With the first Doorway Anchor planted, Croc and I headed back up to the Lobby to start our viral marketing campaign.

Locating a stairwell took less than half an hour thanks to Unerring Arrow, and in short order we found ourselves wandering through endlessly confusing corridors filled with gray carpet, white columns, buzzing lights, and moldy yellow wallpaper. We emerged in a quadrant that was a hundred miles or more away from where I’d first entered the Backrooms, which gave me some sense of exactly how big this place really was.

Each level was easily the size of a sprawling city—according to Croc, some were even the size of small countries—and I couldn’t afford to post more than one Doorway per level. Hell, even if I only planted one on every other level, I’d still need to hit level 500 before I could cover just half of the known levels in this twisted hellhole.

I would be able to move the doors, though, which would likely help in the long run. In the short term, it created a significant logistical problem.

Although I could mark up the walls with spray paint—leaving clues, hints, and even rudimentary directions—the sheer scope of the Lobby was just too massive for that to be an effective long-term strategy. Especially since the floors were liable to shift at sporadic intervals. A phenomenon I personally experienced for the first time after about two hours in the Lobby.

Croc and I were making our way down an unremarkable hallway—identical to a thousand others just like it—when suddenly the whole world rumbled as a massive earthquake knocked me on my ass. Motes of dust rained down from the ceiling, hanging thick in the air, and the lights flickered madly, casting the hallway into darkness for a few long, tense seconds before finally stabilizing. Several long cracks had appeared in the walls, though it would only be a matter of time before the wounds healed themselves.

Once the dust settled, it was damn near impossible to tell that anything had even happened. If it weren’t for my handy dandy mini-map I would’ve written it off as an errant tremor.

Just another weird thing in a very weird place.

My map lent me some much-needed perspective, however. Although the individual sector I was in hadn’t changed at all, that sector itself had moved its relative location within its quadrant, and the quadrant, in turn, had radically shifted its position within the floor.

The mini-map had a useful feature, which allowed me to get an accurate Current Relative Position coordinate at any given moment. Just minutes before the shift, my CRP had been 0.15.23.19-78, which corresponded to Floor 0, Quadrant 15, Sector 23. After the Floor Shift, my CRP had changed drastically to 0.31.12.19-78. Floor 0, Quadrant 31, Sector 12.

The sudden change reinforced my logistical challenge.

Given everything working against me, just how in the hell was I supposed to guide a brand-new Delver—who didn’t know their ass from their elbow—to a singular doorway in a sprawling labyrinth that was as big as the city of LA? Only a thousand times more confusing. With monsters. And no food or water. Plus, the floors shifted, completely rearranging their entire spatial layout at seemingly random intervals.

The answer turned out to be simple and surprisingly elegant:

The red yarn I’d received from the Loot Arcade. The Twinning String.

The string wasn’t nearly as good as Unerring Arrow, but it served a similar function. Although the two small sections of string weren’t physically connected, they were metaphysically connected through a spectral tether of power. With a simple effort of intention, an intrepid Delver could easily use one piece of string to find its twin, no matter how far apart it might be. Even better, because the yarn was an Artifact, it didn’t require Mana to use, which meant even newbs without a Relic could harness its magic.

It was the perfect solution.

I stashed hundreds of little slivers of yarn inside the cash register drawer back in the store. Then I took the twinned pieces, tied each of them into small red rings that could be worn around a finger, and spent the better part of three days systematically distributing them throughout the Lobby.

Well, a relatively small section of it, anyway.

Every time there was a trap or an environmental danger, I’d take a few minutes to spray paint a warning in bright red letters.

Rule #1 - Beware the Bathrooms, the toilets WILL eat you.

—This Survival Tip brought to you by Discount Dan’s Backroom Bargains.

Once that was done, I’d pound a nail into the wall with practiced ease, imbue it with a sliver of Mana using the Surveyor’s Mark ability, then loop several of the yarn rings around the nailhead. That done, I’d mark the location on my mini-map, then beneath each nail, I’d write a much smaller note using my Sharpie.

Bad news, you’re in the Backrooms. Worse news, everything is trying to kill you. Better news, I’m not trying to kill you. Take one of the yarn rings, put it on your finger, and follow where it takes you. Or don’t and die—the choice is yours. I’ve got supplies, intel, and a Progenitor Monolith waiting.

—Discount Dan

It was a truly tedious process and because the Lobby was so enormous, Croc and I were only able to loosely canvass two of the thirty-six quadrants. And that was with three days of constant grinding, trekking for fifteen hours or more a day, and only taking short breaks to eat or catch a few minutes of shut-eye.

By the end of the third day, I was starting to get a little discouraged.

This place was just so impossibly vast that our meager efforts felt like a waste of time. It was like trying to empty the ocean with a coffee mug. But if we managed to save one life, it would be worth it. At least, that’s what Croc told me over and over and over again anytime it seemed like I was getting depressed.

There weren’t nearly as many traps in the Lobby as there were on the third floor. The greatest danger was desolate emptiness and the staggering lack of resources. Most of the unfortunate souls who ended up here would probably die from some combination of dehydration or starvation long before they stepped on a runic pressure plate or accidentally sat down on an aggressive flytrap mimic masquerading as a bench.

That didn’t mean there weren’t any traps or threats, however.

The walls themselves were slightly acidic, and there were rooms where the incessant buzzing of the fluorescent lights was so loud and disorienting it could make your ears literally bleed. Stay in there too long, Croc warned, and your organs would spontaneously liquefy, which was an absolutely horrifying notion.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Needless to say, we marked the rooms quickly and didn’t linger.

I also found one isolated room that wasn’t empty like all the others.

It resembled a nondescript lobby—the kind of place that was common at cheap business hotels. There was nothing particularly impressive about it, but after wandering through a desert of carpet, it felt like stumbling into a lush oasis. There were padded armchairs, coffee tables, an empty reception desk, and even a working drinking fountain. The desk had phones that played banal Please Hold music on an endless loop and an ancient desktop computer that had been cutting edge back in 1993.

Beside the desk was a wire rack filled with travel brochures.

Like the Lobby corridors, each and every brochure was identical.

They all had Welcome to the Backrooms! scrawled across the front, but the interior was filled with monotonous pictures of carpet, columns, and, of course, yellow wallpaper. There was ad copy and customer reviews splashed across each page of the trifold pamphlet, extolling the virtues of the Backrooms as though it were a tourist destination filled with wonderous attractions and not a stinking death hole boiling over with murder monsters.

“Get lost in the ambiance – And just about everything else!” one headline read.

“It’s so awesome here, you’ll never want to leave. Which is good, because you can’t! HAHAHAHA – My eyes are bleeding…” another said.

A customer review at the bottom of one page was especially poignant. “Did I want to come here? No. Would I wish this on my worst enemy? Also no. This place is an infinite loop of existential dread. I want to die.” —Matt Smith, Former Guest of the Backrooms

Still, all of that aside, the room was far more inviting than any other space in the Lobby, which obviously meant it was not to be trusted.

In general, the Lobby was sweltering, but the lounge hummed with AC.

Delicious, cool, inviting, refreshing AC, which was perhaps the single greatest technological innovation of modern man.

Unfortunately, the cool air also carried a faint chemical whiff, which was noticeable at first but faded quickly. Turned out, that chemical smell was a slow-acting anesthetic gas that would knock out anyone who loitered in the cushy lounge for too long. I started to feel a little woozy after ten minutes or so. For those with lower Athleticism and Toughness stats, it probably would’ve been much quicker. The fact that this place would taint something as pure and amazing as AC was a genuine travesty and one of the deepest betrayals yet.

When the gas eventually kicked in, there was something nasty waiting beneath the reception desk.

Well, maybe not waiting beneath the reception desk, so much as it was part of the reception desk. My Spelunker’s Sixth Sense tipped me off right away, and I splattered the creature with a Bleach Blaze that ate through ninety percent of its HP on impact.

Dweller 0.014A – Lobby Receptionist [Level 4]

The Receptionist unfolded its body with a furious shriek as my attack landed.

A tight black suit clung to limbs that were thin and frail looking, and its head turned out to be the ancient computer from the desk.

No surprise there.

In many ways, it reminded me of the Bathroom Janitor who’d guarded the stairwell down to level three. The creature hurdled over what remained of the desk in a mad rush to murder me even as ghostly blue flames ate through its suit and the pale skin beneath. I could’ve ended the monster with a second Bleach Blaze, but instead I drove my enchanted hammer into the side of its computer skull, activating the Gavel of Get Fucked as the blow landed.

Since the Receptionist was well below ten percent total Health, the strike triggered the Killing Blow effect—slaying the target on contact. My hammer hit like a bomb blast and the ancient computer that served as the Receptionist’s head exploded, bits of bone, blood, plastic, and screen flying everywhere before the creature’s knees gave out and it collapsed to the ground in a heap.

There was a small bronze key on its corpse, which opened a secret panel in the wall behind the Receptionist’s desk. The door let out into a narrow stairwell that connected to level one.

The creature granted me 150 experience points and had a Common Relic, called Complimentary Upgrade, along with two Common Shards tucked away inside its Spatial Core. Complimentary Upgrade was a decent support spell that could be cast on a single target, increasing all damage that target dealt by five percent for thirty seconds. Unfortunately, the spell had a relatively high Mana cost and couldn’t be cast on self, which limited its usefulness. Especially since it was just me and Croc at this point.

Still, something like that would sell well, so I added it to my inventory along with the tiny bronze key. Then I made sure to spray-paint the room with so much red that it looked like a murder scene.

Although the current Delver Guardian was dead, another would take its place sooner or later.

On top of dehydration and starvation, exhaustion was also a significant problem, since resting for too long invariably summoned the Lobby Greeters. There was no exact science to how long was too long, however. It all seemed to boil down to one thing: how much time you’d spent in the Lobby. Although there were a lot of Greeters, they weren’t everywhere, all the time, as I’d first assumed. The gangly nightmares traveled in packs, which typically ranged in size between five and thirteen Greeters.

Once a pack found you, they started hunting in earnest, and once they got a whiff, they didn’t relent until you were dead or had somehow managed to escape to a lower level. The Greeters were rather timid, though. Opportunists and scavengers. Each one had a comically small Health Pool, and they only dealt a tiny amount of overall physical damage. They made up for their myriad of shortcomings with volume and patience.

Once a target was weak, they would swarm en masse like a school of hungry piranha.

And although they were weak and squishy, they were persistent little butt-munchers who just wouldn’t give up. They could wait for hours or days, biding their time until their chosen prey became so tired and dehydrated that they couldn’t offer any meaningful resistance.

Now that I’d hit level 12, the ghoulish Greeters—with their inky skin, bulbous eyes, and too-wide smiles—were far creepier than they were dangerous. Croc and I purposely took long rests, luring the creatures into range, then slaughtered them by the dozen before moving on. They offered only a paltry twenty-five Experience Points apiece, and despite being level 2, none of them carried Relics, just Common Shards.

But, again, volume.

There were a shit-ton of ’em and they didn’t seem especially bright because more and more kept coming at me, even though I was leaving actual piles of corpses in my wake. Enough corpses that even Croc got full. I massacred so many of the gangly, potbellied bastards that I leapt right past level 13 and hit level 14 by the third day of grinding. I’d earned 2,575 Experience, in total, plus one hundred and eleven Common Relic Shards.

I’d also unlocked a new achievement, which I had mixed feelings about.

Research Achievement Unlocked!

Fish in a Barrel

You’re one sick fuck, you know that? I mean, 103 Lobby Greeters? Triple digits. Do you feel good about yourself? These things are about as dangerous as a ninety-two-year-old pensioner picking up a few extra shifts at Walmart because they can’t afford their nursing home care. Sure, they pose a threat to new Delvers, but to someone like you? Slaughtering Lobby Greeters is like shooting fish in a barrel. Using a .50 caliber machine gun. You monster.

Reward: 5 x Copper Delver Loot Token, 1 x Silver Slayer Token

Title: Fish in a Barrel (E) – You exude an aura of pure carnage. Dwellers more than ten levels below you will actively avoid you, and slaying any Dweller below level 5 grants no Experience.

This is an (E)volving title. This title cannot be unequipped. Sucks to be you. Honestly, this is what you get for being a dick and upsetting the delicate ecosystem of the Lobby.

The title seemed to do its job because, after that, the Greeters disappeared like fog burning away with the noontime sun. That made the job easier in some ways, but also much less lucrative. And about a thousand times more monotonous.

In the end, though, that was fine, because it was high time I moved on to some of the other floors. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to do my part to help out all the poor suckers stuck in the Lobby, but I also wanted to pick up Relics, and brand-new Delvers weren’t going to have many of those—if any. I needed to find some more seasoned Backrooms veterans, and the only way to do that was to go deeper.

With Unerring Arrow to guide us, Croc and I headed for the first floor.