“This is a disaster,” Karma banged her head on the dashboard of the truck. She’d spent the whole trip into the small town complaining about how badly the dungeon masters experiment was going, culminating in this disaster comment.

“No, it’s not,” Cliff protested, pulling into a parking space at the local Red Robin. He’d brought her out here to cheer her up. “You’re exaggerating.”

“I’m worse than Fizzbarren,” she moaned. “I’m a writing hack and a game designer hack and a … just a hack hack!”

“I think you’re hacking it just fine,” Cliff joked, clanking the engine into park and turning to waggle his eyebrows at her.

There was a glare in Karma’s eyes, but a pout on her lips that all told Cliff that his joke had fallen flat.

“And nobody is worse than Fizzbarren,” he said more seriously. “And if I hear you say that again, I’m telling Dom on you.”

“Be serious,” Karma yanked the handle on the door and carefully swung it open. “He’s too busy playing to care about what’s going on out here.”

“He wouldn’t be, if you told him the truth,” Cliff said over the bed of the truck as she slammed the door.

“Maybe,” she sulked.

“Maybe?” Cliff raised his brows at her, casting a glance over her shoulder.

“What truth haven’t you told me?” came Dom’s voice and Karma cringed.

“I thought you needed the big guns,” Cliff pressed his lips together.

“I thought I was the big gun!” Kat protested and Karma whirled.

“Kat!” Karma called out and dashed into her daughter’s arms. The moment Kat arrived, Karma went from being a whatever to being Kat’s mom. Kat rolled her eyes from over her mom’s shoulder.

“I’m chopped liver,” Dom gave a deep chuckle, but they all knew he was teasing. He knew his place was just a tiny crater lower than Kat’s and he was okay with that as long as he got some of Karma when Kat was done with her.

“Hey babe,” Karma gave Dom a loving look that quickly turned to sour as Cliff’s grinning face intruded. “Traitor.”

“Unrepentant,” Cliff knocked his shoulders back.

“What are you both doing here?” Karma finally let Kat go to grasp hands with both her daughter and husband.

“I had a craving for steak fries,” Kat professed.

“I’m not too busy playing to help out with the engine,” Dom frowned at her.

“Fine, whatever,” Karma tried to change the subject, nearly skipping to the restaurant doors. “I’m just happy to see you.”

“I’m here to find out how the engine is driving you crazy this time,” Dom skipped the niceties and drove right to the point.

They got a booth near the back as Karma avoided Dom’s question. He let it go, but only long enough to put in their order.

“What’s that bucket of egotistical bolts done now?” Dom insisted that they get back to the topic as Karma was trying to get Kat to tell about her pirate adventures.

“It’s messing with her new dungeon masters because it got all butt-hurt that they could take over something it considers its job,” Cliff answered.

“I could handle that,” Karma insisted, giving a smile to the server who was bringing soda. “But we just got another review and the engine is messing with the storyline. It’s confusing readers. They don’t understand what’s going on behind the scenes.”

“The engine is making the storyline worse?” Kat dumped an obscene amount of sweetener in the iced tea in front of her. “That seems like it should be against its major programming dictates.”

“I don’t think it knows that it’s what is making the story worse,” Cliff tilted his hand back and forth. “It just thinks the story is floundering because it doesn’t have merit.”

“Look,” Karma held up her palm. “The hardest part of writing a dungeon-builder book is keeping up the tension. That’s compounded by the fact that it’s also just a game-lit thing where the characters aren’t really trapped in the video game and can leave if they want. The game engine probably believes those are the reasons the story is having trouble.”

“How much trouble?” Dom plucked the lemon from his tea and dumped it into Karma’s diet soda.

“Maybe we should just scrap it and start something else,” Kat suggested. “Dad’s got a good plotline in the spy network under the pirate compound. It might make a whole story.”

“We hit Rising Stars this time,” Cliff interjected. “It’s more complicated than just scrapping it. If we lose the readers at this level, we could be looking at some backlash magic-wise.”

“We’ve hit Rising Stars before,” Dom protested, unimpressed.

“Not the main Rising Stars,” Karma’s shoulders slumped. “We’ve been on the smaller satire category of Rising Stars but never the main board. We’ve got over 200 followers.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“That’s better than Nemesis Quest did,” Kat gave a low whistle.

“And Karma’s fussing because we got what she considers a bad review,” Cliff chided, stirring in his own moderate amount of sweetener into his tea.

“And ratings,” Karma poked the table pointedly.

“So what?” Dom shrugged.

“I’ve never had a rating this low on our books,” Karma’s took a long sip of the diet soda to stall. “But the real problem is that I think they may be right. There isn’t much tension and it’s all my fault.”

“I doubt that,” Dom narrowed his eyes at Karma who avoided his gaze.

“The engine is saying that she coddles the players and makes everything too easy for them,” Cliff butted in to say. “It thinks that’s why the ratings are tanking and it’s using that as the reasoning for letting it go back to handling the dungeons.”

“Is it right, Mom?” Kat asked, leaning back to let the server plop down four baskets of fries.

“Maybe,” Karma hung her head.

“No,” Cliff stated, passing the seasoning salt to Kat.

“But it could be!” Karma protested, snatching the seasoning salt from the pass to use some on her own fries before Kat used the rest of the bottle of seasoning for hers.

“So, coddle them less,” Kat asserted, taking the seasoning salt from Karma. “That’s what you normally do. You try something their way until it fails and then you know it wasn’t your fault.”

“If I coddle them any less, they’ll quit,” Karma dunked her fry into the campfire sauce with enough force to break it in two.

“She’s right,” Cliff explained, and they took the time to tell them what had been happening in game.

“The engine tossed a group of 5 level 29 NPCs into the dungeon when it was only level 11?” Kat wiped burger juice off her hands and reached for a third napkin. “That’s crazy!”

“They’re hanging on, but it’s only a matter of time,” Karma squeezed a fourth lemon wedge into her fourth soda refill.

“Two minutes between incursions,” Cliff huffed out, leaning back. “They barely have the time to set another couple of drawings into the pedestal before the group is right back in there.”

“At least the dungeon resets for free between time-outs,” Kat waved a sauce-coated fry without a drip.

“Yeah, but now the engine is making the NPCs level up their puzzle skills so that the NPCs can get through faster,” Cliff poked a fry at Kat, with a little more dripping. He hadn’t been practicing his dexterity skills in the dungeon as much as Kat did.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Karma wiped at Cliff’s drip on the table. “The worst of it is that the NPC guild sent a few groups to the new dungeon after the dungeon killed off that first foray. The engine said that it was only logical.”

“What for?” Dom asked, waving down the waiter for another refill on sodas.

“One,” Cliff ticked off the points on his meaty fingers. “They want back ups in case anyone dies in the dungeon.”

“And two,” Karma continued on her own fingers, “they are looking for Hughe, who has decided to join in this farce of a fight because the guild offered him extra equipment and leveling if he helps the guild destroy the dungeon.”

“After you took him to the roadhouse?” Kat was indignant. “We need better screening protocols.”

“Another of my mistakes,” Karma started to sulk.

“That’s not what I meant,” Kat patted Karma’s arm and leaned her head on Karma’s shoulder.

“Hughe says that since we cast him as the villain of the story, he should play the part,” Cliff rested forward with his elbows on the table.

“And that’s not the worst of it,” Karma added. “Colt and Lacey have no idea that Hughe could be used against them.”

“If they can handle a full group of level 29 NPCs, why worry about a dinky little moron like Hughe?” Dom handed glasses to the waiter to fill.

They never worried about their conversations being overheard and misunderstood at the local Red Robin. They came to this location a lot and the staff knew them as writers. The staff often read their books, or at least they claimed to have read them to get better tips. Some of the staff had known Fizzbarren too, so their family was just another wacky replacement for the old coot. Dom tipped better, so no one complained, at least not to their faces.

“The issue is that the NPCs don’t remember the puzzles or traps or even the layout, but Hughe does,” Karma crumpled up a wrapper with more force than necessary.

“This sounds like there’s plenty of tension,” Kat opened up three more packets of pink sweetener to dump in her fresh glass of tea.

“There is, but it’s all coming across so subtly,” Karma rolled her eyes. “The readers don’t know that the NPCs are bringing in Hughe. They don’t know the guild has more backup players if the dungeon masters manage to kill someone. They don’t know that the engine is determined to kill them off so it can have control of dungeons back, and I think they may not even know that this is all a story machine.”

“But they opted in at the end of Nemesis Quest,” Kat rolled her eyes. “They have to know.”

“No one reads that fine print,” Cliff brushed his hands off over his plate and still managed to get crumbs everywhere but the plate.

“I’m almost positive that Lacey doesn’t know, but I’m just so in love with how much she wants the dungeon,” Karma’s eyes squinted like she could see them.

“Colt knows,” Cliff nodded his head.

“Probably, but he’s homesick and the tutorial that the engine made up is insane,” Karma exclaimed. “I thought if they could at least get out of the tutorial, I could get them a trip home and let them know that they are making money above and beyond the prize money. Lacey’s pretty sure that their situation outside the game is back to the gloomy apartment with probably no jobs because of how long they’ve been gone. She doesn’t know.”

“But you think Colt does?” Dom stopped her rant with a raised hand.

“Maybe some of it,” Karma hedged. “It’s just so hard to tell.”

“Why hasn’t he told Lacey?” Kat wadded up her napkin and dumped it into an empty fry basket.

“I don’t know,” Karma answered.

“I think he’s not sure and doesn’t want to jinx anything,” Cliff suggested.

“Whatever the case is,” Karma piled the fry trays up just to keep her hands busy, “I want them to keep this up, but now the NPCs are getting better at puzzles and Hughe’s going to destroy everything. It just all seems so inevitable that the dungeon is going to fall.”

“Then let it happen,” Dom draped his arm over the back of the booth.

“They deserve better than that,” Cliff protested with Kat’s emphatic nod of agreement.

“What do you mean?” Karma asked Dom.

“She’s not just going to let them die, Dad,” Kat tossed a dirty napkin at him across the table.

“I know you don’t want to hear it, but maybe you should,” Dom leaned forward, then thought better of it and leaned back again. “It’s not the worst idea. You dumped them in a dungeon with no instructions.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Karma groused, fiddling with a straw wrapper.

“I’m not saying it was,” Dom protested softly, “but it’s done, and they didn’t really have a chance this time around. Let them die and start over.”

“But they’d reboot as adventurers,” Kat argued, threatening to poke his stomach.

“That might help them next time,” Dom scowled at Kat, batting her hand away with his own increased dexterity. “They don’t even know what the world is like outside the dungeon. I can’t imagine designing a dungeon for a world where I haven’t even played in it. It would be like DMing in a DnD campaign without ever having played the game, not to mention that their rulebooks were fubarred from the start.”

“It would blow up the book!” Kat hissed at him. “Mom did that in Nemesis Quest when I died, and it didn’t help the reviews. It just made them hate me.”

“The readers would lynch me,” Karma protested, but his idea had taken hold on her.

“Would they?” Dom arched a brow at her.