“What do you mean you put the manual and tutorial on hold?” Karma yelled at the engine. While the engine itself didn’t talk, Typewriter was pretty good at interpreting for it.
“The engine didn’t get a tutorial,” Typewriter clacked at her.
“Ever since that sadist plopped me into the world with nothing but a mouthful of dirt, I have promised myself that no one would go through the same thing,” Karma’s face was red, her fists clenched at her sides.
“It says that technically, the tutorial is there, but in runes,” Typewriter seemed to wince at its own words. “It says that the backstory is that the previous dungeon master set the system to be locked out and then died.”
“What?” Karma loomed dangerously over the box with the typewriter on it. She’d just spent a glorious two days in the new mini-world watching to make sure that the adventurers were doing alright. She’d been playing the barkeep. They weren’t a particularly original group, but they had done enough chores for the townsfolk that they had nice little first level weapons and armor. She’d gotten them out exploring and then gone back to the workshop to check up on the progress of her new DMs.
“The engine says that it’s a valid variation of a backstory,” Typewriter explained.
What she had found was fubar! With no instructions in any language that they could read, they had done their best with the reward money and gone to sleep. That was lovely except that Hughe, one of the adventurers, was heading their way and they hadn’t yet woken up.
“Why aren’t they awake?” Karma’s voice dropped low. “Hughe is literally around the corner!”
“The failsafe was set so that sleep caused time to pass so that the dungeon could grow on its own,” Typewriter answered her. “The engine says you agreed to that part.”
“But not so that time passes outside the dungeon!” Karma protested, wanting to smack the box with a club. “The adventurers will be a million years old before the dungeon even gets to level 1!”
“The failsafe is set to a maximum of 100 years,” Typewriter’s ribbon slid back and forth.
“One hundred years!” Karma smacked her forehead instead. Cliff was in town getting supplies, but she was sure he’d be on her side for this. What had the engine been thinking?
“The engine says that time will pass until the dungeon is in imminent danger of complete wipe or 100 years have passed,” Typewriter’s keys were shaking, but Karma was past being an enabler for Typewriter’s nervous mannerisms. And it was even more annoying that Typewriter used I as a pronoun when the engine was being praised and third person pronouns when it was in trouble. They were the same. “It is too late to change the failsafe because it has been entered into the chapters provided so far.”
Karma kicked the door, one of the few things in the room that wasn’t animated and therefore safe to kick. She stormed outside the room, slamming the door behind her and called Cliff from the driveway where cell phones could work normally. After an hour of ranting, stomping, hair-pulling and kicking of trees, Cliff pulled up in the old truck.
“Okay, okay,” he held up placating hands, letting the truck door slam behind him. “I’ll talk to the engine. We’ll fix it.”
“I’m trying to help the engine!” Karma shoved her phone into a back pocket, waving her other arm in the air. “If we can get people to make dungeons, it will have more resources for quests and storylines!”
“I know that, and in a way, the engine knows that, but it’s temperamental at best about stuff like this and you know it,” Cliff shrugged, reaching behind him for yet another bag of hardware for the wretched machine that was a greedy little pain in Karma’s ass.
“They might just opt out over this,” Karma lamented, automatically reaching for the bags of groceries that seemed to be the only thing the stupid engine didn’t try to eat up.
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“We have checks and balances in place,” Cliff told her. “Even if the dungeon completely fails, they will still get to be players. Right?”
“The sleep period was always supposed to be to grow the dungeon during down periods so that it could keep up with adventurers always trying to tear it down!” Karma swung the bags precariously, then stopped as she noticed that Cliff had picked up her favorite junk food. “Is that Mountain Dew?”
“Yeah,” Cliff gave her a half smile. “I figured we’d be up half the night solving this. I got you chocolate too.”
“Death by sugar?” she scanned the bags for the cookies she loved.
“They had a snickerdoodle kind,” he tried to mollify her.
“It might be enough to convince me not to kick that infernal machine,” Karma groused with far less vehemence.
“We’ll fix it,” Cliff assured her, shouldering into the house in the middle of nowhere. He dumped two bags in the workshop and then took another two, as well as Karma’s into the kitchen.
“You are not off the hook, you mutant garbage pail wanna-be,” Karma pointed to the engine and growled, then called out to Cliff. “I swear that Fizz-butt put some of his own assholedness in that thing.”
“Normally, the engine is reasonable,” Cliff said, handing Karma the box of snickerdoodles and a bottle of soda. He must have gotten it from the fridge because it was ice cold.
“Normally,” Karma gave a deep sigh and got a haunted look for a moment as she cracked open the soda.
“Engine, let’s have a compromise, huh?” Cliff offered the magical machine. “The adventurers are already levelling up. If one of them goes through the level 0 dungeon, the dungeon won’t stand a chance, right?”
“No, they didn’t,” Mirror answered, and Karma nearly choked on her soda.
“Wait, what?” Cliff stopped, his finger in the air.
“Hughe leveled to 5 and is currently wiping the dungeon,” Mirror informed them, but all the constructs were quivering with tension.
“In the hour I’ve been outside?” Karma gaped at the engine like she was going to pluck out all its innards and feed them to the nearest crows.
“The engine said that since the dungeon was in fast forward that it was only fair that the story progressed faster,” Pestle admitted, ducking behind its mortar.
“We tried to talk it out of it,” Footstool fluttered.
“Pause program,” Cliff’s tone brooked no defiance, and since he was the man with the tools and tech, the engine obeyed.
They negotiated. In the end, the dungeon got 100 years of growth, not that it would help them since it was just a bunch of empty rooms now that Hughe had tromped the dungeon over days of diving in it. The dungeon woke the dungeon masters just in time for them to meet Hughe, who luckily did some expose for the dungeon masters. All that 100 years of growth had done was make Hughe an inflated level 5. Karma was still livid but, at least, her dungeon masters had a chance.
Karma made the engine unlock voice controls into menus that were buried under the tutorial, which her poor dungeon masters had not completed yet thanks to the pedestal being set in runes. The engine had been adamant about not unlocking the pedestal until they reset the password or completed the tutorial. Karma had insisted that fast forward of the dungeon for growth had to be independent from time in the rest of the world in that no matter how long the dungeon slept, no time passed for adventurers. The engine insisted that the time dilation would be exactly 5-1 and only while both dungeon masters were sleeping, not that Lacey or Colt dared to sleep anymore, at least not at the same time. Karma couldn’t blame them really.
“The engine says that the problem with most of the people that have been brought into the machine’s world is that they have it too easy with all these tutorials and handholding,” Typewriter reluctantly divulged.
“What do you mean?” Karma asked, her arms crossed over her chest.
“It doesn’t make for good stories when everything is easy for the characters,” Typewriter went on. “The engine says that’s why the stories aren’t coming out. There’s nothing with enough tension to make for good storytelling.”
“That’s absurd reasoning that is just to justify your pathetic sadism,” Karma fumed.
“Actually,” Cliff waved a sheaf of papers at her. “Have you read it?”
“Not yet,” Karma admitted. “I was helping the adventurers get settled in.”
“And that’s the problem,” Pail had the nerve to say. It was normally quiet and content to clean, but every once in a while, when it had something to say, it was wise. “Here is the story of your adventurers.” Pail hopped over with a small stack of a few pages. “There is little to actually write about compared to the story in Cliff’s hands.”
“This is good,” Cliff said, turning a page and handing Karma the stack he’d read already.
“Royal Road good?” Karma asked, taking the stack reluctantly.
“Maybe,” Cliff answered. “It’s worth uploading.”
“But it’s not fair to them,” Karma complained, but she bent to read.
Karma read. The facts were that they were doing it. They were not only creating a dungeon, but also a story. The machine hadn’t gotten a new god card in a while because nothing had quite been good enough to upload to Royal Road. Karma uploaded the story and sat back to watch and wait. Maybe they weren’t as miserable as they’d looked?