by A. J. Markam
“I don’t really have a choice about the pot-smoking orc,” Richard said in resignation. “But I prefer not to game with clinically insane people.”
“Well, I guess he could be crazy,” Jen allowed, “but then I’d be crazy, too.”
“Wonderful,” Richard sighed. “Two insane people and a pot-smoking orc.”
Suddenly the group in front of us entered the dungeon. We were next in line.
“Since as we’re almost there,” I said, “I should tell you, I’ve got an ability called Gravesite where I can set up save points, which could keep us from having to go back to the graveyard at the top of the dungeon.”
“That could come in handy,” Jen said.
“But if you guys want to use it, I have to invite you into a group.”
“Okay. Go for it.”
I opened up my menu by punching the air with my finger.
“Ooh, ooh, name it the 420 Society!” Slothfart said.
“No,” Richard said.
“Okay, the 420 Club!”
“No,” Jen said.
“Ganja Goons!”
“No,” both Jen and Richard said.
“The crystal-buggers!” Russell called out.
“NO,” I growled.
“Chicken fuckers,” Stig suggested.
The entire group laughed, but Jen said, “No, I don’t think so.”
“How about just Group 1?” I asked as I sent the invite.
“That’ll be just fine,” Jen said.
“Man, I never get to do nothin’ cool…” Slothfart complained.
Jen punched the air as the invite came up, though I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see any of their invites, but I got a message stating, All members of Group 1 have accepted!
Suddenly the wooden door of the stone shack swung open, and an eerie voice whispered, “Enter, fools, if you dare…”
“That’s what she said,” Stig said, and Slothfart roared with laughter as we stepped into the dungeon.
20
The hut contained nothing but a small stone stairwell that spiraled down into the ground, with torches along the walls to light the way. We descended the stairs and eventually emerged into a stone crypt about sixty feet square.
The circular stairs formed a central hub to the room. On each of the four walls was an arched doorway with statuary on either side of it, and sticking up out of the floor were tombstones – the graveyard where we would resurrect when we died.
I looked around in curiosity at the four doorways.
The first had some pretty amazing renditions of slime molds in marble, with sloping curves and polished surfaces.
The second door had skeletons carved in bas-relief. One was a warrior in full armor with a stone and shield, and the other wore a wizard’s robes, its bony hands frozen in place as it cast an imaginary spell.
The third door was flanked by what appeared to be elementals. One was a creature made of fire, with marble flames standing up from its arms. Either that, or it was a weird-ass thorn monster. The second looked like a whirlwind, with concentric grooves around its tornado funnel-shaped body, and deep depressions for eyes.
The final door had a variety of creatures carved into the walls around it: centaurs, goblins, manticores, and the like.
The crypt was lit with torches, and the flickering shadows made the carvings seem eerily alive, like they might jump out of the wall and attack us at any second.
“Wait,” I said, confused. “Are there actually four different dungeons down here?”
“It’s basically one big dungeon,” Jen said, “but it has four different sectors, yeah. We did ten floors of the elementals and then did another twelve of the skeletons.”
“Is that all they had? All elementals or all skeletons?”
“No, there’s a little bit of everything in there, but it’s predominantly whatever the statues outside the door tell you. For instance, we had a giant skeleton boss on floor number five of the elemental dungeon.”
Huh… weird. I’d never seen anything like this before.
As Jen and I were talking, Soraiya pulled off her burqa and cast it to the ground, revealing her gorgeous face and body to the group for the first time.
Slothfart and Russell reacted as you might expect.
“Holy SHIT!” the orc howled as his tongue fell out of his mouth.
“You didn’t tell us you was hidin’ a 10 under there!” Russell hooted gleefully.
“If that’s what you get when you’re a Warlock, sign me UP,” Slothfart said, then turned to me. “Is that a succubus?”
“YES,” Soraiya snarled, “I am a succubus.”
“Geez, kinda bitchy,” Slothfart muttered.
“Well, you were rather rude by referring to her in the third person,” Richard pointed out. “And as ‘that’ rather than ‘she.’”
“Okay, Ms. Manners,” Slothfart jeered, “thanks for the etiquette lesson.”
Jen squinted at me. “Well. Now we see why you play OtherWorld.”
“No,” I protested, “she’s not even mine. Well, I mean, she was mine, sort of, but then I freed her. She agreed to help me.”
Jen pointed at the crystal dangling from my neck. “And I’ll bet your girlfriend looks nothing like her, hm.”
“Um… she looks fairly different,” I said, trying to avoid answering the question.
- Ha – good thing she can’t see me, Alaria smirked. Jealous little prude.
Meanwhile, Russell was reaching out towards Soraiya’s shapely ass – which was at his eye level – presumably to cop a feel.
FWOOSH!
Soraiya summoned her flaming pitchfork, which she pointed right in Russell’s face.
“Hands OFF, short stuff!”
Russell jumped back a foot, but answered with a smile and a wiggle of his eyebrows. “I know parts of me look short, luv, but other parts are amazingly long, if you know what I mean.”
“What, the parts you sodomize rotisserie chickens with?” Richard asked.
“‘Ey – not in front of the lady!” Russell cried out.
“You had no issues reenacting said sodomy in front of her before,” Richard pointed out.
“That’s before she took the hijabie thingie off and I knew she was a stone-cold hottie!”
“Can we please focus?” Jen shouted, and Slothfart and Russell finally stopped ogling Soraiya. “Which dungeon are we going to take?”
I looked at her in surprise. “Aren’t we going to do the skeletons since you already made it to the tenth floor?”
“We could, but if you’re just hoping to get through faster, it won’t work. Once you clear a floor, there’s a shortcut to get back to it – but it only works if every member of your party completed that floor. We found that out the other day when we got a new fifth player and had to start the elementals all over again. That’s why we did the skeletons – out of boredom.”
“Shit,” I griped. I’d been hoping to just zip right past ten floors and be that much closer to the dungeon core. “Alright, well, you know what’s coming with the elementals or the skeletons, so let’s do one of them.”
“BORING,” Russell said cheerfully. “I say we do the slime molds!”
“Ew, no!” Slothfart scoffed. “Slime mold dungeons are like walking around in a porno theater after the last show lets out.”
All of us stared at him.
“You know,” he said. “Because of all the… jizz on the… never mind.”
Jen made a face of utter disgust. “How would you know what it’s like to walk around in a porno theater after the last show lets out?!”
“I just meant hypothetically!” Slothfart protested.
“Do they even have porno theaters anymore?” Richard said. “There is this wonderful invention now called the internet.”
“Bums don’t have the internet,” Slothfart said. “They’re the ones you find in porno theaters.”
Jen made an even more disgusted face. “How the HELL would you know there are onl
y bums in porno theaters?!”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” the orc pouted.
“He’s feeling judged!” Russell announced jubilantly. “Don’t worry, Slothie, I don’t judge you!”
“Or your sexually deviant activities,” Richard chimed in.
“I TOLD you it was HYPOTHETICAL!” Slothfart yelled.
Russell turned to me. “Now yer gettin’ buggered by a crystal don’t seem quite so strange!”
“I didn’t do anything with the crystal!”
“Yeah! Yeah, talk about him for a change!” Slothfart shouted as he pointed at me.
“Let’s just do the weird creature dungeon, okay?!” I snapped.
“Let’s,” Richard concurred.
“I’m sure as hell never doing a slime dungeon again,” Jen muttered.
We were making our way over to the stone creatures when suddenly there was a glow amongst the tombstones, and a human Warrior in full armor materialized out of thin air.
“Hey guys,” he greeted us as he ran into the slime mold dungeon.
“What the hell?!” I cried out.
“Guess somebody likes porno theaters,” Slothfart said.
“How did he get in here?!”
“The stairs?” Stig suggested.
“Don’t worry, mate!” Russell said cheerfully. “This place is big enough for LOTS of people at one time!”
“That’s what she said,” Stig piped up.
Slothfart about lost it. “Bwahahahaha – pretty good, little dude, but not quite there yet…”
I frowned in frustration. “No, that’s not what I meant.”
“You thought the server created an instance just for us,” Jen suggested.
“Yeah!”
Normally when a party entered a dungeon, the computer created a separate ‘instance’ – or digital copy – of that dungeon just for those five people, so they didn’t end up crowded together with a bunch of other players.
“For this dungeon, the computer only creates a separate instance for players at the same level – say, a bunch of Level 30s,” Jen informed me. “Otherwise the dungeon’s so huge that they don’t need to create a different copy for every group that enters it.”
The gears in my brain started spinning. “Wait – that means we could just let somebody else come through and run after them, right?”
“Nice try. As soon as you clear one floor of the dungeon, a stone door automatically slams down so the floor can reset for the next group. You can’t team up and have ten people go through at the same time – it won’t let you.”
“Dammit,” I grumbled. There was just no way the game was going to make it easy for me. “Alright… let’s go.”
21
We started down a long stone passageway lined with torches.
On the right side of the corridor were rectangular holes every 20 feet or so, like crude doorways set three feet deep in the stone.
“What’s through here?” I asked as I stepped into the first mini-passageway for a look.
I immediately recoiled.
The ‘window’ looked down into a vast, deep atrium. And when I say ‘vast and deep,’ I mean vast and DEEP.
Imagine a skyscraper a hundred stories. Turn it from glass and steel into negative space, surrounded by stone walls. Now you have an idea of the pit I was looking down into.
At least a football field’s length on each of its four sides, the shaft plummeted down well over a thousand feet. There were hundreds of open windows dotted across the walls, and from within the openings on lower levels I could hear screams and the clang of steel.
There were also a few torches on the walls here and there that cast flickering shadows, just enough to give you an idea of how far down you would fall.
I hate heights, but that’s not what freaked me out the most.
It was the wyverns. Hundreds and hundreds of them.
Wyverns are basically smaller versions of dragons, only with two legs, not four. Their wings take the place of forelegs, which makes them look like a cross between velociraptors and giant bats.
The wyverns in the atrium clung to the sheer rock faces and stalactite ceiling, spiraled downward into the expanse of empty space, gobbled up the occasional foot-long spider crawling along the stone walls, and battled midair as they tore at each other with their razor-sharp teeth and claws.
“WHOA,” I cried out as I stumbled back into the corridor.
“Yeah, don’t go out the windows, dude,” Slothfart advised me.
“The other day we saw a Mage try to levitate his group down the center,” Richard said. “It wasn’t pretty.”
“How so?”
“Ever go to the beach and throw bread crumbs into the air at a flock of seagulls?” Jen asked.
“Yeah?”
“It was like that, except substitute in players for breadcrumbs and flying komodo dragons for seagulls.”
“Jesus – do the wyverns ever come through the windows?”
“We haven’t seen them do it so far. But on the lower floors, who knows?”
- They will, Alaria confirmed. But not for another thirty floors or so.
Great.
Something to look forward to.
- Looks like Deek expanded since the last time I was here, Alaria mused.
“How many floors did he used to have?” I asked.
- I think he was working on hitting 70 when I left. But he always had the four different quadrants, with the slime molds, skeletons, and the rest.
“Heads up, mate!” Russell announced happily as he readied his war hammer, which was nearly as big as he was. “Incomin’!”
Five gremlins were scuttling towards us. OtherWorld gremlins were humanoid reptilians, smaller than Stig but all teeth and fangs.
“AAAAARGH!” Russell screamed as he vaulted through the air and SLAMMED! down in the middle of the gremlins. They immediately went for him, their claws scraping across his steel armor.
He flattened a couple easily with the war hammer. Slothfart dashed in with his Orcish scimitar and slashed another gremlin, which fell to the ground in a heap. I blasted the fourth with Soul Suck, and Jen hit the last one with a blast of ice particles that froze it to the ground like a statue. Russell immediately shattered it into oblivion with one overhead strike of his hammer.
Five up, five down.
“Easy peasy, Japanesey,” Russell hooted.
“Anybody want some gremlin claws?” Slothfart called out. “They’re worth a copper apiece.”
I wasn’t grinding for money to pay off a mob boss right now, so I didn’t give a shit about every little penny. “I’m good.”
“Bleedin’ stingy dungeon,” Russell griped cheerfully. “Where’s the gold?”
“It’s coming,” Richard assured him.
“That’s what she said,” Stig croaked.
“Here comes more, people!” Jen shouted.
And so the onslaught began. Wave after wave of different creatures, most I’d seen before, a couple I hadn’t. Hairless cave wolves. Pickax-wielding kobolds. Basilisks shooting red beams out of their eyes. Three-foot-long black widows. Once we turned the corner, we encountered a couple of slime molds and skeleton warriors, but then it went back to creatures again: fire-breathing frogs that leapt up in your face. Vampire bats that divebombed us from the ceiling. Even a couple of harpies with ugly women’s faces atop their feathered bodies.
We dealt with it seamlessly and settled into a real flow. As the Paladin tank, Russell joyfully leapt into the thick of things with a near-suicidal lack of regard for his own safety.
As a Priest and the healer of the group, Richard the troll would use his beams of yellow light to replenish any damage Russell took.
Slothfart would rush in after Russell and help him clean up.
Meanwhile, Jen would support the others with ranged attacks: stiletto-like icicles, rays of frost, blasts of ice that would freeze enemies into statues. Her area-of-effect spells were especially devastating, a
s they covered attackers in ice and slowed them down by half, making them easy targets for Russell and Slothfart.
Me and my crew definitely held our own. I mostly stuck to Darkbolts, Darkfire, and Soul Suck. Most of the monsters weren’t really powerful enough to warrant Doomsday, and would die within five seconds of me attacking them.
Stig did his part throwing fireballs. Soraiya cleaned up with her flaming pitchfork, spearing anything that got within five feet. And Fugly used his acid attacks to handle anything airborne – bats, jumping frogs, spiders swinging down on strands of thread.
Actually, he ate a few of them, too.
Wylla just flew around in a constant panic, wailing, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness!”
As the dead creatures piled up, I ignored the stray claws and fangs and glands I could have gathered to sell back at the market. I didn’t see the need to slow us down to make a couple of bucks in change.
The good thing was that the air was filled with a blizzard of golden numbers: 40 XP, 50 XP, 75 XP. The creatures weren’t worth much XP individually, but in aggregate they were decent. That would change as we reached lower floors. The first one was supposed to be a cakewalk.
Well, it was until we got to the final boss, anyway.
It was an evil satyr with panpipes that played one of two things: hypnotizing tunes that made you feel like you were wading through molasses, or high-pitched screeches that pierced your eardrums like knitting needles. A bunch of rabid little fauns kept attacking us, but Jen and my demons handled them while Russell and Slothfart beat the satyr to a pulp. As soon as they shattered his panpipes, it was over within 30 seconds.
‘1000 XP’ floated up through the air.
At this rate I would make Level 26 in no time.
“Any loot?” I asked.
“Two silver for each of us,” Slothfart said as he inspected the satyr’s corpse. “And a healing potion that’ll give you back 2% of your hit points.”
“…wow,” I said, decidedly underwhelmed. “It’s not even worth the effort to walk over there to get it.”
“We’ll get something worthwhile on the fifth floor,” Jen promised. “That’s the first big loot worth having.”
After the satyr, a stone slab slowly retracted up into the wall, creating a temporary doorway. As soon as we walked through, the stone slab SLAMMED down again – but a smaller stone doorway opened up in the wall right next to us.