[ 4 ]
“THERE ARE SIX BASIC STARTER SPECIES THE SYNDICATE USES TO SEED worlds. Humans are one of them. They find a compatible world, sprinkle the humans on there, wait a couple thousand years, and then reveal themselves to the largest settlement. They usually do this as soon as civilization starts to take hold, but long before any sort of industrial revolution. As long as there’s a working government, this counts as ‘First Contact.’ In a legal sense, I mean, which gives them leave to wait a couple thousand additional years, come back, and strip the planet dry.”
“How?” I asked. “It all happened in a second!”
Mordecai shrugged. “Technology beyond your understanding seems like magic. So as far as you’re concerned, in this place, it is magic. It’s like that Wizard of Oz movie, but you’ll never get to peek behind the curtain.”
“You’ve seen Wizard of Oz?”
“Guildmasters prepare for years for each new dungeon world. Kid, I have been preparing for this longer than you have been alive. The advance team arrived in your 1930s, I believe. Whenever that book came out, The Hobbit. I left the last system and entered the prep phase in your year 1964. I know this world and your customs just as well as you do. I even once got to shapeshift into a human and go out into the world. I went to a Blockbuster Video and stole a bunch of James Bond tapes. I was so happy once you guys started
digitizing everything.”
“How long have you been a guildmaster?”
Mordecai shook his head. “You don’t even want to know. So anyway, your planet defaulted on claiming Earth as a sovereign entity. You had 50
local years since first contact, and first contact was several thousand years ago. Whenever those pyramid things were built. The Borant Corporation has a huge backlog of worlds to mine, and your time is now.”
My head swam. “So, they’re taking all of our minerals?”
Mordecai nodded. “Sort of. Borant deals in rare elements and the like.
What they end up mining will fit on a single transport. I don’t know too much about that part of the process. The elements involved are unimportant. It’s a big universe out there, and there are plenty of places to mine. That’s not why they’re really here. While Borant does make a profit on the mining, the real
money is in the game. The dungeon.”
“How?”
“Are you kidding? The Syndicate consists of over three billion independent star systems. Every season, a new Dungeon Crawler World debuts across the net. Quintillions of citizens of the Syndicate become obsessed with the Crawl.”
“Wait, so this is like a TV show? Like Survivor?”
“Oh, I loved that show. And as far as you’re concerned, yes. It’s a show like Survivor. But it’s more a Running Man situation than a Survivor one.”
I leaned back in the chair. I’m on an alien television show. Holy shit.
Bea had always wanted to be on television. She’d tried out for countless reality shows. Me? I’d rather have a hot poker stuck through my eye. I briefly wondered where she was, and if she was alive. Probably not, I decided. It’d been 5 AM in the Bahamas when it had happened, which meant she’d probably been asleep in her hotel. Probably in bed with that asshole. And if by some miracle she had survived, there’s no way she’d have gone into one of those tunnels.
“So are there people watching right now?” I asked, looking around.
Mordecai put his hands together. “I will get to that in a moment. It doesn’t look like anyone else is going to be joining us any time soon, so let’s get the tutorial started.”
Mordecai’s right hand glowed for a moment, and I felt that haptic buzz in my brain. Across the room, Donut hissed and batted at the air.
You have been granted access to the Crawler Menu.
My world blinked, and several items appeared in my vision. A long green bar—a health bar, I realized—appeared in the top right. It pushed the timer down a notch. That blinking folder remained in my top left. A small minimap appeared in the bottom right.
“You just received a notification,” Mordecai said. “That’s called a crawler notification. There are a few different kinds, but that type will only be seen by you. There are also system messages, which everyone sees no matter what floor they’re on. Those may be in different voices. There are also floor-specific notifications, etcetera.”
“I have a blinking box in my top left,” I said.
“Those are game and status change notifications. Probably from your fight outside a few minutes back,” Mordecai said. “Don’t click it yet. We’ll get there. First, I want you to focus on the map on the bottom right. Look right at it, and make sure you’re thinking about looking at it.”
I did as he asked, and the map got bigger, increasing to fill my entire vision. It was a simple blue and gray map showing the hallways and a few random doorways. Most of the area around us wasn’t filled in. It only showed the area we’d walked, pushing out about twenty meters in every direction. A green dot sat in the middle, right in the guild. Two additional dots appeared, a blue one and a white one. I focused on the blue dot, and a note appeared
above it:
Crawler Princess Donut.
The white dot read: Guildmaster Mordecai.
The whole room glowed yellow, and when I focused on it, it read: Tutorial Guild.
A trio of X’s appeared outside in the hallway. I mentally clicked on one.
Corpse – Level 2 Goblin.
I mentally clicked away, and the whole map shrank back to normal.
“Good, good,” Mordecai said. “So, you’re the green dot, the blue dots will be other crawlers, white dots will be NPCs such as myself, and mobs will be red. There are a few other kinds, but you’ll figure those out along the way. By the way, no other crawlers or mobs can see your menus, but while you’re inside this guild, I can see what’s on your screen. You are already adept at opening and closing, which is good. Now try focusing on the map again. With your mind, pinch it smaller. And then move it across the screen.
That way you can customize your HUD.”
It went on like this for a while, him explaining how to open and close menus within my display. I could just think about it, and a whole menu system would pop up, giving me access to several folders. Once I got used to the weirdness of it being in my head, the system was quite intuitive.
The first menu was player stats. Like I mentioned earlier, I’d played a handful of computer and tabletop RPGs over the years, so this section wasn’t
too surprising. My stats were:
Strength: 6
Intelligence: 3
Constitution: 5
Dexterity: 5 Charisma: 4 According to Mordecai, I couldn’t directly adjust these stats. Not yet. I received three stat points every time I leveled up, but I couldn’t distribute them until I picked a race and class. And I couldn’t do that until I reached the third floor down. For now, these numbers went up and down on their own based on my inherent, real-life physical and mental attributes. He also added the typical adult human averaged between three and five for each of these first five stats, so my six in strength was good.
I could find items and potions that would either temporarily or permanently adjust these numbers, but for now, there wasn’t much I could do about them.
“Why do we have to wait until we go down to the third floor before we get to pick a class?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It takes a lot of energy to run this whole operation. I think they figure if you manage to make it to the third floor, you’re worth the investment to transfigure. Class is easy. But changing your race takes some doing. You’re being fundamentally changed at the cellular level. That’s a lot of effort for someone who’s just going to get eaten by a flytrap on the first floor.”
I hadn’t thought about it until that moment. I can change into a different type of creature. If this was a computer game, I’d do it in a second. I never played humans in games if I could help it. But permanently changing myself into something different? The thought made me ill. It was something I’d have to think about and deal with when I got there.
I grumbled a bit about that three in intelligence. Yeah, I never did too great in math, but I never considered myself a slobbering idiot, either. I could fix most anything electrical after studying it for a bit. My friend Billy Maloney, now that guy was an idiot. Just last week we’d come out of a bar, and he’d peed right on a cop’s bicycle while the cop was giving someone else a ticket for drunk and disorderly. That guy deserved an intelligence of three,
maybe two.
Billy is dead. He was still in jail. He’d had a warrant for failure to appear, so they’d taken him in. He’s dead like everyone else in the world. I pushed it away.
After I complained about my intelligence score to Mordecai, using the Billy example, he said, “Intelligence told you that bike belonged to a police officer. Wisdom told you not to urinate upon it. We all have a wisdom stat, but it doesn’t appear on that list. It used to, but they discovered changing one’s wisdom greatly changed their personality, so it’s no longer adjustable. I do not know what this Billy’s intelligence is, but I guarantee his wisdom is not a 5. Worry not about an intelligence of three unless you’re seeking a magic-based class. Your best bet is something that focuses on strength.”
That mollified me while Mordecai moved me to the next menu.
“This next screen is the single most important menu in the entire game.
Your life depends on these numbers.”
It was called Ratings. I clicked on it, and the list took me aback:
Ratings
Views: 0
Followers: 0
Favorites: 0 Patrons: 0 Apparently the first level of the dungeon was off-limits to live viewers, so these stats wouldn’t move until I descended to the second floor.
As of right now, no viewers had access to anything that was going on.
However, Borant would release an edited highlights reel over the next day or so. If I managed to get shown during the “premiere” of the show or any of the regular update episodes, it would be like hitting the lottery. Featured crawlers always gained billions of views and millions of followers right out the gate.
Given the sheer number of people in the world, I seriously doubted I was going to be featured, so if I wanted to survive, I needed to have what Mordecai called “Chutzpah” and “The ‘it’ factor.”
“You need to stand out. You can’t just kill that shambling acid impaler and walk away. You need to kill it with style, with excitement. Maybe you can come up with a catchphrase. During my crawl, I managed to accumulate almost 30 million followers and four patrons. That’s the only way I
survived.”
“Excuse me, a shambling what?”
“A shambling acid impaler. The second floor will be lousy with them.
They trounce about on four legs, are green, hairy. Spit darts at you that melt your skin off. Awful creatures.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. I still felt as if this was all a dream.
Mordecai snapped. “Hey. Kid. Pay attention. The monsters aren’t important. Well, they are. But this part especially is more important.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, waving him along. “Keep going.”
He went on to explain how viewership worked. Once I hit the second floor, watchers from across the universe had the ability to tune into any crawler they wished. Borant would continue to air highlights. So the longer I survived, the better my chances at getting featured. Any time someone watched me for just about eight seconds or so, it counted as a View. This stat didn’t help or hurt me, but it was a good indicator of how “interesting” I was.
“You might not like it,” Mordecai said, “but pay careful attention when I tell you this. Obtaining Patrons is crucial to your survival. There is plenty of great loot in the dungeon that’ll help you survive, but the best loot comes from benefactors. Patrons. Views lead to followers. If you’re being followed, it means the viewer has bookmarked your crawler ID. They can look in on you whenever they want. Following leads to favorites. If you’re favorited, that’s a good thing. It means the viewers are getting live updates on your stats and condition. They get notifications if you’re fighting. If someone has favorited you, they really want to know how you’re doing. Viewers only get a certain number of favorites, so consider it an honor.”
“But,” Mordecai continued, “ultimately, it’s all about the patrons. Lots of favorites will always lead to patrons. Patrons are usually organizations, not individuals. They’ll see someone has a lot of favorites, and they’ll sponsor you. It’s an advertising thing. They sponsor you by purchasing boxes for you.
There are dozens of types of boxes, and each type of box has six quality tiers.
Bronze, then Silver, then Gold, then Platinum, then Legendary, then Celestial.”
“Yeah,” I said drily. “You wouldn’t let me open my boxes yet. Can I do it now?”
“Hold up, kid,” Mordecai said. “We have a process here. We’ll get there in a minute.” He continued. “Most patrons can only afford, or are willing to, send you silver or gold boxes. Bronze boxes tend to be crap, but anything higher usually has some good stuff in it. Some of the richer patrons may even send you platinum boxes, though the cost for them has got to be
astronomical. That said, patrons are the only ones who can send what are called Benefactor Boxes. Those contain the rarest items. So even a bronze Benefactor Box is better than a plain, Gold Adventurer box. A Benefactor Box may contain items from the patron’s home world. You will never find a pulse rifle or automated power armor in any sort of box in the world dungeon, but it’s possible to get one from a patron. Does that make sense?”
“None of this shit makes sense,” I said. “But yes, I understand what you’re saying. I’m on an intergalactic game show, and I have to be an obnoxious showoff in order to get eyes on me. And once I do have eyes on me, I might get a loot box with toilet paper in it. Does that about sum it up?”
Mordecai clapped his rat hands. “Yes! But toilet paper is complimentary.
Restrooms are liberally populated throughout the map. It’s the only place the
viewer cameras can’t follow you.”
“Are you serious?”
Mordecai nodded. “Oh, I’m serious. The last dungeon Borant managed didn’t have rest areas, and the crawlers were pissing and crapping all over the place. Crawlers lose viewers when they’re shitting in the middle of a hallway.
It’s gross.”
“And what does Borant get out of this?”
Mordecai’s demeanor changed. It was a subtle thing, but he stiffened slightly. His voice took on an oddly formal tone.
“In addition to the mining income we already discussed, the Borant Corporation receives advertising dollars, a stipend from the Syndicate government, and a commission on every credit spent by patrons.” He waited a moment, a long moment, before adding, “Also, it should be noted that every time a crawler mentions the name of either the interstellar government or the organization sponsoring the current crawl, the system AI will record the interaction for review. If it is found a crawler is disparaging either of these two entities, especially while on-camera with live viewers, the crawler’s experience may be ‘accelerated.’”
I nodded. “Got it.” I had no doubt that “accelerated” meant nothing good.
We spent the next several minutes going over a few other menu items. I had a health menu like in other games. Overall health was a single green bar, but in the menu, it was a more extensive pie chart. It indicated any active conditions and debuffs plus I could drill down to specific areas. Healing was sped up in the dungeon. I had recently been cured of several issues I didn’t even know I had, like abrasions at the bottom of my feet and on my hands,
frostbite, and the start of an infection from when Donut had bit me. Health ticked up on its own slowly based on my constitution level.
Also, if I went down a set of stairs to the next floor, my health points would instantly fill all the way up on their own. Another way to heal myself was via spells, potions, and scrolls. But there was no respawning.
Dead was dead.
After that was my skills menu. This section just went on and on and on.
There seemed to be an infinite number of pages. If I didn’t have the skill, I couldn’t read what it said. It was still listed there, but the words were blurred out. Literally hundreds of pages would scroll by before I saw anything.
Mordecai had me change the view to skills I did have, and that list was just as long. I had things like Breathing: 3. Walking: 4. Operating a Sony Brand RMVLZ620 Universal Remote Control: 1. The list just never ended. He had me uncheck a box, and most of those skills disappeared. What was left was still several pages long. Then another check, and anything with a skill of one or two disappeared. What was left was things like Unarmed Combat: 3, Basic Electrical Repair: 6, Swimming: 4. Nothing was over five other than Electrical Repair. Most everything was three.
“This is a good start,” Mordecai said. “I’m impressed, kid. You’re proficient with several earth weapons, all firearms. But since you didn’t bring any, you’ll want to train with some of the dungeon-based weapons. We’ll see if you have anything good in any of the boxes when we get to it.”
“And you’ll train me how to use them?”
“Nope,” Mordecai said. “Not my job. There are guildhalls scattered around that’ll help you level up the skills—especially magic ones. But the best way is always to practice.”
“Is there a store?” I asked. “The AI thing said something about a store.”
“That’s when you reach the third floor,” Mordecai said. “There’s a structure to the third floor, and random stores will start populating the map after that. You can also trade with other crawlers or friendly mobs, if you can find any. Mobs on the second floor will start dropping gold.”
Next was the magic menu, which was complicated as shit. It was also one of the most surreal parts of this adventure so far. I was given a simple healing spell and a pool of mana points which appeared in my top right underneath the health bar. Because my intelligence was only three, I only had three magic points. The healing spell cost two. Magic points naturally refilled about one every hour.
I had a hotlist of ten spaces along the bottom of my screen, and there I could add potions or spells or other special items. Mordecai had me place the healing spell in spot number one. I could mentally click it to cast it. The spell was only a level one basic healing spell, and it would heal about 20% of my health.
He made me try it, even though my health was already at the top. I cast the spell, and my whole body glowed red, my magic bar went down by 2/3s, and nothing else happened.
“If you were injured or sick, you’d feel much better after that,” Mordecai said.
A voice boomed, interrupting the tutorial. This was yet another speaker.
Not the game show host that usually spoke, but a distinctly female voice. She spoke almost casually, like a manager addressing a store filled with employees just before they opened for business.
Hello, Crawlers! The dungeon is now sealed. We have a diverse group joining us this season, and we are very happy to have you here.
We had just under 13 million human crawlers make it through the gates and into the dungeon. We are already down to under 10 million. A quick note, the entrances to the second floor will not open up until the introductory episode of Dungeon Crawler World tunnels, which will be in approximately 30 of your hours. Once that happens, the entrances to the second level will populate. There will be no lag time for the appearance of additional levels. On behalf of the Borant Corporation I wanted to thank you for volunteering, and I wish you all good luck and a happy crawl.
Ten million people. It was more than I expected. But still, three million additional people dead in a matter of minutes. The number was so huge, it lost meaning.
The announcement made me think of the way the dungeon was set up.
The 5-day countdown timer continued to tick away.
“Do we get five days before they destroy each floor?”
Mordecai shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s usually more each floor down. Later on, it’ll depend on a lot of factors, such as ratings, how many crawlers are left, etcetera. But they usually add about five days each time. So you’ll probably have ten days for the second floor and then fifteen for the third. The countdown doesn’t start until the previous floor collapses.”
“How hard is it to find the staircases?”
“It can be tricky. It’s not too difficult for the first few levels, but you’ll want to focus on finding items or skills that’ll help you find the next entrance down. This first floor is huge, as you can imagine. It’s almost the size of the surface of your planet. They won’t tell you this, but it’s not all connected. It’s not like you can wander about and run into someone from China. That’ll change once you hit the third floor. You’ll see if you survive that long.
Starting on the fourth floor, each level will have a random theme and will encompass significantly less area. Entrances will stop populating in random places. They’ll be guarded. You’ll have to complete quests or defeat bosses to get to them. I had barely made it to floor 11. And when I saw what guarded the entrances to level 12… I knew it wouldn’t be worth it.”
“What was it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’ll be different here. It’s different every time.”
From there we resumed the tutorial. We went over the Party menu. If I had been accompanied by a group of people, we could manage our party in this menu. Party members shared experience and were able to access a group chat feature. Anyone who entered the dungeon at the same time as anyone else was automatically grouped together, and as a result, I had a party of two.
Me and Donut.
The cat continued to lounge in front of the fire. It appeared she’d fallen asleep.
“So, my cat,” I said. “The system has given her a crawler name and designator. Does that mean she’s getting all these special achievements and loot boxes too?”
“Yes. Any biological creature above a certain weight who enters the dungeon is assigned a crawler ID. But one needs at least an intelligence of two to qualify for training, and if you can’t do training, your inventory doesn’t get turned on, which allows you to access your boxes. Otherwise, they’re designated as pets. All the other ones, like wild animals who happen to make it inside very rarely make it past the first floor. We’ll get to the pet menu after we open up your inventory, which is the next step.”
Now that we’d put about twenty minutes between my earlier mention of Borant, I wanted to continue our previous conversation.
“Before we do that, I have a couple questions about the people running
the show.”
He paused. “What is it?”
“Are they always listening?”
“Listening, yes. Paying attention, not necessarily. They expect a certain amount of …gnashing of teeth… amongst the crawlers. And we NPCs are required to say the name of the organizers multiple times during the training, so we’re mostly ignored. Mostly. You really need to be careful once you start collecting followers. They know they’re sadistic assholes, but they don’t want you saying it on camera. They take their image quite seriously.”
“I’m no math expert, but when the dungeon opened, there were tons of the glowing entrances in my city. They said there were only 150,000 of them seeded around the world. It seemed like… too many for my area.”
“They have certain benchmarks they try to reach. The AI closely monitors the launch of the game, but there are loopholes. The entrances are rarely distributed equally. Ten million crawlers upon the sealing of the dungeon is pretty typical. So however it happened, it wasn’t on accident. Like I said, they spend a lot of time preparing for each dungeon.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that,” I said. “You’ve been here for decades. Does this show really only air once every 90 years or so?”
“No, not at all,” Mordecai said. “Different corporations run each season, which appear about every two and a quarter of your years. My employer usually has about five forward teams working at any given time, and they get chosen to run a season about one in fifteen.”
“So with different corporations running each season and different worlds, uh, crawling, then is every season vastly different?”
“Oh yes. The Squim Conglomerate chooses a different game completely, for example. It’s a battle royale-style fight. An entire world, and it all comes down to one champion. It’s good for ratings, but it doesn’t make them much money from what I understand. My company is known for making the most elaborate, most entertaining dungeons.”
Wonderful. “And you?” I asked. “Are you stuck here for the rest of your life?”
“No,” Mordecai said, smiling sadly. He looked down at the framed picture of the eagle creature I had placed on the floor. “This is my last tour.
Once this nightmare is over, I become a full citizen, I receive a moderate stipend, and I am free to make my way into the universe.”
“Will you go back to your home planet?”
“No,” he said. “It’s not open to me.”
“What about the people who didn’t go into the dungeon on your world?”
He paused. “We really need to get back to the tutorial.”
“Okay, but what if someone won the dungeon, made it past level 18. The message said if that happens, they gain control of the world. Maybe your world is under control of one of your people.”
The rat creature grunted. “Remember how I said I made it down to the
11th floor?”
“Yeah.”
“A handful of crawlers over the centuries have made it that far. One once made it down to 13. One. He died within a half-hour of hitting the floor. He was a human, like you. But from another human world. That’s the deepest anyone has ever delved, kid. Level 13.”
