by G. D. Penman
“Such cynicism.” Klimpt shook his head in disgust. “I do not think that you have believed a single word I’ve told you.”
“I believe that you believe it. I believe that they believe it. And you obviously believe that I can put a stop to this whole mess.” Martin got up and paced around the room, taking it all in again. Now that the bulk of what Klimpt had to tell him was out in the open, he could focus on his immediate surroundings again. It truly was a perfect replica of the garage he’d been in earlier. Maybe in slightly better repair, like it had been coded years before the old man retired to reality.
Klimpt himself looked exactly the same as when Martin had seen him – about a head taller, but otherwise identical, right down to the clothes. The weird-looking NIH he had used must have lifted those surface details, speech patterns and the rest and dumped them into the game to be simulated.
It was a stretch, but if they’d already loaded the majority of the Klimpt program up then these surface details would have been easy enough to replicate. Klimpt had been on the development team from day one, so there would have been plenty of time to bang together a little secret room like this. He was the grandfather of the technology that made Strata. It made sense that they’d grandfather him in. Martin had to blink and backtrack when he realized that the old man was back to talking. “You found me, kid. Despite all they did to hide me away. You found me. I have to believe that means something.”
“You know I don’t believe any of the things you’re saying because you’re giving me no reason to believe you, right? All it would take is a little evidence.”
“What evidence could I give that would overturn the experiences of a lifetime?” Klimpt scoffed at Martin. “No, kid. I’m not here to change your life, I’m here to throw you a life preserver. When you go off the deep end and you don’t know what to believe in anymore, it will be there waiting. Until then, you can just keep paddling along and pretending that there is nothing swimming along underneath you.”
Martin closed his eye and swallowed it all down into the big part of his brain that he usually reserved for Lindsay’s deranged conspiracy theories. More nonsense that could be filtered through for crumbs of truth when he had the time. For now, he needed to get back on track.
“You’re right. I’m not going to believe in this, and you don’t need me to believe it to get what you want from me. All I need is to get to the Dungeon. I can’t make any progress from out here.”
“I’ll drop you off wherever you want. But I warn you. This is the last time you’re going to see me. This little place I made out here, it is just a waiting room.” Klimpt’s face cracked into a smile. “After this, I’m heading out to explore, to learn all the things I could never learn with the Masters breathing down my neck. There is an infinity without end down here, and I want to see it all.”
Martin nodded along with him. “Whatever floats your boat, old man.”
Twelve
The Dark Before the Dawn
Deephaven seemed smaller when Martin tumbled down through the rusted metal of the roof above it. He hadn’t forgotten how high the ceiling was in the deep, he’d just failed to give it due consideration in light of all the other information he had recently acquired.
He flipped end over end, snatching at the few dangling chains that he passed in the hope of slowing his descent and utterly failing to catch any. This was not the end to his epic odyssey beyond the edge of the world that Martin had envisioned. He had hoped to come back wiser, and possibly stronger. Instead, he was confused, upside down and resisting the natural urge to scream. He was on full health, and it wasn’t that big of a drop. The plummet into Strata back at the start of the game had been bigger than this and he’d survived.
The sickening crunch of every bone is his body breaking didn’t come. Instead, Martin went from flipping through the cold air to being comfortably suspended in a pool of uncomfortably warm liquid, like he’d divebombed into a jacuzzi. He tried to open his eye, and that was when he realized what had happened. He had landed directly in one of the giant candles that topped the buildings of Deephaven, and now, for the second time in as many days, he was encased in wax.
The only difference was that this time there was nobody to save him.
The wax blinded his one good eye almost as soon as it was open, and the damage started ticking up.
[Skaife has suffered 3 fire damage.]
[Skaife has suffered 2 fire damage.]
[Skaife has suffered 3 fire damage.]
It went on and on like that, the heat of the wax seeping into his skin and his flesh as he flailed around, trying to swim through the viscous mess. Never quite hot enough for pain, but never quite cool enough that the threat of pain wasn’t there on the horizon.
When he broke the surface of the wax, the only way he could tell was that the stuff coating him hardened up faster. He still couldn’t breathe when he hauled himself up out of it. He still couldn’t move right when he made it to the edge of the candle and flopped against the edge.
[Skaife has suffered 1 environmental damage]
[Skaife has suffered 1 fire damage]
He was about to launch himself out in his blind panic when reason re-asserted itself. He was going to suffocate if he didn’t get rid of this wax. The fire in his lungs was burning hotter than the wick-heat keeping the wax around his legs molten. He held himself there for a long moment, feeling the heat searing into him from both ends and then finally, he flung himself up and over the rim.
Blind, deaf and coated in wax, he felt nothing but the distant tug of gravity as he fell, but when his face made contact with the floor, that all changed fast. The hardened wax on his face cracked apart when he hit the ground, then the numbness of damage spread out along his broken snout.
[Skaife has suffered 7 environmental damage]
He gasped in air, clawing the chunks of wax that he could off his face. Banging his hand against the metal beneath him again and again, he managed to crack it free and pressed it through the gaps in the wax to touch the raw skin beneath and use Healing Touch.
[Skaife has recovered 16 health]
The darkness rippled away from his one working eye as it healed, and he was able to see the NPCs of Deephaven crowding in around him. A mass of bodies that set him scrabbling for the sword at his hip, only to find it also encased in wax. They lunged at him with their hands that were hooked like claws, and he could only muster a whimper before they set upon him, clawed fingers digging into the crevasses of his armor and prying away the wax.
They took his desperate flailing for an attempt to break free of the wax, rather than of them, so very kindly knelt on him until the majority of their work was done and his frantic squeaking had died down to little huffs of air. Most of the crowd had dispersed by then, with only the most curious still lingering. “Never seen somebody come in that way before.”
“Yeah… it… it wasn’t on purpose.”
One of the Corvans, an old woman by Martin’s best guess, was sitting by his head, plucking at any lumps of wax still holding to the hair around his face. “Reckon you know why folks don’t come in that way now.”
“At least it was a soft landing.”
The old crow chuckled. “True enough.”
Martin made his way to his feet, the wax still clinging to him in some truly unmentionable places and tugging at hair he hadn’t known was there. It must have been well after midnight by now, yet still the town was hustling on like it was business hours. Of course, there was no sundown here in the Dungeon – no way to keep track of time unless you blinked and brought up a clock. Then again, Martin had never seen anyone sleeping down here that hadn’t been knocked unconscious, so maybe the time really didn’t matter.
He moved through the crowd without really seeing them, all the stories that Klimpt had planted in his head (before launching him out the garage door) now simmering beneath the surface. Could all of these people have been people? Could they all have played the game and become addicted and se
ttled in this place? It was absurd. The whole idea was absurd.
There had to be a logical explanation for all of this. One that didn’t require believing that this was heaven or hell, or some sort of sci-fi mind-meld. These were computer programs in the shape of people, that was all. If he started acting like they were really people then who knew where it ended? Would he start trying to make friends with the monsters instead of fighting them?
That thought stalled him out for a moment. He’d already done exactly that. Speckles was a monster, by any of the usual definitions, and he’d adopted the slimy little weirdo. When he’d realized that the Felidavans could talk, his first response was to try and make peace with them. Whether he believed they were people or not, he’d been treating them like people all along, and now that he stopped to think about it he couldn’t work out why.
They felt real. That was the truth, but he needed to find some justification for it. Some design argument. They had been built in a manner to elicit sympathy rather than hostility, so he interpreted the designer’s intentions as a guideline to make progress. Expecting a reward for offering the correct emotional response instead of the one that came naturally to a player encountering a monster. That was plausible. That would justify the choices he’d made. A palatable lie.
He needed to shift his focus. Now the initial excitement had passed, the Deephaven folk were off and about their business again. Wax-encasement was probably an ongoing problem here, even if Martin’s case was a bit more enveloping than the usual. He was back in the best possible place, with a map of the next few levels still seared into his mind, a free pass from the Master’s interference while the assumption persisted that he was outside of the game, and with a Heretic inbound to use as a blunt object against the cat-people who’d crossed him. The day was already looking up.
There was a certain layout to all of the towns in Strata. It wasn’t the same each time, but they had certain central hubs that could be identified with a little study. There would be the shopping center, the quest-giving NPCs, the entrance from the upper deeps and, most importantly of all, the respawn. Everything in these towns was built around the respawn point. It wouldn’t be central in every one of them, but the layout would always favor it to the exclusion of all other areas. It would almost always be equidistant from the shops and quest givers, skewed toward the exit from the settlement rather than the entrance from above. The game was designed to push players forward at all times.
With that information in mind, it was simple enough for Martin to work out where Jericho would be arriving when the morning came, and calculating the easiest and fastest route out of town in the entirely likely event that the villagers turned hostile.
There was an empty patch of real estate with all the appropriate pomposity for a respawn area in the right general vicinity, but the escape route was less than ideal. The shortest path to an exit over the town walls involved passing directly through the quest givers of the town, all high-level NPCs in their own right, and liable to cause them no small amount of trouble. Martin counted two Knights, an Invoker, two Knaves and what might have been a Hierophant or a second Invoker. Martin leaned toward a healer of some sort. There hadn’t been many of the alchemical kind about town, so it made sense to place one magical one to deal with the bumps and scrapes folks had acquired fighting the Archduke on the floor above.
They was another niggling doubt at the back of Martin’s mind. The Archdukes seemed entirely different from the vast majority of the monsters the guild had encountered on their descent. Not animal people or constructs, but visceral and horrific. Like something out of a nightmare. That in itself wasn’t enough to lend credence to Klimpt’s deranged theories about monsters predating the dungeon, but Martin did have to admit that, like with the Night Ravagers, there was some sort of connection between the Archdukes and the Heart. He could hear the voice of Strata when he came too close to them. They could change things in a way that Martin would normally say required intervention from a game’s designers. They’d changed him.
That train of thought only led to dangerous territory. He was so lost in consideration that he almost missed the telltale shimmer on the opposite side of the respawning plaza. He knew that shimmer. Up and moving before he had a chance to think better of it, Martin sprinted across the open circle of metal and tackled the invisible creature lurking on the other side. He bore it to the ground, fingers sliding over the soft downy feathers of a cloak.
“Speckles?”
“Martin?”
They untangled themselves in a scramble, then Martin dragged him off into a narrow gap between two of the rustier looking buildings. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Unravelling himself from the cloak proved to be more of a task than Speckles was up to, but with Martin’s assistance they managed to get his bulbous head free. “Me is here! Me escaped nasty cat men.”
“But why did you come back here?” Martin didn’t mean to laugh, this was not a situation that warranted it, but there was something infectious about the frog-man’s enthusiasm that always caught him that way.
“When they kills you I thinking you all come back here, but you not come back.”
Martin realized that he still had his hands on Speckles’ shoulders, so he carefully drew them back to himself. “They didn’t kill us.”
“No? They was liking you?” Speckles bounced with excitement. “Me thought they hate you?”
“Oh no, they, uh… we escaped too.” Pointing was always a good idea with Speckles. There wasn’t exactly a language barrier anymore after so much time together, but he sometimes muddled up words. Martin pointed down. “We escaped down instead of up.”
“You come back for Speckles?”
It wasn’t the truth, but it was the truth that Speckles needed to hear. It was also the truth that Martin wanted to believe about himself. There was only so much denial of reality that you could do before you got off course entirely. “Of course. We weren’t just going to leave you behind.”
“Me so glad. All day me wait and nothing.” Speckles bounced forward this time and Martin had to catch him in a hug to stop them both bowling over into the street. “Hide under cloak. Scary men come. Many scary.”
It took a moment for Martin to slot Speckles into the timeline of events. He was talking about the Brotherhood. “That was us. Sorry. We killed them.”
“All them scaries?”
“Yup.”
The Anurvan rocked back on his heels. Eyes wide. “Me am glad I’m on your side.”
Martin let out a little bark of laughter. “I’m glad you’re on my side too.”
The guild was scheduled to log back in at 11 am. Martin meant to meet Jericho earlier so they could get down and regroup with the others and move ahead as if he hadn’t been left behind. Now he could bring Speckles along with them, another moving part to be managed, but one that knew how to slip in and out of enemy territory. Everything was coming together. All the missing pieces of his plan were sliding into place. He clapped Speckles on the shoulder. “Listen, buddy, I’ve got to go sleep for a while. Can you hang out here and stay safe until morning?”
Speckles bounced with excitement once more. Caught up in Martin’s enthusiasm. “Until sun be coming up. Me hide good.”
Martin gave him an encouraging smile and was about to log out when he felt what seemed like his brain stalling. He repeated it back in his head. Then out loud. “Until the sun comes up?”
Speckles was oblivious to the change in Martin’s tone. “Yes, me is being safe. No worry. Speckles is best at hide.”
Martin tried again. “The sun?”
Speckles nodded at him slowly, like even this frog thought that he was an idiot. “Until sun comes up.”
Martin was silent for a long moment, trying to work out how to phrase his next question. “How do you know about the sun?”
Speckles scoffed, which from a frog-man sounded a lot like a ribbit. “Big fire go up in sky? Feel warm on skin. Make birds sing.”
/>
“You live in Strata. You come from Strata. There is no way out of the dungeon.” Martin could feel his excitement and dread growing in equal measure. He tried to temper them both with reason. There were other logical possibilities for this other than Klimpt’s fantasies. “There is no sun in a dungeon. How do you know about the sun?”
This brought Speckles to a dead stop. His expression, such as it was, went blank. “Me not know. Me remember?”
Ever so carefully, Martin said, “You can’t remember something you’ve never seen.”
It was as though he’d screamed at the little frog. He flinched away from Martin. “Me am sorry. No hurt!”
“What? I… I would never hurt you, Speckles.” This was the reason why Martin had been thinking about all these NPCs as real people. The confusion. The same confusion that he experienced when trying to navigate social situations out in the real world, where everyone had conflicting, confusing motivations. Layers of things that they’d learned and forgotten and deliberately fought back against. Contradictions and dichotomies. Infuriating. “You don’t need to worry about that, I just… it doesn’t make sense.”
“Me no make sense. Me stupid Speckles,” the little Anurvan wailed. “Me sorry. No hurt.”
Martin lunged forward to cover Speckles’ mouth. His hands didn’t stretch to cover even half of it, but he made an attempt. Speckles shuddered under his touch, flinching away, expecting pain to follow. “Don’t… You’re… I’m sorry. I’m never going to hurt you. I promise.”
Very carefully now, Martin drew his hands away.
“Speckles sorry.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just confused. That’s all.”
“Speckles no talk about sun again.” He said it like he was mourning.
Ever so gently, Martin put a hand on the sloped and slippery shoulder of his little friend. Physical contact was soothing to some people. He needed to remember that. “No, Speckles. I want you to tell me everything you remember. Everything that you remember from before Strata.”