It was a nondescript building, as far as medieval architecture goes. Single story, made out of wood. A hole in the front that was either a doorway, or wall that wasn’t doing its job correctly.

If I was walking down the street, I wouldn’t have had any idea what it was. Standing immediately in front of it, it was a little more obvious.

It was the smell that gave it away.

“This is an outhouse. You’ve taken me to an outhouse.”

“Technically, it’s just a maintenance hatch. To the—uh, sewer.”

‘Maintenance?’ A horrible epiphany hit me like a ton of shit bricks. “And we’re here to clean it? Oh god, we’re the fucking cleaners guild, aren’t we? I thought that was supposed to be a metaphor, you dick.”

Ellis practically glowed under my tirade. “Calm down, you melodramatic bitch.” He rolled his eyes.

“This is why they called us shitheads, isn’t it? We’re the idiots that clean their shit.”

“Okay, kind of. But their shit is sentient and out for blood.”

“What?”

“Slimes, man! The sewers are infested with slimes and it’s our job to clean them out. This is standard rpg stuff.”

Moving past the revelation that the ‘slime’ part of the ‘slime hunt’ I was meant to go on was… no, I couldn’t move past it. I tried very hard not to picture it, and I was failing.

“It doesn’t exactly—” I took a brief inhale through my nose for effect and instantly regretted it. “—smell standard.”

“The name of the game is realism, my friend. That includes real smells.”

“Yeah, well this smells ‘real’ bad. I’ll pass.”

“You'll ‘pass?’ On the adventure of a lifetime? On magic? On helping your friend in his time of need?”

I looked from him, to the smelly building, and wrinkled my nose at the both of them.

“Yes.”

“I thought you might say that. Which is why I’ve got—” he reached into his bag and dug out a pair of vials of what looked like salt. “—Boom. Smelling powder.”

I raised an eyebrow at the little vials. “I still think I’ll pass.”

He sighed dramatically. “You said you’d play the game with me.” He gestured to the ramshackle hut, “This is the game. Level one, world one— right here. We start in the sewers, then we graduate to the forests, then the dungeons, then the castles.”

I took a breath to interrupt him, but—

“I wanna go to the castles, Quinn, and I want you to take me to them.”

“Alrigh—”

“Take me to the castles, Quinn. Take me to the—”

“Fine—Jesus! If it means that much to you, I’ll crawl into the fucking sewers with you. Happy?”

He smiled. “Immeasurably.”

Fucking ugh.

“For real though, you will be needing this for the smell. I got them while you were fighting with that hag.” He tossed me a vial.

I pinched it from the air and brought it to eye level. “Am I supposed to equip this somehow, or just snort it right here?”

“Hell yeah you snort it. The store lady showed me how. You just—”

He uncorked the thing, licked his pinky, stuck it in the vial, pulled it out, and stuck it up each nostril. I felt my eyes go wide as I watched him do it.

“Bing bang boom.” He took a deep and shuddering breath in through his nose and started blinking rapidly. “That’s good shit, man.”

I stared at him. “You couldn’t pop a Vicodin that was prescribed to you by a doctor, but this—”

I shook the vial of what could feasibly have been cocaine. I mean honestly, a white powder that you take through your nose and dumbs down your sense of smell? I doubted it was flour.

“—is perfectly fine?”

Stolen novel; please report.

“First of all, the opioid crisis is real—my family has a history of addiction and I will take no part in it—thank-you-very-much.”

He spent two weeks eating Advil like candy after his wisdom teeth were pulled. Whenever anyone brought up how bad that was for him, he’d start talking about the opioid crisis, and essentially bore people into letting him have as much as he wanted. I don’t know how his kidneys didn’t explode, but here he was, still in perfect health.

“And secondly, this is a video game, dummy.” He shrugged. “Drugs can’t hurt you here.”

I sighed.

Right. I already knew this whole experience was gonna be weird as heck, so I may as well just lean into it. I copied him, took a deep breath in through my nose, and— Oh.

I blinked in surprise.

“Is that vanilla?” I brought the vial back to eye level.

There wasn’t any rush of energy or euphoria. Just… pleasant bakery smells, and a faint urge to sneeze.

He frowned. “Vanilla? I got lemongrass.” He looked through the glass with a sour expression on his face. “That’s total bullshit. Vanilla is way better than lemongrass.”

I pocketed it and folded my arms with a pointed glare. “So I didn’t just do cocaine?”

He smirked. “Pff, you and me on coke? Not likely. But it’s cool to know that I could just hand you drugs and you'd do them with me no problem.”

I gave him A Look.

“Breath in deep, and…” he demonstrated, prompting me to do the same with a gesture.

Pure vanilla freshness. I glanced at the looming doorway of the shed. “No shit smell.” I finished for him.

Weird.

“Bingo.” He shrugged off his sack and raised it like it was some prize. “Part of your basic cleaners guild delving kit. For all your cleaning needs.” He pantomimed in a show voice.

“What else you got in there?” I motioned for him to hand it over, but he swung it back over his shoulder.

He tisked at me. Tisked. Like I was some kind of cat. “Why don’t we find out with a quick run through the sewers? Test some stuff out, get some loot, have an adventure of a lifetime…” he leaned towards the building. “Real quick. In and out adventure.”

I sighed. “Sure, whatever. Let’s just do this.”

He broke out into a smile and threw an arm around me, walking us to the maintenance shack. “Come on! Don’t act like you’re not excited. We’re breaking new ground, my friend. A whole world is at our fingertips!”

…

I held up a torch, staving off the ever encroaching darkness. The cool air breathed at me, and I shuddered.

The sewer was, I will admit, not nearly as bad as I thought it might be. Two stone walkways banded either side of a river that sparkled in the torchlight. It must have connected to a natural body of water, I thought.

The walkways themselves were, thankfully, dry, elevated at least a foot above the water. And thick enough that two— maybe three people could stand side by side without worrying about falling in.

To be safe, Ellis told me, we each took our own walkway, on either side of the water. Both of us had torches, but only mine was lit. The plan was that he’d light his when mine went out, and we’d make our way back to the surface.

“You know, El” I started, breaking the still and cool air, “now might be a good time to bring up that this doesn’t really feel like a video game, and that I have no fricken idea how to fight monsters.”

“Relax.” Ellis said easily. “Down here it’s just slimes, and they're weak to fire. If you see anything moving, just…” he gestured at the water. “Whack it with your torch.”

I shot him a glare, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was staring intently, straight ahead.

“I was kind of hoping for a plan with a little more fantasy nonsense, man. Maybe a fireball or something?” I said, hopefully.

“Nope, I don't have anything nearly as useful as that.” He replied, sounding distracted.

I looked over at him again. “That mean you do have something?”

“Oh, I’ve got a couple tricks up my sleeve.”

We stepped carefully in the glittering dark, inching along our separate paths in the eerie light as silence threatened to reassert itself.

“Please, oh mysterious one, elucidate me as to your incredible powers.” I said dryly, when he didn’t elaborate.

“Well,” he started in a high voice, with a slight sigh. “There’s nothing incredible about them, first of all. Your first few abilities are pretty much guaranteed to be useless.”

“Oh, now you’ve gone and gotten my hopes up.” I said, watching my step. “Spill it, whatcha got?”

He sighed again. “I got Dark Vision at level zero, and Monster Sense at level one.”

I blinked at him. “I hate to break it to you El, but we’re kind of hunting monsters in a dark sewer. That sounds literally perfect.”

He shook his head, sounding frustrated. “Look, there's this whole tier system I can’t really explain right now, and ability ranks are a giant thing, and stat points, and I really think this conversation can wait the maybe five minutes it’ll take for you to kill a slime. Then you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

I decided to take him at his word, and didn’t press the issue.

And, sure enough, it was less than five minutes before I encountered my first slime.

“Oh, fuck that.” I said, when it undulated into view.

To be fair, it wasn’t quite as disgusting as Ellis made it sound, and not nearly as bad as the worst my imagination had to offer. Rather, it looked like a jet black lump of tar, with a slightly gritty texture, rolling in the water, against the current.

It was about the size of a small dog, I noticed, slugging through about two inches of water. I hated it immediately, because it was creepy with a capital ‘EEP!’.

“Finally,” Ellis said, with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now get down there and poke it with your torch.”

“Um…” I said, intelligently.

I eyed the water. It was only a few inches high, I knew. And it was maybe a three foot drop from the stone walkway. The dry stone walkway, which was entirely untouched by the shimmering water.

“Don’t be a baby.” Ellis said, possibly reading my mind. “It’s not even real.” He reminded me.

I sighed. “Alright, fine.” I said, grudgingly.

I hopped down.