Terrance was not anything special. Most people find adventure in going into dungeons, slaying monsters, searching for riches and glory. Terrance was not like most people. He preferred a good story of such events over doing them himself. This put Terrance in an awkward place for the youth. Leaving him without many friends. His parents, seeing a worrying trend, bought him a used immersion pod for his sixteenth birthday. Given his plans for getting a job at a book store did not pan out, mainly because those were relics in a digital age, he decided to try it out instead of spending every waking hour waiting from updates from his favorite novels.

DCO was the game Terrance got. It was the most anticipated and desirable even before it’s release. Luckily for him, the initial rush of joining the game had passed after a couple of weeks of the release.

Please select your starting race...

There were the typical races you imagine would be there, humans, elves, dwarves, gnomes, beastkin, draconoids, and many others. In the end, Terrance picked a draconoid, because dragons were cool.

Please select your name...

Terrance paused unsure if he was actually going to play or not. He had heard so much about the game while in school. Apparently the dungeon for the town he was in was a random dungeon and there had many stories of dickenings and robot dinosaurs, he could not help but become curious.

Loreright

With that done Terrance moved on to his stats and characteristics.

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After what seemed like forever working out every detail he could on his character, Terrance finally settled on a red draconian mage. Standing at a little over six feet tall he held a noob level spellbook in one hand as a focus. Instead of a robe, Terrance chose well-fitting trousers and a shirt. Because everyone does robes, he did not want to do the same thing everyone else does. Even if it meant skipping out on starter stat increases. He decided to keep barefoot as well because he always imagined dragons and shoes not mixing.

On the draconian starter island, while waiting for the next ship to the dungeon island, he went around to find out about the lore of the game. Unfortunately, everything he learned was generic backstory he expected and was barely worth mentioning. In the end, Terrance wound up just reading a book about the gods while waiting for the ship. Then the boat ride took several more hours. Which he performed offline as he got a late-night snack.

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When Terrance arrived in the dungeon town he could see a sprawling town, put together without much rhyme or reason in some ways. Like the rows of taverns on one side of the street and on the opposite side, a row of clinics. A rather large restaurant in front of the adventurer guild called the ‘Dicken Shack’. Then the housing seemed thrown around randomly. In fact, it took him some searching before he arrived at the place he was wanting to go to, the library.

Terrance entered the building and found all kinds of individuals. At first glance, Terrance had thoughts that he might have the hope of making a friend or two until one of the gnomes went spoke up.

“ Found it!”

With that, there were some cheers from the half dozen others looking through the books. With the gnome going to the counter, the others replace their books and move past Terrance's dumbstruck face. The moment the gnome paid for the book, he too was gone. The NPC at the counter then turned to Terrance.

“ Can I help you?”

Terrance with a sigh just left.

It took Terrance some time to find a spot for his own personal room so he could get some rest. The next day he decided to try giving adventuring a shot. So he went into the woods and began hunting the game there solo. Admittedly it was not too hard. On most enemies, he could strike first and his fire magic was enough to most times take out the woodland critters. By the time emersion ended for the day he was already level 20 with level-appropriate gear. He decided he was as set as he could be without a party and decided to log out and finally enter the dungeon next time.

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Terrance was not really much of a fighter. He was not a target of bullying because there were much better targets than him. Considering in real life he stood an inch over six feet and had a very broad muscle structure. Bullies tend to not pick on the kid that they had to look up to, nor pick on those that seem to be able to bench press the bully. The fact that he could bench press almost 200 pounds did not hurt either. He was just antisocial and disliked conflict.

When Terrance got in the game again he first went to the Dicken Shack and got their three-piece special. With his in-game appetite sedated he made his way into the dungeon. The first thing he saw after passing thru the doorway that divided the mining nodes of ore at the beginning of the dungeon and the rest of it was red. Red grass, red sky, a red sun... a lot of red. An almost overwhelming amount. A few others even took note of the new player just gocking before moving on. Some rushing to the NPCs near the racetrack in the distance. Some heading toward the barn in the distance. Some aiming for some of the roaming packs of farm animals.

It took Terrance a full minute to snap out of his delusional staring. He was not used to full immersion and the setting caught him off guard. With the time to compose himself, he reminded himself he was not reading an adventure story this time. He was living one. So naturally, as an adventurer he decided to go try and slay the first mob he could find. This so happened to be a rather red and angry looking chicken, or rather dickens. Clucking away as it pecked the ground to gobble up a worm that was just under the surface. Terrance composed himself and assured himself this will be easy. His first mistake was assuming fighting the dickens would be like fighting the creatures in the forest. His second was not noticing the other dickens around.

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Terrance appeared at the entrance of the dungeon horrified, dejected, and covered in egg ooze. Fighting one dickens was hard enough. Seeing his fireball do next to no damage compared to anything, not the starter spell, Terrance quickly came into melee range with the newly enraged dickens. Being nerdy did not mean Terrance did not work out. In fact if he was not reading new chapters of his favorite novels he would often work out in the personal gym at his home. As his father is a military officer, he emphasized staying fit in the youth. And the self-defense he was taught by his father allowed the youth to survive the initial contact with the dickens. So be it with much lower health after the flurry of pecks. Terrance was just starting to turn the tables on the dickens with a rather surprising fireblast to the dickens face when a rain of eggs landed on him from behind. With that, the fight was all but over.

“ Look like you owe me, five copper. Poor noob had his cherry popped by a dickens.”

Terrance looked at the dwarf miner waiting in the queue. The elf who put five copper coins in the dwarf’s hand just shook her head.

“ Not that you can talk Clery, you died how many times before graduating from dickens hunting?”

The dwarf gave a huff and turned back to waiting in line, all but forgetting Terrance, but for the few extra jingles in his pocket. Terrance with no idea how to even get past the dickens alone decided to retreat to his usual happy place, books.

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Back at the library, and with money this time, Terrance decided to start digging into the lore of the first floor of the dungeon. Surprisingly there was quite a lot of information on the monsters and special points of interest for the floor available for free. He learned all about the pack mentality of the dickens, the ease of farming the sheep and the don’ts of the bulls. What caught his attention however was the floor boss, Old Man Jenkins.

According to what he could gather, Old man Jenkins was the husband to Grandma Jenkins, the boss of the third floor. Some kind of event happened when the Jenkins family reunion pulling the entire family into the dungeon. However, after that was only scattered bits and pieces of information. Mostly gathered by the recordings of the two-floor bosses interacting with each other during the recent dungeon war. What is known is that the Terminus Rex boss of the second floor is also a creation of the Jenkins family, but which had not been revealed yet. It was as if Terrance found his purpose in the game. He decided then and there he will get to the bottom of this dungeon’s boss lore.