A cozy sight greeted the party as, next thing they knew, they were on all-fours turning what felt like a final bend. The tunnel was narrow and lush with increasingly long (and in-your-face) greenery.

Rising up from brackens and ferns, nine-pairs of eyes took in the oval room, and nine-pairs of eyes blinked in befuddlement for, out of nowhere, the party had found itself heading not-to-the-next-room but… towards the – quite welcome mind you – sounds of a guzzling, white fountain: a surefire sign that they had unexpectedly happened upon a priorly-unadvertised safe-room.

In a daze, they approached the calm, sparkling waters from which thin trails of cobalt mist trailed off upwards towards moss-laden walls; and that’s when Skeptic, the first of the party to snap out of it, finally did a double-take.

“Mindwipe”, he noted nonchalantly. “Looks like we’re not missing anyone though…” He eyed Mendal out of the corner of his eye, then added “Shame, really.”.

His comment, albeit snarky, finally broke the last of his group out of their trance-like reverie.

“Enchanters?” Mendal asked, ignoring the Agent and immediately seeking to take charge.

“Definitely a safe room, boss.” the group’s wizard-clad Elementalist, said. “Neither fire magic works, nor water, nor… Yeah, no, can’t do nothin’… it’s clear. We’re clear.”

The others nodded their ascent.

“Safe room it is then” Mendal said pulling up a window and confirming his FITpoints were ticking up. “Gotta love me a fountain!”

“Mmm, this mindwipe.” the team’s Enchantress said, bringing the others back to events at hand.“It seems we’re on floor 21 now. Last I remember, we were on floor 17, right?”

“Huh! That’s quite the distance we’ve traveled!” whistled one of the team’s front-liners, “Viking-helmet” thought of him, appreciatively. There always seemed to be one in every party… This one happened to be a Viking though, albeit an undead one who was also doubling as the party’s Porter.

While he was quite a chill dude at present, Viking-helmet specialised in “low-health frontline combat”. With “Low-health" meaning he was always, in combat, finding increasingly reckless and brazen ways to deplete his FITpoints and was thus constantly on the verge of dying.

Viking was even trying the clerics’ patience, which was saying something.

If he weren’t such a monster-of-a-man, Agent Skeptic would definitely be complaining more about how much this mad-man’s antics were costing the whole party in terms of healing-allocated-funds. In fact, Mendal had fully filled one of the party’s available slots with an extra healer just to include this axe-wielding bad-boy in the team’s final composition,

As it happened, the Cleric’s Apprentice specialised in targeted healing while his mentor, the Master Cleric, specialised in area-of-effect magic (also known as AOE or ambient healing).

“ATTENTION TRAVELLERS” a disembodied female announcer’s voice said, “YOU HAVE ENTERED THE FOUNTAIN OF LAST RESPIT. AS A REWARD FOR YOUR EFFORTS, AND DUE TO YOUR CLERICS CONSENSUAL DONATION OF YOUR MOST RECENT MEMORIES, A BOON HAS BEEN BEEN GRANTED TO YOU BY THE SOVEREIGN OF ENLIGHTENMENT. YOUR PARTY HAS OPTED TO KEEP SAID BOON A SECRET.

CONGRATULATIONS! A TEMPORARY SAFE ZONE HAS BEEN UNCOVERED!

AS THE FIRST TO DISCOVER THIS SAFE-ZONE, YOUR PARTY HAS BEEN GRANTED AN ADDITIONAL 20 MINUTE STAY-EXTENSION IN SAID SAFE ZONE, TIME REMAINING IN SAFE_ZONE: 80 MINUTES.”

“Guess you’ll be out again and checking those notes again, aye?” Viking-helmet asked Mendal, giving the latter a hefty – but to unfriendly – clap on the back.

Mendal nodded “Yeap”, he thought, logging out of the game “four floor’s worth of notes to go through is a lot of work. Better to get started.”

Before his eyes… the welcoming moss… The damp lush light on the floor and walls… That almost palpable restorative feeling the others experienced as their health went up in an invigorating, soothing stream… The exhilaration of it all… For a moment, he could almost feel it all as the other members of the group did... but then they blurred out of view.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

He’d spent ages fine-tuning the roster and covering all contingencies, and as they were the last thing he’d thought about before logout, the roster which he really, really knew by heart, raced once more through his mind.

* First of all there were the two Clerics, himself, and the now-diseased Soldier of Fortune. This last was great addition to increase loot drops, passively generating gold from damage, and providing the team with discounts. The Soldier was still a great addition when dead though: he provided everyone with a stat buff the longer he was dead although healing also cost more and more. Best to keep all that between himself, the healers and the Soldier though.

* Next there was Agent Skeptic, the team’s rogue, a class great for taking out bosses by targeting their weak spots and striking one massive blow from stealth, thus ending some fights before they ever really began in earnest. He was also the ideal person to open a lock, like that one Mendal knew was in the Final Boss’ room. Agent Skeptic also had a track record, and some resulting power increase, related to backstabbing a teammate and getting away with it for the duration of a dungeon dive.

* Enchantress, a midrange spell-slinger with some skill in air magic, specialised in being a Conduit, an unorthodox choice for an air practitioner that pretty much relegated her to a support class: while Enchantress had access to the entire party’s mana, she couldn’t use it herself. Instead, through her maxed out mana manipulation, she siphoned the immense pool at her disposal and redirected the flows upon invisible currents towards those of the team that she deemed were in most dire need. For this dungeon dive, per Mendal’s explicit instructions, that was mostly the team’s…

* …Porter, the undead, a viking-helmeted, brutish man of middling years. While out-of-dungeon death, in Exile, was severely punished by a loss of half one’s levels and all of one’s items and equipment – some genius, before the Great Baptism, had posted on the forums of some crazy workaround: by becoming an undead (no small feat in those days), he’d found a complete workaround to the loss of equipment upon death (one can’t die if one is already dead!). People opted into taking undead races to, essentially, glitch themselves into allowed themselves unlimited storage. This was early on in Exile’s history and was deemed... a bit… broken. As one can imagine, not long after the exploit was found, some do-gooder at Dormant Entertainment patched things up, removing it. This again, caused a minor uproar. (can’t please everyone!) Three months later, Dormant introduced some new races (mummies, zombies, vampires, and so on…) that did allow for partial immunity to loss of equipment upon death.

Anyway, Viking’s inclusion in the team fully halved the weight of all their equipment. His undead passive would also, given time fighting in the dungeon, provide each of them each the ability to bond a piece of equipment while in the dungeon. This did not come at no cost however: fully half of Enchantress’ mana conduit was going towards charging his ability. Which meant half the party’s mana was going towards the late-game, defeatist investment.

* The party also contained a long distance power-mage: a wizard-clad Elementalist specialising in Fire and Water magics. Over the course of the last few floors, Enchantress had increasingly found-herself funnelling more and more mana into the Elementalist’s displays of power just to see the mesmerising, awe-inspiring might of his steamy explosions.

* Then, there was Craven, a member of a newly discovered sub-variant of the Archer class. Craven was a single target, bow-wielding sniper. One that could teleport to a recently-cast arrow and, because he was no specialist in hand-to-hand (or anything close range for that matter), the Craven Archer most often ran away from most fights – hence the name: Craven.

* And, last of all, there was the team’s Sound Smith. A peculiar addition: this man had started off his in-game life, as an Earth Elementalist but quickly discovered he didn’t like fighting and would wall-off (or trip) enemies instead. The Sound Smith was doubling as the team’s Tomb Raider and, while he still liked dungeon raiding despite the accompanying fighting. Exile’s AI and the game dev team, in tandem, brainstormed and introduced a non-combat, dungeon-delving class just for pacifists such as he: with a sixth sense for clues leading to secret passageways, the Sound Smith was likely, in no small part, responsible for the team having found this unexpected safe room. In later levels, the Earth Elementalist picked up a second magical affinity for sound magic which he’d combined with his out-of-dungeon hammer-wielding profession. Now a Sound Smith, the burly man used his innate gift to buff allies, not through the use of coin like the Clerics, or mana like the Enchanters – but through the casual repurposing of sounds themselves. The louder, the better.

Before his eyes, Exile made way to a series of ugly, dull prompts.

“DO YOU WANT TO LOG OUT?”

“ARE YOU SURE?”

“LOGGING OUT, PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE–“

An instant later, a slightly Australian-accented, feminine voice kicked in, narrating the second phase of the logout procedure:

“CNS interface shutting down, PNS suppression shutting down, Hatch releasing, hatch released, peripheral safety straps releasing… released… main security harness unlocked! Dormant Entertainment thanks you for playing Exile. We know you’ll be back!”

When, at long last, Mendal did make it back to his room, it was to be greeted by a sight he’d never, not in a million years, expected to see.

“Look, think about it, the more involuntary, or wasteful taxes one is subject to, the more of a slave – percentage-wise – one is.” a voice said. “No, no, I’ll have none of that Loserville talk from you, you’re too smart for that. And don’t even begin to suggest I’m being controversial.”