Stepping through the Buttonwood Gate must have transported Aaron and the delvers somewhere, because he found himself standing at the head of a very wide staircase looking out over a massive room. In fact, ‘massive’ might have been an understatement.
The room was cavernous, gargantuan even, standing well over fifty feet high from the bottom of the stairs to the vaulted roof above. The room was rectangular, rather than square, like an oversized football field. The half-flight of steps Aaron and the delvers stood on would have been at the corner of the left end zone.
Enormous windows filled the wall to their left, starting just above them and climbing all the way up to the ceiling. Sunlight streamed through the iron-framed glass, filling the room with the morning’s radiance. The wall opposite Aaron was a couple hundred feet away, while the rest of the hall stretched off to his right many times that distance. Nor was this immense space empty.
Hundreds — or more likely thousands — of people filled the hall. The horde congregated into vaguely distinct clusters centered around a number of smaller, depressed floor areas. At the heart of each lower section was a circular bank of desks, with old computer monitors stacked above all the way around.
They formed a kind of CRT pillar, islands of data in the sea of bustling people. The old monitors were stacked ten to fifteen feet high, each angled forward more than the one below it. By the fourth or fifth monitor at the top of the stack, it was practically dangling over the people passing on the floor below. Those people seemed more interested in the strings of numbers and letters on the monitors than any potentially falling hazard.
And they were not quiet.
Aaron was awash in a sea of noise. Too many conversations between too many people with far too little regard for their volume blurred together into a nearly-incomprehensible mess from which only the occasional word could be plucked.
“Welcome to the Well of Wealth,” Griffin said, clapping a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “Though some call it the Well of Greed.”
“The Well of Greed is more accurate,” Albert sneered. “Or maybe: the Wellspring of All Human Misery.”
“Don’t be such a sourpuss,” the big man chastised.
“This is the stock exchange, right?” Aaron asked. “I thought it might be something related to it from everything I’d seen so far, but… this isn’t the actual place, is it?”
Kiara stepped forward, tossing and catching her coin pouch with a pleasant jingling clank of metal. “No, not quite, although there are rumors about people figuring out ways to exploit the connection between them.”
“What kind of rumors?”
“Speculators aren’t all that different from alchemists, so it’s always ‘trade secret’ this, and ‘proprietary bullshit’ that,” Albert said. “One jackass claims they found a secret method to get trades in the Well to register on the Exchange; some other wad says they found a way to read the tea leaves of commerce in here to forecast swings in the mundane market. It’s all snake oil and Ponzi schemes as far as I’m concerned.”
“So people come in here to be, like, fantasy finance bros?” Aaron asked. “That’s why we needed a sack of coins? I’m not gonna lie, that seems… kinda lame.”
Griffin chuckled. “There are plenty of folks who come in here trying to make some quick lux, for sure, and the nature of the dungeon does make it pay-to-play, but there’s a lot more going on in here that makes it an… interesting experience.”
“I don’t love the way you said ‘interesting’ there,” Aaron said, giving the big man the side-eye.
“Well, it’s all a bit metaphorical,” Griffin replied. “Or allegorical, maybe. I’m not really sure which is more appropriate.”
“Sometimes it’s all too literal,” Albert grumbled. “That’s honestly one of this place’s most redeeming qualities, for those who can get that far. Most don’t bother.”
“Quit moralizing and let Aaron come to his own conclusions, you dinks,” Kiara said. “He’s not going to experience anything for himself if we just stand around here jerking off.”
“So how does this work?”
Kiara pointed across the throngs of people, down the length of the room to their right. “This room is one big trading floor, with its own subdivisions for specific goods and what-have-you. There are other rooms, other trading floors, as you go. To access and trade on any floor, you need a trader’s badge, which costs coin and gets more expensive as you move through.”
“Each of our coin purses has a hundred platinum,” Griffin said, “The most expensive badge only costs an aethril, so as long as you don’t completely blow all your lux, you’ll be able to keep trading as we progress.”
Aaron raised a brow at Griffin. “Trading? Again — and it’s not that I’m trying to be a buzzkill here! — but this sounds exceptionally lame.”
“You don’t have to trade if you have enough coin to cover each badge,” Kiara said. “We can just walk through and ignore the sales pitches. You’ll probably have a better experience if you engage with the premise, though. That’s a big thing with conceptual dungeons: engaging with the premise.”
“Listen, nobody hates the Well of Greed more than me,” Albert said. “That doesn’t mean the place is totally worthless. There are things to learn, profits to be made, and it can even be fun. You just have to do your best to roll with it.”
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Kiara demanded, giving Albert’s arm a light backhand.
“It’s your call how you want to do this,” Griffin assured him. “You lead and we’ll follow, unless there’s a threat or you tell us otherwise.”
With a shrug, Aaron conceded the point and they made their way down the steps to the edge of the trading room floor. The newel post at the base of the staircase was ostentatiously thick, a foot-wide marble post ornate enough to make it look more like a Corinthian pillar than a support for the gilded railing.
A tiny person — no more than six inches tall — appeared atop the post in a puff of green smoke. He wore a top hat and tailcoat, his shiny black shoes were covered in white spats with gold buttons, and a monocle was pressed against his eye. He stroked one tip of his coiffed mustache and regarded them through his singular lens.
Holy shit, Aaron thought. It’s literally the Monopoly guy!
The micro-mogul shoved a hand in their direction, palm up and fingers grasping. One after another, the four drakus deposited a single silver coin into his palm. In exchange, he produced and handed over a set of laminated plastic badges, each with four numbers printed on it in blocky white letters. It even had a little metal clasp they could use to affix it to their clothes.
Badges in place, they stepped out onto the trading floor.
When Aaron’s foot hit the carpeted floor, littered with discarded scraps of paper, the indistinct babbling of voices resolved into something a bit more decipherable. He could make out the occasional word in the cacophony of the crowd — barely — but it was still too much to pick out more than bits and pieces.
Engage with the premise, he reminded himself.
He had a pretty good idea that something unusual was going on behind the scenes here, but all he could be sure of was that he was supposed to be buying low and selling high. Or whatever it was investment people did.
Since he had nothing to sell, he needed to figure out what he could buy and how he could turn that into a profit. That meant he had to find some way to make sense out of the chaos and din that defined the trading pit.
Almost everything I know about the stock market comes from either that old Eddie Murphy movie or that not-as-old Steve Carrell one, Aaron thought. Maybe I can find someone selling… oranges? Or orange juice? I’m pretty sure it was one of those.
There was no help coming from the trio of drakus delvers. They were looking at Aaron with the smug and smirking superiority of adults watching a child try to play soccer for the first time. There was little doubt that if he asked them for any more guidance each of them would have some snippet of pithy advice that would be about as helpful as a wedgie.
Aaron scanned the room one last time, trying to make sense of what was happening. The only thing that stood out was the way different groups were clustered around the banks of monitors. There were stock tickers up on the walls and even more information on the smaller screens, but Aaron couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. He took a few steps towards the nearest cluster, determined to do what he could to puzzle things out.
There must have been some kind of barrier magically muffling the cries of the traders, because when Aaron got close enough words began to emerge from the babel clearly enough for him to understand. He listened to a host of different sellers, trying to entice investors.
“Selling shares in food!” a voice called. “Three gold per share. Everyone has to eat, why shouldn’t you profit off their biological needs?”
“Food ingredients going at two gold! Buy shares of the company that buys the stuff that gets turned into food and sells it to companies to turn it into food or food-like substances! Don’t invest in products, invest in investing!”
Another called: “Farmers are greedy and stupid, but they’re slightly less greedy and slightly more stupid than financiers. Buy the land food is grown on from farmers desperate to keep being farmers! Their agonized efforts to cling to a dying way of life can boost you to a better bottom line!”
“Rice! Wheat! Corn!” someone shouted. “Endless demand means endless supply. There’s so much supply, most of it will get thrown away or left to rot– but not until someone has already bought it! Almost as profitable as selling nothing at all.”
Aaron winced and moved away from that section of the trading floor. The agricultural trade was just too exploitative for his tastes. Or maybe it was too depressing? It was too ‘something,’ even if that something was hard to pin down.
Hopefully the next trading cluster won’t be quite so… grim, he thought as he weaved through the crowd.
The next couple of trading sections were, perhaps, not quite as grim as investing in agriculture, but they certainly weren’t the kind of thing that would make the human spirit buoyant.
“Money for sale! Spend money to buy money and hope the money you bought winds up being worth more than the money you bought it with. This is a perfectly legitimate economic market! A nation’s catastrophes are your profit margins!”
“Debt! Get your debt here! Other people’s debt! Coppers on the gold! Spend a plat and hope the economic ruin of others will turn it into an asset worth as much as a hundred!”
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Aaron pressed on through the trading floor, seeking something that wouldn’t make him feel sick — or filthy — for participating. Finally, he found something that wasn’t horror made manifest.
“Gizmos! Doodads! Widgets and contraptions!” a trader cried. “Technological innovations with the potential to make everyone’s lives better. Or worse. Or both! Invest in doohickies and ride the bubble to fortune!”
That sounds promising, Aaron thought. Especially considering some of the oddities I’ve noticed around the room.
During his brief journey across the trading floor, Aaron had realized that the big, old fashioned monitors weren’t the only things that were out of place. The ticker boards were digital, but they used the old segmented numbers Aaron hadn’t seen outside of old alarm clocks since he was a kid.
The people were strange, too.
Setting aside that many of them looked not-quite-human with faintly animalistic features, their fashion was dated. And that was putting it mildly. Flashy power suits, lots of pastels, and people openly snorting lines of unspecified white powder all created an impression that the Well of Greed was a place out of time. It was like something closer to his childhood — or even earlier, most likely — than the sleek arena of algorithm-controlled microtrading that dominated the stock market in the 21st century.
If Aaron was right and the Well of Greed was in some way stuck in the Eighties or Nineties, then any technology would likely be an actual technological product rather than software frameworks and social media platforms. He wanted to see if he could turn a profit using his knowledge of what would be successful in the years ahead of the anachronistic dungeon.
Just have to hope I don’t get shot by Biff Tannen, Aaron thought with a smile.
Of course, the dungeon was conceptual and not literal, so he quickly discovered he was in for a few surprises. One of the traders working the floor spotted him coming — perhaps scenting the coins in his purse like a shark smelling blood in the water — and stepped forwards to block his path. He waved a bundle of promotional materials in one hand, his sales pitch coming in hot.
“The Nut Buster,” the trader proclaimed. “Patent pending. With shares priced at just a silver each, can you afford not to invest in this kind of exciting, paradigm-shaking innovation?”
Aaron pointed to himself. “Are you calling me a ‘nut buster’?”
The trader laughed and swept the front of his bright green blazer open, placing his hands on his hips and revealing a belt with an unusually large and shiny buckle. “No, friend, I was referring to this fantastic product here: the Nut Buster (patent pending). The latest innovation in social engineering. Would you or your friends care for a demonstration?”
He gestured at Aaron and the other drakus, who were gathered loosely around him in the best version of a semicircle three people could make. A good deal of their attention was directed to watching the crowd, but they nodded, smiled, and gestured encouragingly at the trader’s inquiry.
Aaron eyed the trader dubiously. His instinct was to pass on the offer, but he was in the Well of Greed for the experiences it provided. You couldn’t exactly gain new experiences by turning them down when offered.
“Alright,” he said. “I’ll engage with the premise. Show me what you got.”
“Of course, of course,” the trader replied, exuberantly, raising his voice like a carnival barker. “Now pay close attention or you’ll miss all the innovation!”
The trader beamed at Aaron, then something came flying out of his belt buckle. Aaron tried to flinch away, but he bumped into someone behind him — Griffin! — before he could take a full step. Whatever had ejected from the trader’s belt crossed the space between them in the blink of an eye and hit Aaron right in the crotch.
He winced instinctively, but there was no pain. There had been an impact — and a pretty forceful one, at that — but it hadn’t been enough to cause Aaron any real harm.
It looks like a dragon’s nuts aren’t his weak point anymore than his tongue is, Aaron realized. Still, though… What the hell?
“What the hell, dude?” he demanded.
The trader didn’t respond. He was fully bent over, hands on his knees and loudly guffawing. Some of the other members of the crowd, having turned to see what the trader was barking about, were also laughing, slapping their knees or each others’ backs.
Behind Aaron, he could hear at least two of the delvers — he was pretty sure it was Albert and Griffin — snickering. Even Kiara, in the corner of his eye, seemed to have tightly pressed her lips together to hold back a smile.
“The Nut Buster,” the trader exclaimed. “Patent pending. Guaranteed to provoke gut-busting laughs without busting anyone’s nuts! It’s got humor, it’s got sex appeal, it’s got an extending arm with a cartoon-ish boxing glove, and — best of all! — it’s reusable. At just one silver per share, it’s a bargain and sure to provide a return on investments once these babies hit the open market. And that’s no joke!”
Aaron hesitated to invest — whatever the hell that even meant in this place — on something so juvenile. If the dungeon was presenting a world before the internet, though, this kind of gag would be the sort of thing that would win a lot of friends around the playground. Or certain job sites. Plus, kids loved buying crap — or getting their parents to buy crap for them — so there was definitely a market for it.
“Alright, I’ll bite. Let me grab some coin,” Aaron said, fishing around in his coin purse as he did some math in his head.
After a couple seconds, he figured out how much he wanted to invest, then what that would work out to with the zany magic world’s nine-to-one exchange rates. Once he knew what he wanted, he felt metal pressing eagerly against his fingers and pulled a single coin out of the purse.
Looks like silver as far as I can tell, except I know it’s platinum, he thought as he examined the gleaming coin.
The coin was engraved with four intersecting lines which formed an eight-pointed star, which was surrounded by a circle. The circle was what identified it as a five platinum piece instead of four. It wasn’t the metal that gave the coin value among the eidolons, though, it was how much aether or quintessence was packed into it.
Because of the arcane thresholds and limitations on how aetheric density worked with the various precious metals, all the different coins were basically the same size and weight regardless of their composition or value. So a one lumen copper coin would feel pretty much the same in the hand as a five platinum piece.
Even the plaques, which were used for densities from factors of six through nine, were only about twice the weight of the coins and were basically indistinguishable from each other.
What a mystically whimsical pain in the ass this stuff is, Aaron thought. Thank god for predictive magic storage pockets, otherwise you’d have to dig through all these different lumps of metal, pull out and appraise each one, then do the stupid nine-sided math every time you wanted to buy a fizzy lifting drink. Do they have those? Something to look into.
Thanks to his own pocket dimension, Aaron had a five platinum piece in hand. No muss, no fuss. Since a single platinum was worth nine gold and a single gold was worth nine silver, a single platinum was worth eighty one silver. The coin in Aaron’s hand was worth five times that, or four hundred five silver.
“I’ll take four hundred shares,” he told the trader, handing over the coin. “You can keep the extra five silver if you can give me demo products of equal value.”
The trader was only too glad to take that deal and Aaron walked away wearing a ridiculous new belt and stuffing four more into his pocket dimension. There were some grumblings from Albert about sharing, but Aaron simply spun on his heel and, loudly, said, “Hey, check this out!”
When the so-called Nut Buster had been used on him, Aaron had been completely unprepared and it had caught him off guard. Despite that, his post-Emergence reflexes had let him detect and respond to it better than he ever could have before. Now that he knew it was coming, he was able to get a better look at the novelty belt.
Sure enough, when he activated it, a little boxing glove on a scissor-type extension arm came flying out of the buckle, heading unerringly for Albert’s groin. That wasn’t the only thing he noticed, however. He wasn’t the only one benefitting from enhanced drakus reaction times.
Aaron was pretty sure Albert saw the gag coming his way and decided to let it hit him. He also noticed that Griffin and Kiara tensed slightly when the boxing glove was launched. It was almost imperceptible, the way their eyes immediately homed in on the prank then went right back to scanning the crowd for threats or signs of danger.
When the little boxing glove made contact, Albert played along with it. His eyes crossed, his knees buckled, and he made a sound Aaron thought would have been better suited to some slapstick black and white film from the Forties. The small man wheezed, puffed out his cheeks, and sank down onto his knees. His feet kicked frantically at the carpet.
“Jeez, man, way to sell,” Aaron whispered, mostly to himself.
It was unlikely anybody heard his quiet compliment since, all around them, the crowd was howling with mirth. Many of the brokers and traders had glanced their way when Aaron called out to them and, perhaps even more predictably, they had burst into uproarious laughter after seeing Albert take a nutshot. Of course, the traders were, for the most part, men.
Dudes, Aaron thought, with a roll of his eyes. We are so stupid, sometimes. I could probably make a god damned fortune here if I had an endless supply of really good sticks.
A bell began to chime, ringing at a furious rate and filling the entire hall with a nearly discordant clang. A new cheer — one unrelated to Albert’s testicle-related woes — filled the hall.
Aaron looked around, trying to get some idea of what was going on. Griffin leaned in to explain in a quiet voice.
“That’s the closing bell,” he said. “End of trades, margin call, all that finance stuff.”
“What? But it’s not even eight o’clock in the morning,” Aaron said.
“Each trading ‘day’ only lasts ninety minutes on this trading floor, with fifteen-minute intermissions on either end,” Kiara explained. “It’s probably so brief to reflect the impact of newer technology causing faster and faster trading. It’s not nearly as truncated on the other floors.”
Albert rose to his feet as if nothing had happened, punching Aaron gently on the arm. “Clever move with the belt, by the way, that should pay real dividends. Or returns. Whatever finance bro shit it’s supposed to be and-or do.”
As if summoned by Albert’s words, the trader Aaron had invested with earlier came rushing up to him, so giddy he was sweating.
“There you are friend,” he exclaimed. “Quarterlies on our Nut Buster (patent pending) are doing gangbusters! We did so well another, larger company bought a controlling interest, fired everyone but the executives, and shipped all the manufacturing overseas. Here’s your totally-not-an-income money!”
He thrust a small pile of metal into Aaron’s hands, winked conspiratorially, and ran off whooping over his good fortune. Aaron looked down and found he had been given back his initial investment of a five platinum coin, but it was set atop a stack of five platinum ingots. The ingots were each marked with an eight-pointed star, like the coin, though not surrounded by a circle.
“That symbol is a… four,” Aaron mused, working it out in his head. “So an ingot with a four on it would be, uh… six, seven, eight, nine. I invested five platinum and got back fifty?” Aaron looked through the pile of lux again. “That can’t be right, can it? A five hundred percent return?”
“Commerce!” Griffin said enthusiastically.
“No, come on; be serious,” Aaron insisted. “A near-immediate five hundred percent increase in share value on what was, frankly, a childishly stupid practical joke?”
“You have to remember that his place is based on concepts,” Kiara said. “Things can be very exaggerated. This was pretty tame compared to some of the stuff you can see in here.”
“Plus, you put your thumb on the scales by getting people to see you use it on me,” Albert added. “Manipulating markets is very much a part of the game in the Well of Greed. You wouldn’t believe the shit you can get away with, not unless you already know a good deal about the world of finance.”
“So engaging with the premise isn’t just a way to have a better experience in a conceptual dungeon, it can have a huge influence on what you can achieve in them,” Aaron said.
“Now you’re getting the idea,” Kiara said.
Griffin checked an antique pocket watch he pulled from somewhere. “We should move on to the next trading floor before these yuppies start a snowball fight with pure Colombian blow.”
“Lead the way,” Kiara said.
As they made their way towards the wall farthest from their entrance and the next trading floor, Aaron dropped his new lux into the coin purse Griffin had given him earlier. Exhilarating as it was to get such a lucrative windfall, he didn’t really feel like he’d earned it.
Maybe it was just his nature or lingering self-doubt. Maybe it was that he didn’t feel like he had genuinely engaged with the premise and had just phoned it in. Or maybe it was just that the nature of finance and investment disagreed with him.
Whatever the case, Aaron couldn’t say it hadn’t been entertaining. He was excited to see what the other trading floors had to offer. Some of Albert’s more cynical comments had nestled into the back of his thoughts, but he tried his best not to let them draw too much of his attention. This whole trip was supposed to be fun, after all.
Wasn’t it?