Simbul sighed as the door shut behind Clay and his friends. Slowly, she put her latest notebook and pencil down, then hopped down from the table she had been sitting on. She walked calmly over to the nearby table where Lynn had placed her first notebook before the group had left. She sighed again as she flipped through the pages.
“Maybe I can just get away with erasing, after all this is just the first draft anyway,” she said popping the notebook into her inventory.
She looked at the blackboards that she had used for the tutorial and briefly considered putting them away, then decided that would be too much effort.
Gathering her pencil and second notebook, she made her way to the rear of the Guildhall and through a curtain that was used to partition the area behind the rear counter from the rest of the room. After passing through the curtain, she sat her current notebook on a table beside a small bed, then she picked up the only other item on the table, a picture frame. Inside the picture frame was a photograph of two bald, seemingly human women with an arm around each other and waving. Both women had no eyebrows and would have looked identical were it not for the tattoos on both of their heads.
“Hiya, sis,” she said, running a tiny finger lightly over the cheek of the woman on the left. “I got my first crawlers today. They were human… well, one was a horse… actually horse is wrong too because Marv is a unicorn now, which is technically a horse, but more in the mythical variety, I guess. Anyway, one of the crawlers was his owner and she reminded me a lot of you. The system Ai for this crawl has even taken a liking to her too, just like ours did with you, though this one was a hell of a lot more generous with the loot than ours ever was, probably because the time limits are so much more restricted this season than they have ever been.
“So, this crawler, her name is Clay, like the dirt, she and two of her other friends were dressed up like anime characters, the Sailor Scouts to be exact, you know, Sailor Moon? I’ve told you about the show before. Anyway, they were dressed up like that and they had two men with them too, one was dressed like Tuxedo Mask but like an evil version of Tuxedo Mask. He tried to strike me too, the gall. Oh, and the other one was also dressed up like cartoon character… um… I can’t remember the characters name but he was in that cartoon X-Men from the 90’s. That’s X with a capital X, by the way, not ex, though that would be funny.
“They had some other friends when they entered but three of them died pretty quickly. I removed them from the party menu before they saw it so that they wouldn’t be reminded any more of their deaths than they already were… in fact one died while we were getting started on the tutorial.”
Simbul let out a long sigh.
“I’m not sure how many of them will survive long enough to get deal with the Syndicate and escape, but I’m going to do the best I can to prepare them for the later floors…
“What was I saying… OH! Right. Clay. She almost got an entire set of equipment just on her first bunch of loot boxes. I have never seen favoritism quite like that before. Even her horse got some good stuff. But, as I mentioned before, she reminds me of you, not just because of the Ai favoring her, but also the way her other friends look to her. Yes, they teased her, but it is clear they all viewed her as someone to follow, kind of like you, sis.
“There is another reason she reminded me of you though… and it is impressive this happened before the first day had finished. She managed to upset the Ai to the point where it threatened to accelerate her, just like ours did with you when we hit the tenth floor. Luckily, she gave in to it’s demands immediately and it has backed off the threat for now…
“You know, I really wish you had… I know you just did what you thought was right, sis, but I really wish you hadn’t been so stubborn. You would probably still be alive today if you had.”
A tear fell and hit the corner of the picture frame.
“I miss you, Laeral,” she said before sitting the photo back down on the small table.
Simbul waved a hand and her current outfit disappeared with a poof, and was replaced by a cute pajama set with rainbows and unicorns on it. She crawled into the small bed and hugged a tattered old teddy bear that was beside the pillow before drifting off to sleep.
******
The door closed behind us with an ominous boom. Once again, we were on our own in the torchlit halls of the dungeon.
“Okay… I know how to get us to that Safe Room that was on the map Simbul showed us,” I said after the echo from the door shutting had faded. “The map she had drawn was actually the map of this area and, lucky for us, I was able to commit it to memory. There is a problem though.”
“We are in a place that wants to kill us and turn you into a girl?” Matt offered helpfully.
I glared at him.
“I don’t know, I think her new additions suit her,” Lynn said cheerfully.
“You are clearly handling this better than me,” I responded. “Is there something I should know?”
“Nope!” She replied, patting me gently on the cheek. “Though I’m not complaining. They really do suit you, Callie.”
I sighed at her use of that name. I shot a look to my other friends daring them to join in on her teasing.
“Okay, so you said there is a problem,” Aaron stated, then asked, “What is it?”
“Look at your map,” I responded. “You see those red dots?”
He nodded.
“We have to go through them,” I said.
“Dude, one of them is a level 4,” Matt pointed out. “I’m not a gamer like you and your girlfriend, but even I know a level 4 is stronger than a level 1, and that’s not mentioning the level 3s and 2s over there either.”
“Maybe we can talk to them and negotiate our way through?” Mary suggested.
Marv cleared his throat.
“If I may, Lady Mary,” he said. “I shall keep you all safe from the scoundrels, there is no need to fear a confrontation.”
“Even if we could, I doubt we would get any experience for doing so, plus they are red which means they are hostile,” I pointed out. “Also, at one point, Simbul pointed out that the lower we go, the stronger everything will get. We will have to kill stuff to level up ourselves, even if we can’t benefit from the stat distribution until the third floor. I say we tear our way though those, get to the saferoom, and then go out hunting for a set of stairs leading down to the second floor. While we search, we get whatever levels we can from anything that is hostile.”
“If we find the stairs quickly, do you think we should just go ahead and go down then?” Lynn asked, less for herself and more for the non-gamers in the group. She knew how I thought.
“No,” I answered. “If we find the stairs and there is more than 5 hours till the level collapse, I say we grind in the area to rack up as much experience as we can.”
“Grind?” Matt asked.
“What My Lady means, oh ignorant child, is that we, as the uncouth one would put it, “kill the shit out of everything in the area.”” Marv replied.
“You know I’m older than you by, like, fifteen years, right?” Matt pointed out.
“Age is but a number, it does not constitute wisdom,” Marv retorted.
“Will you two not bicker, please?” I asked. “And yes, as Marv put it, we kill the shit out of anything with a red dot until right before the collapse, then head down the stairs. That way we maximize our experience gain to better prepare for the third floor and beyond… Any arguments or does this plan work for everyone?”
Lynn, Matt, and Aaron readily agreed, but Mary had a look of doubt for a moment before agreeing as well.
As a group, we moved down the hall as quietly as we could, which wasn’t that quiet because Marv’s hooves clopped loudly on the stone.
We are going to have to figure out a way to muffle his footsteps, I thought to myself.
As we drew closer to where the red dots were, I could see on the map that just beyond them was a large chamber. They had gathered in the entryway. For a second, I thought I caught a flash of blue among the red, but when I looked again the hint of blue I thought I had seen was gone.
That was when the sound of hooting and hollering reached us, accompanied by music.
“Is that… Lynyrd Skynyrd?” Matt asked.
I paused and listened closely.
“It sounds like it,” I said recognizing the song being played as The Ballad of Curtis Loew, though the voices singing were way off key and slurred with their words, which I couldn’t quite make out.
I checked my minimap and again saw what looked like a splash of blue among the red. I motioned for everyone to stop moving and pulled up my map proper, then zoomed in on where the red dots were. There was a solitary blue dot so close to one of the red ones that they had overlapped when the view was zoomed out. There were also a lot of X’s scattered around as well. I focused on the blue dot.
Crawler Derrik #142
And then I looked at several of the Xs to confirm my suspicions.
Corpse – Crawler Beatrice #843
Corpse – Crawler Jackson #1000
Corpse – Level 4 Crocodilian Butcher
Corpse – Level 1 Crocodilian Yokel
Corpse – Crawler Ashley #666
I got the point.
“Guys, there is another crawler in the center of that group,” I told my friends. “And there are a few dead crawlers as well, though from the look of the markers on the map, they took down a number of mobs with them.”
They all paused for a second as they looked at their maps.
“My Lady, and retinue, I suggest that we swap to the chat function until we get closer so that we can catch them by surprise and rescue this noble Derrik.” Marv said as a sense of courageous bravado filled the space in my mind that his emotions occupied.
"Why is he noble?" Matt asked. "You haven't even met the guy."
"Derrik is a most noble of names, clearly he would be of noble standing," Marv patiently explained.
We started moving forward again, a bit slower pace so as not to make any excess noise. Even Marv figured out some way to clop along slightly quieter than before.
CLAY: Good idea, Marv. Way to think ahead.
MARV: I live to serve… you. Just you, but serve nonetheless, My Lady.
MATT: I’m not going to argue that this isn’t a good idea, but your hooves are still loud, Marv, and might give us away before we can ever see what we are walking into.
MARV: Hmph!
AARON: He’s right. How about one of us sneak ahead and report back what we see while the rest follow at a slower pace?
CLAY: That could work.
We all turned to stare expectantly at Aaron.
AARON: What?
MARV: You suggested it, now get on with the scouting.
His eyes bulged incredulously.
MARY: He makes a good point, brother.
MATT: Yeah, so get to it. The faster you can do recon the sooner we can act.
LYNN: Guys, I hate to raise this point… but how do we know they don’t have a minimap like we do and already know we are here?
That made us all pause again.
AARON: Fuck it, then I guess I’ll do what I apparently do best.
With that, he turned and charged down the hall.