The north corridor leading to dungeon 127VD-E-1 stretched far into the dark. The Kobold had mentioned their dungeon was at the very end and to the left, but as Victor stared down the tunnel, he couldn’t even see that far, Cat eyes or not.
At this point, the amount of effort required just to get to the damn place was almost comical, but there was nothing to it, so they got their move on.
They had been walking past flickering lights and exposed wiring for about a minute or two when Victor heard Waverly humming. He was surprised to find she had been trying to harmonize with his own quiet rendition of one of the songs he'd heard on the mixer album.
"Aww, why'd you stop?" asked Waverly.
"I don’t know, just surprised," Victor said, a smile tugging at his lips.
"Oh, sorry! I didn’t want to distract you. But that was the song about the hammer, the square, and Satan, right?"
"Yeah, I think. To be honest, I remember the melodies better than the words."
"You should totally keep going! Hey, maybe we can start a band! You could be the singer!"
Victor laughed. Then, after checking that no one was around, he began to sing, putting everything he had into it. In his head, he could hear the organ, the drums, and the bass supporting him, lifting him up.
For a moment, all his fears and thoughts about where he had gone wrong were just a bit further away, separated from his mind by a feeling that formed in his chest. He knew he wasn’t good, but he didn’t care. Just when he was starting to really get into it, Waverly's laughter interrupted him.
"What?" he said, giving her a sidelong grin.
"Vic? You know you're my best friend in the whole underworld, right?"
"Yeah?"
"And you know that I will totally support you in anything you want to do, right?"
Victor snorted, amused. He motioned for Waverly to go on, certain that anything Waverly had to qualify that much was going to be terrible and hilarious at the same time.
Waverly could barely contain her grin as she went on, "Okay, that being said, like, if we ever start a band, I am going to gag you just to make sure that we survive our first gig." She burst into laughter again, wiping a few tears from her face while mumbling, "Now I understand what they mean when they talk about cat music…" between gasping breaths.
If anyone else had said that, Victor would have been hurt. From Waverly, apart from the obvious teasing, it was more of a friendly warning. She meant well, and he knew it. Besides, she was absolutely right. He couldn’t sing on key if his immortal soul depended on it.
Still, he playfully shouldered her into one of the walls, and she dutifully slammed into it without fighting back, still laughing.
"I will have you know, that for generations, my family was widely renowned for their stellar singing skills !" Victor said, unable to keep the grin out of his voice.
"Yeah, when we still tortured people down here! Wasn’t Mozart’s purgatory just the choir of catboys? I totally read about that in some history book, I’m sure!" Waverly said, her laughter subsiding into a snicker that didn't stop until they reached the end of the corridor.
"Watch it," Victor said with mock severity as he put his left hand on the door handle and held up his right index finger in a warning most stern. Honestly, It was hard to fix her with a stare and not laugh at the same time. "That's not how you talk to your new boss!"
"Oh no, I’m the boss," Waverly said, winning yet another round this morning.
Damn, he was out of sorts, even if he tried to push it down.
"You're just the dungeon master," the werewolf finished, nodding sagely.
"Oh, right. Just a glorified pencil pusher," Victor said.
Waverly nodded eagerly, emphasizing how satisfied she was that he grasped this simple truth.
"The guy who has to do all the accounting."
Waverly’s nodding intensified.
"The one who controls the layout of the dungeon, and the positioning of the mobs, and the design of the theme, and the ledgers, and the salaries, and who gets which snacks between shifts…"
"You know, have you ever thought about a career as a singer?" Waverly interrupted him, buttering him up with innocence so thick they could use it as sound insulation in Tartarus.
She batted her eyes at him. "You really should! I think you’d be super great at it!"
Victor just snorted a laugh as he opened the door into their dungeon antechamber.
A second later he wished he just left it closed.
He would have said that the room was as sparse as the corridor outside, but that was just not the truth. Because it was completely overflowing with junk. There were broken tables, broken chairs, broken everything. The only thing that worked was the mandatory resurrection scroll dispenser, but the resurrection altar right next to it was cluttered with something that looked like medieval torture devices someone had tried to repaint and use as planters.
The plants were dead, obviously.
"Holy shit," Waverly breathed. "If my parents could see this, they’d personally tear the person responsible for this place to pieces."
She gave Victor a sidelong glance and a small smile that still retained a vestige of her earlier humor. "Good thing that would be the dungeon master, not the dungeon boss."
Victor’s face must have betrayed what went on inside him, or perhaps she was just that good at reading him, because her smile trailed off after that.
She looked at the trash heap that was the entrance to the dungeon they were supposed to manage, then at him, then back at the chaos. Her tail dropped as she huffed out a long breath, and crossed her arms on front of her chest. For a second, she said nothing, and when she finally spoke up, her voice was calm, quiet, and as earnest as Victor could wish for in a friend.
"I mean, it sounds super weird, but if you want to go back up, we can do that. I super appreciate that you thought of me for this gig, but I really don’t want to push you into it if… I can wait until after I’m done with college, no problem." She gave her tail a few wags, but Victor could tell that it was forced.
She’d said all the right words, had hit the right tones, but it didn’t help. Inside of him, everything was in tumult.
How in the fuck was he supposed to turn this thing around? All he had ever done in his life was lie around, take naps, and wait for other people to solve his problems. And now he was supposed to fix a fuck-up so big that it literally spilled out of its confines? What if he failed? They’d take the [Dungeon Boss] class from Waverly, and she’d downgrade in levels and probably need therapy. Regression was nothing to scoff at. Some people took years to recover from it.
No, perhaps it was better to take her up on the offer, stop before they even could get started and she could rank up levels that she would have to give up later.
"Yeah, I…" he began, but Waverly interrupted him.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
"Actually, you know what? Fuck that. Wait, sit down here!" she said, and plunked him down on one of the chairs that at least still had all of its legs.
Then, she pulled out her Hellphone, made sure the door was closed, and started swiping around on it. Its screen was broken, and the back was held together with tape, but it seemed to work still, because, after a few seconds, the tinny little speakers started blaring the song he’d been humming just a few seconds ago.
It should have been cheesy, should have felt forced, like an injection of artificial happiness. Somehow, though, it helped, a little bit. He pulled himself out of the worst thoughts, but before he could tell Waverly his decision to spare her future pain, she said:
"Like, where is the Victor who got into the Hellevator with me because he wanted to explore the Dregs? Where is the guy who was with me in the Crowbar just two weeks ago? Where is the guy who picked vampiric hunger? The Vampire who just grabs the sword like, twice his size, and just cleaves a guy in half instead of giving up!?"
Everything about her, from her curt motions to the way she fixed him with her eyes was intense. She wanted to help so much he could almost feel it in the air, like warm summer mist. But she didn’t get it. This wasn’t about him going on a fun little adventure…
"Yo, Wave. I appreciate the pep talk, but those were really easy decisions to make. Sure, some of them were dangerous, but only for me. This time it’s not just myself. It’s about you and who knows how many other monsters in this dungeon who rely on me. What will they think when they find out that I’m just an intern, who doesn’t even pay attention in class, because he’d rather nap? What will you do when I fuck up and you lose this Job, and the class that comes with it? I said it earlier: I thought this would be easy, but turns out this is hard. Way too hard. And I don’t want to drag you down with me when I fail. I’ll land on my feet, sure, but… yeah. Sorry, Wave. It’s just too hard."
"But, like, Victor,” Waverly began, her voice riding that line between insistent, pleading, empathetic and comforting.
And then she said something that changed everything because that’s who she was.
“You can do hard things."
The sentence hung between them, floating in the music.
He wanted to reject them, to tell Waverly it wasn’t so, to lie to himself and to her and everyone, because, for a second, the simple truth of her words was almost too much.
It resonated with that part deep inside of him that had risen from its sleep over the last few months, the part that wanted to try new things, to see how far he could go. The part that knew that he only ever failed if he gave up trying.
Then the song ended in a crescendo of drums, and with it, that vast feeling receded.
It left Victor with the faint impression that Waverly was as confused as him about what had just happened.
Then she burst into the deep red and orange glow that signaled a level-up.
----------------------------------------
Woo! For advancing a skill that is unique to you, and aligning with the way of the [Werewolf], you just gained 25,000 werewolf experience.
Awesome! You are now a Level 19 [Werewolf]!
Your overall level is now: Level 19!
Well done, my child. You have spoken words that ring as true as moonlight. Take them to heart, for they will never lead you astray.
You have attained a new rank in your skill [Call of the Moon].
Call of the Moon
(Sign of the Heart, Sign of the Earth, Sign of the Water, Sign of the Moon)
Witness, Daughter, and rise as I do.
(F) Remember it.
(E) Feel it.
(D) See it.
(C) Hear it.
(B) Speak it.
Waverly tilted her head. Her Hellphone had finished playing, but it was as if there was music in the air. Still, no matter how hard she strained, she couldn't quite make it out before it faded, leaving her with a memory of intense calm and wisdom of terrifying magnitudes.
Then she blinked, and a huge smile bloomed on her face.
“Ohmydevs! Level 19!” Waverly yelled, pumping both her fists into the air. “Whooo!”
She opened her palm up high and waited for Victor to slap it...
…And waited…
Victor looked at her like she was one of those paintings in museums that made you feel a lot of stuff when you looked at them, but like the really old ones, not the modern abstract stuff they used to torture classical arts professors with.
Finally, she said, “Victor, if you don’t high-five me right now, I will slap you in the face, which will be super hard for me because I really like you, and I generally don’t like hitting people, well, OK, maybe kinda, sometimes, but not right now. But the point is that I would feel super bad, so let’s go, up top!” She snapped the fingers on her free hand for emphasis.
That got a chuckle out of him, which made her happy. Almost as happy as the high five he gave her a second later. It was super satisfying, echoing loudly in the antechamber.
It was good that he’d snapped out of it. Sure, he was quiet, but it was mostly, like, the super chill kind of quiet. All this brooding really wasn’t like him, and she kind of wondered if she was pushing him too hard. Wait, was she pushing him? Should she be pushing him?
Maybe that was something that good friends did every once in a while. She'd think about it later. Right now, they had a dungeon to explore!
She was already pulling Victor up to his feet and was halfway to the rickety wooden door that hid the portal when Victor yelled, “Yo, Waverly! You forgot something.”
She turned and found him pointing at the resurrection scroll dispenser.
“Oh, right,” she said, but her smile didn’t turn sheepish; she was still riding that enthusiastic high. So she just dashed over to the surprisingly clean metal machine, which looked a bit like one of those old cigarette vending machines they still had in the Dregs, notorious for devouring several fathers annually.
It had a little handle for you to turn, and then you could pull out a shiny silver drawer at the bottom. Inside, she found a scroll no longer than her finger, bound with black velvet and sealed with blood-red wax.
She didn’t need to open it to know what it said. They’d covered it in class at least 15 times, or something.
Death,
(or a death-related goddess, god, or other entity [please see signature for details]) grants whichever deceased, unraveled, banished, disintegrated, vaporized, or otherwise permanently* ** incapacitated organic, non-organic, incorporeal, ethereal, elemental, insubstantial, hypersubstantial, topstantial, analog, digital or otherwise (previously or currently) existing life form, including, but not limited to, all other forms of life and unlife (subsequently called Resurrectee) Touched by this scroll 1 (one) [dark resurrection], restoring the Resurrectee to its state prior to the aforementioned adverse event, at the site of any death or death-related altars the resurrect last touched, or, failing that, the point where the owner of this scroll last woke up.
Signed,
Choking hazard. Do not swallow. May contain small parts.
Void where prohibited (Heaven, Paradise, Paradise Roots MI, Texas, Vatican State, and that one ice cream shop in Modena too heavenly to exist on earth, etc.)
*up to and including the heat-death of the universe;
** Resurrectee must experience a decrease in capacity to act and/or interact
In short, if she died, and this thing touched her person, she’d get resurrected for free. She watched Victor pull out his own scroll before she dashed to the portal again, opening the rickety door and revealing the black and green portal swirling behind it. This was it, her first-ever visit to Virtual Damnation Online! To say she was excited would be like calling Inferno A sauna.
For a second, she worried that Victor might yet turn around, but he looked at her with that quiet smile of his and made a shooing gesture for her to go first.
She stepped through the portal with the unshakable certainty that Victor would be right behind her.