For a single blissful hour when I woke up, I could go about my morning routine like nothing had happened. My alarm woke me up, then my dog started licking my face to coerce me out of bed.
I got dressed slowly, as I usually do just after waking, then let her out the back door for her morning freedom run and potty break. Once she was back inside, I fed her and the cats, then sat on my couch reading the news. That whole debacle last night with the fridge? Obviously that was just a very weird and immersive dream, I needed to cut back on my drinking.
Lets disregard the fact that my tactical vest was on my bedroom floor, and my rifle was propped on the wall next to my bed. I can totally ignore the fact that both of those are almost always, ninety nine percent of the time, in the next room over in my workshop.
Somehow, by a stroke of luck or sheer will, I managed to avoid looking into any of the mirrors that hung in my living room, or bathroom, or bedroom, and just glanced over the glowing crystal that still sat by itself in a Tupperware on my counter.
I could just pretend none of it had really happened, I could go about my life.
Then I opened my fridge to get some eggs and juice and was faced with the undeniable fact.
There was a void in my fridge that led to a dungeon.
And so, I had to come to terms with this. There was no avoiding it. Yes, I opened and closed the door several times first to make extra certain that I wasn’t imagining it (and thankfully no goblins attacked while I did). I also unplugged and replugged the power cord, to no avail. During my inspection I found my freezer was still in perfect order, though the contents of my fridge door, mostly condiments and butter, had all gotten warm, or at least warmer than they should be. Some of it was salvageable, mostly condiments that didn’t need refrigeration anyways. Getting a new fridge was added to the growing list of things I had to take care of.
I could already hear my bank account screaming at me.
I’m sorry savings account, I’m so sorry.
To begin with, everything I needed required capital, and my job wasn’t going to cut it for the amount of stuff I wanted and needed. Those nuggets needed to get appraised, and see if this dungeon truly was the cash cow I thought it could be. So I quickly got dressed, made sure to grab my daily conceal carry pistol (the larger PX-9 I carried at work was too large and bulky to comfortably hide except in deep winter). I have a great fondness for the Smith and Wesson Shield Plus that rode inside my waistband when I was out and about, and I will hear no criticism of it.
I stuffed a few other things into my pockets, wallet, multitool, spare mag, spare knife, keys, bits and bobs, and headed out.
I had known Charlie for most of my life, and I’d put him highly on a list of my friends. He was the kind of guy that knew people and could get things. Need your car worked on? He knows a guy. Need tickets to a bought out concert, ask Charlie. Trying to smuggle yourself into Cambodia? Charlie.
Now of course Charlie wasn’t his real name, I’m not the kind of asshole that would give that info away. So to the Feds reading this trying to get him, you can give up. For the purposes of retelling my story, I’ll refer to him as Charlie.
Normally, it was a short drive to his place, maybe twenty minutes if traffic was good, which it wasn't. Then there was the fuck-off long train I got caught behind at the railroad crossing, and the road-work.
It took an hour to get there.
Despite not telling him I was on the way, he still met me on his porch with a beer in hand. No doubt he was alerted to my arrival by the multitude of cameras that were mounted around the property. He liked to know everything that was going on around his land. Not a single squirrel trespassed without him knowing.
“James, good to see ya, what brings ya by?”
He handed the beer to me, and I drank it gratefully despite hating beer (you don’t turn down free alcohol).
“Hey Charlie, I found some stuff yesterday, wanted a second opinion.”
His eyebrow raised, and he motioned his head toward the door.
“Not out here, inside.”
“Right.”
I followed him inside, and the smell of breakfast hit my nose. My stomach rumbled.
“I was in the middle of breakfast, there is still some in the pan if you’re hungry.”
“Oh you beautiful bastard, yes please.”
I had to restrain myself from sprinting into his kitchen, and filled my plate with a respectable portion of eggs and bacon, grabbed a fork, and joined him sitting at the table.
Half my food was done before we spoke again
“Alright, so what do you have?”
Chewing a piece of bacon, I wordlessly pulled a nugget of gold from my pocket and slid it across the table to him. He took it, held it up to the light to examine it, tapped it against the wooden table.
“Well, I’ll give you that it looks like a piece of gold.”
“Mind testing that for me? I need to make sure.”
“Sure, not like I have anything else going on today.”
He stood up and walked into another room, then came back with a cardboard box marked “gold testing”. You might guess that he’s done this before. The first thing he pulled out of it was a small electronic scale, which he turned on and sat the piece in.
“This piece weighs half a troy ounce.”
His pen scribbled on a notepad, then he pulled out a measuring cup, which he filled halfway with water from the sink. Then he dropped the nugget into it. It sank right to the bottom, which he notated, then measured the water displacement.
“Density is consistent. The weight matches what I’d expect.”
He fished out the nugget with his fingers and dried it off, then sat it on the table. Out came a magnet, which he held close to it, but nothing happened.
“Alright. So as of now it could be two things, I’d need one more test to verify.”
“Do tell.”
“This can either be a real piece of gold, or it could be a chunk of tungsten coated in real gold.”
“And the final test?”
“We take this and try to melt it in my crucible in the garage. If it’s real, it’ll melt. If there is tungsten in there, we’ll have a piece in a small puddle of gold.”
“Then let's get to melting.
Charlie grinned at me, and led me to his garage. He opened a window and turned on a box fan pointed at it to allow proper ventilation. The nugget got dropped into the small crucible on his workbench, and it turned on. There was a brief moment of panic in my head.
What if this was some fantasy metal that had the same density and characteristics of gold but a much higher melting point?
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My concern was unfounded, as the nugget began to melt, and at the correct temperature.
There was a pool of beautiful liquid golden metal, which Charlie fished around in with a pair of steel tongs.
“Well James, it would appear you found yourself some gold. Good job. Where’d ya find it?”
“I’d rather not say, but it was obtained completely legally.”
“Fair enough, I won’t pry. What are you going to do with it?”
“I think I’ll sell it. What’s the running price on gold?”
“When I checked this morning, about two grand for a troy ounce, but good luck getting full value if you can’t disclose its source, or without a certified bullion dealer to stamp it. You might get half that, so I’d put this piece at around… Five hundred?”
Five hundred dollars for something that took a negligible amount of work? That was a fucking steal.
“Alright, you willing to be a middleman for me?”
“Sure, but I want a cut of twenty percent, since I’ll need to do some hefty talking, do these same tests to verify to the buyer.”
“Fair enough.”
I silently pulled the ziplock bag of gold nuggets out of my cargo pocket, and dumped the remaining fourteen on his workbench.
“Christ on a fucking bike James. And here I already said I won’t pry. Damn. Well, a deal is a deal is a deal.”
We sat down and worked it out for a while, hashing out the details. I explained that I had a reliable source of gold, but the process to get it was dangerous, and we agreed on a flat rate for all future nuggets. I’d be getting eight hundred dollars per troy ounce, with the understanding that he’d be the one casting it into bars, marketing it to his contacts, dealing with the shadier customers. Eventually, he explained, once the authenticity of my gold was more established we’d be able to sell it for more, and it was decided that we’d renegotiate the rates once that happened.
An hour after I’d arrived, I was walking out the front door with six grand in an envelope in my back pocket.
My first stop on the way home was the gun store where I worked.
My coworkers were pretty used to me dropping in on my days off, usually to buy ammo on the way to the range or to pick up something I had transferred. Today I was there for other things.
The back wall of the shop had a section dedicated to body armor, with level IV being available (when in stock). Plate carriers were to the right. I grabbed one, and two plates, and asked someone to grab me a cart from the back. They obliged. Next I grabbed a helmet that would fit over my ear-pro, and a set of the vented safety goggles we carried (normally meant to stop spalling or rogue brass from hitting your eye, but I figured it’d do just fine at preventing viscera as well).
So there was $1250 so far in my cart.
We had a decent enough selection of tactical and hiking backpacks, so I grabbed a simple fifty liter, no need to go overboard just yet. That was another $200.
A couple packs of glowsticks, flares, three sets of motion sensors (normally meant for home security, they mounted to the wall with a mild adhesive, and made a loud ping when anything crossed them) and a box of MRE’s. When I went to ring everything up, I had about two grand of stuff. My coworkers stared at me questioningly, so I simply explained that “I won the lottery”.
That seemed to satisfy their curiosity.
On the way home I stopped at a small legal office to get my will updated. I wanted to make sure that my pets would be taken care of if I happened to go missing, and that my stuff would be dispersed around my friends and family. With the exception of my fridge. I left instructions that my fridge was to be chained shut and buried in a field. That cost another five hundred, which felt like robbery but I didn’t feel like arguing it.
A brief stop at Walmart secured me two stopwatches, batteries, and water bottles.
Then I finally drove home, having spent twenty five hundred out of the six grand.
It occurred to me that it’d be a good idea to set up one of those dead-man switches on my phone, the sort where you have to enter a code within a certain timeframe or else it sends out files to selected recipients. I set it up to wipe my browser history, and to notify my family of my disappearance if I didn’t check in every seventy two hours. On the table next to my front door, I sat a notepad that detailed the last time I had fed my pets, so that anyone who came to investigate would know to feed them.
I prepared my backpack. I would be taking enough food and water to last me two days, though I only planned to be in the dungeon for a few hours today (doesn’t hurt to be over prepared). The crowbar came out of my trunk and got strapped to the side. A hundred extra rounds for both my AR and my PX-9, batteries, glowsticks and flares, a roll of paracord, first aid kit, another roll of duct tape.
It dawned on me that I was making a lot of assumptions, and ran to check my fridge, making sure the dungeon was still there.
It was.
That would have been awkward if it had disappeared. "Oh yeah, hey Charlie, sorry to tell you that I can't actually get more gold, sorry." No thanks.
Before embarking on my second excursion, I wanted to figure out just what the hell was up with the odd timing from last night, so I grabbed my rifle and the two stopwatches and started them at the same time. I sat one on the counter, and took the other into the fridge with me. I walked a few feet in, scanning for any goblins, then checked the time.
It had been less than ten seconds. I waited until it read two minutes, then sat it on the ground and walked back out.
The stopwatch on my counter read eight seconds. Accounting for the time it had taken me to walk into the fridge, and to get back out, that accounted for most of that time. I watched the timer until it hit five minutes, then walked back into the dungeon.
The stopwatch on the ground read five hours.
On the one hand, that was a relief. I was in fact not going insane, the time really had been off last night.
On the other…
“HOLY SHIT!”
My voice echoed down the tunnel, even catching me by surprise by the volume of it. I instinctively aimed my rifle and waited for a goblin to come running, but it seemed nothing had been attracted by the noise. I was allowed to depart again unmolested.
I sat the two stopwatches back on the counter while I got back to prepared my gear.
My new plate carrier could take a plate in the front and rear, and had the ability to hold side plates but I abstained because they would have just hampered my mobility more than the extra protection was worth. The goblins were fast, I was mainly worried about attacks from forward and behind, and the Kevlar of the vest itself would just have to suffice for my sides. The store didn’t have the customizable rigged for the carrier, but my existing tactical vest fit over it just fine, if a bit tight. I took a moment to adjust it so it wouldn’t shift around, but still let me turn side to side without much issue.
Four spare mags for my AR, two each of glowsticks and flares, the motion sensors, those went into the vest. I thought about it for a few minutes, and also decided to grab my multitool and my portable charger. None of my stuff had rechargeable batteries that would work with it, but it had a flashlight function. I had once left the light on by accident for three hours, and it had only drained to 90%. I made sure it was fully charged and stuffed it in.
I had a fantastic pair of Mechanix gloves, which I had bought years ago but were still in good shape, if a bit dirty. I wanted the extra grip traction they’d give, and the padding on my knuckles if I had to sock a goblin with my bare hands.
The rest of my clothing was simple cargo pants, t-shirt, hoodie, and my work boots. They had served me well, with excellent ankle support, and kept my feet warm.
My PX-9 rode in its holster on my side, with two spare mags on the opposite side, and a jury rigged holster for my main roll of duct tape, then my grandfather's old Kabar knife strapped to my leg.
Overall, there was going to be quite a bit more weight on me than last time, but I did not want to be taken unprepared. Just in case, I brought a pen and notepad to notate anything I thought of later I might need on future expeditions (I still wanted night-vision or thermals).
I made a silent prayer of thanks to my late uncle, for forcing me to go on all those hiking trips with him and getting me acclimated to carrying up to a third of my own bodyweight in gear.
I gave my dog a good belly rub and a bone to chew on, tried to pet my cats but they ran off, and strapped on my pack, helmet, and goggles. I made sure my phone was on the counter, plugged into the wall so it wouldn’t die. At the last minute I remembered to grab a set of tongs and a tupperware and shoved them into the backpack.
I walked to the fridge, started my stopwatch, and began my second dive into the dungeon.