Today’s Earth date: September 29? 1991
I have frostbite on two fingers and three toes. They hurt like hell for a while, but now they’re numb, which is like getting bad yet good news. I’m doing my best to baby them so they don’t fall off. I hope sleeping in a bed gives us the system reset we’re used to, topping off our hitpoints and undoing injuries.
I’d rather not lose any digits, if I can help it.
We’re out of the mountains, at least, but not out of the woods. We don’t know where we are or which way to travel to reach Cuan, and we have no more rations. Those of us who can still move okay have been picking berries, but that’s not going to take us very far.
-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin
***
The rangers wouldn’t be healthy enough to return to the dungeon for a few weeks yet. Gus and Artie could probably manage, but Dekar had a broken arm. If all three of them couldn’t take a job, none of them would. Wayne could respect that, even if it was disappointing. He spoke to a captain of the city guard about who else might be worth hiring and came away with a list of two ranger groups and three mercenary groups.
Wayne had three choices for his next move that he could see:
-Wait for Gus’ group to heal
-Hire a new group
-Go by himself
Abandoning the quest completely didn’t cross his mind. Quicken might be accounting software, but Wayne didn’t care. He needed that page even if it had no benefit. He would rather struggle and discover it sucked than go the rest of his life with that nagging curiosity. Knowing bad news was preferable to missing good news, which, as he thought on that, may not be healthy. Or was it actually the healthiest perspective of all?
At any rate, he decided to go alone. That might be dangerous, but so was carrying a bunch of valuable gear into a dungeon with four strangers exceptionally adept at killing and strongly motivated by money.
Leaving a dungeon and having to return to clear it was a feeling Wayne hated in video games. If he was in that situation, it meant he had gone in too soon or unprepared. That was embarrassing, and it was a massive waste of time. Retreading a dungeon dense with random encounters was like rubbing his face in his failure, and it took forever.
After a good bit of travel, part of that in the tunnel, Wayne descended into the dungeon, using Brake to cover the descent in three beats instead of climbing the normal way. A little bit more speed was great, but practicing Brake was of more interest to Wayne.
The motion sickness wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. His ability to judge distance from above also improved. If he got good enough–and grew a massive pair of balls–he could jump from any height and waterbucket the landing. All he needed to do was tap Brake at the right moment.
Yeah. Simple.
Walking a dungeon alone was unnerving, especially after passing the dried blood of the explorers the rangers recovered. At least their bodies had been retrieved.
Even if Probe wouldn’t detect sleeping gargoyles, he continued his habit of using Probe as often as he could. Between the Chosen Heroes passing through and Wayne’s own party doing the same, the dungeon should be empty, or nearly empty.
He could handle it, he assured himself. Always needing a friend or a copilot to go anywhere was a habit from his old life, and that fear of being alone caused him to miss many unique experiences.
Jumping right into solo dungeon crawling might have been a bit extreme. He could have just taken a long hike or something, ease himself into it.
But he was here, following in the Chosen Heroes’ footsteps, climbing a set of ancient dwarven stairs with only his magic headlamp spell to keep him company. Wayne scanned for traps as he went and looked for anything that could be a gargoyle. He found a few the Heroes hadn’t killed, but they were a rarity and were usually alone.
Fighting so many of them with the rangers made hunting gargoyles feel as trivial as goblins. He triggered them to come to life and then stab-stab and on to the next. Without the element of surprise or incredible numbers, they were much less dangerous, but best not to get cocky.
In addition to looking for something lootable, he intended to finish the dungeon map as well. Instead of drawing as he went like Fergus, Wayne paused periodically to copy the map on his HUD. Properly orienting every piece of the map was much easier that way as was getting the proportions of rooms and hallways right.
Sticking to the floor numbering conventions he established with the rangers, he was on floor 3 when he finally found something interesting.
In one of the many laboratories, he found a corner that had been rearranged into a campsite. One of the people who used this camp was bored enough to scribble on the walls. In dripping black ink, he saw the tell-tale outline of a hastily sketched penis.
Dick jokes were plentiful in this world too, but that style of drawn penis was unique to Earth culture. A masterpiece of civilization if we’re being honest.
At any rate, Wayne was certain this was where the Heroes camped out for at least part of their crawl. Plenty of dust had settled since, but he could still make out where they put their bedrolls, and the chairs they circled up while they rested still had finger streaks on their backs, left from someone moving them.
Looking closely, he saw a four letter game of hangman carved into a pantry door. That must have been the slowest game of hangman ever, Wayne thought. The four letter word was POOP, and whoever was playing was a leg and an arm away from losing.
Yeah, that felt like eighteen year-olds from Earth. Brushing the dust away, he found ink on the door as well. Each of the Heroes had signed it and “was here” came right after.
Like all of the furniture in the dungeon, the door had a distinct craftsmanship to it, likely something recognizable as dwarven to an expert. Wayne could say for certain the handwriting matched the Heroes, easily recognizing who was who from reading their journals. The pantry door was also the perfect size for carrying, about the size of a shield.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
He looked for hinges to detach, but dwarven construction was more sophisticated than what he would find at Home Depot. Wayne could see where the doors hinged, but no hardware was visible. He puzzled over it for several minutes before he had a better idea.
Urg.
He yanked the door free.
If Kryss wanted to argue about this find being verifiable or not he could sell it somewhere else, of that he was certain. The novelty of it was so tempting to him that he wouldn’t mind keeping it. Tossing it in Storage to use for decoration when all this was done would be easy enough. In fact, why wasn’t he picking up more souvenirs during his travels in general? He could cram quite a bit into two instances of Storage.
With a few more floors to explore yet, he set the door aside next to the stairs so he could grab it on the way out.
The upper floors, 7 and 8 especially, looked more residential and commercial than all of the studies, workshops, and laboratories below. A few areas had stalls like a market, and he found one library, a large one. All of these books fell apart in his hands as well. He had as many as another hundred books to try, but if they were salvageable, he clearly didn’t know how to accomplish that. Better he stop trashing them.
Recalling a passage from Laszlo’s journal, he remembered the Paladin describing the dungeon as full but empty, and he found himself agreeing. It was like the first dwarves hit CTRL+V over and over and called it a day–and then no one moved in when they were done.
The stairs going up to floor 9 carried the chill of winter, and not long after, he found the exit, high in the mountains. The wind lashed at the mountainside. Standing in it meant each gust relentlessly running him through with chills as it swirled loose snow around him. Visibility wasn’t great, but what he could see was all sharp rocks and steep slopes.
On a whim, he picked a point out in the distance and activated Navigation. A path appeared on his HUD, and it zig zagged back and forth on top of itself dozens of times. A flattened map was not useful in the mountains where paths were more vertical than horizontal, it seemed. The Heroes hiked down to Cuan from here, and Wayne was happy he got to turn around and go back inside.
The dungeon was mapped, he had a trophy for Kryss, and the monsters were dead. By all the usual standards, this counted as a full clear, but Wayne had the feeling that he missed something. A lifetime of gaming taught him to spot the telltale signs of hidden loot, like a waterfall, a curiously arranged set of bushes, an unusually prominent dead end, or a stone that was immovable now but would clearly be movable later.
Horcus the Chosen Wizard adopted the video game mentality according to the Hero journals, and he helped save the world, so maybe Wayne should trust in game logic far more than he had been.
The walk was long but uneventful. He carried his graffitied door down to floor 1, set it down, and continued descending to the pit chamber.
The room was as they left it: bits of gargoyle and crystal scattered throughout, a splash of blood from Artie’s wounds, a few stone demon corpses, and an enormous pit.
They searched the room on their first visit, but it was rushed. The party was wounded, tired, and hungry. Their missing an obvious point of interest was unlikely, but under those circumstances, any human could overlook something small, like a button, a switch, a secret door, or a coded message.
Standing at the edge of the pit, he shone his headlamp about the room, trying to pinpoint a source for his lingering sense of incompletion.
He looked up at the ceiling.
“The earthquakes…”
The Heroes experienced an earthquake in the tunnel, but Wayne’s party had to kill the dungeon boss to trigger theirs.
“Play this out like an RPG.”
In his mind’s eye, he saw a 16-bit party descend the stairs, finding a magic crystal suspended over a pit and a ring of demon statues. Their entrance triggers a dramatic scene where one character notices a crack in the crystal just before it bursts. It explodes, spreading unconscious party members around the room. Just when they’ve collected themselves, the gargoyle emerges from the pit and attacks. When the gargoyle dies, the earthquake triggers.
Fergus’ theory was that the dungeon was built to contain the gargoyle they fought, yet none of the monsters in the basement floors had been disturbed, and the magic crystal that would presumably power the force that restrained the gargoyle was already broken when they arrived.
And the boss wasn’t running loose. He didn’t attack until Fergus touched a crystal.
Why did all of this feel so wrong?
Wayne looked down into the pit. His magic headlamp wasn’t powerful enough to reach the bottom.
Missile.
He watched the magic fireball rocket down the hole, casting a circle of light on the pit walls as it went. In the perfect quiet of an empty dungeon, he heard the Missile strike a solid surface. From this distance, all he could see was the pinprick of light blink out instead of fade.
If treasure was hidden in this dungeon, it would be down there.
All the way down.
Wayne jumped.
Brake.
Brake-Brake-Brake.
Brake.
Brake.
Brake-Brake.
Brake-Brake-Brake-Brake.
When Wayne finally reached the bottom, he immediately slipped on the countless shards of broken demon statues. Queasy from the descent, he fell and sat in demon dust while he breathed slowly to quell the churn in his stomach and the wobble in his brain.
The bottom of the pit had the same dimensions as the mouth above and had a stone gazebo-like structure in the middle. The top of that structure had a pedestal, and on it Wayne found gouges from gargoyle claws, like something nasty had taken off from this point and flown up.
Inside the gazebo, centered perfectly and oriented so it would face the stairs above, was a chest carved from stone.
“I knew it. I knew it.”
Boss battles traditionally ended with a worthwhile reward. This must be that reward.
Standing as far away as he could, he focused on the chest and cast Open.
The lid flung back and smashed against the floor, cracking and chipping, unleashing an awful echo that vibrated Wayne’s teeth.
His heart fluttered with anticipation as he approached and looked inside.
The chest was empty save for a strip of stone that looked like a single ski broken in half. A line of dwarvish text ran from end to end. His work as a scholar made the script easy to recognize, but he would need a stack of reference materials to translate the text. He gently retrieved it to get a closer look.
When he lifted the stone, the floor beneath his feet vibrated slightly, and he felt a slight increase in gravity, like the first second of an elevator beginning its ascent.
Yep. Just like an elevator. He slowly approached the light far above his head, happy that he wouldn’t have to use any of his ideas for getting back out. Like spamming Blitz straight up dozens of times or rolling the dice on casting Rise. He believed he would appear in a B2 hallway, but if he was wrong, he could teleport into a void with no exits or possibly on top of the mountain, like ending up on the roof of Big Benny’s back in Taobh.
The floor lurched, shook, and slowed to a stop with a grating screech.
He had risen a fair amount, but he was still far from the opening of the pit.
Frowning, he hugged the stone strip to his chest and lay on his back on top of the gazebo like he was going to look for shapes in clouds.
Blitz-Blitz-Blitz-Blitz.