instead of what should have been two DIYs and a yo-yo instructional. He prepared everything he could think of, checked various survival-related forums on Reddit for advice on how to handle the apocalypse, spoke with old friends, had dinner with his mother on Tuesday.
He didn't tell her what was coming. Mom was 72, badly out of shape, and burned up a pack of coffin nails per day. She had, as she had said before, "had her adventures, raised her kids, and now it was time to relax." She would not survive the dungeon and she would not welcome the need to try.
The knowledge that he was making this decision for her left the taste of ashes in his throat throughout the meal. (Store-bought mac and cheese; she had never liked cooking and "had done her time at the stove" while he was growing up, since she thought it was important to model good money management and life skills for Taylor and Danielle, as well as ensuring that what they ate was healthy. Now, the only cooking she did involved a microwave.) She talked for a bit about the neighbor across the street:
"Poor Trish," she said, shaking her head. "When her husband died—Mark, you remember Mark?"
Taylor had a vague memory of the name but with a gun to his head he couldn't have told you even the color of Mark's hair. "Uh-huh," he said. No reason to go down a rabbit hole of reminders.
"Died in his sleep. She woke up and he was cold." She shook her head. "Good thing they slept in separate rooms. He snored. Can you imagine if they still shared a bed?"
Oh, right. The snorer. "Yeah, that would have been awful. They seemed like a nice couple. I remember you had them over for dinner a while back and they were teasing each other about his snoring."
"Right, right. Well, he was the one who always took care of the money, and it turned out that they had been living well beyond their means." She clucked her tongue disapprovingly. "He made some very poor decisions and after he died she discovered she didn't have the money to stay in the house. I told her to get a good agent but she insisted on doing it herself. She thought she was going to have a few months to get organized and get out, but she underpriced it and it sold so fast that she suddenly found she needed to get out that night. Then she didn't prepare anything and the truck she rented was too small. I was over there half the afternoon helping her carry all this stuff into our garage until she can come get it. Banker boxes! Mark's paperwork was so disorganized. He left her forty banker boxes of papers."
Eventually, the neighborhood gossip ran out and she turned her focus to him, drawing out every detail of his life since she had last seem him six days ago. She insisted on seeing 'that new yo-yo thing you were doing'. Taylor had anticipated the request and brought his Skyhawk with him. They went out on the porch and he ran through the routine that he'd been putting together for next year's Regionals. (He had mostly been doing it as a brand-building exercise; he was good but he wasn't good enough to match the people who made a living earning contest prize money and corporate sponsorship deals.) He went into a series of Eli Hops that made her face light up in child-like wonder. Long experience as an entertainer let him sense how long to repeat the series before the wonder lost its luster, at which point he transitioned into a series of boingy-boingies, then finished up with an off-string throw and one-handed whip. She applauded.
"Marvelous," she said, smiling ear-to-ear. "How is your channel doing?"
"Good. Coming up on 220,000 and the views are reliable. Also, I'm getting good crossovers from the DIY videos to the yo-yo work and back."
"Wonderful! When you first said you were going to do it that way, I have to say that I didn't think it was going to work."
He laughed. "I may remember a comment or two to that effect. Oh, and I picked up a sponsorship for my next two videos. They sell template websites and shopping systems. I've been working up a piece about how 'if you enjoy building an extension on the house, you will also enjoy building a website.'"
"I see. Well, I don't really understand all that, but I'm glad it's working for you. I was worried when you decided to do YouTube for a living."
"Yeah, I know, but an English degree wasn't exactly in high demand. I got tired of driving rideshares for drunk people and the barista job just wasn't doing it. If I had one more snotty person demand that I remake their drink because it was too bitter and I had to explain that they ordered an espresso and it's supposed to be bitter and then they demanded that I remake it anyway...well. I dunno what I would have done."
"Well, I'm glad you found something you like. Now, you'll take the rest of the mac and cheese, right? Oh, and I've got some orange juice for you." She bustled into the kitchen and he followed her like an amused duckling; long experience said that there was no point in arguing. Besides, this was the last time she would ever get to fuss over him and he wasn't going to take that away from her.
It took five minutes of rustling through the stack of paper bags in the pantry and then loading one up with random things from the fridge and the cabinets, but finally he was back on the porch and she was holding the door open for him with the beaming smile that said she was proud of her goofy and off-kilter son.
"Goodbye, Mom," he said, hugging her extra tight and burying his face in her shoulder. He was almost a foot taller than his mother and hugging her like this was a strain on his back that he absolutely couldn't care less about right now. "I love you so much."
"Oh! Thank you, sweetie," she said, patting him awkwardly on the back. She had never been much of a hugger, not like Dad was. She showed her love by asking about YouTube stats that she didn't understand and wasn't even vaguely interested in, and by pushing food on him, and by fussing at him to clean the windshield of his car if he hadn't recently because otherwise the glare could be dangerous.
He held the hug extra long and then kissed her on the forehead, not minding the way her gray hair tickled his nose. He breathed in the scent of her grapefruit shampoo and did his best to lock it into his memory.
"Will I still see you Sunday?" she asked. "You don't have to. I love having you over in the middle of the week like this but if you—"
He swallowed the lump from his throat and gave her the best smile he could manage. "Of course you'll see me Sunday, Mom. I wouldn't miss it for the world."
"Good! Maybe we can watch some more Golden Girls? I've been going back through it again and it's still as good as it was the first time through."
"That sounds great. I'll see you then." He kissed her again and then hurried away, brushing the mist from his eyes.
o-o-o-o
On Wednesday he had dinner with his father. Daniel was 74 with a fivehead and only a bit of pepper left among the salt that was his remaining hair. His eyes, though weakened by glaucoma, were the same bright blue and filled with delight as they had been since the very first time Taylor could remember being swung above his father's head for an airplane ride.
"Taylor, Taylor, Taylor!" Daniel said, coming towards him with arms upraised and fingers wiggling in eagerly anticipated hugs. "There's my boy!" He wrapped his arms around his son and squeezed tight.
Taylor hugged his father back, allowing his eyes to fall closed so that, just for one moment, he could feel that sense of safety and comfort that had suffused his childhood. He was taller than his father by two fingers; growing up, he had frequently made his father stand back to back with him so he could check if he was taller yet. It had been a glorious day in high school when he had finally caught his father going slightly up on tiptoe in an effort to maintain the appearance of stature status quo.
Another thing that had changed from Taylor's childhood: his master athlete of a father, a tennis-playing, expert-swimming, canoeing man of iron, who had done pushups with Taylor on his back when Taylor was small, had always had solid layers of muscle under his skin. When you hugged him he had a solidity, like toughened oak. Now he felt fragile, as though his flesh was directly attached to bird-brittle bones with no cushioning between the two.
Taylor could feel the tears starting, both for the slow failing of this wonderful man's body and for the death that he knew was about thirty hours away. He breathed through the inner pain, discreetly wiped his eyes, and stitched a smile on his face with brutal effort. Only then did he release the hug and step back.
"Hi, Dad."
"What's that? You're sad?" his father said, cupping one hand to his ear. He liked to play up his steadily increasing lack of hearing. "Why are you sad? Wait, I know! Cake to the rescue! Come on, I've got some strawberry rhubarb in the oven next to the pizza." He grabbed Taylor's wrist and started towing him up the walk towards the open door of the house.
"That's pie, Dad," Taylor said, the smile becoming more honest now. He followed along willingly enough.
"Fat fry? Why would you fry cake?! You kids these days, always frying everything!"
"Oh, we are, are we? And I suppose you're not still eating your fried eggs and bacon for breakfast?" He followed his father inside and pushed the door closed with his elbow, already toeing off his shoes.
"Of course not, of course not! That would be against my doctor's advice."
"And you are just wonderful at following your doctor's advice, aren't you, Dad?" Taylor couldn't help but chuckle. In truth, his father was good about following doctor's advice on almost everything. He ate some things that Dr. Friedman would prefer he not, but in compensation he had completely given up alcohol. He took his glaucoma drops and his blood pressure meds exactly on time every day. He willingly, even eagerly, did the physical therapy to ensure that last year's torn rotator cuff healed properly. On the other hand, he refused to take pain meds for his arthritic knees. He never complained about them either, and Taylor knew of the problem only because Daniel moved a little more stiffly than he used to and Taylor had browbeaten him into explaining why. Fortunately, the emphasis in 'moved a little more stiffly' was heavily on the 'a little'; only someone who had grown up looking to Daniel as a model of how a man should behave would have noticed it.
"It almost sounds like you're implying something, my boy. How sharper than a serpent's tooth is the snide implication of an untrusting child!"
Taylor laughed. "I would never not trust you, Dad. Come on, let's eat before the pizza gets cold. Pineapple and bacon, right?"
"Of course, of course! What else would I serve to my wonderful son but the greatest delicacies? The fruit of the tropics and the flesh of the pig! For what more could one ask?" He plucked a dishcloth off a hook and used it to flip the oven door open and pull the pizza out. It was an 18" deep dish pan that Taylor had given him for his birthday six years ago, and the product of that pan was among the prime things that Dr. Friedman would have preferred Daniel cut down on. It was also one of the few lines that Daniel had drawn in the sand; he was not giving up his homemade deep dish pizza.
The pizza was as delicious as always. Taylor had bought an identical pan for himself, same size and brand, and tried to reproduce his father's recipe; he couldn't, no matter how precisely he recorded and reproduced the proportions and ingredients. There was some hidden paternal secret, a subtle essence that suffused the bread and cheese and sauce with a virtue that owed nothing to chemistry.
They ate in goopy silence, strings of cheese stretching from slice to teeth and needing to be raveled up with a finger in order to avert disaster. Taylor normally tried to stop after two slices; deep dish was far denser and more filling than what the rest of the country laughingly referred to as pizza. Two slices was more than enough to leave him completely satiated. Tonight, he indulged shamelessly, glorying in the flavors that he knew he was experiencing for the last time.
"Hungry, huh?" Daniel asked, smiling. "Haven't seen you eat that much in ages."
"If r'ly goo'," Taylor said, sucking air in to cool off a bit of still-hot cheese.
Daniel tsked. "Don't eat with your mouth full, Taylor."
Taylor grinned at the old joke. For a split second he was a child again, back in the Apple Lane house, back when Mom and Dad were still (so far as he was aware) happy together. Dad would say that and Mom would look amused while Danielle rolled her eyes and said "Daaaad!"
Every moment of the evening was like that; a single word or flash of an expression on his father's face would take Taylor back to another time. A different time, when everything was better and billions of people were going to wake up on Friday morning.
Should he ask his father the hypothetical? He hadn't asked Mom because he had known the answer. She wasn't suicidal but she also wasn't particularly closely tied to life; she didn't want to get old (the definition of which was a moving target) and was thoroughly prepared for her death. Burial plot booked in advance, instructions on what to do and what not to do, will made up, discussions with Danielle and Taylor about what they would each get of the possessions, and the house kept in neat order so that it would be easy to dispose of the contents and the building once she wasn't using it anymore. In the meantime she seemed to be drifting, lacking in purpose or direction.
Dad...was an unknown. He had his will on file because he was a sensible person and that was what sensible 70-somethings did. He hadn't felt the need for the morbidly detailed preparations his ex-wife had made. He enjoyed his life. He might want to continue it beyond the Collapse.
The problem was that his health wasn't good enough to survive what it sounded like the dungeon was going to be. There was no muscle left on him, his shoulder pained him if he moved it too quickly, his vision was hazy, his hearing was gone without the hearing aids and only decent with them. His knees were rough enough that walking for miles on end wasn't in the cards, so he would slow everyone else down—'everyone else' meaning Taylor and Drew and anyone else they managed to hook up with once they were down there. His good cheer would be a morale booster and perhaps the dungeon's healing properties would fix some of his issues, but probably not. Marjorie had said that the dungeon would speed up the body's natural regeneration. Natural regeneration wasn't going to fix hearing loss or arthritis or glaucoma. The health potions and any potential healing magic were an unknown; maybe they could heal his ailments, maybe they couldn't. Or, rather, maybe they would or wouldn't. An alien race with the power to cross the stars, use 'altspace' storage for their space phones, and simultaneously destroy every building on the planet? They had the power to rejuvenate one old man.
The final decision was purely selfish: there was a risk that Dad might say yes, he wanted to go into the dungeon, and Taylor could not take that chance. He could not bear to see his father die. It would crush him, utterly ruin him at a time when he needed to be at his best. Knowing that Dad had died in the Collapse would be bad enough, but there was a tiny chance of succeeding and rescuing him; realistically, it wasn't going to happen, but the possibility would suffice to keep Taylor going.
The decision argued itself back and forth in his mind throughout the evening, but when the time came, when the very last second came and he was about to get into his car to drive away for the last time, to never see his father again, he said nothing. Taylor did not offer his father the chance to survive.
"I love you so much, Dad," he said, wrapping his arms around his father and clinging tighter than a child waking from a nightmare. (If only Taylor could wake from this nightmare.)
"Awww," his father said, hugging back just as tight. "I love you too." He stood there, legs braced so that Taylor could lean on him, and held his son tight, rubbing his back.
A tiny whimper, more of a squeak and probably deniable, slipped out of Taylor's throat and he felt the tears gathering. He hurriedly swiped at his eyes and straightened up, letting go of his father for the last time.
"Everything okay?" his father asked, frowning.
No, Dad, it's not. You're going to die tomorrow night. "Yeah, it's fine," Taylor said with a plastic smile. "I'm a little stressed is all. I had a really good time tonight. Thank you."
"I enjoyed it too. You sure nothing's wrong?"
Everything's wrong, Dad. Everyone's going to die. You and Mom haven't spoken in six years. I'm going to die fighting monsters in a dungeon so that aliens can sell toilet paper, or whatever. "Nah, s'all good. Thanks for everything. See you next week?" His gorge rose a little at the last words.
"Looking forward to it." He squeezed his son's shoulder and then stepped back so Taylor could fold himself into the car and close the door. When Taylor rolled the window down, his father kissed two fingers and pressed them to his son's cheek. "Drive safe, okay? Text me when you're home."
Taylor laughed. He was 34 years old and his parents still worried. "I will. Love you. Thanks again. For everything."
"Always. Drive safe!" He stepped back and waved.
Taylor took one last look, storing the memory up for the future, and then he drove away.
o-o-o-o
It was 3:36:17pm on Thursday. The world was going to end in 10 hours, 46 minutes, and 43 seconds.
The Nissan was packed, floorboards to roof rack. The F-350 was ready for the trip to Home Depot where it would be loaded up. The house was tidied and vacuumed. Sure, it was completely pointless since it would be destroyed in a few more hours, but it provided a sense of closure and a way to keep his mind from skittering off into dark corners that helped no one. In the center of the back yard was a survival cache—tools, weapons, food, chlorine tablets for water purification, a stack of wilderness survival manuals, and maps of the area. Perhaps there would be a handful of survivors in the morning, and perhaps they would find the cache. He would put signs on the lawn when he left. Granted, the cache would be easily visible from the street once the house was out of the way.
Taylor was on the sidewalk, running through the Regionals routine that he had spent eight months developing and now would never need. A bunch of the neighborhood kids were gathered around, oohing and aahing. It was still November, still cold, but there wasn't much wind so as long as you stayed in the sun it was comfortable. His Tibetan Mastiff, Moose, was floomped on the grass while the children petted him.
The door across the street opened and Alice Benning stepped out. She was new to the neighborhood, having moved in only a couple months ago. A brunette somewhere in her mid-thirties, she had made a point of knocking on all the doors up and down the block and introducing herself. She was an excellent listener and immediately found herself being invited for drinks and added to the neighborhood email list.
"Tommy!" she called. "C'mon in."
"Aw, mom!" Tommy called. He was twelve, blond and freckled with a Spider-Man T-shirt. He climbed to his feet with a grumble about 'stupid grounding, totally wasn't my fault' and slouched off to his mother.
"Hi Taylor," Alice called, waving. "Impressive!"
"Thanks, Alice," Taylor called back, unmounting the yo-yo and sending it into a few 'Around the World' spins so as to free up one hand to wave.
"Do the pops!" Sequoia demanded, with all the unshakable authority that only a six-year-old girl can apply.
"The what now?" Taylor asked innocently. "What's a pop?"
"You know!"
"No I don't."
"Yes you do!" all four remaining members of his audience shouted. They ranged from six to twelve, since Tisha recently had achieved the ancient age of thirteen and decided that yo-yos were no longer cool.
"It's the pops!" Sequoia said, waving her hands in and out.
"It's not called the pops, dummy," Bradley sneered. "It's called the Eel Hops."
Taylor frowned. "Actually, it's called the Eli Hops. Be nice to your sister, Bradley. Apologize."
Bradley scoffed, but when Taylor recovered the yo-yo and stood there with it motionless in his hand, the boy broke.
"Fine. Sorry I said you were a dummy, or something."
"It's okay, Bradley," Sequoia said. "Mom says that people only accuse others of the things they're afraid of about themselves. Don't worry. I think you're smart."
Taylor nearly choked but managed to keep the laughter inside. He got the yo-yo moving and went into a series of Eli Hops, shifting direction and magnitude so as to keep it dramatic for the kids. (They'll be dead tomorrow.)
There was the sound of a car approaching; Taylor looked up to see his sister's Taurus pulling up to the curb. He wound up the show and bowed dramatically to his audience, then shooed them away with promises that he would do another show tomorrow. (Liar.)
Danielle and Calliope climbed out of the Taurus at the same time. Danielle was her younger brother's gender-flipped and upgraded twin: tall and thin, with an oval face, but her hair was 'chestnut' instead of 'brown', and it was done in a chin-length bob with layers and gentle highlights. Her body was 'willowy' instead of 'rail-thin on the edge of scrawny', and she had annoyingly perfect teeth with an annoyingly blinding Colgate smile.
"Hey, sis," Taylor said, moving to hug his sister. Moose beat him to it, racing around the car and shoulder-barging Danielle almost off her feet with wigglies of lurrv.
She laughed and scritched behind his ears firmly, ruffling them with her nails. "Hi there, Moose. Miss me?"
"Woof!" came the affirmative.
Taylor carefully nudged his dog out of the way so he could hug his sister. Moose accepted the nudge with poor grace.
"Hi, Taylor," she said, accepting the hug but not allowing it to go too long. If she had been a cartoon there would have been squiggly lines of 'frazzled' around her head. "Thanks for taking her. I'm sorry about the short notice."
"S'all good," Taylor said. He held the hug as long as she would tolerate it, then trailed his hand across her shoulder as she pulled away, sustaining the contact for one final instant. "You know I love having her." He turned to his niece. "Hey, Leo. Got your stuff?"
The young woman in question had hauled a massive duffel out of the back seat of the Taurus and was now crouched down giving Moose an appropriate ear-scritching while fending off his determined attempts at slobbery kisses. "Yup!" She yelped in surprise and laughed as Moose pushed forward, knocking her over so that he could deliver the appropriate face-washing. She eeped in surprise and covered her face but couldn't stop laughing.
Calliope had gotten her nose and jaw from her mother, but the bright green eyes and the straw-blonde hair were straight from her father's Scandinavian-by-way-of-Minnesota heritage. She was fourteen, with coltishly long arms and legs that made her the terror of East Overton High's soccer fields. She was wearing a blue and green flannel shirt and jeans with shredded knees and thighs. Taylor knew that, unlike many teenagers, the tears in Calliope's jeans didn't come from the factory; they were earned the hard way, through vigorous exercise and occasional falls on hard surfaces.
"Did you bring your wheelboard?" Taylor asked.
Calliope shot him an exasperated look from the ground. She pushed Moose aside and stood up so that she could lean into the back seat and pull out a skateboard and helmet. "Unc, you know it's not called a wheelboard."
"It's not?" Taylor looked at Danielle in simulated surprise. "It was called a wheelboard in our day. I'm sure of it."
Danielle snorted. "Why do I always feel like you two getting together without supervision is a sign of the Apocalypse?"
Taylor jerked as though she'd slapped him, then did his best to cover it by quickly grabbing his niece up and spinning her around before setting her back on her feet. She eeee'd in surprise as he did it and stutter-stepped when he put her down, then glared up at him.
"Unc! I'm too old to be spun around like a kid!" Somehow, the expression was not entirely convincing.
"Bah," Taylor said, waving her protests away with magnificent disdain. "My house, my rules. I'll spin you if I want to. And make you watch anime. And have pizza and ice cream for dinner." He looked at Danielle and stage-whispered, "I'm lying. Broccoli all the way."
Danielle rolled her eyes. "Just try to make sure she doesn't die, okay? And take care of yourself. You're too skinny, even for you. And you look exhausted."
"I'm fine," Taylor said. "Thanks for worrying, though." He bit his lip, eyeing his sister. This was the last chance; he could tell her the truth, give her a chance to make the decision for real.
...No.
No, Danielle was too grounded in the 'real world'. She had always been the serious, studious one. Taylor had no proof whatsoever and the claim was so wild that Danielle would simply get annoyed if he pushed it. She had made the decision with enough of the information but none of the pressure; it wasn't going to do her any favors to have to make it again with pressure. Besides, it was too late to save her husband, Charlie. No great loss, though; Taylor had cordially detested the man since first meeting him and could not understand why Danielle stayed with him.
"Make sure she doesn't die, check," he said, smiling. "Safe travels, sis. You're a wonderful sister and I love you."
Her eyebrows went up. "Thanks, Taylor. You too." She hugged him quickly and then opened the door of the car. "Okay, gotta run. Gotta get on the road if I want to beat the traffic. Be good, you!" She pointed at her daughter and scowled dramatically; Calliope rolled her eyes and waved it off. Danielle smiled at the dismissal, blew both of them a final kiss, and then vroomed off.
"So, Leo," Taylor said, slinging Calliope's duffel over his shoulder and turning towards the house, bracing himself at each step as Moose pushed into his leg. "I've got a hypothetical for you..."
o-o-o-o
Drew rolled up at 7:13pm, meaning that he was early for Drew. His car was the same hinky green beater that he'd been driving for the last ten years, with tires bald as a newborn and what might have been a few extra dings in the right rear quarterpanel. There were so many that it was hard to tell.
"Hey, Drew," Taylor said with a grin as his friend got out of the car amidst a blue cloud. "You know the cops are going to put you away if they ever see you hotboxing like that on the road."
"I am immune to po-po oppression, for my Lord and Savior has wrapped around me the protection of his Noodly Appendages," Drew said, waving the thought aside with a grand gesture. "Leo! You're here! Yikes! Hello to you too, Moose." He delivered the appropriate tribute of patting, scritching, and rib-thumping in order to receive the gracious permission to not be knocked over.
"Hey, Drew," Calliope said with a laugh. "Still baking more than the Brits, huh?"
"Ayyyy," Drew said, shooting her a pair of finger guns. "I love that show! We should watch it."
"No way! Unc said I could watch Die Hard on Prime!"
"Shoot for it! One, two..."
Taylor smiled at the banter and said nothing, preferring instead to collect Drew's two suitcases from the back of the beater and carry them inside, the other two following him automatically. He dropped the suitcases inside the door, then picked up his keys from the bowl and turned back. Moose's ears went up in excitement. He was a sucker for car rides.
"Guys, I hate to interrupt this love fest," he said, "but we have an errand to run. I need to head over to Home Depot and pick up some stuff. I need to talk to you two, so all three of us are going."
"We are?" Drew asked.
"Yup," Taylor 'explained' unhelpfully.
"Why are we going to Home Depot at 7:30?" Calliope asked, but she was already shrugging into her jacket.
"Story for later," Taylor said, mostly because he didn't have a damn bit of clue how he was going to convince them that the 'hypothetical' they had answered was in no way hypothetical. "C'mon, we need to hurry. They close at 10. Moose, you're staying here." With the ease of long practice, he ignored the pitying whine and soulful eyes.
"What? Aren't they, like, twenty minutes away? It's only 7:16," Drew said, sticking his tongue out at Calliope in correction of her earlier statement.
"Twenty-five minutes, but we're going to have to load everything, and then we need to hit a gas station on the way back." He locked the door behind them and led the way to the F-350. "Also, what do you guys want for dinner? Absolutely anything you like, my treat. I've got some great tenderloin in the fridge, pizza is a phone call away, we can stop and get Thai or Indian, whatever. Oh, and I raided the candy aisle at the supermarket. There's literally a couple dozen pounds of stuff in there."
"Mom is gonna kill you, Mom is gonna kill you," Calliope chanted as they climbed into the rental. She buckled herself in before continuing. "I'm shocked, Unc, shocked I say, that you would corrupt a young woman of my virtue with your candy- and steak-pushing ways. You know that us teenagers have poor self-control. What if I eat myself into a sugar coma and end up diabetic?"
"Is it really 'us teenagers'?" Drew asked. "Shouldn't it be 'we teenagers'?"
"Let's just go with 'teenagers'," Taylor said, not wanting to get drawn into a grammar debate. He waited until he had negotiated the five-way intersection at the end of his street, then took the first step towards the most difficult conversation he would ever have. "Hey, you guys remember that hypothetical I asked you, about what you would do if the world ended? Have you changed your minds?"
"Heck no," Drew said. "Chance to get superpowers all the way. Death comes for us all, live as a lion and not a sheep, all that stuff."
"Fighting my way through hordes of evil monsters on a quest to rescue humanity? Dude, sign me up," Calliope said, her grin a thing that had time-traveled forward after first appearing on the face of a Viking, or perhaps a Cimmerian.
Taylor nodded slowly. He merged onto the highway and held the pedal down. "I want you to think about it again, and now take it seriously. Remember that you're going to be fighting living creatures, with real blood and real death." He had been psyching himself up for that all week, forcing himself to imagine the horrors that he expected to face so that he wouldn't be freaked by them when they happened.
"Dude, you're kinda freaking me out," Drew said. "This one is damn morbid, and now you're doubling down on it?"
"I'm still doing it," Calliope said. "Like Drew said: live like a lion, not a lamb. I'm going to die in any of the scenarios, I might as well do the one that's exciting. I mean, it's not like I'm going to randomly murderhobo stuff, right? If the monsters don't bother me, I won't bother them. If they do, well, then they had it coming."
"What she said," Drew said, jerking a thumb towards Calliope who was leaning forward so her head was between the two front seats. "Kid knows her stuff."
"Damn straight," Calliope said.
"Language, young lady," Taylor scolded.
"Yes, Mom."
"In all seriousness, I need you two to listen for a second and take me seriously," Taylor said. "It's not a hypothetical and I'm not joking. See, I went hiking last week..."
o-o-o-o
It was 2:21:37am on Friday morning and the timer on Taylor's freshly-charged phone was at 1 minute and 23 seconds. He glanced to his right, checking that Calliope was thoroughly strapped in, wearing the motorcycle helmet, and that the stacks and stacks of pillows packed around her were all in place. The F-350 had six airbags, including side-mounted, but they were definitely going to be necessary so Taylor had added a bit of extra padding just in case. Moose was wearing his chest harness and the heavy nylon leash was looped around the headrests as an ersatz seatbelt. There were more pillows in front of the dog.
Taylor licked his lips and pushed the button on his walkie-talkie. "You ready, Drew?"
"Rodger, dodger, O Captain My Captain! Ready and wilco, Blue Five standing by, ready for the insertion! Over!"
Taylor took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Drew was driving the Altima, the Altima was blue, the three of them were going 'into adventure!' and therefore Drew had demanded that he be called Blue Five for the duration of what he also insisted be called 'the insertion'. Calliope had started laughing, Drew had noticed the double-entendre and started laughing along, and the two of them had fed on each other.
"Right," Taylor said into the radio. "Dungeon opens in 90 seconds. Remember, we want to make a grand entrance so that the audience has something to latch onto. Follow close behind me but hit the brakes once we hit the stairs. Jump dramatically out of your car, don't stumble out. Do not point that gun at us. Got it?"
"Got it, Captain! Over and out!"
"Jesus Christ," Taylor muttered, clipping the walkie-talkie to one of the D-rings on his pants. He pulled the pillows into place beside himself so that his head wouldn't hit the door post if for some reason the side airbag failed to deploy.
"You know," Calliope said, the smoked surface of her motorcycle visor muffling the words, "if this turns out to be a joke, you really went all-in." She reached up with gloved fingers and touched the jagged metal where Taylor had used a SAWZALL to remove the roof of the rented F-350. The Altima had received similar treatment, except he'd cut a little too deep and the windshield had been wobbly afterwards. They had removed it for safety and driven over here very slowly, Drew following close behind the larger vehicle with another motorcycle helmet on to handle the wind.
"Yeah," Taylor said, his voice grim. "If it's a joke, it's on me." He put the heavy truck in gear and revved the engine but kept his foot on the brake. It wasn't time yet.
Elm Street was zoned commercial. The 400 block had a bakery, a trendy thift store, a small grocery store, a place that sold pictures and picture frames, and a few other things that you'd expect on a moderately affluent block of a moderately affluent Midwestern town.
All of those buildings disappeared into the ground, sucked down in an instant and leaving behind nothing but churned-up earth.
"Oh, thank Christ," Taylor muttered. Calliope choked down a laugh.
Surviving humans take note.
The message floated in front of them, written in symbols that weren't any earthly letters but that Taylor understood as though they were his milk tongue. Simultaneously, a masculine voice spoke them in his ear, using words that made his brain split as it simultaneously understood the words and didn't recognize them.
Per Syndicate rules, subsection 543 of the Precious Elemental Reserves Code, having failed to file a proper appeal for the mineral and elemental rights within 50 Solars of first contact, your planet has been successfully seized and is currently being mined of all requested elemental deposits by the assigned planetary regent.
Every interior of your world has been crushed and all raw materials—organic and inanimate—are in the process of being mined for the requested elements.
Per the Mined Material Reclamation act along with subsection 35 of the Indigenous Planetary Species Protection Act, any surviving humans will be given the opportunity to reclaim their lost matter. The Borant Corporation, having been assigned regency over this solar system, is allowed to choose the manner of this reclamation, and they have chosen option 3, also known as the 18-Level World Dungeon. The Borant Corporation retains all rights to broadcast, exploit, and otherwise control all aspects of the World Dungeon and will remain in control as long as they adhere to Syndicate regulations regarding world resource reclamation.
Upon successful completion of level 18 of the World Dungeon, regency of this planet will revert to the successor.
A Syndicate neutral observer AI—myself—has been created and dispatched to this planet to supervise the creation of the World Dungeon and to ensure all the rules and regulations are properly followed.
Please pay careful attention to the following information as it will not be repeated.
Per the Indigenous Planetary Species Protection Act, all remaining materials—estimated to be 99.999999% of the sifted matter—is currently being repurposed for the subterranean World Dungeon. The first level of this dungeon will open approximately 18 seconds after the end of this announcement. The first-level entrances will be open for exactly one human hour and one hour only. Once the entrances are closed, you may no longer enter. If you enter, you may not leave until you have either completed all 18 levels of the World Dungeon or if you meet certain other requirements.
If you choose not to enter the World Dungeon, you will have to sustain yourself upon the surface of your planet, and this may be the last communication you receive during your lifetime. All previously-processed matter and elements are forfeit. However, you are free to mine and utilize any remaining and naturally-occurring resources for your own benefit. The Borant Corporation wishes you luck and thanks you for the opportunity.
For those who wish to exercise their right of resource reclamation, please take note.
There will be 150,000 level-one entrances added to the world. These entrances will be marked and easy to spot. If you so choose to enter the first level of the dungeon, you will have five rotations of your planet to find the next level down. There will be 75,000 entrances to level two. There will be 37,500 entrances to level three. 18,750 to level 4. 9,375 entrances to level 5 and 4,688 entrances to level 6. The number of available entrances to the next lower level will continue to decrease by half, rounding up until the 18th level, which will only have two entrances and a single exit.
Crawlers who choose to enter the World Dungeon must find a staircase and descend to the next level down before the allotted time is up for that level. Once the time has passed, the level will be reclaimed and all remaining matter in the level, organic and inanimate, will be forfeit. Generated loot and other matter that is not gathered and claimed may be placed in the Syndicate market.
Each lower level will have a longer period of reclamation. Additional rules come into play once any crawlers descend to level 10. These rules will be explained when and if any crawlers reach this level.
If you so choose to enter the World Dungeon, it is highly recommended you immediately find and utilize a tutorial guild. Multiple tutorial guilds will be seeded throughout the dungeon on levels 1 through 3.
If you have any additional questions, or you wish to file an appeal, such requests must be submitted in writing directly to the closest Syndicate office.
Thank you for being a part of the Syndicate. Have a great day.
The instant the last word faded away, Taylor shouted for Drew to follow and stamped on the gas. The massive truck threw itself into the traces and lurched forward. It was loaded to the rafters with everything from lightweight tools to a brutally heavy but barely portable gasoline-powered generator, and the rented trailer had more on top of that. Taylor had wanted to bring at least one ATV but there simply wasn't space on the truck for something that would become useless as soon as its tank went dry. There were four jerrycans of gas (one of which didn't count because Taylor had fed styrofoam into it until it changed to napalm) but those were designated to refill the generator, because having a source of electricity would allow for options that could be achieved in no other way, among them recharging the battery-powered SAWZALL and other cordless tools.
The F-350's massive engine rose to the challenge of all that weight, steadily gaining speed as Taylor aimed it for the exact spot that, in another 9 seconds, was going to become a staircase.
The math was simple: 150,000 entrances around the world. 149,999 chances for someone else to beat them into the dungeon. Being first to identify and capture a new media niche was the biggest advantage you could get and Taylor was determined to have that advantage. And thus he was currently throwing himself, his niece, and five tons of gear that included several gallons of homemade napalm, down a flight of stairs at a speed higher than legal for city streets. The trick was to be in motion just as the staircase appeared in front of them so they could slide down it without delay.
He got it almost, but not quite, exactly right; he hit the line early, so the front 2/3 of the truck was in midair when the ground fell away and the stairs appeared. Except they weren't stairs, they were a ramp, and a much gentler one that any staircase would have been.
The truck crashed down, the weight in the bed making it bottom out and scrape the oilpan. Calliope shouted in delight even as Moose woofed his alarm. The trailer came over the lip, bounced twice and slewed slightly, tugging on the truck and making Taylor overcorrect so that the truck's nose went into the wall and out of control. It bounced off, thrashed to the other side, bounced again, and Taylor was finally able to steer into the turn and get them going straight.
"Hang on!" he shouted as the doors loomed ahead. They were massive, stone or perhaps metal, with towering images of fish/men hybrids on riotous display. He had barely a moment to hope that the doors weren't strong enough to stand up to a five-ton battering ram.
The doors flicked open just as the truck would have hit them. They didn't move, they did a sloppy jump cut from 'closed' to 'open' and the truck barreled through. There was a T-intersection on the other side, the leg of the T a dead end that started directly in front of the truck and just long enough that Taylor had time to stand on the brakes but not remotely enough time to halt the vehicle. They slammed into the far end and the engine crumpled inwards. The airbag went off in Taylor's face, Calliope bounced off her entombing stack of pillows, the trailer rammed them from behind, the tongue went under the hitch and popped the whole thing up in the air, and then all was silence.
Two seconds later there was a lesser screech as Drew dragged the Altima to a halt with only minimal contact against the elevated rear of the trailer. Granted, 'minimal contact' still included the tearing shriek of metal being demolished, but it wasn't full-scale destruction.
They had arrived.
Voting is open. It ends on Wednesday,
.
Note: Your inventories and chat systems are not currently working.
There are two polls for your possible actions:
[] (Gear) No person left behind!
Leave the gear here, take the weapons and armor, all four of you go find a tutorial guild and figure out how to get inventory and chat working, then come back and load up.
[] (Gear) Guard the gear, Drew!
[] (Gear) Guard the gear, Calliope!
[] (Gear) Guard the gear, both of you!
These options are the same except for the person/people who gets left behind. You'll leave the gear where it is with the relevant people guarding it while Taylor and Moose go off and find the tutorial guild.
[] (Gear) Write in
[] (Tactics) Scout the area carefully before fighting anything
Getting views is great, surviving is better. Be careful, move slowly.
[] (Tactics) Murderhobo!
Those viewers likely have the attention span of goldfish. Get out there and kill, kill, kill!
[] (Tactics) Write in
EDIT: Note that Drew was originally named Thomas. I retconned it after I kept confusing 'Thomas' with 'Taylor' and having to fix it.
Even with the protection of his motorcycle helmet, the impact had stuffed Taylor's head full of cotton batting and then shoved a tuning fork against each ear. It took a few seconds to shake it all away and bring himself back to focus, but as soon as he could think straight he pulled the helmet off and turned to check on his passengers.
Calliope wasn't bleeding and didn't seem hurt; she could be checked in more detail later, because...
...Moose was upside down, butt on the seat and head in the footwell with his harness tangled around him. The poor dog was whimpering and struggling futilely to escape until Taylor managed to tug the leash loose from where it had been looped around the headrests. That let Moose sprawl clumsily into the footwell, then twist around and get back on his feet.
"You okay, boy?" Taylor asked, running his hands over his friend to check for sensitive areas or blood. Moose grumbled but slurped his face in forgiveness for ending their car ride—a thing that was supposed to be relaxing and fun—by smashing into a wall in a loud and unpleasant way. More importantly, Moose didn't wince at being touched anywhere and there was no blood on his fur. The stack of pillows and the ersatz seatbelt had done their job and kept him safe. Taylor unclipped the leash and made sure that the harness was straight and not pinching.
"Leo?" Taylor asked, glancing over to where Calliope was now sitting up and shaking her head. "You okay?"
"Yeah," she said, her voice finishing the transition from 'blurry' to 'focused' over the course of the word. "Yeah, I'm fine." She pulled the black motorcycle helmet off. Amazingly, she was grinning fit to split her head. "That was epic."
Taylor laughed. "You are one weird kid."
"Hey, I learned from the best." She chucked him on the shoulder. "C'mon, let's go see what's out there!" She reached for the door handle but Taylor grabbed her arm.
"Load first," he said. "Don't want to have to do it once something spots you. Remember the first rule?"
"Finger off the trigger until you fire," she recited. "Second rule: don't point a loaded weapon at anything you don't want to shoot. Third rule: the weapon is always loaded, even if you just checked and saw that it's not."
"Very good, but let's work on that sarcastic tone, yeah?"
"Why? I think I do a very good sarcastic tone."
Taylor rolled his eyes. "Load your weapons." He shifted pillows out of the way so that he could access the shotgun and the .45 that were fixed under his seat with bungie cords. He pushed a magazine into the butt of the pistol and racked the slide, checked to make sure that the safety was on, and set the weapon on the seat beside him while he pushed shells into the shotgun.
"UwU Tavor TS12 semi-automatic shotgun," Joe had said. "One of the most versatile weapons on the market. Bulldog design with a piccalilli rail and regular gas, three tubes with five shells each and they can be rotated by pressing this here button on the grip and turning. Load one tube with birdshot, one with buckshot, and one with slugs, you're set for pretty much any threat envelope and blah blah blah lots of cool gun words that are causing your brain to drown in testosterone."
On reflection, Taylor was fairly certain that he hadn't remembered all of that correctly.
The weapons had been kept unloaded for the trip into the dungeon because Taylor cringed every time he thought about one of them potentially going off if and when the truck hit something. Now, however, he wanted to be armed and dangerous as fast as possible. There was no knowing how the dungeon would work—maybe they would be swarmed by Lovecraftian snakebearpig monsters the moment they stepped out of the vehicle. Maybe they wouldn't see anything for hours. Only thing to do was assume the worst and be prepared.
His hands were shaking enough that he dropped the first shell and had to pick it up off the floor, much to Moose's amusement.
"Hush up, dog," Taylor muttered. Moose woofed and slurped him before Taylor could get an elbow up to protect himself. He gacked and wiped his face clean. Moose panted happily.
Weapons finally ready, Taylor shoved the .45 into his holster, looped the shotgun's patrol sling so that the weapon hung at his side, and slipped one finger into the loop of his Skyhawk. He yanked the door handle and kicked it open, sliding out of the truck with the most insouciant move he could manage. He threw the yo-yo and spun it, then flipped it through a simple set of trapeze mounts and dismounts so familiar that his hands could do them on their own, thereby leaving his eyes free to look around with studied casualness.
"This it it?" he said loudly. "The big, bad, world-eating dungeon?" He looked up at the ceiling. "Hey, Borant! Not impressed so far! You guys destroy my world and the best you can do is a gloomy stone hallway with glowing moss? Would it kill you to put in some decent lights? Preferably the LED type—they're better for the environment."
Welcome, Crawler. Welcome to Level One.
A timer appeared in the upper right of his vision. It was at 4 days, 23 hours, 57 minutes, and counting down.
Moose galumphed out of the truck and looked around, then sat down and batted at the air with one paw.
Holy crap. Whatever this was, Moose saw it too. As Taylor watched, a text box appeared over the dog's head.
Crawler #6. "Moose"
Level 1
Race: Dog (Tibetan Mastiff/Rottweiler/Golden Retriever)
Class: Pet
The heck? Moose had Golden Retriever in him?
You have been designated Crawler Number 5.
You have been assigned the Crawler Name "Taylor".
You are currently level 1.
You are assigned the race of Human.
You may choose a new race and a class as soon as you descend to the third floor. Your stat points have been assigned based on your current physical and mental profile. See the stat menu for more details.
"Menu? Stats? Help?" Taylor tried, to no effect. Moose got up and started snuffling around, scouting the neighborhood for things to eat, bite, or lick, depending.
Congratulations! You've earned your first achievement: Doggy Daddy
Walk me, daddy! Walk me! You are the first person to have entered the World Dungeon accompanied by a dog. Awww, ain't that sweet?
Reward: You have received a Legendary Pet Box!
New Achievement! Early Adopter
You are one of the first 10 Crawlers to enter a new World Dungeon. Sucker.
Reward: You have received a Platinum Adventurer Box
New Achievement! Clown College
A yo-yo? Really? I suppose next you'll tell me that you're a brony and you still use your Wonder Woman lunchbox.
Reward: You have received a Silver Weirdo Box!
New Achievement! Doomsday Prepper
Holy shit, dude! Guns, armor, machetes, sure. The 10' pole is a classic. You brought a frickin' generator and an ebook reader loaded with ebooks and YouTube videos??? You must be some kind of lunatic.
Reward: You have received a Legendary Prepper Box!
New Achievement! Cheater!
There is no way that you happened to have all this shit with you and still managed to enter the dungeon in the first ten. You got warned the dungeon was opening, didn't you? Naughty, naughty!
Reward: You have received a Silver Cheater Box
New Achievement! Ballsy Fucker!
Three minutes in the dungeon and you're already calling out the fish? Good for you! They'll kill you for that, but good for you.
Reward: You have received a Silver Ballsy Box
Ohhhhkay, maybe he shouldn't insult Borant anymore. He wasn't sure why the AI was referring to them as 'fish'—unless those carvings on the doors had been Borant people? Yeah, that made sense. Anyway, he had already done it and would have to live with the consequences, but he'd keep his mouth shut until he knew more.
A clatter caused Taylor to spin around; Calliope's skateboard had been tossed out of the truck, followed immediately by the girl herself. She landed on the board, stuck the landing, and then jumped off and did something with her feet that caused the board to flip up into the hand that wasn't holding the shotgun. "This sucks!" she said, looking around. "Where's the monsters? Where's the dramatic alien construction materials? It's just raw stone and moss!"
"Don't tempt fate," Taylor said. As he looked, another infobox popped up over her head.
Crawler #7. "Calliope"
Level 1
Race: Human
Class: Not yet assigned
"I'm fine, thanks," Drew called, crawling out of the wrecked Altima. The nose of the vehicle had gone under the elevated back of the trailer and been crunched down into a wedge by the force of impact. Drew had needed to duck to avoid being decapitated. He got to his feet and started pushing shells into his shotgun's right-hand loading port.
Crawler #12. "Drew B"
Level 1
Race: Human
Class: Not yet assigned
"Wow," Taylor said. "I thought you were right behind us, but four people got in between Leo and you. I wonder how many will go in overall?"
"Dunno," Drew said, wrestling with his weapon. "Hey, how do I load the other two tubes again?" he asked, turning to face the others.
"Muzzle! Muzzle!" Taylor shouted as the barrel of Drew's weapon swept across him. Drew jerked it up into the air. "Push the release, then rotate the ammunition tubes," Taylor told him more calmly, moving to assist.
"Hey, did you guys get a bunch of achievements?" Calliope asked.
"Yup." / "Oh yeah!"
"Cool," she said. She looked into the air, eyes moving as she read, then snorted in disgusted amusement. "'Bitch Brat'? Apparently I'm the first female teenager into the dungeon. Gets me a Gold box, whatever that means. Also Silver for being the first with a skateboard, Silver for 'Cool Entrance', Platinum for 'Early Adopter', Legendary for 'Doomsday Prepper', and Silver for 'Cheater'. You guys?"
"Nice," Taylor said. "I got the Early Adopter, Prepper, and Cheater ones, plus a Legendary for being the first one in with a dog, a Silver for being first with a yo-yo, and a Silver for what I said about Borant."
"Aw, man," Drew said. "I got the Prepper and Cheater ones, but only a Silver for Early Adopter. I guess being in the first ten really does matter."
"Eh, getting four Legendary boxes between us sounds pretty good," Taylor said. He looked around. "Okay, time to pack this stuff into inventory and then find a tutorial guild." He stepped over to the bed of the truck, undid the tie-downs, grabbed a toolbox...and then paused as he realized he had no idea how to put something in inventory.
"Inventory?" he said hopefully. "Activate storage? Go go Power Ranger subspace storage?" He grunted in annoyance. "Like I said, time to leave this stuff here and go find a tutorial guild."
"Couldn't someone steal it?" Drew asked, looking at the wrecked vehicles.
"Fair point," Taylor said. "Let's go pairs. Me and Moose will look for the guild, you two mind the store."
"What?! No way, I wanna go badass my way through traps and monsters, not babysit a couple of busted up cars!"
"Leo...look, no one should be alone, okay?"
"Then how about if I take Moose and you stay here and be lame? I can keep him out of trouble better'n you can."
Taylor snorted. "Actually, that reminds me." He stepped back to the cab of the F-350 and rummaged under the seat. "Moose, c'mere boy."
Moose trotted over and sat, head cocked in doggy curiosity, as Taylor crouched down and undid his collar, replacing it with one that had brutal half-inch spikes on the sides and top. "There we go, fella," Taylor said, ruffling his dog's ears. "Let's see anything try to get a bite out of you now, huh?"
Moose panted happily and barked, once.
"Ssshhh!" Taylor said, tapping Moose on the muzzle and then placing a finger over his own lips. "Don't attract attention."
Moose sneezed in annoyance and shook his head as though shaking off water. The new collar had no tags on it, so there was not the expected jingle.
Taylor turned back to Calliope. "Leo, you're younger and faster than I am. On the other hand, I'm bigger and stronger than you are, I've had the most weapons training of any of us, and I've had a lot more time to plan. Which of us do you think should go and which should stay?"
Calliope glowered her frustration at that and crossed her arms over her chest. "Fine."
"Thanks, kiddo," Taylor said with a smile. He reached behind the driver's seat and pulled out a bulging backpack, shrugging it on and adjusting the straps carefully. "I'll be back soon."
Calliope looked at the pack and snorted in amusement. "Cheater. If I'd had time to plan then I'd be going. Leave you two oldies sitting here while I went off and had exciting adventures."
"True," Taylor lied. "On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there's plenty of exciting adventures in front of us. Probably more than we would prefer."
"Personally, I'm all for preventing excitement," Drew said, pulling a joint out of his shirt pocket, sticking it between his lips...and then pausing and shaking his head before putting it away again. "I mean, excitement in this place is going to involve a lot of bleeding and screaming and dying."
"As long as it's not us doing the bleeding and dying, who cares?" Calliope said with a feral grin.
Taylor adjusted the patrol sling of his shotgun so that it hung facing forward and he could have it ready while also having his hands free. "Yeeaaaah...on that subject. There's going to be other people down here and it's too dark to see far. Make sure you know what your target is before you start shooting. Especially because it might be me."
"Yes, mom," Calliope said, rolling her eyes.
o-o-o-o
Taylor walked, his hands going through a series of easy and low-risk tricks with the Skyhawk even as he kept his eyes up. Gotta attract those eyeballs and build that brand, also gotta not die. The shotgun hung horizontally, barrel poking forward and next to his lower ribs; it interfered with and constrained the motion of his arms, but he made it work instead of shifting it to muzzle-down and out of the way. Again with the 'not dying'. Moose paced along at heel next to him, on his left and therefore away from the gun.
He had been walking through the wide stone corridor for five minutes before he saw his first monster.
It was a rat. It had the usual long, naked, worm-like tail and grasping front paws. It was also the size of a Maltese dog, its eyes glowed red, and it had teeth like a beaver—four protruding vicious chisels visible even when it wasn't hissing.
It was chewing its way into the stomach of a human corpse.
Corpse of Crawler Li X — Level 1
The rat must have heard their footsteps because it skittered back out of the corpse and whipped around to face them. It was drenched in blood all the way to the shoulders, brown fur matted and red. It shrieked, red eyes blazing, and charged.
Rat — Level 1
Taylor dropped his yo-yo and went for his weapon. The yo-yo string was on his right hand and it tangled over the barrel of the shotgun, arresting his motion before he could reach the trigger. Ten feet away, the rat gathered itself in mid-charge and leapt. Its jaws gaped wide, yellowed teeth bared and aimed straight for his face even as he tried to duck aside. He was clumsy, the weight of the shotgun changing his center of balance and making him stumble.
Moose leapt up and snapped the rat out of midair like it was a thrown doggy treat. There was a crunch, a yelp, and a series of head-shakes that would have broken the animal if it weren't quite thoroughly dead already. Nonetheless, Moose pinned it down with one paw so that he could tear it in half.
"Jesus," Taylor said, straightening up from his panicked duck-and-dodge. "Good boy, Moose. Good boy. Holy crap." He took a moment to untangle his yo-yo and slip it off his finger, then pulled a pack of dried jerky out of his pocket and handed over half a palm-sized sheet of the stuff as a reward to his very, very good boy.
Moose accepted the jerky as his due and chomped on it happily, pausing only briefly when a laughing Taylor crouched down and wiped the rat blood off Moose's jaws.
With Moose looking less like a creature from a horror movie, Taylor stepped over to examine the corpse.
Lootable Corpse. Crawler Li X. Level 1. Killed by a rat.
That was all it said. Nothing about who this man had been, nothing about whatever family might be missing him or why he had come into the dungeon. Even his name was subordinate to the fact that his corpse could be looted.
He was an athletic Asian man of an age that was probably close to Taylor's own thirty-four years. He was wearing running shoes, sweat pants, and a T-shirt that said 'Chicago 10k, 2020'. The rat, or something, had chewed through his left shoe. The front half had fallen off and his toes were gone, blood pooled around the mangled flesh. His eyes were open and his face frozen in pain.
"I'm sorry," Taylor said to the corpse. "I don't know who you were or why you came down here. I wish there was something I could do for you but..." He gestured helplessly at the barren corridor: a twenty foot square of rough stone with glowing lichen and no place to bury a body.
The corpse made no answer.
Taylor arranged the limbs into a more respectful pose and closed the man's eyes. They promptly opened halfway, making Taylor shrink back.
Taylor looked down helplessly for a moment more. "I don't know what your beliefs are—were," he said, "but I guess I hope you get the good side of them." He looked around vaguely, unsure what else he could do, then nodded to the corpse and went on his way.
He shifted the yo-yo to his left hand this time.
o-o-o-o
The door said 'Tutorial Guild' in gold calligraphy letters on frosted glass. It was straight out of a 1920s hardboiled gumshoe's office. The moment Taylor read it, a glowing blue box shimmered into existence in front of him and the AI's snarky voice spoke in his ear.
New Achievement! You have discovered and read an official dungeon sign.
Wow. You can read. Whoopie.
Reward: All official dungeon signage will now be highlighted and easier to spot. Nearby guilds, bathrooms, and safe rooms will appear on your minimap.
Taylor glanced down at Moose who looked up at him in silent query.
"Here we go, boy," he said quietly. He took a breath and pushed the door open.
Inside was a massive room, easily forty feet on a side, with a hardwood floor so pale it was practically silver. The ceiling soared thirty feet above, a massive crystal chandelier glowing with warm yellow brilliance. Thick, brightly-colored, asymmetrical rugs were scattered around, dividing the room into three notional segments. To the left of the door was a pale blue carpet on which sat a redwood dinner table surrounded by eight Bauhaus chairs. To the right there was no rug but a pair of shoji screens blocked off sight of the rest of the room. Directly across from the door was a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, a bonfire happily blazing away inside it. In front of the fireplace was a rug that faded from burnt umber to crimson sunset, topped by a glass coffee table and two brown leather couches with lines of brass upholstery tacks. A royal-blue velvet-covered armchair with a high back was angled to face the happily crackling fire.
A huge screen was displaying something on the wall above the fireplace, but it winked out before Taylor's eyes could parse what he was seeing. The screen faded away, becoming indistinguishable from the richly-textured honey blond wood of the walls.
Tutorial Guild Hall
This is a Safe Zone.
Warning: level timers are still active.
"Damnit!" cursed the armchair. (Or, hopefully, the person sitting in the chair.)
Something leaned around the side of the chair, looking at Taylor. It studied him for a moment, then sighed and stood up. It looked like it had been built out of the leftovers from an animal construction kit.
Start with a humanoid rabbit, almost seven feet tall. Give it the head of a manatee, four arms with impressive claws, and mount its eyes on octopus-like tentacles that stuck out to the sides.
Levi — Lepotrichus — Bardic Adept. Level 56.
Guildmaster of this guild hall.
This is a Non-Combatant NPC.
You know those kids in high school who had a shitty garage band and unrealistic dreams that went nowhere until the kids gave up and became CPAs? Bardic Adepts are like that. They use the power of music to heal friends, charm enemies, and occasionally induce vomiting with their emo lyrics.
Taylor stepped back and put his hand on his shotgun as Moose lowered his head, growling.
"Relax," the monster said, waving a hand dismissively. "I'm friendly, and attacking me in here would be a bad idea. It's a safe room and I'm a non-combatant." With a grunt, he picked up the heavy armchair and waddled it in a circle so it faced towards one of the couches. "Sit, sit. Let's get through this quickly and maybe I can get you out of here before my show ends."
"Uh...who are you?" Tayler asked, not taking his hand off the shotgun. It hung from the patrol sling so he was able to aim it with one hand while setting the other on Moose's head. Taylor kept his weapon aimed at the floor between himself and the alien, and he kept his finger outside the trigger guard, but that was as far as he was willing to go towards disarmament.
"I'm Levi," the monster man said. "I'm your game guide. Sit! I can't have the screen on while you're in here and they were just getting to the good part." He pointed firmly at the couch.
Taylor didn't move. "Can you tell me how to use the inventory system?"
"Yes, yes. That, and the chat system and I'll answer all your questions and yadda yadda. Sit, damnit!"
"I've got a couple friends that I had to leave guarding our gear when I came in. How about you explain the inventory system to me and I'll go fetch everything, then come back here and we'll do the rest? That way you'll only have to do the speech once."
Levi hesitated. "I'm not supposed to send you back out with only a partial explanation...there's a process."
"But you can, right?"
"Well..." He glanced back to where the screen had been. His neck was thick enough that this required twisting at the waist; he was far more flexible at this than a human or rabbit would have been. "I'm really not supposed to. It's important stuff and not getting the full briefing can be a problem."
"Look," Taylor said, "it'll take me about half an hour to get back to my gear, then I have to load up, then another half hour back. You should have time to finish whatever your show is and I'm going to get back here as fast as I can. I have lots of questions."
Levi dithered, wringing both pairs of hands. Finally he nodded. "Okay. Here." He waved one hand.
Game Guide Levi has activated your interface!
A pale yellow rectangle appeared at the bottom right of Taylor's vision, with three dots inside it. The top of his field of view was suddenly populated by a grey dot, a green bar, a blue bar, and the countdown timer that was presumably measuring how long he had before the level collapsed.
"Concentrate on the grey dot and blink twice to click it," Levi said. "That will bring up your menus. Click on 'Inventory'. That will give you an 'Add to Inventory' option. You need to be holding a thing in order to put it in your inventory. If it's heavy then the AI will make you hold it off the ground for four seconds before it lets you inventory it. Light stuff you can put in as fast as you can click the button. Leave the rest of the interface alone for now and I'll explain it when you get back. Now go on, get outta here." He picked up his chair and turned it around again, settling down so that he was once more obscured from sight.
Bemused, Taylor stepped back out of the room and closed the door behind himself.
Moose woofed quietly, looking at Taylor, then at the door, then back again.
"Yup, that was weird," Taylor said to his dog. "C'mon, let's go get the others."
o-o-o-o
Taylor was moving faster now, the yo-yo in one of the pockets of his tactical vest and his shotgun at port arms. He studied the new interace elements as he went.
The yellow rectangle was clearly a minimap; it showed everything within about fifty yards, including side passages beyond line of sight.
The green dot in the center was himself, and looking at the orange dot at his side brought up the label Crawler #6. "Moose". Levi had been represented as a white dot, but it had disappeared as soon as Taylor moved out of range.
Curious, he clicked on the grey dot.
New Achievement: Using your interface!
You have used your interface outside a safe room for the first time!
Reward: Nothing! Be grateful we gave you an interface!
Glowering, he waved the blue notification box away. Instead of disappearing, another one popped up.
New Achievement: Dumbass!
You ignored the rules and didn't let your game guide give you a proper explanation of your interface! Sucks to be you!
Reward: Nothing! You don't get rewards for being stupid!
This is one of the rare achievements that can be received more than once.
The translucent notifications stubbornly refused to go away regardless of how much he waved or blinked, and they remained directly in front of his eyes no matter how he moved. Taylor suddenly found himself with better understanding of what his father's life had been like after the glaucoma set in. (He's dead. You'll never see him again.)
He swallowed a lump from his throat and focused on walking, looking slightly to the side and using his peripheral vision to see what was in front of him. Moose seemed to have picked up that something was wrong because he kept looking up at his owner and whining nervously.
"It's okay, boy," Taylor said, patting Moose. "I'll be fine. We just have to get the others and get back to the guild hall. I chalked the way so it'll be easy. Levi will straighten this out for me."
As best Taylor could tell without being able to look directly at him, Moose seemed unconvinced.
They were perhaps ten minutes away from where the others waited when Taylor saw the red dot appear in a side corridor on his map. Looking at it brought up the label Rat — Level 2. He cursed and tried to go faster, but he stumbled on the slightly uneven floor and almost fell.
The red dot started moving towards them. Taylor fumbled with his gun, rotating the ammunition tubes to put buckshot in the feed. He had painted the tubes orange, blue, and white in order to be able to distinguish them better.
"Moose, stay," Taylor said as the rat came around the corner and ran towards them. The dog growled but did as he was told.
Taylor got his weapon aimed as well as he could while looking through two popups with 80% opacity and yanked the trigger; the shot went nowhere near its target. The rat reeee'd its disapproval and accelerated.
Desperately, Taylor fired again, and again, shooting as fast as he could pull the trigger until the five shots in the tube were gone.
"Moose, okay!" he shouted, stepping back and struggling to get the barrels rotated to a fresh tube.
Released from 'stay', Moose growled and ran to meet the attacker. The thing was bigger than the last one, easily the size of a terrier. Impressive as that seemed, Moose had no trouble explaining to the creature exactly who the apex predator was around here.
"Good boy, buddy," Taylor said, voice shaking. "Very good boy." He crouched down; his knees were shaking too much from the adrenaline to reliably support him. He tried to pull shells out of the loops on his tactical vest in order to reload, but his hands were shaking too much and he had to wait a few seconds.
Moose panted happily and woofed his expectation.
"Yes, you do seem to be doing all the work around here," Taylor said, bemused. "Still, let me reload anyway." He managed to get the shells into the tube, then pulled out another sheet of jerky. This time he gave Moose the entire thing. He'd brought plenty and Moose had earned it.
The pair were two minutes back on their way when Calliope came charging out of the darkness, shotgun in hand and Drew two steps behind her. She started to raise her shotgun when she saw Taylor and Moose but let it fall again as she recognized them.
"Uncle Taylor, you're okay!" She charged up and glomped him the way she had when she was much younger. "I heard the shooting."
Taylor hugged her back and ruffled her hair. "I'm fine, kiddo. Moose took care of it. C'mon, let's get everything loaded and then get back to the tutorial guild. It's about half an hour away. Also, I can barely see because of these two announcements that I can't dismiss, so you guys are going to have to help me."
Voting remains closed. I'm going to write the tutorial and loot unboxing for chapter 3, then we'll get back to questing.
Author's Note: Taylor doesn't know squat about guns. Among the things he doesn't know:
Yes, shotguns need to be aimed. This is especially true when firing slugs instead of shot. (Well, he knows this now.)
The IWI (not UwU) Tavor TS12 shotgun is a bullpup (not bulldog) design, it has a Picatinny (not piccalilli) rail and is gas regulated (where 'gas' refers to the phase of matter, not the fossil fuel). It has three ammunition tubes, each of which can take 4x 3" shells or 5x 2.75". Pressing a release button allows the tubes to be manually rotated in order to access a different ammunition type / a tube that isn't empty.
It's wildly unlikely that a properly-loaded and properly-maintained firearm will 'go off' by being dropped or thrown against something, even in a car crash. It's a big universe and almost anything is possible, but they are pretty much designed to prevent accidental discharge.
Despite the previous bullet point, don't throw your weapon against a wall, and avoid car crashes whether or not your firearm is in the car with you.
Taylor does in fact know this one, but it bears repeating: always treat your weapon as dangerous. It is always loaded, even if it's not. It's never okay to point the muzzle at someone unless you intend to kill them, even if the weapon is unloaded and the slide is locked back and there's a trigger lock on it.
For Ghu's sake, keep your finger off the trigger unless it needs to be there.
Levi was waiting for them when they returned, his chair facing the door.
Both Calliope and Drew stopped in the door when they saw the enormous and visually disturbing game guide, but after a moment they stepped inside willingly enough.
"Hey," Levi said, waving a hand. "I'm Levi, and I assume this guy explained that I'm your game guide." He paused and frowned. "Jesus, man, I told you not to mess with your interface." He waved a hand and the notifications finally disappeared from in front of Taylor. "See, this is why there's a process. Sit down, all of you. There's a lot to cover.
"Most important thing first," Levi said. "This is a safe room. You cannot injure or kill another being while in this room and they cannot injure or kill you. I am a Non-Combatant Non-Player Character, or NCC. You can kill regular NPCs but you can't injure or kill NCCs anywhere in the dungeon.
"Don't attack anyone in a saferoom, or an NCC anywhere," Levi continued. "The first time you do it, you'll be frozen in place for about 100 seconds while you listen to an automated lecture on good manners. Second time, you'll be frozen for an hour or so. Third time, you'll be stripped naked and teleported into the middle of a mob nest. You will die."
"What if—" Calliope began.
"This will go a lot smoother if you just let me talk. I'll take questions at the end."
Her jaw clicked shut and she glowered.
"Second most important thing: You are going to die in this dungeon unless you do exactly what I tell you. Got that?"
All three humans nodded jerkily, eyes widening slightly.
"Here's the first thing I'm telling you to do if you want to survive: Focus. Don't waste time on anything you aren't going to need right now. Once you make it to the second floor you can start thinking about the future. Until then, your entire attention needs to be on surviving the next five minutes.
"Now, I'm sure you're bursting with a million questions and they're going to keep buzzing around and preventing you from focusing, so let's get those out of the way.
"First, who am I, why am I here, and what am I to you? Like I said before, I'm Levi, your game guide, and I'm here to help you get oriented. I was a crawler like you a very, very long time ago. My world was reclaimed, I made it to the eleventh floor, and now I'm indentured. After I serve as a game guide for enough seasons I get my freedom and a small pension. It's better for me if my crawlers survive to the fourth floor but it's not essential. I'm motivated to help you but I have restrictions on what I'm allowed to tell you so don't be surprised when I won't answer some things."
That didn't sound ominous at all.
"Moving on, what is the dungeon and why is it here? It's a reality TV show crossed with a snuff flick. You crawlers fight your way through level after level of deadly traps and monsters. The vast majority of you, if not all of you, are going to die. While that's happening, uncountable numbers of Syndicate citizens will be watching your struggles, betting on it, writing bad fiction about it, and making money off of it. Is it cruel, unfair, and unreasonable? Yes. Get over it.
"How do you survive the dungeon? Broadly, you kill things. Then you loot their bodies for stuff which lets you kill things better, and you keep doing that until you can exit the dungeon. There are two ways to exit: If you make it all the way through and out of the eighteenth floor then you become the owner of Earth and all the aliens have to leave. You won't make it."
"Why not?" Taylor demanded. "We're well prepared, well armed—"
"No. You are not, and you will not. This show has been running longer than your species has existed on Earth and no one has ever made it past the thirteenth floor. One person made it to the thirteenth floor, one time. One. He died within half an hour. You three are not such special snowflakes that you're going to be the first." He glanced at Moose and corrected himself. "You four." Moose panted happily.
Calliope looked mutinous but, fortunately, did not interrupt.
"The only way you get out of this dungeon, the one that you're going to use if you're very, very lucky and you do everything I tell you, is to make it to the tenth floor and cut a deal."
"You said that you made it to eleven and that other people made it to twelve...?" Calliope asked.
"You're not as good as I was." He raised a hand to cut off any response. "You're a tiny little girl, two nerds, and a dog. Yes, you've got a bunch of guns so you'll probably survive until tomorrow, but it's very unlikely that you'll make it off this floor. Me, I was a decathlete, a four-time martial arts champion, and I came in with both a ranged and melee weapon, both of them excellent."
Taylor's heart started pounding in his chest. Drew wasn't wrong, but potentially upsetting Levi seemed like a very bad plan.
The alien man ignored Drew's comment completely. "Now, probably the stupidest question that we need to get past but one that I get every time: You may have heard something in the dungeon announcements that referenced your pop culture or some other aspect of your world. That's because the dungeon didn't spring up overnight. The advance teams started working back in your 1950s or '60s. They scouted locations, recorded your media, laid out construction and programming plans, lined up the galactic media rights and so on.
"Finally, who is doing this? The Borant Corporation is the one running the show. The Syndicate is the overall galactic government. Don't use those names. Using either of those names causes that timestamp of your feed to be saved for evaluation by a moderator. If they find you were being disparaging to either of those entities then you can be accelerated, which means you will die. If you need to refer to those entities be respectful and try not to do it by name. Say 'showrunners' or something like that."
"I, uh, already took a shot at them," Taylor said nervously. "When I first got in. I was trying to look cool for the audience."
Levi's tentacle-mounted eyes briefly looked at each other, then back at Taylor. He wasn't sure what that meant in Lepotrichan body language, but it almost certainly wasn't complimentary.
"Well, don't do it again," Levi said. "It's probably not an issue. The audience feeds don't get turned on until you hit the second floor, so the showrunners will probably forgive you once. Probably."
Taylor swallowed nervously and nodded. "I'll be careful."
Levi nodded, grateful that his advice had been heeded. "Now, since you've brought up the subject of the audience, let's skip to that part. It usually comes later in the discussion but might as well do it now.
"Like I said, this is a TV show. The only way to survive until the tenth floor is to attract an audience. Fans can send you fan boxes that contain gear you wouldn't find in the dungeon. If you develop enough of a following then you may get a Benefactor—that's a rich person, corporation, or government that decides to sponsor you. Benefactors can also send you loot boxes and they will generally be better than anything you would get from regular boxes or fan boxes. I had two Benefactors during my crawl, and I wouldn't have made it without the suar that they sent me, and the picks that came with it. You need to be interesting, you need to pop. Develop a catchphrase, have some kind of gimmick. Think you can do that?"
"I was a YouTuber," Taylord said. "Over 200,000 followers."
Levi's eye-tentacles curled up like double quotes. "Cool. That's going to help a lot. Keep in mind the differences; once the feeds get turned on, the audience can and will be watching at all times, everywhere except in the bathroom stalls. They aren't allowed to look there. If you need to wank, do it in the stalls and be quiet. They can still hear you even if they can't look in."
Calliope blushed crimson.
"Okay, let's move on to your interfaces." His right hand glowed for a moment; Drew and Calliope jerked in surprise.
"You two should have received a notification saying that you have access to the Crawler Menu. Look at the minimap in the bottom right. You're the green dot in the center. Other crawlers are shown in blue, pets are orange, hostile mobs are red, non-hostile mobs are white. If you focus on a dot it will tell you what it is. Try that."
Taylor looked at the dots on his minimap. Sure enough, the names and levels for each of his friends and Levi came up.
"Look at your map," Levi said. "Mentally pinch in and out to resize it and try moving it around in your view so that you can customize your HUD."
Taylor did as instructed and found the interface easy to manipulate. When he expanded the minimap it showed more area around them, including a trio of red dots two corridors away to the east. He focused on one of them.
Kruthak — Level 2
He blinked in surprise and the displays went away.
"Okay, let's talk menus," Levi said, rubbing his clawed hands together. "Eventually you'll be able to control them mentally, but for now just flick your eyes up twice to make them appear."
He walked them through it, explaining how to open and close things, customize the view, and generally getting them accustomed to their new enhancements. They asked questions and got clear, albeit impatient, answers.
The most important menus were the Chat menu, which allowed them to mentally write texts back and forth, and the Party menu. Since they had come in together they were automatically in a party, meaning that they would share experience for kills. Taylor had been chosen as the leader of the party due to having the highest combined stat total.
Partway through the introduction the room shook and a new voice spoke in Taylor's brain. This time it wasn't the AI's rough bass, it was a saccharine soprano.
Hello, Crawlers! The dungeon is now sealed. We have a diverse group joining us this season, and we are very happy to have you here. We had just under 13 million human crawlers make it through the gates and into the dungeon. We are already down to under 10 million. A quick note, the entrances to the second floor will not open up until the introductory episode of Dungeon Crawler World tunnels, which will be in approximately 30 of your hours. Once that happens, the entrances to the second level will populate. There will be no lag time for the appearance of additional levels. On behalf of the Borant Corporation I wanted to thank you for volunteering, and I wish you all good luck and a happy crawl.
"Right, we're nearly done," Levi said, blithely ignoring the announcement.
"Dude, are you serious?" Drew asked, eyes wide. "They just murdered three million people!"
Levi shrugged. "Eh, that's about average. All of you chose to come down here."
"Because it was cold and you destroyed all the buildings and food supplies!"
Levi's eyes looked at each other again. "Look, I wasn't the one who did it. I'm indentured, I'm just along for the ride. Remember what I said before, about 'get over it'? Here's where that applies."
Drew glared but said nothing.
"Okay, moving on. Let's talk about stats. Taylor, we'll do you first since yours are highest."
Levi looked up at the ceiling, his eyes glowing for a moment as he fiddled with menus. Suddenly, a blue box popped up, visible to everyone present.
"Not bad," he said. "Most humans range between 3 and 5 on each stat with 4 being average, so yours are better than most. Now, the ranges are narrow and the starting values are low, so it's possible for anyone to go in any direction as regards their build. That said, your initial stats suggest a rogue or mage build. Whether you like those or something else, it's important to try to pick something and work towards it right from the beginning, because once you start acquiring loot and gear you'll end up locked in pretty quickly.
"On the first floor the AI will generally help you get into whatever build it thinks is right for you. Your preferences seem to be one of, although far from the biggest, factor in its decision. The loot and skills that you get will pretty much determine what you're capable of, so if you want to go rogue then you need to focus on sneaking around, scouting, stabbing stuff from the shadows, that kind of thing."
Taylor looked up. "Sir, or ma'am, or...I'm sorry, I don't know the appropriate address. I'd prefer to go mage if it's all the same to you, but I'll respect whatever you think best. You're smarter than me and know the dungeon better than I do."
New Achievement: Brown Noser!
Awww. Diddums think you could sweet-talk me into doing you a favor? Dat's so kyoot!
Reward: Brown nosers don't get rewards!
"Ohhhkay," Taylor said. "Sorry about that."
New Achievement: Chatty Cathy!
'My Lord and Master, Highest of the High' is preferable, but I'll settle for 'My Lord', or even just 'sir' if I'm in a good mood.
Reward: The information is the reward, bitch!
This is one of the rare achievements that can be received more than once.
Until now the achievements had been spoken in Taylor's ear, audible only to him. This one was out loud, coming from nowhere and everywhere, and the tones were so deep that Taylor could feel them in his chest. When the announcement was finished he needed to swallow before he could say, "Thank you for telling me, My Lord."
Levi's eye tentacles were wiggling nervously, flipping in all directions, and his claws were drumming on his belly with a furious rhythm.
"It's been fifty seasons since I've seen an AI speak that directly to a crawler," he said, his voice shaky. "You'll want to be very careful about that."
"Right." Drew and Calliope were looking at him, wide-eyed.
Levi took a moment to gather himself. "Right. Uh...okay. So, everyone has spell points equal to their Intelligence, so if you do end up going mage then you'll start on the high end. You regenerate spell points, also called mana, based on your Intelligence and you regenerate health based on your Constitution. You'll also find potions of various kinds around the dungeon. There's a cooldown after drinking one before you can safely drink another. It's based on your Constitution for everything except mana potions, which are based on Intelligence."
"How common are potions?" Drew asked.
"Not so much for the first floor but the availability ramps up a lot after this. You'll be drowning in them by the time you get to the third or fourth floor. Here." From thin air he conjured three small test tubes full of blue liquid and passed one to each of them.
Minor Health Potion
"Flick your eyes down twice and your hotlist will appear. Practice with it and eventually you'll be able to activate the menus or the hotlist with just a thought and no need to move your eyes, but it's easier like this to start with. The leftmost item in your hotlist is the Heal spell that everyone gets. It costs two mana points and heals you about 20%. It can fix broken bones but not amputations so don't let your bits get cut off. On the right you've got nine more slots that you can fill with whatever you like and then activate mentally. Put the potion in the first free slot and then click it."
Taylor did as instructed; a feeling of warmth flooded through him and various aches and pains that he hadn't even realized he was carrying all disappeared.
"You can drink potions manually, but they generally taste like ass," Levi said. "Better to put them in your hot list. Also, practice with your hot list and the rest of your interface. As the system learns your thought patterns you'll start to be able to control it without all this blinking and waving.
"Okay, let's do stats for you two." He gestured and two blue boxes appeared, floating in midair the way Taylor's had earlier.
"Not bad, kid," Levi said to Calliope. "You'll probably want to go with some sort of Dex-based build. Swashbuckler if you want to fight, rogue if you want to sneak. Maybe a bard if—"
"Fuck bard," Calliope said instantly. She immediately remembered Levi's class and blushed. "Sorry. I'm here to have adventures. I want to kill shit, not sneak around or play music in the back. No offense."
Levi smiled, revealing square teeth. "No offense taken. I used to kill plenty of shit—I could control my picks at range and they were razor sharp. Still, I get it. Lots of people think that bards suck. You know what they say: opinions are like assholes. If yours is bad and you share it, you're the asshole."
Despite Levi's admonition not to worry about his stats, Drew studied them with a look that somehow combined worry, disgruntlement, and a modest amount of offense.
"Moving on," Levi said, waving the stat windows away. "Let's talk about the inventory system." He explained it for the benefit of Drew and Calliope, then gave them pebbles to practice with until it became second nature.
"Okay," Levi said at last. "Levels, skills, bosses, loot, and then we're done.
"You earn XP—experience points—for killing stuff and various other things you do in the dungeon. Each time you kill enough stuff you level up. Each time you level up you get three stat points. You can't distribute your stat points until you get to the third floor so don't worry about it. For the first couple of floors, your stats will go up automatically as you use them, but slowly and not that much." His eyes glimmered for a moment as he did something with his interface, and then he chuckled.
"Amusingly, your dog is currently level two while the rest of you are only level one. Don't let him kill steal so much."
Taylor covered Moose's ears. "Don't listen to the bad man, Moose," he said. "You go ahead and kill anything that's trying to eat my face."
Moose shook his head to throw Taylor's hands away, then turned around and slurped his face. Taylor gacked and Moose panted in a happy doggy grin.
"More important than your level is your skills," Levi said, ignoring the byplay. "Let's look at those now."
He helped them through reviewing their skills. There were a ridiculous number of them, mostly useless things like Breathing: 4 and Shoe-tying: 2. At Levi's direction Taylor filtered it down to skills that were higher than level 2 and not basic life functions, which left him with a disturbingly short list.
"Wow," Levi said after studying list. "No combat skills whatsoever?" His eyes glowed for a moment. "Ah, there we go. 'Shotguns: 2' and 'Pistol: 1'. Yeah, you're toast unless you practice those up. I hope you brought a lot of ammo."
Taylor smiled. "I really, really did."
"Well, it's going to run out eventually, so you're going to want to practice with dungeon weapons too. My recommendation: in each fight, one or two of you use the guns and the others stick with dungeon weapons. Dungeon weapons could mean barehanded fighting, spells, swords, hammers, whatever you get. It's important to do that now; it's easy to get skills just by doing things on this floor, but it gets a lot harder on the second and is virtually impossible after that. You'll get new skills from loot and occasionally from doing stuff, but only very occasionally. None of you have a decent Running skill, so run everywhere on this floor so that you can build that up. You're going to be doing a lot of running away throughout the dungeon.
"Speaking of running away, you're going to be fighting. A lot. There's two kinds of mobs out there: regular ones and bosses. There's six levels of boss: Neighborhood, Borough, City, Province, Country, and Floor. The power level of mobs and bosses goes up as you level so boss monster levels will generally be higher than yours no matter what yours are. Neighborhood bosses on the first floor will probably be around 8 or 10.
"Killing regular mobs will sometimes get you a loot box. Killing a boss will always get you a loot box. Neighborhood bosses give Bronze, Borough bosses give Silver, then Gold, Platinum, Legendary, and Celestial respectively. Also, they drop maps that will show you what's going on in a wide area around you, including where all the mobs and crawlers and such are. Boss maps update in real time so they're a huge advantage. Since there's four of you I'd suggest grinding on regular mobs until you're all level 6 or 7, then find the local Neighborhood boss, kill it, and collect the map so that you can more easily find other stuff to grind on.
"Do not try to take on a Borough boss on this floor if you can possibly avoid it. If for some bizarre reason you absolutely have to then make sure you've got as many levels as you can first and team up with a bunch of other people." He looked at them seriously. "If you forget everything else I've told you, remember that. You will die if you don't.
"Aaaand, speaking of other people: player killing. Yes, it's a thing that can happen. Nothing is stopping you from killing other humans. It can even be very profitable, because you'll get all their gear and players usually give good XP. Also, the audience loves watching treacherous backstabbing assholery, so the AI will generally feed you good loot boxes as a motivation to do it." He shrugged. "I'm not going to tell you that you should or shouldn't do it. The one thing to know: if you kill another crawler, you'll get a skull floating over your head, permanently. One skull per kill. Doesn't matter if it was self-defense or mercy killing or whatever. You kill another crawler, everyone will know it. Catch my drift?"
He waited until all three of them had nodded in acknowledgement and then the serious expression fell away and he clapped his hands in delight.
"Okay, on to the fun part. Loot! You'll get loot boxes based on stuff you do. Taylor, we'll start with you. Go into your menus and click 'Open Loot Boxes'."
Taylor did as instructed. A line of boxes appeared in midair in front of him, stretching out across the room.
Levi's eyes glowed for a moment as he checked his menus and then he goggled. "Wow. Four Legendary boxes between you guys? Nothing lower than Silver? Damn, you guys are lucky sons of bitches. You just might make it a few floors."
It was a wooden box, painted silver, and about the size of a dorm-room microwave. It stopped in front of him and flipped its top open to reveal a small pot of goop.
Yo-Yo Enchantment Enamel. Any yo-yo that soaks in this enamel for ten minutes will become an enchanted item. This item has a Short Shelf Life; don't be a bitch, use it now.
A 30-minute timer with a jagged red font appeared over the pot and started counting down. Taylor looked to Levi and raised an eyebrow.
"Enchanted items are essentially indestructible," Levi said in response to the implied question. "All loot box items are considered enchanted, but they usually have powers in addition to that. Short Shelf Life means that you've got limited time to use it."
Taylor nodded and flipped the top off the pot, then pulled out his Skyhawk and dropped it in. There was a faint glorping noise as the yo-yo sank into the viscuous yellow goop. The timer flickered and shifted to 10 minutes and a soothing green color with a rounded font.
The box disintegrated into glittery dust that vanished a moment after touching the floor. The next box rushed forward and opened itself.
He picked up one of the vacuum-sealed TV dinners and studied it.
Enchanted Fish Dinner
Satiates you for 6 hours. Also heals you by 1% per minute for 100 minutes.
"That's a good prize," Levi said. "Especially until you've had time to collect some health potions. Won't help in combat the way a potion would, but it's good to make sure you heal fully between fights. Also, they'll probably be tasty. The crawler biscuits will fill you up, but they taste like dirt."
Taylor nodded and scooped the dinners into his inventory. The box disappeared and the next one trotted up.
Platinum Adventurer Box (4/6)
The box was larger than the rest, easily the size of a footlocker. It was made of what looked like solid platinum and the lid was a curlicued pagoda top filled with detail. Taylor didn't have a chance to examine it before the top dissolved away.
Spellbook: Gold Grabber
Cost: 3 SP
AOE: A 60-degree cone symmetric around your line of sight at the moment of casting. Length of cone is 5 meters plus 1 meter per level of spell.
Gold within the AOE will be pulled to the caster's dominant hand. Force of the pull is dependent on the level of spell and the caster's Intelligence. Gold pulled in this fashion will stop on contact with the user without imparting kinetic force, although other forms of energy transfer are not prevented. (i.e. It won't hurt you or knock you back no matter how fast it's moving, but it can still burn you, freeze you, and so on.)
"Spellbook, nice," Levi said. "You can activate it, which will destroy the book and cause you to learn the spell, or you can give it to someone else or sell it or whatever. There will be shops later on. Spellbooks are usually pretty valuable."
Taylor nodded and tucked the book into his inventory for now. It was time for the high-end boxes.
Legendary Prepper Box! (5/6)
Horns went off as the box opened and confetti sprayed everywhere. A small blue jewel floated up from the box and settled into Taylor's hand.
Enchantment Enhancement Jewel
When added to any Enchantment Enamel, the Enamel's effect will be enhanced. This item has a Short Shelf Life.
"Oof," Levi said. "Loot that doesn't specify its effects can usually do a variety of things. You will never get outright cursed items from a loot box, so whatever it does will be mostly positive. Mostly. Still, I always found it stressful. Might as well use it, though."
Taylor sighed and dropped the thumbnail-sized jewel into the pot where his yo-yo was soaking. The goop bubbled and fizzed for a moment, then started to swirl around, trails of blue and silver dispersing through it.
The box shattered, crumbled, and disappeared. The next one bounded up to him and opened.
Legendary Pet Box (6/6)
The box was huge, curvy, and white. It looked like a refrigerator made by Apple, or an absolutely enormous Tic-Tac. When the top dissolved, Taylor looked in to find...
A piece of meat jerky the size of a credit card.
He plucked it out with a frown and studied it. Legendary Enchanted Pet Biscuit
Levi winced. "You should definitely give that to him now," he said. "Those things are very unpredictable, and if it turns him into something dangerous and he attacks you then you want to be in a safe room."
"It won't hurt him, will it?"
"Depends on your definition of 'hurt', but give it to him anyway."
This entire time, Moose's eyes had been locked on the treat with a furious intensity that shut out everything else in the room. When Taylor tossed the treat to him, he snapped it out of the air and chomped it up.
A foxfire red aura flickered over Moose, tiny sparks dancing off each hair. It faded away after a few seconds, leaving him looking very surprised but not displeased. Taylor examined his friend's properties nervously.
Crawler #6. "Moose"
Level 1
Race: Enhanced Dog (Tibetan Mastiff/Rottweiler/Golden Retriever)
Class: Pet
Enhancement: Legendary Familiar. This animal will grow larger each level until reaching full size at level 15. Additionally, it will gain +2 Strength and +2 Constitution per level. Additionally, it will gain +1 Intelligence every 30 levels.
Enhancement: The Soulbonded skill at level 3.
"Oh, wow," Levi said. "You lucked out with that one. 'Legendary Familiar' means that both of you will always know the distance and direction to each other and you'll be aware if the other one gets hurt. You'll have an empathic communication that will enhance his ability to understand spoken commands and possibly even communicate with him at range.
"Better yet, he's Soulbonded. To start with, that means that his damage is increased by a percentage equal to his level plus your level times the level of the skill." His eyes glowed for a moment. "He's already got a Bite skill of 5, Rend of 1, and a Back Breaker of 2—that lets him cause extra damage to any mob he can lift off the ground and shake. Keep him safe for a couple levels and he'll start getting very tanky and very dangerous.
"Perhaps more importantly," Levi continued, "after Soulbonded hits level 10 some spells will start to work differently—you'll be able to share things with him that would normally be caster-only, cast them through him, whatever. At level 15 you'll be able to see through each other's eyes."
"Cool," Taylor said, smiling with teeth.
"My turn!" Calliope said, bouncing in her seat. Before anyone could stop her, a line of boxes appeared in front of her, the line zigging and zagging around furniture. "Yesss, my pretties. Come to mama!"
The boxes marched up to her one by one and she gloried in their contents like a kid at Christmas. Her three Silver boxes were unimpressive, yielding a total of 100 crawler biscuits, 20 torches, 3 health potions, and 2 mana potions. Her Gold box contained a T-shirt that gave her +1 to the Regeneration skill, immunity to poison, and reduced kinetic damage by 5%. Her Platinum box gave her a Mutable Ring, a plain platinum band that gave her a total of +10 stat points that could be distributed as she wanted and shifted around every 6 hours.
"Sweet!" she said.
"Before you—" Levi began, and then stopped with a sigh when Calliope glowed blue for a moment. "I was going to say, before you distribute those bonuses, finish opening your boxes."
"Oh. Yeah," Calliope said, embarrassed. "Well, I can change them around later." She saw Taylor opening his mouth to ask and said, "Five into Strength, three into Constitution, and two into Dexterity. Lets me kick some ass!"
Taylor sighed. "Let's talk tactics before we start kicking ass, okay?"
"Bah." She waved dismissively, then rubbed her hands together and opened her last box, the Legendary for Doomsday Prepper, with an excited, "Come to mama!"
Super Skateboard Spray
It looked exactly like a can of spray paint. She studied it for a moment and then grinned. "Awesome."
"Can I see?" Taylor asked, holding out a hand. He could not see the properties of an item unless he was holding it.
She passed it over wordlessly.
Single use. A skateboard painted with this will provide the following benefits:
+3 to the Skateboarding skill
+5 Dexterity while in contact with the board
+5 to the Summon Object skill (skateboard only)
The Gravity Resurfacing benefit (skateboard + rider only, only when ridden, board centered)
Taylor checked the last two benefits; Summon Object called the skateboard to her from a distance and Gravity Resurfacing was essentially an unlevelable spell that cost five mana and redirected gravity so that 'down' was towards whatever non-living surface she chose. It would allow her to ride on walls and ceilings as though they were the ground. It lasted thirty seconds plus the caster's Intelligence.
"That's pretty damn awesome," he agreed, handing it back.
"Especially the fact that Gravity Resurfacing doesn't have a cooldown," Levi said after examining it in turn. "Most movement spells and abilities do. It's a little expensive for someone who wants to be a combat build instead of a mage, but it'll be very effective if you're careful about how and when you you use it."
Calliope's hands were obviously itching for the paint but she allowed Drew to read the description before taking it back. She pulled the skateboard from her inventory, popped the cap off the spray paint...and paused.
"Any reason not to use this now?" she asked Levi. He shook his head, failing to suppress a small smile, and she went ahead and sprayed her board down. The paint gushed out and, in a sign of precisely how magical the dungeon loot was, every particle of it sank into the board instead of going everywhere the way real spray paint would have. It gave the device itself a shiny cobalt blue color, although the layered stickers on it remained unchanged, albeit glossier and easier to read. (Taylor could see "Rage Against the Machine"; "Thrash on!"; "No limits, no fear"; "Ride or Die!", and various others.)
"I've gotta try this," Calliope said, hopping up from her chair and onto the skateboard. She started gliding around the room, doing tricks that sent the board spinning on various planes. "This is so cool! I could never land that before and now it's a breeze!"
"Dungeon skill bonuses are like that," Levi said wisely. "They can make— Oh, my."
The three adults watched as she tricked around the room and then skated up the wall, mongo footed halfway across the ceiling and started performing various flips and spins.
"Leo, get down!" Taylor shouted. "It only lasts a few seconds!"
"Relax, Unc, there's a timer. I got this!" She flipped up into a one-handed handstand on her left hand, the board clamped to her feet with the right.
Levi's eye-tentacles jerked straight. "Don't—"
With a scream, Calliope plummeted thirty feet to the floor. Taylor felt the world slow around him as he struggled to lunge forward out of his seat. (Just try to make sure she doesn't die, okay?)
Calliope was still holding her board and therefore still benefiting from the massive Dexterity bonus it provided. In midair, she tucked into a ball and spun, trying to get her feet under her and roll out of the fall.
Unfortunately, even superhuman reflexes aren't always enough. She was still on an angle when she hit and there was a vicious crack! as her left ankle broke. Crackling noises indicated other bones going as well. She screamed in pain and a health bar appeared above her, 90% of it grey and the remainder red.
Levi's long rabbit legs allowed him to cross the distance in a bound, meaning he arrived a step ahead of Taylor and two ahead of Drew. "It's okay," he said, resting a furry hand lightly on her shoulder. "Use a health potion."
Calliope's head had hit hard; she was conscious and her eyes were open but she was unresponsive.
Taylor hit his Heal spell and growled when a message appeared saying Nope! Self only, loser!
"It's okay," Levi repeated, this time speaking to Taylor. "She can't die of injuries sustained in a safe room. She'll be fine." He started to sing, a powerful tenor that echoed off the walls and wove a tapestry of sound around them. Taylor felt his panic ebb and a warm looseness sweep through his body. Calliope's eyes drifted closed and the pain eased out of her face as her health bar began climbing smoothly. A crackling sound indicated her bones mending, her health bar jumping higher with each one. After only a few seconds she was back to full health and thirty seconds after that her eyes fluttered open. She blinked for a second, then pushed herself upright and shook her head. Levi allowed the song to die away and sat back.
"Still think bards suck?" he asked, amused.
"I regret everything," she said. "Thanks."
"That spell only works if the board is within three feet of the surface that gravity is oriented towards," Levi told her. "That's what 'board centered' means in the description." He stood up and extended his lower right hand to her.
"No more handplants when the ceiling is the floor, got it." She took his hand and he pulled her to her feet as though she weighed nothing.
"Why don't we all keep our feet on the floor for a bit while Drew opens his boxes?" Taylor suggested archly.
"It's a plan," Calliope said, smiling and rubbing her neck. "Still, that was so damn cool. I could tweak the direction of gravity so whatever I was riding on seemed flat or tipped. It was like everything was a ramp! So. Epic."
"If 'epic' means 'would have been fatal outside of a safe room with Levi in it' then yes," Taylor said. "I promised your mother I would keep you from dying, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't make me a liar." Too late he realized what he had said.
Calliope's face wobbled as realization struck. "Mom's dead, isn't she? And Dad. And Gramma, and Grampa, and my crew."
Taylor bit his cheek and cursed himself. "I think so," he said. "But we can still save them. All we have to do is get through this place."
Calliope glared at him. "No one has even come close, remember? One guy made it to the thirteenth floor, one time." Her voice broke on the last words and her eyes were wet.
Levi shifted uncomfortably. "It's...possible that you could save some of your people," he said slowly. "At the start of each level from ten on, you are given a chance to make an indenture contract. It gets you out of the dungeon and if you can make a good enough contract then it can involve them bringing your people back. After you pay off the indenture, of course, and that always takes a long time."
Everyone's eyebrows shot up.
"You didn't mention that before," Taylor said.
Levi shrugged. "Indentures aren't relevant until you make it to the tenth floor and you shouldn't be thinking about them right now. Still, if you want big perks like resurrections then you'll need to have huge view counts so that you're making the showrunners a ton of money."
"Did you get that deal?" Drew asked.
Levi considered the question for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah. My parents will be resurrected when I pay off. I've got another hundred and sixteen seasons to go, so it'll take a while."
"How many people can we—"
Levi held up a hand. "Not now. It's a distraction. You need to be thinking about what's in front of you, not about something that might be possible, maybe, far in the future. Besides, things change a lot and I'm no expert. Get to the tenth floor and you'll be given an advocate who will know all the rules and relevant laws. Right now, Drew should open his boxes and then you need to get back out there."
Everyone looked mutinous at that, but finally Drew nodded. "Fine."
They moved back to the couches and settled down to watch as Drew opened his loot.
Drew, being far more basic than either of his companions, had received only three boxes. The first, the Silver Early Adopter box, contained a health potion and a dozen torches. His face, excited as a kid at his own birthday party, fell like when the kid discovered that the birthday cake was frosting on top of poop and the guests were cardboard cutouts.
He took a breath and shook it off as the second box opened, the Silver box he had received for the Cheater achievement.
"Sweet!" he said, pulling out a bulging plastic grocery bag, a lighter, and a small silver tin. Taylor frowned in curiosity, then rolled his eyes when the smell wafted over.
Drew didn't notice; he had his head stuck in the bag and was busy snorking up the hugest lungful of air ever snorked by a human being.
"Drew," Calliope asked calmly, "is that weed?"
"Damn straight, baby girl," Drew said, smiling brightly. He started pulling small ziploc bags out of the larger grocery bag. Someone had pasted a chunk of masking tape across the front of each ziploc and labeled it with a fat marker and poor handwriting. "Check it out," he said, holding up the first bag. "Northern Lights! This stuff is a classic! Spicy, earthy, and just a touch of sweetness. Very smooth." It disappeared into his inventory and he showed off the next one. "Trainwreck. I know, I know, bad juju with the name. Still, it's great stuff. Citrus and lemon flavors with a tang of pine. Plus, you don't need much to get a good buzz. Over here we've got Blue Dream. This stuff is my absolute fave, so thank you very much, My Lord AI sir. You are the bomb!" The last was said to the ceiling and made everyone cringe.
All told there was almost a pound of marijuana divided among six strains. Drew's encyclopedic knowledge of all things weed-related allowed him to describe each strain's flavor, mouth feel, and potency.
"Should we be worried that he knows all this so well?" Calliope asked her uncle. "I feel like we should be worried."
"Eh. Let's just get through the day."
"Oh, man, even high-end rolling papers!" Drew said, looking in the tin.
"Stick it in your inventory," Levi said. "You can manipulate the contents in small ways. If you put an entire container in inventory, it will itemize the contents for you and you can pull out any combination of the container and contents. The system will also allow you to assemble and disassemble items, up to a point. I suspect it will let you roll a joint in your inventory."
The papers vanished and a moment later a blunt appeared in Drew's fingers. "Fuck yeah," he sighed. "Damn I needed this." He lit the blunt with his new lighter and drew on it.
"Go easy," Taylor said. "We're going to be walking around shooting things in a few minutes."
Drew nodded, holding his breath.
Levi sighed. "Open your last box, then get out there before you get too blasted."
Drew let his breath out in a rush. "Oh, right." His voice was relaxed already.
The smoke was drifting past Taylor, who imagined that he could feel a contact high. He began to get up and move away, but Levi waved a hand discreetly and all the smoke started being sucked up into the ceiling.
Drew didn't notice, as he was too focused on his Legendary box. It was shimmying back and forth in front of him like a puppy eager for attention. It was four feet high and three wide and deep, made out of what looked like a chunk of the night sky: velvety black vapors drifting slowly about, with points of silvery light glimmering deeper inside the walls of the box than should have been possible.
Drew reached in and pulled out a spellbook. He read the cover and his eyes brightened. "Fuck yeah!" Before Taylor could ask, Drew glowed blue and the book, and the box it had come from, vanished.
"What was it?" Taylor asked, suppressing frustration that Drew hadn't allowed the others to examine the book before using it.
"Smoke Form," Levi said, his eyes glowing as he flipped through menus. "And since he got it from a Legendary box it came with a level boost too. It's starting at level 5 instead of level 1. That's going to be huge—most spells change every five levels, getting stronger or more versatile each time."
"What's it do?" Calliope asked.
"He can control smoke."
"Yeah!" Drew said. "Check this out! I'm a dragon." He sucked on the doobie, wiggled his fingers, and blew out a long breath. The smoke flowed out of his mouth in the form of a Chinese dragon, long and serpentine with a lion's head and four clawed legs. It spun and danced and twisted around the room.
"At level 1 it lets you condense smoke into a shape that it will maintain until the spell ends," Levi explained. "It's useful for maintaining breathable air, for example. At level 5, where he is now, you can maintain control of it, move it around and change its color so it looks like something that isn't smoke. At level 10 he'll be able to make the forms solid."
"What about level 15? Or 20?" Calliope asked.
"I don't know," Levi said. "I've never seen Smoke Form at level 15. Spells and skills generally top out at level 15 unless you have something that unlocks them, in which case you can train them to 20. It's easy to train stuff up to level 9, but every level after that takes more and more experience and comes slower and slower. It's hard to get even to level 12 in a skill or spell without using potions or boosts of some kind. Getting things above level 15 is virtually impossible, but worth it. The power jump per level after 15 is enormous—a level 15 Force Lance will make a City Boss think carefully about its life choices, but the level 20 version will blow a hole straight through a mountain." He tossed the subject away with one hand. "Regardless, even at level 5 that's a great spell. He's definitely going to want to go mage and boost up his Intelligence as much as he can, because the more mana you put into it the larger the area you can affect and the longer it lasts."
"Man, this is some good shit," Drew said, releasing a lungful of smoke that immediately drifted upwards and away. "You guys want a toke?"
"No, thanks," Taylor said quickly, cutting in before the interested sparkle in Calliope's eyes could develop into action. "You should put it away now. We need to get back out there and kill stuff, and you need to have your head straight while we do."
"Right, right." The blunt disappeared into Drew's inventory and he lumbered to his feet, a beatific smile on his face. "Let's go kill some shit, or something."
Voting time! Voting ends at
.
Bleh. Didn't get to the 'exploring and fighting' part, but this took enough time that I think it's worth redoing that vote. In the interest of moving things along, have some OOC information: Which direction would you like to travel?
[] (Direction) Stick in this neighborhood, where the insectoid monsters are. (They are not sapient.)
[] (Direction) North, where the sheep are. (A few of them are sapient, most are animals.)
[] (Direction) West, where you can meet a large group of humans. (Might be friendly, might be hostile.)
[] (Direction) East, where the kobolds are. (They are sapient.)
[] (Direction) South, where the plant monsters are. (They are not sapient.)
You're almost certainly going to end up fighting something in the next update. How do you do that?
[] (Tactics) Moar dakka! Guns, guns, all the guns! 'Murika, fuck yeah! Also, machete some shit up!
[] (Tactics) Yo-yo-yo, bust some heads with that newly combat-capable enchanted yo-yo!
[] (Tactics) Write in
The string of the enchanted yo-yo can get longer and shorter and the yo-yo itself can change its mass slightly in order to make a more effective bludgeon.
Using the write in option will allow you to specify how you want the others to fight and how you should all coordinate. Please give it a short plan name (e.g. "[x] Kommando Klobberers") and put details underneath it.
Finally, what do you want to do with your spellbook of Gold Grabber?
[] (Spellbook) Use it!
[] (Spellbook) Give it to Drew
[] (Spellbook) Give it to Calliope
[] (Spellbook) Keep it to sell later
The dungeon, per Levi, gave all new crawlers death sight until they took the tutorial. The 'glowing moss' that they had been seeing by until now wasn't actually glowing. It was regular living moss and, just like every living thing, it was slowly dying and that death was visible to those with death sight. It even served as a minimal 'light' source, offering those with death sight the ability to see the surrounding area. Having been through the tutorial, the death sight was gone and they were reduced to using torches and other sources of normal light.
Good news: the dungeon had provided several dozen torches in their collective loot boxes, they could be lit from an interface command instead of needing a fire source, and they had a 30-minute countdown timer so you knew how much longer they would burn.
Bad news: They were moderately heavy and holding a chunk of wood above your head while walking became uncomfortable quickly.
Better news: Fuck torches, Taylor had brought a wide variety of LED lights in various form factors, including miners' lights that could be strapped to your forehead and were way brighter than a torch. Also, they emitted white light which didn't miscolor the surroundings the way a torch did.
He was feeling somewhat smug about that, but was trying not to show it. Instead, he had his shotgun on patrol sling facing forward while he played with his new loot.
Enchanted Skyhawk Yo-Yo
+3 Dexterity
+3 Strength
+3 to the Yo-Yo skill
+3 to the Summon Yo-Yo spell
The Ambidexterous benefit
On mental command, yo-yo will become spatially locked for up to (Intelligence) seconds unless unlocked sooner. Cooldown: 60 seconds from when unlocked
String changes length on mental command to be from 5cm to 100cm + 30cm/level of Yo-Yo skill (current maximum length: 430cm)
Yo-yo changes mass on mental command to be from 80g to 100g x level of Yo-Yo skill (current maximum mass: 1100g)
Velocity is unaffected by changes in mass
Retrieval force is based on user's Strength and level of Yo-Yo skill
Yo-Yo glows and emits sparks on command. It doesn't do anything, but it looks cool as shit.
Summon Yo-Yo
Cost: 1 mana
Effect: All yo-yos within your line of sight are summoned to your dominant hand with force proportional to your Strength and the level of the spell. Summoned objects will not harm the caster from impact.
The enhancements to his Skyhawk had cost Taylor a Silver and a Legendary box; it was totally worth it.
They had been walking through the dungeon for twenty minutes—well, Drew and Taylor were walking. Calliope hadn't gotten off her board the whole time, and probably couldn't have been pried loose absent a hydraulic jack. She was continuously 'throwing heat', which apparently was TeenSpeek for 'repeatedly performing multiple complex and advanced skateboard tricks while maintaining a disaffected attitude of faux-humility that was not fooling anyone.' Taylor had been nervous about all the noise she was making and the unwanted attention it might produce, although he calmed down when Drew pointed out that they wanted all the monsters to come charging towards them. In fact, not being able to find monsters to kill would be one of the bigger problems they might face.
"That is an excellent point," Taylor said. "Leo, how would you feel about wearing a collar with a little bell on it?"
"Jeez, Unc. Don't you think it's a little inappropriate to be talking about putting a collar on your own niece?" the girl asked archly. "Besides, I don't sub."
Taylor's brain made a valiant effect at not understanding Calliope's words but, sadly, it failed. He instantly blushed so hard he was afraid that his head would burst and he started sputtering. "What?! How... What? How do you even...? Why...? No!"
Calliope snickered gleefully and handplanted, somersaulted, and came out crouched on her board and gliding rapidly off down the corridor.
"How do you even know what that means?! You're fourteen!" Taylor shouted after her.
The word "Internet!" came floating back.
Drew was cackling so hard that he started coughing.
"Et tu, Brute?" Taylor asked, glaring at his friend.
"Huh?"
Taylor's embarrassment incremented slightly. He often forgot that his long-time friend hadn't completed high school, let alone gone on to receive the college education that Taylor had.
"It's from a play," Taylor said. "Back in Roman times, some senators got worried that Julius Ceasar was gaining too much power, so they got together and stabbed him. A lot. His friend Brutus was one of the senators, and supposedly Caesar said 'Et tu, Brute', meaning something like 'Even you, Brutus?' Of course, no one knows what he really said, so Shakespeare was making it up."
"Cool. Did it really happen or it's just the play?"
"No, it really happened. 44 BCE, if I remember right." He thought back, groping after half-forgotten details. "Let's see...Caesar was a huge big-juju general, absolutely beat the crap out of everything and anyone who looked at Rome funny or was standing on ground that Rome wanted. A few years before this he brings his army back to Rome from North Bumblefuck or wherever they were at the time. The Roman senators tell him to disband his army but he says fuck you. He takes his army across the Rubicon river into Rome, and kills everyone he doesn't like. The Senate then graciously and absolutely voluntarily appoints him dictator for life—"
"Like Calvin! And Hobbes was his President and First Tiger." Drew sucked on his joint and held the smoke, a satisfied smile on his face.
"Yup, just like that. Anyway, Caesar gets appointed dictator and starts treating the rest of the government like crap. The senators decide they don't like that, so on March 15 they stabbed him a bazillion times right on the floor of the Senate in the Theater of Pompey."
"Pompeii, like the volcano?"
"Different Pompey."
"Ah, cool. Theater, huh? Between Caesar and Abraham Lincoln and that 'shouting fire' thing, I'm thinking that important people shouldn't go to the theater."
"That's—" Taylor broke off as a girlish Yaaah! came from around the corner ahead, followed by a gunshot. He glanced at his minimap for the first time in too long and saw Calliope's blue dot engaged with a red dot labeled 'Kruthak — Level 2'.
"Shit!" he shouted, charging forward. Drew raced after him, his pistol in hand. "Muzzle!" Taylor shouted over his shoulder, purely out of reflex.
"I was being careful!"
They rounded the corner before Taylor could respond, and Taylor skidded to a stop, shotgun coming up into firing position and then hesitating.
The kruthak was a mutant four-legged crab the size of a low-backed loveseat. It had a smooth armored shell and legs that came to needle points, its head was literally a skull with spider-like jacknife chelicerae currently dripping what was either black blood or horrifically acidic venom, since the stone floor was smoking where the stuff landed.
"Hooah!" Calliope shouted, rail-grinding her skateboard across the monster's back while facing backwards and firing her shotgun down into it. Purple blood fountained upwards as the heavy buckshot tore inch-wide holes into the monster, but Calliope was already past before the blood could touch her. She hit the ground, crouched down, and fired straight up the kruthak's butt, the force of the shot sending her gliding backwards and away.
The kruthak collapsed, its legs splaying out to the sides and twitching for a moment before going limp. Blood and meat slurry leaked out of it.
"Now that's what I call killing it with style, baby!" Calliope said, pushing her way back to her team. Moose greeted her with a congratulatory woof and a tail wag.
"Thank you, Moose," she said, ruffling his ears with the hand that wasn't holding the shotgun. It had swept across the two of them when she turned around, but she immediately noticed and jerked it up and away.
Taylor found himself torn between being appalled at her recklessness and impressed with the style. The different reactions warred within him, preventing him from saying anything.
"Duuuude," Drew said, fistbumping Calliope. "That was badass."
"You're bleeding," Taylor said, pointing to her calf.
Calliope blushed. "Yeah, I stuffed the grind first time. It stabbed me with one of its legs before I could pull away and go back for another try. It's fine." Her leg glowed for a moment and she pulled up her baggy jeans to show unmarked skin. "This Heal spell is the what. Two mana for big time healing? Signs."
Taylor pushed hard on his eyebrow with one thumb, trying to drive away the headache that inevitably appeared when exposed to teenage slang that reminded him he was now officially an old person.
"Try to be more careful, okay?" he said. "Don't engage on your own. We're a team."
"The fuck, Unc? I handled it fine on my own. I was badass and you know it."
He took a deep breath. "Yeah, you were, but I worry, okay? Just...please."
"Whatever. Killing that thing got me most of the way to level 2. Let's go find some more because mama needs some damn looooot!" She spun her board around and started to move away.
"Hold up!" Taylor said, grabbing her shoulder quickly. "Take one second and tell us about the monster. You blew the shit out of it before we got here, so we didn't even see it move." A bit of sugar for the teenage ego was likely to make this go smoother. "How fast was it? How strong? Did it turn well? Drew and I might need this to survive." He gestured to the corpse.
Corpse of Kruthak — Level 2
The kruthak are a eusocial species of fanged, spiked horrors that periodically boil up out of the ground and eat everything in sight. Their lairs tend to be deep underground with multiple hidden and easily-collapsed entrances, making it very hard to completely eliminate an infestation.
Basic Kruthak such as this are the lowest caste. Hatched from defective eggs, they are essentially living tripwires that wander around the edges of kruthak territory until killed. Interesting fact: kruthak communicate over long distances via pheromones. When killed, all of their sphincters release, including the ones for their pheromone glands. Just a random bit of trivia that probably isn't important in any way.
Calliope had started to bristle at being grabbed, but his words created the desired response: flattered and boastful. "Yeah, pretty fast when it's moving in a straight line. Can't turn for shit when it's moving, but it spins in place pretty fast. That's how it got me. Also, it's strong enough that it didn't go crunch or even collapse when I ollied on it."
"Cool. Stay in sight, okay? Drew and I need to get some kills too."
She laughed. "Keep up or lose out, oldies!" She turned and pushed off down the hallway.
Taylor rubbed his temples, hard.
"It's cool," Drew said, resting a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. "She's smart."
"Yeah, I know. She's also reckless. How many times has she come home bloody from the skate park?"
"Sure, but—"
"And the time that she broke her nose trying to...land a wobbly or whatever the hell it was."
Drew looked amused. "A 'wobbly'? I don't think that's a thing."
"I thought she was going to lose those teeth."
"She didn't."
"She almost did. And she had a concussion. And she didn't even wait a week like the doctor told her. She was out there again two days later. It would have been the next day if Danni hadn't practically locked her in her room."
"This is our life now, Tay. You heard Levi; we kill lots of stuff in a really dramatic way or we die. Two choices, two choices only. Leo is young, cute, charismatic, and she also just showed us that she can do the job. The audience is going to love her, so give her the room to do her thing."
"She showed us that she can do the job against one of those things. You saw the description, right?"
"Yeah. Social bugs. Going to be lots of them. And it's clear that the thing is stinking up the place and it'll be attracting more of them." He shrugged. "We knew it wasn't going to be easy, Tay. Three million people died in the first hour. The three of us have got a better chance that probably anyone else because you brought us in prepared. Doesn't mean we can afford to play it safe. Levi said that the power curve scales up as we go deeper. Either we grow faster than the curve or we die." He chuckled and slapped Taylor on the back. "Now come on. Mr Murder Rabbit also said that we should be running everywhere." He took off at a jog. Taylor chuckled and went after him, falling in beside him after a few steps.
Neither of them were in shape. Within a hundred yards they needed to slow down and powerwalk in order to catch their breaths. Taylor fretted; Calliope was already out of sight, her dot more than halfway out towards the edge of the minimap. He pulled up the chat interface.
Taylor: Leo, come back. You're too far out ahead.
Calliope: I'm the one with the bell on, right? Relax. I'm not that far away. If I see anything I can't handle, I'll come back.
Taylor: Come get Moose, okay? I'll feel better if you're not alone.
Calliope: Fiiiiiine.
"You know, Danni used to talk about locking that girl in a barrel," Taylor said thoughtfully. "Mesh bottom, put in a supersized version of one of those hamster bottles for food and water. I'm coming around to her way of thinking."
Drew laughed and shifted back up into a jog. "C'mon, man. Breath to bitch, breath to run."
Taylor followed along. "What's with you and the exercise program all of a sudden? You've never been a jogger."
"I've also never been locked in a dungeon where shit wants to eat me."
"Fair point."
They jogged along for another minute until Taylor needed to dig his fingers up under his ribs to squeeze out the stitch in his side. His breath was rasping and the blood was pounding in his veins but he forced himself to continue. "Have you thought...about how...you're going to fight?" he gasped.
Drew looked at him in confusion, not wasting breath on speech, but a few seconds later he dropped back to a fast walk. "What do you mean?" he said, panting between the words.
Taylor waited until they had walked long enough that he wasn't gasping. "Levi was right. The guns are a good start but we need to plan for when we're out of bullets. What are your thoughts?"
"I dunno, man. Not like I got a lightsaber falling out of the sky, yeah?"
"I had a couple thoughts..."
o-o-o-o
Calliope swung back to pick up Moose, then pushed back out into the darkness, the teenager riding faster on enchanted wheels than the older men could on shank's mare. This time, Taylor kept one eye continually glued on the minimap, monitoring Calliope's position as he and Drew walked and jogged after her. And so it was that he saw the three red dots appear right on top of her.
"Shit!" he shouted, taking off at a run. Drew was only a second slower.
It was a nightmarishly long run, nearly a minute while gunshots bellowed out from ahead.
Taylor: We're coming! We're almost there! Retreat towards us if you can!
Calliope: Fuckshitholyfuckingchrist!
Taylor: Go up the wall! Skate on the ceiling where they can't reach you!
Five long seconds became about a million years and then there was a series of five shotgun blasts in quick succession. A second later there were five more.
Taylor: CALLIOPE ANNABETH MCCORMICK, ANSWER ME! WHAT IS HAPPENING?!
Calliope: It's okay. I'm okay. They're right behind me, but I'm okay. I'm coming to you.
Taylor: GODDAMNIT, Calliope! I told you to stay near us! I told you and you wouldn't fucking listen!
Calliope: I said I'm okay! Jesus, Uncle Taylor. Take a fucking breath, okay? Not the time. I'm almost there. I'm on the ground and out of mana again—I had to use a mana potion so that I could refresh the gravity thingy. They're called 'Kruthak Assassins' and they're level 4. They didn't show up on my map until they jumped out at me. They're right behind me and they're faster than I am without the gravity boost.
Drew: Both of you, chill. Baby girl, we're ready. Take the corner very wide. Go past us, ten yards down the hall, then set up one of the barricades. We'll give them a splash of grape juice and then fall back to you.
Taylor looked over in surprise, although it was purely reflex; their lights were out and he couldn't see Drew. "A splash of—"
Calliope came rocketing around the corner, crouching as low on her board as she could manage without reducing her ability to push. Seconds later, three kruthak rounded the corner behind her just as Drew and Taylor flicked on their headlamps.
Kruthak Assassin — Level 4
They were smaller than the first one, only up to Taylor's thigh, but they were leaner, faster, and covered in spines over most of their body. The basic kruthak had been brownish and slick; the assassins were pure, lightless black, so black that they were simply a hole in the world with no perceptible depth.
They jolted and hissed like angry steam engines when the light hit them, hesitating for just one moment before rushing forward again.
Drew and Taylor were each standing behind a barricade, a chest-high slab of metal six feet long with multi-axis sockets at each corner. A metal pole in each socket braced the barricades upright and grooves across the front had allowed them to slide in custom-made strips of spikes. The mens' shotguns hammered as the creatures came at them, a torrent of solid slugs that ripped into the enemy and splashed purple blood everywhere.
The barricade was set up fifteen feet back from the corner and stretched halfway across the corridor, leaving room for Calliope to fly past them, carom off the far wall, and push herself frantically down the hall. Her shotgun was slung, her pistol holstered, in order to free her hands for balance. Moose ran behind her on three legs, his right front paw off the ground and drenched in blood.
The first kruthak dropped as it rounded the corner, torn apart by the storm of slugs. The second stumbled and fell five feet closer, one leg blown off. The third scrambled over it without slowing down and flung itself at the two men.
Taylor stretched out a hand, took two steps to his right in order to get properly positioned, and called his yo-yo to him from where it waited against the far wall. The kruthak, either through lack of intelligence or lack of situational awareness, hadn't reacted to its presence when they charged blithely past it to get at the fleeing morsel that was Calliope.
The yo-yo zipped across the distance between them, zooming for his hand. Given where he had not-accidentally positioned himself, the kruthak was in the way. The yo-yo slammed into the monster's back with the force of a minor-league fast ball and its night-dark chitin cracked even as the monster yowled in pain and was thrown forward.
Drew was ready; he stepped forward even as Taylor was raising his hand. He dropped his shotgun to dangle from its strap and conjured the machete from his inventory, swinging for the fences. The yo-yo's impact and the force of the swing combined to sink the entire length of the blade four inches into the creature, through its armor and the otherworldly flesh behind it. Blood fountained out, splashing across both of the men. The kruthak shrieked in agony and spat out a spray of acidic venom that splashed across Drew's right arm and the left hand that he had instinctively and too-late raised to keep the blood from his face. The stoner went to the ground, screaming in agony as the acid burned into him.
Taylor clicked the release on his shotgun, rotated the ammo tubes to put a fresh quintet of shells in line, and locked it in place. Even as the action automatically cycled a shell up into the chamber, he stretched out his left hand and dropped a box of washing soda from his inventory onto the stone in front of Drew. His right hand dipped, shoving the barrel of the gun against the Kruthak's head and yanking the trigger. "Use this!" he belatedly shouted at Drew.
The kruthak went still after three shots but Tayler dumped the remaining two into it just to be sure. He dropped his shotgun and started to turn to help Drew use the washing powder to neutralize the acid, when movement in the corner of his eye grabbed his attention.
The second kruthak, the one whose leg had been shot off, was up and lunging. It scrambled up and over the barricade without pausing, only slightly slowed by the missing leg and the spikes on the barricade, and threw itself on Taylor.
Taylor was trying to twist aside and simultaneously reaching for the shotgun that bounced at the end of its sling, just out of reach of adrenaline-fumbled hands. He managed to start moving backwards, buying himself a split second as the monster hit him and bore him down onto his back. He got one hand on the shotgun and brought it clumsily up, wedged between right hand and left forearm, as a barrier to keep the kruthak away.
The thing was on top of him, its chelicerae snapping and hissing as it attempted to get around the metal that was barring its path. All three surviving legs stabbed in sequence at Taylor's legs and sides, forcing him to writhe and wriggle backwards. His .45 was in its holster on his right thigh but he couldn't free a hand to get at it.
The man and the monster struggled across the floor, Taylor barely managing to keep the beast from hitting anything vital and settling for receiving minor cuts and stabs instead. His health was flatlining; he dumped two mana into his Heal spell, then did it again. It put his health almost back to full but it started dropping just as fast. When it dropped below half he clicked his only health potion out of his hot list, sending his health back to full. A three-minute countdown timer labeled 'potion cooldown' clicked on at the bottom left of his vision,
"Die!" Calliope shouted, smashing the edge of her invulnerable board down on the kruthak's chelicerae, snapping the left one off. The kruthak hissed in surprise and pain; it looked away from Taylor, snapping at Calliope instead.
Then Moose was there, shoulder-barging into the kruthak and knocking it over. He got his teeth into one of the monster's legs just above the middle joint and shook with the full force of his massive neck and shoulders. The leg was torn completely free and the kruthak shrieked in agony, scrambling backwards in an attempt to escape.
Even if it wasn't down two of its four legs, neither Calliope nor Moose were in the mood to let it run. The teenager flung herself at it in a berserk frenzy, smashing at it over and over, using her skateboard like an axe. Moose circled around to attack from the back, grabbing and tearing off the third leg.
"Fuck you, bitch!" Drew cried, suddenly appearing from behind Taylor. He shoved his shotgun into the kruthak's mouth and dumped the magazine; he had loaded buckshot and the holes that came out the creature's back were the size of a fist. (Hydrostatic shock, said some far off part of Taylor's mind that was desperate for a distraction from the reality of imminent death.)
The kruthak shuddered and went flat, its weight landing on Taylor's legs and pinning him in place.
"Getitoffgetitoff!"
Calliope and Drew grabbed hold and pulled, managing to flip the armored bug away from him. Taylor scrambled backwards on hands and butt until his back was against the wall where he sat panting and waiting for his heart to slow down.
"We are out of here," he said after a moment, letting his head fall forward into his hands. "Three of those things almost killed us. There's going to be more of them and apparently the pheromones are going to be drawing them in." He raised one arm and sniffed. "God, even I can smell it. I think. Can you smell it?"
Calliope leaned over the kruthak's corpse and sniffed at it. "Maybe? Not sure. Mostly all I smell is my own sweat. Jesus."
"Language," he said, face once again in his hands.
"Yes, Mom."
Drew started giggling.
"What's so funny?" Taylor demanded, checking Drew for injuries. His friend's health bar was at full, which was good. The washing powder had neutralized the acid and the Heal spell or heal potion or some combination had dealt with the injury, although there were still scarred pits across Drew's forearms and left hand.
"You," Drew said. "The two of you are hilarious. Also, I might be a little baked."
Calliope blinked. "You're fucking what?"
"Later," Taylor said, pushing himself to his feet with a sigh. "C'mon. Let's head any direction but this one."
Calliope stared at him for a moment. "Unc, we need to kill stuff. I leveled up to 3 off that. What about you guys?" She looked to Drew for support.
"I went to 2," he said.
Taylor wearily pulled up his interface and then nodded. "Yeah, I went to 2 and halfway to 3."
"And we've only killed four of them! C'mon, Unc!"
"No." He stood up and walked over to her. "Are you wounded?"
"What? No. I used my Heal spell."
"Good. Give me one of your health potions. Moose got hurt protecting you and I had to use my health potion to keep myself alive while we were rescuing you from the monsters." The moment the words were out of his mouth he regretted them, but he kept the feeling off his face. Harsh, true, possibly even too harsh, but Calliope needed the lesson.
She glared at him, then conjured up one of the two blue bottles stored in her inventory and slapped it into his hand. Without a word, Taylor took it over to Moose and convinced the big dog to drink it. Afterwards, Moose looked very unhappy and kept licking his nose as though trying to get rid of a foul taste, but at least his paw wasn't injured anymore.
"Come on," Taylor said. "We're packing up the barricades and then we're heading west, away from those things."
"But Unc—"
"Now, Calliope."
o-o-o-o
They had been moving for half an hour, Calliope and Moose ranging out ahead even farther despite repeated warnings. Drew and Taylor were jogging when Drew finally broke the silence.
"If you push her too much she'll stop listening."
Taylor took a breath. "I know."
Drew nodded and didn't say anything for a bit.
Five minutes later, after the two men had gone through another jog-walk-jog cycle and were walking again, he spoke.
"You remember how my mom used to be with Brenda?"
Taylor noticed that he was grinding his teeth and forced his jaw to relax. "Yes. I get it, Drew." Drew's sister had babysat for Taylor and Drew plenty of times; she was a soft touch on TV rules and a good storyteller, so both of them had thought she was the greatest thing since fire. Most of the world thought the same, because Brenda had been everything that her brother was not; studious, athletic, driven...she had excelled at everything, and her parents had pushed her to go beyond even those levels. Then she went off to college and never came home again. She occasionally called her brother and she always sent a birthday card, but she never spoke to their parents.
"I remember one time in high school, Brenda wanted to go over to a friend's house for a graduation party," Drew said. "I was...what, eight? I didn't understand what Mom and Bren-Bren were arguing about, but I remember it now. They were really mad. Finals were done, school year was basically over. Mom wouldn't let her go out, insisted that she stay in and practice her violin piece for a recital that was still a week away." He laughed. "I'm sure she already knew that thing cold. She always knew everything cold."
"There's just a bit of difference between 'I hate you because you won't let me go to a party' and 'I hate you because you're trying to keep me from being killed and eaten by giant monsters.'"
"Not to her. I mean...you do you, man, but baby girl wants some space. She just lost everything and everyone. She wants to feel like she's in charge of her own life for a bit."
"Yeah, well, she's perfectly free to be in charge of her own life as long as she doesn't act stupid and get herself killed."
"You should definitely tell her that. In those exact words even—I'm sure it'll settle everything."
Taylor shoved his friend. "Hey, I thought we agreed that sarcastic mockery is my thing. You're supposed to be the cool one." A thought connected. "Speaking of, what was that about splashing grape juice on the monsters?"
"It's a quote, man. 'Give them a splash of the grape juice.' Napoleon, I think? Somebody like that. It's a military thing, you wouldn't understand."
Taylor snorted and moved the pace up into a jog. Gotta grind that Running skill.
Ten minutes later, thinking back over Drew's points, Taylor couldn't help but notice that this was the first time Drew had mentioned his sister in years.
o-o-o-o
An hour later, the team's feet were about to fall off but they were still walking, now in a group. Calliope and Moose had had two successful encounters with basic kruthak. The first time, Calliope saw the monster before it was on the men's map and dealt with it before they could get to her. The second time was two basic kruthak; she and Moose retreated so that all four of them could take the bugs on together. It was enough to push Calliope to level 4 and Drew and Taylor to level 3. Moose, due to the bizarreness of whatever algorithm the dungeon AI used for awarding XP, had gone up all the way to level 5. As promised, he had grown larger with each new level. His shoulders were now even with Taylor's thighs and his proportions had changed, his shoulders and neck bulking up even more than the rest of him. Taylor had needed to let the spiked collar out so it didn't choke him.
No one had spoken in twenty minutes. The silence and monotony had given Taylor time to think and that was turning out to be a bad thing. He kept trying to think about the crawl—anticipate problems, come up with tactics, something. Instead, his mind kept drifting to deep dish pizza and Golden Girls, to breakfast nooks and bad jokes, a father's blue eyes crinkled up at the corners in laughter and a mother's brown ones rolling like amused marbles at her husband's well-worn delivery.
The silence had become a heavy thing, pressing the memories out of his subconscious and up to where he couldn't think about anything else. He wanted to say something, share some of those thoughts. Calliope and Drew were probably having much the same experience and sharing would undoubtedly help all three of them. The weight of the silence, and abrasive pressure of the memories, squeezed all the words out of his chest and all he could do was walk in silence.
"Hey," Calliope said at last. "Blue dots."
"Oh, cool," Drew said. "People."
Taylor silently cursed himself again. He needed to pay more attention to his minimap. He had told himself, repeatedly, to pay more attention to his minimap. Yet here he was again, brooding and not paying attention to the damn minimap. There were half a dozen blue dots, out on the very top edge of the map and coming closer.
"We need to be careful," he said. "Remember what Levi said? Player killing is a thing and they outnumber us." The dots were closing fast, the people in question clearly jogging. They would be in sight in thirty seconds unless the team retreated fast, and that might not be possible if the other group decided to pursue. After all, if the strangers were on Taylor's minimap then he was on theirs.
"I got this," Drew said, pulling a lit blunt out of his inventory and dragging hard.
"Drew, what are you doing?" Calliope demanded. "This is no time to get wasted."
"Nah, nah," he said. "S'all good. Have a little faith, baby girl." He exhaled a cloud of smoke which billowed up to the ceiling twenty feet above and clung there. Moments later he blew out another cloud, barely holding the smoke at all. Calliope stared at him as though wondering where his pod might be hidden.
By then it was too late. Four men and two women came around the corner and spread out to face them.
Taylor found himself wishing that the team had moved into one of the smaller side tunnels instead of sticking to the main throughway. The 'main line' tunnels, as they had taken to calling the things, were twenty feet square with walls of a specked green and red stone. The floors were relatively flat, with the same subtle dips and upthrusts here and there that you might get on a natural field—not something you could comfortably walk on blindfolded, but nothing that was an issue if your eyes were open.
The side passages, by contrast, varied between six and twelve feet wide and their height varied even more, ranging from five-foot holes that the team wasn't willing to crouch through, up to thirty-foot ridiculousness that made the corridor feel like a crack in the earth. The narrower halls would have been easier for three people and a dog to defend when outnumbered.
The enemy (?) team was led by a bull of a man, well over six feet and built like a tank, with graying hair caught back in a pony tail and secured by a rawhide strip. He was wearing a wife-beater shirt that glowed faintly, blue jeans with frayed hems, a wide leather belt with an oversized buckle showing a confederate flag, and shit-kicker boots that had started off tan but were now mostly stain. He carried a thick chain in his hand, with a 10-pound kettle bell stuck to the end.
His backup band were built in a similar vein, although not as large. They were all in their late twenties and all wore jeans and leather jackets covered in various patches, although an eagle with crossed rifles in each claw took pride of place on the left chest. One of the women had a jagged peroxide-blonde bob and the other had shaved her head completely. The leftmost man had another of the oversized belt buckles, this one saying 'Bobby', and a Confederate-flag handerchief tied over his head like a genderflipped Southern Rosie the Riveter poster. He carried a claw hammer in each hand. Beside him was his literal twin, identical except for a scar on his cheek and a crook in his nose where it had been broken and reset. The brother carried a long spear with a crossguard a foot back from the point.
The third man was pale, very blond, and had the sort of muscle definition that required hours of work at a gym and fanatic attention to diet. He had brass knuckles on his left hand and carried a broken bottle in his right; the edges of the glass glimmered in a way that suggested they had come from a loot box and not a bar top. He wore combat boots, black jeans, and nothing under his leather jacket. A bit of ink showed on his chest, peeking out from under the lapel, but Taylor couldn't make out the full tattoo.
The last man was short and lean, and could not have looked more like a weasel without being covered in fur. If Central Casting had sent over someone to play the role of "prison snitch", this man would have been sent back for being too much of a stereotype. The tattoo of three blood-red tears dripping down under his left eye suggested that there might actually have been some prison in his past.
The peroxide-blonde had a skull over her head. It was grey and it throbbed like a slow heartbeat, shifting between being crisp and being slightly out of focus.
The leader had two skulls.
"So," the leader said, his voice deep and rough. "What have we here?"
Drew exhaled another lungful of smoke, allowing it to float up to the ceiling amidst the silence.
Author's Note: I borrowed the general idea of the kruthak from Dungeon Crawler Darryl, which apparently borrowed them from D&D. Some liberties have been taken with spelling, description, and abilities.
Voting time! What do you do next? Voting ends at
.
Taylor: Drew, start your smoke forms. Leo...you know cool better than us. Do as you think best, but don't start the fight.
Drew: No worries, man. No worries. S'all good.
Calliope: You better do the talking. Drew is baked and they're not going to respect a teenage girl.
Taylor flicked a glance at his niece. Acknowledging that she wasn't the best one to solve an issue? Presumably the devil's air conditioner had finally been installed and promptly run amok. She glared back at him and jerked her head towards the strangers. He grinned at her and faced front.
"I'm Taylor," he said to the opposing leader with his two murder-marking skulls. He shifted his hand to rest along the top of his shotgun, which still hung from the patrol sling and was therefore facing forward and more or less aimed at the man's navel. "And you are?"
"Luke. Where you three from?" Unsurprisingly, Luke had a thick Southern twang to his voice.
"Outside Chicago. You?"
"Tennesee."
"Long way," Taylor said, his eyes flicking away from Luke as the man with the broken bottle shifted his weight.
"Guess the dungeon don't care too much about distance," Luke said. "You mind aimin' that thing someplace else?"
"Let's all put our weapons in our inventories."
Luke started to reply and then stopped as the pot cloud that had been covertly trickling along on the ceiling above the team suddenly drifted down to hover four feet over the Southerners' heads. The smoke shifted to be emerald green and then coalesced into the form of serpents whose bodies shifted and swirled without ever leaving the confines of the snake form.
"Don't worry," Taylor said. "They're friends of ours. I believe we were all going to put our weapons away?"
"Suddenly not too inclined to do that, what with you having snakes hanging over us."
"I'll back them off." He raised a hand and waved the snakes aside. Better if the Southerners didn't know who was actually controlling the things.
The snakes didn't move.
Taylor: Drew, back the damn snakes off! Move them so they're above and behind us.
"Huh? Oh, yeah," Drew said out loud. He started giggling. The snakes backed away as Taylor had ordered, hovering above and behind the team.
Luke raised an eyebrow, looking from Taylor to Drew and back. Taylor cursed silently.
The yo-yo was currently on Taylor's left hand, the string pulled in tight so as to hold it against the back of his fingers like a ridiculously oversized diamond ring. Taylor dropped the shotgun into his inventory and simultaneously activated the yo-yo's 'rave mode' as he had started thinking of it. It glowed softly and sparks flew out from it like from a sparkler, bouncing between all the colors of the rainbow.
"Your turn," Taylor said, chinning towards Luke.
Luke pursed his lips, but his chain and kettle bell vanished into his inventory.
Taylor: Drew, put your shotgun in your inventory.
Honestly, it would be an excellent idea for Drew to not be carrying a firearm right now. His muzzle and trigger discipline were bad at the best of times, and 'stoned out of his socks' was not the best of times.
"Dude, you sure that's smart?" Drew asked out loud, his voice dreamy. "These guys seem intense."
Taylor: Goddamnit, Drew, use the chat system! And put your damn shotgun away!
"Okay, okay. You don't have to shout." Drew's shotgun vanished into inventory.
"Your friend there seems a little stoned," Luke noted.
"You think that's gonna help you, bitch?" Calliope said, dropping her hand to her shotgun's grip, trigger finger extended beside the trigger but not on it. "Try it."
"Calliope!" Taylor snapped, chills crawling across his neck as his heart suddenly raced. "Stand down."
Calliope: Relax, Unc. I'm just being bad cop.
"You'll have to excuse her," he said out loud. "She's a little testy."
Luke nodded slowly. "Guess I know somethin' about that. Girl, put that shotgun away and the rest of us will put ours away."
Taylor flicked his glowing, sparking yo-yo out, lengthening the string as he did, and let it drop into a sleeper for a second before binding it back up to his hand and repeating the action. "Leo, put the shotgun away. Leave the pistol holstered for now."
Calliope glared daggers at Luke but reluctantly obeyed.
Luke gestured and his crew's weapons shimmered away in turn.
"You headed that way?" Taylor asked, jerking his head back the way they'd come.
"Plannin' on it."
"We came from there. Trade info?"
"Boss..." said peroxide-blonde-with-murderskull.
"Hush now," Luke said, not looking at her. To Taylor he said, "We'd be more interested in trading for some of those guns. We got caught without, been feeling the lack."
"Not happening, sorry."
Luke nodded, unsurprised. "We've got some good loot boxes. Might be worth your while for one shotgun. What are those, anyway? They look like something out of some sci-fi movie."
"Tavors," Taylor said. He smiled slightly and added, "Israeli made."
A muscle in Luke's cheek twitched and his eyes narrowed slightly. "Way you say that makes me think you're assuming that I'm a racist asshole just because I'm Southern."
"Dude— Ow, fuck man!" Drew said as Taylor grabbed his bicep and squeezed, cutting off whatever he had started to say.
"You're wearing Confederate flags," Taylor noted. "Doesn't do you any favors."
"Southern pride, my brother."
"Flag of traitors and slavers. And I'm not your brother."
The five members of Luke's crew shifted angrily, muttering. The broken bottle reappeared in Aryan Bro's hand and he started to step forward, then froze as Luke raised a clenched fist in the 'stop' handsign that anyone who had ever watched an action movie knew.
"Not lookin' for a fight here," Luke said.
"Looks like you already found three of them," Calliope said, nodding to their skulls. "You backstabbing hick bas—"
"Calliope!" Taylor snapped. "Shut up."
Taylor: Sorry, Leo. Just part of the act.
Calliope: S'all good, Unc. I think it's working.
Drew started giggling.
"Your friend there's got a real smart mouth," said the skinhead woman. "Seems like maybe she should keep those lips clamped."
"Seems like maybe you should follow your own advice, Roxy," Luke said. "All of you, step back."
"Boss—" said the broken-nosed twin.
"You questioning me, Nose? Step the fuck back."
Reluctantly, the five members of the gang took a step back.
"One more."
All five of them glowered but took a second, smaller, step back.
"Y'all seemed a tad tense," Luke said to Taylor. "Now, if you can keep your girl there from pissing in anyone's Frosted Flakes for five minutes, maybe we can do business."
"Yeah, that'll—"
"Calliope."
The girl glared at Taylor but stopped talking.
Drew giggled harder.
Luke's cheek muscle twitched again as his teeth clenched. "Care to share what's so funny?"
"You," Drew said, giggling madly. "All of you. Everybody's so tense and puffy. Bad vibes, man. Bad vibes."
Luke's teeth had moved from 'clenching' to 'grinding', but he forced himself to take a breath and look back to Taylor. "The skulls aren't what you think," he said. "We were having a dustup in the parking lot of the Bulls'n'Babes. We're kickin' ass, but it's friendly-like until one of 'em pulls a knife, stabs Roxy's sister in the guts. Just then the 'Babes vanishes into the ground along with all the cars and trucks. A staircase opens a bit away. Georgie stays with Mad Mary, tries to stop the bleeding while the rest of us go after the guy with the knife. Yeah, we were gonna stomp him dead for what he did, but only him.
"Their trucks are gone, so he and his buddies run down the stairs. We follow and suddenly we're in here. He and his buddies all pull knives, go after my crew. I caved one guy's head in while he was trying to shank Holt." He jerked his head towards Aryan Bro, who still held the broken bottle. "Rest of the fight went how you'd think."
"So, what?" Calliope asked. "You're a bunch of sweet little misunderstood lambs who were just defending yourselves?"
"You've got a real smart mouth on you, girlie. Might want to see to that." Luke's voice was disturbingly mild. Frighteningly so; Taylor would much have preferred that he sound angry.
Taylor: Back off, Leo. I think he's about at his limit.
"You wanted to do business," Taylor said. "So let's do business. Guns are off the table, but we've got information on what's back that way. Trade you for a read on where you're coming from."
Luke considered him for a moment. "All right. You start."
"Big bugs called kruthak," Taylor said. "We saw two kinds, the regular ones and the assassins. Think 'four-legged crab'." The regular ones are about four feet across, the assassins are smaller but pure black. You can't see them in the shadows." He tapped the LED miner's light on his headband. "Once you get a light on them they're pretty easy."
Drew looked over at him in surprise.
Taylor: Drew, shut the fuck up. Keep your eyes on Luke, do not speak, do not react to anything I say. You're stoned and you're going to screw this up.
Drew rolled his eyes but turned back to look at Luke, who had not missed the byplay.
"Seems like maybe they weren't that easy," Luke said.
Taylor shrugged. "Everything's relative, but yeah. Not that hard, but not trivial either."
"'Trivial'," Bobby muttered in a mocking sing-song. "Geek."
Taylor sent his sparking Skyhawk into a series of fast Around the World spins, the string lengthened until the Skyhawk nearly brushed the floor. He spun it fast enough that it blurred into a wheel, and stared Bobby down the whole time.
"You mentioned that my niece has a smart mouth," Taylor said calmly. "Seems like your boy does too."
Bobby's chin came up. "Fuck you, you geek fa—"
"Bobby, shut your hole before I need to shut it for you," Luke said. "Swear to god, you open your lips one more time and I'ma put your head in the wall."
"Boss, are you gonna let him—" That was as far as Roxy got before Luke turned around and backhanded her to the ground.
"I told you before to hush yourself," he said calmly.
"No you didn't," Drew said helpfully. "You said that she should follow—"
"Not the time, Drew," Taylor said. "Just be quiet. This doesn't have to get ugly."
The five members of Luke's backup band shifted angrily. Bobby helped Roxy back to her feet; her lip was split and her face was already puffing up. She glimmered and the injuries disappeared as she used her Heal spell. Luke turned away, deliberately leaving them all at his back and returning his focus to Taylor.
"What's ahead?" Taylor said. "We showed ours. Your turn."
"This area looks to be divided into a grid of neighborhoods," Luke said. "Each one's two, three miles across and's got a different type of critter. The neighborhoods only join together at a few places, one or two places on these main halls and a few more on the side channels. The monsters seem to mostly stay out of the main halls. The bit you're headed to has weird cat monsters in it, and if you go about thirty minutes where you're headed you'll run into a bunch of folks. A hundred, hundred and fifty of 'em, somethin' like. They were at some kind of outdoor party when everything collapsed, so they came down together. Buncha kids, buncha meemaws and pawpaws, but mostly grown folk. Most of 'em don't know what the hell to do so they're just sitting around."
"And you just blew on by?"
Luke shrugged. "I've got a responsibility to my own." He hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the other five. "We've been in here a few hours and I've already lost four brothers. This place is dangerous and we can't take responsibility for those as won't take it for themselves."
Taylor nodded. "All right," he said at last. "I think it's best if we all just move on now."
"Feelin' like I gave a little more in that trade than I got," Luke said. "You might could even that up a bit."
Taylor: Drew, do not say anything out loud or react.
"All right," Taylor said after a moment. "Here's a piece of advice for you: the dungeon gives loot boxes with most achievements and it gives achievements for doing things that will entertain the audience. That means either killing stuff in new and exciting ways or generally doing weird shit. Sing raunchy songs at the top of your lungs or hop on one foot for an hour, that kind of thing. Also, the AI enjoys seeing us do embarrassing stuff. Our game guide said that drinking your own piss will sometimes get you a good loot box, but only if you do it early before enough other people have done it."
"You're fucking kidding me," said Holt, aka Aryan Bro. "Boss, I ain't drinkin' piss."
Taylor shrugged. "Yeah, we weren't hard up enough to try it. Still, our guide said that the first couple dozen people to do it usually get a Legendary box. Apparently the prizes drop off fast, though. The hundredth person only gets a Bronze and then nothing after that." He pondered. "Oh, yeah. If a guy can jerk off four times in an hour that's apparently worth a good prize too. Again, it's one of those things that you need to do early before the AI gets bored of it."
"Damn, only guys?" the skinhead woman said. "Four times in an hour ain't nothin' for me." Several of her male compatriots snorted their amusement.
"Dunno," Taylor said, raising his hands helplessly. "It's possible that our guide was just fucking with us." He pulled the Skyhawk string in, clamping the yo-yo to the back of his hand, and pulled his shotgun out of inventory, keeping the barrel pointed down. "Now, if y'all will step to the side, I think it's time for you to go on your way and us to go on ours."
o-o-o-o
"Whoa," Taylor said, jerking to a halt. "You guys see that?"
"Yup," Calliope replied. She was a few yards in the lead this time, tic-tacing back and forth down the corridor with a clacking noise that was making Taylor's teeth itch and temples pound. She paused, cocking her head as she studied her map. "Six, seven, eight...thirteen of them?"
Taylor was only seeing five. He walked forward to stand beside Calliope and eight more blue dots appeared on his minimap. Most of them were sitting still while a few shifted back and forth. They were camped in the corridor around a safe room. Not one of the guild halls which always contained Levi, just a blank room labeled 'safe room' on the map with a white-dotted NPC inside it.
He pinched out on the minimap, expanding the area that it covered at the expense of losing detail. More blue dots popped into existence. Dozens of them.
"Wow," Drew said, beating him to the punch. His voice was dreamy and slow, the effects of the THC he'd taken in while building up the smoke cloud needed for their earlier encounter with Luke and his gang. "That's...a lot of people."
"I guess that's the group NaziHickFuckBoi told us about," Calliope said. "Maybe he was playing it straight." She laughed. "Also, that thing about drinking piss and jerking off? That was fucking epic, Unc."
"Language," Taylor said absently, focusing on his minimap. "Do we engage or do we leave?"
"We're already on their maps," Calliope said after a moment. "And we're heavily armed, probably more than them. I'd rather know what we're dealing with. Plus, if there's really kids there..."
Taylor grunted. "I suppose. Drew, your thoughts?"
"Hm?" Drew said. He was looking at his hand, twisting his wrist and curling his fingers. "What?"
"Never mind," Taylor said. "Calliope, you're right. Let's do it." He wasn't at all sure if it was safe to get themselves tangled up with this group, much less if it was a good idea. Still, it wasn't necessarily a bad idea and giving Calliope her way might tone down the teenage rebellion for a while.
"Cool! Thanks, Unc."
"Just...please stay with us?" he said. "I want to present a united front."
Calliope rolled her eyes. "Fiiiine."
They moved down the corridor, Taylor and Calliope with their shotguns slung and aimed down, Drew with his shotgun in inventory because he was so stoned that he was less 'walking' and more 'moseying'.
They saw the light first. Someone had lit a series of fires in the hallway, and the minimap showed dozens of people clustered around those fires.
"Who goes there?!" came a voice from the shadows.
"Geez, Charlie. You can see our names on the map," Calliope replied. "What's the 'Tho' for? Charlie Tho seems like a weird name."
"Leo," Taylor hissed.
"What? It does!"
Four men walked out of the shadows. The leader was carrying a baseball bat with nails hammered halfway into it. The second had a fireplace poker, the third a steel garbage can lid, and the last man was carrying an unlit torch as a club.
"It's short for Charlie Thompson," the man in the lead said. He was medium height, maybe five nine, with thinning red hair and freckles. "The dungeon abbreviates your name to distinguish you. Presumably there's a Charlie, a Charlie T, and a Charlie Th running around somewhere in here." He looked them over. "You seem pretty well kitted out."
"Yeah, we got lucky," Taylor said vaguely, putting a hand on Drew's shoulder to keep him from saying anything. "What's your story?"
Charlie glanced back down the hall to where the others waited. "We were at a star-watching party, looking at the meteor shower. Cars got sucked down, staircase opened up, we were a hundred miles out in the desert with no way home, so we went down."
Taylor winced. "You've all had the tutorial?"
"Most of us. There's a tutorial guild about half a mile that way and we're cycling people through it. We're camping here because there's a bathroom and we can get food from the safe room."
Calliope: Speaking of bathrooms, I gotta wee as soon as we're done with this guy.
"How many people do you have?" Taylor asked, ignoring Calliope's message.
"Counting everyone including the kids, 194. It was 217 when we came down but we got jumped by these cat things, and then...well, stuff happened. We've been prioritizing getting the wounded through the tutorial so they can use Heal."
"Ouch." Taylor looked past the man to where the people were sitting. "What are you doing about leveling?"
"We're limited by the weapon supply. We've got groups out collecting whatever they can find, earning loot boxes if they can, and bringing it all back to divide up so we can send out more groups. You guys have guns; you'll be a huge help."
Irritation spiked through Taylor at the presumption that they would be placing themselves under Charlie's direction, or even sticking around.
"We need to take care of a few things first," Taylor said. "Hit the bathroom, eat something, and check in with our game guide. After that we can talk about whether and how our two groups can work together."
Charlie's lips tightened as he caught the subtext. "Sure. Why don't you come with me? I'll show you where things are, introduce you around a bit."
"That bathroom thing would be really good," Callipe said, shifting uncomfortably. "We haven't passed one for a bit and I didn't want to say anything, but I really gotta go."
"Right this way," Charlie said, giving her a nod.
He led them back towards the light. There were, as the map suggested, dozens of people camped out here. Several of them had guitars or other portable instruments and were playing music softly. Those were the exceptions.
The majority of people that they walked past were slumped against the wall, knees drawn up, staring at the ground. There were so many that Taylor's brain only recorded snippets of what he saw.
One plump young woman, late twenties with blonde hair sweatily melting out of its careful style, was holding a ripped teddy bear in one hand, staring at it silently.
Two young girls were playing one of those mysterious clapping games that all grade-school girls somehow know. Their teenage sister sat nearby, staring blankly at them.
An ancient man, limbs thin and twisted like dried-out tree branches, was staring at his left forearm and idly rubbing one finger back and forth across the blurred number tattooed there.
A man in dirt-streaked tan boat shoes and a woman in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse were arguing in angry whispers. Their neighbors hushed them every time their voices began to rise.
A red-headed woman had gathered eight children of ages six- to sixteen-ish around a fire and was telling them fairy tales.
Calliope: Holy shit.
Taylor: Yeah.
Charlie led them to the bathroom, which was a red metal door with a unisex sign on it, the kind that you would see in any fast-food place or truck stop. There was a line, but he jumped them to the front.
"Hey!" whined the man who had been about to go in. "No cuts!"
"Chill, Eugene," Charlie said. "These guys really need to go and they've got better weapons than anyone else. If we're nice to them they could do a lot of good for us." He crowded the other man out of the way, turned to face Taylor and the others, and gestured to the bathroom door.
"Dunno if you've used the bathrooms yet," Charlie said. "Everyone gets their own. Any bathroom door you open will be your particular version. Don't try to walk into someone else's version. You'll explode."
"You'll what now?" Calliope asked.
"Explode. That was how we lost Travis." He snorted in grim and humorless amusement. "Granted, it got a Bronze box for the seven people who got splattered with his blood, and two of those boxes had decent weapons in them. So, hey. Take the win where you can get it, I guess."
"That's seriously fucked up," Calliope said. "You knew this Travis guy and you're making jokes about him blowing up?"
For just a moment, Taylor thought Charlie was going to shout at her, but then the man caught his temper. "No, Calliope," he said calmly. "I'm acknowledging exactly how messed up our situation is and looking for the tiniest shred of silver lining in the middle of this cloud. Now, why don't the three of you do your business? The safe room is a self-serve taco bar. I'll be right back with a plate for each of you and then I'll take you over to the guild hall. Remember, you need to open the door for yourself when you go into the bathroom." He nodded to them and strode off.
Calliope watched him go and then quickly wrenched the bathroom door open and ducked inside, closing it behind her. Taylor only caught a brief glimpse of the bathroom itself; it was tiny, barely larger than a shower stall, with a sink and a regular porcelain toilet like you would see anywhere in America.
Calliope: Guess he wants to get us pushed through ASAP so we can go out and start farming weapons for him.
Taylor: Yeah. Let's talk to Levi and then we need to figure this out.
Calliope: Not to be a bitch about it but... I mean, we're carrying a shit ton of stuff that would make good weapons.
Taylor: True, but not enough to outfit two hundred people. Yes, some of that stuff I bought specifically so that we could give it out to other people in the dungeon, but do we want to drop it all in one spot or should we save some for future groups?
"Damn, I'm hungry," Drew said out of roughly nowhere. "Tacos sound amazing."
o-o-o-o
"...and then he brought us here," Taylor said. "What do you think, Levi?"
The rabbit man's tentacle eyes waved lazily for a moment. "I think big groups are a trap," he said. "There's only so much XP in the dungeon. Every floor has a janitor mob—on this floor it's rats, on the next it'll be something else. Those spawn indefinitely and can be moderately dangerous but they don't give any XP, or at least so little it doesn't matter. Aside from the janitors, there's a finite number of mobs and they don't get replaced after they're killed. If there's a thousand trolls in the neighborhood then there's only a thousand trolls worth of XP to be had. That's a good amount if you're dividing it among three people and their dog but it doesn't mean squat when you're dividing it across two hundred people. They all came in together, right?"
"Yeah, why?" Taylor asked, ignoring the way that Drew was shoveling down taco mix in the next chair.
"If you come in together then you're put into a party together, and XP gets divided across the entire party," Levi said. "There's a lot of different factors and it's too complicated to explain—who makes the kill, the distance you are from the person making the kill, on and on—but the essential thing is that if those people are all in one party then the useless ones are leeching XP off the useful ones, keeping them from leveling as fast as they should. If they break into smaller parties then they're still dividing the same amount of XP in this area up between all those parties because there's only so many targets to hunt. If you guys stay with these people it's going to flatline your growth. It's also going to tank any chance you have of doing something exciting enough to make it onto the recap episode."
"The what now?" Calliope asked. "I thought the views didn't turn on until the second floor?"
"They don't, but that just means that the hoi polloi can't watch. The press can, and obviously the showrunners can. Right now they're working frantically to cherrypick the most exciting moments from the crawl and turn them into the first episode of Dungeon Crawler World: Earth. It'll tunnel in a little more than a day. If you can be on the first episode it'll give you an early lead on the social side and that can snowball easily once you hit the second floor. If you're not on the first episode, you aren't hosed but you're giving up on an advantage.
"The stuff that makes it on the recap is exciting. Derring-do, narrow escapes, clever tactics, big explosions, badass speeches, that kind of thing. Moreover, it's personal. A mysterious lone hero, or maybe a scrappy team of underdogs. A group small enough that the audience can tell them apart—and keep in mind that most of the audience isn't human, so you want to give them easy ways to distinguish you." He gestured to the team. "You guys are fine. She's short and blonde, you've got that yo-yo, and he's the other one." (Taylor stifled his wince and pointedly didn't look at Drew to see how his friend would react to being called 'the other one.')
Moose barked.
"And he's the dog," Levi amended.
Moose panted happily.
"Wait, most of the audience isn't human?" Calliope asked, sitting forward intently, elbows on knees.
"Yeah. The way it was explained to me, the Syndicate seeds worlds with various species and humans are one of them. They also nudge cultures slightly to ensure that there will be at least a few common elements everywhere that people can use as a touchstone.
"Anyway, not the important part right now," Levi continued, "Like I was saying: the stuff that gets on the recap show is exciting and personal. Know what is not exciting and personal? Two hundred people sitting around the fire telling fairy tales and wiping kids' noses. If you latch onto these people you're pretty much signing your own death warrant."
The three humans digested that.
"You didn't mention the recap before this," Taylor noted.
Levi shrugged his lower shoulders. "There's a lot that's useful to know but it's not all equally important. If you dump too much on people at once it just overwhelms and distracts them. I gave you what you needed to know and sent you out. Either you were going to die immediately, in which case it didn't matter, or you would survive and come back to see me again after a few hours, at which point I could read you in. Like I said, there's a process."
"Suppose we survived but didn't come back to see you?" Calliope asked, grinning.
"Then you would have died a little later and it wouldn't be my problem." The alien man's voice was completely flat, refusing to play along with the joke.
"So you're saying that we shouldn't link up with these guys," Taylor said.
"Right. Dump some weapons with them if you must, but then get the hell out of there. Get over to the next neighborhood, grind for a while, then kill a boss. And get out of the main hallways. The first few levels are easy, so you guys should already be level 4 across the board. Get into the guts of the neighborhood where the good monsters are."
"Thank you!" Calliope said, flopping dramatically back on the couch. "I said that we should go after the rest of those kruthak bastards, but Uncle Taylor had to puss out."
"Calliope—"
"C'mon, Unc, you know it's right! Those things were sweet, tasty little XP dumplings on four legs. We killed seven of them between us and it got me up to level 4 and you guys to level 3. If we'd gone straight in like I wanted I bet we'd be the most bitchin' group in the dungeon right now and we totally would have made the recap!"
"Speaking of 'bitchin'," Levi said, "you guys should choose a team name. Taylor, as party lead it's your choice. Look in the Party menu and you'll see a place where you can customize the name of the team and give each person individual titles if you want. The individual titles aren't important, but the team name is a good way to let press refer to you and to—"
"—build brand identity, right," Taylor said, nodding. "Do the titles have any mechanical effect?"
"Nah. It's just an aesthetic and branding thing. It's still important." Levi glanced up at something the others couldn't see. "Cyberknight Squad is about to start, so it would be great if you guys could get out of here. Unless there's anything else...?"
Taylor pursed his lips in thought. "I think—"
What does Taylor think?
Voting time! What do you do next? Voting ends at
.
Four votes going on, the categories of which are:
[] (Team Name) name goes here
[] (Gifts) plan name here, details below
[] (Where) direction to travel and enemies to be found there, see below for options
[] (Actions) plan name here, details below
Specifics:
[] (Team Name) put name here
[] (Gifts) plan name here, details below
Charlie's group has plenty of food and basic necessities. What they need are weapons. Things that you could contribute:
3 Tavor shotguns (ammo will be included)
3 .45 pistols (ammo will be included)
30 rough but functional metal spears
20 cheap stunguns (not useful after the batteries run dry)
50 cans of pepper spray
Several dozen tools such as hammers, heavy wrenches etc. Most of these you only have one of
Based on what Charlie and Luke have told you, you're in a grid of neighborhoods, each of which has a theme to the mobs that live there. Known themes and how to vote for them are:
[] (Where) East (kruthak)
[] (Where) North (winged snakes)
[] (Where) South (oozes and slimes)
[] (Where) West (birds and bats)
[] (Where) East,North (weird sheep-like monsters)
[] (Where) North,East (weird sheep-like monsters)
[] (Where) East,South, (plant monsters)
[] (Where) South,East (plant monsters)
[] (Where) East,East (kobolds)
[] (Where) write in a direction or two-direction path here (not more than 2, please)
Note that options like 'East,North' and 'North,East' are distinct because they describe a path -- i.e. walk (one neighborhood east, then one north) vs (walk one neighborhood north, then one east). In this case it means that in order to get to the sheep monsters you need to either go through kruthak territory or winged snake territory.
Finally, (Action) is a catch-all category where you can put write-in details if you like. An (Action) plan must receive at least 4 votes in order to be counted as passing. If it conflicts with one of the other category-based votes then I'll reconcile them based on my best judgement and preferences.
"I think we can do that," Taylor said to Levi. He looked at his teammates. "Drew? Leo? Anything you want to ask?" Both of them shook their heads, so Taylor turned for the door...and then paused.
"Oh, actually: Levi, can we get you in our contacts list so we can chat to you? That way we don't have to keep interrupting you while you're doing other stuff." Like watching space TV instead of helping them survive, but he wasn't going to say that part out loud.
Levi shook his head. "Sorry, no can do. Game guides have rules, and among them is that we can't communicate with you outside the tutorial guild. And, before you ask, no. We can't leave the guild."
"I see. Okay, can you at least brief us on the monsters around here?"
"Nope. Not in advance, anyway. I can help after the fact—after a battle you can come back and I'll go through the logs with you, point out options you missed and help analyze what happened. Even there I've got limits, but I can still be pretty darn helpful. It'll let you come up with better tactics and notice patterns that will be useful against similar opponents."
Taylor blinked. "Seriously? You can't warn us but you can do detailed analysis afterwards?"
"I don't make the rules."
"...Okay, well, in that case let's do it now. We can go over the fight that we had with the kruthak."
Levi's left eye stalk flicked very briefly towards where the screen would be if it weren't currently hidden, but the eye immediately turned back to the team. Levi nodded and sat forward, gesturing them back to their chairs. "Can do. One sec." Lavender lids irised closed over his eyes and glowed faintly for a moment the way a crawler's eyes did while using the chat system.
"Unc...?" Calliope said quietly. "Is this really important?"
Taylor shrugged. "Dunno. Let's find out." He led the others back to the couch opposite Levi and got them settled, waiting patiently while Levi did whatever he was doing.
A minute dragged by and then Levi's eyes opened. "Okay, I went through your feeds and it looks pretty good," he said. "A lot to like, but a few problems."
"Hey, I thought we've done pretty good," Calliope said, sounding slightly hurt.
"Yeah, your biggest problem is that there aren't enough fights," Levi said.
"I told you!" Calliope said, swiveling in place so that she could point dramatically at her uncle. "I told you that you were being too careful! Ha! I was right and you were wrong, I was right and you were wrong, nanny nanny boo boo!" She stuck her tongue out and gave him an urchin grin to show that she was joking.
Taylor stuck his tongue out back at her.
"A little snide, but not wrong," Levi said. "You've only got five days on this floor and you need to level as fast as you can. Yes, finding mobs is the first thing you have to deal with and yes, you need to choose your battles carefully, but you've also got to be aggressive about it. Get yourself six or seven levels and kill a boss so you can get the map. That'll let you know where the mobs are so you can be more efficient about finding them. As to the specifics..." His eyes glowed for another moment and then he snorted.
"Taylor, the less said about the rat fights, the better. Keep your weapons ready at all times. You're lucky that Moose was with you."
Taylor smiled and ruffled his dog's ears. "I really was."
Moose panted happily.
"Cally," Levi said, "as to—"
"Calliope," she corrected. "Not Cally."
"Oh." His eyes blinked, one after the other. "Sorry."
"S'okay. Second-grade girls are mean, you know?"
"Having never been a human girl, I don't. But I'll take your word for it. Anyway, Calliope, your first kruthak fight was pretty much perfect. You saw it coming, you went towards it instead of away. You did that thing where you punched it in the face with your board, then skated over the top of it and shot it into mulch. That was..." He tossed a chef's kiss to the ceiling. "Brilliant. Only things that makes it not perfect are that you fell off the first time and got stabbed, which looked dumb. Also, what was that 'Oorah' thing?"
"Yeah, don't do that. First, when it's coming from a fourteen-year-old girl with skinny little legs and arms, it sounds silly and not badass. Second, it's a military phrase from your world and you using it is stolen valor. A good fraction of the Crawl's audience are either disabled veterans or military nerds of some stripe. Some of them always get fascinated by the lore and those guys will be combing through Earth's military history and protocols with a picoscope. The minute they discover that little factoid, the tunnels light up with angry memes and parody sensestreams of you wearing oversized uniforms and falling down while trying to get through boot camp."
"Oh."
Levi watched her for a moment, then nodded. "Anyway, you've got the right general idea. Catchphrases are gold. Something short and memorable that summarizes who you are. It gives you a hook to hang your brand on."
Taylor nodded. "I can work with that. For my outros I used to say 'Play on'. It's a pun—yo-yo people are called players, and 'play on' means let YouTube autoplay into my next video."
"Hm...it's not awful, but it doesn't fit well into the format. You aren't doing your catchphrase during an outro here, you're doing it in the middle of an exciting moment. Figure something else out."
"Okay."
Drew stirred restlessly, stretched and yawned, conjured a taco bowl out of his inventory, and proceeded to rip into it. "I get that we need to get out there and kill stuff," he said around bites of sour creamy, meaty goodness, "but can we get some sleep first? Clock in my interface says we've been walking, jogging, and fighting for almost eight hours now. Plus, I'm still baked. We've gotta find something else to make smoke with. Weed's great, but only recreationally and only when we aren't about to"—a yawn ambushed him—"get into a fight."
"Find a safe room," Levi said. "You don't want to be sleeping in the corridors where something can get at you. And let's wrap this discussion first." His eyes glowed for an instant. "The way you dealt with the assassin bugs was solid—heroic stands at the barricades play well as long as you aren't cowering—but you need to be more careful about making sure things are dead. And better ammo discipline."
"Those two things seem to be at odds," Taylor noted.
"Just one of the joys of dungeon life," Levi said with an amused smile. "Oh, Calliope: using the board like an axe? Good. The board is your gimmick so the more versatile you can make it look, the better."
Calliope's face lit up. "Excellent!"
"Um, akshewally, I believe you intended to say 'radical'," Taylor said severely, pushing imaginary Coke-bottle glasses up his nose. "That's how board skaters talk these days."
Calliope snorted. "There were so many things wrong with that sentence, I don't know where to start."
"You guys are funny," Levi said, smiling. "I hope you don't die."
"Uh...thanks," Taylor said.
"Also, Calliope?" Levi said. "It was two sentences."
She blew a raspberry at him.
o-o-o-o
Charlie took them to the safe room where they could get a bed. It was full and the dungeon was better at enforcing occupancy limits than any fire marshal's fondest dream: the doorknob simply would not turn once there were 30 people inside.
Charlie pounded on the door until someone finally opened it. He was an older man, fifties and greying with thin-framed glasses and, bizarrely, a striped necktie. There was a stain on the tie but it was still neatly put together.
"John, I need to get three people out of there," Charlie said. "These guys need beds."
John stood half a step inside the safe room, studying Team Trick Shot (as Taylor had named them moments after leaving the tutorial guild), then looked at Charlie. "Why do we have to give up our slots for them? They're newbies."
"Because they've got firearms and can use them to get the rest of us good weapons, but to do that we need to make sure that they are rested, taken care of, and motivated to help us. So c'mon. Step out of there so I can go in and haul Betty and Alex out. Their shift ended two hours ago."
John folded his arms. "I'm not leaving."
"John, you've been in there for two full shifts. Other people need to get some food and a bed."
"If other people want to leave, fine. I'm staying."
"You know that the floor's going to collapse in a few days, right?" Taylor asked. "If you aren't out there grinding, you'll die."
"If we die we just get put in storage," John said. "Plus, it's fast and painless. Going out there and fighting just gets me killed painfully and messily."
"You don't get put in storage if you die in here," Charlie said patiently. "Lord Covvingtyn-Smythe told us that. Plus, we don't know if the collapse is fast or slow. Maybe the ceiling will come down slowly, one inch at a time so that you can see it coming. You'll duck, but it will keep coming until you have to lie down. You'll try to hold it back but it's billions of tons of rock and it won't even notice your efforts as it slowly and relentlessly compresses your chest, making it impossible to breathe. You'll gasp for air, struggling to get a tiny sip of life-giving oxygen as the ceiling presses harder and harder in tiny little increments until your sternum shatters and drives inward, piercing your heart and lungs. What do you think—would you drown in your own blood before your skull exploded?"
John swallowed nervously. Calliope was pale as a sheet.
"Or, alternatively, you could come out of that room and go with the next patrol," Charlie said lightly. "Kill some of the lower-leveled cats around here, get stronger, and have a small chance of surviving. Even if you fail, you'll die helping others. There's meaning in that. Purpose."
John stepped out the door and hurried off.
"Jesus fuck, dude," Drew said as soon as John was out of sight. "Why didn't you just murder the guy?"
"It's the apocalypse. There's no time for nice," Charlie said, stepping inside. "Wait here while I get you guys some beds. Don't let anyone else in."
o-o-o-o
There were twenty rooms for rent in the safe room, at a price of 0 gold each. The bedrooms were the size of a prison cell and contained a cot and nothing. The cots were stretcher wide and disappointment long, with sheets so thoroughly starched that the creases could cut and mattresses no thicker or more supportive than a gas-station sheet cake. In the morning, the team cycled through the showers (the hot water wasn't, the towels were missing, and there was no soap in the showers so it was necessary to pump it out of the dispensers by the sink before getting under the water. Despite all the lacks, Taylor felt a dozen times better in the morning than when he went to bed. He hadn't realized how tired and stressed he was.
Breakfast was self-serve tacos with a side of tacos. The only beverage was donkey urine falsely advertising itself as beer, but Team Trick Shot had plenty of water in their inventories. Eating was an uncomfortable experience; the taco house was filled with people and nudges and nods went around the room as they came in, leading rapidly to the existing boisterous conversation fading into expectant, hopeful silence and desperate eyes. The team tried to ignore the stares but all three of them quickly broke like soft pine, wolfing their food and racing out the door.
"Heading out?" Charlie asked, materializing at Taylor's elbow and making him jump.
"Jesus! Where did you come from? Did you even sleep?" It was clear that the shorter man had not; he was in the same clothes and the bags under his eyes had been promoted to trunks.
"No. You're leaving? Are you planning to come back?"
The team exchanged looks and Calliope tossed her chin at Taylor in a 'you can take this one' gesture that made him roll his eyes.
"Yes, we're leaving and yes, we plan to come back," Taylor said. "Until we do, these should help." He set his hand down by the floor and conjured up five metal spears, a .45 pistol, and two hundred rounds of ammunition. ("How much ammo do you want?" Joe the firearms dealer had asked. He had snorted amusement when Taylor replied, "Yes." Joe had been even more surprised when Taylor bought literally every shotgun shell and .45 bullet in the store.)
Charlie's eyes went wide. "Wow. Thank you."
Taylor shrugged. "S'aright. I hope they help." He looked down, checking the scratchpad in his interface where he had jotted down a todo list. "By the way, are you all still in one big party?"
Charlie nodded. "Yeah, why?"
"Our game guide said that's a bad plan. Any XP your hunters receive is being divided among everyone, which slows down the hunters' advancement. You should make sure that everyone has everyone in their chat and then break up into multiple smaller parties."
"Huh. That...makes perfect sense." He shook his head in frustration. "Lord Covvingtyn-Smythe hasn't been that helpful. He hurries everyone through and he gets pissy a lot."
Calliope winced. "Damn, that sucks. Our guy generally wants to watch his shows and would prefer that we get out ASAP, but he's still diligent."
"Sounds like you lucked out," Charlie said. "It's gotta be tough on these guys. They get all these strangers stumbling into their homes. The guides need to prepare them and send them out, knowing that the vast majority of them are going to die no matter what they do and they don't know exactly what to prepare them for. Not too surprising Lord Covvingtyn-Smythe doesn't want to spend more time with us than he has to."
Taylor cocked his head in thought. He hadn't considered that aspect of it.
"Use the gun to get started, but stick with dungeon weapons as much as you can," Calliope said. "Bullets run out. Oh, also, don't worry too much about food. Apparently it's pretty common in loot boxes. I've got dozens of those crawler biscuits."
Charlie snorted. "Have you tried those things? They're dry as a salt flat and they taste like sawdust."
"Also, health potions are apparently pretty common on the lower levels," Taylor said. "If we can get you down a staircase that should help a lot."
"Yeah," Charlie said. "It's our biggest priority right now. Lord Covvingtyn-Smythe says that on the third floor you can choose a class and a race, both of which give you special abilities. As soon as we can find a staircase, we're going down. We'll do the same thing on the second floor and once we're there maybe some of our noncombatants can rank up enough to contribute."
"You want six-year-olds to fight?" Drew said, eyebrows rising.
Charlie glared at him, but it was an anemic thing. "No, but apparently when they change your race they rebuild your body into something young, fit, and attractive to that species. It would let our older members be effective."
"Oh," Drew said. "Yeah, that makes more sense."
"By the way," Taylor said, quickly diverting things to a less fraught topic, "there's this team wandering around. The leader's name is Luke. They're all from Tennessee and wearing Confederate flags; I got a bad vibe from them. One of them, a woman named Roxy, has a player-killer skull. Luke has two."
"Yeah, those guys went through earlier," Charlie said. "They saw that we didn't have anything and they blew right on by even though we asked for help."
"They didn't harrass anyone?" Drew asked.
"A few harsh words and a couple of shoves, but nothing serious. Still, I got the same bad vibes you did. We'll let you know if they come back."
Taylor nodded. "Cool. Can we get you and as many other people as possible from your group in our contacts list? The best way for us to all get out of here is to share information about what's where, both monsters and staircases."
"Sure," Charlie said, holding out his fist and bumping each of them in turn. "I'll take you around." He turned and started walking, gesturing for them to follow. "As to monsters, we know that this area has cat-based things. They mostly travel solo, which is good. The weakest we've seen was the Krazy Kitteh, which are generally about level 2 and the size of a Maine coon with one three-inch fang." He chuckled. "Honestly, they look dumb. Still dangerous if you aren't armed, but not as bad as some. West you've got birds and bats. The bats have a ranged sonic attack that made us back off; it's not that strong individually but they tend to gang up. Plus, we don't have any ranged weapons and the ceilings there are high enough that you can't hit them with melee stuff." He thought for a moment. "North are these winged snake things. Sort of like those South American critters? Bright feathers, something of a hypnotic effect. South is oozes and slimes; they're acidic and kinetic damage just splatters them on you. We stepped back from those real fast."
"Cool," Taylor said. He quickly described the kruthak and how the team had fought them.
"Yeah, we met one of those and stepped off. It was a level 4 Kruthak Gatherer. Low damage but very tough. Killed three people and ate the bodies before ambling off. We've stayed out of their turf since."
"Smart," Taylor said. "When they die they release pheromones that attract others."
Charlie winced. "Yeah, glad we stayed away. We'll keep grinding on the cats, thank you very much."
Taylor: I'm thinking birds and bats? Unlikely that other crawlers will go after them for the same reasons Charlie's group hasn't, so they'll be mostly untouched. Gives us the most grinding targets and also lets us thin things out for other crawlers who might need to cross through there.
Calliope: Cool! Can't wait to ramp up the wall and grab one of those things out of the air!
Taylor: Yeah, let's hold off on that until we see what they can do, okay?
Calliope: Yes, mom.
She even rolled her eyes when she chatted the last.
Drew: I'm cool with birds and bats. Smoke will likely help since it can reach them. This time I'll just burn it, not smoke it.
"We'll head west," Taylor said out loud. "Thin the herd on the hard-to-reach things in case you need to go through there at some point."
"Thank you," Charlie said. He bent to gather up the weapons. "And thank you for these. They'll make a big difference. Let's get you introduced around and on your way."
o-o-o-o
Charlie's group was camped near the border with the next neighborhood, so it didn't take long to get there. It was easy to tell when they arrived, because the ceiling suddenly soared from twenty feet to fifty or perhaps more—it was hard to tell given the shadows.
"Yeah, there is definitely not going to be an ambush by another one of those 'invisible on the map' mobs," Drew said. "Nope. Definitely not."
"Definitely," Taylor agreed. "Leo, please stick close until we get a handle on what we're dealing with?" Inspiration struck. "Drew and I are going to need your mobility to cover us if we get swarmed."
Calliope had been opening her mouth to object, but she closed it again and smiled, delighted. "Since you ask so nicely, I guess I can stick around and protect you oldies," she said, swaggering a little. "Welp, let's get it on." She dropped her board and glided forward, shifting her weight to weave back and forth so that she didn't get too far ahead.
Taylor winced. He checked to make sure that his Tavor was currently set to birdshot and waved for Drew to follow after Calliope while Taylor took the rear. He wasn't comfortable having Mr Poor Muzzle Discipline at the back of the group.
It wasn't long before Drew was proven right about the ambush theory.
A red dot suddenly appeared on their minimaps, directly above them; an instant later a bird dove on Drew from behind.
This time, Taylor had been keeping an eye glued to the map. "Down!" he shouted, dropping to one knee and raising his shotgun. Drew went down on his face and the bird streaked through the space where Drew's head had been, its feet balled into tiny fists that would have hit like twin hammers. It wasn't large for a hawk, only about as large as three large human fists overall, but the glimpse that Taylor caught showed a savagely hooked beak and nasty claws.
Nitrofecal Kestrel — Level 4
Taylor's shotgun barked twice as the bird went past, followed by a wild shot before he could recognize that the target was gone. It looped up, disappearing back into the darkness on the ceiling and off their maps.
"Did you get him?" Drew asked, coming back to his feet with his weapon upraised.
"Doubt it," Taylor said. "Keep moving. Don't give him a stable target for another of those dives." He stepped aside to show what he meant.
It was a good thing that he did, because it meant that the explosive bird shit landed next to him instead of directly on him.
The blast wasn't that powerful, but it landed within inches of Taylor's shoes and swept his legs out from under him, breaking both his ankles in the process. Taylor shrieked in pain and managed to twist as he fell so that his weapon was aimed upwards. A flash of movement made him track right and fire.
The bird spun around Taylor's shot with arrogant ease, disappearing back into the shadows and vanishing from their minimaps yet again.
Taylor cursed and hit his Heal spell twice, leaving himself with 1 mana and a pair of unbroken ankles. He climbed to his feet and moved to put his back to the wall, shotgun aimed up. Drew and Calliope stayed in the center of the hallway, back to back, while Moose patrolled around them, eyes on the ceiling.
The red dot appeared and all three humans discharged their weapons at it reflexively. The dot disappeared again but no dead body fell from above.
"Guys, we've got a problem," Taylor said.
"Wait for it," Drew said, smiling.
"If we can't see it—"
"It's okay. Just wait."
"But—"
A bird fell from above and hit the ground a short ways off, peeping and kicking its legs weakly. Drew walked over and shot it from a range of six inches, turning its body into birdburger.
"What just happened?" Taylor demanded.
Drew slung his shotgun and pulled an empty plastic storage tub from his inventory. He peeled back the lid and looked up; a moment later a small cloud of bluish smoke wriggled down and crawled into the tub. Drew snapped the (relatively) air-tight lid back on and shoved the whole thing into his inventory.
"I took your advice," he said to Taylor. "Got the thing so high it couldn't stand up."
"Right. Didn't see you deploy it, but cool." He looked around. "Okay, time to get off the main corridor and head inwards. Let's take a minute, though. There's something I want to try."
He sorted through his inventory tab until he found what he needed. A moment later he conjured forth two metal tanks and a box of party supplies.
o-o-o-o
They found a side corridor branching off the main throughway and turned onto it, heading towards the center of the neighborhood where there would presumably be more monsters. Over the next fifteen minutes, they had two more encounters with the birds.
The first encounter was with another singleton, the second with a swarm of five. By now they had evolved a protocol: at the front of the group, Calliope walked backwards in the middle of the corridor, eyes and shotgun up. Moose walked a few paces to her right, facing forward. Drew and Taylor hung back and stayed spread well apart, eyes and weapons up. In this formation at least one of them had eyes on the moment a bird dropped on them.
The birds didn't adapt well; they always started with a diving attack and if that didn't work they followed up with a fecal bomb. The bombs were powerful but had a narrow blast radius; as long as you were two or three feet away they felt like nothing more than a shove.
During the first encounter, Calliope tracked the bird's dive at Taylor, waited for it to pull up after missing its attack, and blew it out of the air with two quick blasts of buckshot. The second time was trickier because of the multiple attackers, but Team Trick Shot kept moving around fast enough that the birds had no good targets and therefore stayed up on the ceiling until Drew's marijuana smoke sent them plummeting to the ground. Unfortunately, Drew's spell expired at that point and the smoke dispersed, forcing him to burn another ounce of pot in order to refresh his weapon.
The birds were enough to push Caliope and Drew to level 5 and Taylor to 4. Moose, who hadn't been able to get involved, remained at level 5 and seemed grumpy about it. He made a point of peeing on one of the dead birds which, along with a sufficient amount of ear-ruffling from Taylor, was sufficient to mollify him.
It was then that they had their first encounter with the bats.
The first that Taylor knew something was wrong was when his stomach suddenly flipped over. The corridor tilted around him; he staggered drunkenly and went to all fours, the slung shotgun barrel ringing against the stone floor before being drenched in an outpouring of Taylor's vomit.
You have been rendered Queasy!
You have been rendered Vertiginous!
Everything was too topsy-turvy for Taylor to even stay on all fours. He flopped to the ground, rolling onto his back and releasing a swarm of red, white, and blue party balloons from his inventory. They floated lazily upwards to the ceiling where dozens of tiny red eyes marked the locations of the red dots that suddenly carpeted his minimap. The balloons bumped up against the ceiling but they did not obstruct the view of the bats or interfere with the supersonic screeching that was disabling the team.
Moose was unaffected by the shrieking. He howled in pain at the supersonic noise and danced back and forth, barking and jumping in futile threat.
"Skyfire!" Taylor said weakly, waving his shotgun blindly and sending multiple loads of birdshot in the general direction of the bats. Several of the balloons popped and one bat fell to the ground, its left wing and leg mauled, but the attack continued unabated.
A pair of lit torches arced away as Drew and Calliope played their part in the Skyfire tactic. Both of them were on their backs like Taylor and suffering just as badly from the vertigo; Calliope's torch flew down the corridor and fell to the ground ten feet away. Drew's bounced off the wall ten feet up instead of arcing cleanly to the ceiling, but the semi-magical dungeon torch was not extinguished and it continued upwards after the bounce. That, as it turned out, was enough.
Take a party balloon and fill it halfway from a hydrogen tank. Fill it the rest of the way from an acetylene tank. Let it fly up to the ceiling and burst it with birdshot, then throw a lit torch into the released gas.
The explosion sheeted across the ceiling, tearing bats apart and disrupting their shrieking. The bats who weren't outright killed dropped from the ceiling and swooped away, charging at the downed humans with tiny claws and not-so-tiny fangs spread wide.
The humans, no longer disabled by the shrieking, responded with a storm of shotgun fire that shredded the attacking bats.
"Hah!" Taylor said. "Got that ding-ding noise that all the boys chase. Level 5, baby."
"I was there first," Calliope grumbled. "Also, was that a quote? It sounded like you were quoting."
Taylor looked at her. Was she joking? "Seriously? 'All About That Bass' by Meghan Traynor? 'I got that boom boom that all the boys chase', except the system announcements go ding and not boom. Yeah?"
She shrugged, mystified. "Is that one of those nineties songs you like so much?"
Drew started laughing.
"Just ride," Taylor grumbled.
"Also, Calliope? Moose made level 5 first," Drew said, grinning. "If we're being accurate."
Calliope glared at him and jumped on her board, pivoted it and glided down the corridor.
"Hold up a sec," Taylor called.
Calliope looked back over her shoulder, saw him waving, and rolled her eyes. She pivoted the board and monster-walked back to them, the board repeatedly turning 180 under her while continuing in the same direction. "What?" she demanded.
"I think we should back off," Taylor said. "That sonic attack is too rough. We barely survived it and I used up all the balloons."
"Jesus, Unc!" Calliope said, throwing her hands in the air. "We can't always back off from everything! You heard Levi—we haven't been aggressive enough. We need to level faster. If you're going to be a complete—"
"Easy, kiddo," Drew said. "I'm with Taylor on this one. We're better set up against flying things than anyone else we've met, but the birds were still a challenge and the bats were impossible."
"Also, Moose can't level against these things," Taylor added. "How about we head anyplace else, your choice?"
"Except not the winged snakes," Drew added. "Those things sound like they'd blow goats."
"We can go back and hit the kruthak again if you want—those guys gave good XP," Taylor said.
She chewed her lips for a moment, thinking. "Nah," she said at last. "We'd have to go past Charlie and his gang. We'd look like a bunch of chickenshits for backing off right after getting here. Let's go back to the main corridor and punch through to the west—part of the idea of coming here was that we would clear out the path in case he and his people need to head this way, so let's do that and then see what's in the next neighborhood over."
"Sounds good," Taylor said, relieved. "Lead the way."
"I always do. Mostly because you oldies are so damn slow." She dropped her board and jumped on, pushing back the way they had come.
"Language, young lady!" Taylor shouted after her.
o-o-o-o
The next neighborhood was another two miles on, which meant a bit less than half an hour at the walk/jog/repeat pace the two men could handle. Calliope ranged ahead, swinging back occasionally to roll her eyes and complain about how slow they were. Taylor made a couple of acidic comments about how it was a bit more tiring to go on your own two feet instead of rolling along on wheels.
Moose watched and panted doggy laughs at all of them.
They met two more birds and a lone bat and managed to punch through them through the clever tactic of filling the air with massive amounts of birdshot sprayed in the general direction of the enemy until said enemy fell down.
The borders of the neighborhoods weren't clearly marked, but it was easy enough to tell when they had left the birds/bats neighborhood, because mobs suddenly started appearing on the map again.
"Thank fuck," Taylor said. "May we never see anything with wings ever again."
"Race you there, oldies!" Calliope pushed off, zooming down the hallway and pivoting into the side corridor where the zombies waited
"Wait! Damnit!" Taylor cursed and started running.
"Have a—holy fuckballs!" came from ahead, followed by two pistol shots, then two more a moment later, and a lot of laughter throughout.
Taylor came puffing around the corner ninety seconds later to find Calliope well down the hall and gliding back towards them. On the ground in front of him was a pair of...a pair of...
"Dude, are those zombie catgirl cheerleaders?" Drew asked.
The two dead (re-dead?) mobs were in fact zombie catgirl cheerleaders. They were just under five feet tall with long, straggly blonde hair, fur that was reddish brown where it hadn't rotted off, three-foot mangy tails, pom-poms and tight pink sweaters that said "Zombie U" and underneath, in smaller letters, "Go, go! Eat those brainiacs!" One of them had both her kitty ears, the other had one and a rotted-away fragment of the other.
"Have I mentioned that this place is messed up?" Taylor said.
"Teetee," Calliope said, nodding.
Taylor looked over at her. "What?"
"'Two tees', which anyone who can figure out their phone knows means 'too true'."
Taylor felt old, started to say "You kids and your slang today", felt horrified and even older at finding himself having that thought, and said nothing.
"Come with me," Calliope said, grinning. "You'll love this." She flipped the nose of her board up, pivoted, and pushed off down the hall.
Taylor and Drew walked after her, struggling to catch their breath.
They made it seventy or eighty yards down the narrow corridor, passing by three branches, before Calliope stopped and waited for them.
"Pretty awesome, huh?" she said as they joined her. She was grinning fit to split her face.
Taylor pinched out his map and immediately saw what she was talking about. There were scores of zombies just in the hundred-meter radius that his map showed. He couldn't see their types or levels when he was zoomed out this far, but there were plenty of them. They were mostly shambling around but a few were standing still. Also, at the very northwestern corner of his map, he could see the lower half of a large room. It was the only non-corridor space they had seen thus far that wasn't a safe room or bathroom, and it was a solid grey block with no information about what was inside.
"So, what do you say, Unc?" Calliope demanded, turning to face him and putting her hands on her hips. "Can we actually go fight some zombies and level up, or are we chickening out again? Because that room over there is looking pretty damn tasty."
Author's Note: I wish to offer a great thank you to @Inferno Vulpix. I was trying to figure out what monsters to use in this neighborhood and I came up with boring old 'zombies'. I happened to flip past the tab that had the memes channel of the Discord on it and my eyes caught one sentence from the page: "Vampire catgirl foiled again!" And thus was born the neighborhood theme.
Voting time! What do you do next? Voting ends at
.
[] (Where) Go find out what's in the room
[] (Where) Stay and fight the zombies in the halls until you level up, then go check the room
[] (Where) Back up to the main corridor and keep going west to the next neighborhood
Write-in action plans are accepted. As always, please keep them under 300 words.
"Why didn't they just write 'boss fight' on it?" Drew asked. "C'mon, there's no way that room is anything but a boss fight."
"I dunno," Calliope said. "It's pretty close to the edge of the territory. Aren't the boss rooms supposed to be at the center?"
"I don't think Levi said anything about that," Taylor said with a frown. "He repeatedly told us to fight a boss, but I don't remember him saying where to find them."
"I'm guessing the answer to that one is 'in that big room over there which is suspiciously unlabeled, unlike the safe rooms and guild halls which are the only other rooms we've seen in the dungeon'," Drew said.
Taylor chewed on that for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. I say we hunt up some more zombies in order to get an idea of what we might be facing in there. Levi said we should all be level 6 or 7 before we take on a boss but we're only at 5 now. Let's grind until all four of us are at level 6, then we'll go deal with the boss."
"Sweet," Calliope said. "C'mon, oldies! Let's do this!" She hopped on her board and pushed off.
"Barrel," Taylor grumbled under his breath. "Nice big barrel with the top nailed shut."
Drew laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. "Relax, Tay. Think of it as a chance to get better. Now let's get a move on; my Running is up to level 2 and I want that next point."
o-o-o-o
Taylor: Leo, a pair of zombies just came out of one of the side tunnels up ahead and they're between us and you. We're going to take them out but it would be great if you and Moose could come give us cover.
And stop being so goddamn far away, he didn't say.
Calliope: Be there in a blink, twink.
Taylor waved the chat message away and peeked around the corner. The two zombies were approaching at a dragging amble. The one on the left was big and bulky, twenty something, the sort of college boy you'd see wandering around any college town in his varsity jacket. Well, if you ignored the large patches of mold that covered his hands and face. The second was a skinny man in his late forties wearing pince-nez glasses and a banker's suit. The left half of his face had rotted away, exposing the bone of the jaw and causing the eye to droop in its socket, on the edge of falling out completely.
He looked back to find Drew waiting expectantly, jittering in place. And, of course, his finger was on the trigger of his shotgun where it hung from its sling and he wasn't watching where the barrel was pointing.
"Jesus, Drew!" Taylor hissed, pushing the weapon away from himself.
Drew's hand leaped guiltily off the weapon and he cringed. "Sorry, sorry."
"Don't be sorry, man, just don't frickin' do it!" The angry words were a hiss owing to the need not to give away their position.
"Sorry."
Taylor shook his head. "Whatever. You ready? You're on shotgun this fight. And keep it on slugs, because I don't want to catch a rogue pellet in the back while you're shooting something else."
Drew saluted sloppily. "Roger dodger, O Captain My Captain."
"And mind your damn muzzle! I'll stay to the side, but do not point that thing at me."
"I won't, I promise."
"Good." He risked another quick glance around the corner. The zombies were in position. "Three...two...one." As the final syllable left his lips, Taylor was around the corner and charging.
He rapidly closed to ten yards, heads up and therefore looking at the zombies more closely than his previous quick peeks had allowed, and as he did their status lines clicked into focus. Instead of the simple 'Zombie' that had been shown on the map, which was what he had damn well been relying on, they now said:
The zombies didn't react to his appearance for a moment, but when they finally did their reaction was frighteningly fast.
"Blue forty-two! Blue forty-two!" the linebacker shouted, dropping into a three-point stance and launching himself at Taylor.
"Buuurn!" the pyromancer groaned. He raised one rotted hand and sent a fountain of fire down the hall at Taylor.
Taylor threw himself to the side, slamming his shoulder into the wall and using the impact to bounce out and forward. The pyromancer shifted its arm, tracking the fire fountain towards Taylor. Fortunately, the zombie was stiff and slow so Taylor wasn't instantly fried, but the heat coming off the edges was enough that he could smell burned hair.
And then the linebacker ran straight through the flames, igniting itself while also shielding Taylor from the heat.
Taylor was so shocked that he barely managed to react in time. He threw the Skyhawk down, whirled it in an Around the World spin to gain speed, and lengthened the string on the upswing so that the yo-yo shot forward. An instant before impact he sent the mental command that changed the yo-yo from a measly 80 grams to a much more impressive 1100, somehow without changing its speed.
More than a kilo of high-speed and invulnerable yo-yo slammed into the linebacker's stomach. Taylor had been aiming for its broad chest but was still getting used to yo-yo style fighting. The impact knocked a chunk off the linebacker's health bar but still left it in the green. And then the flaming creature was on top of him, arms outstretched to grab.
Taylor dropped into a crouch, bracing himself and letting the zombie run into him. He got his shoulder into its stomach and stood, lifting with his thighs and sending the linebacker up and over. The creature was faster than the shambling braaaaains-eater that he and Drew had expected, but it was still stiff and poorly coordinated. It hit the stone floor with its chin, knocking off another big chunk of health. The fire that covered its back was grinding steadily away at its health bar and by the time it managed to pull itself back to its feet it was already halfway down the yellow.
Taylor couldn't pay attention to that right now. He was up and moving, dodging to the side as the pyromancer fired another blast of flame at him. This was a fist-sized sphere instead of the previous massive fountain, which hopefully meant that the larger attack had been a one-off.
The Skyhawk lashed out again, swinging wide and looping around the pyromancer's legs. Behind him, a shotgun blast went off as Drew dealt with the linebacker, but Taylor ignored that in favor of summoning the yo-yo back to his hand.
The Summon Yo-Yo spell pulled all yo-yos in sight to the caster's dominant hand with a force based on the caster's Strength and the level of the spell. With a strength of 5 and a level of 3, the force left something to be desired.
The yo-yo's invulnerable string was currently looped around the backs of the pyromancer's calves. Taylor had been hoping that it would slice the legs off the pyromancer as the yo-yo's head was pulled back to Taylor. Instead, the monster went over on its back, its arms waving in surprise and sending another ball of flame into the ceiling. It was dragged several feet towards Taylor before the string slipped free. He shortened it, snapping the yo-yo back to his hand, then spun it around and lashed out. The string lengthened, the mass increased, and the Skyhawk came down on the pyromancer's chest like a flail, knocking its health from full to half in one blow. It had been struggling to rise, but the impact knocked it flat again.
Taylor proceeded to beat the zombie to death with his yo-yo while behind him Drew shot the linebacker's head open with fast-moving chunks of lead.
Once it was over and the zombies were dead, both men stood panting.
New Achievement! Killer Yo-Yo
You beat a monster to death with a yo-yo! Kinda weird, kinda badass.
Reward: You have received a Silver Adventurer box
New Achievement! You've killed a mob a higher level than yourself!
You're getting the hang of this. Don't let it get to your head.
Reward: You've received a Bronze Adventurer Box
Skill Acquired! Flexible Weapons, Level 3
Meteor hammers, manriki-gusari, chain whip, kusarigama, rope dart...the mysterious ancient Orient sure loved them some 'ouchie thing on a string'! You have added a new entry to that list: the yo-yo! Congratulations, you now deal 25% more damage per skill level when fighting with a chain- or rope-based weapon.
Skill Acquired! Combat Specialization: Yo-Yo, Level 3
A unique variant of the 'Weapon Specialization' skill, this represents the nearly fifty thousand hours of practice you have put into slinging that thing around in weird and wonderful ways. Ways that you are now learning to repurpose for more murdery use. When wielding a yo-yo you do an extra 50% damage per skill level.
Something clicked in the back of Taylor's head. Experimentally, he spun the yo-yo in an Around the World to build speed and then let it shoot forward. It was easier than it had been. Somehow, his fingers and arm knew when to release tension on the string so that the yo-yo would go where he wanted it to instead of striking two feet low as it had the first time. He grinned and flipped the yo-yo into a trapeze, over into a reverse trapeze, and let it bind up to his hand.
Couldn't do things the simple way if you wanted to impress the audience.
"Thank you for the new skills, My Lord," he said to the ceiling, grinning.
Drew looked up from where he was standing by the head-splatted body of the zombie linebacker. "What'd you get?"
"Couple of things that enhance the yo-yo damage," Taylor said, distractedly as he was currently busy pinching out his map. "I see another group at the edge of the map over there." He pointed. "Five of them. Moose and Leo are almost back, so let's team up and go take those guys out."
o-o-o-o
They roamed the halls for another three hours, killing every zombie they could find. Most were human but there were some disturbing alternate options; giant snakes larger than a python, a strange cat/insect amalgam, and a handful of snake/human amalgams. Very strange amalgams—one of them was simply a ball of stitched-together snakes that moved by rolling. Another had a human body with a five-foot snake coming out of the neck. A third had a human head and torso mounted on an enormous snake body and snakes where the arms should have been. They ranged from level 4 to 7.
Level Up: You are now level 6. Three attribute points gained.
"Finally," he said, relieved. "Level 6."
The rest of the team sighed in relief. Calliope and Drew had made level 6 already while Moose had hit level 7. The dog was absolutely enormous now, his shoulders nearly to Taylor's waist. His teeth were longer and sharper as well, which had led to one yelp-inducing incident of accidental tongue-biting.
"We can do the boss room now?" Calliope asked hopefully.
"We can do the boss room now," Taylor said, nodding. "Although it would be a good idea to hit a safe room first so we can open our boxes. Might get some mana potions that way—you only have enough for one use of Gravity Resurfacing, right?"
She nodded, looking torn.
"Plus, I'm tired," Drew said, admitting the thing that neither of the others hadn't wanted to say. "Wouldn't mind a few minutes of sitting. Maybe take a couple caffeine pills to get a little revved up."
Calliope rolled her eyes theatrically and sighed, long and gusty. "I suppose," she begrudged. "C'mon, oldies. Let's go find a place for you to rest your weary oldie bones. I saw a safe room a couple of corridors ahead."
Taylor laughed and gave her a one-armed sideways hug that she enjoyed until he ruffled her hair on the release.
"Hey! Don't mess with the 'do!" She finger-combed at her messy hair, glaring at him.
"At that sweaty, straggly mop?" Taylor asked, his voice mocking as he started down the hall. "Hate to tell you, Nibblet, but you're not cover-ready right now."
Her glare turned grumpy as she struggled to hold onto teenage pride.
o-o-o-o
The safe room was a Wendy's, taken directly from the surface somewhere. There were plastic tables with attached plastic benches, a counter with a menu above it, and a small gnome-like creature standing behind it.
Ho — Bopca Protector. Level 61.
Caretaker of this saferoom.
This is a Non-Combatant NPC.
Bopca Protectors are magical, gnome-like creatures who exist solely to watch over safe rooms. They do everything from scrub the toilets to prepare your food. They are surly, smelly, and they never wash their hands.
"Hey there," Drew said to the Bopca. "I'm Drew. Nice to meetcha."
Ho eyed him suspiciously. The Bopca looked like an explosion in a Brillo factory. His face was completely overtaken by a jungle of gnarled, wiry grey hairs that sproinged in all directions. A giant and heavily veined nose stuck out the middle of the hair and if you looked closely it was possible to locate a pair of eyes.
"Ho is greeting you," the Bopca said after a moment. "You are ordering food?"
Drew looked up at the menu. "There aren't any prices. How much is it?"
"Is free. Last season food was not free but crawlers had no money. Many people starved and it made for boring TV. This season, Borant tells us we are to be sure crawlers are well fed. All safe rooms will have food and all food is free." He sighed. "Different locations are given different establishments. Ho would have preferred one of the custom-order safe rooms where menu is unrestricted. Unfortunately, Ho was assigned to burger place. It is the life of a Bopca."
"That's rough," Calliope said, sidling up to join the conversation. "No chance you can get relocated?"
"No. Assignments are fixed. Now, you are to order food, yes?"
"Right," Drew said. "I'll take a baconator fries, a chili and cheese baked potato, and a large Coke."
Ho slapped a large paper cup on the counter and pointed to the side. "Drinks are there, next to plasticware and napkin dispenser. You go sit; Ho will have food shortly. Next!"
Calliope and Taylor both placed their orders, with Calliope ordering about three times as much food as should be possible to put in a human being. ("What? I'm a growing teenager and I'm hungry.")
While they waited, everyone opened their boxes. The loot was unimpressive aside from a handful of health and mana potions.
"Either of you want this?" Calliope asked, staring dubiously at the rainbow-striped propellor beanie that she had just pulled out of her final box, a Silver Gutsy box that she'd gotten for killing a mob after deliberately leaving her teammates behind. "It's +2 Intelligence but -1 Charisma."
"Dibs!" Drew said, snagging the beanie out of her hands and plopping it on his own head. He pulled a small hand mirror from his inventory and admired himself.
Taylor and Calliope exchanged looks, both of them struggling not to laugh.
"Leo, you may want to—oh, thank you," Taylor said as Ho came out and slid three plastic trays of food in front of them.
The little Bopca grunted. "You are polite for crawlers."
Taylor frowned. "Really?"
"Yes. Many crawlers curse at Ho. Others pester him with questions about dungeon that Ho cannot answer. Most sit and cry. Very distracting. You ask reasonable questions, order food, wait quietly, and even say thank you."
"Uh, well, it...seemed like the sensible thing to do?" Taylor tried. "It's not your fault this is happening."
"You are to take compliment," Ho said with a sniff. "Eat food. Let Ho know if you want anything else." He turned around and hurried back behind his counter.
"Right," Taylor said, shoving a handful of fries in his mouth. "Leo, I was saying that you might want to reallocate your Mutable Ring if you haven't. You're using the shotgun, so Strength isn't important. The duration on your Gravity Resurfacing spell is based off Intelligence, right?"
"Yeah. I'm figuring split between that and Dex so I can dodge better. Plus, I feel like the skateboard gets faster as my Dex goes up."
"Ooh, cool," Drew said, chewing on his potato. He hadn't bothered with flatware, preferring instead to simply pick the potato up and bite it like a burrito. "That wasn't in the description, right?"
"Nope. Not sure if it is or not. Feels like it, but I might be wrong. Only way I can test it is to put the ring on and take it off again and it was only set to two points of Dex so it didn't make that big a difference." She tapped at the air for a moment. "Anyway, it's set now. Five to each."
"Cool," Taylor said. "What are you at, anyway?"
Wordlessly, Calliope chatted him a copy/paste from her interface.
Taylor's eyes widened. "Wow. That ring of yours is busted."
"Yeah, well, my beanie is baller," Drew said, spinning the propellor with one finger and offering them a grin.
"Eat your potato, Uncle Drew," Calliope said, amused.
o-o-o-o
The unknown and totally-not-a-boss-room-honest room was, based on walking around the outside of it, huge. At least a hundred feet long and eighty feet wide—well, less than that depending on how thick the walls were. Still.
The door, when they finally found it, was a big steel thing with lines of rivets around the edges and a thick plastic viewing port at eye level for a tall man. The viewing port was covered with a metal shield on the inside of the door. A professionally-printed sign was bolted to the wall beside the door:
Dr Cutter McSlicerson, Doctor of Recorporation
Experimental Laboratory
Parts deliveries in the rear, please
Below the neatly-printed words someone had added a handwritten note, slightly askew from the text: And try not to squish the livers so much! Those things are expensive!
"Ready?" Taylor asked. He waited to get two answering nods and then pushed the door open and looked inside.
Inside was a doctor's waiting room.
It could be nothing else. It was carpeted in thin beige. It had a dozen chairs scattered around the walls and in neat aisles. There was a sliding window with a sign next to it saying 'All copayments are due at time of service' and 'Please check in 15 minutes before your appointment'. The door they had entered through was on the east wall and there was a door opposite them next to the sliding window.
They stepped inside, weapons drawn. Taylor noticed that, for once, Drew was careful to keep his shotgun aimed down and his finger along the trigger guard instead of inside it.
They had taken only two steps from the door when it slammed shut behind them and locked with an ominous click.
"So totally a boss fight," Calliope muttered. She gave the door an experimental tug and found, to no one's surprise, that the handle wouldn't turn.
No one was in the room aside from them, but their map suddenly updated, showing this room and the small office on the other side of the sliding window. There was a white dot inside it.
Calliope moved to the window and tapped on the glass. Taylor and Drew hurried to follow.
An arm, rotted enough that the muscles were dripping away from the bone, slid the window back and the zombie catgirl inside looked up at them. "Naaaame?"
"Uh...Taylor?" he said, confused.
She looked down at a blank sheet of paper in front of herself. A moment later she looked up again. "No appointment," she groaned.
"...True," he admitted. "Can I make one?"
She shook her head slowly. "Doctorrr very busy." Her voice was creaky and dragged like a prisoner with a metal ball on their leg. "Come back in July."
Calliope stuck her shotgun over the divider and blew the zombie's head off, causing Taylor and Drew to jerk in surprise.
"Boring conversation anyway," she said. "C'mon, let's find out what we're dealing with." She turned for the door that led deeper into the office.
"Did you just quote Star Wars at me?" Taylor demanded, setting his Skyhawk to rave mode and following along.
"Yeah, and not even the good ones. The ones with the shit CG."
Taylor spluttered while Drew laughed. Before he could come up with a reply, Calliope pushed the door open and started to step through. Taylor quickly shouldered her aside and went in first, the patrol-slung shotgun in his right hand and the sparking Skyhawk in his left.
"Not you, Ms Calliope 'Caution to the Winds' McCormick," he said. "Let's try to take a little bit of care about this, okay?"
She growled annoyance and crowded through behind him, spreading out to his left while Drew moved to his right. Moose, of course, went up the middle and stood with his side pressed against Taylor's left leg.
The inner room of the doctor's office was a massive open space with a series of stations along the walls, each with a body on the table being poked at by a zombie while a second zombie stood ready with a gurney. Nine surgical tables in three neat rows of three stood in the center of the room. Each of the stations had a body on it, as did each of the surgical tables; the table in the center had a man in surgical scrubs, gloves, face mask, and face shield . Above each surgical table was something that looked like an exotic chandelier, pulsing with crackles of gold and blue energy as it shone light down on the body. The room was so hot that it was hard to breathe.
A notification popped up on Taylor's interface, blinking furiously. He clicked on it just as Calliope started to say, "Let's do—"
New Achievement: Time to Dance, Motherfucker!
You have met your first boss monster! Fun fact: for most crawlers, this is the last achievement they ever get.
Reward: Let's wait a few minutes before we decide on whether or not to waste a prize on you.
The achievement closed itself as soon as he finished reading it, and the world around him froze. The doctor had been starting to look up at them, the zombies at the various stations had been turning to face them, Drew and Calliope had been shifting their weight, and a handful of flies had been buzzing around some of the bodies. All of it stopped, the flies suspended in midair as though trapped in transparent amber.
The door slammed shut behind them, locking with a lound clank!
Music started playing. It was teeth-rattlingly loud, filled with a thumping techno beat and a jangled, uneven melody line that sounded like an accordion and a steel-string guitar trying to claw each other's eyes out.
Boss Battle!
You have discovered the lair of a Neighborhood Boss!
The announcement was booming and echoey, words being repeated like at a Monster Truck rally, and it was out loud instead of in Taylor's head.
An oval mugshot of Taylor appeared in midair with a whump!, his name and level hanging below it and its expression shocked. Mugshots, name, and level for Calliope and Drew hammered into existence in a neat row alongside Taylor's, each accompanied by the sound of hammer on anvil. A red Versus! appeared, written in a font that looked like dripping blood.
There was a dramatic pause and then a picture of the doctor appeared opposite those of the team. The doctor's mugshot was four times the size of theirs and its expression was intense and threatening instead of the gormless and slightly panicked looks of the team's portraits.
Doctor Cutter McSlicerson!
Level 9 Neighborhood boss!
When he started his work, Cutter was doing it in the quest for knowledge, an attempt to cure aging. Now, after a decade of cutting bodies up and stitching them together, it's become more about the power of life and death and the ability to play god. It's a sobering look into how easily humanity can descend into depravity!
Put your game faces on ladies and gentlemen! Aaaand Here. We. Go!
Battle ensues! No voting for now.
New Achievement! Discordian Delight
You are invited to drop by the #dungeon-crawler-you channel in the Quests and Stuff Discord. That second link is an invite to the server, if you hadn't figured it out!
Reward: You are invited to have social experiences and you want more?! Yeesh, some people.
The world unfroze and the doctor shouted, "You do not have an appointment! This is a restricted area! Remove them!"
The head of every single zombie worker snapped around to stare at Team Trick Shot. The monsters bared their variously-specied dental weaponry and charged.
None of these were the slow-shuffling braaaainsing type of zombie. They were fast, and they were damn strong to judge by the way the elf zombie with the nurse's scrubs flipped a body-laden gurney out of the way with one hand.
The forty or fifty duty stations around the room were clearly stops on an assembly line that produced bodies ready for processing by the doctor. Every single one of those duty stations had some collection of body parts in some degree of fastened-togetherness. The first station had a bin full of organs and bones, a giant spindle full of skin standing beside it. The station at the very end of the line held the fully assembled body of a brown-skinned humanoid nine feet tall with two heads.
The workers at the duty stations were first off the mark, but the work product at each station followed. The humanoid at the last station pushed itself off the table, tried to stand up, and fell over when its left leg came off—the limb had been in the process of being sewn on and the stitches popped the moment weight was applied. Other partially-complete zombies pulled themselves off their assembly station and started hobbling, hopping, or crawling towards Taylor and his friends.
Worst of all, the unassembled organs at the head of the line flopped out of their bins and started squelching to the attack.
All of this went through Taylor's head in a flash. And then he pulled the shotgun out of his inventory and started shooting.
The Tavor shotgun has three ammunition tubes, each of which can hold five 2.75" shells. The tubes can be rotated to change ammunition types or to bring a fresh load into position. A semi-automatic shotgun with fifteen shells in the magazine and one in the chamber, all loaded with slugs, is an ideal tool for dealing with a zombie. Or two, or three. Maybe even four.
Forty, maybe fifty zombies? No.
Worse, Taylor realized as he fired his first shot, he wasn't loading sixteen slugs. He had been using his yo-yo in order to level up his combat skills with it and he hadn't changed the load on the shotgun since the team backed out of the neighborhood with the birds and bats. He had one tube devoted to slugs, one to buckshot, and one to birdshot. Birdshot. He might as well spit on the zombies.
Moose growled and lunged forward, flashing across the distance to the zombie horde and bowling them over. The horde stopped moving towards the humans and descended on Moose, snapping and clawing at the dog's flanks.
"Get off my dog!" Taylor screamed. He took three long steps forward and started firing into the scrum as carefully as he could.
On his right, Drew stepped forward and dumped all three magazines as fast as he could pull the trigger, killing three of the zombies that were charging for Moose and wounding several others. He dropped the shotgun back into his inventory and pulled out a pair of machetes.
Right! They weren't limited to guns!
"Barricades!" Taylor shouted. "Moose! Come!" He jumped back until his back was almost against the door, then dropped a 5' metal barrier out of his inventory in front of himself. On either side of him, Calliope and Drew did the same.
Moose shook himself free of the tide of zombies and soared over the barricade, only to turn back and put his front feet up on it so he could bark furiously.
"Moose! Drink!" Taylor commanded, pouring one of his three precious health potions into the wounded dog's mouth. Moose's health bar was at the high end of red after only a few seconds of scrumming with the zombies. A few precious seconds that had saved the lives of his human friends by giving them time to think.
Moose's health shot up, almost to full. He licked furiously at his chops, clearly struggling to decide whether he preferred being healed more than his disliked the foul taste of the potion. Either way, he licked Taylor's hand and snooted him in thanks.
Taylor took just a moment to ruffle his dog's ears, started to raise his shotgun to stop the zombies that had turned back towards the humans, and stopped. "Cover me!" he demanded. He stepped back from the barricade, bumping against the door, and knelt down. The shotgun went into his inventory and out came a plastic jerrycan and a machete. He tipped the jerrycan on its side and started hacking at the top.
"What the fuck are you doing?!" Calliope screamed, blasting the head off the first zombie to reach the barricade.
"Buy me a minute! And tie the barricades before they—"
A godawful screeching noise showed that one of the zombies had grabbed the forward barricade and was pulling it out despite the friction grip that the braces inside it had on the floor.
Drew cursed and chopped the thing's hands off, then had to jump across to the other side to slash at the fingers of a zombie doing the same on that side. Calliope shoved her shotgun through the gap in the barricades and shot another zombie in the face before it could grab on. She stepped back so that Moose could lunge his head through and bite most of the way through a zombie's leg. One of the zombies clouted him on the neck, only to rend its hand on the dog's spiked collar. Moose ducked back inside the ersatz fort before the zombie could try again.
Nothing they were doing was enough; the barricades were wide enough for three zombies at a time and they were all grabbing and pulling. If they had been smart enough to lift then the barricades would already be gone, but they were dragging them instead.
"Torch it!" Taylor shouted. He yanked hard on the mostly-severed top of the jerrycan, tearing through the last few bits of plastic holding it together. It jolted the can, splashing some of the contents across his calves and shoes, but he ignored that and ran along the inside of the barricades, pouring gasoline stuffed with styrofoam—also known as homemade napalm—over the sides.
Drew tossed a lit torch over the barricade on the right and the napalm went up with a FUMP! The flames spread rapidly around the outside of the barricade, but the stoner wasn't waiting. He tossed another torch to the left and to the front.
The zombies screamed as they burst into flames, but they didn't stop pulling. The center barricade was dragged back and out of position.
Taylor conjured another one, and this time he took a moment to put a premade loop of rope around two of the bollards, one on each barricade, that were there for the purpose. A couple quick turns, twist and loop and pull, and the barricades were solidly fixed together. He turned to see that Calliope had done the same on the other side, so he crouched down and used a rag to wipe up the spilled napalm, then tossed the rag over the wall.
The zombies had drawn back from the flames at first, but the creatures were wading back in now. Apparently the unliving dead didn't care too much about being burned.
"My children!" the doctor shouted. He raised a hand and a beam of light zipped out, striking one of the zombies that Taylor had just set on fire. The flames winked away and all the damage they had done healed over the span of a second or two.
"FUCK!" Calliope shouted. She aimed towards the doctor and fired a blast of buckshot over the wall, but there were too many zombies in the way and she couldn't get a good shot. "Jesus, dude! Does your MD stand for Massive Douche?!"
The doctor ignored her and fired more of his healing rays, restoring a half dozen zombies to perfect condition. He held the beam on one of the ones with a hole blasted in its face and the face in question started to reassemble itself, the bits and slurry from the ground oozing back from whence they had come and restoring the zombie piece by piece like Hell's own 3D-printing process.
The filthy black smoke of the napalm washed into Taylor's face and set him to choking. Drew waved a hand and all the smoke condensed into a ball that wrapped itself around the doctor, blocking his line of sight. The rest of the smoke followed as quickly as it was produced. Choking coughs could be heard from within the cloud and then the doctor dashed out, moving from the surgical table he'd been standing at to the next one over.
Out of the smoke stepped the body that had been lying on the table the doctor had just vacated. It was eight feet tall, humanoid, with an insect head and an extra arm sewed onto the lower left ribs. It moved slowly but with a ponderous inevitability; Taylor had not the slightest doubt that when it reached the barricades, ten or twelve seconds from now, it would tear them aside like tissue paper and let its weaker but more numerous cousins pour in. Moose barked a threat at it, which it completely ignored.
"I've got a malpractice suit for you, doc!" Calliope called. And then she abandoned her friends in order to skate up the wall and across the fucking ceiling towards the doctor.
Taylor was suddenly too busy blasting zombie faces and hacking at zombie fingers to do anything more sophisticated than shout, "Goddamnit, Calliope!"
The first rush of the napalm had burned itself out and it had settled down into a moat of low, smoky flames that did nothing to stop the zombies from pressing forward. Oh, it set them on fire, but they didn't seem to care very much in the first place, being as they were dead and didn't feel pain. Also, none of them were on fire for more than a second or two before one of those healing rays would strike them. The flames would disappear, the zombie would heal and continue forward, only to catch fire again a moment later. Taylor and Drew jumped back and forth across the left and right barriers respectively, blasting and chopping at zombies who tried to climb over the walls or pull them apart. Moose took the center, biting any half-rotted fingers or faces that were unwise enough to show themselves. Their best efforts were just barely enough, and Taylor could already feel himself starting to slow down from exhaustion.
"Die, asshole!" Calliope shouted somewhere off to the side, followed by several blasts from her shotgun. There was a clatter-thump as she dropped from the ceiling and hit the ground skateboard-first. Taylor's heart jumped to his throat but he didn't have time to look.
And then one of the zombies flopped over the barricade and threw itself at him. A burning zombie.
He caught it in his peripheral vision and started to turn, but it was too late. The zombie was on him already, knocking him to the ground face-down and climbing on top, dragging itself up his body while clawing and biting at him.
Taylor screamed as the flames on the zombie ignited the napalm that had spilled on his calves and feet. He struggled frantically to turn over so that he could push the monster away, but it was too heavy and he didn't have the leverage. Moose savaged the creature but the zombie ignored him and refused to be distracted from murdering Taylor.
And then Drew was there, putting his shotgun against the zombie's ear and blowing its head into a spray of bone and blood across the floor. Taylor's world became silent except for a loud ringing.
Taylor dropped his pants, socks, and shoes into his inventory to get rid of the flaming napalm, leaving himself with nothing except boxers below the waist. He clicked on a healing potion to restore his hearing and his health.
New Achievement: Stealin' My Look, Bro!
You have attempted to copy the dress style of a crawler who caught my eye before. Nice try, but I'm not that kind of AI.
Reward: A Silver Bitchy Box
The fuck?
"Thanks," Taylor said, pushing himself to his feet and nodding to Drew. "Keep the smoke on the doctor." He conjured two more machetes into his hands rather than spend time picking up the ones he had dropped. He lunged and chopped, embedding his right-hand machete into a zombie's head as it tried to come over the barricade. The monster lost its balance and tumbled backwards, pulling the blade out of Taylor's hand. He conjured another one; he had bought out Home Depot's entire supply. He, Drew, and Calliope were each carrying ten of the things. To his right, Moose bit another zombie's face off.
There was another shotgun blast from across the room and then the doctor screamed. "Help! My children!"
Every single zombie spun towards Calliope and the moment's pause in the fighting allowed Taylor to get his first clear look since things went to hell.
Calliope had grabbed her skateboard by the front trucks and was holding it along her right arm like a shield that she used to block the frantic stabbing of the doctor's scalpel in between smashing him in the face with it. In her left hand she had a machete that she was using to chop at the doctor's knees at the same time. The doctor saw that this was a losing fight; he pulled away and ran, the teenager right on his heels. He raised a hand and shot himself with one of those healing rays, restoring all the damage she had inflicted.
Calliope screamed her frustration and threw the machete, trying to tangle the doctor's legs up. She missed but a moment later she had another machete in her hand.
"Use the smoke!" Taylor hissed to Drew. "Tight around his head! Choke him out."
"Right." Drew waved a hand and the cloud of napalm smoke that had been hovering in a compact two-meter ball flowed towards the doctor.
Calliope had been an athlete before entering the dungeon, a soccer player who could outpace most of her agemates. Since entering the dungeon she had more than tripled her Dexterity, thereby increasing her speed significantly. The doctor was a middle-aged man in not great shape, but his legs were longer and he was able to hide behind the various exam tables. He was managing to stay just ahead of her.
The massive uberzombie that had been seconds from tearing the barricades apart and killing Taylor and Drew had been standing motionless ever since Calliope distracted its creator. Now it turned and strode towards the girl.
"Motherfucker!" Calliope shouted, pulling a fist-sized bag of lead fishing weights out of her inventory and hurling it at the doctor's chest. It slapped into him, staggering him and distracting him but not doing significant damage.
The distraction was enough. Calliope cat-leaped over the table the doctor had been keeping between them and smashed the doctor in the face with the edge of her skateboard. His nose crunched, blood flying out and glittering in the bright yellow light that lit up the operating table. He grabbed for his nose, eyes watering in pain. It started healing instantly, the blood that ran down his face reversing course and crawling back up into his body.
Calliope smashed him in the face again, and again, driving him backwards and then kicking him in the crotch. He bent over with an oof!, clutching at his privates. She flicked a slipknotted loop of rope around his neck, pulled it tight, and dropped her board to the ground. She stepped on and suddenly zoomed away as though she were plummeting down a steep ramp. The doctor was yanked off his feet and dragged after her, clutching at the rope as his face turned purple.
The uberzombie lunged for Calliope but she dropped down, squatting low on her board and zipping under its grasping hand.
The doctor, unwisely, grabbed onto a table in an attempt to halt his forward motion. He succeeded...and then Calliope's full weight came to bear on the rope. She was snapped backwards off her board, which went skirling away and flipped over. At the same time, the doctor went limp as his windpipe collapsed and his neck broke.
Once again, the world froze.
And the winner is: Team Trick Shot!
Mugshots for Calliope, Drew, Taylor, and Moose appeared in midair with the word Winner! stenciled over each of them.
All of the zombies collapsed.
The boss music stopped, the world unfroze.
Taylor fell to all fours and puked.
Voting time! What do you do next? Voting ends at
.
Author's Note: A big thank-you to the players who proposed punny insults for the team to use on the doctor, especially @KreenWarrior for the 'does your MD stand for Massive Douche' line. +1 gratitude cookie to you, fine person.
