A bank of sturdy wooden doors, decorated with large panels and etched brass fittings, let the four drakus into the second trading floor where they found themselves once again at the top of another wide stairway. It looked an awful lot like the staircase from the first trading floor at first glance. At second glance, Aaron realized it was identical, only with much better carpeting.

The cavernous hall that held the trading floor was also much the same as the last, though slightly smaller. That still made for an absurdly huge open space, similar in scope to a major travel hub.

The structure itself seemed largely the same. The great wall of windowed panes taking up most of the high wall to the left of the stairs was proof enough of that. But other transitory features, like the decor, presented a stark difference between the two floors.

Like the bank of doors, the aesthetic of the space was a touch more ostentatious, replacing the familiar sleek metallic and plastic fixtures of the late twentieth century. Polished wood, gleaming brass, and ornate cut glass were the rule of the day in both the furnishing and fixtures, much of it intricately detailed.

Scrollwork, beveling, and other decorations embellished most of the pieces, showcasing a level of craftsmanship and grandeur that was rare in Aaron’s time. The light fixtures, in particular, drew his attention; thick, etched glass panels and ornate stepped or fanned designs, each emitting a softer, fuzzier light that modern bulbs.

It reminds me of the old lamps my grandpa had, he thought. Only much nicer and the color isn’t quite so orangey-brown.

Where round banks of workstations stacked with clunky CRT monitors had formed the anchor of trading clusters on the last floor, the hubs on this one were built from more antiquated features. Shallow desks topped with columns of cubbies and drawers formed the base of the trading anchors with large blackboards perched above them, their slates cluttered with a spreadsheet of incomprehensible data.

The dry, cloying scent of blackboard and chalk dust was strong enough to tickle Aaron’s nose, even from more than a dozen feet away, searching for the vulnerable to draw sneezes and nosebleeds out of.

Desk lamps with glass shades nearly as lavish as the wall fixtures perched on desks besides old cradle telephones, which leapt and moved in a constant dance that kept the hands and ears of the traders busy. A row of complicated clockwork devices, about the size of a toaster oven, sat on a slightly raised shelf at the rear of the desktops. Their internal workings moved without cease, visible through a glass metal dome on top of each machine, and their endless tick-tick-ticking produced a thin paper strip that poured out of each contraption like an archaic printer.

That’s an old stock ticker machine, Aaron realized, recognizing them from old cartoons more than any personal experience.

Furniture and technology weren’t the only things drastically changed from one floor to the next. The crowd of traders was more muted, as well. Not in terms of volume — though they were a bit more of an orderly crowd down here — but in the very fashion they wore.

Suits were ubiquitous, but they were almost uniformly dark. There were none of the bright, flamboyant hues that dotted the throngs above, these were all somber blacks, blues, and grays. They were cut differently, as well, giving them a hang that looked more comfortable and roomy but with a weight that said they’d be miserable to wear anytime other than a cool autumn.

There was also, for some reason, a marked increase in hats. The rounded crowns of bowlers and homburgs could be found in the crowd, if you looked, but the vast majority were fedoras. Proper fedoras, not its narrower cousin, the trilby.

The fashion made it easier to spot that everyone — or nearly everyone — on this floor were men. Not mostly men. Not the seventy five to eighty percent ratio of the previous crowd, but almost entirely male. Women on this floor were few and far between and, in each instance Aaron spotted, they were behind tall counters around the edges of the broader trading floor.

That’s weird, right? he thought. Finance has always been bro bullshit, but this seems like an excessive amount of sausage at the picnic.

At the bottom of the stairs, the six-inch tall caricature of a capitalist appeared atop a marble post in another puff of smoke, though the cloud was darker this time and had an acrid, sulfuric musk. The fee for a trader’s badge had also increased from a single silver coin to a gold, which they each handed over before stepping down onto the floor.

There, Aaron noticed another significant change between the floors — this one dealt in products that were generally much more tangible and mundane.

Or maybe they’re less loaded with metaphor would be a better way to describe it, he thought.

Rather than selling outrageous gizmos or investing based on the idea that farmers were greedy morons, the traders here were selling things like coal, oil, steel, pork, and so on. Some sold shares in companies that dealt in those commodities while others sold the products directly. Or a kind of contract or promissory note for a certain amount of a specific product, anyways.

Despite his knowledge of the stock market being largely drawn from the occasional movie and skimming the news around whatever financial calamity Wall Street was dumping on an unsuspecting America, Aaron was pretty sure shares in companies and physical products were different types of trades and generally weren’t handled in the same place at the same time.

This is a conceptual dungeon, though, Aaron reminded himself. There are going to be things that won’t be literal or translate one-to-one with the world outside. Best to roll with it as best as I can. Engage with the premise, like Kiara said.

Keeping this new perspective in mind, he began to look for solid investments he could turn a nice profit from. The prices here were a bit higher than they’d been on the previous floor, which was counterintuitive to moving further into the past, but it wasn’t enough to be prohibitive. Trading for gold instead of silver might be a big step up in value, but Aaron wasn’t particularly worried about losses.

Everything he’d seen on the last floor suggested it had been a representation of either the eighties or nineties — more likely the former — and this floor was clearly a few decades before that. There were very few scenarios where steel and coal wouldn’t be profitable, especially for someone with enough cash to weather any economic storms.

Another advantage was that the trading ‘day’ wasn’t dilated to the same extreme degree it had been on the Eighties Floor. Instead of a new round of trading starting every other hour, there was only a risk of margin calls every four or six hours. None of the delvers were entirely certain about which it was, but they had several hours until the next one either way.

The greatest benefit of foreknowledge was that Aaron could filter out a lot of extraneous information. Having some idea of what he was looking to invest in helped keep him from being overwhelmed by information overload. That was a real boon because, as he quickly learned, there was something else — something altogether peculiar — happening out there among the traders.

Large, mostly-stationary crowds tend to move in a certain way. Without a destination, a crowd will generally swell and contract as if breathing, the edges bulging and condensing like a misshapen heart but the whole remaining relatively still. That was the norm on the trading floor as far as Aaron had seen, both on the Eighties Floor and this one, but there were some very strange exceptions here.

Thanks to knowing what he was looking for, Aaron was free to pay a little more attention to what was going on around him. Otherwise, he might not have noticed the most unusual thing going on around the trading floor.

Occasionally, and for reasons he couldn’t fathom, specific sections of the trading floor would start to move in a very different fashion from the breathing masses of a loitering throng. From what he could make out at a distance, it was almost like entire trading pits around individual trade anchors would start moving in circles. But that was an oversimplification.

The way people were moving in those unusual crowds was noteworthy in its own right. It was like something was rushing through the crowd, lifting, pushing, or dragging people along in its wake. And the traders were throwing things at it, as well, although Aaron could tell what. Even their voices rose, though the obscuring effects around the trading anchors made it impossible to get a better sense of what they were saying, or why, or even how they felt about whatever was happening.

To further complicate matters, sometimes one of the delvers would disappear into the crowd and return a short while later without comment. It might have been his imagination, but Aaron thought Griffin’s clothes looked a bit disheveled after coming back from one of these mysterious excursions. None of the delvers would tell him what they were up to, of course, shrugging off his questions with the smug, enigmatic smile that was becoming all-too-familiar in this stupid dungeon.

That means it’s probably something they want me to figure out on my own, he thought. Or they’re trying to make sure we avoid it — whatever it is — but that seems less likely. Figuring it out should be more interesting than avoiding it, and you can’t engage with a premise by ducking it, so… let’s see if we can figure it out. They’ll probably wave me off if they don’t want me chasing the mystery.

None of the delvers tried to stop him as he started angling towards the disturbances as soon as he spotted them. Even with free rein to pursue the mystery, It took nearly an hour for Aaron to catch his first glimpse up close.

Whatever was disrupting the crowds was happening fast, starting and stopping within a few minutes. Making his way closer was an exercise in frustration. He wasn’t alone in chasing the commotion, so whenever he started getting closer he’d find a veritable wall of other traders trying to head in the same direction and effectively blocking him out. The frustrated groans of traders whenever a disturbance petered out told him it was definitely something worth getting involved with.

When he finally managed to get within a hundred feet, Aaron wasn’t sure he believed what his eyes were telling him. Something was definitely churning through the crowd and knocking the traders around, but he also thought he saw someone throw a lasso over the other traders’ heads. An honest to god lasso, like a cowboy at a rodeo!

The loop of rope rose above the crowd for just a second then fell back out of sight. Whether it wrangled anything or not he had no clue, but it gave him something to keep an eye out for. His next abortive attempts to finagle a position near a disturbance might have been a bust, but he was confident people in those crowds were throwing lassos around. For some reason.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked the delvers, perplexed.

Kiara had a stone-cold poker face and Griffin only offered him a big, dopey grin, but Albert clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, “You should always bring a decent length of rope into a dungeon, buddy, I thought you knew that. Didn’t you say you’d played D&D before?”

“I have played D&D and even if I had brought a rope, I don’t know how to tie or throw a damned lasso,” Aaron replied. “Well, whatever. I’m gonna make my way to one of these things eventually, then we’ll see what’s what.”

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Exhaling hard through his nose to vent a little frustration, Aaron thought about his next steps.

He was getting nowhere trying to chase after the disturbances, so he needed a way to get ahead of them. If there was a pattern, he hadn’t been able to figure it out. That didn’t really mean much; the sheer size of the entire trading floor made it likely he was missing more than he was seeing. Nor had he seen any obvious indicators, like guys wearing chaps and big hats striding through the floor with coils of rope in hand.

Pretty sure I would’ve noticed a proper cowboy, even with a crowd this size, he thought. But there’s got to be some way to anticipate this… whatever it is. Albert, Griffin, and Kiara all seem to be able to find them, which tells me I’m looking at this the wrong way.

Aaron let his eyes unfocus and his gaze wander across the room. There was something he was missing. Ignoring the details would let him see the bigger picture and take stock of what he knew without being distracted. A broader perspective could make something jump out at him, something he’d noticed but hadn’t fully processed, perhaps, or something hidden in the noise of the bustling trading floor.

Since the trading floor was a representation of the New York Stock Exchange at some point in the past — the thirties or forties was Aaron’s current guess — then whatever was going on was more likely than not to have something to do with stocks. That fit with the premise a lot better than looking for cowboys and cattle. He could figure out the whole lasso thing once he managed to get close enough.

He went to the nearest trading anchor and positioned himself to watch the stock tickers lined up along the rear of the desks. The endless strips of paper each ticker spat out carried a tremendous amount of data — abbreviated stock names and their fluctuating values, combining to tell a story of the market in action — that was far too arcane for Aaron to suss out, but he didn’t think he’d need to.

As he’d wandered the trading floor in his quest to find the disturbance, he’d realized that each bunker was dedicated to one of four major products: foodstuffs like crops, meat, and coffee; fuel sources including coal, gas, and unrefined petroleum; metal, both raw ore and processed material; and what Aaron thought of as utility products, like rubber, glass, and textiles.

Each trading anchor traded exclusively in goods that belonged to one of those four categories, and usually in closely related product clusters. And, as best as Aaron could tell, each stock ticker tracked the trades of specific anchors around the floor.

The disturbances had all been connected to specific trade anchors so far, so he figured there would be some sign of it in the tickers. Hopefully with enough time in advance for him to find the appropriate bunker before he was blocked out again.

After just a couple minutes watching, one of the stock tickers started spitting out tape much faster than the others. Aaron didn’t know precisely what it meant, but surely it meant something. It didn’t take an MBA from the Wharton School of Being a Dickhead to figure that much out.

The hyperactive ticker was labeled for one of the trading anchors the drakus had passed earlier, one that Aaron had marked in his mind at the time. He had been pretty sure he could get excellent returns there, assuming he was right about the era this trading floor was mimicking.

Wish I had brought some rope, even if I don’t know what it’s supposed to be for, he mused as he made his way towards the anchor.

As he got closer, he noticed that the traders around his destination had a different kind of vibe about them. They were more active than others on the trading floor, agitated even. They flashed their complicated hand gestures at one another at breakneck — breakwrist? — speeds and crammed trading slips into their pockets as fast as they could fill them out.

There was a frantic energy to the trading, beyond simple excitement. Their faces and body language reminded Aaron of other people he’d seen before, people in the grips of addiction or mania. It was a dangerous kind of energy. Unsustainable. Reckless, even.

He recognized it and knew well enough that he should steer clear, but he was there to find out what was behind it. He was there to experience something, dammit, even if he didn’t know what that something was. Even if his instincts were telling him to get the hell out of Dodge.

Sometimes all you need to get a home run is to take a swing, as long as you’re in the ballpark, Aaron thought, pulling out four of the platinum ingots he’d earned in his last trade. Or some other sports metaphor if that one doesn’t happen to be true. Fuck if I know. Anyways, here we go.

His tour of the floor had given him a rough idea of how trades were made. He couldn’t decipher all the gestures the trades used to accompany their deals, but he’d seen enough to know what a couple meant and that they weren’t strictly necessary.

Taking a breath, he let the voices of the traders wash over him. The calls created such a cacophony most words were lost in the confused din, but Aaron only needed to hear two things: a product and a price. He had two or three things in mind he thought would guarantee a profit, which was to his advantage. If he waded in blind, he was likely to drown just trying to stay with the currents.

It didn’t take long to hear what he was looking for, even through the chaos.

“Selling steel, three gold!” a voice called.

Aaron swiveled towards the voice, raising a hand and fanning it towards himself, as if beckoning the unknown trader over. “Buy ‘em! Buying at three!”

A small, furtive-looking man was standing in front of Aaron almost before he finished calling his bid. He had practically materialized out of the crowd and was hunched over, furiously scribbling on a notepad. He spoke so quickly the words practically ran together.

“Howmanyyawant?”

Ah yes, Aaron thought ruefully. Math.

“I’ll take, uh… I’ll take–”

“T-t-take your time, pal,” the trader said, affecting a mocking stutter. “S’not like chewin’ the fat ain’t chock-full of profit and I got all day to gab like a dozy dame.”

“Twenty seven,” Aaron spat out, fumbling one of the ingots out of the pile and holding it up. “I’ll take twenty seven.”

The trader hardly bothered to look at the platinum ingot. In a flurry of fingers made deft by practice, he tore a paper slip from his pad, thrust it into Aaron’s solar plexus, snatched the ingot, and deposited it somewhere on his person. With neither a second word or glance, the trader disappeared back into the crowd.

Even in a mild daze after enduring the trader’s idea of customer service, Aaron was gratified to hear he was on the right track; the calls for steel out in the pit were already up to five gold, not even a minute after he’d finished his trade.

Griffin leaned in and asked, “You gonna keep going for steel?”

Aaron shook his head but didn’t reply. He was listening for something else in the tumult of the trading pit. Something that, if he was right about the time period, would make him a fortune.

It’s a gamble, but everything just screams the thirties or forties, Aaron thought. I guess all speculative trading is a gamble, that’s why it keeps crashing out.

Armed with foreknowledge — or a close approximation of it — the biggest risk was that Aaron would sell a little too early or too late, leaving money on the metaphorical table. As long as the trading followed the rough arc of real world history, it should be a no-lose situation.

Then again, he had no idea what the strange disturbances were. There was no sign of it around the anchor yet, but that ‘yet’ was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Aaron was pretty sure it would show up and had no idea what it was or what it would do. Since he had to pass the time waiting for it, he might as well do some trading. Besides, it seemed like the strange occurrences were connected to trading. Engage with the premise, and all that!

The press of bodies around the anchor was frenetic as traders jockeyed to buy and sell, but Aaron’s prodigious drakus strength let him wade through the crowd with relative ease. The brokers were trading mostly in metal, but he hadn’t heard the one he wanted yet, so he kept moving.

As he worked his way through the crowd, he caught sight of the edges of a few errant newspapers. They were folded up in that way real newspaper fiends had and tucked into jacket pockets, but enough was exposed that he was able to pick out the occasional word in the bold type of a headline. Those little scraps of information were enough to tell him his idea about the time period of the floor was just about dead-on.

It took a few minutes of making his way through the masses as gently as he could, but he finally heard someone calling the trade he wanted.

“Selling aluminum, four– make that five gold!”

Aluminum won’t stay priced at five for long, Aaron thought. Better to do the math at six. I’ve got three ingots I’m willing to invest. At eighty one gold each, that’s… two hundred forty three. So four times six, then add a zero. I can buy forty shares of aluminum and have three gold in change coming. But I need to move before it goes up.

Aaron muscled his way closer to the trader, careful to use enough strength to get through the throng but not so much that anyone went stumbling or flying at his touch. His fine control of his drakus strength was improving, which was for the best. He didn’t need to get excited and break something or, worse, hurt somebody!

It turned out his prediction was right. In the handful of seconds it took to get close enough that Aaron felt comfortable offering a bid, the trader’s asking price had gone up to six gold.

“Buy it,” Aaron called, waving his hand in the beckoning gesture again. “Buying aluminum at six!”

He made eye contact with the trader, who beckoned him over impatiently and began scribbling on his notepad. Aaron and the delvers made their way over despite the press of the crowd.

When he got to the trader, he found a couple other people trying to convince him to sell to them at six gold a share. All they got in reply was a dismissive smirk.

“Should’ve bought when it was on the table, you vultures,” he chastised them. “If you’re so interested in buying, let’s see where the price lands after this transaction, fellas. Now, give me some space so I can complete my trade, see?”

The trader cut off their complaints with a wave of a hand, turning his attention to Aaron.

“How many shares?” he asked.

“Forty,” Aaron replied, holding up his three platinum ingots.

“Forty, eh? A real butter-and-egg man, you are, and that order ain’t no brodie, pal. I bet it’s gonna push the index and open the gates.”

What a fresh and exciting bunch of old time-y gibberish, Aaron thought. I wonder how often the dungeon gets super immersive with archaic speech. Hopefully not too much or it’ll get real god damned annoying real god damned quick.

There wasn’t enough time to puzzle out what all the euphemisms might have meant because the trader finished with his notepad and ripped a slip off. Aaron traded him three nine-platinum ingots for the trading slip and a gold coin marked with a six-pointed star.

The trader pocketed the ingots and turned to the desk, leaning over to watch the stock tickers and rubbing his hands together with undisguised avarice.

“Watch this, hot shot,” he said. “This joint’s about to juke.”

Aaron turned his attention to the desk, as well, where the stock tickers were churning out tape furiously. He had no idea what he was supposed to be looking at but soon learned the ticker didn’t really matter.

Faintly, at first, but quickly growing stronger, the floor began to rumble beneath his feet. A quick glance around revealed no obvious source of the commotion, but the crowd of traders had gone still. Mostly.

Several began producing lengths of rope — from dimensional storages, most likely, given there had been no sign of them previously — each ending in a wide lasso loop.

Now that he was closer, Aaron saw that most, possibly all, of the lassoes had paper tags attached to them near the knot. The tags were too small for him to read them, but they must have been significant.

The traders’ faces shone with anticipation. All of them had turned to the mass of desks that formed the core of the trading anchor when the floor began to rumble, so Aaron kept his eyes there, as well.

Griffin leaned in and put a hand on Aaron’s shoulder.

“Clench your sphincter,” the big man said quietly. “Shit is about to get wild.”