The Eye of the Bedlam Bride — Chapter no 40

[ 40 ]

WE HAD TO HIKE A GOOD WAYS TO THE SAFEROOM, WHICH WAS WITHIN A small, side-of-the-road shrimp shack. As we traveled, Donut continued to chat, rapid-fire about card theory, but somewhere along the way, she trailed off, and we finished the walk in mostly silence.

I continued to talk with the others. All were pushing their way through the first nine opponents. People were trying all sorts of ways to cheat, attempting to kill the enemy squad leaders before the fight actually started.

Nothing worked so far.

Because the enemy deckmaster only activated and became corporeal when the squad leader approached, people were getting creative, like ringing the frozen NPC with traps or sitting right there with weapons poised. None of that worked. The moment the fight started, any traps or placed structures in a ring around the enemy literally disappeared, teleporting off to god knew where. Crawlers who were within the ring were knocked unconscious, which had disastrous results for some.

Tserendolgor had a long-range sniper guy in her group, someone who used an old-school sling and some sort of targeting spell, and she’d had him posted up on a hill, overlooking the opponent from a distance. He said the moment the fight started, the targeting spell failed, and the opponent moved a meter to the left, which screwed up his aim. But he managed to kill the guy anyway a minute later.

It was like they were desperately trying to fix how unbalanced the card game was, but they still hadn’t gotten it right. Most of these fights were still ending before the totems could be useful.

The bopca eyed us warily as we pushed our way into the saferoom, not bothering to stop to talk. When we got into the guild, I found the main room filled with sleeping strippers and changeling children, all piled around the

base, many of them snoring loudly. They were supposed to be sleeping in their barracks, but they didn’t have video games and television in the barracks. The room was an absolute mess. It appeared they’d had a water balloon fight. I had no idea where they’d gotten the balloons, but the broken latex pieces were everywhere, and the whole place was wet. The main screen was showing the movie Encino Man, but the sound was off.

I looked about and spied the cleaner bot in its spot in the top, right corner of the room, and it gave me a quiet, sullen beep, almost like the whine of a dog locked in his cage. Mordecai must have told the thing to wait until morning to clean, so not to wake everyone up.

Samantha was in the room, and she was the only other one awake. She’d been cleaned since the Desperado Club incident, and she rolled toward us and hopped up on the kitchen table. She opened her mouth to say something, but I put my fingers to my lips, indicating for her to be quiet. I patted her on the head, and she growled and snapped at me.

I didn’t see Mordecai, and I assumed he was asleep. Or more likely, working in the crafting room.

Mongo moved to the pile of sleeping, half-naked men and curled up in the middle of them. He was still covered in gore.

I had several notifications and achievements to wade through, but we decided to do it in Donut’s room, and we moved there.

“Carl,” Donut said as I closed the door. I was exhausted, but I could tell she wanted to talk. She’d been full of energy for a bit, but it was like it had

drained away all at once.

“Yeah?”

She took a nervous glance at her social media interface and seemed to deflate. “You know what, never mind. Let’s open our boxes.”

I sat down on the lone chair in the room, and I pulled her into my lap. I stroked the side of her head. She was matted and dusty and needed to be brushed.

“Don’t worry about anybody else. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

She sniffed. “I keep thinking about that fight with the diving suit guy. It was easy, but he had this strategy that could’ve worked if we hadn’t killed him so fast. You would’ve been smooshed. I didn’t see it coming. There’s so many cards out there. Like thousands of different ones, and we don’t know what the bad guys will have. It’s not fair.”

I continued to stroke the side of her head. “No, it’s not fair. But that’s

why we have a strategy of our own. We move fast. We finish the fights as soon as possible and make it so it doesn’t matter what the other guys have.”

She swallowed, building up to what she really wanted to say. “What happens if you die? What would I do? And if something happened to me, what would Mongo do?”

I just sat there, holding her warm body against mine, waiting for her to continue.

“The more I study this card game, Carl, the more I realize how easy it is for us to lose at any moment. That last guy was only number six. Each one after him is going to be harder.”

I continued to stroke her. “It’s always dangerous, Donut. We can only do our best.”

“I don’t like being in charge of the deck. You’re usually in charge of the important stuff. When I went from Odette’s show to that room, and I was by myself I had this terrible feeling for a second that I would never see you again.” She inhaled. “We’re already losing Katia no matter what happens, and nobody is talking about it. Doesn’t anybody see what it’s doing to Bautista? To me? To her? I can’t even imagine how scared she is. Sometimes when I think things like that, I can’t breathe. It’s like I’m being crushed.”

I leaned all the way back in the cushioned chair. We were in the corner of the room, facing away from her social media board, which beeped and clicked as people made comments about our conversation. I caught sight of someone’s comment.

I’m going to drop this stupid feed if she keeps being so whiny.

Go fuck yourself, I thought. I didn’t dare say it out loud. I didn’t want her to see the comment. I reached over and clicked the screen off. Donut continued to snuggle in my arm.

Her candle was sitting there, right by the screen, along with the photograph of Bea and Brad, which she’d never put away. That was okay. I pushed the photo aside, pulled a lighter, and I lit the candle. The scent of home filled the room.

“You know what, Donut? Forget the magic bed for a minute. Let’s just take an old-fashioned nap together. Right here in this chair. Not a long one, but a real one. We can open up our boxes after. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Sunrise still wasn’t for a bit. I sent a quick message to Mordecai and told him to wake us in two hours.

Mordecai: I’m in the crafting room, working on some potions. I’ll wake you.

Donut was already asleep. I tried to sleep myself, but I couldn’t. It was as if I’d forgotten how. So instead, I just sat there alone with my thoughts. My thoughts and the river, which was still there. Always.

I thought of Mordecai, and I pictured him there at his table, working on this or that. I thought of the baggage he carried on his shoulders, heavier each year. I thought of Odette, and the guilt she claimed to have over it all.

I thought of Frank Q, and the ring of Divine Suffering and what he’d told me so many weeks before. About how he was feeling crushed by it all. Just like Donut. Just like me.

I thought of that pile of dirt, and of the climb we’d have to make in a few hours. I thought of the man I knew I’d find up there.

You will not break me. Fuck you all.

I eventually did drift to sleep, only to wake on my own like 40 minutes later, about five minutes before I’d told Mordecai to wake us. Mongo was in here now, curled up on the floor, his large and heavy head on my foot.

Samantha was here, too, and she was sitting to my right on the table, looking up at the social media board feed, which she’d somehow managed to turn back on. She was angrily muttering to herself.

“Let me read it. Let me read it, or I will find your mother and you know what will happen.” She turned and noticed me awake and let out a big smile.

“You talk in your sleep.”

“Samantha, don’t mess with that thing. You’re going to break it.”

Donut yawned and stretched as I tried to wake myself up. I felt like such utter, fatigued crap that I immediately moved to the magic rest pad and reset my exhaustion.

I both hated and loved how well it worked, how it was so easy to just step over the pad and let the energy flow into me.

Donut was back to her regular self, clucking over the gore splatters in the room from Mongo. Like always, she made no mention of her earlier mood.

I moved to my notifications. The message boards were awash with people talking about a loot box most everyone got. I had private messages from Katia, Li Jun, and Elle, all asking for updates. Katia had apparently visited

us, noticed the mass of sleeping people, and slipped back out of the personal space. I’d message them all back in a minute.

I actually had more achievements than I was expecting, including one for killing the swordfish guy with my foot. That one resulted in a bronze spicy box. My Smush skill base was now at level 12. My bonus for using my pedicure kit supposedly raised it an additional three levels, but it was still listed as 14. Like always, the skills got wonky when items buffs attempted to push them toward 15.

I was starting to realize we were getting some seriously padded experience from these card fights. I needed to work on my Powerful Strike.

Most of my other achievements weren’t too interesting. The notable ones were: New Achievement! Cascadia’s Turquoise Taco!

It’s important to explain to you how much work it took for you to get here, to this point, Crawler.

Long, long before any of you monkeys were even born, this planet was chosen to be used for this season of Dungeon Crawler World. When that happened, the then-showrunners, the Borant Corporation, needed to submit their proposal for all 18 levels of the World Dungeon. That proposal included an outline for how this floor, the eighth level, would proceed.

As you now know, it was a game involving T’Ghee cards. Artists, engineers, and writers, both flesh and artificial, went to work designing the system. It takes a gargantuan effort to make something like this viable, something that can be played by thousands of people at once. It takes a lot of work to create and balance all the cards to make a game that’s both fair to play yet entertaining to watch by the viewers. Millions of work hours have gone into this moment, where your squad now faces an opponent with a card deck of their own.

Mudskipper Cascadia, the recently divorced lead engineer and the current executive producer of Dungeon Crawler World: Earth, has already been humiliated over the disaster on the previous floor. Combine that with her utter inability to control what is still happening on the ninth, and you know what you get? An administrator who is on the edge, that’s what you get. She’s right there, man. Right. There.

So, imagine if you will, how she’s going to feel when she realizes most of you monkeys keep ending these carefully-set up fights before either

side can draw a single, damn card.

You ended a card fight before it even began.

Reward: You’ve received a Gold Prepotente Box!

I refused to believe it’d really taken that much work to design this ridiculous card system. It felt more like a half-assed YuGiOh! ripoff duct- taped together by someone on an Adderall bender. It wasn’t balanced. It wasn’t fair. My opinion, from even before the dungeon, was how could any card game be fair when not everyone had access to the same pool of cards?

My friend Sam had been a big player of the card game, Magic: The Gathering. We’d argued about this more than once.

I finally noticed the name of the box, and I laughed. This was the same one many others had received, but I still wasn’t sure what it was. There was another version of this achievement for the squad leaders, but the prize was the same. I knew Donut would have this one, too. In fact, just about everybody in the dungeon had received something with this same box.

New Achievement! Smeat!

You participated in deck combat as a minion bodyguard for a squad leader!

Do you know what that makes you? Expendable. Cannon fodder.

Spreadable Meat. The raw materials used to lubricate the forward momentum of the galaxy’s inevitable downfall.

Hey, don’t feel so bad. Lubrication is an important component of any machine.

Reward: You’ve received a Silver Spam Box.

I’d gotten that one the moment our first real fight started, which meant most everyone in the dungeon would have this one also.

Next to me, Donut was going through her rewards. She had many more than I did, most involving specific card moves from her first and last fight.

I opened my boxes, which were mostly bronze adventurer boxes.

The Silver Spam box contained a pile of scrolls: Scroll of Build Trench. (x5) Boy, I hope you’re up on your knowledge of the fighting techniques of the first world war.

Allows for the placement of a permanent trench two point three meters deep and two meters wide. Length of trench is variable based on user’s intelligence plus strength. Combine scrolls to add reinforced sleeping quarters and other front-line accessories.

I put them away and waited for the Prepotente box to open. The box itself was made of wood painted gold and was made to look like Prepotente’s head.

“Carl,” Donut asked, looking up from her own set of adventurer boxes.

“Why is there a floating Prepotente statue in my room?”

It appeared it was going to open with some hinges at the top, as if opening a compartment to the brain.

“Man,” I said. “I actually wish he was here so I could see the look on his face when…”

The box screamed. I almost jumped out of my skin. The noise was loud enough to wake Mongo up from a dead sleep, who scrambled to his feet and started looking around wildly.

I grumbled as the prize appeared. It was a heavy book. Not a magic tome.

A thick, diary-like book filled with blank paper. There were probably three or four hundred pages. The cover was a hard, black leather with no title.

The Filthy Little Crawler’s Book of Voodoo.

Warning: You may not trade this item. This item may not be destroyed. You may remove it from your inventory to use it, but you will not be able to throw it away. If you drop this book, it will automatically return to your inventory.

Way back in the old days before you flesh sacks invented pagers and cellular telephones, it was difficult for people on the go to get ahold of one another. And if you were at a large event such as a science fiction convention, forget about it. You were on your own.

But then came the Voodoo Board.

They started popping up at all the nerd conventions. It was simple, really. It was just a big board with the name of everybody attending the convention upon it. If you had a message for somebody and wanted to let them know your mommy was coming to pick you up at a certain time, you would take a pin and place it by their name. They’d stroll by the board, see they had a message, and they’d move to an alphabetical file and find the note. Privacy be damned!

It was called the Voodoo board because of the pins. This book is the same thing. It’s called a book of Voodoo because it’s named after the message board. Not because it can secretly be used for any sort of nefarious purpose which will become clear later, so just get that out of your head this instant, mister.

When you meet a crawler who owns this same item, their name will

permanently appear in this enchanted book. You may use the book to exchange messages. You may write your message under their name, and only they will receive it. If you write under your own name, everyone who has your entry will see the message. You may write your message manually or using the messaging interface while turned to the page. One must open the book to read the message, but you will have the option to copy the words. Message will erase on demand, allowing one to write a new note.

This book is not retroactively filled with the entries of people you have already met. You must be within close-ish vicinity of them for their name to be added. Works only with crawlers who also own this book.

“Huh,” I said, turning the book over in my hand. It was basically a combination between my Coffee Shop Author’s Kit and the regular messaging system. It allowed for easier mass messages, but one would have to physically pick up the book, turn to the page with the crawler’s name and read. I wasn’t certain of the utility.

Still… why would they give this to most everybody in the dungeon? The description was a little alarming. You never really knew when the AI was being serious or not. I thought back to the new achievement message attached to the box. It’d been about Cascadia, the kill, kill, kill lady. The loot box was presumably named after Prepotente because he’d really upset her. He’d more than made her angry. He’d broken a floor.

Across from me, Donut had received the same box and was opening it now. She looked at it suspiciously. The moment it appeared, the book, still in my hand, buzzed like a telephone. I opened it up, and sure enough there were now two entries. The first was my own name. The second was Donut. As I stared at her entry, a new type of window popped up into my interface. It was similar to a chat window for a group quest chat.

I mentally wrote: You have bedhead, Donut.

I watched the book buzz, and Donut leaped back and batted it with her paw. Then she hesitantly reached forward, and it magically opened on its own. She read the message and scoffed. She flipped the page to my entry and stared at it for a moment. The book buzzed in my hand, and I turned to Donut’s page.

THIS IS A STEP BACKWARD, CARL. THIS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF CHATTING BY LEAVING POST-ITS ON ONE’S

LOCKER IN HIGH SCHOOL. THE REAL MESSAGE SYSTEM IS MUCH BETTER, AND I ABSOLUTELY WILL NOT USE THIS.

I stared at the words, and they highlighted themselves on the page. I copied the text and added it to my scratchpad.

“Interesting,” I said out loud and stuck the book into my inventory.

“Come on. No training today. Shower and buffs, and then we’re going back out there.”

In the daylight, the relocated chunk of land looked even more haphazard and unstable. The entire mountain had turned to mud. It was, I realized, a mix between the ocean battering it at the base and the snow melting off the top.

Still, the slope wasn’t that steep and not too muddy on the side facing where we’d killed the deep dive guy. I tried my hand at scaling it with Donut on my shoulder, which was a mistake. She spent the time commenting loudly in my ear about my climbing skills.

I’d forgotten my new back patch also came with a Climb benefit. It turned out to be really useful. Despite the slippery mud, I started to make my way up the slope. Donut didn’t seem to notice my new ability, however, and she was constantly offering me “tips.”

As I ascended, I caught up on the group messages. Most everybody in my groups had made their way through the first four or five opponents with little trouble. Imani’s seventh opponent used a flee card, and when she approached the eighth, it remained incorporeal and frozen, which meant we had to fight these guys in order. So Imani was now running through the streets of Detroit attempting to find where the guy had gone to. Katia was on her way to her seventh fight as well. She’d ditched one of her totems for what sounded like a giant, Vietnamese cow thing called a kting voar or something like that.

Li Jun’s team was still experimenting, attempting to circumvent the protections and kill or trap the opponents before the squad leader approached.

They were having little luck. Chris had ranged forward to scout out the final boss, but the area was locked. He said there was a giant vending machine blocking the entrance to the area, and you had to feed it the nine tokens for it to open.

Louis wanted to know if we were all going to get together for Christmas celebrations once midnight passed.

Carl: You know, it’s not really Christmas. It’s like early March or something.

Louis: Oh man, really? It feels like we’ve been here a year.

Donut: CARL HADN’T EVEN PUT HIS TREE AWAY YET WHEN EVERYTHING HAPPENED.

Carl: We were just barely a week past Christmas! And my “tree” was a foot tall thing that I bought at the grocery store. You’d gnawed all the pine needles off it.

Donut: AND THEY WERE JUST EVERYWHERE. IT WAS QUITE THE MESS, CARL, AND YOU HADN’T EVEN CLEANED IT UP. WE WERE PRACTICALLY LIVING IN SQUALOR.

Louis: Still, we should do something. Maybe we could give each other

presents.

On my shoulder, Donut audibly gasped.

Imani: Let’s make sure we all get our keys first, okay?

The slope was about 700 feet up, which wasn’t so bad if one was just walking. Even with my enhanced climbing, it was a chore. I put my head down and continued to ascend.