Chapter 41 (Patreon)

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I still had plenty of moonshine left, and Donut and I spent the hour torching all the pupae in the large room. I looked up at the map. There was no way we could get to them all. We were going to have to hightail it out of here. 

With the unfortunate destruction of the chopper, our travel options were now limited. I had enough crap in my massive inventory to probably build another one, but I didn’t know what I was doing with the boiler part of the mechanism. Hopefully we could find another set of goblins to help us. Or better yet, find something better. 

About forty minutes after we killed the elemental, the tattered remains of Meadow Lark entered the chamber. Brandon, Chris, and Imani had built a second, less elegant transportation system. There were 36 residents left, and they were piled into three separate shopping-cart-like contraptions, built with chopper wheels and hunks of wood. Chris and Imani pushed the two larger “people buckets” as Brandon called them. This time, both of them strained with the effort. Brandon, whose strength was nowhere near the other’s, also awkwardly pushed a group of six people into the room. 

“We didn’t need your directions,” Brandon said. “There’s a long trail of scorched hallway that leads directly to this hole.” He paused. “There are a lot of those chrysalis things out there. You sure you don’t just want to come with us?” 

“I’m sure,” I said. I looked into the smoking hole. “Do me a favor though, and pick up anything you find down there. There probably isn’t much left.” 

He nodded. I reached out to shake his hand, and he pulled me into a hug. “You two take care of yourselves, okay?” 

I grinned. “You do the same.” 

I said my goodbyes to Chris and Imani. I found Donut on the lap of Mrs. McGibbons, purring away. 

“Barry?” she asked as I walked up. “Barry, where are we?” 

“We’re in the dungeon, Mrs. McGibbons. It’s me, Carl. You’re going down to the next floor.” 

She looked at me, her eyes registering confusion. Once again, I felt a wave of doubt wash over me. Was this the right thing? What else could we do? 

“The dungeon?” she asked. “Like a sex thing?” 

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to see you again,” I said, kneeling down. She sat in the people bucket, looking about, eyes wide. “I wanted to say goodbye.” 

She reached up and touched my cheek. Her hands were worryingly cold. “We should have had children, Barry. I wish I hadn’t talked you into working so hard.” 

I grasped her hand. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” I remembered my mom saying the same thing to me the day she had left. It had been a lie then, and it was a lie now.  

“I think I’ve had too much to drink,” she said. “Or another one of those acid flashbacks. This cat keeps talking to me.” 

I smiled. “Goodbye, Mrs. McGibbons.” 

~

Imani was the last to go down the ramp. It’d gone quickly. She waved, unsmiling at us. I waved back, and we turned away.

“Do you think we’ll ever see them again?” Donut asked. 

“I don’t know,” I said. 

We angled toward the quadrant with the kobolds, killing all the grubs and burning all the pupae we passed. Earlier, I had noted a safe room deep in the kobold quadrant, along the back side of the area. We would grind our way toward it and try to get a nap before we had to do this next interview. 

Hopefully the wasp monsters, when they hatched, would remain in their area. 

~

Kobold Rider – Level 5

Here’s an interesting fact. The DNA of a kobold and the DNA of a chihuahua are almost identical. That should tell you almost everything you need to know about these yappy little assholes. 

Small, angry, think they are bigger than they really are, there is nothing more terrifying than a pack of these little bastards charging at you across the battlefield, at least in their own minds. But don’t underestimate them, either. They are fearless, they are intelligent, and they bite first, ask questions later.

Their mounts, the Danger Dingoes, should probably worry you.    

The last time I’d played Dungeons and Dragons had been aboard the USCGC Stratton. I remembered kobolds as little, lizard-like monsters. Here, they were different. They, indeed, looked like goddamned armored chihuahuas. They were about the same size as the barking little dogs, but they stood upright and wore chainmail armor that seemed to be made out of beer can tabs. Each wore tiny metal caps with a spike on them. 

Most of them were armed with long, angry-looking spears with feathers hanging off the end. They wielded them like lances. 

“Dogs riding dogs,” Donut spit as the pair of Danger-Dingo-riding kobolds charged at us. “I’ve had nightmares like this.” She hissed and fired a pair of magic missiles, hitting the mounts. The level-5 dingoes stumbled, rolling forward. I formed a fist as the two kobold riders went flying. The first one crunched onto the ground, breaking his neck. The second bounced up, yapping, teeth frothing. It charged at me. I punched it, and it splattered against the wall. The things were more solid than they looked.

I fell back as one of the dingoes lunged at me. This one had a Septic debuff blinking over its head.  This monster’s snarl and bark was deeper, more terrifying than that of its rider. Their white face paint made them appear even more frightening. Donut leaped onto the back of the dingo, ripping with her back claws as she hopped high into the air and fired a third magic missile at the still-recovering second mount, killing it. The dingo on top of me shuddered, then fell over, dead. Stinking blood and gore washed over me as I pushed it off.

Donut landed deftly next to me and started licking her paw. 

“That was pretty slick,” I said, brushing myself off. My entire front was soaked in gore. “You’re getting a lot better at that.” 

“I think I have a bonus to damage against canine creatures,” she said. “That reminds me, I saw something weird earlier, and I forgot to tell you about it. It was a new tab that said ‘Racial benefits,’ but it was only there for a second. It blinked and disappeared.” 

“That is weird,” I said. Instinctively, I pulled up my own menu, and I didn’t have anything like that. 

The safe room was just around the corner. After we obliterated the kobold and dingo corpses, we headed toward it. This was another one of the non-manned rooms. The room appeared to have once been some sort of industrial kitchen, but with all the appliances removed except a large, walk-in freezer that still was in working order. We inspected the giant refrigerator, but it was empty. 

A stainless steel counter stood underneath the set of screens, and on the counter was a plain, metallic toaster, surrounded by a pile of crumbs. It didn't seem to be plugged into anything, but I couldn't lift it up, either. Up on the screen it read, Free Mana Toast! One per Crawler!

I pressed down the little handle, and a moment later it popped up. A burned triangle of toast jumped out, landing on the counter. I picked it up and smelled it. I examined its properties. 

Mana Toast.
This is toast.
It refills your mana. That’s it. Nothing more. Fuck you.  

“Well that was unnecessary,” I muttered. I gave my piece to Donut, who tucked them both away into her inventory.  

The room also contained a drinking fountain, a couple chairs and cots, and a set of bathrooms. As become our custom, we checked both of the bathrooms out. They were empty, but someone had clearly been here before us. The toilet paper had all been taken, and the shampoo dispenser in the woman’s shower had been emptied. The floor was wet, like someone had recently taken a shower. 

Mukta (Admin): Crawlers Carl and Princess Donut. You are to be transported to your interview in ten minutes. Prepare yourselves. 

Mukta? 

Donut: WHO ARE YOU? WHERE IS ZEV? 

Mukta (Admin): Your Outreach Associate has been put in a time out. She will return to you tomorrow. I am her substitute until then.

I glanced up at the clock. We had eight hours until the next episode. That wasn’t right.   

Carl: We weren’t supposed to go for another couple hours. 

Mukta (Admin): Administrator Zev had you scheduled on a program called Dungeon Crawl Tactics. I have overridden her decision and picked a better program for you. This one is paying a higher fee. Do not worry, it is similar to the other one. It is still round-table style. Well, sort of. They still offer gifts to the participants.  

Carl: We were promised the right to refuse interviews. I don’t want to go on this one. 

Mukta (Admin): You seem to be under the impression that you have a say in this, crawler.

Donut: WHAT DID ZEV DO? WHY IS SHE IN A TIME OUT?

The message clicked away, and the chat disappeared from our log. There was no way to respond or initiate a new message.     

“Carl, I’m not ready!” A brush appeared in front of her. “Brush me, quick!” 

The front of my jacket was still covered in dingo gore. I moved to the bathroom to clean myself off the best I could. “I’ll get to you in a minute.” 

“I don’t like this,” I said a few minutes later as I brushed a knot out of Donut’s fur. This was my first time doing this since we’d come to the dungeon. I had a quick memory, of Bea teaching me how to properly brush the cat. The first time I’d ever done it, Donut had yowled and tried to disembowel me. Bea and I had fallen over ourselves laughing at the indignant look on the cat’s face. It took months before she’d sit still and let me do it. 

We only had a couple minutes, and I spent it looking at the handful of achievements I’d received from our rage elemental gambit. Donut actually had several more than I did, all of them bomb-themed ones I’d already received. She didn’t waste time opening the associated boxes just yet, instead opting to use her precious few minutes cleaning herself. 

Most of my own bomb-themed skills moved up to level nine. I now had a handful of mechanic and construction-themed skills as well. I received two achievements of note: 

New achievement! Grease Monkey!

Don’t get ahead of yourself, Dale. You built and deployed a wheeled device. When the primitive humans in Mesopotamia made the first wheel, they probably thought they were hot shit, too. It still took them another 5,000 years after that to invent the toilet.    

Reward: You’ve received a Silver Mechanic’s Box! 

New achievement! You call that a trap?

A mob has been injured because of something you purposely left lying around the dungeon. From scattered Legos to spiked pits to buckets of flesh-devouring Skinner Ants to dimensional rifts that instantly boil all the blood in one’s body, the art of trapmaking has a celebrated and storied history in the annals of Dungeon Crawler World. 

So if you’re going to do it, you better do it right. Whatever it was that gave you this achievement, it was probably something stupid. This will help you make the next trap more… exciting. 

Remember: if you don’t make it titillating, we will.    

Reward: You’ve received a Gold Sapper’s Box! 

I was a bit confused about what, specifically, gave me the trap achievement. I knew Donut had received this one, too. I guessed it was from either dropping the chain or the oil slick. Probably not the bombs, which were placed in another category.  

The mechanic’s box gave me a tool called a Gorgon Marital Aid. It was shaped like a spatula. “What the hell is this?” I muttered, pulling up its properties. 

Gorgon Marital Aid 

A favorite amongst intergalactic porn stars, this is a hardening and de-hardening tool. May only be used at a workbench. Assists in fusing joints or creating varying degrees of plasticity in otherwise rigid materials without affecting material strength. 

That seemed like a pretty useful tool. I put it in my inventory next to my goo-inator 3000.

The sapper’s box contained two items. A Sapper’s table that practically knocked me over when it appeared. It was a table just like my engineering and alchemy table. The description noted that explosive items or traps created at the table didn’t lose stability or couldn’t be prematurely set off. 

The second item in the box was a trap-building item. There were ten of them, and each one was nothing more than a tiny black box the size of a dime with a long length of wire attached.   

Proximity Trigger

Trigger Warning! Traumatizing content! Using a Sapper’s Table, the highly-valuable Proximity Trigger may be attached to any non-static trap. Allows for the establishment of activation conditions, including countdowns, mob-type triggers, etc. 

Sure enough, the moment I put the item in my inventory, it placed itself near the top of the list in terms of value. And I now had ten of them. 

After all of that, my level was still stuck at 11. It was near the edge of 12, but it had barely budged since the fight with Krakaren. The plan was, for now, to kill out the kobolds and then move out of the area. I was hoping to be at least level 13 by the time we hit the stairs.  

Mukta (Admin): Transferring now.

Before I even had the chance to finish my thought, we disappeared and reappeared. 

Donut, who had been sitting on a chair, reappeared two feet off the ground. She yowled in surprise and clanked onto the deck. The ground roiled. As always, my HUD snapped off. 

We were on another boat, one much smaller than the last one. There were no windows and no doors. There were no features at all other than a pair of chairs that sat cramped together at one end of the room. The place was about the size of a large walk-in closet. I could reach up and touch the ceiling, which seemed to be made of plastic.. The room smelled of salt water and was about twenty degrees cooler than where we’d just come from.

A floating frisbee thing descended from the low ceiling. The jet-black, metallic disk hummed. A single blue light flashed on the edge. It spoke in a soothing female, robotic voice.   

“My name is Mexx-55. You are in a rental trailer owned and operated by Senegal Production Systems, Unlimited. This trailer is used by multiple tunnel productions related to the crawl. For this session, use of these facilities has been leased by the program Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem. Sit in the provided chairs and keep your limbs to your side while the table generates. The holo will commence in 60 seconds.” 

“No green room?” Donut said, looking around, outraged. “No snacks?” 

“Please sit down,” Mexx-55 repeated. 

“What’s the host’s name?” Donut asked. 

“The Maestro,” Mexx-55 said. Her previously-emotionless voice hinted an air of distaste. 

“Death Watch Extreme Dungeon Mayhem?” I muttered, moving to the chair. The moment we sat, Donut’s seat raised up. A table formed out of the wall, grinding in place in front of us. It was only about two feet wide. “That’s the stupidest name I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah, wait until you see the show,” Mexx-55 said before rising up into the ceiling.