The dungeon core has been retrieved. Congratulations! You are now Level 2. Clearing the dungeon on your first dive attempt makes you eligible to receive a perk. Awarding perk: Mental Resilience.
Mental Resilience: Your defeat of a mind-based dungeon core has sharpened your sense and steeled your will. From now on, any attempt at deception by a dungeon must first pass an additional check. Should the check fail, you will immediately become aware of the deception and may act in whatever manner you please. Bonus: you gain a permanent +1 to Wisdom.
Welcome back, Diver.
The notifications flashed up in my consciousness before anything else, and I barely had time to read them and begin puzzling out what they meant–or where the hell they’d come from–when my feet landed in the hallway outside the out-of-order restroom in Bob’s Dive Bar. My ears caught what sounded like the last second or two of Spectre, then the place went quiet again.
“Welcome back, Del,” Bob said. My head snapped around toward his voice, and I was surprised to see him standing behind the bar and acting as if nothing had happened. He waved me over. “Come on over and grab a seat—you still have half your Kettle One and Tonic left.” He gestured to the drink sitting on the bar.
I squinted at the glass he’d indicated, then continued to stare in disbelief. The glass was half full, sitting in the exact place I’d set it down right before I’d walked over to the jukebox with the coin. The ice hadn’t melted, and only a small amount of condensation flecked the outside of the rocks glass. But that had been ages ago. Almost two months, by my reckoning.
“I’ll save you the question,” Bob said. “You’ve only been gone for four minutes and twenty-six seconds—exactly the length of the song you chose.”
I blinked. What the hell was the old bat talking about? Four minutes my fucking ass! I knew damn well how much time I’d experienced inside that place!
…Or did I? The longer I was present out in reality again, the more my body was telling me it really had only been a few minutes. The cognitive dissonance that slammed into me then threatened to overwhelm me, and my vision went a little blurry as a wave of light-headed nausea hit me.
“Hey man,” a gruff voice said from behind me, and a gentle hand pressed down on my shoulder.
I spun around, half expecting to see the specter standing behind me, but what I found instead was a hard-looking guy in his mid-forties. He backed away a step, raising his hands to show he wasn’t there to fight. His brown eyes softened, and I got the impression he knew exactly what I was going through.
“It’s ok, man. You’re out now. You made it.” He pointed past me to the bar. “I know what you’re going through—my first dive was brutal, too. Go sit down and finish your drink, and let Bob talk you through it. It’s going to be ok. You did good.”
I opened my mouth to say… what? My mind was racing, but the thoughts it was trying to churn through were chaotic and incomplete. It felt like the world was spinning around me, and my knees suddenly went weak. I tried to turn and run for the exit, but I stumbled and went down.
A pair of incredibly powerful hands swooped in and caught me, pulling me upright and then gently guiding me toward the bar.
“Rough dive,” Bob said as I slid onto the stool and then put my head down on the bar.
The cool surface of the old wooden counter did wonders to help my mind come back to an even keel.
“What the hell was that?” I croaked out, fighting back my rising gorge. “What did I just experience?”
“A dungeon,” the guy who’d kept me on my feet said. “You can think of it like a pocket of reality that’s separate from our own. Each one is different… what was yours like?” He asked conversationally, like it was the most natural topic in the world. “Classic dungeon dive with traps and monsters?”
I shook my head, rocking it back and forth on the countertop. “It was like the real world, but so much of my life was different,” I said into the cool wooden surface. When I didn’t get a reply, I continued. “The people in my life were mostly the same, but the details were different. A buddy of mine that was killed a few years back was there, and he and I were on the same SRT team together, which is crazy, because I’ve never spent a day of my life in the military or on a police force. And yet, in there, getting called out on a mission and handling all those guns seemed like second nature to me.”
I picked my head up off the bar and found both Bob and the other guy staring at me. Bob’s face was unreadable, but the guy sitting next to me had a look of horror on his face… and something else I just noticed, floating over his head.
Level 19.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered. “You got a mind fuck for your first dive at Level 1?” He looked up at Bob. “What are the odds of that? Mind dungeons only drop less than one percent of the time, and I’ve never even heard of one rolling on a Level 1 track.”
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“That’s the nature of the jukebox,” Bob replied with a shrug. “You can’t predict what you’ll get.”
I barely registered what they said. My jaw dropped open and I squinted, sure I must be seeing things. But nope… the marker stayed right there above the guy’s head, no matter how I moved my head around to take it in from different angles.
“What the hell is that?” I said, pointing to the space above his head.
My new friend smiled and chuckled. “That’s my level. You’ve been initiated into the system now, so you’ll be able to see other diver’s levels now- Only in a dive bar, though,” he added quickly, gesturing around the place. “Outside, everything goes back to normal. Well, more or less.”
I turned to look at Bob. “So it really was a game, afterall?”
“No.” Bob stated emphatically. “It was real, but that reality is governed by a game-like system. We’ll get you brought up to speed on everything, now that you’ve got your first dive under your belt. In the meantime,” he said, nudging my drink toward me, “take a sip of that and let your mind finish finding its center.”
“Well, my hat’s off to you, buddy,” the big guy said, thumping a hand on my back and sliding onto the barstool next to me. “Name’s Stern, by the way.” He nodded by way of introduction. “Man… a mind fuck on your first dive, and you cleared it first time out. Impressive.” Then, he motioned for Bob to get us a couple shots. “Tequila.”
“So it was all real… but also, none of it was real?” I asked, ignoring my new friend. I was pretty sure I now had a reasonably good handle on the nature of what I’d gone through, but I needed to hear them confirm it for me. “I didn’t really hold my wife’s corpse in my arms or watch my daughter bleed out on that hospital bed?” Tears welled in the corners of my eyes, and my whole body began shaking. “Please tell me it wasn’t real.”
A shot glass filled with a clear liquid appeared in front of me, and I reached down on instinct and immediately picked it up and knocked it back. Hissing through my teeth at the burn, I set the glass down and motioned for Bob to hit me again.
“If you just ran the kind of dungeon I think you did, then no,” Stern rumbled quietly. “The core would have searched your mind and pulled out your greatest fears, then used them against you.”
I shuddered again, struggling to beat back the torrent of awful memories. “Yeah. That sounds about right.”
“I’m Stern,” the guy said again, this time holding his hand out.
“Yeah. Sorry,” I replied absently. “Del.” I grasped his hand and gave it as firm a shake as I was able, at that moment. His calloused hand gripped mine like an iron vise, and I winced.
“Ah. Sorry about that, Del,” he said, releasing my hand and looking apologetic. “You’ll find that if you stick around here long enough, you forget how strong you’ve become.”
“Stern here has been a regular for over twenty years,” Bob said when he saw the confusion setting in on my brow. “His clear count is approaching triple digits, and he’s Level 19, which puts him in the top one percent or so of divers, worldwide.”
“Wait… worldwide?” I said. “You mean there are more places like this out there?”
“Mhmm,” Bob confirmed. “399 more, to be exact.” Then he waved away the topic with a casual flick of his hand. “But we’ll get into all of that later. For right now, I want you to have a drink and decompress. You can ask any questions you want, but I reserve the right to not answer them. Oh, and one more thing…”
Bob ducked beneath the counter and I heard what sounded like the locking bolts on a safe clunk open. He reappeared a moment later, and my eyes bulged at the sight of what was in his hand.
“Ten thousand,” he said. “Standard reward for clearing a level one dungeon and extracting the core.” He eyed me. “You did extract the core, right?”
I blinked. Was he talking about that weird, orb-like heart that I’d pulled from the specter? “Uh, I think so?”
My hand instinctively reached down to the pocket I’d put the specter’s heart in. My fingers grazed something that felt like a stiff piece of paper, and I pulled it out and brought it up to eye level. I was looking at a vinyl decal about the size of my palm. On it was an image of two crimson eyes and a wide mouth with a set of jagged teeth peeking out of a grin. I dropped it reflexively and jerked back.
“Don’t worry, man, it’s just a sticker,” Stern said quickly, moving to put a hand on my back in a reassuring gesture. “Come on. Pick it up. I’ll show you where it goes.”
I looked up at Bob, who nodded, then set the stack of cash on the counter, next to my newly refilled shot glass. Then, I grabbed the sticker off the bar and hopped off my stool.
Stern was already halfway across the bar, toward the back of the seating area. I stepped quickly to catch up to him, and that’s when I realized the back wall was covered in a sea of similar-sized decals. The images on them were all unique, and each one had been signed.
Stern took up position in front of the wall and gestured to a patch of open space. “When you clear a dungeon, it generates a sticker from the core you removed. Those stickers get put up here, and the diver that cleared it signs their name. There are a couple other things the stickers can be used for, but you’ll get a lesson on that, when the time is right.”
I shook my head in bewilderment. My time in the, uh, dungeon was already starting to feel like a bad memory, but I was really struggling with just how insane of a situation I’d found myself in.
No, that wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t my situation that I was having a hard time believing; it was the fact that my gut was telling me it wasn’t, actually, batshit crazy that I found borderline insane. And, like when I’d been in the dungeon, I let my instincts guide me again. I peeled the backing off the sticker, then slammed it onto the wall with a meaty thump. Then I rubbed it with the outside of my palm, making sure it was good and stuck to the wall.
“Here,” Stern said, holding out a black sharpie marker.
I took the marker and scrawled DEL in large lettering, then capped the marker and handed it back.
“Alright then, Del. Let’s get you good and drunk.” Stern clapped a hand on my back and pointed me back toward the bar. “The best way to clear your mind after a bad dive is to get absolutely fucking hammered, and I’m buying.”