The group ended then, after deciding that they didn’t need anything more. They had the tentative beginnings of a plan, a bond with the dungeon which would allow them to speak to both it and each other, and were tired. They decided to head up to Max’s to sleep and get ready for the morning’s meeting.
Morning broke. Fern and Will were almost the first ones out of their room. They both had a well-rested and content look on their face.
It had been a night of learning for Jake too. Basically learning how not to see things inside him, how not to scar permanently the delicate crystal lattices of his mind.
“Oh my god!” he thought. “What was I thinking. Bernie and Rex, mom and dad. Oh my god! I need to fix those beds.”
“Jake honey,” said his mom.
“Yes,” he said. He was glad that he didn’t have to face her because he might never be able to look her in the eyes again.
“I would kill for a cup of coffee!” she said. “I almost did. Withers almost died when he took the last cup. Is there anything that you can do?”
Jake said, “Only if you’ve got a coffee bean. I can create more, but without something to start, I’m not sure if what I can create will be coffee, you know?”
“As it so happens,” she said. “I have a bunch of beans from Mary’s house. Her dad used to order coffee beans and roast and grind them himself. I realize that it’s old, but can you at least try.”
“Of course,” he said. “With that much of a start, I should be good to go. Drop one on the floor.”
“On the floor?” she asked. Suddenly he thought, ‘Oh shit!’
“Just here on the floor,” she asked.
“I’m sorry, you’re right. Better if you take it to my locus. It’s where I can see, hear and accept things the best,” he said.
“Where is this locus?” she said.
“It’s outside on the porch, by the cigar store Indian statue. There’s a circle there. Just drop it in the circle.”
His mom said, “I’m going to do that because, well, it’s better than the alternative.”
Jake thought, ‘Oh you have no idea how much I agree with you now!’
His mom went to the front door and opened it. The circle, newly installed by Jake existed exactly where he’d said it did.
But what really caused his mom to take a breath was the two arrows sticking in the door about man height.
“When did these arrive?” she asked.
“This morning, shortly after first light,” Jake said. “I thought about what I should do with them, but couldn’t decide so I left them.”
“Could you see who did it?” she asked.
“After they hit, I had my hawk fly over. It looked like that guy Matchstick and a couple of other men. They turned and left afterward. There are a couple of other guys watching still. What do you want me to do with them?” he asked.
“Can you remove them?” she said.
“Not a problem,” he answered. The wood of the newly installed door seemed to ripple around the arrows, softening and then pulling away from them, allowing them to float free. The arrows started to bend as if force were being applied and his mom shouted, “Wait! Wait.”
Jake stopped.
“Let me have those and don’t fix the door. Leave the scars where the arrows hit,” she said.
“Why?” said Jake. His dungeon instincts did not like the imperfection the arrow scars left on his doors.
“We’ve got a bunch of people inside that until two weeks ago never had to fight, never had to defend themselves. They could call the cops if there was a problem. Now, they can’t, but I think they still have the mindset of ‘it’s somebody else’s problem. Let them sort it out.’ These arrows might be a wake-up call for some of them.”
Will had been beside her this whole time and said, “Let me see those.”
They looked much like the arrows that came out of the quivers that they had inside. They were black shafts of wood with a broad steel arrowhead on the front and fletched with some sort of feathers. It looked like the Bobs had cheated a little because the feathers weren’t tied on using rawhide or gut, but seemed to merge with the wood.
“Event arrows,” Will said. It was what the group had started calling the arrows and other things that had come through the apocalypse changed in form and materials, but still functional.
Fern dropped the bean and then after looking around, said, “Let’s go back.”
Jake absorbed it and then thought about the various ways that he could recreate it. As it stood, he could create it as loot. He’d gotten the loot pattern when he’d absorbed it. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in the morning coffee business, so he thought he might play with the bean later. Try to recreate it as a growable plant, as well as one that grew as a native in Oklahoma.
“Did it work,” said Fern as she and Will closed the door.
“Yeah,” said Jake. “I can make coffee beans now.”
“Oh, that god!” said Fern. “Thank you little baby Jesus!”
“Thank Bob!” said Jake. “Or actually don’t. Whatever they are, they don’t seem to want our worship, I’d just as soon keep it that way.”
The doors were big, blocky rectangles of red oak. They could be barred by another beam of red oak which Jake hadn’t bothered to do last night. He’d formed the brackets which could hold the beam but hadn’t bothered to set it in place. Instead, he’d created a channel in the floor behind the front edge of the doors and stuck two iron pegs, about as thick as a railroad spike in the hole. The base of the spike widened larger than the main opening of the channel. This made it impossible to pull the spike out, but they could be slid along the channel to either side of the door, making it possible for the door to open.
Now that he could make glass, Jake thought it was kind of pointless, so he’d filed up almost all the windows with stone, leaving only the one between the two doors remaining. He’d filled it with a lattice of bronze as thick as the walls and anchored firmly in them which allowed visibility and air to escape. Also mana.
“Hmm,” said his dad, looking at the door stops. “Not a bad idea. Good job son.” And then he slid the stoppers back into their closed position.
Jake felt ridiculously proud of that comment. His dad was handy. The kind of man that could, Jake felt, given time, create an ark if he needed one. Jake was not. Or didn’t used to be. He felt that maybe things were changing for him. Maybe all this becoming a dungeon crap wasn’t all bad.
They went back to the dining area. By now many of the adults were up and out of their rooms. Georgia was busy taking the shocked for their morning showers and to use the restrooms. She’d acquired a couple of helpers. They had created a slow parade of people from the room where the shocked had slept the night before through to the far north restroom.
Bernie and Rex sat at a table by the kitchen. Jake had tried not to listen to their conversation last night and what came after but was only partially successful. He was glad to see that whatever the reason, whatever had occurred with Bernie, it hadn’t broken them. She still hadn’t taken the vow, but Jake didn’t really care. And evidently, and more importantly, neither did Rex.
“Where’s my coffee?” asked his mom quietly, looking around the mostly filled dining room. “Lord, I am going to need it!”
Jake quickly created the plan for a coffee pot. One of those big metal cylindrical ones. He’d actually had a pattern for a coffee pot, courtesy of Max’s. It was an ‘event coffee pot’ but would work. Unfortunately, he couldn’t create it out of aluminum yet like the original pot he’d ‘cleaned’ away and had gotten the pattern from, but he could use other metals. He wasn’t sure how making it from some other metal would impact the flavor though. He decided to create it out of copper reasoning that people used to love cooking with copper pans, so it should be safe enough.
Another thing that he’d done in the night, was to add the rest of the wall to the south side of the kitchen. He'd also put in some swinging doors in the door to the kitchen. He’d left the northside of the kitchen with its short wall enabling people to see what was going on.
He’d also added two thick balsa wood rooms to the back of the south side. Not very big, just big enough to hold stuff that needed to be refrigerated or frozen.
That along with the various stoves and ovens and food prep tables was how he’d spent the night while everyone else was sleeping. ‘Or not,’ he thought with a shudder.
He created the actual coffee pots themselves already filled with ground coffee beans and starting to perk in the part of the kitchen where the dining room folks couldn’t see.
“It’s in the kitchen. I created two pots. Hope they like it black because I’ve got no sugar or milk,” he told his mom. “Dad could probably drag the pots out and set them on the serving wall, I guess.”
“Oh,” he said, as she started that way. “There’s cups too.” And he quickly created a lot of glass cups, being still unable to make porcelain.
Will and Fern made their way into the kitchen and brought out the copper, coffee pots and set them on the short wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room. Then went back into the kitchen and got the trays of cups that were also waiting for them. When they got outside again, every adult in the room had formed a line waiting or for those who had glasses or cups in their inventory, already serving themselves and settling into a spot around the table.
By the time the line completed, Georgia and her helpers were done and got coffee as well. Jake had been watching the pots and whenever they ran low, he simply filled them up again. Looking around the room, Fern decided that everybody was there. Just in case, she asked Jake who said that this was everyone.
She filled her cup and went to the center of the dining room where she’d stood last night when she’d held the meeting to get things somewhat organized. Will stood beside her.
“Everyone slept alright last night?” she began.
A rumble of affirmation came from the crowd. They had all slept well. The Beds of Good Sleep had done their jobs. No one was poorly rested this morning.
“Good,” she said. “We’ll have breakfast in a little while. I’m sure us cooks will be able to scrape something together. But before we started, now that we’ve had some coffee, let me just say, thank god for coffee again.” She had to pause here to let the shouts and cheers of agreement slow down.
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Eventually, the room quieted down and she began again. “Just in case any of you didn’t hear last night, I’m Fern Silvestre. My family is scattered all around the room. I’m also the reason that you all are here. I invited you. I wanted to bring up two things for you all to consider. The first is that when I got up this morning and went outside, I found these stuck in the door.”
She held up the arrows then. She’d been holding them in her hands this entire time and she’d seen people glance curiously at them.
“Do you mean somebody shot them there?” asked a man. One of the older men who’d volunteered to join the ‘army’ last night.
“Yes,” she said. “I happen to know that it was the man named Matchbox or Matchstick or whatever his name was and two friends of his. I think it was their group's way of letting us know they know where we are.” She paused to let this settle in.
A bunch of conversations sprang up as various people tried to figure out what the arrows meant. Nobody seemed to think that it was a positive sign.
People began to shout back and forth across the room, calling each other idiots when they disagreed. The tension in the room shot straight through the roof.
Finally, one man stood up and shouted at Fern who was still standing in the center watching the chaos spread, “This is your fault. If you hadn’t invited us all here, those people would have never known, even cared that we existed.”
This kind of shook the room for a bit. Everybody stopped and looked at Fern who looked back.
“Fair enough,” she said. “I said that I was responsible for inviting you here and I meant it. If I hadn’t invited you here, you would be still sitting hungry in your homes. I invited you here. I fed you and I gave you a safe place to sleep last night. But, you are right, sir. You could have been safely starving at home. Provided a giant coyote or something else didn’t come crashing through your door.”
She looked around some more.
“I didn’t show you these arrows to scare you,” she continued. “Or to threaten you. I showed you these arrows so that you could take a real look at what the world is like now. What we can expect. That means, no government, no Red Cross, no police, no judges, no army, no civilization. That means that those men are as right as they can make stick. People used to say, ‘your rights stop at my skin’. Well, it was the government that saw to that. Now, your rights stop where I or some other person can make them stop.”
“That’s a pretty bleak attitude,” said another man.
“Maybe, but tell that to the women those men have got screwing and cooking for them in their camp? Do you think they want to be there? That’s what this world is allowing to happen. And I, and my family, aren’t going to stand for it.”
“Your family, what all five of you,” said another man, sarcastically. “How the hell are you five going to make a difference?”
“Yes, my family and another one, that I haven’t introduced you to yet. Say hello Jake.”
‘Well, shit,’ Jake thought. ‘I can’t talk to these folks. I mean after ten minutes or so, I might be able to break through like I did with Hildi. With one of them. But hell, there’s a hundred and thirty of them.’ He quickly scanned the room and saw that a bunch of the people were starting to snigger and smile.”
‘Ah, fuck it!’ he thought and created a cube of bronze at the ceiling level and let it fall down beside the table of the man who’d asked how they were going to make a difference. The block hit with a deafening noise, sounding like a car crash. The floor shook and indented, cracked, the tables jumped, the cube started to roll, but Jake steadied it and it held its position, rocking a little, back and forth.”
People jumped from their seats and attempted to run to the walls. Benches overturned as people jumped up, although mostly people cracked their knees on the tables and stayed in place. Benches are not easy to escape from in a crowded, panicky situation.
“What? Holy shit!” shouted the man, attempting to stand and falling back.
“Relax, relax,” yelled both his father and mother at once. After a moment, Bernie and Rex and Dato started yelling it too. Finally, the crowd began to quiet down a lot and people began to focus on their neighbors again, to focus on Fern. The benches were straightened again, stood up in a few cases and people began to resume their seats.
“Jake,” his mom said, “Can you bring that cube over here? I need something to stand on so the people in the back can see me.”
Jake lifted the cube and brought it over to where his mom stood beside the central pillar. He only raised it about a meter, but it was enough to be visible. Despite wanting to fix it immediately, he left the impact crater on the floor of the dungeon. People close to the moving cube got up and stood back. People further in the room stood again to watch the cube sail its short distance from where it landed next to his mother. His mom moved and he set the cube down where she’d been standing moments before. Then his dad helped her up so that she could stand on top of the cube.
“That’s better,” she said. “I can see my son and daughter-in-law over there by the kitchen now.” She smiled at the group. “Like I said, my other son, Jake. He’s the reason that I felt confident enough to invite you all here, he’s my, our joker in the deck, our get out of jail free card. Importantly he’s the one that built all this stuff that surrounds you. He’s the one that supplied the meat you ate last night and the beds that you slept in. This,” she said as she waved her hand around encompassing the whole room, “is my son Jake.”
The sound of kids playing in the pool penetrated the dead silence of the meeting. A few dripping kids stood on the outskirts of the dining room, summoned by the noise of the falling cube. Fern just let the people sit and absorb what had just happened.
“So what do you propose to do? You and your family? And Jake?” asked Joseph, one of the single men that had been part of the original group.
“Billy here,” she said, pointing toward Billy, mentioned that a class that I was offered after the event might be a good fit. I took it last night and it is. It’s called, “Clan Leader.” It gives a small bonus to experience gain and a larger bonus to health. Not just for me either. For every member of the clan. Neither are earth-shattering, but in this world, I figure every little bit counts. So, after my family and I met with Jake last night, I decided to form a clan.”
“What happens if we don’t want to join?” said the man who’d been sarcastic before, proving that in some people stupid runs to the bone.
Jake wondered if his mom wanted him to drop another cube. Unfortunately, something in him told him that he couldn’t actually drop the cube on the man. He guessed it was another of those unwritten dungeon rules.
“Hang on,” Fern said. “I’m still trying to answer Joseph.”
“A clan is a group of family members that join to support each other. If they get too many non-family members they become what’s called a sect. Anyway, it’s a way to join up and make a stand. And before you ask, I’ll tell you. A stand against the people that would take your daughters for sex slaves, take your food, take your weapons and leave you helpless except for their so-called protection. I’m against all that. Every fiber of my being says filth like that doesn’t have a place in this world next to me and mine. We fought one war against slavery in this country. I am not letting it start up again next to me.”
“Ok,” said old man Withers. “Maybe Joseph wasn’t clear enough. What do we get if we join? How do we join? What happens if we don’t? Is your son going to drop a chunk of metal on us?”
“All good questions,” Fern answered. “If you join you get to belong to something bigger than yourself. There’s no government, no USA anymore. It’s gone according to that notification we all got. And no Sapulpa either. It’s spread all to hell and back. And I don’t know what’s happening at the city center. But with that Wade guy and his group, I’d say things are probably not good there. There’s that ‘Duchy of Northern Tulsa’ thing, but I suspect that they’re busy getting set up. I don’t know what the heck is going on there, but I suspect it’ll be a long time before they get out to this neck of the woods. Especially since things have grown so much bigger. Heck, I have no idea even where Sand Springs is anymore. It’s probably still almost due north of us, but how far north it is, is another question.”
She stopped then and looked around. “So the first thing you get, as Withers asked, is you get to belong to a group. Before you knock that, I want you to think about how many of your old groups or institutions that you belonged to, still exist? How many of the churches, sports leagues, companies, governments, all the other organizations that you belonged to before, still work, still have open doors or a place that you could meet up at?”
She made eye contact with old man Withers then and the man who was sarcastic before moving her gaze around the room, trying to will people to actually think about it.
“The second thing you get is a safe place to live,” she said.
An immediate outcry sprang up at this. People stood and started shouting. The wet kids who had turned and started back to the pool came back, their faces a little frightened.
“Hold it! HOLD IT!” Fern and Will and soon all the family began shouting, trying to get some quiet in the room so she could speak again.
After about five minutes, the room was at least quiet enough that she could be heard.
“I didn’t say that you’d be kicked out, did I?” she said. “We are planning on building a wall around Max’s and a town inside that wall. If you don’t want to be a part of our clan or sect or whatever it becomes, that’s fine. You’ll just need to move out into a house in the town. Jake doesn’t want anybody inside Max’s that he doesn’t trust. And I imagine that works both ways, doesn’t it?” She may have glanced briefly at the man who’d been sarcastic before.
“Who’s Jake?” asked one of the elderly men.
“That’s my son,” she said.
“The building?” he asked.
“More or less,” she answered.
“Ok,” Wither’s said. “How do we become a member of this sect or clan? What’s its name? Who’s leading it? What are its long-term goals? Have you thought about any of those things yet?”
“Yes,” said Fern, which kind of surprised the rest of her family, as well as Billy and Hildi since none of those things, had been brought up at the meeting last night.
“The Sect’s name is the Dungeon Born. You get in by being offered a chance to form a bond between yourself and everyone else in it, including my son Jake. A bond is like a vow or an oath. But a bond is somehow overseen by the heavens. It cannot be taken by children. In other words, you have to be over thirteen. The goal of the sect is, right now, saving as many people as we can. When the blue screen said, “Do Better!” about saving other humans, we took it to heart. And the actual bond you’ve got to make is:
‘I pledge to the sect: I will keep myself strong, keep myself mentally awake, be always prepared, be trustworthy, be loyal, be friendly, be courteous, be kind, and be clean. I will act responsibly, not against the interests of my sect, nor any member of it. I will accomplish the tasks which I have been given and which I have accepted’
“That sounds like the Boy Scouts oath,” said a man at one of the tables closest to Fern.
“It should,” she said. “We took parts of it from that, parts of it from the Girl Scouts oath and parts of it we just made up.”
“What else do we get?” someone at the back asked.
“Well, we think that you’ll get the ability to be heard by Jake and you’ll have the ability to talk to other bondholders.”
“I can talk to them now?” said an elderly woman. “I mean I just talked to you, didn’t I?”
“No, like internally,” she said. “Think of it like having a cell phone again. But keep the service and ditch the phone. Also no payments either.”
“How long does this bond last?” asked Dianna. “Are we signing up for life or can we leave?”
“That’s a good question,” said Fern. “It can be either. We can set it up so it’s permanent or we can set it up so it expires after a certain time.”
“This may be a crazy question, but since we’ve gotten all these blue screens and stuff, does the system or the new gods or whatever, oversee the bond? Make sure you keep to your promise?” asked Joseph.
There was an immediate circle of quiet that spread around the room at his question. It was clear that everybody wanted to know the answer to this particular question.
“That is a really good question,” Fern answered. “And it brings me up to the next points about this bond and oaths in general anymore. People,” she said almost vibrating with the intensity that she was trying to project. “You need to understand. This new world, one of the biggest differences, is that your words have weight. What you say in a bond or if you make a promise to the heavens, something is going to listen. So yes, there are consequences to breaking the bond. It looks like you get drained stamina or mana, one point a day until you make up for whatever you did to break the bond.”
There was quiet in the room as everybody tried to digest this. Nobody really had a handle on their status screen or what the numbers on there meant yet.
“So what happens when you reach zero stamina?” asked a little girl, still wet from the pool.
“That’s a good question, sweetie,” said Fern. “And this may be a little scary, but we think, it means, you can’t move.”
There was a large inhale of breath from the crowd.
“And who judges if you’ve fixed the breach,” another voice said. “Can we just go up and apologize and say we’ll do better next time.”
“Unfortunately or, my husband would say, fortunately, no. The System or the new gods or whatever you want to believe in issues you a quest. While you’re on the quest, it stops you from losing points, but until you finish the quest, you’re always going to be a completed quest away from losing more points.”
** 2/19
She waited some more but this time the voices of the people did not stop. Her audience began talking among themselves at their tables and even cross-table discussions developed with people shooting answers to questions raised on other tables.
She stood there for a while, then she held up her hands and said, “Everybody, everybody.” Her husband and started yelling too, “Eyes to the center.” Eventually, everyone focused on her again.
“Everybody needs to relax a bit,” she said. “We’re here, we have food and shelter. Nobody needs to make a decision fast. We’ve still got to build the wall, make houses, and we’ll still need to figure some other things out, like food long term and what we’re are going to be doing with the rest of our lives. I imagine most of you used computers in your day jobs. Well, they’re gone. Maybe some of you were involved in, well like Georgia there, sales. She worked for Bama Pie. Bama is gone and so are the companies she sold to. Heck, even what she was selling is gone. No more Bama pies.” Once again she paused.
“Everything has changed,” she said. “It’s up to us to reap this whirlwind. We’ve been spit out the other side. Now it’s on us to make our lives. Keep talking, but if I could get the cooks from last night to meet me in the kitchen we’ll get breakfast started and then, after breakfast, we’ll have another short meeting about what it is we need to get done. Ok?”