SKIPS-ONE-STEP

The Dungeon was frustrating and Skips was very underleveled. To make things worse: Teki showed them how to enter their instance instead of using a new one as they normally would. This meant that the experience would be shared between all of them, including the folks who got themselves into this mess.

Fortunately, she was a part of Solidarity and had the ability to get out of bad situations fast. Her Modus Operandi was to hit and run, to attack with her spear and run off. Sometimes, it also was to look obvious and enticing for a monster to run towards her -- thus falling into the trap of Sure-Climbing-Friend. Nourishes would often need far fewer attacks to finish a monster off, but needed to be in the exact position, so getting trapped was a good solution for him to get into position and execute the monster with clinical precision.

She rushed further, trying to find the others. When she could, she avoided the monsters, but as they needed clearing, she always lured one of them back to the group after she had a glance into an area. As she did so, she noticed something strange: A white Rhino that was ramming the rock in front of it over and over. No, there was a cave. That was what the creature tried to get into. She was not certain if the cave contained the other group, but she had a hunch that there was something important in it.

She immediately returned to the group. Sure-Climbing-Friend delighted in the situation and immediately had a plan. Skips agreed quickly and the two of them, as well as Nourishes scurried around the rocky plain to the location of the hidden cave. There, Sure-Climbing-Friend skittered away only to appear a few moments later much higher and holding a net. Skips gave the signal and the net dropped while opening and practically engulfing the monster, while sliding off the rocks without any problems. Skips gasped as the creature tangled itself in it. A few more stabs with a spear as well as by Nourishes's magic and the Rhino fell. That was when she saw Cvetka, Crystal, Igor… and Rush.

"Hey there! Are you guys okay here?" Skips tried to keep her temper even.

Cvetka looked shocked: "How did you get in here?"

Skips shrugged: "Doesn't matter. We all leave now, k? You don't look like you can defeat these."

Cvetka looked back to her group, saw them nodding to her and said: "Yeah, thanks for getting us out."

They were about to leave when Skips said: "And Rush: Any wrong movement and I will feed you to the monsters here! If your hands reach anywhere they were not supposed to be, you will lose them. Understood?"

Rush looked angry for a moment before silently looking down.

Skips nodded and then led the group to the exit. She often glanced at Rush, who behaved and kept his mouth closed, but whom she trusted as far as she could throw him. If she could get away with leaving him there, she would. However, even if her morals allowed it, it would prevent the dungeon from resetting. And if that thing didn't reset, they would not be able to delve it without a long wait. So Skips had to cope with the absolute knobhead for now, at least until she reached the end of the dungeon, waited for it to reset and then delved it for real. Still, until then, his existence was a thorn in her side, a stone in her nonexistent shoe, and a bee in her nonexisting bonnet.

A few monsters were summarily dispatched before they reached the exit only to see it being blocked. She looked towards Teki, no, Thrives-in-Water, and asked: "Is this working as intended?"

Thrives sighed: "Ugh, it is, but in the most annoying manner. The behaviour of a dungeon during lawful interception depends on their release date. Newer dungeons don't allow anyone to leave until the thing is either defeated or escaped with a police code. Which I don't have. Getting in is reasonably easy, getting out… now so much. If Lawful Interception is used by anyone not a police officer, like a rescue team, it requires the dungeon to be defeated. They seem to think that rescue teams can stabilise you long enough to defeat whatever is in there, which to be fair, dungeon rescue teams generally can. They're really high-levelled folks. The system just hates the idea that someone escapes a dungeon when the cops are after them."

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There was a longer explanation about what exactly cops are, including some swearwords from Thrives's side, which made Rush squirm. Then, Skips asked: "So? I take it, we have to cooperate until we're out of here?"

Teki confirmed this with a nod.

Skips made a defeated sigh and then groaned: "Okay, we are going to skip most of this misery. I am going to find out where the boss portal is. Stay right where you are, please."

Then, she ran.

KEREU TAAKI

Kaatiiek, the clerk, took a deep breath before he talked. "I never wanted to take this job because I liked that particular dirtbag. I wanted to work for the courts because I hoped I could make justice happen – and I couldn't afford to study law on earth or on Mountainchill, I guess." He looked to Kadish Anashii, the Kyadi-ha-Sygia, who was the only non-Sigya-ha-Sygia among them. "I learned relatively fast that the work was anything but and remained because I hoped I could help people get out of the fangs of this system. Sometimes, I even succeeded. And I wrote down a lot of things that were mentioned in passing, when Yarden Greenland ran his mouth." He took out a paper notebook, with a pen clipped to it and started to read from it. He painted a bleak picture: Yarden was sent from the Greenland family, one of the families behind the Unlimited Potential System in order to help increase the influence of the Greenland family, which mostly meant ensuring that the resources of Windrush were used to integrate new planets. That Yarden Greenland knew that the fabrication of magic relays for the integration of new worlds would cause diminishment among the Sigyan population, but that he ignored it. That he had known of the disablement of the governor and hated that the thing even existed as he hated the Sygians. That he often, especially in landmark cases, asked a certain Darwin Greenland, instead of checking the legal precedents and coming to an unbiased opinion. That he was hellishly corrupt in any of the minor cases. The reason that there was no public transit on Windrush was because of one of his decisions, directly influenced by the car lobby from earth. He also was an influential force in getting protections of workers cancelled. While the trip he took to earth was officially a gift, not a bribe, Kaatiiek was not fooled. He had initially reported ethical violations, but as he didn't trust the system, he did so pseudonymously with the names of colleagues he despised, only to see them get fired and, in the last case, have a 'traffic accident' a week later. Afterwards, Kaatiiek stopped. Yarden even was behind the prosecution of Kereu because the idea of a worker receiving adoration from average people could lead to them rising up and forming trade unions, in addition Yarden was, via shell companies, shilling pseudoscientific goods to protect against diminishment, so the idea that someone used extra-systemic means to heal people was also something Yarden noticed in his wallet.

At various times during the explanation, people reacted in anger, be it shouting, beating the ground, murmuring swearwords that would make an astronaut blush, or just covering the head in the hand and breathing heavily, as if commanding oneself to remain calm.

Kereu looked at Kaatiiek: "Is all of that real? Because if yes, it would be a scandal."

Kaatiiek nodded, then shrugged and responded: "Do you think anyone would believe us?"

Kereu sighed: "So, what do you think we can do?"

Jaaru responded: "Get to the spaceport. Cut off their reinforcements and escape route."

Init raised an eyebrow: "Why do you think they will try to get off the planet?"

It was Kadish who responded: "Because they have no allegiance to Windrush. If it stops making them money, giving them levels and stroking their egos, they do not want it. They will call it a write-off, potentially eventually get the military to intervene, but they will not try to make the world a better place. And they will absolutely not make themselves a better person for the changed circumstances."

INIT ANIIK

There was something about shutting down system after system that made her heart sing and her Interception skill rise, now reaching Level 6. The team knew better than to come to the spaceport with a force and the threat of violence. Instead, they arrived with reflective vests, clipboards, a shallow excuse that they had forgotten their badges, or lost them in the fights of the change, and a plan to sabotage. Init was a raging goddess of systems, causing not necessarily shutdowns, these were just something she did to shift attention of the IT teams, but also sabotage the IT infrastructure on a more subtle basis. The fact that some systems went belly up was just a way to distract the IT team from what she was actually intercepting: She was slowly inserting malware into the most relevant systems of both the spaceport and the ships. Yes, all cafeteria menus were down and vending machines were down, but at the same time, she had gained access to the control tower as well as the controls of the ship Sojourn, which was about to depart for Earth and right now, to both systems, it looked like the winds prevented takeoff. This was subtle, but that was the very point. She kept her Interception skill focussed on sensing what was happening. That was when she noticed the systems going through the bureaucratic machinations of a group of passengers arriving, their names being listed as "[censored for security purposes]" in the system. Init looked at Jaaru and gave her a nod: "It's happening! Get ready!"