Chapter 22

Congratulations!

For Reaching Floor 5, you receive a mandatory 6 hour break!

By Reaching Floor 5, you attain access to the System Shop!

You may Sell Loot at the system shop, or you may buy from the system or other players! List your items for sale at system prices, auction them to the highest bidder, or request an abovemarket price!

Break Time remaining: 5:59:23

Eli closed the menu and looked around. They were in a school, he could tell. He even knew which school. He ought to, he’d been a student there until the eighth grade before moving on to high school.

It was the middle school in the town that he’d grown up in. Specifically, they were in one of the computer labs. It was dark in the room, the lights turned off, but the room was filled with the soft glow of the monitors of a dozen computers.

He sat up and looked around. “Everyone present and accounted for?” he asked.

The others called off one by one. Lucy, however, cried out in despair.

“The message came to fast, I didn’t have time to grab everything this time,” she said. “All of our stuff is gone.”

The others let that sink in, but ultimately it wasn’t Lucy’s fault, so nobody got that upset. Until Gabri started laughing.

“It was in the SafeZone wasn’t it?” he asked. “It should be stored just fine! That’s the entire point of a SafeZone; your stuff in that Zone is Safe. Not only that, but it should be in the store if you want to sell any of that junk now. Go and see.”

The little faerie laughed as the others looked at him in confusion. Then he motioned towards the computer chairs, and Eli took a seat.

The computer screen came up with several tabs.

Inventory

Auction (View Listing)

Buy

Auction (Bid)

Sell

Auction (Sell)

He clicked on Inventory, and to his relief he saw all of their missing gear. He called the others over to verify. There was a lot of gear to choose from, but after a few minutes of browsing they concluded that everything was there.

“Right,” he said. “I’m going to mark everything that’s communal property as not-for-sale, and we’ll go ahead and list the books that Gabri said are valuable but not useful to our party. Obviously we’re holding on to the ones that are useful for now, maybe once we get deeper into the dungeon we can sell them after we’ve gotten everything we can out of them.”

“Or maybe they won’t be worth that much by then,” Luke said. “But it would still be useful if we could actually read what they’re saying.”

“Sure,” Eli agreed. “Anyway, there should be enough computers for everyone, so go ahead and browse the system to see if there’s anything that you think would be useful for you to purchase at this point. Everyone should have Contribution Points to spend. After that, I guess it’s time to get out the sleeping bags and try to get some rest.”

The others agreed with him, and they sat down at the computers and began looking through the system’s lists.

Eli tried searching a couple different ways. He searched “Gear for a Scholar,” and “Scholar magic accessories,” “Scholar enchantments,” and “Scholar consumeables.”

And he got a lot of very interesting results, to be honest, but not many of them were in his price range. Most of them were selling for millions of Contribution points. He only had a few thousand. However, when he reached “Scholar Consumables,” he came across an interesting item.

“Language Codex,” he read. “Initiate acquisition of lost languages and tongues. Note: allow three to six hours of processing time”

He frowned, but the price was right at sixty contribution points, so he bought it. Abruptly his interface began flashing, and he slumped over, unconscious.

~~~~~~~

Miguel Phelps sat in the interrogation chamber, blinking as he adjusted to his new life with a system. He was pretty deep down the rabbit hole of what he could tease out from interacting with his interface, but ultimately that by itself wasn’t a source for finding power. If the kid was right, then to find power, he’d have to get into the dungeon, somehow, and according to the system messages that kept popping up for anyone still on the surface, that required a party of five or more.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Unfortunately the idiots interrogating him weren’t interested in carrying his slightly overweight – or at least he had been – ass through the opening levels of a dungeon. And Phelps didn’t have any real way of knowing what awaited him there except for what the agents were telling him.

“Look, here’s the thing,” the man was saying. “You’re goose might just be cooked, Miguel. I mean, your website helped a lot of these ‘delving parties’ organize. So many of them are returning after facing casualties, and who are they going to hold liable when their families sue? The government which tried to keep them safe and out of the dungeons, or the websites which told them lies and encouraged them to dive into the most dangerous place on earth.”

“Lawyer,” Miguel said.

“I told you, we’re working on getting you your lawyer, but you’ve got to work with us here. If you—”

“Lawyer,” Miguel said again. “I want my Lawyer. I won’t speak to anyone without my lawyer. Quiero a mi abogado. Je veux mon avocat. Ich will meinen Anwalt. Voglio il mio avvocato. 我要我的律师 . I want my lawyer.”

“You really want to go down this route?” the interrogator was saying. “You realize that things are changing, don’t you Phelps? That things might not be the same in the new world as the old one. We need to know where your information came from so that we can verify it, that’s all. Who is Erandius, how do we talk to him?”

“Lawyer,” Phelps repeated.

The Interrogator sighed, then got up and walked out of the room, leaving Phelps alone to stew in his own juices for a while. Unfortunately for both of them, while the old world was indeed falling apart, it wasn’t doing so in quite the way that either of them hoped it would.

~~~~~~

Gabby was eight years old when the world started to end. It hadn’t happened all at once, and she hadn’t been aware of anything at first. But then she’d had a really weird dream where words had talked to her and told her that she was a catterpillar and maybe she’d be a butterfly before it was time to die.

She didn’t understand the dream and it made her confused and afraid, and when she’d woken up she and everyone she knew could see the system in their heads. The adults in her life were all panicking while this was happening, but Gabby had her own concerns.

School was out. That wasn’t a good thing, because Gabby liked school. Mostly because it got her out of the house, as she didn’t like living with her foster parents. So even though school was out and the president was saying to quarentine and stay at home, Gabby snuck out to go see what was happening at the park between her foster parent’s and the school.

She was surprised to find a small group of other kids organizing. There were a lot of them, and one of the boys she knew – he was two years older than her and kind of cute – ran over.

“Hey, Gabby, join my party,” he said, and suddenly her new interface flashed in her mind.

You have been invited to join Team Monster Truck by Antony.

Accept? Yes/No

Gabby accepted, and she suddenly had an awareness of four other people in her head. A bunch of other kids like her. Antony fistpumped and looked at her. “It’s just like they said. Now that we have five we can go to the dungeon.”

“What are you talking about?” Gabby asked the cute older boy. “I don’t think a dungeon is somewhere we want to go in real life, is it?”

“No, but I think we have to. If we wait for the parents to figure stuff out then we’ll die when the Antithesis comes. My big brother was talking about it. We have to fight for ourselves, Gabby. If we don’t, then the world is going to end before any of us hit puberty.”

She frowned, because that milestone wasn’t something she particularly understood nor was it something she was looking forward to. Antony cajoled her for a few minutes to enter the dungeon with him and the others, and after a few minutes of peer pressure, Gabby gave in. They were going to be going in on very easy mode, after all, so how hard could it be?

Suddenly a doorway appeared before her.

Team Monster Truck has selected to enter the Dungeon.

Prepare for Transference, Gabby Mitchel.

Good luck!

Suddenly Gabby didn’t feel so confident, but she stepped through the archway a moment after Antony and the others.

Welcome to the 1 st Floor of the Junior Challenger’s Dungeon!

Please note that time runs faster inside the dungeon than outside.

At present you will experience two weeks for every day that passes outside.

Training and Preparatory Modules are available.

To advance to the next floor:

Defeat your combat training partner in a duel 100 times

AND

Solve the floor puzzle

Good Luck!

Gabby looked around at the four idiots that had talked her into this mess, then looked for the way out. Which she immediately noticed was missing; the doorway that they had entered through was gone. They stood outside of what looked like a reform school, with a school bus nearby and a sign over the door that said “Welcome!” While they had entered with a party of only five children, there were ten other parties nearby of equivalent sizes and ages.

“Where’s the exit?” she asked her friends. The others looked as confused as her.

Abruptly a tall, slender man appeared, with long flowing golden and—were those elf ears? An elf appeared.

“Welcome to the tutorial dungeon. You are here because, through no fault of your own, the Antithesis is coming for your world. The Titans in their wisdom have seen fit to give you a chance to stand against the coming apocalypse, and they are bending time itself to your aid. I shall be your instructor. Call me Gwel-nor. Unlike the other difficulties, there is no retreat option for Very-Easy. But there is also no danger. It is a soft place meant for children to come of age. For the next seven years, you will train next to each other and the other cohorts of the—”

“I’m sorry did you say Seven Years ?” Gabby shouted. “We’re trapped in this place for Seven Years ?”

“Yes. I’m sorry if that news is troubling, but in order to prepare you for the Antithesis drastic steps must be taken.”

Gabby stopped listening, and started beating Antony for talking her into this idiocy in the first place.

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