Cal got the normal prompt he’d seen before on Tittikaka.

<<<>>>

Basic Dungeon Meld activated. Weavelord has accepted your request. Have fun building dungeons and saving the world! Wait! No! Error!

<<<>>>

A second later, Cal received the error message:

<<<>>>

Error! Insufficient Apothos available. Please try again once your Celestial Node doesn’t suck rotten eggs. Kinda sad. Better luck next time!

<<<>>>

Cal was then kicked out of the spell.

Weavelord’s gem pulsated. “Is there a problem, Cal?”

Cal nodded. “Yeah, uh, there’s not enough power. Does that make sense?”

Dave’s guardian form was laying down next to the pedestal, looking like it had just been run over by a pinball and semi-healed by trolled. The two surviving pairs of glasses were skewed, and the magical tie drooped. His Dweebers stood around, looking concerned.

It took a second, but Dave finally answered him. “Things are different all right. I’m getting only a fraction of the power. Most of it is going to the other Nodes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I’m feeling like my old self again. You know, Cal, it’s kinda nice being back in the dungeon-building game, even if I failed to stop you. My Newton’s Cradle Pendulum Desk Toy trap sure backfired. You guys bashed through the wall and into the chessboard room. It circumnavigated most of the dungeon, which includes a fair amount of stuff that’s returned to being the normal basement. I couldn’t build a room now even if I tried.”

Cal closed his eyes, fighting the despair. If they couldn’t build another dungeon, and quick, whoever was controlling Inke would just waltz right into the secret file room, kill Dave the Weavelord, and then have all five nodes again.

Dave offered some hope. “While I gather power, you guys should check out the corner office. Maybe you can find something useful there, and with all the junk around here, we might be able to build something we can use to defend ourselves. Do we know where Perkle is?”

Cal slapped his forehead. “I forgot about him. I thought you’d have him. Your spiders grabbed him.”

The Spidercrat concentrated and then whispered. “Yes, I remember now. He escaped my clutches. Perkle always was very clever.”

Cal prayed the gnome was okay. “So Perkle is M.I.A, as are the Quatros, but Gwen has a Gadget ability. She’s really good.”

Dave gave his daughter a soft look. “I’m sure she is. Gwen always was so very smart. Far smarter than her father.” Their boss had completely changed.

Gwen couldn’t meet his gaze.

Cal cleared his throat. “Sure, uh, we can search for stuff to use. We need to get going. I would imagine, with the Apothos change, Inke will be here soon. So hurry!”

Kronke raised a hand. “Me stay to protect Dave.”

Gwen looked worried for a minute, her eyes on Dave’s withered, weak form, but a second later, she was her normal badass self. “I’ll leave Shrimpie and Karl. He’s out of frozen food, so I’ll put about half of my silverware collection in his freezer. Just so he has something to throw.”

“You have my thanks, my dear,” the geezer freezer said from above. “Hey, Gwen, bring down whatever is in the fridge up there. I know Ethel has some chicken salad going bad that should make for some nice shrapnel. I can start loading up for our next fight. We’re gonna go after the annoying tattoo troll, right? I wouldn’t care if we killed all those AT1 jokers. They weren’t ever nice to us breakroom cores. Not a bit.”

Instead of yelling, Daphne made a woman’s head out of water, and had it nod, so vigorously that droplets spattered Cal.

Helga scowled. “Shut yer frozen gob, ye daft idjit. Them AT1 guardians are our comrades. It’s likely they’re being controlled as Weavelord was.” She took a deep breath, taking control of herself. “Helga continued. “I’ll go with Calcannis and Gwenivere as far as Fullgeers while Hurricane rests up. We should guard that hallway from the stairwell. That be the entrance, right, Weavelord?”

“Weavelord. Dave. Whichever,” the dungeon core said. “But yes. Guarding that hallway would be smart. While I rest up and figure out how to get enough power to do a Dungeon Meld with Cal. You know, your TAP report said you had to wait for Mimi to power back up. Looks like history is repeating itself.”

Helga loaded her musket. “Aye, Weavelord, and let’s hope it does. We won that one…barely…but we won it.” She went and pet Hurricane, kissed her battle goat on the horn, and then gathered up her gear.

Cal, Gwen, and Helga then left the inner sanctum through the same door they’d entered, though they had to climb a ladder to get back up to the ledge. They then retraced their steps. The rec room was much the same, minus the tiger traps, but the chessboard room was completely different. Instead of a magical game board, the room was littered with broken desks and broken office chairs, pushed to the edges of the room. Across the way, the huge metal orbs were gone, leaving a gaping hole in the wall.

Helga strode through the room. “I’ll go and check on Fullgeers. That foul machine better not try and depress me with its hisses and whispers, or I might have to bash it to pieces. Never should’ve let them infernal cores talk. By my auntie’s alcoholism, we have enough talk already.”

The halfling barbarian then left the room, heading for Fullgeers.

Gwen shook her head. “Something’s eating at our girl Helga. I’ve seen her angry before, but this feels more like undirected rage. I’m worried about her.”

“Me too,” Cal said. “Maybe I could do a Conference Call with her. Get her to talk about it.”

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“Right. Because everyone loves your dumb Conference Call ability and your dumb Lower Middle Management thing. Come on, Cal, let’s check out my dear daddy’s dungeon. Well, we won’t see it in it’s prime, but let’s get a sense of what we’re dealing with.”

They left the former chess room through the right, the one they hadn’t gone through before, and walked a long hallway. It had a bare concrete floor. The walls had wood paneling, though it was piecemeal, from all different kinds of wood. The wallpaper was also piecemeal, and there was everything from green velvet stripes to maroon and purple paisley to pink and blue paisley. The carpet was equally diverse and patchy.

Cal didn’t cast his Triple A spell, but in his head, he called this the long hallway. “We’ll have to repair that hole in the chessboard room. We don’t want Inke and his minions taking the same shortcut we did.

The long hallway ended in a small boxy room with shelves stuffed with lots of old manuals and outdated forms. There were multiple copies of everything.

Gwen made a face. “Why not just throw all this stuff out?”

Cal gasped, completely shocked. “What? Throw out all this history? We need an archive of all our forms, past, present and future. Look, that’s the OAT2, the second version of the Omega Audit Template. It’s a classic.”

Gwen looked at him like he’d sprouted an extra head. “Why keep five copies of DUDE’s Dungeon Auditing Manual from fifty years ago? One copy sure. But five copies?”

Cal sputtered, “But it’s the amazing version twenty-one point eleven. Some good stuff there.”

Gwen lifted a hand. “Fine. I surrender. I just wonder what this looked like before Dave lost his mojo.”

“Not sure,” Cal said. “But I think we should do a trap room here.

Gwen looked up at the ceiling tiles. “Love that false ceiling. We could do a lot there. Don’t love the fluorescent lights. Now, which door?”

There was one door across the room and one door to the left. The left door opened up to a ragged hallway of bare stone. The door across led to another hallway, like the long hallway, which ended in another boxy room. This had shelves and shelves of office supplies.

Gwen grunted in disgust. “So that’s where the extra staples were. You have no idea how often I went for them. And Post-it notes. The tiny yellow ones. I bought some from that store in Cogsville using my own money, Cal. My own money! This is such malarkey. I bet no one knows all this stuff here.”

Cal had to laugh. “And you said Helga had anger issues. You’re getting upset about office supplies.”

“Cal, yes, and you of all people should respect that.” She shook a box at him. “Number two pencils galore! You love number two pencils, Cal. I know you do.”

“They are a superior pencil,” Cal said. “So much better than the number ones.”

They backtracked to the archive room and then went down the cavern.

Gwen pointed. “Helga would love the all-natural look. It’s surprising, but am I crazy, or would the pink and blue paisley wallpaper be better?”

“Crazy,” Cal said with a smile. “Definitely crazy.”

They followed the rough rock hallway to another room. The walls were unfinished drywall, with the seams taped, and while there were patches of paint, it was mostly blank sheetrock. There were more desks and chairs stacked on top of each other, as well as some old boxes filled with paper. On the front were the words, “Give to Ramsay for immediate incineration.”

Gwen squinted. “Ramsay? Our dragon? Good luck with that. The only thing I’d take to Ramsay would be Brussel sprouts for roasting. He’d be super good at that.”

Cal bent down and started to go through TAP reports, some of them rather recent. “This is weird. I wonder if these are copies of TAP reports. Or were they put here accidentally. Most of the cover sheets were removed, so it would take some time to figure out which team submitted them.

Going through the TAP reports, Cal noticed some examples of Denise’s writing, but none of his own. Six didn’t seem to have any reports here. Was that good or bad?

Gwen went over to the side wall, where some of the drywall tape had peeled off. “Hey, I know boxes of paper in storage rooms are fascinating. Like the best thing ever. But we are on a tight schedule, boss man. And looky here. Gwenny has found herself a secret door. Not well hidden. And I’m probably going to get drywall chalk on me. Try not to breathe.”

She reached and peeled open the wall to reveal a rough-hewn passageway through solid rock.

Cal cast Mood Lighting, so they had light when they went down the hallway and into a vast underground cavern. The walls and ceiling were bare, glittering stone. The floor was carpeted with the same gray industrial carpet that was upstairs.

That was a problem because of the leaking water. Cal wrinkled his nose at the stink of the moldering carpet. All around the room were swords, armors, spears, a whole arsenal of weapons.

“What’s all this junk?” Gwen asked. “Am I back in Otis’s dungeon? Hoard much?”

“From audits,” Cal said. “I would imagine we might find some magic items here, but nothing important. I remember at some point, the Department would try and bring back all the exogenous weapons that could be salvaged from Omega Audits. To think. These are the gear and weapons from dead dungeon cores, the artifacts of long-forgotten worlds. We could make a museum. We should make a museum.”

Gwen groaned. “Museums are so super boring.” She pointed to the hallway that looked rather familiar. “That leads down to the Newton’s Cradle Pendulum Desk Toy room. Let’s go back to the incineration room.”

“Right. The boxes marked for incineration by Ramsay. I understand.”

That room led to another cave-like hallway that ended in a strange circular chamber, completely tiled, with a drain in the floor. There was also a vent in the wall, caked in dust and grime.

Cal lifted a hand, thinking he might feel some air coming through the vent, but there was nothing. And though the entire circular room was tiled, there wasn’t any sign of moisture.

Gwen pointed out the obvious. “Probably should’ve put the drain in the museum cave room. Save the carpet. Save the possible magic items that we could use to save our butts. But you know, that would make too much sense.”

Cal couldn’t explain the circular tile room, but they had to get moving.

Another hallway cut through the rough rock led to the biggest storage room of all. This was rectangular with folding vinyl walls that could be pulled close to form two rooms. The accordion doors were open because the entire place was packed with gadgetry. Strange gadgetry. One pile contained large white plastic boxes with glass screens on the front. Nearby lay a stack of rectangular beige boxes with different buttons and slots on the front. Some of the gadgets were as big as small horses, with lots of doors, trays, and lift-y things on them. Other mechanisms were no larger than a mouse. Most of the equipment was the same beige color. There were also black square pieces of plastic piled around everywhere.

“What is all this?” Cal asked.

Gwen went and picked up one of the little squares. She read the label out loud. “Electronic Abacus Diskette.” Then she got it. “Ohhh, I know what all this stuff is. You can thank my Basic Advanced Gadgetry skill, because it gives me some instinctual technological knowledge. Baffling, I know. For a while, the Council of Dungeons were pushing out this new technology, computationers, or compootoors, but most everyone called them electronic abacuses. Those square boxes are called See-Art-Tee monitors, and the beige rectangular boxes are called See-Pee-Yous. That stack of stuff over there are the Kee-Bards. I think they played music or something. And the huge demon boxes are called printer/copiers. And something called a Facts machine. You could send someone the Facts on a piece of magical paper, but it was super complicated. IBM made a bunch of this stuff, especially the copiers and Facts machines.”

“IBM?” Cal asked.

Gwen laughed. “Interworld Bureau of Machinery. It went out of business because magic is so much easier than all this stuff. Right? I mean, magic is awesome, and these electronic abacuses didn’t work half the time anyway, so they junked them.”

Cal remembered someone mentioning this. The crystals worked so much better. “And they kept all this junk. This basement is like Otis’s dungeon.”

Gwen shrugged. “It was all super expensive. When you spend so much money, you don’t want to throw stuff out, even when it’s obsolete. I kinda understand that. Up to a point.”

They walked through the old, cast-off technology and down another natural cavern, which led them back to the Newton’s Cradle room. The huge silver balls were gone, and Helga was about to bash Fullgeers right in his espresso sprouts with her crowbar.

“That’s enough, ye fiend! Enough of yer whispers and despair!”

They’d arrived just in time to save Fullgeers from certain death.

They’d gotten a sense of the basement, and Cal had some ideas on how to turn it into a dungeon, but first, they had to see what was in the abandoned corner office.

No. First, they had to save Fullgeers from Helga’s crowbar.