Chapter 172 (Patreon)

Chapter 172

Time to level collapse: Six days, fifteen hours.

~

System Message: A champion has fallen.

I took another step back, and I pulled the ring of Divine Suffering off my own finger and slipped it back into my inventory.

“Get ready,” I whispered. “We don’t know how he’s going to react. He might unleash that Bianca thing on us.”

“Are we going to let him stay with us?” Donut asked, looking down at the pile of dust.

Hell to the fuck no, I almost said out loud, but I remembered he could possibly hear us. “We’ll see.”

Nearby stood a literal stack of random potions and magical items and more plants than I could count.  She’d spent the last few minutes dumping everything from her inventory. She’d feared that the act of turning to dust would make her body unlootable, and she’d been correct. I promised her we’d give it all to Prepotente, and I intended on keeping that promise. Mostly.

She did have a pair of little, orange, traffic-cone like hats she’d taken off some gnome-like creature, and she told Donut it was okay if she had one of them.

I didn’t want to be obvious about it, but now that she was gone, I started examining everything she had. She had over forty scrolls of something called Size Up. I walked around out of Prepotente’s sight and stole two of them.

As I pulled the second scroll into my inventory, my interface flickered. The number 50 appeared and slammed into place just under the level timer.

“Carl, do you see that number thing?” Donut asked.

We were interrupted by another system message.

New Quest. The Creeping Apocalypse.

This is a world quest! All crawlers and all hunters currently active on the sixth floor will receive this quest!

You may not opt out of this quest.

Miriam Dom the vampire has fallen. With the rising of today’s sun, she found herself caught out in the open. Helpless and crying, she burned away into dust. The callous crawlers Carl and Princess Donut watched and did nothing as she died in agonizing pain. Nothing!

(Actually, not nothing. Someone should probably ask Carl why he suddenly has three new points to his intelligence stat. Suspicious!)

Anyway, Miriam did not go quietly into the good night. Oh no. Her death has cured thousands of crawlers, monsters, and hunters who have been touched by the vampirism curse.

There is, however, a problem.

Some of the forest monsters infected with vampirism have spent the past few nights on a killing spree. And another vampire, a now-cured Allosaurus by the name of Big Tina, unfortunately has expended a lot of effort on building an army of undead monstrosities using the... leftovers... from the forest-wide slaughter.

These newly created monsters are not vampires, and they were not cured when Miriam died. These mindless freaks were left all alone, not under control from any entity. Some are nothing more than mini-Grinders, also known as Shrillings, also known as Shambling Berserkers. We’ve all seen these before, most notably in some of the train stations at the end of the fourth floor. Yes, they can get pretty big and annoying, but it’s not anything you really need to worry about. Hardly worth a regular quest, let alone a world one. You’d have to be a total idiot to let one of those things kill you, especially during the day. I’m looking at you, Nihit Kumar who’s about two seconds from getting... Oh, that’s a shame. Gross.

Anyway, some of the other, more powerful monsters have become something else, and short of a god, they are the most powerful monsters who have ever set foot on a sixth floor in Dungeon Crawler World history.

I like to call them Odious Creepers.

The good news? Like Shambling Berserkers, Odious Creepers tend to be pretty slow during the day. The bad news? When it’s dark outside, they gain the ability to combine with both Shamblers and other Creepers and get even stronger. And they can get fast, very fast. They can replicate themselves, too, if they have the parts!

There are currently fifty of these things... growing around... the forest, plus another few thousand Shambling Berserkers of various sizes. For fun, we have randomized their location. And for extra fun, we have marked the location of each creeper on the map for you all.

So, here’s the quest part. Kill all the Odious Creepers before the sun sets tonight.

For every Creeper you kill, you will receive +5 to a random stat. For every five you kill, you will receive an additional +5 potion of level-up. The crawler or hunter who kills the most will get an additional prize.

Only the person who does the most damage gets credit for the kill.

If you don’t kill all of them before the sun sets tonight, bad stuff will happen. And I mean every single one of the fifty Creepers. And by bad stuff, I mean something completely batshit. And not just to the crawlers, but the hunters, too. So all of you cowards sitting on your ass in Zockau need to get to work.

“Holy shit,” I muttered.

“Carl, did you really use that ring on Miriam? After everything that just happened with Prepotente?”

I looked at the map, and the closest creeper thing was about five miles away.

“Also, have you noticed how the A.I. refers to itself as ‘I’ way more often than it used to? It always did, but something has changed.”

I started to answer her, but Mordecai interrupted us.

Mordecai: I think I’ve seen this before on a smaller scale. Undead and bereft minions can get taken over by certain types of plants. If these are the self-building, glamoured fragments you saw earlier, they were likely going to turn into something called a Glamoured Creeper once they gained 70% of their bodies back. But now their boss is no longer able to control them, they’ve been commandeered by something else. Likely a plant called an Odious Blossom. The whole process is supposed to be rare and take a long time, but they’ve sped everything up to create this event. Listen to me. These things are going to be deadly. Deadlier than I have time to explain. Stay away from them. Don’t even get close. They’ll likely control all the vines in the area. They will rip body parts off people and use the parts to make themselves stronger. They will shoot poisonous darts. They will grow up out of the ground.

My messaging system blew up with chatter.

Carl: Mordecai, we can’t just sit back and let everyone else do the work. Can you come up with something to kill it? Like with that Pestiferous Vine?

Mordecai: An Odious Bloom? Yes. But this is a different creature, and I doubt anything I have will work. Not without a lot of trial and error. Things this big usually require a full application, so we’re talking an aerosol. Delivery is going to be a problem. With only half of a day... They want you to kill these things the old fashioned way. Hacking and burning, and that’s going to be difficult. They’re trying to draw the hunters back out. The prize for killing these things is a little too good, which means it’s too dangerous. It’s going to be a slaughter.

I added Katia to the chat, who was asking me what had happened with Miriam. I quickly gave her a rundown.

Katia: I’ve been doing the math based on what you said earlier, and I think some of these glamoured creepers will be as high as level 150, maybe more, and that’s before they turned into these plant things. We’ll have to attack in groups from afar. Eva’s group has one right in the middle of them. Hopefully it takes them out, but if it doesn’t, we’ll have to move in.

Carl: Holy shit. Be careful. Make sure you only work with crawlers you trust. This has potential to get out of hand.

Donut: STAY AWAY FROM THAT DOG LADY. TSERENDOLGOR. WHAT KIND OF STUPID NAME IS THAT ANYWAY? HER MOM OBVIOUSLY DIDN’T LOVE HER.

Katia: Donut, she’s a very nice person who had a very difficult life. And her name is Mongolian.

Donut: EVERYONE IS HAVING A DIFFICULT LIFE RIGHT NOW, KATIA. SHE DOESN’T GET EXTRA CREDIT BECAUSE SHE HAS A STUPID NAME.

Katia: Okay, Donut.

Mordecai: Guys, listen to me. For the sake of the gods. Stay away from them. This is going to be a clusterfuck.

Carl: Well, it’s about to get even worse. Donut and I need to wake up the goat.

“Carl,” Donut said. “I see a bunch of dots moving in. I think they’re lady Mongos. How did you know that was going to happen? I swear, I think you’re psychic sometimes.”

“Is Tina with them?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t see a big dot.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this quick.”

I took a knee in front of Prepotente. It was weird. Even though he was motionless, I could feel it. I could sense it coming off of him, like electricity off a live wire. Or heat radiating off a stove. The sense of utter despair and anger and misery and loss.

He’d thought of Miriam as his mother. He’d just watched her die as he sat by, helpless.

Christ, I thought. I knew exactly how that felt. The realization was like a punch to the gut.

“Listen, buddy. We’re gonna wake you up. I’m really sorry about what happened, and I wish I could take it back. She would want you to be strong, and she needs you to take care of all your brothers and sisters or whatever. You need to be strong for them. We have some monsters moving in, and we have to wake you up now. But don’t kill these new monsters, okay? Donut and I need to do something with them.”

I nodded at Donut, who cast the spell. She waved her paw, and Prepotente glowed.

And just like that, he was awake.

For several moments, the goat made no sound. He remained frozen in place, just blinking. I tensed, waiting for him to attack.

“They’ll be here in a minute,” Donut whispered. “They’re coming in slow now, like they’re hunting.”

Prepotente slowly pulled the ring of Divine Suffering off his finger and dropped it to the dirt in front of him. My heart quickened, and I started to plan on how to get it for myself. I wondered what would happen if I wore two of them, if I’d be able to double up on the benefits.

But then he reached down, and he picked the ring back up, his fuzzy hands trembling. He popped the ring into his mouth, and he swallowed it whole.

He ate it. He ate the goddamn ring.

He fell to his hands and knees before the pile of dust that’d once been Miriam. The sun had come out for a few moments, but it was already starting to rain anew, and big, fat droplets fell upon the already rain-soaked ground, splashing into the only thing that remained of the crawler. The drops splattered heavily into the piles of ash, washing them away.

He screamed at the pile of ash, but this wasn’t his normal cry. This was haunting, almost silent, like he couldn’t get the sound out. Like wind rushing across a desolate landscape.

He screamed, over and over until he had no more.

“Oh, mother,” Prepotente finally said, his voice raspy. “Oh, mother, what did you do? Please. Please, no.” He turned to look up at me and Donut. Muddy tears ran down his face. “She was going to play piano for me like she used to. She was going to sing me my special song.”

Donut leaped from my shoulder and landed upon the shoulder of the smaller goat. She butted her head against his horn.

“I’m sorry you’re hurting right now,” Donut said, her voice unnaturally gentle. “You just sit here and have a good cry. Take as long as you need. Some monsters are about to come into the clearing, but don’t you worry about them. Don’t move, and let me and Carl take care of it.”

Prepotente reached up and patted Donut on the side of the head just as Kiwi the velociraptor slunk into the clearing, head low, growling. She didn’t attack, however, and she kept to the edge of the field. Multiple dots finally appeared on my map in a semi-circle, coming from the south.

“She said everything was going to be all right, but it was a lie. A dreadful lie,” Prepotente said as Donut returned to my shoulder. His hands trembled. He was oblivious of the danger around us. “What am I going to do now?”

He paused, eyes going wide.

“It appears I’ve just received an emergency benefactor box from my sponsor,” he said, sniffing. He returned his attention to the empty space on the ground, and he began to sob.

~

There were twenty of them. They emerged from the woods, each about twenty meters back against the treeline, poised. I knew they could clear the distance easily with a single leap. They held like this, ready to attack.

I took a moment to observe them. All, including Kiwi, were covered with blood. I knew these guys were some of the few dinos that had not been turned to vampires, and it appeared that was a hard-fought victory.

I’d already figured they’d be in the area. These things didn’t talk, but they used to be intelligent creatures, and it was clear some of that remained. I figured if they weren’t following Tina around, they would be hunting the source of the infection. If we hadn’t shown up, they’d surely have attacked Miriam already.

Or maybe they’d been waiting for dawn, just to be safe. Either way, they were here now.

The remaining question was, what did they want? Tina—who was Kiwi’s daughter—was cured of the vampirism curse. From what I gathered, this pack of women velociraptors spent most of their time following the kid around and protecting her and keeping her from getting herself into too much trouble. That had gone off the rails because of Miriam and the elite. But why were they still here? Why weren’t they out there, seeking out the big dinosaur?

Their dots were red for me, but white for Donut. Mongo remained in his carrier. Mordecai warned his presence might negate the spell.

Kiwi made a barking noise and took a step forward. All around, the others hunched, as if about to pounce. I tensed, ready to hit Protective Shell.

Donut: I NEED TO BE CLOSER FOR THE POTION TO WORK. IT SAYS IT ONLY LASTS FOR A MINUTE, AND I NEED TO MAKE SURE I DON’T ACCIDENTALLY CHARM THE WRONG ONE.

We only had one potion of Tame Animal, actually named Tame Mongoliensis now. The potion caused the closest eligible monster to be tamed by Donut for the duration of the floor. She wouldn’t become a pet with a permanent bond, but she would be a minion, which was a similar sort of deal.

If we managed to actually tame Kiwi, she would, hopefully, bring the rest of the pack with her.

I realized taming Kiwi had always been the solution. This was still part of the Tina quest, and they wanted us to somehow enlist her help to solve the Tina problem. That potion recipe from the Plenty was a cheat. A shortcut. A way to guarantee we’d get involved in the quest, and ultimately, end up where we were right now. Protecting their precious Prepotente.

Kiwi looked between me and Donut. She rested her piercing gaze on me and growled again. Up and down the semi-circle of raptors, feathers bristled. A warning.

“I think you need to do this alone,” I whispered.

Behind us, Prepotente continued to rock back and forth, muttering to himself, occasionally bursting into tears. He screamed a few times, his voice still hoarse.

“Don’t worry, Carl,” Donut said. “I’m quite practiced in the matter of taming dinosaurs.”

She hopped off my shoulder and put her tail up, ramrod straight. She took a few steps toward Kiwi, whose feathers remained poofed out.

“Now, Kiwi,” Donut said. “I’m prepared to forgive you for what you did to my poor Mongo, but that does not mean we can forget it. Just let me get a few steps closer, and we can discuss it like adults.”

I could see it in the dinosaur’s demeanor. She seemed to be fighting her every instinct to attack Donut. I’d seen it before, so many times, in so many places. That battle between what one used to be and what one had become.

“I wish you’d never given me that pet biscuit. It’s not worth it,” Prepotente said to his dead mother’s ashes. “We’d all be gone now.” I could barely hear him over the rain.

But no, I realized. The rain had stopped once again. My head throbbed.

Fuck everything about this place.

I kept my mental finger on the Protective Shell, ready to slam it down. With my newly-enhanced intelligence, the shell would be plenty big enough to protect Donut, myself, and Prepotente. If only for a few precious moments.

It wasn’t necessary. Donut stopped about ten feet in front of the pink dinosaur. Kiwi cocked her head to the side, just like how Mongo did sometimes before he screamed and attacked. Donut glowed, and about three seconds later, Kiwi also glowed. The dinosaur shrieked, long and loud. Her dot turned white, and the green X appeared into the dot, indicating her as either a mercenary or a minion. A moment later, the dots of all the other raptors turned white. They did not gain the green cross pattern.

Multiple more lady mongo dots appeared on my map, raising the total to just under forty. They’d been behind us, and I hadn’t even realized. And then others, too. More of those small bambiraptors, whose dots remained red, but they quickly moved off. I examined the pink dinosaur as the others all moved into the clearing, no longer in a battle formation.

Her demeanor hadn’t changed too much. She still appeared as if she wanted to rip my throat out, despite the dot on the map changing color.

Kiwi. Mongoliensis Pack Leader – Level 60.

This is a minion of Princess Donut.

“Good job,” I said to Donut as the raptor sniffed at my crotch and growled. “You did it.”

“Of course I did it, Carl,” said Donut. “After all the torture we put Mongo through, what else did you expect? Now, Kiwi, we do have a few rules to go over. Rule number one is not to molest Mongo again. Rule number two is to not eat Carl.”

Kiwi looked at me and squawked, sounding disappointed.

“That should probably be rule number one,” I said as more of the pony-sized dinosaurs started sniffing at me. One snapped at the air inches away from my junk, and I almost pissed myself. They were ignoring Prepotente, but they seemed to find me fascinating.

“You can take care of yourself, Carl,” Donut said. “Just don’t get them riled up.” She returned her attention to Kiwi. “Also, I’d like for you to introduce me to each of your friends. I must insist upon knowing everyone’s names if we’re all going to be working together.”

I looked over the group, counting. There were a total of thirty-six velociraptors. Most hovered around level 40. A few had a strange debuff over them.

Immortalized.

There was a 29-hour countdown with each debuff.

I had never seen nor read about that one. I sent a note to Mordecai, and he said it came from being cured of vampirism. Anyone with the debuff would be at half strength and mana and unable to heal for the duration of the debuff while they were in direct sunlight. The debuff wouldn’t affect them if they were in shadow. In direct moonlight, the debuff would turn to a buff: plus 50% strength and mana and double healing speed. Right now, the sky was overcast, so these guys were unaffected. The rain kept starting and stopping, but a thick layer of clouds had moved in and remained heavy in the sky.

I wondered if those Odious Creepers were suffering from something similar. I sent a note out to the main chat.

A few of the dinosaurs finally started to notice Prepotente, sitting there on the ground. He grumbled about the attention and waved at them to go away. A few snapped angrily at him, deliberately keeping their distance. He growled back, which worried me.

Donut only had true control over Kiwi, and if something happened to her, we’d be in trouble. I needed to remember that all of these guys were different from Mongo. We did not have an army of Mongos now. We had—Donut had—one minion, who controlled her own army. That was a major difference.

“Okay, Kiwi,” Donut was saying. “I’m going to bring Mongo out now. He might be scared at first, so please be gentle with him.”

“Uh, Donut,” I said, “Maybe we should wait until...”

Mongo appeared, zapping into place between Donut and Kiwi, who squawked and jumped away at the sudden appearance of the male dinosaur. She angrily bit at him, who shrieked and snapped back. They both started barking like pissed-off geese, circling one another while other dinosaurs scattered, almost knocking me over.

“Mongo, no!” Donut cried. “It’s Kiwi!”

All of the others crowded around Mongo and started sniffing at him. He cried and tried to move away, but he was quickly circled. He squeaked in fear.

“Mongo, it’s okay,” Donut called. “Ladies, give him some room!” She returned to my shoulder to get a better view of the crowd. “Mommy is right here. Kiwi has agreed to help us. Don’t worry, Mongo.”

One of the lady Mongos—not Kiwi—bent down in front of Mongo, face down, butt in the air, presenting herself to him, wiggling her tail enticingly. Mongo suddenly didn’t appear so scared anymore. But before anything could happen, Kiwi saw this and hissed angrily, pouncing through the air and tackling the offending female, who hissed but shrank back.

“Good girl! Good Kiwi!” Donut said. “I’m glad we understand... Kiwi, no! Mongo! Not again! Bad!”

“So much for rule number one,” I said a moment later.

~

While this went on, I finally noticed that Prepotente had returned to his feet. He’d collected all of the loot from Miriam. He had a wand in his hand. He hung his head low, and he faced away from the circle of screeching dinosaurs.

“Hey, Prepotente,” I said, stepping back. Donut remained on my shoulder, complaining loudly. I’d told her to just let it happen, but she didn’t listen. “Hey, you doing okay, buddy?”

I tensed as he pointed the wand at an empty space in the field. A blue square, about one by one meter appeared on the ground, flattening the grass around it. The goat put the wand away and stepped onto the square.

“Carl, do you see that?” Donut said, attention suddenly on the spot on the ground. “It’s a safe space!”

“I only have one charge left after this one,” Prepotente said, his voice uncharacteristically monotone. “It lasts for three minutes.”

“Wait, what are you doing?” I asked, suddenly alarmed. A wand that created a temporary, tiny safe space? My mind swirled with possibilities. That was better than Protective Shell. A lot better.

But then I saw the adventurer box appear in midair, swirl and start to open. He was using the space to open his loot boxes. What a waste, I thought. Even with an emergency benefactor box. But now that he’d cast it, I waited, curious to see what would come out of the box.

He had a ton of boxes. He received mysterious potion after potion along with several scrolls, none of which he bothered to explain. Finally, the benefactor box—a legendary benefactor box—opened with a loud fanfare. There was only ten seconds left on the safe space when the two items appeared.

It looked like a handheld bicycle pump with a tin can welded underneath the nozzle. He’d also received a piece of paper.

“It looks like a giant version of one of those perfume bottles Miss Beatrice used to have,” Donut said.

“It’s not for perfume,” I said.

It was a vintage-style spray applicator. Something one would use to spray herbicide onto a garden. You’d put the poison in the tin can part and push the pump to apply the mist. The applicator disappeared into his inventory. He read the paper before it also disappeared.

“Carl. Do you have any fine healing potions? I only have two.”

I had about fifty of them.

“Yeah. A few,” I said cautiously. I thought of the ring he’d swallowed. “Do you need one? How’s your stomach?”

“Give them to me. I need at least five more. I have all the other required ingredients.”

“Give them to you?” I asked.

“Consider it payment for the Size Up scrolls you stole from my mother.”

I paused. “Tell me what’s on the paper, and I will.”

“It’s just a potion recipe for a herbicide. Fine healing mixed with blessed water and a weedkiller. But it’ll only work if it’s applied using my new magical cannister. It has to be turned to a very fine mist.”

I sighed and pulled out five potions without any further complaint. Behind us, the festivities were coming to an end, and I was too tired to argue. I handed them to the goat. But even as I did, I sent a note to Mordecai. I remembered a bomb recipe in my cookbook specifically designed to turn chemicals into an aerosol. I just needed to figure out how to explain how I would know this. And fast.

“I’ve made a decision, Carl and Princess Donut. I don’t expect you’ll understand, but I am quite determined.”

“Okay,” I said, still distracted by the problem with the recipe.

He waved his hand, and Bianca materialized. The large, pitch-black, evil-looking goat monster chittered. Multiple dinosaurs screeched angrily. Donut gasped as I jumped back in surprise. Heat filled the clearing.

Bianca was much bigger than the last time I’d seen her only a few days ago. She’d gone from level 33 to 40. She now had a full set of black, smoking wings. And a saddle. Prepotente pulled himself upon the back of the creature, which was the size of a large rhinoceros.

She still had ten more levels before she would be full-sized.

He leaned in. “Yes, Bianca,” he said. He paused, and I had the sense he really was talking to the demon. “Yes. She’s gone. No. You can’t eat any of them. We can, however, fly now. We are no longer tethered to the ground or to moonlight. We need to hurry. We are going to level-up several times today.”

The goat returned his attention back to me and Donut. “If I can’t exist in a world with my mother, then nobody even remotely responsible for her death can exist in this world, either. I am going to kill all of them, or I am going to perish trying.”

I just looked up at the goat. Translucent, black-hued flames crackled across Bianca’s body, which smelled of burned flesh. With Prepotente on the saddle, he also burned with the black flames, and the sight was terrifying to behold.

I had a strange, sudden feeling, one I couldn’t quite understand. It was a unexpected mix of fear, sadness, but something else. Hope, maybe? Pride? I didn’t know. As much as I couldn’t stand this guy, there was comfort there. Comfort in knowing we were on the same page.

“Why do you think I wouldn’t understand?”

Prepotente just nodded, and I knew he understood it, too.

The goat’s demeanor had greatly changed from the first time I’d met him. Trauma does that, I thought. It’s an explosion with your heart at the center. It changes everything all at once.

“Thank you for being with her when she died. I’ll see you two at the party, if not before. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have enough applications to kill twenty of these Creeper monsters, and I plan on not wasting a drop.”

Bianca spread her wings and flapped a few times as a group of raptors hesitantly surrounded the hellspawn familiar, growling and hissing. We all had to take another step back.

As we watched them lift up off the ground, I noted Prepotente was currently level 57, one above my level 56.

Donut: CARL. I’VE JUST HAD A TERRIBLE THOUGHT. DO YOU THINK THE PLENTY WANTED MIRIAM TO DIE?

Carl: Yes, Donut. I believe they did.

I didn’t add that I was almost certain that Prepotente believed this, too. This was also something that trauma could do. It could make you blind, and it could open your eyes wider than they’d ever been, all at the same time.

The implications of this, I could not predict.

Out loud, I said. “We need to hurry back to the saferoom. See if you can figure out how to communicate with Kiwi as we go. We need to figure out why she sought you out.”

“She sought me out because she wanted to get her filthy claws back onto my Mongo,” Donut said, looking back at where the two remained, both on their sides, panting.

“There’s more to it than that. I have this weird suspicion that all of this is a lot more important than I realized before.”

“Hey, at least Prepotente doesn’t blame us for the death of his mother,” Donut said as we set out.

I wasn’t so sure about that, either.

~~~~

Hey everybody! This month was a bear because I was home for less than two weeks for the whole month, and I have Emerald City Comic con--my biggest show of the year-- this upcoming weekend plus all the additional holiday craziness with my Collageorama job. Plus my daughter just got a job in LA, and she's moving there permanently this weekend, also during the con, and I'm helping her coordinate all of that. I have been a very busy beaver.  

If you're in the Seattle area, I will be at the CollageOrama booth all weekend at the con in the Homegrown section. My booth will be art-focused, but I will have books. Come say hello. I will also have stickers AND a booth babe.  

If you are god-tier, and I owe you a signed book, those will be mailed out starting next week. Thank you all for your support.

I will have a mystery poll coming up in a few. The winning choice will have a major impact on the next book.

Speaking of books, my good friend Ben Wolf has a new Xmas-themed book out called What the Frost. I pre-read it to blurb it, and it is absolutely batshit bonkers. I really liked it. It is here: https://amzn.to/30MPcyu

As for the audio, I've attached an mp3 of the audiobook's first chapter because I told him I would after reading it, and he got me a cigar, which was pretty cool.