PART NINETEEN

MPD: 0

We agreed a time to log in the next day, and she moved her spawn point to be the same as mine. At 8pm on the dot, I logged in. Valentine was already there, trying to suppress her excitement. We walked towards the dungeon. She started firing questions at me, but I stopped her.

"Not in the open, please. What I do, I do in the shadows." I tried to be mysterious and dashing but her reaction suggested I didn't quite succeed.

"Oh, right." She looked at the nearest NPC and went shh! He shrunk into his body and scurried away. She winced at his reaction; I think she often forgot how armored she was.

I didn't want to say something like 'That's the first lame thing I've seen you do.' Actually, I DID want to say that but I had JUST enough maturity not to. "Let me check something." I pulled Woke Up, the skill book that had started all this, out of my inventory. I tried to give it her, knowing that the game would tell us both how much it would cost for her to buy the book from me.

"Holy scrap!" she said. "What's this?"

We'd each gotten a notification that the book would cost 99,999,999 gold - an impossible number. If you've read lots of books like this one (high-quality, well-written, definitely worth leaving a five-star rating and lengthy review) then you'll probably think 'ah, I bet they work together to concoct a scheme to raise that much cash'. So I really want to reinforce this point - it was an impossible number. The land outside the dungeon that I wanted to buy was quoted at 35,000. The big building that Ted Steel got in Nerves of Steel was worth 300,000 (and double that by the end of the book). The single biggest haul from a raid that I'd ever heard of was one million gold - split between about 20 players. So Valentine wasn't going to be learning Woke Up anytime soon. No-one was.

I briefly outlined how I got the book and summarised what was in it. I was just getting to the part where I went looking for golems when we arrived at the cave entrance. It looked different. Most noticeably, instead of saying 'Austeralia' the sign now said 'Closed!!'

A Specter Calls

"What," I said, not alarmed or worried. What I was seeing was too bizarre to react to in a coherent way. Everything inside the dungeon was gone - the traps, the mirrors, the pirate pinball machines. Instead there was a maze of empty, lifeless corridors.

"What's going on?" said Valentine.

"I don't know," I said. "He was being weird yesterday."

"Who?"

"The dungeon. He's dungeon 386. I call him 386." I ran my hand along the wall - it was still solid, which meant it had recently been fortified with mana, which meant the core was probably still around. "386, bro? Wassup?" I waited. "Nothing."

"Weird how?"

I pointed to the left and we set off. "Um... if you don't mind, can you lead the way? Your stats are way higher than mine." She squinted at me like this might have been some kind of trick to stare at her asp, but she agreed; she was used to being a tank. I continued talking. "Um... He got it into his head that he should play cupid and get us together. Ah... I wonder if whatever this is might be a continuation of that? If it is, I didn't have anything to do with it. I promise."

"Cupid?"

"You don't have cupid in New England?" I realised I was being creepy again, made worse by us being close together in a dark tunnel. Although in this particular circumstance I was the one who had the most reason to be afraid. "I'm just going off your accent, there. I really don't know more about you than your username and some stats."

"Yes, we have cupid on the east coast. I was hoping for more specifics. In what way was he weird? Left or right here?"

"Left." I rubbed the back of my neck. "How was he weird? The first thing was that bee in his bonnet about matchmaking. He came up with that whole 'mirror of desire wedding' thing on his own. I had something much cuter planned. You'd have seen yourself in a big cat tree surrounded by kittens."

"Is that right?"

"Yes, so many kittens. Right then left. Actually, no. Let's try right then right. Oh, okay, it wasn't kittens. It was going to be a bit of a wind-up. Sort of a singing contest karaoke where the song would have a high note and the mirror would crack when you tried to hit it. But 386 went rogue. And then the second weird thing was: when you went into the casino he showed me a deepfake -"

"He what?"

I clicked my tongue. She knew what a deepfake was - she just didn't think it was possible to show video inside the BetterVerse, plus how would the dungeon know about deepfakes? And why would it bother? A cartoon piano of knowledge suddenly came crashing down on my head - the vast majority of what I was saying made no sense to anyone but me. No-one else would have the slightest bit of context, not even someone from ThetanSoft. "Let's just find him and then I'll explain more. We should be able to show you. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that."

"He's definitely here?" We'd already hit two dead ends.

"He has to be; he can't leave. Don't you know about dungeons?"

She shook her head. "Not really."

"Oh, boy. Explaining everything would probably take exactly 112 pages. An hour isn't going to be enough."

Revelations

We finally found him.

"Oh, thank fudge," I said. I bent to get a good look at his surface. He seemed fine. "386, what's going on? Talk to me."

"No," he said.

"What -" started Valentine.

"He's talking to me," I said. "Actually he's refusing to talk to me but that's the same as talking to me. One thing about dungeons is that you can always beat them with logic. They're not capable of linear thinking. They aren't good at math."

You can probably guess that I was trying to provoke him. Something was really off. The scratchy bleakness of the corridors had really got under my skin.

"He's in a mood," I said. "I'm going to just wait here till he talks to me or my time's up. If you stay I'll talk to you but I'm afraid it won't be very cosy."

She shrugged. "In for a penny, in for a pound."

We settled down facing each other with our backs against the wall - there were no seats carved into the wall. 386 had moved himself in a hurry and his core room was just a plain cube. Which made me think - "Where's Lenny?"

386's metronomic color-shifting - his breathing - briefly quickened. "He's DEAD," he wailed. "Dee Eee Ay Dee."

Finigin's Wake

"What?" I cried.

"I don't want to talk to you," said 386. "This is all your fault."

"My fault?" I said.

"I don't want to talk to you," he repeated, moodily. Sulkily. Somehow that cheered me up - this was a temper tantrum more than real despair. I'm not a good enough writer to know if I'm making sense. It's like... if he really didn't want to talk to me he wouldn't have said a single word. It felt like he wanted me to coax the story out of him.

I rubbed my temples. I told Valentine what he'd said, but just out of politeness. She didn't have enough context to contribute. What were my options? Not many. The only thing I could think to do was to 'be there for him'. So I decided to tell Valentine my story from the beginning. A couple of times 386's breathing changed, which I took as a show of interest. I realised I hadn't really talked to him about me in the 'old days' or how I got the skill book.

Valentine was unmoved by the part where I got kicked out of the gang. "I would have canned you, too. But it's weird you were SO useless. Most builds are viable."

"I'm not claiming to be an elite gamer or anything."

"No, I get that, but you should still be able to pull your weight." She scrunched up her face. "Do you have any unfinished quests?"

"Of course. Dozens."

"One of those is where you get the exploding cards."

"Huh. Maybe. Anyway, this whole dungeon consultant thing is way more fun. So here are some of the limitations..."

I told her about dungeon cores and mana and my idea that you could create a fun, chill dungeon that would make more mana more reliably than an 'evil' one and would just be something unique and unrepeatable. I described our early experiments with Ski Ball and Lair Hockey and why we had a room where you could smash things. At one point I realised she had shuffled towards me and was leaning at me and I thought 'oh that's weird' but then I realised I had shuffled the same distance towards her. Her eyes were all shiny and she kept looking up and to the right as though she was trying to visualise what I was saying or maybe she was thinking of how she'd have done it differently.

And becoming aware that I'd got quite animated and peppy while my friend was feeling sad just a few inches away from me, I changed the angle of the conversation somewhat. I started RAVING about 386: how I'd give him the outline of an idea and then come back the next day to find a fully-functioning game that was already on version 2.2 because he was just so great at iterating and taking on feedback. I gave him special praise for his gambling algorithms which tried to ensure that no-one left substantially poorer than they came in. Valentine seemed really relieved about that. I was about to say how cutely paternal 386 was in terms of letting Lennie gamble as much as he wanted but then I remembered that Lennie was - supposedly - deceased, and I must have looked a bit stricken because Valentine rose to the occasion like a champ and got really chatty.

Anyway, this all took about twenty minutes, but it was worth it. 386 took comfort from our presence and after correcting 'a couple' of things I had mis-remembered, he started to tell me what had happened to freak him out.

Freaks Come Out at Night

When he started to talk, it came in a torrent. I stopped him fairly quickly. "386, dude, bro, buddy, this here is Nicki Valentine, as you know. Assistant to the Regional Manager."

"Assistant Regional Manager," she corrected, and that was a thousand relationship points right there.

"So can you just show us on the tape?"

"Tape?" said Valentine.

I waved my hand at her, indicating she should shush for a minute. 386 sighed. "I didn't recreate the cinema room."

"Just use this wall here. It's fine."

386's vibe jumped from 'sad emo teenager' to 'annoyed AV Club nerd' in a nanosecond. "This wall isn't flat. It's covered with bumps and CREVICES. The color is not suitable for projected images. It's clear to me now how little you appreciate the work I put in to this place. The cinema room didn't just appear. There are no templates for it in the dungeon template repository. I spent hours sandpapering the walls, smoothing away imperfections, making it impossibly flat and reflective. As Isaac Newton created calculus to understand the motions of the planets, so I created an entirely new branch of number theory simply to get the perfect shade of paint."

I held my hands up in surrender. "Okay, okay. I hear you. So either we can leave and you can put things back the way they were, or you can show us the story here on the wall and we won't ask for a refund if the quality's bad."

I hoped he'd ask us to leave so he could recreate the previous dungeon. Part of me wondered why - it'd be much more efficient to just get on with it. And then I realised - it was because I wanted to sit side by side with Valentine on the little cinema room sofa. I felt my cheeks flush - it was pretty desperate.

"You're sure you want HER to see this?"

"Yes."

Fortunately, he did another dramatic sigh and said "Fine." And on the wall between me and Valentine, he showed us what happened.

What Happened

We saw ourselves on screen, moving left and right around the bench in the waiting area. Valentine dropped her sword, we talked, my head drooped and - in fast-forward - we went wee-wee-wee into the dungeon room. The replay slowed down, but was still faster than in real time. I pointed to the core and said some things. The video slowed to maybe 0.5 speed and the camera zoomed all the way into Valentine's face as she said, "How do I get in on this?"

It sped up, showing the next 30 seconds of us-arranging-to-meet admin in about 3 seconds, then she portaled out and it slowed to real time to show me doing a stupid little happy dance.

I glanced at Valentine and she glanced at me. "I can explain that," I said.

"Go on," she said.

"Oh, look," I said, pointing at the screen. "A distraction!"

"It seems to be paused."

I simply gaped at the screen as though watching the moon landing. 386 skipped through a few hours until just after 2 am. We watched a human with a rogue-class build enter the dungeon. He looked like a rogue, anyway. He was wearing a black hood, a black cape, and had two long daggers and kept hiding in shadows and getting ready to launch spinning attacks on people.

"386, pause," I said. "Can you put his name and stats on the screen?"

"Sure."

A pretty modern-looking 'data bubble' was overlaid onto the image, pointing to the dude. It said:

Cince Polka Jr.

Strength: 8

Dexterity: 14

Constitution: 8

Intelligence: 13

Wisdom: 11

Charisma: 9

Detected Skills: Muffle; Hide in Shadows; You Spin Me Right Round; Black is the New Black

Known Associates: NICKI VALENTINE THE NARC

"Wait a minute!" said Valentine, getting to her feet. "I don't know him. What are you saying? What is it saying?"

386 glowed violently for a few seconds, then calmed down. He reduced the font size of the last sentence and added a question mark in brackets.

"386, I don't think she knows this guy. Will you try to be chill? Please?"

"No."

I remembered she couldn't hear him. To Valentine, I said, "He's had a bad time and he's lashing out. He says he's sorry, and he also says he's sorry about the wedding in the mirror which he admits was lame, whack, pogo, jerds, and naff. (He's been watching a lot of short-form videos.) He's also EXTREMELY sorry about giving me a heart attack with the scorpions and he won't do anything like that again."

"Um," said Valentine.

386 throbbed a bit, but then the 'known associates' text vanished. I waved at Valentine to sit down again and the video sped up, and almost immediately slowed down. Lennie came out of the casino, scratching himself. He was carrying what looked like an oversized coffee mug and was wearing one of those transparent green plastic semi-circle caps. Was he cosplaying as a Las Vegas gambler?

Cince Polka Junior emerged from the shadows and unleashed an enormous spinning attack, hitting Lennie four times in a second. Even though 386 was obviously depressed he couldn't help but add some 'flair' to the video. A 1960s Batman-style speech bubble came out of Polka saying 'POW!' and one came out of Lennie saying 'OOF'. The mug fell and shattered, as did Lennie.

Polka didn't even stop to think about what he'd done. He explored a bit, and was fooled by the curtains and the 'fresh vomit here' signs - at first. When he couldn't find the core, he ventured through the trick curtains to the core room and he had this little measuring tape thing and used it on 386. The whole time he seemed puzzled and alert - even afraid at one point - and then he left.

The Bit Where I Say Holy Ship and the Chapter Ends

"Holy ship," I said.