New Achievement: Bulimic No More!

You have gotten tired of puking your guts up every five minutes! Good for you!

Reward: You are now resistant to the 'Queasy' debuff!

"Oh, thank god," Carl muttered, wiping the latest round of puke off his mouth.

I wholeheartedly agreed but didn't say anything because I was too busy swishing my mouth out with iced tea that had been in my inventory since the second floor.

"May I?" Carl asked, holding out a hand.

I spit my portion out over by the wall and passed him the bottle, not commenting on the fact that I'd put my pukey lips on it. Carl did his own oral cleansing and offered the bottle back; I raised my hands in a 'you keep it' gesture and he tossed it into his inventory.

We had been hunting these tunnels for over four hours. The Cornets' sonic attack took the rest of us down instantly, so Mongo had been doing nearly all the killing. He had leveled up partway through, climbing to level 14 and becoming a handspan taller and thirty centimeters longer. Donut was excited; apparently Mongo would reach full size at level 15, although he would continue to level up after that. (He was already up to my chest and three meters long from nose to tail so I was a bit scared about what he would be like in the end.) The only good thing about the constant sonic attcks was that Donut had been too sick to nag at me about 'being more vibrant', whatever that meant.

We were able to move faster and engage larger groups now that Donut, Carl, and I had some defense against the rabbits' Queasy attack. Within two more hours I had leveled up to 22; Carl and Donut hadn't leveled but they had to be getting close.

"Boss room?" Donut asked.

"Boss room," Carl said. No one felt the need to ask me so I followed along quietly.

By now we had a good sense of the layout of this area. The platform was on the eastern edge, the middle was a maze of tunnels and small rooms, to the south was the boss room, and to the north was the room the Cornets originated from. We hadn't gotten close enough to see exactly what was there, so we weren't sure if it was some sort of portal or tunnels or what, but it was clearly the source.

On approach to the boss room the tunnels opened out into a long corridor made of concrete instead of rock, squared-off instead of water-formed, and large enough for an entire basketball team to walk side-by-side without being able to reach up to the ceiling. The boss room itself was square, thirty meters on a side, and there was only one entrance/exit. The double doors were large and bronze with a spear-carrying dwarf on each one, the spears angled so that they crossed where the doors met. My map showed me no details inside the room, nor did Donut's map show any mobs inside. Hence, our assumption that this was the boss room.

"Here we go," Carl said, his hand on the door pull and a stick of dynamite in his other hand. "I'm going to look in before I throw it. We don't want another goblin incident."

"Goblin incident?" I asked.

"Tell you later." He leaned hard on the door and it slid groaningly back just far enough that he could stick his head in. He paused and then relaxed, the dynamite vanishing back into his inventory. "Clear," he said, pushing the door open farther so we could get inside.

Something about the boss room made my hackles rise. It was like no boss room I'd seen thus far, mostly because there was no boss. It was the size of a warehouse, entirely made of concrete that had been polished until it gleamed, and it was completely empty except for three objects.

In the very middle of the massive room sat a Wire Cage Materials Cart. Wheeled. It'd probably be fun to roll down a hill in this thing. It looked like a dumpster made of chain link with a dozen wheels on each side. Against the far wall were two...somethings. Steampunk machines of some sort, although my eyes were having trouble figuring out exactly what I was seeing because they were too baroque and didn't match up to any machine I'd seen in the past.

"This is disappointing," Donut said.

"Uh, guys?" Carl said, pointing towards the contraptions.

We walked over to study them more closely. There were two of them, each had a pair of smokestacks at the top, and the air above them shimmered with heat, suggesting that the machines were powered even if not currently active. Brass pipes ran across their surface, dials and gauges here and there, and gears and hinges sat in places where there was no apparent need for them.

Dwarven Industrial Light-Duty Automaton. Contraption.

This contraption is in Sleep Mode.

These smaller-sized, industrial workhorses are used to complete simple tasks, such as pushing bins full of ore up from the depths. They are not designed or commonly used for fighting or defense, but who are we kidding? Like you'd have a chance against these things if they wanted to smush you.

"What?" I asked. "I don't get it."

"It's a transformer mecha, but folded up," Carl said. "See? These are the legs, those are the arms, that's the head."

Suddenly the whole thing mentally clicked into place and I understood. It was like a person sitting down with their chin on their knees and arms wrapped around their shins. If the thing stood up it would be four meters tall and three meters wide.

"Oh, wow," I said. I studied it for a moment, then frowned and glanced back to the door. "How did they get here?" I asked. "It could fit in the corridor, but not in the tunnels."

Carl shrugged helplessly. "It's the dungeon, it doesn't have to make sense." He chuckled. "Maybe it grew up here."

"...What?"

"It's an old D&D joke. A lot of times the DM doesn't think about things like that, so you run into a huge dragon under the mountain but the dragon is too big to fit through any of the tunnels. If you call them out on it the DM will flail around a bit and say 'Well, maybe it grew up here.' And then someone points out that it doesn't solve the problem because then how did its mom get in there to lay her eggs or whatever, and then the DM says 'Rocks fall, everybody dies!'" He shrugged again. "I think maybe you had to be there." He started inspecting the robots closely, not touching them but moving around them and then pulling a weight bench out of his inventory so he could use it as a step ladder.

Katia: Hekla, are you there?

Hekla: Yes. Just woke up an hour ago. How are you?

Katia: We found a room with two robots inside it and a giant shopping cart thing. Have you seen anything like that?

Hekla: Yes, there's one like it in the warren we're currently clearing out. Two robots and a cart. How are you doing on getting to us?

Katia: Great! We're on the yellow line and it connects to the indigo at 263. We're at 116 right now—I wanted to go straight to 263 but we ran into this swarm of ants and we had to jump off the train or die.

Hekla: Can you get to the gold line? We can pick up Mei Lin, Svetlana, and Danielle if we transfer to gold at 181 and take it to 193.

Katia: I'm not sure. When we get back on the train I'll talk to the conductor. Donut's Charisma is so high that they'll do anything for her.

Hekla: Good. Do that now.

Katia: It will take a little bit. Carl is busy and I think he's not going to want to leave for a bit.

Hekla: Damnit! Katia, you need to stop what you're doing and get back on the train. I need to know if I have to choose between you and the other three. We need to connect. There are bounty hunters out there looking to kill me, and Carl, and Donut. We need to be together or we're all at risk. Bring them along, now. Katia: I'm not sure Carl wants to come. He got evasive when I suggested it. Hekla: Convince him. It's important. I need to go now, but it's important that you do this. I can't keep you safe if you're off wandering around the dungeon on your own.

Katia: I will, I promise. It will take a while but I'll do it as fast as I can.

Hekla: Good girl. We'll stay here for a couple more hours to give you time to pitch it properly. Here's what we know about the trains so far, and where we plan to go.

A list of train lines and transfer stations appeared in my chat log. I acknowledged it and signed off.

"Guys, I was talking to Hekla and she found a room just like this in a different warren," I said. I left aside the 'join up' subject for right now. I needed to think about how to present it and it wasn't relevant until we were ready to get back on the train.

"Huh," Carl said, putting the weight bench back in his inventory and stepping back. "Weird. One room with them, okay, but why are they a recurring thing?"

"Let's blow them up," Donut said.

Visions of the necessary size of that explosion danced through my head and I paled. It could collapse the room, it could damage the tunnels... "I don't think that's a good idea."

Donut: Remember what I said about being more vibrant? You should agree with me. People love it when Carl blows stuff up.

Damnit, Donut! This wasn't a question of being vibrant, it was a question of being safe! Just because we were in a giant murder dungeon didn't mean we had to actively go out of our way to take risks.

"Actually," Carl said. "Let's do it. You know, for training. And science."

"Are you serious?" I asked, appalled.

He laughed. "The truth is, I need more materials for the crafting bench. There's only so much you can do with weight equipment. If we scrap these guys, I'll have enough material to build better train defenses."

That...actually made some sense. And if we were far enough away then it would probably be safe. Worst case, we collapsed the room and the corridor so that we couldn't get back in to collect the metal. The tunnel system had multiple routes to the platform so we didn't need to worry about getting blocked out. Agreeing would give me a chance to play to the cameras the way Donut had been urging for the last several hours. Of course, just agreeing wouldn't be eye-catching for the viewers, I should propose something distinct. It would look better and it might put Carl in a good mood and make it easier to convince him about joining the Daughters.

"All right, I guess," I said. "But if we do this, maybe we should kill the rest of the Cornets first, too. Clear the whole place out." I tried to wink in a 'charming and adorable' way although I think it came out closer to 'has something in her eye.' "You know, for science."

Donut: That's the way to do it. Now we just need to work on the mohawk and catchphrase.

o-o-o-o

We roamed the tunnels for the next hour, moving fast and killing everything. Mostly it wasn't an issue. The Cornets weren't great hand-to-claw fighters, depending on their sonic Queasy attack to render their prey helpless. Our resistance to the debuff allowed us to shrug off the efforts of individual Cornets and even small groups, although the more of them there were the more of the effect we could feel so we took care not to engage more than five or six at a time. If we encountered more than that, Carl would throw a grenade and we'd move on. It didn't come up much; singletons and small groups were easy enough to find and the Cornets were generally sluggish.

I leveled up to 23, Carl and Donut finally leveled to 28 and 27 respectively. Donut's Second Chance spell leveled up to 7, meaning that she could raise a monster from the dead and have it under her control for up to seven minutes. That became important when we came across a Skinned Rabbit Warren.

"Stop," I said. "There's a room up ahead labeled Skinned Rabbit Warren. There's"—I counted quickly—"twenty-six Cornets in there. They're mostly against the walls and they aren't moving around. Carl, the room is small enough that one of your bombs should be able to take them out."

He thought about that for a minute. "A bomb might destroy any loot. Donut, let's Monster Mash."

She squealed in delight and bounced on his shoulder.

Monster Mash was the plan where Donut built us an army of zombies. I had been following Carl's strategy of 'loot everything', although unlike him I took the corpses as well. Carl had started copying me on that, so between us we had over a hundred Cornet corpses in our inventories. Second Chance cost 10 mana and with the buffs from the shower and the bed Donut had 49. She raised four Cornets from the dead, waited ninety seconds for her mana to tick back up, raised another one, took a potion to restore her mana, and repeated the process.

"Charge, my pretties!" Donut cried. "Kill everything in that room!"

Ten moaning, shambling Cornet zombies charged into the room and killed everything. We leaned casually on the walls, listening to the howls and shrieks.

"Sounds like the zombies have the Queasy shriek," Carl noted. "I'm not feeling it much from this distance but there's something."

I nodded. "Me too."

The zombies only had a couple minutes on the timer when they attacked, but that was all they needed. Soon enough, the warren was full of red X's on the map and we were able to wander in and loot to our heart's content.

"They've all got these vials," Carl noted. He frowned. "Given how they were acting...I think these might be a drug, not a potion."

"More meth?" Donut asked. "Like those llamas from the first floor?"

Carl shook his head. "I don't think so. That amped them up. The Cornets were sluggish. I think they're getting off at station 125, getting these drugs, and then teleporting back here to drink them. When the buzz wears off they get back on the train and go back to 125."

"Why?" I asked.

"No idea. Come on, let's finish this."

We went down the hall to the origin room and peeked inside. It was a small room and the far wall had a shimmering oval on it that was so clearly a teleportation portal that it might as well have had a sign.

Carl studied it distrustfully for a minute but nothing came out. In fact, our maps had shown no new Cornets coming through here for at least twenty minutes.

"Let's test it," he said. A long wooden bar appeared in his hand; it still had mounting brackets attached to it, suggesting that at some point it had been a handrail and he had ripped it out of the wall. He held it out in front of him like a lance and crept close enough that he could tap it against the portal.

Tunk. The pole stopped dead as though it had hit concrete.

"Rats," Donut said. "I guess we can't go through."

"It's fine," Carl said, relaxing and dropping the bar back into extradimensional storage. "Let's go deal with the robots."

o-o-o-o

Three sticks of dynamite and a detonator later, we walked into the robot room to find the robots blown to bits. There had been a tunnel behind them but it was collapsed.

"Cool," Carl said, satisfied. He started grabbing chunks of metal and tucking them away.

Donut jumped from his shoulder to mine. "Let's go over there," she said, pointing to the corridor. "We need to work on your look. Mongo, stay with Uncle Carl."

The dinosaur peeped at her and started running around the room leap-attacking thin air. He accelerated like a motorcycle and his talons were longer than my fingers. He was thoroughly terrifying.

Of course, more terrifying than the giant murder chicken was what Donut was about to do to me. My stomach sank but I followed directions.

When we reached the corridor she hopped down and moved a couple meters away so that she could see me easily. She sat down, tail wrapped around herself, and cocked her head thoughtfully.

"Turn around."

I turned in a circle, feeling like a complete idiot.

"Good. Okay, first is the hair. Mohawk means the sides are shaved and there's spikes from front to back along the center line."

I gritted my teeth, bit back a resentful 'I know what a mohawk is', and did as I was told. I absorbed all my hair and then pushed some in a crest from the top of my forehead all the way back so that the last of the hair was pointing straight back. It took me a moment to get the necessary rigidity, and I finally ended up cheating by building the hairs out of bits of wire from scrap metal that I'd picked up along the way. Texturing them to look like hair was the hard part but since Donut wanted spikes it was easier to do it this way.

"Make them longer," she said. "Try about fifteen centimeters."

I took a moment to bless the dungeon translation system for being smart enough to convert units. Donut and Carl were from America, but at least I didn't have to deal with their barbaric 'inches' and 'feet' while I was being humiliated.

She considered my efforts and nodded. "Good. Now make it purple."

"Why purple?"

"I like purple."

For some reason this seemed like it was pushing things, but I went ahead and did it.

"Good! Now, your clothes. Those sweat pants and sweat shirt won't do it, I'm afraid. Try something tighter."

I felt myself start to blush and overrode it, manually controlling the color of my skin to conceal the reaction. I took a breath, then made my 'clothes' form-fitting.

"No, tighter than that. Oh, and make it black. And shiny! That will look amazing. Like that Trinity person from the Matrix movies. Ms Bea always got annoyed when Trinity came onscreen so I think she was supposed to be pretty."

I put more effort into controlling my skin color to avert the blush, but I shifted my skin to look like the sort of objectifying catsuit she was going for.

"Good! I'm sure all the alien boys will love that...oh, the shoes. Those snowboots you're wearing are a travesty. Do stiletto heels."

"I am not doing stiletto heels," I said firmly. "I am not doing heels at all. I need to be able to run and fight. I can't do that in heels."

"The AI would love it," Donut cajoled. "I bet you'd get some kind of loot that made it work."

"I. Am. Not. Doing. That." I glared at her.

New Achievement: High Heeled Hottie!

You're too dumb to listen to your clever little friend who knows how things work in here, so maybe you need some motivation! This box will have something foot-related in it but what it is and how good it is depends on what you wear from now to the next saferoom. Dress nice for Daddy and you'll get something nifty. Stick with the snowboots and...well, loot can be anything as long as the upside theoretically outweighs the downside. And it can auto-equip.

Reward: A Silver Slutty Shoes Box

"For fuck's sake!"

Donut laughed so hard she fell over.

o-o-o-o

I walked back into the robot room with my full fetish outfit in place: Fifteen-centimeter spikey purple hair, my literally skin-tight shiny black bodysuit, and ten-centimeter stilettos.

Carl looked up from looting and blinked when he saw me. "Donut, what did you do?"

"Doesn't she look great? What do you think about the heels? The AI is going to give her something good if she wears heels from now to the next saferoom."

A muscle worked in his jaw and I found myself touched that he was clearly just as angry about this exploitation as I was. "Just be yourself," he told me.

"That's terrible advice, Carl," Donut said. "She's a doppelganger. It's her job to be someone else."

"It's fine," I said. "If it helps me get views, fine." I couldn't keep the resentment out of my voice even though I knew this was the right answer.

His jaw tightened again but he nodded and let it go. "Fine. I've got all the parts I can get out of these things without tools so I think we're done here. Also, Bautista messaged me. Apparently there's a trick to the station numbers: If a transfer station ends in one then it will have a Desperado Club at it and if it ends in nine then it will have a Club Vanquisher. Bautista is going to be at the Desperado tonight and I want to join up with him, so let's ride up to 131 and see what we've got."

Donut beamed. "We're going dancing tonight! It's Dirty Shirley time! Katia, you'll love them."

"I don't have a Desperado pass, Donut. And you guys never told me what you did to get one."

"Oh, right." She deflated. "I guess we'll have to find another bunch of babies for you to kill."

"Wait, what? You killed a bunch of babies?"

"It's complicated," Carl said. "Let's get on the train."