The dungeon faded away and Darryl's sight went black. His body became weightless for a moment, and then he felt his consciousness drift away to remain oblivious to the unnatural passing of time.
Elbgen (Admin): Congratulations, crawler. You have been booked, you will be transferred to the surface now. Be grateful, crawlers that go down early rarely get such a boon, especially on the first floor. You lucky bastards! ;D Be entertaining, this is a great way to get an early fanbase going!
Elbgen (Admin): Transferring now.
The ground roiled. Darryl no longer saw his HUD, and the admin's messages disappeared entirely instead of fading away into the corner to be reopened at will.
They were on a boat, it seemed, and a small one at that. There were no windows and no doors. There were no features at all other than four chairs that sat cramped together at one end of the room. Elise had immediately plopped down on one and sprawled out comfortably despite the chair looking like a combination of one of those cheap plastic white folding chairs and a school chair designed to be impossible to slouch on.
The place was about the size of a large walk-in closet. Even with one of them already seated, Darryl was still awkwardly standing in Ben's space and vice versa. Ben quickly sat down next to Elise and Thomas took the seat most to the left. The chair next to him and Elise was left open for Darryl, but he didn't immediately sit down. Instead he decided to explore the place a bit.
He could easily reach up and touch the ceiling, which seemed to be made of plastic. The room smelled of saltwater and was about twenty degrees cooler than the dungeon. They all got goosebumps from the cold, and began shivering. None of them were still wearing the winter jackets they'd come in with, and with their HUD gone they couldn't take these out of their inventories either.
The only odd part of their small room was a circle on the ceiling that didn't look like a light source. Darryl tapped on it, and it felt hollow and plastic. He tried to grab it, but the black frisbee-shaped sphere had but thin seams that his fingers didn't find purchase on.
“Would you kindly stop touching me, if you don't mind?” A metallic female voice said.
“Yeah, stop groping her, Darryl.” Ben said a few moments later, half a chuckle on his face replacing the same startled expression the rest had at the sudden sound.
The frisbee descended from the low ceiling and floated in front of Darryl's face. It hummed and a single blue light flashed on the edge. It spoke in a soothing female, robotic voice.
“My name is Mexx-55. You are in a rental trailer owned and operated by Senegal Production Systems, Unlimited. This trailer is used by multiple tunnel productions related to the crawl. For this session, use of these facilities has been leased by the program Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem. Sit in the provided chairs and keep your limbs to your side while the table lowers itself. The holo will commence in 60 seconds.”
The dark, heaving room flickered, and the lights turned on, revealing an audience. They had no reaction to the sudden appearance. The bobbing of the boat on the sea became more muted and the cold became less noticeable. Both were still there, but the holo seemed to have some sort of compensation effect.
The cramped space they were in turned into a much bigger room. A table floated before his three party members, shaped like a smile. They sat at the left side of the table, from the public's perspective, with Ben sitting right next to a larger, more ornate chair. It was made of a dark wood with what appeared to be red velvet cushions. The armrests were made of pig skulls. Four more plain, empty chairs appeared to our right, curving along the table.
In the backdrop was an elephant-like monster with three spike-covered trunks. The animation swung its head back and forth in a loop with the word “Extreme” exploding over and over in the midst of the image. More trashy decorations littered the walls everywhere the audience could see.
Darryl touched the table and his hand went through. He heard a buzzing sound, and though he saw nothing floating next to his head he still heard the flying roomba's voice.
“Please sit down, crawler Darryl. You have 45 seconds to comply. We will lower the table at your physical location once you do so, or after that time runs out. The producers will not be pleased when you fail to follow basic guidelines.”
Darryl walked through the table and sat down, hearing a soft whirring not long after. Elise tried to shove her chair backwards so she could place her feet on the table, but the chair hit a now invisible wall and couldn't be pushed back far enough to enable her to do it without looking awkward and messing with her balance. To his other side, Darryl practically felt Thomas' relief for being the furthest from the centre of attention.
Ben, sitting next to the gaudy throne, shifted uncomfortably and looked nervous. Elise hid it better, and softly spoke something probably meant to calm him. Ben nodded but his body language didn't change much.
Then the audience began cheering. They chanted at times, either repeating “Die!” or saying what Darryl assumed was the word “Glurp!”. He lacked the context for the latter, but the former combined with the audience's attention drawn to an invisible screen and the eventual cheers that the death chants ended in made it clear what the underlying idea was.
“Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem.” Darryl muttered. “It's a show about seeing people die. The audience is fucking cheering when someone dies.”
“There's no viewers on the first floor yet, and millions of crawlers is probably too many for anyone to browse through. They probably have shows like these to sift through the deaths and find the goriest and worst to highlight.” Thomas said, less disgusted though still with a bitterness to his tone. “I wonder why they'd get us on the show, then.”
“I don't want to be on a show like this, fuck popularity and fuck this dungeon.” Darryl said.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Calm down.” Thomas said. “I agree, but we can't go around demanding that kind of stuff. I assume that Borant will 'accelerate' our little adventure if we start acting out this early. We're worth nothing to them, as we've already seen.”
“You don't need to say anything, Darryl.” Elise said, her usually casual tone more comforting and supportive now. “I'm the charismatic one, let me do the talking. You guys... Just try to sit this one out, I guess.”
After a few minutes of the audience seeing several people die, someone popped in. The host—the Maestro—was an orc. A huge, muscular orc. The Maestro’s flesh was dark and covered in black, bristly hair. He looked like a wild boar. His left tusk was completely gold. He stood about six and a half feet tall, built like a tank. A line of earrings circled his left ear. He wore a hot pink, silken shirt, buttoned halfway up, revealing a hairy, well-muscled chest covered in gold chains.
The orc had appeared mid-sentence, causing Ben to jump in surprise. He talked loudly and with plenty of cursing, and he acted as if they didn't exist.
“Wow, and I thought middle-aged Germans could murder fashion and piss on its corpse.” Elise said, luring a chuckle from Ben.
“Please don't infuriate the host, we don't want to make a bad impression.” Thomas said.
“Relax, he can't hear us. Clearly.” Elise said, leaning over Ben to wave her hand in front of the orc's face. She grimaced when her fingers were suddenly stopped by thin air where the trailer's walls were, and sourly nursed them a bit while the big orc raved on.
ON AIR SOON. BE READY.
Same as before, the message just instantaneously appeared and disappeared out of thin air, without the more pleasing transitions that they had in the dungeon. This time it got a jolt out of Thomas, though he grit his teeth and pretended nothing happened while Elise chuckled.
“And now my little piglets, we get to the meat of the show!” The Maestro belched out. “We've picked out some crawlers for your entertainment that are a good mix of cowardice and action.”
“I think we all remember the Kruknik encounter that took down our public favourite crawler Slaari six seasons ago, and some of you may have seen a few other times that those buggers went full Siddon City on some crawlers!' He continued. “Now these guys were stuck in such a situation on the first floor, knew the advantages of grinding these better mobs to get themselves a head start, and still made a run for the stairway!”
The audience laughed when the Maestro played mock terrified, and their attention turned to a large screen that appeared over the three-tusked elephant skull mounted on the wall behind them.
The video was a string of their highs and lows, and not edited in their favour. The audience laughed loudly at Ben sitting on what turned out a woolf and then crawling pathetically to the toilet, the scene ending with a cheap poop joke. Darryl's fight against the Corpora office lady was cut up to appear as if he came in with the Greek adventurers and was the lone survivor only because he curled up under a booth while the others died. Elise's encounter with the rats that gave her an infection was short, and her hoarse grunt was butchered in editing to sound like a girlish scream that anyone who heard her speak before would know wasn't her voice.
The next scene was where Darryl lost the use of his right arm, followed by a short diagram of his wounds and their consequences before showing the worst bits of the felake battle. A sped up display of Ben trying to kill a vulpenier with a Krutnik leg, in all of its awkwardness. Then they showed him cycling like a madman from the Big Bad Woolf, playing an upbeat tune that made the whole affair seem silly while the Maestro made jokes about grandma chasing some pussy.
They ended with some of the Krutnik battles and some highlights, balancing out the bad with a reason to take the party seriously at all. Ben's player kill was in there, showing him killing Louis by making a pan of boiling grease with fries appear and throwing it in the Frenchman's face before shivving him while the man was screaming and clawing at his face. Their victory over the original Woolf boss was in there too, as were several of Elise's savage rampages amongst the fodder.
When the lights brightened up again, Darryl already knew what this interview was going to be like. The audience already looked small and lanky, and the video only confirmed that they were dealing with a show aimed at a certain demographic of prepubescent boys and their shallow humour for vulgarity and scathing jokes.
Darryl glanced over to Elise, who seemed a lot more confident than him. The show had almost exclusively shown her from angles that highlighted her boobs or arse, and he doubted that the Maestro was going to be more respectful when talking to her.
“So, not the most talented batch of crawlers we have today, huh?” Maestro said, getting a decent response from the audience. “But that makes sense, there's still a lot of chaff to get through. We're still on the first floor, after all.”
“Well, that's not entirely true. These guys were so scared of a few bugs that they went down prematurely.” He continued. “How stupid is that? Oh, look at me. I'm scared of what's on the first floor, so I go down into the more dangerous floor. Because that makes sense.”
The audience laughed and jeered. Ben seemed like he wanted to counter the statement, but the Maestro had already turned to them with a new topic in mind.
“But we do have to admit that they're a lucky bunch. You've seen it yourself, they managed to survive some pretty nasty situations.” The Maestro said. “On that note, Darryl, how's the fapping going now that you had to switch hands?”
The crowd jeered and the Maestro laughed at him with a sardonic smile. Darryl just frowned, the jab so shallow and childish that he wasn't sure whether to take it seriously.
Deciding that nothing he could say here would help him any, Darryl just continued to look at the Maestro with one eyebrow raised and a “Really?” in his eyes when the crowd died down. There was an awkward silence for a moment, Maestro flinched and he decided to switch targets to fill the void.
“And you, the latest addition to the team. Definitely a welcome sight, wouldn't you say?” The Maestro said in a tone that had no nuance as to what he meant by that. The crowd hooted, and then hooted even louder as Maestro moved over to fondle Elise's breasts. His fingers were illusions to Elise and did nothing, but he clearly wasn't after copping a feel rather than doing this for the audience's amusement.
She crossed her arms over her chest and looked positively miffed. “Alright you ugly cunt, what the hell makes you think that I'd ever want anything to do with a pig like you?”
“Oh, do you hear that, piglets?” The Maestro said. “She's got some spunk in her! That's hot, no?”
The audience hooted and jeered.
“Not that I'd actually want to be with some lowly trash like her! I'm a prince, I can do a lot better than a crawler harlot hoping to suck and jerk her way out of Borant's latest death trap!” Maestro said, before leaning back to make his hips thrust out some. “But you're welcome to try. What does she say when she sucks it, piglets?”
“Glurp glurp!” The audience screamed, mixed with jeers of a more degenerate nature.
“Oink oink!” Ben said. While he started intimidated at first, the kid had gotten ever angrier as things developed and he had now reached his boiling point. “You really think that Elise would want to taste you? She didn't call you a pig because you're a prick, you literally look like an unshaven porcine halfwit dressed up by a deranged rapper!”
“Ooooooohhhhh...” The audience said in unison, and the Maestro smiled broader.
“Bold words for some kid that relies on fast food to win against other players. What's wrong? Couldn't fight that crawler like a man?” The Maestro rebutted.
“Did I just hear the cattle talk?” Elise said. “Nah, I must've misheard. All I heard was Oink oink!”
“Yeah, or can you not even do that, you overgrown boar?” Ben said. “Did you get so fat and lazy that you can only produce some glurp glurps? Or is that supposed to be you belching?”
“You hear that, piglets? Sounds like these savages are picking a fight with the Maestro!” The Maestro said, turning to the audience. “Well, allow me to oblige...”
To his right, Darryl heard Thomas let out a long sigh as the three to his left devolved the quality of the show to internet shitposting.