It took a few days for the reality of Andy’s death-death to fully sink in, then the gloom continued to hang over us for several more. I was torn between wanting to be around people and wanting to have nothing to do with them. I compromised. I kept up my mornings with Sigrid, but our exercise was half-hearted at best. Mostly I wanted to make sure she was okay. Despite her protests about his clinginess, they had been close. Not in the same way she and I were, of course, theirs was a different kind of intimacy, but it was intimacy all the same. I wanted to be there if she needed me.
Chika had also been close with Andy. After the tournament they’d had a friendly rivalry going and she was taking his death harder than most. I was also worried about her so I made sure to invite her to practice toron-do with me, but her heart wasn’t in it either. For that girl to not be interested in doing martial arts, I knew she had to be very upset. Again, I just wanted to be there for her if she needed a big brother.
I told the sisters I needed a break from training, and when I explained why they totally understood. There was one PvP duel but I barely put any effort into setting the odds and I was a bit off, so a few Players ended up making a fair bit of coin off of me as a result.
Ruka visited me the night of our dungeon raids to congratulate me, but there was no celebration after I told her about Andy, and we didn’t even play a game that night. We just sat and she listened as I told her about him and the time we’d spent together. They were good times. Even the ones I didn’t remember. For a demon, she was a lot more empathetic than you’d expect.
Apart from that, I spent the time exploring what it meant to be the Great Sage and trying to keep myself busy. I had more than enough ways to do that.
When I got the title of Great Architect in the labyrinth I was flooded with information about the things Daedalus knew, such as architecture and engineering. With the Great Sage title, I was gifted with a deeper understanding of the Void, which included crafting and extra-dimensional space.
A great deal of the science or magic or whatever you want to call it that made such fantastical things happen on Crucible was directly related to manipulating space by taking advantage of certain characteristics of the void. This included portals, inventories, summonings, and teleportation. Anything that suddenly appeared where it wasn’t there before got there via void. All of which is to say, these insights combined with a deeper understanding of crafting gave me some ideas for powers I wanted to synthesize and items I wanted to enchant.
The first thing I did was finally make the upgrade to the range of the portal power I’d been trying to figure out for so long. The solution seemed so obvious now that I grokked the void.
Next up: improve my inventory. A while ago I’d managed to merge it with Jane’s blink power so that I no longer had to open it up to pull things from it or put things into it, but with a few more improvements I was now able to open a portal that let me physically go inside the inventory itself if I wanted to. It was my very own pocket dimension, after all. I cheekily renamed the inventory Gift from Hands Off My Stash, Man to Fortress of Solitude.
At first it felt a lot like being inside the Void Dungeon, just a whole lot of nothing, but as the Great Sage I had the power to change that. After a bit of trial and error with manipulating the void, I transformed the environment to something a lot friendlier — a recreation of a pristine lake in Northern Ontario where we used to vacation every summer when I was a kid — creating for myself a cozy home base that brought back lots of fond memories of childhood summers, and that I could escape into from anywhere.
I set up a large island in the middle of the lake with everything I could need: a nice cottage with a library, a workroom with my newly acquired forges, a gymnasium for training where I one day hoped to create a formation like the one in the arena that created sparring partners, and of course, there was plenty of organized storage for all the items I collected. It was primarily an inventory after all. My very own Fortress of Solitude.
I spent some time fiddling around with Command Line, trying to figure out what information I was able to access from the game database. What I discovered was: not much. It’s possible I was asking the wrong sorts of questions, but I think my Great Sage level access wasn’t very high. It would answer direct questions, but it would also provide snippets of info based on what was happening around me if I wanted. It was kind of like having a very stupid AI-powered search engine; not Google, more like Goo. A glossary for the game, if you will, that could provide basic information but nothing more.
It was a fantastic way to learn about monsters, and there were detailed files on everything you could think of, including where they could typically be found. I learned a lot about different locations, and some background history I hadn’t known before. But when I started asking questions about the game, like what the rules were, or what the point of it all was, all I got was a big access denied message. I tried asking what a Gamester was, that’s what was on Stratos’ business card and System called them that a few times, but was rewarded with nothing but more curt access denials.
What would it take to upgrade my administrator clearance with Command Line so I could get some juicier data? And more importantly, was there a way to issue commands to the game’s OS rather than just recall information from it?
Something else I got with the Void Dungeon that I was keen to explore was the Control Key for the teleportation circles. It allowed me and anyone on my team (if there was anyone else on my team) to travel to any affinity circle whether or not they’d ever been there before.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
There were still several dungeons that hadn’t yet been located yet so I used my new ability to pay a quick visit to all of the different circles so that I’d know where all the dungeons were located, and get a sneak peek into what the dungeons might be like.
It was informative to say the least, and gave me a few ideas about what dungeons I might want to challenge next. It also gave me the opportunity to see how hard it was to sneak around in the Shadow Dungeon. Using only the abilities Kenji had access to, supplemented by an elven cloak customized to blend in with Shadow instead of Nature, I discovered that it was indeed possible to move around without drawing attention, if you were really careful.
I resisted the urge to try to solve the Shadow Dungeon myself. The temptation was there, a big eff you to the ones who didn’t want me to go with them, but I’m not that petty and I knew doing so would ruin a lot of friendships. My elf spies had discovered which dungeons the other Players had been attempting, and I was also tempted to have a go at those too, but if I took away those opportunities for other Players to gain experience and grow that was a net loss to me.
Maybe the game Stratos had designed would have me trying to clear all the dungeons myself if I could, but that wasn’t the game I’d decided to play. I had designed a different game for myself and any Players who wanted to grow stronger and won together.
About a week after the dungeon raids Jane called everyone together in the courtyard, including me. It was a grim gathering.
“I miss Andy as much as anyone, but this,” she waved her hands around to encompass everyone, “it has to stop. Andy would not have wanted us to mope around like this.”
“How do you know what Andy would have wanted?” Chika said. I don’t think anyone had seen her without puffy red eyes since the Shadow Dungeon raid.
“I don’t know,” Jane said, “not for sure. I have a feeling that Andy would have been touched that we all miss him so much, but at the same time he’d be pissed off that we were moping around. So I am done with moping around, and I’m willing to bet I’m not alone.”
She was greeted with scattered mumblings of assent. Chika didn’t voice her agreement, but she didn’t argue either.
“She’s right,” Sigrid said. “Acting like this is doing nothing to honor Andy’s memory.”
“What are we supposed to do then?” Sam said.
“There’s only one thing we can do,” Jane said.
“Get drunk and visit a brothel?” Lancelot said, earning the first laughs I’d heard from any of us in a long time.
“Okay, two things,” Jane said. “But what I meant was that we should go back into that dungeon and rip the Shadow Demon a new one.”
“It won’t be the same as last time,” Sigrid said, leaping into the conversation without skipping a beat. I got the impression that she and Jane had planned this beforehand. “Now we know what we’re up against. We know the terrain. We know how that demon fights. We know its weaknesses, so what we need to do is plan a proper strategy and go back.”
“I thought we already did that and look where it got us,” Galahad said.
“I agree with Jane,” Arthur said.
“Big surprise there,” Kay mumbled.
”I don’t like to give up,” Arthur continued, “and it would really piss me off if another team beat the Shadow Dungeon before we got a chance.”
“I’d like to see them try,” Lancelot said. “I mean if we couldn’t do it, do you really think anybody else could?”
I noticed a few sets of eyes glance over at me, but nobody said anything and I was glad I’d resisted the urge to try solving it.
“But Andy was one of our best fighters,” Nina said. “Can we really do it without him?”
More mumbles of agreement.
Before I even realized it, I was speaking up. “It will be that much harder without him, it’s true,” I said, “but losing him was the tragedy, not your failure. So you tried and failed, there’s nothing wrong with that. You can at least give his loss some meaning by using what you learned from the experience to come up with a better plan and by working better as a team.”
Galahad turned and snapped at me. “How dare you say that? You weren’t even there. Morgan’s strategies are sound and our teamwork is just fine, thank you. You’d know that if you’d bothered to help us. Instead you went off on your own to steal another dungeon for yourself. You don’t know what it was like.”
Ignoring his jab about stealing dungeons, Galahad’s comment about not bothering to help them surprised me, but not as much as how Jane leapt to my defense. “Back off, Gal,” she said. “While we were in there getting our asses handed to us it’s true he was busy beating the Void Dungeon all by himself, but you’re missing the point. The reason he was able to do that is because he’d seen what was there and came back with a smart plan and won.”
Morgan stepped in to back her up. “Jake,” she said, using his real name, “I appreciate the support but they’re right. We can do better next time because we failed this time. We know what to expect from the boss now.”
“And let’s not forget the reason why Daniel wasn’t there,” Sigrid said.
“Yeah,” Galahad huffed, “like I said, he ditched us because he wanted to go steal another dungeon all by himself.”
And that was when Sigrid and I both realized something important. Not everyone knew that I had been specifically excluded from joining them on the raid, and it wasn’t hard to tell who was in the loop by how they reacted to Galahad’s accusation. Jane, Arthur, and Morgan were the only ones looking like they wanted to crawl away, and Sigrid looked livid.
I wasn’t very happy about it myself. Who knew how many of them were harbouring similar bitter thoughts about me, all because a certain someone chose not to tell the others about his request that I keep out of it.
Maybe I should’ve stolen the Shadow Dungeon for myself after all.