Ben stood up and shouted 'Lights On,', immediately the area around his camp was illuminated by high intensity LED floodlights, the kind used by night construction crews. As Ben ran to his tow behind trailer to grab his mana rifle, he shouted;

“Girls, head inside, go right into my room. In the closet you'll find weapons with the a bunch of aim skills attached, grab the guns and come right back out. Now!”

They ran, and Ben reached his gun right at the moment the door shut behind them. Now armed, Ben ran back to his skill bag and grabbed two Aims, breaking one immediately, two good shots, then he put the other in his mouth and keeping it intact. Ben brought the rifle up and aimed conventionally, watching closely as Vaughan's beat up old Jeep got closer and closer, the gap between them and the creature that chased them getting wider and wider, until it stopped in place and hissed. Even from the distance, Ben could hear that hiss. Whatever it was, it looked big, bigger than most of the monsters Ben had seen in Oasis Mountain before. It seemed to notice the campfire and started charging directly at him. With a scowl, Ben took Aim and fired a shot, never really getting a good look at what it was.

The bolt of mana illuminated the night and impacted with a flash, causing a much louder hiss. Ben wasted no time and fired again, another flash, another hiss. The monster turned around and started running back the way it came, screeching in fury. Ben fired off a couple more shots, the bolts lighting up the desert like a spotlight from the sky, giving Ben the brief sight of brush and rocks. Farther away he heard another hiss, a second of the same kind of monster. Ben stood at the ready, listening; another hiss, even farther away, then an answering call farther still. They must have decided we weren't worth the trouble, he thought but still stood at the ready. From the corner of his eye, he saw Vaughan's Jeep approach their camp at a leisurely pace. They parked, and right about the time their headlights went off, the girls came out of the trailer, both armed with mana rifles.

“Dude!” Vaughan shouted as he stepped out of the passenger side of the Jeep wearing a black D.A.R.E (To resist Drugs and Violence) tshirt “What were you shooting?”

“The monsters?

“No, the gun!”

“What,” Ben asked, sounding cocky, then firing a shot into the desert night “you mean this?” Vaughan, rather than say anything in response, began to hold out his hands and make a grasping gesture over and over again. Ben tossed it to him, and he whooped and started shooting, the gun unloading forty shots in four seconds before the crystal in the butt started to glow and smoke.

“Did you already break it?” McCrea asked, getting out of the drivers side, an expression of absolute interest and focus on his face.

“No, it recharges after about a minute when you overheat it like that. If you fire in short bursts with decent breaks, you can keep shooting it pretty much forever. It's drawing some of it's power from you, so be careful you don't exhaust yourself-” Vaughan, having seen the crystal flash and go dark, immediately unloaded the weapon again, firing forty more shots, raining devastation in a roughly cone shaped patch of desert. He quickly handed the spent weapon to McCrea and gestured at Louden, who immediately tossed him the gun, which he immediately fired at the same unlucky patch of ground.

“That's so awesome!” he shouted, then hollered and hooped, grabbing both Ben and McCrea into a shoulder hug, going 'Yeeeeeaaaahhh!', then losing his footing as his legs promptly collapsed out from under him.

“Yeahhhh!” he said again, this time a little quieter, then looked at Polk and started gesturing for her gun.

“No!” she said, giggling “are you crazy, you'll hurt yourself!”

“I need morrrrre,” he said, an enormous smile on his face, completely unable to move on his own.

“Help me set him by the fire,” Ben said to McCrea, and the two of them, who were by the way arguably the worlds foremost experts at moving Vaugahn around when he was incapacitated/piss drunk, flawlessly set him by the fire, where he could warm up and recover. McCrea looked at Vaughan, then at the mana rifle and shrugged.

“Between this and that giant lizard? I'm convinced. I came up with a plan for the gold on the drive over; I figured you didn't know what to do with it when I heard you were burying it. Can I see it?”

“I've got some under the tarp, here, I'll show you.”

As they walked over, it struck Ben that even though it had been almost a year since he'd seen them, it was as though no time had passed at all, and they just picked right up where they had left off.

“It's good to see you guys again,” Ben said, then gave McCrea a side arm hug.

“You two man, we were all starting to get worried. Send a text next time you discover a dungeon, all right?” They got to the trailer and Ben threw back the tarp. The gold, rough textured and pure, shone like liquid in the orange light of the fire.

“Woah.”

–

The five of them sat around the endlessly burning fire, the first time they had all been together in almost a year; since the ecstasy incident. McCrea had been working as an anti-cheating agent down in one of the Vegas casinos; Vaughan had gotten a job as a bouncer at a highly successful club thanks to his, and by extension Ben's, connection to the mob. Louden had continued her work as an unlicensed party pharmacologist, a drug dealer, and was also benefiting from using her connection to organized crime. Polk was in the middle of sharing what she'd been up to since Ben vanished off the grid.

“I'm back in school,” she said, sounding proud of the fact “and with a little bit of effort and studying, I'll be able to be a nurse. I'm working in an old folks home,” the group groaned in a friendly way, Polk's reputation as a goodie two-shoes forever cemented in their minds “Shut up,” she said with a smile and a blush “I'm doing really good work there, and it pays for most of my classes.”

The conversation lulled, and Ben realized it was his turn. He coughed, suddenly self conscious, the self knowledge that he was terrible at this sort of thing rising to the surface.

“How to even begin,” he said, stalling for time “I've been like a sort of, uh, mercenary for an otherworldly entity? Well, less of a mercenary and more of a servant? No, wait, it's more like a friendship with a cancer patient, or a five year old with the mind of an adult. Hmmm. I've got lots of gold, so none of you will ever need to work again. I never forgot about you guys, I just got really swept up in all of it, and time just flew by me.”

“So the dungeon,” McCrea said when he saw a natural break in Ben's speech “What genre is it? Are we talking like Castlevania? Are they ruins? Is it like the dungeon in Diablo? MMO style instance? Sex dungeon?” From the background, Louden could be seen to get closer to Polk and whisper 'what does any of that even mean?', and Polk started whispering back; Vaughan, for his part, crossed his fingers, closed his eyes and started whispering 'sex dungeon' over and over again.

“I'm pretty sure I know what you're saying, but lets all get on the same page. What do you mean by all that?” Ben asked.

“Sure, that's fair. So in a game, there's a gradient of how permanent a dungeon is; on the farthest end of impermanence you have something like a ruin, which only has a set amount of monsters and treasure, and none of it regenerates, it's literally just a ruin with valuable stuff in it. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got an MMO dungeon, which does not change and constantly regenerates it's resources. That's the x axis,” he said, and Louden groaned and put her head on Polk's shoulder, loudly whispering 'Nerd!'

“The other factor to consider is what the purpose of the dungeon is. Is it a lair of a terrible monster? Is it a prison for some terrible monster?”

Ben was about to launch into a lengthy monolouge detailing everything he knew about the dungeon, when Polk surprised everyone and shouted 'Nerd!'. Ben, McCrea and Vaughan all gave their attention to Polk and Louden. Polk was the one who spoke.

“I'm sure those questions are relevant, but right now, since we're all here, we really need to talk about something. What are we going to do about this?” it was so obvious to the group what 'this' referred to “I mean, no offense meant, but Ben, you've been sitting around for almost a year on top of this, burying gold in your backyard and hoarding trinkets in your trailer, fighting horrible monsters every single day.” From the background, Vaughan could be heard to whisper 'living the dream,' and the sound of their loudly bumping his own fists together.

“And what about the mob? Do they know about this place? About the gold,” she said, saying the word gold as a whisper, eye wide.

“Doug and Lou, my handlers, they know about. . . some things. They advised me to keep my damn mouth shut and told me they were doing the same thing. So far,” Ben said “They seem to have stuck with that strategy. They're. . . well, they're pretty good dudes. They come and visit every once and a while, I've got a job coming up for them in a little while. To be honest, I think they're afraid to tell anyone about this. They've never gone in, not after the first time.”

"A job?"

"They usually have me analyze things for them, I can help tell if the drugs are pure and if somebody's a cop or not. It's really not a big deal."

“That's one less thing to worry about, at least. But that still brings us back to the most important question; What are we going to do about this? We can't just sit on something like this, I'm honestly shocked nobody's noticed this gigantic mountain on satellite, or even from the road.”

“Casimer's aware of satellites, and he's taken precautions against discovery.”

“That's-ok, but what are we doing about this? I mean, are we even in America anymore?” She said, half frustrated and adopting an absurdist tone. Vaughan seemed to get more from her words than she ever could have intended. He stood straight up and looked over to the mountain, body locked in focus. He had a joint in his mouth, and took a sharp pull.

“George Washington,” he whispered, smoke coming from his mouth in a thick white cloud, suddenly grabbing McCrea's shirt around his shoulders and shaking him a little, breathless with excitement. "GEORGE WASHINGTON!"

“What,” Louden said, eyebrows raised and clearly enjoying the abrupt left turn the conversation was about to take.

“High school, the founding of America, George Washington, the pirate who stole a country.” He looked around, making eye contact with each of them “Lets be George Fucking Washington.” The educational perspective in Hope, Nevada was signifigantly 'off curriculum'.

“Ambition! A fine idea!” Melchsee shouted from the distance, startling everyone. Ben recovered fastest though, and muttered.

“Great. Everyone, this is Melchsee, Casimer's wife or whatever.”