by DoctorHepa
We returned to find the blood was still everywhere, but the cleaner bot was working as quickly as it could. It’d thankfully started at the kitchen counter, leaving the area habitable. Katia sat there eating a pineapple she’d gotten from the Bopca. She sat there as if nothing had happened, humming a little song to herself. She used her hand to form a knife to cut and core it. She offered me a piece as I approached. I declined. All I could taste was the blood.
“Okay,” Mordecai said, holding up his hands as he emerged, clean, from his room. “Before you say anything, I know it was a mistake. I shouldn’t have lost my temper like that at Chaco. It won’t happen again. And, no, we are not going to talk about it.”
“Someone told us if you do it again, you’ll be gone for good,” I said.
“I assure you it won’t happen again,” Mordecai said. “You have my word. Now what did you pick from that prize carousel anyway?”
“He got a stupid recipe book,” Donut said. “It was a joke prize.”
“Really?” Mordecai said. “Can I see it?”
“Later,” I said, trying to change the subject. “We don’t have much time, and we still need to sleep. We need to catch you up, but then we need to get back out there.”
“Did you see my sunglasses?” Donut asked. “Aren’t they just the greatest? I got them from Princess D’Nadia. If I hadn’t gotten them, we wouldn’t have known Hekla was trying to kill Katia. Oh, oh, and I have over 100 in charisma now, and I got the Love Vampire skill. Just like you told me to get. I’ve cast it a few times, but it never triggered.”
Donut’s love vampire skill allowed her to basically reflect any damage to a mob that was a lower level than her. She hadn’t used it yet because we’d been careful to keep her from getting hit on this floor.
“Okay,” Mordecai said. His eyes got huge at the mention of Hekla. He once again zeroed in on that golden skull floating over Katia. “That’s great, but slow down. We have a lot to go over, but we don’t have to do it all at once. First explain the circumstances regarding the player-killer skulls you two have, how Katia is the highest level of all of you, and then we’ll go over all of your new skills and…” he trailed off, his eyes fixed on my left hand. He took two steps toward me, grabbed my wrist and held it up so he could look at the ring I’d gotten from Frank. The Ring of Divine Suffering.
“Take this off,” he said. “Take it off right now.”
“I’m not going to use the Marked for Death skill,” I said. “It gives a five percent bonus to my stats.”
“If I wasn’t afraid I’d be kicked out of the game for good, I’d smack you into the next floor. Even if you were a player killer, you’d be an idiot to keep this on you, let alone on your finger. Every season, several of these rings are generated, and every season, the crawlers who own them are the first to be tracked down and killed by the hunters on the sixth floor. The bonuses for this ring work both ways. One of the reasons why those idiots flock to the hunting grounds is to obtain one of these things.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because in the hands of a sadistic bastard, a combatant can raise his power exponentially. Once it is charged up enough, its owner gets massively stronger each and every kill. I don’t think there has ever been a faction wars where the victorious army is led by a champion who doesn’t have one of these rings, amongst several other items. And those rich assholes who fight it out on the ninth floor will do anything they can to win. This sort of item can’t be brought in from the outside. But the factions can collect them if they can convince an idiot to go hunting for one on the sixth floor. And if there’s one thing this universe doesn’t lack, it’s idiots. You need to sell this ring. Otherwise you’ll have a huge target on your back. Bigger than the one you already have.”
I just stared down at the ring on my finger. I didn’t want to take it off. “So the faction wars winner always has one of these?”
He smacked me, then. Thwap, right on the side of the head. He did not freeze or teleport away. If he had hit me just a little harder, it probably would’ve gone bad for him. My father used to do the same thing, though he’d done it much harder. I felt my eyes narrow.
Mordecai looked at his webbed hand, just as surprised as I was. So much for promising to hold his temper.
“Carl. I shouldn’t have done that. But out of everything I just said, that’s what you’re holding on to? Crawlers don’t get involved in winning or losing faction wars. They ride out the ninth floor like it’s a tornado passing by overhead. They keep their heads down, and they pray it doesn’t sweep them away. We already have one impossible task to deal with when we get to that floor. You attempting to hold onto a Divine Suffering artifact when the entire universe knows you have it is just another level of idiocy we don’t need.”
I started a retort, but he held up his hand, interrupting me.
“Plus, don’t you remember the magic pulses on the third floor? Events that activate magic are a real danger. There will be traps that activate your spells and items. Triggering something like that could be devastating. Despite what its description says, this item is not meant for crawlers. It’s meant for tourists, designed to get them to gather up combatants by the hundreds and farm them for power. It is evil, and if you don’t get rid of it, gods help me, I will tell Donut to stay the fuck away from you the moment you hit the sixth floor.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said, pulling the ring off. I felt my strength lower, which pissed me off further. “We’ll talk about selling it on the fifth floor. Before we get to the sixth. Don’t touch me ever again.”
He looked like he was going to object, and insist on me ditching it now. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, but Katia interrupted. She had the map out, spread onto the counter.
“What was it?” she asked. “You said you knew how to get to the lower train stations. We figured it out, but there’s a bunch of different ways, and I want to know what you saw.”
Mordecai looked down at the large paper, worn and blood splattered and filled with many more marks than when he’d started working on it over a week earlier. He blinked a few times, staring at the mess of circles. I still couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could make sense of this confusing bullshit. I had the sense whoever designed this let it get away from them. I hoped the same asshole wasn’t in charge of the next floor, too.
“You see this?” he said, pointing to the circle that was the Nightmare’s loop. “And this, and this?” He indicated several other named lines. He grabbed the pen off the table and drew a symbol in the corner. It was a group of overlapping circles, similar to the Olympics logo, though the rings were all a different size. “It’s the logo for the Syndicate, at least from the top down.” He pointed to the second circle of the logo, then tapped the Nightmare line again. “See here, it matches up perfectly. The named trains make a specific pattern. That means there is a train that has to loop to the front. Probably at this station here. Yes, look, you discovered it already. The Escape Velocity line. Yeah, that makes sense. Escape Velocity is the name of the ship that discovered the worm hole to the first system where a Gleener scientific crew investigating a Primal ship graveyard came across the Vog Generation Ship. A few hundred cycles later, the Syndicate was formed. So it’s obvious once you know what you’re looking for.”
“What?” I said. “How in the hell were we supposed to spot that? How would we even know what the Syndicate logo looks like?”
“Isn’t it etched on the doors to the next floor down?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a massive kua-tin.”
“Huh,” Mordecai said. “When I did it, it was the Syndicate logo. Odd.”
“You said this is from the top down?” Katia asked. “What does it look like from the side?”
He drew again, but this time it looked like a lopsided mattress spring. The circles were actually all connected together. “Honestly, I don’t understand how these wormholes work, and that’s what the logo is based on. I
t’s not usually portrayed in 2D, but in a twisting, 3D shape. Sometimes they show the rings fly together, but when it rotates, it’s one piece. It’s like one of those optical illusion things.”
Katia snatched the pen from him and started re-drawing the logo from several different angles.
“Anyway,” Mordecai said, “that’s how I knew. The abyss here represents the center of the galaxy. You really filled this in well, Katia. The tracks probably represent the worm paths.” Mordecai leaned in. “Yes, I see it now. The whole thing is a simplified map of the galaxy, and the trainlines are the original worm paths.” He paused, reading some more. “Does that say station mimic?” He laughed. “They really went all out. There’s a story about the early days of the Syndicate where the H’lene system set up six waystations near the center. They were traps. The H’lene were robbing and eating all the travelers and then stealing their tech. The H’lene don’t exist anymore, and they weren’t really mimics, but they’re oftentimes represented as them. They got wiped out by the Valtay and the orcs.”
“Jesus,” I said, looking it over.
“What about all these Krakaren bosses and the ghouls?” Katia asked, looking up from her sketches. I had no idea what she was doing, but she was now drawing lines from the logo to different parts of the map.
Mordecai returned his gaze to the map, frowning. “Oh, wow. I see it now. The Krakaren is a real creature. It is a collective mind, and it is spreading throughout the universe. Its proliferation causes a lot of anxiety. A better translation of its name is the Apothecary because of its ability to synthesize elements. When they call it the Krakaren, it’s them deliberately bending the translation into a negative. What we have here in the dungeon is a caricature.”
He pointed to one of the stations where Katia had written, “Drug dealer.”
“They have the Krakaren making the drugs and the Pooka are the ones handing it out. I think the Pooka are supposed to represent the Plenty. They are a caprid race. They look like goats.”
We hadn’t seen or fought the Pooka, but I remembered that Elle and Imani had. They were the ones who gave the addictive “vitamin shot” to the mobs. Elle had described them as goblin things that turned into giant goats when you fought them.
Mordecai continued. “The Plenty invented the modern tunneling system. It’s only been around for a few hundred seasons, but it allows near-universal, real-time communications. The technology is proprietary, and nobody knows how it works. There’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory that they use Krakaren technology, and it’s all a ploy to get everyone into the Krakaren collective. Previously, everything had to be filtered through the wormholes. Borant had a stake in the communications relays that are now obsolete. It’s a long story. I barely understand it all. Before, even in my season, the crawl would get just as many views as it does now, but most everyone in the universe would receive it on delay. Maybe an hour. Maybe a year, depending on where you lived. Only the center system would get it live. It’s only a recent thing that the outer systems are able to follow and favorite crawlers in real time. The breakthrough changed everything. The Plenty are responsible for so much prosperity, but some, like the Bloom of the kua-tin, think of it as some insidious plot. They’re like a telegram company protesting the invention of the telephone. Or a typewriter company protesting the invention of the word processor.”
“Wait,” I said. “So when they have the Krakaren manufacturing drugs and giving it to the pooka to distribute to everyone else, what they are really doing is making some sort of bullshit metaphor? To make a political point?”
“That’s what it looks like. This whole floor is a racist political cartoon, telling the universe how shifty the Krakaren and the Plenty are. Borant has been very vocal about this for a while now. They say the Plenty are selling everybody this technology just so everybody will become addicted to it. But one day they will take it all away, and that will, somehow, allow their overlord, the Krakaren, to I don’t know, absorb the entire universe. It’s a bit ironic if you ask me, considering how Borant are actually using the tunneling technology to spew their hate everywhere.”
All of this was interesting, but I didn’t really give a shit who was racist against who when all of them were stepping all over us. As far as I was concerned, they could all go fuck themselves. But the story itself was important to know.
“But anyway,” Mordecai said. “Now that we know how to get to the front, we just need to wait out the timer and hop down the stairs. Oh, and then give me your table upgrade coupons so I can boost up my alchemy table before we go down a floor.”
I exchanged a look with Katia. We’d both already spent the upgrade coupons. “Okay, I said. We’ll give you a quick recap. But you gotta promise not to smack us again.”
“Wait until you hear about how we stuck Katia to the front of a train and then killed Hekla,” Donut added.
* * *
We took our naps and reset our buffs. By the time we were ready to emerge out into the world again, we had one day and 10 hours left. Mordecai had been busy while we slept. He’d rearranged the crafting room. He’d installed that repair bench I’d found and bought three more benches. Two with our coupons and then one with gold. He bought a second alchemy table, which he said was necessary because he could specialize one of them. He bought a metalworking table, which he said he’d explain the purpose of later, and he bought something called a Bolt-Thrower’s Workshop, which would eventually allow for the mass production of explosive and other magical crossbow bolts.
“Once we get that sapper’s table up a few more levels, you can build Katia some great ammunition,” he said.
We hadn’t yet told him about the bolt she’d gotten from her sponsor. There was just so much he’d missed. I’d bring it up soon.
He’d been aghast with some of the chances we’d taken over the past several days, and we had argued quite a bit over some of the expenses, but he’d been particularly impressed with the progress Katia had made plus some of the items I’d manufactured, including the landmines and the heal-infused smoke curtains. Both of those items I’d actually gotten from the cookbook, but if he suspected anything, he said nothing.
We still had a lot to talk about. We hadn’t discussed the Kimaris figure nor the PVP coupons nor a dozen other small items. I wasn’t finished with him regarding that bullshit with Chaco, either, but we simply didn’t have the time.
I finished my daily training to find Katia leaning over the map, chatting with Mordecai.
“But if these railways represent paths to the center of the galaxy, are they really all on the same plane?”
“All I know is what I’ve learned from years of watching Syndicate programs,” Mordecai said. “When my world was taken, we weren’t much more advanced than your world was. We’d colonized a few planets in our solar system, and that was it. I was more interested in fungus and plants than the stars. But you’re right. I think maybe it’s, I don’t know, squished.”
“I put it all together, and we’re still missing half the system,” she said. “Plus that symbol only works from above.” She trailed off. She started scribbling furiously.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, coming to look over the table. “We know where the stairs are. We just have to defend it.”
“Wait,” she said, drawing a line. “Are they able to make things upside down? Like make you think you’re right-side-up when you’re really upside down?”
I thought of the fight with the rage elemental. He’d cast a spell on us that had turned the hallway upside down.
“Yes,” I said.
“They have done that before,” Mordecai said. “They’ve done it several times, actually. It’s easy to do and saves space.”
She took the paper, and she folded it in half. She held it up to the light. She ripped it a little and rearranged it again.
“I figured out how to make the logo work,” she said. “Also, I think I know why there were only six station mimics. And why they’re so big. They’re rea
lly occupying two stations at once.”
* * *
“Wait,” I said. “So right below our feet, like if we dig down far enough, we’ll come to another train station, and you’re saying it’ll be upside down?”
“It could be right side up,” she said, “but I don’t think so. If it’s upside-down and mirrors the tracks above it, then the map works. We are at station 59 on the zomp line. If we dig, we’ll end up at station 59 on some other line. Probably whatever the inverted color is on the color wheel. Plus, I think there might be an empty chamber between the two levels. Remember that room from the recap episode? With the stairwell and the ladder? I think that’s the space in-between.”
“These tracks are twisting around and over and under each other already. A mirror world doesn’t make sense.”
“I don’t think it’s a mirror of the entire tangle. Just each individual line.”
“What? Katia, what the fuck? How does that make sense?”
“Just think of every line as a noodle, and the track is on the outside of the noodle. And there’s another track on the opposite side of the same noodle. And think of the abyss as a fork stuck into the middle of the bowl that has been turned a few times. It’s not so much a spirograph pattern like we originally thought, but a chaotic mess. And in the middle of that giant bowl, the named lines make a pattern, spelling out the logo of the Syndicate. Actually, they do it either 12 or 24 times. Or maybe 48. I’m not sure.”
“Yeah, not helping. Jesus fuck. Nobody can follow this.”
“Just pretend like you half understand.”
“Sure. Why not. That’s wild. And weird. And it just makes everything more, not less, complicated. Which goes back to my original statement. It’s amazing that you could figure this out. Really. I don’t want to come across as a dick. But how does this information affect us now other than giving me a bigger headache than I already have?”