Fate Deals The Cards
Fifty-two Pickup part 1: The Lovers
Ch: 6 Stacking The Deck
I’m afraid I’ve become a bit of a chatterbox, after all these years of enforced silence. I’m really glad I can finally tell my story to someone at last, even under these circumstances, friend…
So anyhow, old Klevin just shook his head at my antics, no matter how hard I tried to communicate. “I’d hoped that if I could see thee, I might be able tae understand ye, but ye seem incapable of even gestures that do make any sense…” The old dwarf sighed. We’d had the same thought; when I realized he could see me, I’d hoped that maybe we could improve our communication, but a rigid carapace is tough to work with. After a few minutes of fruitless gesturing and waving my claws, I gave up; my crab was not able to communicate, it didn’t have the capabilities built in.
Klevin and I were standing in a pretty impressive field of loot; which I was gradually picking up and sorting out in my dungeon’s inventory page. It was a simple spreadsheet with mild interactivity and customizability; but like the Octos themselves, it was low effort and kinda just technically usable. I immediately got the sense that the more I made the thing my own and the more I played around with it, the more entertainment it might provide…
A globe sized, fully realized virtual sandbox world to explore, play with and create from whole cloth? And it’s free to play in pre-beta? Where do I sign up to join the dev team?
I had to salute the complete freedom that the entity behind this thing was offering me. If I were a total asswipe, I could scrub the world and restart, if I wanted to genocide my little eight armed friends and erase their ‘Akashic Record’... which was also listed among my current assets. It was just a progress bar with no further data or controls available to me.
When I touched its entry I had only two options, Continue? Or Delete? Touching any other part of the entry gave me a mild buzzing sensation in my tender tentacle, along with an error message that read:
Species authentication failed, access rejected.
I wasn’t octo enough to interact with whatever that was, even here… It was pretty alarming that the universe would just let a rando like me wipe a planet of all life on a whim… but doing that would expend all current Life and Biological resources and basically almost everything else.
With just the tectonic and climate functions, it would take untold eons for life to churn up a new viable biosphere from the wasteland, so any dungeon lord that pulled the plug was putting the whole thing back into pre-development...
I was coming to the conclusion that Klevin’s unseen outer gods were either recklessly careless and clueless, or playing a game so long that I couldn't grasp the plotlines and story arcs…
I gave up on those vast metaphysical concerns for now; one entire globe and the fate of my adopted species was enough responsibility for my eight fiddly tenties to grasp. I had work to do.
If I highlighted an item, I could read its full details and provenance, while there were customisable columns and rows I could set for keywords or simple phrases to help sort things out. I quickly typed up columns for Weapons, Jewelry, Armor, Trinkets, Miscellaneous and Oddities. After that I sorted for rarity, using simplified colors, despite the subtle gradients each item displayed within its hue.
Even simple and mundane items ranged from dull, dark gray to a shining glint of well polished and oiled iron or steel. At the upper ranges, violet was the end of the rarity spectrum, so I tagged that Legendary rarity and worked backwards to Basic.
After violet, well… That stuff got weird and eldritch; like the Monkey’s Paw, which glimmered with that strange ultraviolet haze.
The old man helped me sort stuff, once he figured out my scheme, making things go much more smoothly. He kept up a constant chatter at the same time, easing the tedious work.
“My sweet Misty Fens were populated by a clan of harpies, fer some time.” He muttered, while glaring at the awful paw thing. “Harpies be bird brained humanoid creatures, a bit ‘o the local problem children. They did nearly drive my native residents tae extinction, while I were away.”
Klevin seemed honestly disgusted by the creatures he mentioned and went on to confirm that. “Harpies being barely sentient enough tae move between worlds and mighty vicious as a general rule; it were my first task tae drive them out…” He grinned and shook his head.
“Harpies nae be brave enough nor strong enough tae hunt a monster of any strength. The title ‘o dungeon lord ‘o a new made dungeon be given tae the fist sentient tae defeat a monster at least three ranks higher than themselves, in single combat. Wi’ nae valid dungeon lord tae manage the place, they did cause the poor Fens tae spawn a frightful antique shop of such objects of wicked intent and evil deeds, made manifest.” The coot lectured ardently. “Every mortal soul bears the touch of selfishness, greed an wonton ass-hattery; there be no shame there, ‘tis the mortal lot. Yer world will certainly collect a fair dose of those low lying, un-lofty dregs an waste products in yer pools, Mine own be stuffed awfully full of such.”
“Spend those things ye don’t want in the mix in things like this… He rumbled. “Ye’ll gather a few of these of yer own, an their counterparts on the other side. We live betwixt shadows and the light, boy.. The real light, mind ye, nae the bullshit cult ‘o charlatans.” He warned me sternly.
“As time passes, ye’ll gain more appreciation fer their worth. This be a starter gift frae me.” He grumped cheerfully as I set the paw into action, slowly draining what little I had in those categories.
“An a dungeon builds up soul fragments containing these darker emotions, it will spawn things such as this…” Klevin remarked, pointing at the mummified paw on a pedestal with some distaste.
He watched as I set the monkey’s Paw back down “I still hae cursed lamps, haunted fetishes an dolls, evil paintings, a whole round table ‘o Seiges’ Perilous… an the terrible ErlKing’s Dining Table tae go with them.” He sighed in deep satisfaction.
The sinister looking, gold, orichalcum and demon bone rings it could produce were each unique in design, displayed in ghostly outline until created.
The four fingers and thumb of the paw could each produce a ring independently, or create a matched set, drawn from a near limitless array of designs available in the ‘menu’ the paw offered.
I could flip through the ghostly images on the fingers to choose designs and even pluck simulated examples off for closer examination at no cost, though they vanished if I lost physical contact with them.
I could make actual cursed rings, if I had the points and wished to. There were options to give the rings powers, some were super cool, too. Invisibility, Skill Buffs of any kind, Regeneration, Wardings, Hexes, you name it, all available on a simple point buy system.
They were available in every rarity gradient after red, through violet Legendary items. There were a number of enchantments and magical effects I could pick and choose from; if I wished to start working that side of the street.
The basic ring was just a collectible that the wealthy and ostentatious just had to have, each one was just dripping with details and the kind of ornate gaudiness that some people mistake for craftsmanship...
According to Klevin, the prices such objects fetched on the collector market were incredible, even the ones possessed of no innate great power, beyond being absolute catnip for chunnis and douchebags of all sorts.
They were invariably, very obviously cursed. By default, once pulled from the paw for distribution they just oozed warnings and almost cried out to be handled with extreme care… No one was going to be surprised that the glowing, evil looking ring was cursed.
I could, if I wished, conceal their cursed nature for a tiny increase in cost overall, or by spending points from specific pools. One hundred Duplicity, Scam, Huckster, or Fraud points or any combination adding up to one hundred of those and several other similar pools… would send those rings out into the multiverse seeming innocuous, but leaving chaos in their wake.
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If I was reading the process right, I could use the paw and similar objects to drain away elements I didn’t desire in my slowly evolving, nascent deity, sequestering those energies and releasing them to find a home elsewhere.
“A cash sink… with evil and wicked microtransactions at the heart of it…’ I thought, as the ramifications of the weird functionality became more clear. Every skinflint who cheated a trade partner, every mugging in my back streets and all the bar brawls, bad blood, conniving, backstabbing, corruption and viciousness of life were going to flood into my tranquil little sandbox and start trying to shit all over the place; probably within minutes of our opening day.
Just as easily, a baby’s birth, a friend's recovery from a long illness or a joyous reunion could also release torrents of those soul fragments onto the world I was building. With tools like the paw, I could manage those energies and direct the processes I desired, from early on.
I flipped into my point pools spreadsheet and skimmed for the kind of stuff I could feed the Monkey’s Paw, at Klevin’s recommendation… and there they were, nearly empty, but I had an early start on managing those forces.
I was so excited to have a way to manipulate the greed and wickedness that all living beings possess in at least some measure, I got a little giddy over the power.
Once the realization of just how insidious those things could be in the wrong hands, I knew what had to be done. I went back into my spreadsheet and flipped down to the Oddites column. With absolute surety of purpose I made my first proactive change to make the palace my own. I swiftly edited the label for Oddities, typing gleefully with my tentacles on the internal screen. When it was done I sighed wetly in satisfaction. The eldritch column was now marked Bethesda Softworks, to my intense pleasure. Damn all microtransactions!
I scooped all the stuff that the Monkey’s Paw could use as resources into a huge folder I labeled, Waste Management, for ease of use later on. My buddies didn’t really produce any of those resources from their tiny and pleasant souls, just like they couldn’t generate Industry or Agriculture points without actually engaging in those experiences as a society.
Klevin chattered excitedly, while helping me arrange and sort the stuff I was unfamiliar with; there was a whole assortment of magical tools, all either mundane or low ranked that I was having trouble sorting out.
I had no idea what a ‘Calcinator’ was, aside from how it looked… It was a stubby iron tabletop furnace with a chimney and an assortment of iron boxes, bowls, crucibles and such. If I had to guess, you could incinerate, melt, boil or just warm all sorts of things in the little device, but only in tiny quantities.
“Dinnae just bury those cursed rings, once ye harvest them, they’ll go bad an start tae fester. Ye’ll hae no trouble findin’ places tae stash those, where only arseholes will find them.”
He shook his head and smiled. “I hae a few friends that will buy or trade them frae thee directly, an ye wish. They dearly enjoy playing wi’ those wretched things.”
As I checked out the goods and sorted the last items, he kept rambling on, not even listening to himself, really, until I looked up in alarm at something he’d said off-handedly.
“The Tarots are deeply weird, as a clan… each one be always insisting he be named Gary Ward… A half dozen ‘o the fools… aye and many wi’ the same face, an I hear the word correctly.” He said, his mouth just remembering old times while they worked together.
When I dropped everything and clacked once demanding to know more, he gave me a blank look.
“The cursed rings ye wanna know more about?” He asked and got two clicks for no.
“The Tarot clan, then lad? I hae met two ‘o them, o’er the years. One were the lich lord I mentioned, the other… Well, he were a giant spider, lad… A friendly fellow an well met, but a giant spider!” He shuddered and shook all over at the idea.
“He be a new dungeon lord himself, that spider, it was from his dungeon, Arachnophobia, that my cousin got my new cloth eyes.”
I was busy wondering how the living hell there was a whole group of fuckers out there calling themselves Gary Ward… so I might have glossed over the spider information a little, I suppose that might have helped ease the multiple shocks to my poor octopus system. But, eventually the spideryness of his new friend, Gary Ward, the human isekai from earth… who appeared right about when I did, finally sank in...
“My cousin did bring me along tae translate fer the lad, like yerself, the poor fellow kinnae make humanoid speech by any wise.” He murmured happily. “Like most isekai, I speak all languages an read all scripts… wi’ some limitations… even non verbal and purely visual languages.”
He was still talking, but now I had the germ of an idea boiling in my brain. maybe, if I climbed out of my crab Klevin would be able to understand my flashing colors and gestures…
I slowly wriggled out of my giant zombie crab, squelching wetly onto the cabin floor. I shouted in all the brightest colors I could manage and made exaggerated gestures…
“Lad… I sensed ye trying tae speak, but I kinnae understand thee.” He sighed at last.
It was no good, he didn’t have the visual acuity to read my desperate shouts and cries. Defeated, I clambered back into my unliving crab and took the helm.
“I must ask thee in all due seriousness… Gid ye eat the brain of that crab, an now ye control its mindless body?”
When I clacked once for yes, he looked even older and more careworn than usual.
“Kin yer take other creature’s bodies too?” My affirmative answer made him sag on his stool, with a deep sigh.
“Body snatching be deeply taboo lad. I trust thee an know ye are good hearted… but think. If folk suspected ye had the power tae become a different person…” He shuddered. “Keep his yer deepest, darkest secret, lad. An I pray ye kin continue tae live wi’ honor an dignity, wi this terrible power of thine…”
“Ye kinnae ever leave this realm lad, save in yer natural octo body…” He mumbled.
“The undead kinnae pass through. Only the living.”
We never spoke of that again, not to each other, not to another living soul… I still haven’t.
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While I had been alone for the long monsoon season, I’d done a lot of the ‘groundwork’ for the plan, if you’ll pardon the pun. That meant moving the islands around and eating land masses that I’d need in the future, while there were no outside eyes to make things troublesome. I gently shifted the unsuspecting octo colonies to the southern hemisphere, on a wide, tranqill sea just a little south of the tropics near a huge continent modeled after Africa. I placed a wide band of barren desert between the verdant lands and the precious octo shallows.
I had other continents too, I let them run wild and untamed, with wild monster spawns occurring without interference. I knew I would want to expand my active zones, and once people came to my world, raising a continent would trigger The Physics Engine…
Then I’d have earthquakes, tsunami and the whole apocalypse to clean up. So I built all my land zones on spec, just taking my best guess and set them up to just go nuts without my attention.
That gave me the flexibility to keep my octos and the archipelago free of monsters, beyond small fry that could slip through the net, like Klevin’s groundworms and monster mosquitos.
I could shunt all the violent weather into unpopulated zones too; I let the climate forces run rampant in the wilds, churning up storms and keeping things regulated in my two widely separated seas of calm water. Climate controls I could manage easily with people on the face of my world, people expect the weather to change.
I know, my story gets a little dry and dull in spots, but you aren’t going anywhere… Are you?
Anyway, I was building up from very little and even with Klevin’s help it was a lot of work. The old dwarf came back every summer for ten years, bringing a few more treasures and another of the eldritch tools to add to my collection of cursed item generators.
He gave me an undead oyster that produced haunted black pearls from the energies of mortal hate, a statue that consumed children’s nightmares and wept them from her eyes in the form of glittering tears of sweet tasting poison, rainbow hued jewels that drew the eye and urged the avaricious to contemplate theft and a few other strange things his dungeon spat out. He also brought a small army of his kin, every summer.
When old Klevin finally passed, it was during an unremarkable winter. His nephew Kalvin brought me the sad news in spring, looking pretty embarrassed to be consoling a giant crab monster, as I spewed foamy bubbles from my mandibles.
Kalvin took over for his dear departed uncle as the lord of the Misty Fens and he brought more people with him. They came to mine the iron outcroppings and pump up my pools, but they stayed, because it was just tranquil... They built a little town at the base of the volcano and got quite homey, a few of them even began to stay all year long, tending gardens and living in a tropical paradise ruled by a giant crab.
The Iron Wolf clan did a fine job of keeping things tidy too, they built a slab of gravel and mine tailings over a low lying bit of boggy swampland near my lagoon, compacted into a solid base for their proposed permanent town, once I opened for business.
Thirty generations of octos came and went, more or less… I may have lost track, while I fiddled and twiddled my dungeon world; until I was ready for my big opening day!
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I had all the dwarves bail out that night, merrily chasing them all to the foot of the mountain trail with giddy clicks of my claws. When they came back down, I saw the wonder of it in their eyes. I watched their reactions and dreamed of what Klevin would have said about my finished product…
The dwarves all came trooping out, happy to see that the pleasant little town on Iron Wolf Island was still there, undamaged by whatever the enigmatic crab had done… And they all began to gasp and stare in wonder.
Floating high among the clouds, three sky islands drifted lazily, one covered with buildings of worn, weathered, ruined stone, a huge city carved into the underside of the inverted mountain flying in the heavens. Wild, steaming jungles covered the flat top of the island, begging to be explored.
To the west, two floating islands orbited each other, one dark and dismal, with a forbidding aura and topped by an endless maze of crypts, mausoleums and cemeteries. The other bore a bright, white marble city with golden ramparts, but seeming vacant and empty, daring the bold to enter, if they had the courage.
Rainbows of glittering water poured from the flying landmasses, drifting and sparkling, even at night draping the moonless sky in a gaudy display of colors that I unashamedly loved.
Before every adult mortal eye, a golden window appeared, displaying my welcome message.
Welcome to the Swarm Dungeon, travelers!
Explore the wilds! *
Challenge the forces of nature!*
Battle monsters!*
Win fabulous loot and quest rewards!*
*Warning, the dangers of this place are real… delve responsibly.
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