PART TWELVE

MPD: 20

We spent a few days monitoring the effects of the changes. We were generating about 20 mana in profit per day. Not very much, but it was clear that things were on the up.

Except... they weren't.

Not for me.

"386," I said. It was a Friday night and I'd had one of the grimmest weeks of my life.

"Three B," he said. "My man."

I sighed. "What have you been watching?"

"I was trying to understand the word fragment 'bro' and the Engine permitted me access to some short-form content on the condition I don't contaminate the other AIs with it."

"Cool."

"I learned about nicknames."

"Three B is not the worst nickname I've ever had. But 3... um... yeah we can't both have names that begin with 3. Just call me bro, dude. 386, listen. I've got... I'm having some..." I sighed. "What I want to say is that it's getting hard to..."

"Hard to finish a sentence?"

"Real life isn't being very good to me right now. I'm running out of money."

"Money."

"I'm like you before I turned up. But instead of mana, it's money. I'm spending more than is coming in, and I'm not spending much. To the point where... I've been looking at the numbers and I'm going to have to cancel my BV subscription and sell my headset."

"I don't completely understand."

"It means I won't be able to come into the BetterVerse. Into here." There was a little moment of reflection that ended when Lennie poked his head into the room looking worried. He offered me a bronze coin. I took it from him and gave him a fist bump.

386 brightened. "Perhaps I should consult you the way you consulted me. Help put your affairs into order. Being a human seems much easier than being a dungeon. I've always thought so. Perhaps you can level up in your main Skill and earn more money that way. Have you thought about accepting some fetch quests?"

I smiled and said thanks for the tips, and then I went to find Lennie and told him I had a gift for him. I gave him the coin - he was delighted - and said I was going for a walk. I kept the smile on my face until I was well out of 386's dosmesne.

A Long Walk Off a Short Pier

There was one thought that kept itching me, so I went to go and scratch it while I still had access to the game.

I went to the bank. In the game, I mean. In Auster. 'The Austerity Bank,' which was a pretty sick joke. I asked for a meeting with whoever was in charge of loans and said it was to buy some land. I was ushered into a little room and had a chat with a thin, balding man in a beige shirt. I want to say everything about him was beige but that would be inaccurate.

So this all-beige man asks how he can help me and I tell him I'm interested in buying some land and I show him where and he says 'oh nobody wants that so it's cheap as' and then tells me the price. He might as well have said 'a gigathousand shillings'. I ask if they do loans and he asks for my consent for a credit check and then says that they'll loan me the money if I provide a deposit of 300%. Bear in mind, I'm nowhere near as broke in the game as I am IRL. My only weapon was the playing cards so I wasn't always upgrading a sword or a bow like most players. You could say I was pretty frugal.

"Sorry, dude," I said. "Do you mean 30%?"

"No, sir," he said. "With your credit score, we would loan you the capital if you gave us three times the buying price."

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Something had gone seriously wrong. "I heard that the economic model in this game was developed by Nobel prize-winning megabrains."

"Did you?" he asked, politely.

"Never mind," I said, and left. At least I knew how much the land around the dungeon would cost.

Uptown Funk

I walked around for a bit, feeling sorry for myself. I had to give ThetanSoft credit - they'd created a wonderful simulation. For all the swords and fireballs and lovable street urchins, life here in Auster was eerily similar to reality. Just when things were looking up, I'd get my head pushed back down into a flushing toilet.

The Catch-22 of it actually made me smile. If I could buy the land around the dungeon, it'd get more valuable as the dungeon got bigger and more popular. But I couldn't buy the land until I'd made enough in-game money from the success of the dungeon. And the success of the dungeon would make the land too expensive to buy.

Argh!

Anyway, I could take that idea out back of the farmhouse and shoot it tenderly through the brain.

There was still a version of the story where I just got rich from my 10% of the dungeon's income.

How long would it take for the dungeon to start pumping out really serious amounts of mana? If we could keep expanding then three to six months. I had two months left on my subscription. If I could scrape together some money in real life I could maybe extend another month or two, but it was cheaper to pay for a whole year than add one month at a time. And where would I get more cash? 386 had mentioned fetch quests, which was a second job I could actually get. But delivering pizza or driving people around would cost so much in gas I'd barely be breaking even. And if I got into an accident... the repairs, the medical bills. Oof. Just thinking about it brought me out in a cold sweat.

I really felt like there was no way through. No way out. No way up. Plenty of ways down. Chutes and ladders, but every square is a chute.

I wanted to punch something so hard it turned to powder, but I didn't have a Strength build. I'd gone for the most Dexterity I could get. I looked around at all the NPCs and players milling around. They thought about their attributes virtually non-stop.

My legs stopped. I stood in the street with my mouth open. I looked around and had no idea where I was. The mini-map told me I'd wandered into the old town. But it didn't matter where I was. A little smile crept onto my face. I'd just had a revelation. A Road to Damascus moment. I'd realised something so incredibly obvious that my own stupidity made me smile.

It wasn't a solution to any of my problems. I was simply experiencing the joy of being creative. It was like a warm glow that rose up through my body and hugged me like a scarf. It was a feeling I used to get in school and in college, but not so much since becoming a wage slave. But I'd been having it more and more since meeting 386 and Lennie. Is it overly sappy and sentimental to say that coming up with ways to improve the dungeon was the best part of my day?

I was going to be a dungeon consultant for a few more weeks. So what if my ideas didn't lead to fame and fortune?

Being creative was fun. Watching 386 turn my sketches into portraits was rewarding.

I smiled.

I was going to be a dungeon consultant for a few more weeks.

Meet Cute

"Hey," came a voice. "Are you Bain?"

I turned and saw a normal-looking woman with normal woman hair and normal woman elbows. That was all I could really see because she was wearing massive armor everywhere else. Colossal. Intimidating. But she seemed friendly. "Yes?"

"Huh." She regarded me for a while. "Why were ya smiling?"

"I just had an idea."

She tilted her head at me. "Have a lot of ideas, do ya?"

"I have no idea why you're talking to me." Written down, this sounds belligerent, but it was said and received playfully.

"I got a quest to."

"Excuse me?"

"Talk to Bain, it said. Reward one experience point. Seemed pretty bonkers but ya were there on my mini-map and I thought, why not?"

"You got a -? Huh? Who gave you the quest?" I looked around. "This is a prank isn't it? Are you going to tase me and run off?"

She laughed. "Look, I don't want to pry but I was watching ya and ya looked pretty depressed and then ya started smiling." Reader, by now you've worked out that she said ya. A lot. Boston accent? But I'm not going to keep typing 'ya'. I have standards. "Do you want me to run a cranial nerve exam on you?"

I chuckled. "Did you get your XP yet?"

She nodded. "Yeah..." She seemed confused by it. “I thought there’d be a follow-on or a part 2 or something.” Then she perked up. "Did you create that quest?"

I gawped at her. How could I have done it? I had never even spoken to her. Even if I could do such a thing what would be the… "What would be the point...?"

"To meet girls, ya?"

I was stunned. This was a stunning concept. I was more stunned than when I bent down to pick up a Tide pod and smacked my head on an open laundry machine. Then I got excited. Very excited. "Guys... giving quests to girls... to start conversations. That's genius. It's better than being a pick-up artist! It lets the woman make the first move. Is that real? Is that a real thing that's happening?"

She twisted her lips, closed her eyes, and laughed like a... I dunno... a baby pig? "No, it was just an idle thought."

"Oh, but it's galaxy brain stuff. I want to try it! How many girls could I meet in an hour? It's like speed dating."

"I think word would get out."

There was something about the concept that energised me. It fired me up to the extent that I forgot about the weird ‘meet Bain’ quest. "Did you seriously just come up with that idea?"

She squinted. "Yes?"

And then I realised what it was. It wasn't the potential applications - even if it was possible to create ‘flirting quests’ ThetanSoft would put a stop to it as soon as they realised what was happening and probably ban the players who'd abused the loophole. No, it was this woman. There was something about her. I tilted my head at her. "Have a lot of ideas, do ya?"

She blinked, but then gave me a little grin.

And my time was up and I got sucked out the game.