Chapter 14

From the very first second Ben had seen his utility pocket elemental, he knew he'd made the right choice. The very next second after the first, he just spent admiring the little blobby thing.

In the third second, he'd named it Frankie. Why that particular name? Ben had no idea, but he really liked it, and he was as proud as could be of his new pet.

Then, Frankie had opened a portal and vanished, and Ben had no idea where he'd gone off to. He called out, and heard no answer.

Then, he felt something he'd never felt before from his utility pocket; movement. Something inside of it was moving around and touching things, moving them about and interacting with them. When Ben focused on the source of the disturbance, he found Frankie.

The amount of relief he felt was, in a word, absurd. He'd known the elemental for like. . . eighty-three seconds?

Irrational or not, Ben felt much better now that he knew Frankie was still around, and that he was submerged in the element he needed to survive.

Ben expected to feel a pull on his mana pool to sustain the elemental, but felt nothing.

“Guess the little guy's bringing his own magic to the party. Neat!” Ben said, then tried to eject the elemental so he could get a better look at it.

A utility pocket opened, and Ben willed Frankie to come out, but Frankie did not come out. Frankie stayed exactly where he was, and continued sorting through all of Ben's stuff, organizing it or something.

“Oh, Ok,” Ben said, “No, that's my bad. It makes sense he would want to stay in there.”

Then, Frankie ate the antique spear Ben had looted.

“What!” Ben said, feeling the item vanish from his inventory. Before he had a chance to say something like 'No, bad elemental, give that back!' and embarrass himself, a utility pocket appeared in Ben's left hand, and the spear sort of forced itself into his palm.

It was the oddest sensation, really, it was. He felt his fingers being manipulated by the utility pocket's ability to push and pull; they were gently separated and then the spear erupted into the gap, and the pocket pulled his fingers onto the shaft.

Two things happened after that; First, Ben felt his mana start to drain at a slow, steady rate; Second, the rust started to fall off the spear.

“What's happening?” Ben asked, then felt the answer in the space of his brain devoted to his skills. [Royal Antique Restoration: Left Hand]. “Right, I have that skill. Shit, I should have used that on the sword.”

In response, Frankie swam through the utility pocket and started to gently pry the broken remains of the old sword from the Ax Beetle's body. Once they were loose, Frankie ate them.

“You are just a helpful little dude aren't you,” Ben commented, and Frankie. . . there's not a remotely graceful or accurate way to describe the actuality of what happened in this moment. Suffice to say, Frankie turned towards Ben with what could qualify as his head, and then wiggled some purple tendrils at him that had appeared out of nowhere.

Ben was pretty sure it was like a purr in a cat, but he was positive that it was an expression of happiness. He watched Frankie get back to work; the little guy wasn't fast, but he didn't ever stop in there. Ben noticed him occasionally take a bit of something, or something else, but at this point, Ben trusted Frankie was on his side.

He looked around the room, which was green, glowing, and showed signs of a serious fight. The wood was splintered or deeply dented where the Ax Beetle had kicked off from it, and a great torn gouge marked where it had gotten stuck in the wall the first time. When Ben looked over to the spot where it had been stuck a second time, his eyes widened in shock.

It was a startlingly violent scene! The first thing that struck him about it was the shadow of the monster, the large oval where its chest had been pressed up to the wood; the least damaged part of the wall. Outside of that, Ben could see where the powerful creature had been clawing at the wood, finger-shaped gouges all over the place.

His memory surged, and he remembered standing on the back of that thing, a rusty sword in his hand; he had seen it tearing at the wall with its arms, hadn't he?

Then, he saw the stains from the blood around the torn, deep hole that its horn had made. In a way it was interesting to examine, because the horn had gone in, then been removed with the utility pocket. Some parts of the wood were broken and torn up, but near the end, Ben could see a near-perfect mold of the horn.

He took his hand off of the Town Crystal and sat down, staring at the scene. The spear dropped from his hand and was quickly swallowed up by a pocket from Frankie.

“That looks awful,” Ben said, chin resting on his knuckles as he stared in a near stupor. “I did. . . It doesn't even feel real,” Ben said, looking down at the deep, terrible bruise on his side, and felt a wave of nausea come over him when he remembered what it had looked like before.

“This is just insane,” Ben said, leaning up straight and pointing with his entire hand, emphasizing how hard he was pointing, looking off to the side, and suddenly feeling terribly alone.

He looked back at the wall, and suddenly felt a terrible dread; because he realized it reminded him of an old job he'd had in his early, early twenties.

Crime Scene Clean Up. He'd worked for a company called Bioscrub for about nine months up in the Pacific Northwest. They'd been based out of a town north of Seattle, but their service area extended to southern Oregon and as far out as Missoula, Montana. He'd been single and just out of the house, and really out on his own for the first time.

He'd gotten the job because he'd had some idea about visiting Washington state and living there for a while as a vacation. That had gone great, till he ran out of money in like a week, and he didn't want to go home. Bioscrub had worked because they hired him the moment his application was filled out.

He doubted they'd ever read it, the turnover rate for that job was insane.

Ben had been on call 24/7 with no standby pay. After three months, they decided he wasn't a serial killer or a total fucking weirdo, so he got to sleep in the shop; it had been set up like a Police or Firestation, with a room that could get completely dark any time of day, filled with about ten really shitty beds. It was the only reason the job was remotely worth it, not having a rent payment; the pay was shit.

What did they do? What did Ben get called out to do at two in the morning?

Well, mostly he cleaned vomit out of police cars. Bioscrub had a contract with pretty much every police station that said they weren't allowed to clean out their cars anymore, because some guy got crabs or herpes or something. They needed professionals, they needed Bioscrub.

He'd drive for three hours in some of the worst traffic in the country to go and put on a Tyvac suit, gloves, little white shoe covers, and use a wet vac to get half a gallon of happy hour out of the plastic floor of the back of a police car.

That was eighty percent, and the scene on the wall didn't remind him of that. It reminded him of the other part.

The first suicide he'd had to clean up after was fresh and vivid in his mind. There had been so much less blood than he'd thought there would be, and a hole in the wood ceiling from a high-caliber handgun. The guy’s girlfriend had been there in the beginning, and it was at that exact moment that Ben learned one thing.

He was never, ever, going to kill himself.

She had been white as a sheet, though it had been nearly eight hours since the guy had ended a heated argument in the most dramatic and final way possible. She kept saying he was a 'fucking asshole' and how she was so glad the kids weren't home when he'd done it.

The job itself had been easy, in a technical sense.

The scene on the wall didn't even remind him of that.

It reminded him of every time he'd ever cleaned up a fucking homicide.

Those scenes were. . . nobody, not the cops, not the cleanup guys, not the CSI nerds. . . it was alarming on a neurological level, and everybody was always wound tight till they left the scene. Bloody smeared handprints on everything; an obvious trail of destruction from the fight; the completely obvious spot someone died.

“I did that,” Ben said, his head slowly tilting, his eyebrows slowly building into a tight, painful frown. His mouth was slightly open, and he whispered, his eyes hot, his voice blistering yet quiet, “I fucking did that,” he said, then stared, breathing hard.

It was an ugly, ugly thing. Ben stood up and began to walk towards it, a utility pocket forming on each palm. He got close to it, then started spraying it down with ocean water, getting the gore off of it. It ran down the wall and around his feet, orange and green, that had been the color of the bug's blood.

The utility pockets were moving around without any conscious thought on his part, anticipating his needs as he had them, and adapting to his desires.

The gore was gone, but the record of what happened was literally carved into the wall, and he didn't have the tools to fix it.

“What would I do, just carve a giant rectangle out of the wall, that would practically be a closet or something,” he said, stepping back and going to the same spot he'd been before, at the foot of the Town Crystal.

Ben stared and stared, the crushing feeling of loneliness he'd gotten a taste of earlier now settling in him like cold air on naked skin.

“I did that,” Ben said, remembering how. . . it wasn't easy, and it hadn't felt good. He'd been so completely aware of everything when it had been going on, but in his memory, it felt like a dream. Like it hadn't just happened.

Ben dumped the body of the Ax Beetle on the ground in front of him.

“It fucking happened,” Ben said, standing up, harshly rebuking himself. Then he sat back down and stared at the body.

He started to shake, and he didn't want to be shaking. He wanted to feel normal again, but the shaking wouldn't stop. He was trembling hard, hard enough to spill water out of a half full glass, but his lips were set in a hard line, and his frown was painfully solid.

Hot tears started to fall, but he refused to acknowledge it was happening. This was a hard world, a killer's world, and he'd have to be a killer too-

A utility pocket formed in front of his chest, one he hadn't summoned. Frankie plopped out and landed on his lap with a soft impact. The Utility Pocket elemental was very light, hardly any weight to him at all. But he was warm though, not hot, just warm.

It curled up in his lap and appeared to be sleeping, or at least pretending to sleep. One of Ben's badly, badly shaking hands made its slow way over to Frankie, and started to stroke the elemental.

If Ben's hand had passed through Frankie, if the little creature of magic had been insubstantial like a ghost, Ben would have broken right there and never come back.

Frankie was soft though, like a very soft rubber stress ball in consistency, the kind people would squeeze in an office.

Ben still broke when he started to pet the strange little thing, holding his own neck up straight, his nose a little high in the air, looking away from the horrible sights in front of him while he bawled like a baby. Ugly crying, like when his parents had died-

'Oh My God', Ben thought, then lost himself utterly to grief.

–

When Ben was done, he stood up and put his hand on the Town Crystal. It only had about fifteen minutes remaining till it fell apart. He considered the suggestion box again, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead, Ben used the one full heal available in the town crystal.

A wave of warmth washed over him, and injuries he didn’t even know he had, along with the ones he was painfully aware of, closed up completely.

Ben nodded once, put on his metaphoric big body pants, made sure Frankie was safely in the utility pocket, then started towards the next room of the dungeon.

–

The hallway was unusually long, and sloped upward a little bit. Ben realized it was leading him to the second floor, and if his dungeon lore was correct, dungeons got more dangerous with every floor; at least, that's how it was in video games.

He reached the end and floated through cautiously, ready for a fight. The room was larger than any previous, a long rectangle with a silver door at the end, and the door was behind what looked like the bars of a prison cell.

Between Ben and the locked door was a swimming pool deeper than he was tall, filled with a vibrant green goo. Movement caught his eyes, and he saw, stuck to the walls on either side, two turret snails like he'd fought earlier. They were retracted in their shells, but slowly coming out, burbling angrily.

“Hey, I remember those guys,” Ben said, his self-directing monologue lacking a bit of the. . . energy it had before. The snails didn't respond, except to continue burbling.

Ben quickly flew across the room and examined the door, getting on the other side of the turret snails in the process.

“Hmm,” Ben said, then turned around to find that these snails were quite a bit faster at turning than the last one had been. Two balls of fire shot at him, and Ben felt himself enter the grip of adrenaline once again.

His eyes tracked the projectiles, and he dodged; the thing about the snails that Ben hadn't appreciated before was how fast they could shoot at him, at least once per second. Their shells were glowing, lines of light were coming from the wall like they were drawing power directly from the dungeon.

Ben flew over the green stuff, noticing a lever down at the bottom of the pool, the exact same kind of lever he'd used in the puzzle room.

“Ok, ok, I get it,” Ben said, then got up close behind the turret snail on his right and cracked its shell open by shooting it with rocks at high speed. To his surprise, a utility pocket opened in front of its face and Frankie popped half of his body out, a small almost mouth of purple tendrils on his front. He sat for half a second, then the spear shot halfway out of him, piercing the snail, then retracting back just as fast before Frankie vanished.

One down. Ben had to dodge fireballs on his way over to the other by taking a wide, zig-zaggy route. He dispatched it as well, this time allowing Frankie to take it out while he distracted it. He collected both bodies, some quiet instinct pleased that he'd gotten one with a shell intact.

When the battle was over, Frankie put the spear in Ben's left hand, and he held onto it, allowing his ability to slowly repair it to take effect while he was out of combat.

The white fog lifted from the door, but it was still caged and locked. Ben went over to the edge of the pool close to the door, then dipped the tiniest tip of his finger into it. It was thick, and stuck to him easily.

He sniffed it, it smelled sweet.

He tasted it, and realized it was a honey of some kind.

Ben considered, only for a moment, just a small moment, diving into the pool of honey, pulling the lever, and trying to get out of it before he drowned.

Then he snorted a laugh, and began to steal all the honey with a utility pocket, draining it like a bathtub. Ben felt a momentary rush, because this honey had to be valuable, and he had an entire swimming pool's worth! Then, Ben remembered he was [Extremely Tiny], and estimated that he probably actually only had a large jar of it in real people measurements.

Even with good suction, it still took a while. When he was done, the walls were still thick with the slow-moving fluid, so Ben did his best to make a squeegee utility pouch and collect as much of it as he could. Then he got the stuff pooled on the ground in the same way, floating above it, not wanting to get all sticky and dirty.

He cleaned the lever, pulled it, and heard the sound of a jail door opening. When he floated up, he saw a chest with a silver lock, and a single silver key sitting in front of it.

Ben picked up the key and was momentarily baffled by the scene. So, normally, he'd have to pick between treasure and progress?

“Tricky, tricky,” Ben said, then scooped up the chest into his utility pocket. He figured he would open it only after he knew for a fact that he wouldn't be fucking himself over by using his last key before the dungeon was finished.

The key practically appeared in his hand out of thin air, that was how good the utility pocket was getting, and it's worth noting it was the new key, rather than the one with the '1' on it.

The lock had the same bubbly, magnetic resistance as the last one, and when he got it in, the key broke into silver glitter that evaporated as fast as it formed. The lock broke apart in a glittery mist, and the door melted in the way the previous one had.

It revealed the same kind of hallway he was used to, and without hesitation, Ben went through. The hallway was as long as the last one, and angled up.

“Third Floor, I guess?” Ben said, then emerged into the grandest, most well-decorated room he'd seen so far.

There were green torches, like from the first room, six of them, and no skeletons. There was moss growing on the ground, and the wood in the room had a tough, worn quality to it, like it wasn't as healthy, as alive as the rest of the dungeon.

The ceiling was tall too, at least four or five times Ben's height. The rest of the room paled in comparison to the door at the other end.

It was a massive arch shape, with a big, golden horned skull at the top. Ben was going to steal it no matter what anyone said or did, even if it took hours. No, wait, he'd make a crown out of it, an enormous, spine crushing-

'Fucking [Prince] class, oh my god,' Ben thought to himself, and shook the thoughts away.

The door was ornamented with gold designs that formed the same elaborate eye that was featured on the silver keys. Down near the bottom, an enormous golden lock in the same shape as the skull above it held the door shut. Ben leaned on the spear, noticing that the door behind him hadn't fogged over, trapping him.

“No monsters,” he said, then increased the flow of mana into his [Royal Antique Restoration: Left Hand], no longer feeling the need to conserve any for a fight. Ben paced around the room carefully, relishing in how soft the moss was on his feet, and laughing when he saw the bare wood behind him as he scooped it all up. It was really beautiful moss, all thick and clumpy, almost like a living green foam.

He circled the room, keeping his distance from the green torches, then approached them and stole the glass-like gems, feeling some relief when the green fire vanished.

He found the locked hatch under the moss, in the exact center of the room.

“Tricky!” Ben said loudly, looking from the hatch, which had a silver lock on it, and the golden, which was clearly a boss room door.

“I bet it's right here,” Ben said, then bet his last key being right, unlocking the hatch and noting with delight that his key hadn't broken; now a '2' was etched into it. He stowed 'old lucky' away, and opened the hatch.

Sitting in a little compartment was a gaudy, gem covered golden key with a skull that matched its lock on the end.

Ben picked up the key, and was surprised to find it was uncomfortably warm. He looked at the lock, then looked at the key, then looked at the door.

“Oh shit,” Ben said, suddenly realizing he was planning on going in there and fighting something worse than the Ax Beetle.

“Fuck you all,” he said to nobody, and also to everybody, and marched up to the door. The spear was taken by Frankie, and Ben got a sense of determination from the little elemental. Ben nodded his head and jammed the key into the lock, turning it.

The lock fell to the ground, and did not vanish, so Ben immediately whap'd it. The door opened away from him, slowly, dramatically. The music in the dungeon changed to ominous, dangerous.

Utility pockets appeared on Ben's hands, and he floated a few inches above the ground.

“Hit it hard, hit it fast, don't even hesitate, just attack,” Ben said, hyping himself up. He was ready this time, he was going to clear this dungeon, he was going to level up, get strong, and figure out a way to beat The System's game; it had been done before, and it could be done again.

The door finished opening, and Ben shot through, his eyes steel.

He emerged into a large chamber, where a slug about his size with large, human-like eyes at the end of its stalks waited.

“Aaaaahhhhh!” Ben shouted, and the slug screamed in fear.

“Please, let's just talk about this!” the Aeon Slug yelled, and it was such an outrageous departure from what Ben had been expecting, that he didn't attack the creature. The slug didn't attack him either, seeming to be breathing hard.

“Oh,” the Aeon Slug said, visibly sagging with relief, “oh thank The Stars, I thought I was going to die!”

Ben looked to the left, then looked to the right, noticing for the first time he was in a cozy little room that looked like a study or a den. Bookshelves made from a rich looking red wood lined the walls, and the slug was sitting in what looked like a soft dog bed, but really nice, like actual furniture.

“Please,” he said, indicating with an eye-stalk a comfortable looking pillow across from it, “please, sit.”

“Are you the Aeon Slug?” Ben said, feeling uncomfortably awkward and a bit like a home invader.

“Yes,” the slug said, “but my name is Vivi, it's short for something much longer and too cumbersome to be useful for conversation.”

“Aren't I supposed to kill you?” Ben asked, gesturing towards the slug as if it wasn't clear enough. His right eye twitched, that had never happened to him before.

“Well, that's,” the Aeon Slug said, “look, I can explain. Please, please, sit.”

Ben sat down, and prepared himself for a good fucking explanation.