Chapter 145 (Patreon)

Chapter 145

“I would like some time alone with my client,” my new attorney had said the moment he appeared in the room. I’d just asked for a lawyer, Orren had stopped everything, and a moment later, a new creature appeared, standing next to the liaison.

“Alone?” Orren asked, grunting with amusement. “This is my office. I will turn off the feed to the others, but you’ll have to suffer my presence.”

I was so astonished that asking for an attorney had actually worked that I barely registered this exchange. Everything I’d read implied lawyers didn’t become a thing until the tenth floor.

I studied the newcomer. The system didn’t give much information.

Quasar
Advocate of Crawler #4,122.

The small creature glowered at Orren as I examined him. I was pretty certain the alien wasn’t really in the room with us. I wouldn’t know for certain unless I touched him.

He was a gray alien. I knew from reading descriptions in the cookbook what this creature was. A Nullian, though they were mostly just called “the Null.” I’d seen their kind once or twice in talk show audiences, but they seemed rare. This race was similar to the much-taller Forsoothed, but this guy was only about four and a half feet tall. He looked just like a stereotypical, cartoon, Area-51 alien with the gray skin, large eyes, and the bulbous head. He wore a tan suit with a tie. The tie had what appeared to be an image of a Nullian hula girl on it. The hula girl gyrated back and forth.

Unlike the halting speech of their soother big brothers, this guy had more of a gritty, rapid-fire, New York sort of accent which was somehow even more unnerving.

“You’re gonna have to step out of the room,” Quasar said to Orren. “The rules are clear. I get to speak to my client alone.”

“I will turn off my auditory receptors. How is that?” Orren said. “I’m not leaving. You and your client are welcome to step outside yourselves, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There are Desperado Club entrances in Zockau.”

The threat was clear. There’d be hunters out there on the dance floor.

Quasar sighed dramatically. “All right, but if you do listen in, the Sys AI will know, and we’ll file a grievance. That last one we filed didn’t go so great for your coworker, now did it? Also, get those items out of here. My client isn’t going to touch them until we got an agreement.”

“You have five minutes,” Orren said as he gathered up the watches and winding box. They disappeared. He reached up and touched the side of his head, presumably to turn his headphones or whatever off. Nothing appeared to happen.

Quasar made a spinning motion with a long finger, indicating he wanted Orren to turn his chair around. The liaison grumbled but complied. The fish-bowl-headed creature produced what looked like a rubber ball and started bouncing it off the back wall, deftly catching it each time it ricocheted back toward him.

The null watched Orren for a moment and then shrugged. He moved to the front of the desk and leaned against it, facing me. He pulled an item that looked like a vape pen and inhaled. The smoke pixelated as it spread away, confirming he was a holo. “Okay, buddy. We gotta be quick. You are balls deep in the wrong hole, and mom is pulling into the driveway. You get me?”

“I… What?” I asked, trying to make sense of the metaphor. I couldn’t take my eyes off the alien hula girl on his tie. The goddamned thing winked at me. “I… So you’re a lawyer? Do you work like a regular lawyer from Earth?”

“Look, pal. If you’re going to be a babbling idiot this whole time, we’re going to have a very short courtship. I have no clue how lawyers work from your world, but in my experience, they’re mostly the same everywhere. We’re in a hurry, so we need to get past the first date finger bang jitters and move straight to the part where we argue about me smoking too much. Got it?”

A million questions swirled in my brain. I just nodded.

“First off, don’t buy anything this worm head is trying to sell. Most Valtay are tricksy fuckers, but the naked ones are the worst. If they ain’t riding a body, that’s usually a sign there’s something wrong with them. And if they’re a liaison… yeah. Growing up, you ever know a kid who’d rat you out to the adults just because it wet his receptors? That’s the type of fuck stick who becomes a liaison. Fuck those guys.” He took a deep drag from his vape pen. “You hear me? Liaisons are all fucks.” He raised his voice at that, testing to see if there was a reaction from Orren. There wasn’t. “From now on, any time you get hauled in front of one of these chodes, say nothing except, ‘I want to talk to my lawyer.’ Got it? And for the sake of his left tit, don’t touch anything until I get there. You did good. They were trying to get you to pick up the artifact while it was under administrative hold. It would’ve deleted the item.”

“Jesus,” I said, looking at the spot on the desk where the gate pieces had been sitting.

“Yeah, that mudskipper admin guy was having a conniption. Those idiots actually want you to keep the artifact even though you fucked them over. I gotta tell you, pal. I’m moderately impressed.

“So, are you my lawyer from now on?”

“That’s right. My name is Quasar by the way. I am your attorney. Nobody else’s. So I ain’t representing the cat or the weird lady who turned into a shovel. Just you.”

“And your job is to represent me? My best interests?”

“Best interests?” He made a scoffing noise. “When a crawler hits the tenth floor, he gains a teeny, tiny bit of autonomy over his fate. He’s officially a citizen of the Syndicate. The moment anybody becomes a citizen, the Syndicate bends them over and fucks them. I can’t stop you from getting fucked. But I am the condom. You guys have condoms on your world? Of course you do. Everybody has condoms. Your ass is gonna hurt no matter what, but at least you won’t have tryptic genital mites after.”

“And what do you get out of this?” I asked.

“What do I get out of this? Tits, pal. You mean besides a headache? I get credits. Not a lot. But it’s enough to keep me in receptor tugs and gelatin swabs. But in case you’ve been living on a backwater planet, you might not have noticed I’m a null. Not too many outfits hire my kind. So here we are.”

I was still trying to decide if I was better off with or without this guy. I suspected I wasn’t going to be given a choice. “What’s to stop you from getting bribed by the Skull empire to fuck me over?”

He barked with laughter. “I love the way you think, pal. You humans are almost as paranoid as my people.” He took another hit from his strange vape. The device pulsated with each drag. “You mean besides the sense of ethics and pride I have from working and studying for twenty cycles straight just so I can scrabble for scraps by representing condemned assholes such as yourself? The short answer is there ain’t nothing stopping some interested third party into attempting to bribe me. The good news for you is that you’re already fucked. To screw you over, I just need to do nothing. So if I’m doing the bare minimum, that should be a sign to you that King Rust hasn’t been whispering sweet into my ears. Yet. And not that you’ll believe me, but I do have my pride. The day I take a bribe from some pig-faced imperialist fuck is the day I wither.”

“Our manager said lawyers don’t usually come into play until the tenth floor. Why now?” I asked.

“Look. Is this really what you want to spend your time talking about? Your manager is correct. But most crawlers usually aren’t subject to liaison action, either. Let alone a meeting where the sub-minister of the Native Species Agency takes an interest. There are a lot of moving parts of the Syndicate government, and there is a bureaucrat and or a committee for each and every one of those parts. And each one of those suits and committees is beholden to rules and laws and regulations that can date back tens of thousands of cycles. And all these moving parts and interlocking teeth are all grinding their way forward through time, trying to gain some sort of upward momentum. It’s a perpetual motion machine that will only stop once the universe implodes in on itself. And how is that machine greased? The universe’s four lubricants. Blood, tears, taxes, and lawyers.”

By the time I realized he hadn’t actually answered my question, he was already moving on to the next subject.

“But as much as I’d like to bore myself to death with pointless questions, we need to deal with the issue before us now. Nobody wants you to break the game. They’re not allowed to take your artifact. Their solution is simple. You can just fuck off and die, and if you were a regular crawler, you’d already be goblin kibble. The good news is you got something important. Leverage. Your sponsorship and entertainment value offsets the damage you might cause. It’s Remex the Grand all over again. So the mudskippers would prefer if we come to an amicable solution. The problem is this liaison fuck sitting right here pretending to be deaf. If he determines we’re at an impasse, he has limited authority to create solutions. And these rat fucks crave power so much they’ll manufacture problems just so they can take out their magic dick wands and start zapping shit.”

“So what do we do?” I asked, my mind swimming. I still couldn’t tell if this guy knew what he was doing or not, and that terrified me. “I don’t want to give up the gate. I need it.”

“We’ll come up with a proposal,” he said. He put his vape away and suddenly had a tablet in his hand. “You sure you don’t want to give it up? I bet I could get you a deal. Too bad we ain’t on the tenth floor. I’d probably be able to get you something really sweet.”

It hit me, then. This was the guy who’d help negotiate my exit from the dungeon if I made it down that low. I felt ill.

“We’re not selling it,” I said. “Orren said I could have it back on the ninth floor. I don’t know how it works in the universe, but it my world, if someone is borrowing something, they usually give collateral. Something they won’t want to lose.”

Quasar grinned. “Now we’re talking.”

~

“Oh my god, Sledgie!” Donut cried after I opened the door. “What’re you doing here?” The four cretins: Bomo, the Sledge, Clay-ton, and Very Sullen all lumbered into the room. The moment they entered, a new door appeared on the wall next to Mordecai’s chambers. It was labeled Mercenary Quarters. The four white dots blinked and then changed color, obtaining a green cross.

“We received four free mercenaries. They’re part of the package deal we negotiated in exchange for temporarily giving up the Gate of the Feral Gods.”

Donut jumped to the Sledge’s shoulder, and the rock monster gave her an affectionate pat. Chris came to stand before Clay-ton. The lava rock monster was almost the exact same size as the granite-colored NPC. Chris made a non-committal grunt, and Clay-ton answered with a similar noise.

Mongo, who’d never met any of these guys, started running in circles around them, hopping up and down with excitement.

“Bomo and Sledge stay with us, Very Sullen goes with Katia, and Clay-ton will stay with Chris.”

“How are these guys collateral?” Katia asked. “What if something, uh, happens to them?”

“We have them on floors six, seven, and eight. That’s it. If they die, they will regenerate, but not until the next floor. You guys should bring Clay-ton and Sullen with you when you venture out, but Bomo and the Sledge are too valuable to risk, so they’re staying in here.”

“What?” Donut asked. “Sledgie can’t go adventuring with us? Why not?”

The Sledge made a disappointed noise.

“Did they give you the spells?” I asked Bomo.

The rock monster rumbled. “Yes. The Sledge has the second.”

I nodded. Excellent.

“Sorry, guys. We need to keep these two safe,” I said. “Since we were losing the gate, I wanted to be able to replicate two of the gate’s abilities. The first thing I asked for was a teleport spell, but they wouldn’t give it to me. Not directly. They didn’t want to give me anything that I could just keep after we got the artifact back.”

“They really said you could have it back when you hit the ninth floor?” Katia asked.

“Yeah. They seem to like the idea of me being able to sow chaos during faction wars.”

“Or they think you’re going to do something really stupid between now and then and die first,” Donut said.

Katia walked up and patted Very Sullen on the arm. This guy was Katia’s regular body guard when she entered the club. The rock monster’s face was thinner than that of the other two, and his eyes were tiny, emotionless dots. I’d never heard this one talk. “Wait, so these guys can teleport now?” Katia asked.

“Not your guy, but yes,” I said. “Sort of. They agreed to give me a Mercenary upgrade and access to four bodyguards. Then they gave two of them extra spells. Bomo now has a level-15 spell called Teleport to Stairwell. We can pick a stairwell from a list and teleport there. It has a ridiculous cooldown. Like twenty-five days. Still it’s a pretty powerful spell because it lists all the exits on the entire floor. It’s not something they want me to have access to later on, so it’s in their best interest to make sure we get the gate back.”

“And the other spell?” Katia asked.

“The Sledge’s spell is also teleportation, and it’s even more impressive. This one was my lawyer’s idea.”

“Your lawyer?” Katia asked, looking at me sharply. “Back up. What?”

“Yeah, the lawyer thing is a long story. But he suggested it. It’s a spell called Zerzura.”

“Zerzura?” Donut asked. “Sledgie, you got a new spell? I just got one too! Actually, I got a bunch of new ones. I am now a singer, and my voice casts spells. Do you want to hear one?”

The Sledge rumbled happily.

“What does his spell do?” Katia quickly asked, cutting Donut off.

“It’s…” I trailed off, finally noticing Katia’s level. So much had happened since the end of the last floor, I hadn’t even thought about the aftermath of what we’d done. “Holy shit, Katia. What the hell?”

She grinned. “I was wondering when you were going to notice. I finally got my base constitution over 100. Got something called Steely Skin. The lower my health, the thicker my flesh.”

Katia had been level 44 when she opened the Gate of the Feral Gods onto the ninth-floor city of Larracos, sending a frothing mass of sharks and jellyfish flooding into the metropolis. Apparently she’d gotten a bunch of experience for it. She was now level 52.

“Did you get any good gear?”

“I got a few boxes, including a platinum asshole’s box. It gave me a gambling chip for the Desperado Club and an upgrade to my Find Crawler skill. Also…” She trailed off, as if she was about to say something but changed her mind. “You still didn’t answer my question. What does the Sledge’s new spell do? What was it called? Zerzura?”

My hand found my necklace. I fingered the small charm with the yellow gem. It was warm to the touch. I thought of the crazy story Quasar told me about Remex the Grand and what he’d done with the Zerzura spell.

It was glorious, Quasar had said. Shame how it ended for Remex. They made us study the deal he made in school. But the mudskippers cleaned up that season. It was a real windfall. You ask for this spell, and they’ll fall over themselves to give it to you. And you want to know the beautiful part? All those other pricks won’t interfere. Everyone will want you to pull it off. All the factions. All the fans. The showrunners. The AI. Everybody. That spell always leads to carnage. Everybody likes carnage when it’s not them.

~

I slept two hours and came out to find Mordecai standing on the kitchen table quietly conversing with Chris and Clay-ton. The other three cretins were leaned over my Frogger cabinet.

If Mordecai was still pissed at me for laughing at him earlier, he didn’t show it now. Which was good because I had to work really hard not to bust out again.

“We need to purchase some upgrades for the space,” Mordecai said, “But I think we should wait until after the recap. If they’re really going to open up the guild system, I want to know how it works first. They’ve tried this a few times over the cycles, and it’s different every time. There are multiple upgrades we need.”

“Okay,” I said, moving to the food box and dialing in a breakfast sandwich. “There’s something I want to buy right now if we can afford it.”

“The bomber’s studio?” he asked. “It’s not too expensive, and that Venison box had what, 300,000 gold in it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The advanced bomber’s studio. Between me and Donut, we now had just about a million gold. I had a suspicion we were going to need it all.

I eyed the small shrine in the corner of the room, bubbling merrily. It was a disk and a cup. When I was in the room, the cup boiled over with water. Apparently it stopped when I wasn’t around. I still needed to do my daily blood drop into it. Thanks to my new religion, I also had to drop 5% of my “looted” gold into the cup. A number appeared floating over the shrine, helpfully telling me exactly how much I owed. Unfortunately, the shrine’s definition of “looted” included the gold I’d received from surviving the previous floor while on the top 10 list. I’d dropped the 30K in there when Donut wasn’t looking. She’d noticed anyway and had complained for five minutes straight.

“It’ll probably be okay if you buy the bomber room right now along with the magic studio, which will be expensive. We’ll get them as soon as Donut is ready.”

Katia emerged from her room and moved to the food box. She and Chris along with her two new mercenaries were going to head out on their own after her daily training. Louis and Firas had managed to recover the flying house, the Twister, from the changeling refugees. A group of crawlers, including team Meadow Lark, Bautista’s team and several others were meeting up in a large settlement that was a few hours south of here. Katia wanted to make sure she met up with them before the hunters were unleased.

She was going to remain in the party until after we figured out the guild system, which was fine by me. I still hadn’t fully come to terms with her leaving the group, but I’d already decided it was for the best, especially after considering what I was planning on doing today.

Donut emerged from the space, all poofed out and clean. Mongo padded behind her. She hummed the theme to the A-Team. “Carl, I think I’ve figured out the melody I’m going to use for my Standing Ovation spell.”

“Great,” I said. I exchanged a look with Mordecai.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go buy those two rooms.”

~

Time until Hunter Release: 21 Hours.

“You guys be safe. Stay on the trail,” I said.

“We’re taking the caravan. We’ll be okay,” Katia said as she, Chris, Clay-ton, and Very Sullen exited the safe room. “We’ll see you guys later.”

“Bye Katia! Bye Chris!” Donut said. She was attempting to be enthusiastic, but I could hear the sadness in her voice. Katia leaned over and kissed Donut on the head. Donut sniffed.

Mongo squawked mournfully.

“See you tonight,” I said.

Katia held my eyes. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“I won’t,” I lied.

As soon as they left, Donut and Mordecai were going to hit the town and go shopping. There was no Desperado Club here, and it wasn’t yet safe for me to attempt to enter Club Vanquisher, so they had to rely on the local shops for the supplies they needed.

We only had 100K gold left after purchasing the two new rooms, and we needed to find a Shield spellbook for Donut. Mordecai also wanted to find an item with something called a Golden Throat enchantment, which was apparently the dungeon’s version of autotune.

Donut’s new bard class didn’t use mana. All she needed to do was sing, and the bard spells would be cast. That was great, but there was a problem. A big problem. The song had to be in key. And until we found that item, her new class was useless.

Why?

Because Donut sounded like a helium-drunk cat being crushed by a steamroller when she attempted to sing, that was why. And even though she wasn’t that bad of a dancer, when it came to making a song emerge from that tone-deaf gullet of hers, her rhythm was that of a drunk, three-legged donkey trying to negotiate its way down a set of ice-covered stairs.

There were two types of songs. For some of the spells, a group of lyrics appeared floating in front of her in midair, and she had to sing the words, karaoke style. She had to make up the melody herself. Apparently it didn’t matter what the melody was, as long as it was consistently in key.

For two of the spells, however, it was different. She’d select the spell, and the melody would start playing on its own. She had to make up lyrics on the fly. It didn’t appear to matter what the lyrics were as long as they, again, were sung in key.

I didn’t know which one was worse

Not that it stopped Donut from attempting to cast them. Over and over and over again.

The first three spells were party support spells: Standing Ovation, which increased everyone’s Dexterity and made our regular spells more powerful. Entourage, which created multiple, illusionary versions of each party member, and Encore, which was a Heal Party spell that could also remove multiple debuffs. Mordecai was pretty stoked about that Encore spell.

She could manage to cast all three of these if she sang the lyrics in a steady, monotone voice. Each song was a relatively short paragraph. Unfortunately, the spell’s power was based on how well she sang it. So until she got that autotune buff, the spells were pretty weak.

The other two songs were offensive spells, and neither were going to be feasible for now. One was a psionic attack, and the other was an Elle-style ice attack.

Donut had also received one additional, regular spell thanks to her spellbook-of-the-floor club. A spell called Laundry Day, which removed an item of armor from an opponent and caused it to fall to the ground. The higher the level of the spell, the more powerful it was. At level five, she’d be able to remove breastplates and other chest armor. At level 10, she could strip an opponent bare. At 15, she could cast on multiple opponents at once.

Thanks to our new Magic Workshop, we could train our spells up much like with the training room. Unlike the regular training room, however, only one person could use it at a time. The room was also required for some of Mordecai’s higher-level potions, but I wasn’t clear yet on how all that worked. Mordecai already mapped out a strict schedule. He had Donut pushing her Magic Missile which had stalled out at level 11 despite her constantly using it and me working on my Fear spell, which hadn’t moved past level five.

I’d sent a message to Donut and told her to work on Laundry Day instead. She didn’t question it.

“What if something happens to Katia, and we can’t protect her?” Donut asked after they left. “Mongo would never forgive me if something happened to her.”

I scratched Donut behind the ear. “Her staying away from us is probably for the best right now.”

“Come on, Donut,” Mordecai said. “Let’s go shopping.”

The Sledge moved to follow them out the door, but Mordecai held up a fuzzy hand. “Not this time, big guy.”

“It’s okay, Sledgie,” Donut said. “You stay here. We won’t be gone long.”

The cretin grunted and then turned back to the Froggergame, which we’d have to shove over and place next to the television screens. With the addition of the two new rooms, the wide space was starting to look much more cramped. We could still fit one or two new rooms depending on the size, but anything after that would require us to figure out how to unlock the second level of the space.

I made a beeline toward my new room, the Advanced Bomber’s Studio. The small room was only about ten feet wide, but it was long, making me feel like I was standing in a private bowling alley.

Most of the work still happened at my Sapper’s table, for now. This new room had two separate functions.

The first was that I could now virtually “copy” a design or an existing explosive and bring it over to the studio where I could place it and set it off. There were no actual explosions involved inside the studio. Everything in the testing area was virtual, like it was a game. I could create a miniature, virtual person or group of people or even a whole village, place the bomb, set it off, and see what would happen. I could pause the explosion and see what way it would blow based on its position. I could use the information to go back and tweak the design or the method of delivery and finetune the yield.

The system wasn’t perfect, however. Sometimes it gave a range of possibilities. The cookbook stressed this point. Just because it blew in a certain way in the simulation wasn’t a guarantee it’d actually go up that way. There were literally thousands of small environmental factors that could affect the way an explosive went up.

Thanks to this being an “advanced” bomber’s studio, I could also test bombs and other incendiaries that I didn’t actually have. I could build a virtual bomb and see if it’d work. For now I could only use items I had in my inventory, but hopefully that’d change after I gained some more experience.

The room’s second function was the crafting table in the very back. One where I could tweak actual explosives. This was a specialty workbench, and at level one, it wasn’t as good as my level five sapper’s table in terms of building explosives from scratch. At least not yet.

However, the table was designed to be able to examine and dissect explosives, and it was absolutely required to engineer certain large-scale bombs.

I stood at the new bench now, shaking. I, for the very first time since I’d grabbed the thing, took out the Carl’s Doomsday Scenario bomb and placed it onto the table. The small bench reshaped itself to accommodate the glass reaper case, which glowed like a miniature sun. The bomb was a microsecond from exploding, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. But I could examine it. I copied it using the bomber studio interface so I’d be able to play with it safely using the simulator. I placed the bomb back into my inventory, my hands still trembling.

One day I would use that thing. One day.

Okay, I said to myself. Quit screwing around. Back to work.

We had 21 hours until the hunters would be released and about six or seven until darkness descended on the jungle. I pulled a stick of hobgoblin dynamite and started to carefully slice it into twenty different pieces.

~

Their shopping trip had been mostly a bust, but Mordecai had purchased a ton of herbs and supplies from the town’s vendors. He’d even picked some plants from the ground. But they hadn’t found a Shield spellbook nor any magical gear with a Golden Throat enchantment. There still wasn’t anything good on the shop interface, either, though that would change over the next few days.

Mordecai wanted us to go out and start looking for some special type of small mushroom that only appeared at night. “These will appear at the base of the trees in town, so don’t wander out into the jungle. It’s just like the third floor. Stay out of alleyways. Keep a lookout for more of those pets. There’s a caravan coming though town in the morning, and I think you should get on it. It heads deeper south and ends up in a larger settlement than this one. From there you can start building a defensive zone and grinding. The Vengeance of the Daughter production is probably going to rope you into something pretty soon, too, assuming the show hasn’t been cancelled yet, so I want to make sure you’re in a good position for when that happens. But for right now, I need those mushrooms.”

“Yeah, we’ll be on the lookout for your herbs. We’re going to head out now,” I said. “Bomo, can you come?”

“You sure you wanna bring him?” Mordecai asked.

“We’re keeping Sledge locked up,” I said. “Bomo is worth the risk.”

~

“Do you think the hunter guys can see what we’re doing?” Donut asked as we stepped outside into the town. It smelled like rain. It was already pitch black out here. A pair of tree creatures strode by, not acknowledging our presence. A pair of monkeys rode in their upper branches. Donut moved to cast Torch, but I waved her down. “Like, can they cheat and have their friends watch the show from outside and follow us and then tell them where we are at all times?”

“Well, in theory people outside the dungeon aren’t supposed to talk to those inside, even the tourists, but we all know that’s bullshit. The fact they sued us for our plan on the previous floor means they’re obviously watching our every move. I think it’s safe to say they’ll eventually know what we’re doing. I don’t think they have a direct line, especially since the Desperado Club access got all messed up for those on the ninth floor. But they’ll still know eventually. So any plan we have needs to be kept as much of a secret as we can make it. By the way, do me a favor really quick. Can you put Mongo away?”

“We’ll need a plan first before we can keep it a secret,” Donut said. “Mongo, come on. Into the cage. No, put that down. I think that’s mushroom poop. Come on, do what Mommy says. Good boy! Good boy Mongo!” She returned her gaze to me. “But it’s nice not to have to be all top secret for a day or two. It’ll give me time to practice my singing. Why did I just put Mongo away?”

“Don’t practice your singing in town,” I said, putting my hand up on Donut to scratch her. “Stay on my shoulder, okay? We don’t want to set the mushroom guys aggro off. Also, I’d like to apologize.”

“Apologize for what? Aren’t we hunting for herbs?”

“Oh, we’re going hunting all right. This is gonna go quick. Get ready.”

Carl: Bomo. Cast your spell. Send us to the stairwell in the middle of Zockau. Do it now.

~

Hello everybody! The tops of new floors are always so difficult to craft together because it's really easy to get into the trap of too much exposition. And every floor down, it gets more and more difficult to avoid that because we have so much to shove into there.

The good news is that we're about to get into some full-tilt action. I've been preparing for this floor for a bit by watching and reading and re-watching and re-reading some of my favorite movies and books. Notably Seven Samurai, Rio Bravo, and the original Jurassic Park novel. I'm really looking forward into getting into the meat of this floor.

I hope you're all doing well.