A Dungeon Crawler Carl Fan Fiction: Floors One and Two
Free, non-commercial fan fiction. Dungeon Crawler Carl, Carl and Princess Donut belong to Matt Dinniman. Not for sale.
I came to Seattle on business. The business was a free hotel room, and I'm happy to say it went very well.
Phil Brumley's my best friend. He teaches high school biology, and every winter he goes to the Pacific Northwest Biology Teachers' Conference and asks me to come along. This year I said yes. He was so surprised he asked again, in case I'd misheard.
I had my reasons. Phil said the hotel had a free breakfast, and I heard "free," and I was packed before he'd said the dates. Also, Phil was paying, which is my favorite way to travel.
Our hotel's downtown, and there's a card on the pillow with the housekeeper's name. Ours is Doreen. I left Doreen a note asking for more of the little soaps, and she brought eight. You don't bring a man eight soaps unless you feel something.
There was a personal watercraft expo at the convention center across the street, and Phil asked if I wanted to go look at the jet skis.
"I've seen a jet ski," I said. "I've seen the inside of one."
Phil's first workshop was called "Engaging the Reluctant Learner," and he asked if I wanted to come.
"I'm consulting," I said.
"On what?" Phil said.
"On whether I'm reluctant," I said. "I'll let you know." He wrote that down and went by himself.
I lay down on his bed, because it was closer to the window. The window looked out on a parking lot, and Seattle's parking lot was mostly puddles. Phil said later that Seattle has water on almost every side, plus a lot of lakes. I told him I'd keep an eye on them.
From the bed.
The free breakfast at our hotel ran from six to ten, and I'd done the math. If I went down at six, I could eat four muffins. If I went down at midnight, I could take all of them.
It was the middle of winter, and Phil was asleep with his journal on his chest, in case he dreamed something educational. I put on the hotel bathrobe. It's white and thick, and it's got the hotel's name stitched on the pocket, so if you get lost they'll know where to return you. Then I put on the hotel slippers, which are made of the same stuff, only flatter.
Then I took the steel ice bucket. A bucket's the right tool for muffins. A bag can tear and a pocket gets crumbs, and if anybody stops you, you're just a man who wanted ice.
The lobby was dark except for the front desk, and the fountain was off for the night. In the breakfast room there was a cart covered in plastic wrap, with a little sign on it that said, "Breakfast begins at six." I took that as a guideline.
I peeled back the wrap and filled the bucket. Blueberry, bran, lemon poppy seed, and one that might've been a dinner roll. I took it anyway. A roll in a muffin bucket isn't a mistake. It's variety.
Then I heard a man checking in late at the front desk. He had a duffel bag, and a jacket with "Pacific Northwest Personal Watercraft Expo" printed across the back. "Brandt," he told the clerk. "Hollis Brandt."
Hollis Brandt is the man whose jet ski I sank in Lake Wendle, back home. He says I owe him four thousand dollars. I say the lake was deeper than it looked. We've been going back and forth on it for a while.
I didn't panic. I stood very still behind a potted tree, holding eleven muffins, which is what a professional does.
He'd tracked me across the country. That was the only explanation. Some people would call a man in a watercraft expo jacket, at the hotel across from the watercraft expo, a coincidence. Those people don't owe Hollis money.
The clerk looked over and saw me. "Can I help you, sir?" he said.
"Ice," I said, and I held up the bucket.
Hollis turned around. He looked at the robe, and the slippers, and the bucket, and the muffins in the bucket, and then for a long time at the roll.
"Dale," he said.
"Wrong guy," I said, in the voice I use for that.
"Your lanyard says Phil Brumley's guest," Hollis said. Phil had made me wear it so they'd let me into the free coffee. In hindsight, it was almost my name.
"Four thousand dollars," Hollis said, and he set down his duffel bag.
I went out the side door at a pretty good clip. It was snowing in the parking lot. The door swung shut behind me, and then it opened again, because Hollis is a man who follows through.
I kept the muffins. I'd earned them.
A hotel slipper isn't made for running. It's made for walking to the ice machine and back, and it's honest about that, which is more than you can say for most shoes.
I crossed the parking lot in about nine seconds. Somewhere around second six, my left slipper came off in a slushy gutter. I didn't go back for it. You never go back for a slipper, and also Hollis was right behind me, breathing like a man who exercises.
I cut between two parked cars, and my bathrobe belt caught on a side mirror. The mirror bent, and the car's alarm went off. A dog in a window started barking at the alarm. A man in a different window started yelling at the dog. I felt bad for that dog. It wasn't his night either.
I ran around the corner, straight into a bush with a little sign in it that said, "Please keep off the landscaping." I was mostly on top of the landscaping, so I left.
Behind the next building was a big green dumpster. I got down behind it and crouched there in the snow with the ice bucket in my lap. I'd lost two muffins and a slipper, and I'd gained a twig, so overall I was down.
My left foot was in a sock, and the sock was in a puddle. My right foot still had its slipper, which made it the lucky one. I told it so, quietly.
Then I heard footsteps. I lifted the bucket over my head, because a man has a right to defend his muffins. Then whoever it was sneezed three times, and I put the bucket down.
It was Phil, in his coat and boots. He'd looked out the window and seen me crossing the parking lot in a bathrobe, being chased by a duffel bag.
"Dale," he whispered. "I brought you a slipper." He held it out. It was a left.
"Whose is it?" I said.
"Mine," Phil said. "From my side of the room."
"Phil, I can't wear another man's slipper," I said. "I've got a policy."
"Since when?" Phil said.
"Since I saw your feet at the community pool," I said.
Phil looked at the slipper for a while. Then he put it in his coat pocket and said, "I understand."
So the left one stayed in the gutter, and the right one stayed on me. I was a one-slipper man now. Some guys would've been embarrassed, but I've always said a man only really needs one of anything, as long as somebody else has the other.
It was cold out. But it was a clean cold.
Some people have no idea how to dress for the weather.
Phil and I were crouched behind the dumpster, watching for Hollis. I had my bathrobe on, and Phil had his coat. Then I looked across the street and saw a man in a jacket and boxer shorts. No pants. Just boxer shorts and bare legs, in the snow, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a major city.
"Phil," I whispered. "That man isn't wearing pants." Phil looked, and he said maybe something was wrong.
"Something's definitely wrong," I said. "He isn't wearing pants."
The man was chasing a cat. It was the biggest, fluffiest cat I'd ever seen, white and puffed up, with a little squashed face. It looked like the kind of cat that has papers. If you found a cat like that, you'd get a reward, or at least a big meal from somebody very grateful. I thought about that for a while.
"Come here, Princess," the man called. He sounded very tired. "Come on, Princess. Please."
The cat didn't come. She sat down on the hood of a car and looked at him, and then she went under the car, slowly, so he'd see her do it.
I'll be honest. I judged him. A grown man, out in his underwear, yelling "Princess" at a car. You'd never catch me going out like that. When I go out at night, I go out in a bathrobe, which covers everything that needs covering, and a few things that don't, just to be safe.
"He might be in trouble," Phil said. "We should help him."
"We've got our own trouble," I said. "We're hiding from a man." Phil said the man was hiding too, sort of, from a cat.
"That's different," I said. "That's a cat."
The man got down on his hands and knees in the snow and looked under the car. His shorts had some kind of pattern on them. I couldn't make it out, and I didn't try very hard, because I've got standards.
I shook my head and pulled my robe a little tighter. My bare foot was in a puddle, and I was holding a bucket with a dinner roll in it.
"Some people," I said.
The man with the cat had just gone around the corner when the sky did something I didn't care for.
It didn't flash, exactly. It sort of blinked, and then it pretended it hadn't. Then a voice came from everywhere at once. It talked very fast, and it sounded pleased with itself. I didn't catch most of it. I caught "Earth," and "dungeon," and something about being lucky, and I figured it was some kind of ad.
Then the buildings went into the ground. All of them, at once: the hotel, the convention center, the building behind our dumpster, everything on the street. They didn't fall over. They just went down, smooth and quiet, until there was nothing but flat ground and snow.
I stood there with my bucket for a long time. Phil's conference was in that hotel, and so was Doreen, and the clerk, and the man who'd yelled at the dog. Everybody who'd been inside was gone. I didn't know what to say about that, so I didn't say anything, and neither did Phil. It was the quietest I've ever heard a city.
Then numbers showed up in the air in front of me, counting down. Across the lot, where the hotel used to be, a hole opened up with glowing stairs going down into it. The voice said anybody still outside could go down the stairs. It didn't say what happened if you didn't, and I didn't ask.
"Dale!" somebody yelled. "Dale Tummins!"
It was Hollis. He was standing where the curb used to be, holding his duffel bag, and he was still yelling my name. The world had ended, and he hadn't missed a step. You've got to admire a man who stays on task.
"Four thousand dollars!" Hollis yelled.
Phil took my elbow. "We need to go down the stairs, Dale," he said.
"Why?" I said.
"Because of the numbers," Phil said.
I looked at the numbers, and then I looked at Hollis. The stairs were in the other direction from Hollis, which made them the right direction.
"Okay," I said, and we walked over and went down. Phil went first and kept hold of my elbow the whole way, because the steps were slick and he knew about my slipper. I held the ice bucket in both hands. I'm not sure why. There was one dinner roll in it, and some snow. But it was mine, and it was all I'd brought.
I'd like to say I looked back one last time at the city. I didn't. I was watching my feet, because the stairs were slippery, and I only had the one slipper.
That's where I was when the world ended. In a bathrobe, watching my feet.
At the bottom of the stairs there was a room, and in the room there was the voice, and the voice had terms and conditions.
I've agreed to a lot of terms and conditions, and I've never read one. Phil reads them all, so he got out his waterproof journal.
The first term was that this was a dungeon. It had eighteen floors, and they went down.
"Is there an elevator?" I asked. The voice didn't answer. It went right on to the second term, which was that every floor had a timer. When the timer ran out, the floor would collapse, and anybody still on it would go with it.
"Is there a lost and found?" I asked. "I'm missing a slipper."
The third term was that every floor had stairs down to the next floor, and we had to find them before the timer ran out. The voice went very slow on that one. I could tell it wanted to make sure I personally got it, which was thoughtful.
"Do the stairs have a railing?" I asked.
The fourth term was that monsters would try to kill us, and when we killed them, they'd drop loot. "Is the loot taxable?" I asked. Phil wrote that down, and then he crossed it out.
The fifth term was that everybody had a menu, with an inventory and a map and stats. You thought about it, and it showed up in the air. It said my name was Dale Tummins, and I was level one, and my inventory had a dinner roll in it.
I looked in the bucket. The roll was gone. Somebody had moved my roll without asking, and I felt that was a privacy issue.
The sixth term was the big one. All of this was a show, broadcast live to an audience out in space. The voice said the audience was enormous and excited, and that they'd paid a lot of money.
Phil stopped writing. I've seen Phil stop writing three times in my life, and every time it's been bad.
But I wasn't worried. I'd been on a show before, Season Thirty-One of Exile Isle, so I knew how it worked. You get there, you do your confessionals, you make a friend, and then you take his rice.
"Is there a dress code?" I asked. The voice said, very kindly, that I was already wearing it. That was a relief. A lot of shows make you change.
The seventh term was that we should try to have fun.
"Will there be a host?" I asked. "Will there be snacks? When do we do the confessionals?"
"I don't think there are confessionals, Dale," Phil said, and he closed the journal.
"Every show has confessionals," I said. "You just have to find the room."
The voice said goodbye and good luck, and a door opened in the wall. Phil went through it first.
He'd read everything.
Our guide's name was Fenwick, and he looked like a lizard somebody had left out in the rain for about four hundred years.
He sat behind a desk in a little room, with a lamp and a rubber stamp. He was green and wrinkled and damp all over. The desk was damp, and so was the stamp. The chair I sat in was damp too, and it stayed in the back of my robe for an hour.
There was a little sign on his desk. It said, "Fenwick. Guide. Retiring soon." Somebody had crossed out "soon" and written "very soon" in pen.
"Crawlers," Fenwick said, in the voice of a man at the end of a very long shift.
"I'm Dale Tummins," I said. "Maybe you've seen my work."
"I don't learn names anymore, crawler," Fenwick said. "I used to. It didn't help anybody."
Phil opened his journal and said we were ready to learn. Then Fenwick gave us some advice. I'll be honest, it was good advice, and I've always respected a man who gives his advice away for free, because that's how I give mine.
He said the first thing to do was find a safe room. Monsters can't hurt you in a safe room, and there's a bathroom, a shower and food. He made it sound like a pretty nice place.
"Do they take reservations?" I said. Fenwick looked at me for a while and didn't answer, which I took as a maybe.
He said the second thing was not to fight anything we couldn't read. You look at a monster, and the menu tells you what it is. If the menu doesn't know, or it tells you something with a lot of words in it, walk away.
"What if it's cute?" I said.
"Especially then," Fenwick said.
He said the third thing was to keep moving toward the stairs, always, because the timer doesn't care how you feel. Phil asked if that was all of them. Fenwick said that was all of them, and everything else was details.
Then he looked at me with his big yellow eyes for a long time. I could tell he saw something special in me. I'm not sure what it was. I think it was the robe.
"Can you get me an agent?" I said. Fenwick said no. I asked if he knew anybody who could, and he said no again, so I told him to think it over, no rush, because I'd be around.
Phil raised his hand. "I've got allergies," he said. "Shellfish, wool, bees and most grasses. Is there anything down here I should watch out for?"
Fenwick sighed. It was a long, wet sigh, and it went on so long I worried he'd sighed out something he needed.
"Crawler," he said, "everything down here is an allergy."
Phil wrote that down and underlined it twice. I didn't write anything down, because I didn't need to. Fenwick and I had a real connection. He'd talked to Phil more, but he'd looked at me longer.
In show business, that's what counts.
On a show, your name's everything, and mine was Dale Tummins, so I tried to change it.
There's a box at the top of the menu with your display name, the one the audience sees. "Dale Tummins" is a fine name for a man who owes you money. It's not a name for a hero.
So I picked "Dale the Survivor." I'd survived a lot. A lake, a jet ski, Exile Isle, and so far the end of the world. That's a good run for one winter.
I tapped the box. A message popped up. It said, Display names are locked. You keep the name you came in with. Thank you for your interest. I tapped it again, and it said the same thing, only slower. That was fine. If the menu wouldn't do it, I'd just have to tell everybody myself.
"Fenwick," I said, "from now on I'd like to be called Dale the Survivor."
Fenwick looked at me, and then he stamped something. I didn't see what. I like to think it was a form making it official.
"Okay, crawler," he said, and I felt that was almost the same thing.
Then Fenwick handed out our starting items. Phil got a fire poker. It was long and iron, with a hook on the end, and the menu said it was good for poking fires and things that aren't fires.
"What do I get?" I said. Fenwick looked at the bucket in my hands and said I already had it. The menu agreed with him. My starting item was one ice bucket, used.
"I'll trade you," I told Phil.
"I understand," Phil said, but he didn't trade me.
On our way out, Fenwick said one more thing, without looking up from his stamping.
"The ones who think they're the hero usually aren't even on camera," he said.
I looked over at Phil, who was writing it down. Phil's a quiet guy. He's in the back row of every photo he's ever been in, and I'd always figured he didn't know that about himself. Now Fenwick had told him. It was hard to hear, but somebody had to say it.
"Don't take it too hard," I told him in the hall, and I patted him on the shoulder.
He wrote that down too. I think it helped.
My first monster was a goblin, and he pulled a knife on me before we'd even said hello, which I thought was pretty forward.
We'd left Fenwick's office and gone down a long stone tunnel with torches on the walls and puddles in the low spots. Phil walked in front with the fire poker. I walked behind him with the bucket, for strategy.
The goblin came around a corner. He was about three feet tall and green, with big ears, little teeth and a vest. The menu said, Goblin, level one. So we were the same level, and I took that as a sign of respect.
"Hello," I said. The goblin screamed and came running at me.
I've always said a man should face his enemies. That night I faced the other way. I turned around and ran back up the tunnel as fast as I could, swinging the bucket behind me for balance.
There was a clang, and then there wasn't any more running behind me. I stopped and looked back. The goblin was lying flat on the floor, and the bucket had a dent in it about the size of a goblin's head. Then the goblin sort of faded out, and where he'd been there was a little pile: three copper coins, a bent spoon and the knife.
"You killed it," Phil said.
"I did," I said. "I planned it that way."
"You were running away," Phil said.
"From the front, maybe," I said. The coins and the spoon went into my inventory. The knife went into Phil's, because he got there first.
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Backed Into It. You killed your first monster with your back to it. Bold choice. Reward: one Bronze Adventurer Box.
I read it twice. Bold choice. Nobody had ever called me bold before, not even a computer. I could tell the audience was sitting up in their seats.
"They think I'm bold, Phil," I said. Phil said he thought it was sarcasm.
"That's what they always say about bold people," I said.
Then the voice came back on, all over the dungeon at once, to tell everybody how many crawlers were still alive. It was a long number, with a lot of millions in it, and some thousands, and some hundreds. I didn't catch the front of it. I caught the end, which was "and six."
So there were six of us left, and two of them were us. "Phil," I said, "two out of six is the top half."
"No, it's not," Phil said, "and there are millions of people left."
"That's what they want you to think," I said. I wasn't going to let a bunch of millions I'd never even met tell me where I stood.
We went on down the tunnel. I held the bucket out in front of me now, so the next goblin would know who he was dealing with.
Then I turned around, just in case.
The dungeon has moss, and Phil's allergic to it, which I could've told you before we ever saw any.
It grows on the tunnel walls in big fuzzy patches, gray-green and a little damp. The menu calls it Dungeon Moss, and that's all it says. It doesn't warn you. I guess it figures you'll find out.
Phil found out. He walked past one patch, and his eyes went red. He walked past another, and his nose started running. At the third patch he sneezed, and it was a big one. Phil sneezes like a man who's been saving up since college. It went down the tunnel and came back twice.
Something in the dark woke up. It was a rat, but it was the size of a beanbag chair, and it was lumpy, and it smelled used. The menu said, Giant Rat, level two.
"Phil," I said, "you woke up a rat."
"I'm sorry," Phil said, and then he sneezed again.
The rat came at us. I got behind Phil, because that's where I do my best work. Phil swung the fire poker and sneezed, and he hit the rat. He sneezed and swung and hit it again. It went on like that for a while. I counted eleven sneezes and seven hits, and one hit that was really just a sneeze in the rat's direction. Then the rat fell over, and it left behind a rat tail and four copper coins.
"We did it," I said.
"I did it," Phil said. His eyes were swollen almost shut.
"We did it," I said. "I was right behind you the whole time."
As for damage, Phil got bit on the arm, and I got moss in my slipper. His arm bled a little, and then it healed up, because the dungeon does that. My slipper's still got moss in it. So we both took some damage, but mine's lasting.
Phil couldn't see to write, so I wrote it in his journal for him. Group kill.
Our first safe room had a bathroom, a shower that worked, a long table with benches, and a little shopkeeper behind a counter. I've paid money for worse, and I've been asked to leave better.
Fenwick had said monsters can't hurt you in a safe room. I tested it by standing in the doorway with one foot out in the tunnel, and nothing happened. Then Phil pulled me in by the robe.
The shopkeeper was a small gray creature with a big nose and a little apron. He sold potions and bandages and rope. I asked him if he had slippers, and he said no. I asked if he had muffins, and he said no. I asked if he was hiring, and he said no and went in the back.
Then I noticed we weren't alone. The man from across the street was sitting at the far end of the table, still in his jacket and his boxer shorts. He looked like he hadn't slept in a week, and it had been about a day.
The cat was sitting on the table next to him. She was even bigger up close. She was cleaning her face with one paw, and then looking at the paw to see how it went. Then she talked.
"I've decided I love it," she said. "Talking. I'm extremely good at it. Carl, tell them I'm extremely good at it."
"She's good at it," the man said. So his name was Carl.
The cat looked at me. She looked at the robe, and the slipper, and the bucket. "Oh, thank goodness," she said. "Room service. I'll need a pillow. A soft one, and not one that's been on the floor."
Here's what I want people to understand. A lesser man would've said, I'm not room service. A lesser man would've said, I'm a consultant, and a crawler, and a star of Season Thirty-One of Exile Isle. I didn't say any of that. I could see a cat was in need.
There was a stack of pillows in the corner. I picked the softest one, and I tested it on my own face first, which is called quality control. Then I brought it to the cat. She looked at it for a long time.
"It'll do," she said. She sat on it, and then she turned around and sat on it a different way.
"Thanks, man," Carl said. He said it in a tired, decent way, the way you'd thank a guy who held a door.
"Anytime," I said. "I'm Dale." Carl nodded, but he'd already closed his eyes.
I went back down the table to where Phil was writing in his journal. I sat down very calmly. When something big happens, you don't want to cause a scene.
"Phil," I whispered. "I'm in with the cat."
"She thinks you work here," Phil said.
"That's how it starts," I said. "First you work for them. Then they can't live without you."
Before long the cat was asleep on her pillow, and Carl was asleep in his chair. Nobody had ever trusted me enough to fall asleep in front of me, except Phil, and once a guy on a bus, and I'd taken his sandwich.
I didn't take anything from Carl and the cat. I want that on the record.
I looked, though.
The next morning, over breakfast in the safe room, I told Phil what had happened the night before. I thought he should hear it from somebody who was there.
"So Carl and the cat were stuck," I said. "They'd been in the dungeon a whole day, and they didn't know what to do next. And they looked around the room, and they saw me."
Phil was eating a boiled egg. He stopped.
"And Carl said, Dale, we need your help," I said. "And I said, What's the trouble? And the cat said, We need a pillow, and we need a man who knows pillows."
"Dale," Phil said.
I wasn't done. "So I gave them some advice," I said. "Mostly pillow advice, but some life advice too. And Carl said, Dale, you've given us a lot to think about. And they both fell asleep, because I'd put their minds at ease."
Phil set his egg down on the table. "That's not how I remember it," he said.
"Well, that's the thing about memory," I said. "Everybody's is different."
Then I explained it to him. He's a biology teacher, so I figured he'd appreciate the science. Memory's like a muscle. The more you use it, the bigger it gets. I use mine all the time, so mine's big, and it's got a lot in it. Phil hardly uses his, because he writes everything down, so his is small, and the parts that don't fit fall out.
"That isn't how memory works," Phil said.
"How would you know?" I said. "You'd have to remember."
He opened his journal to the page from last night. He'd written it all down. It said, "She thinks he's room service." Then it said, "He fetched it." Then, "Carl said thanks, man." Then, underlined, "Carl doesn't know his name."
"See, that's the problem with writing things down," I said. "It doesn't leave any room for growth."
Later I went in the bathroom and told the whole story to the mirror. It went great. The mirror nodded at every part, and it never interrupted once.
The mirror remembers it my way.
There are a lot of things you think might survive the end of the world. Cockroaches, maybe, and those little packets of crackers. I never would've put Hollis Brandt on the list, but he would've.
We were in a long tunnel with a puddle in the middle, and he came around the corner with a goblin spear on his shoulder and a clipboard under his arm. He'd found the clipboard down here somewhere. It was the most Hollis thing I'd ever seen, and I once watched him read a contract out loud to a dog.
He was still wearing his watercraft expo jacket, with a goblin vest over it. The menu said, Hollis Brandt, crawler, level four.
Level four. He'd been down here a day and a half. I'd been down here the same day and a half, and the menu said I was level one and had recently picked up a spoon.
"Dale," Hollis said.
"Hollis," I said. "What a coincidence."
"It's not a coincidence," Hollis said. "I followed the robe. It's the only white thing down here."
That stung. I'd always thought of the robe as my look. I'd never thought of it as a trail.
Hollis checked his clipboard. "Four thousand dollars," he said, "plus half a coconut."
The half a coconut's a long story. I paid him with it once, and then I needed it back.
"Hollis, there's no money down here," I said. "It's the end of the world. Money's over. You can't even buy a muffin."
"There's gold," Hollis said, "and there's copper." I'll admit he had me there. I had seven copper coins and a bent spoon. I offered him all seven coins, which is very generous for the end of the world, and he wrote something on his clipboard.
"Dungeon copper's at a hundred to one," Hollis said. "So that's seven cents."
"Who says it's a hundred to one?" I said.
"I do," Hollis said. "I'm the one with the clipboard."
Then he took off nine cents for the conversion fee, and two cents for chasing me across a parking lot. That made my seven coins worth minus four cents. He wrote it on the clipboard: four thousand dollars and four cents, plus half a coconut.
"So if I pay you, I owe you more," I said.
"That's how it works," Hollis said, and he held out his hand for the coins.
I've been getting out of these for years. I looked past his shoulder and pointed, and I put real fear in my face. "Goblin!" I yelled.
Hollis didn't even turn around. "Come on, Dale," he said.
Then a goblin hit him in the back of the head with a rock. There were three of them, and they all came out of a side tunnel at once, and they all went for Hollis. I don't blame them. He had a clipboard.
Phil and I ran the other way. I kept my coins.
Honesty really is the best policy, if you time it right.
I made level two by standing next to a goblin while Phil killed it. A lot of great careers start that way.
A message said I had three stat points to spend. Phil wanted to sit down on a rock and think it through. I told him I'd been thinking it through my whole life. I just never had the points before.
There are five stats, and Phil read them out of the menu for me. I could've read them myself, but a consultant should always have somebody reading to him. It shows you're busy.
Strength is for hitting things. I already hit things with the ice bucket, and honestly, the bucket does most of the work. I didn't want to step on its toes.
Dexterity is for dodging. I've dodged things my whole life, like Hollis, and a jury, and the dentist. I'm a natural at it, and you shouldn't pay for something you've already got.
Intelligence is for magic and figuring things out. Phil said it was the most important one. I said that's exactly what a man with a lot of intelligence would say, to keep the price up.
Constitution is how much punishment you can take. A goblin stabbed me in the robe yesterday, and I barely noticed, because it's a very thick robe and the stab mostly stayed in there. So constitution's really the robe's stat, and the robe can't spend points.
Charisma is how much people like you. "I'm putting all three into charisma," I told Phil.
"Dale, charisma doesn't stop a knife," Phil said.
"It does if the guy holding the knife likes you," I said.
"Goblins don't like anybody," Phil said.
"They've never met me," I said. "Besides, the camera's going to want me, and you can't teach charisma." Then I paid three points to learn it.
Phil put his points into constitution and dexterity, and right away he got better at everything. He dodged a rat, carried both packs, and walked up a long ramp without breathing hard. Then he walked back down the ramp to get me.
I didn't feel any different. But later on, a rat looked at me in the tunnel for a long time before it bit me. Before, they'd always just bitten me right away. That's progress.
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Charm Offensive. You spent every point on charisma. The monsters will be very polite while they eat you. Reward: none. Good manners are their own reward.
"Polite monsters, Phil," I said. "Even the dungeon can see it."
"It says they'll eat you," Phil said.
"Politely," I said.
So far, nobody's eaten me at all.
Forty-one people in outer space are watching me. I found out by accident. I was looking for the button that makes the map bigger, and I hit the one that tells you who's watching. Forty-one is more than came to my cousin Darryl's wedding. Thirty-five came to that, and I know, because I worked the door and took everybody's envelopes. Darryl brought that up every Thanksgiving after, from across the room.
"Phil," I said. "I've got forty-one."
"Forty-one what?" Phil said. He was bandaging his own arm, which was bleeding from my goblin.
"Fans," I said. Phil checked his own number and shut the menu fast, without saying it out loud. I felt bad for him. Not everybody's a draw. Some people are the guy who carries the draw's pack.
From then on I performed. Whenever we walked down a tunnel, I narrated it for the people at home. "Dale Tummins enters a tunnel," I said. "It's dark in here. He isn't scared."
"Can you whisper that?" Phil said.
"Whispering doesn't come through on the microphone," I told him. I don't know where the microphone is. That's exactly why you have to project.
I didn't know where the cameras were, either, so I waved at all of the walls. Then I waved at the ceiling, and once at a rat. You never know who's a camera down here, and the rat seemed to appreciate it. After every fight I posed, with one foot up on the goblin and the ice bucket on my hip and my chin toward the torch. The goblins were mostly Phil's. But Phil was busy getting stabbed by them, so somebody had to pose.
Then Phil told me Carl's number. A man in the last safe room had told it to him. It was so long that Phil had to stop and take a breath in the middle.
"Bots," I said.
"What?" Phil said.
"Fake viewers," I told him. "You buy them. Everybody knows that."
"Who would he buy them from?" Phil said.
"From space," I said. "My forty-one are real. You can tell, because they're not doing anything."
I waved at the ceiling again, for the real fans. The ceiling dripped on me, right on the head.
That's engagement.
Nobody's asked me about the ice bucket yet, but I've got my answer ready, just in case.
It's stainless steel, with the word "ice" printed on the side, in case you forget what it's for. I never forget. It's for everything. The lid's gone, which makes it lighter to swing, so I like to think the lid gave itself up.
It's got two kills, both goblins, plus most of a rat. The rat's in dispute. Phil says his poker killed the other part of it, but he can't say which part, so I count the whole rat. It's got eleven dents. Seven are goblins, and three are walls. One's Phil, from the time he came up behind me in a dark tunnel and said "Dale" too quietly. He's fine now, mostly. So is the dent.
Then there's everything else it does. It's a helmet when the ceiling drops things. It's a drum for morale, at least until Phil asked me to stop the morale. It's a plate and a pillow, and once, in a long tunnel with no safe room, a toilet. I'm sorry about that. I washed it twice at the next safe room, and once more in the shower with me, to be thorough.
A man and his weapon should share a name. Carl's got the cat, and everybody knows her. I've got a bucket. So I told Phil that from now on I'd be going by The Bucket.
"The Bucket," Phil said.
"Dale The Bucket Tummins," I said, so he'd have the whole thing.
"Like the thing you used as a toilet," Phil said.
I hadn't looked at it that way. I told the walls anyway, in case the cameras were in the walls. I told a goblin too, right before I hit him with it, so he'd know who did it. He didn't say it back, and neither did Phil or the walls.
By lunch I was Dale again.
I was posing for my fans when a beetle came out of the wall. It was the size of a love seat, and it came in without knocking. I let it go. It's their wall.
My best pose has the ice bucket up on my shoulder and my chin toward the torch. The beetle came at me from the other side, which is my bad side, so luckily the camera probably missed most of it.
It knocked me flat and stood on my robe. Then it pinched the slipper off my foot, and some of the foot. I told it to get off the robe. It didn't get off, but it stopped and looked at me, and I felt it was listening.
Then an axe came down out of nowhere. The beetle split into two halves and a little bag of coins, and that was the end of the beetle.
The woman holding the axe was about my age, in a fleece jacket and hiking boots, with her hair pulled back very tight. She looked down at me the way a plumber looks at a sink he's already fixed twice.
"You okay?" she said.
"I am now," I said, and I winked. I had dust in that eye, so the wink went on a while, but she got the idea.
Her name was Renata Ocampo. She was a paramedic from Tacoma, off duty the night everything happened, and she'd grabbed the fire axe out of her car on the way to the stairs. I asked if she always kept an axe in her car. She said she does now.
"I'm Dale Tummins," I said, from the floor. "You might know me from television."
"I don't," Renata said.
"Exile Isle," I said. "Season Thirty-One. I was the one everybody talked about."
"No," she said. She didn't even have to think about it, which shows you how sure she was.
Phil had hives up both arms. He'd crawled through whatever the beetle had crawled through, to get to me. Renata took one look and handed him a little red potion, and the hives went down while we watched. Phil thanked her four times and wrote her name in his journal, spelled right. I didn't need to write it down. I'd be seeing her again.
"So when all this is over," I said, "maybe you and I get a drink."
"No," Renata said.
"Maybe not right now," I said.
"Not now, and not later," Renata said.
But she'd said later. Nobody brings up later unless it's on their mind. I've been told no plenty of times in my life, and almost none of them mentioned later.
She said she was heading the other way. I told her that was fine, because the tunnels down here curve. She said not all of them do. You don't look up a thing like that unless you're planning to run into somebody.
Tunnels always curve.
I watched Carl's highlights from behind a pillar. That's not where I'd have picked to sit, but it's where the bench was. The safe room had a little screen up in the corner, over the snacks, that showed the best moments from around the dungeon. From my bench I could see about two thirds of it. The man in front of me had a big head, so really it was more like half.
In my half, Carl kicked something enormous. I couldn't tell what it was. It had a lot of legs, and it didn't want to be kicked, and Carl kicked it anyway until it fell over. The whole safe room cheered. Even the shopkeeper clapped, and he doesn't clap for anything, including money.
Then the cat was up on his shoulder. She held out a paw, and a lot of light came out of it, and something on the far side of the room stopped being a problem. Then she turned and held very still, so the camera could find her good side. As far as I could tell, they're all her good side.
"I could do that," I told Phil.
"Which part?" Phil said.
"The kicking," I said. "He's got feet, and I've got feet. The only real difference is pants, and he doesn't even have those."
"You've only got one slipper, Dale," Phil said.
"Then I'm one slipper ahead of where he started," I said.
So I went out into the hallway and kicked the wall. I did it like Carl, with a lot of hip in it, so the cameras would have something to use. My toe broke. That seemed like a fluke, so I kicked with the other foot, and that toe broke too. The slipper flew off and went down the hall. A rat came out, picked it up and carried it about twenty feet, and I had to hop down there and work something out with him.
The dungeon heals you overnight. By morning both toes were fine, and so was the wall. So was the rat, mostly. I'd only hit him with the bucket the one time, and not hard, since we'd been negotiating.
I watched the little screen all the next evening. They never showed it.
Goblins wear little wool vests. I'd never noticed until Phil's face started to swell, and then we both noticed, because his face was getting bigger than the goblins.
Five of them came around a corner, all in vests. By the time they got close, Phil's eyes were puffed shut tight, and his nose was going too. He sounded like a man trying to whistle through a sandwich.
"Dale, I can't see," Phil said. "You'll have to be my eyes."
"Left!" I yelled. Phil swung left and hit a wall. So I said, "My left," and Phil swung the other way and hit a goblin, which proved I'd been right the first time, from where I was standing. I was standing behind him, which is where a coach stands. Every great coach in history has stood behind somebody, usually somebody bigger, and yelled.
"Low!" I yelled, and Phil swung low and got one in the knees. "Behind you!" I yelled, and Phil turned all the way around and faced me. "The other behind," I said.
"Duck!" I yelled. Phil ducked, and a spear went right over his head. I hadn't seen the spear. I'd just wanted him lower so I could see what was happening.
After a while it got quiet. "Is that all of them?" Phil said.
I counted the goblins on the floor, and there were four. "There were five," I said. "One got away. Stay sharp."
"You counted one of them twice when they came in," Phil said. "There were four."
Phil couldn't see a thing, and he was still better at counting than me. I put that down to his teaching background, and to him being the one who hit them. He sneezed for an hour after. I told him that was natural, because athletes always crash after a big game.
"I'm allergic to wool, Dale," Phil said.
"And to losing," I said, and I patted his back.
That was my coaching debut. Undefeated.
We'd been saving our loot boxes for a safe room, because Phil read that you should open them somewhere safe. I wanted to open mine right away, in the tunnel, in case there were sandwiches inside that would go bad. Phil went first, because he had more boxes. He had more boxes because he'd killed more things. But I'd been standing near a lot of those things, so in a way they were partly my boxes.
His first box had a shield in it. A real one, round and heavy, with a leather strap and a dent already in the front. That's how you know it works.
His second box had an upgrade for his map. Now it shows him where things are, and not only where he's already been. Phil said that was the main weakness of the old map. I said I'd never had a problem with it.
His third box had four healing potions, red, in little corked bottles. Phil held them up to the torch and got misty. He's always been sentimental about medicine. Then it was my turn.
My first box had a sock. One sock, hotel white, and it fit either foot, so really it's got two uses. That's more uses than most of what I own.
My second box had a coupon for ten percent off at a safe room shop on floor one, with the shop's name and directions. Phil looked it up on his new map, and it wasn't there.
"It might be on the old map," I said.
"The old map didn't have anything on it," Phil said.
"Then it's probably on there," I said, and I put the coupon somewhere safe.
My third box had a jar. Glass, with a lid, and a little label on the front, and the label said, "Jar." I liked that a lot. No games and no tricks, just a jar being honest about itself. I've owned a lot of things that turned out to be something else, and this was a jar.
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Fair Share. Your friend got armor, a map and medicine. You got a jar. We feel this is balanced. Reward: the jar, again.
I read it to Phil out loud, with feeling. It's not every day the dungeon calls you balanced. Some days I don't even feel balanced myself, but now I've got it in writing.
I offered Phil my sock for one of his potions. He said he'd just give me a potion. I told him that wasn't the point, so he gave me a potion, and I kept the sock, and I felt like I'd come out ahead.
"What are you going to keep in the jar?" Phil said.
"Something important," I said.
"Like what?" Phil said.
"I'll know it when I see it," I said.
I put the jar in my inventory, next to the sock and the coupon. It's empty for now.
That's how you know it's ready.
I don't look where I'm going anymore. I look where the camera is. You can't do both at once, and only one of them has fans. So I walked backwards into the trap room, waving.
There was a little metal plate in the floor just inside the door, and I stepped on it with my good heel. A dart shot out of the wall and missed me by a foot. Another one hit the bucket, which I took to mean the bucket wanted to be in the shot. Then the ceiling started to come down. It came down slowly, which I appreciated, because it gave everybody at home time to get a good look. I kept waving. It was the longest anybody had ever watched me do anything.
Then something grabbed me by the belt and pulled. It was Renata. She hauled me out by the bathrobe belt, hand over hand, the way you'd pull up a bucket from a well. I came out on my back, full of dust, with the robe most of the way open. Behind me, the ceiling met the floor with a little click.
"You came back," I said.
"I was walking past," Renata said.
"Past me," I said. "Walking past me, specifically."
She took out a little light and shined it in my eyes. Only a paramedic would think to look that deep into a man's eyes while he's on his back. I looked deep into hers, right back.
"Pupils are fine," she said.
"Grabbing a man by his belt," I said. "In front of his fans."
"No," Renata said.
"Not yet," I said.
"No," she said.
Phil came running up with his shield and his poker and asked if I was okay. I said I'd never been better. Renata said I'd been worse, but not much worse. Then she picked up her axe and went off the other way again, which is her way.
Phil helped me up and started shaking the dust out of my robe. "Dale, she saved your life," he said.
"Twice now," I said. "It's getting serious."
Hollis Brandt has a party now. It's two big men from the watercraft expo, and they don't talk. They stand behind Hollis and hold things for him.
He found us at a fork in a tunnel. The menu said he was level seven, but he told me anyway, before he even said hello. That's the kind of man Hollis is. He wants you to hear it from him.
"Dale," he said. "I've been keeping notes."
Crawlers can keep notes in their menu. Phil keeps his in the waterproof journal instead, because he doesn't trust anything he can't get wet. Hollis keeps his in the menu, and he opened them up and read them out loud.
"Four thousand dollars and four cents," Hollis read. "Half a coconut. With interest."
"How much interest?" I said.
"A lot," Hollis said. "I'm very interested."
The two men behind him nodded. One of them was holding Hollis's spear. The other one was holding a goblin by the back of its vest, still alive, in case they needed one.
"I'd like to pay it off," I said. Phil turned and looked at me. He'd never heard me say that before, and to be honest, neither had I. It came out in somebody else's voice, somebody with a job.
I took the jar out of my inventory and held it up in the torchlight, so everybody could get a good look. "One jar," I said. "Dungeon issue, and authentic. It came with an achievement. It's labeled, too, so you'll never mix it up with some other jar."
Hollis looked at the jar for a long time. The goblin looked at it too, and I think the goblin was impressed.
"Eleven cents," Hollis said.
"Eleven?" I said. "It's a dungeon jar, Hollis."
"Floor-one rates," Hollis said. He typed it into his notes with one finger, very slowly, so I could watch it go in. "Less eleven cents."
I'll be honest. I'd been saving that jar for something important. But a debt's important, and I'd gotten the jar for nothing. So I'd turned nothing into eleven cents, right in front of Hollis Brandt and his men. Most people walk away from Hollis with less than they had.
The men let the goblin go, and it ran off down the left fork. Hollis and his men took the right one. Phil and I went back the way we came, to be safe.
"You lost your jar," Phil said, once they'd gone.
"I invested it," I said.
Fenwick keeps a little towel next to his stamp. He uses it on the stamp, never on himself. I asked him why, and he said the stamp still has a career.
We'd come back up to a training room, and there he was at his desk, as damp as ever and a little closer to retirement. I asked him straight out how to get more viewers. I figured he'd know, since he's been here long enough to see everybody's.
Fenwick looked at me for a long time. He blinks sideways, so it's hard to tell when he's done looking.
"Crawler," he said, "do something brave. Help somebody, somebody who can't pay you back. The audience notices that. It's rare down here." Phil got out his journal and started writing.
"Notices what?" I said.
"Help," Fenwick said. "Bravery. Kindness."
"But how would they notice?" I said. "In these tunnels everybody looks the same. They need something to remember you by. That's what you're saying."
Fenwick didn't say anything to that, so I knew I had it. I took the belt off my bathrobe and tied it around my head, with the knot in front so the cameras could find it. It looked great, I'm pretty sure. There's no mirror in the training room. I asked. The robe hung open after that. That's memorable too, in its way. Phil looked at the ceiling, and Fenwick looked at his stamp.
"Is that brave?" Fenwick said.
"It's a start," I said.
"Help somebody, crawler," Fenwick said, a little slower.
"I'm helping them see me," I said.
Fenwick stamped something. I hadn't filled anything out, so I don't know what it was. As far as I can tell, he stamps whatever's in front of him, and that day it was his own hand.
Phil wrote down every word Fenwick said and underlined "help somebody" twice. Then he found a goblin's bootlace in his pack and tied my robe shut with it, so I wouldn't frighten anybody we were helping.
I let him. It was pretty brave of him, honestly, to get that close to the robe.
He's coming along.
Every big star has a thing. Carl has no pants. I've got the robe, and I had it first.
Some people think I copied him. Nobody's actually said it, but I can tell they're thinking it, so I'd like to set the record straight.
I put this robe on the night everything happened, right after my shower, at twelve eleven. I know because the clock by the bed was blinking it. Carl came out into the snow without his pants at twelve fifteen at the earliest. I know because I was behind the dumpster, and there was a bank sign across the street with the time on it. I was watching it closely, waiting for Hollis to give up.
So the robe came first, by at least four minutes. I could prove it in any court in the galaxy. I've got the clock, in my memory, and the bank sign, also in my memory, and nobody's memory was closer to the events than mine.
Phil said there was nobody down here to prove it to. So I went to the AI. You can't trademark a look in a dungeon unless you ask, so I stood in the middle of a hallway and asked, loud.
"I'd like to trademark the bathrobe," I said. "Not the robe itself. The look." Nothing happened, so I said it louder, and then a third time, toward a different wall.
A message popped up. It said, Request denied. Bathrobes already belong to everyone who's ever stolen one from a hotel. That's a lot of people, Dale, and you're one of them. Please stop yelling at the hallway.
I studied that one for a while. The AI hadn't said no to me. It had said no to the paperwork. And it had used my name, which it doesn't do for just anybody. It's never once used Phil's.
Since I couldn't trademark the robe, I named myself after it instead. "From now on," I told the hallway, "I'm the Robe Warrior."
"The Robe Warrior," Phil said. He said it the way he says the names of rashes.
"It's got a ring to it," I said.
"Dale," Phil said, "we should keep moving."
So I let him go first. A warrior needs somebody to stand behind.
My new plan was simple. Find Carl, stay one tunnel behind him, and do whatever he does, a little later. That's how the second man on the moon did it, and everybody knows his name.
Phil said it was a bad idea. He said it from one tunnel behind me, which is the right distance for that kind of talk. Carl's easy to follow. You just walk toward the yelling, and some of the yelling is the cat.
The first room I got to, Carl had already kicked a big goblin to death and gone. The loot was gone too, because he'd taken it. All that was left were the big goblin's brothers, who hadn't gotten there yet. They got there right when I did, and they were upset, and I was the only one in the room to be upset at.
The second room had a lever. From the doorway I'd watched Carl pull it, and a door slid open, and he went through. So I pulled it too. A different door opened, and it had rats in it.
The third room had a nest. The cat had lit it up from Carl's shoulder on the way past, and they'd moved on. I got there in time to meet whatever had built the nest, coming home from work.
By dinner I'd been bitten, pinched, sat on, and, by something with a lot of legs, hugged. The dungeon heals you, so all of it went away overnight, except the hug. I still think about the hug.
Then, in a long hallway, they stopped. The cat turned around on Carl's shoulder and looked straight back at me. I froze and stood very still, the way you would for a deer.
"Carl," Princess Donut said, "the room service man is following us again."
Carl sighed. He didn't even turn around. "Just let him be, Donut," he said. "He's not hurting anybody."
"He's hurting me," Donut said. "Look at that robe. It looks like it was in a hotel's lost and found, and somebody lost it again on purpose." Then they turned the corner, and that was that.
I said it back to myself the whole rest of the day, so I'd get it exactly right for the memoir. Lost again, on purpose. Out of everything in this whole dungeon, the most famous cat on floor one picked my robe to talk about.
"Dale, she insulted you," Phil said that night.
"She described me," I said. "That's what critics do."
"She called you the room service man," Phil said.
"She remembered me," I said. "Most people don't."
Phil said he remembers me. I told him that's different, because he has to.
Lost again on purpose. She gets me.
There's a leaderboard now, and I'm the foundation of it.
It shows the top crawlers, with their names and their numbers, and it moves while you watch. Carl and Donut were up near the top and climbing. Every time I looked, they'd gone up another spot. I don't mind. I taught him most of it. Not the kicking, but the being outside in winter without enough clothes.
I looked for myself. I scrolled down, and then I scrolled down some more, and then I went back to the top in case I'd gone past myself on the way.
"Phil, I'm not on it," I said.
"It's only the top hundred, Dale," Phil said.
"Then where am I?" I said.
"Further down," Phil said, gently.
Then the AI came on to tell everybody how many crawlers were left. Phil sneezed right through the front of the number. All I caught was the end of it, which was fourteen. Fourteen crawlers left, and I'm one of them. That's the top fourteen, which beats the top hundred any day. So the board was wrong, and I told it so.
"It was a lot more than fourteen," Phil said. "It was hundreds of thousands."
"Then I'm at the bottom," I said.
Phil said the board doesn't have a bottom, it just stops. I told him the bottom's the most important part of anything. It's the foundation. It holds everything else up. Without the bottom, Carl would just be falling.
Phil didn't have an answer to that. So I checked my viewers, and it said nine. That's down from forty-one. Phil said not to take it personally, and I don't. The ones who left were tourists. They came for the bucket, and they left when things got hard.
These nine stuck it out. They stayed through the trap room, and the toes, and the hug. Nine people who'd follow me anywhere, or at least haven't followed anybody else yet.
"The real fans," I said, and I waved at the wall.
Phil waved too, to be nice. That made ten.
My best ideas come to me while I'm running from something. That way you know they've been tested under pressure.
We were running from four goblins down a tunnel when I saw a room off to one side. The floor was little square tiles, and one of them was a different color. In the dungeon that means a trap. Phil read that in the rules, out loud, while I stood right there, so I basically knew it too.
"In here," I said. "We step around the funny tile, the goblins chase us onto it, and the trap does all the work. Then we split the loot."
"With the trap?" Phil said.
"With each other," I said. "The trap doesn't need money, Phil. It's a hole."
I was already calling it the Tummins Method. Someday there'd be a book about me, and the method would be in there, near the back.
We ran in. I stepped around the funny tile very carefully and onto the tile next to it, which was the trap. The funny tile was just a funny tile. Somebody had spilled soup on it.
The floor opened, and I went down to my armpits and stuck there. Everything below that was in some kind of warm, wet tube, and something in the tube was very interested in my foot.
The goblins came in and looked at me sticking out of the floor. I waved. It's nice to have visitors when you can't get up. Then the biggest one hit me on the head with a club.
Luckily I had the ice bucket on as a helmet. Unluckily I'd put it on with the handle under my chin, so the club rang it like a dinner bell, and I couldn't hear out of my left ear for a day and a half.
Phil killed two of the goblins with the fire poker. The other two looked at each other and left. I think they went home to try the method themselves.
Then Phil got a rope out of his inventory. I'd laughed at him for buying it. He tied it around me and pulled until I came out of the floor with a loud wet pop.
My slipper stayed down there, so I had to go back in up to my elbow to get it. Whatever lived in the tube had been chewing on it. Now it's more of a sandal.
"That went great," I said. "Now we know exactly where the trap is."
"We knew where it was before," Phil said.
"We thought we knew," I said. "Now we know. That's science, Phil. You of all people."
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
I told him that's the trouble with remembering. You only get the parts you were there for, and I was there for all of it, from the armpits down.
Before we left, I scratched a big arrow on the wall so nobody else would fall in. It pointed at the soup.
Phil hit level ten in the middle of a sneeze.
The whole tunnel lit up gold, and a deep voice said his name, and trumpets played from somewhere up in the rock. Then a big silver box came down with a ribbon on it and landed at his feet. When I hit level six, I got a small ding, like a toaster.
Then a message popped up for me, too. It said, New achievement! Nearby. Someone close to you did something impressive. It wasn't you. Reward: one Bronze Adventurer Box, for standing there.
I read it out loud, slowly, so Phil could enjoy it with me. "It's a team achievement," I said.
"It says it wasn't you," Phil said.
"It says I was nearby," I said. "That's all a coach is, Phil. He's the guy who's nearby."
And I'd coached him all the way to level ten, mostly from behind. You can't get far in life without somebody behind you, and in the dungeon that was me, usually by about twenty feet.
"Since it's a team achievement," I said, "we should open your box together. As a team."
"It's my box," Phil said.
"That's exactly what somebody on a team would say about a team box," I said. Then I looked down at my slipper and didn't say anything for a while, which is something I learned from Phil.
"Okay, Dale," Phil said, because he's Phil. His box had three healing potions, a pair of good leather gloves, and a little bag of gold. He gave me the gold. I asked about the gloves, and after a while he gave me one glove. My box had a single raisin in it. I ate it right there, in front of him.
It's important to celebrate together.
The safe room had three showers, and one of them worked. The other two had little signs on them from the AI that said, Decorative.
I'd been waiting for the working one for forty minutes. I stood outside the stall in my bathrobe, holding the ice bucket, which I'd filled with all the soap from the decorative showers. Nobody was going to use it on decorations.
The water shut off, and a man came out in a cloud of steam, and I stepped forward. Then a voice behind me said, "I'm next."
It was Renata Ocampo. She was sitting on a bench with her fire axe across her knees and a towel over her shoulder. "I've been waiting forty minutes," I said.
"I've been waiting an hour," Renata said. "I was here when you came in. You stood in front of me."
I hadn't seen her. When I'm thinking about a shower, I don't see anything else, which is called focus.
"Then you go first," I said, because I'm a gentleman. "Right after me. I'll be quick, and I'll leave you the warm water, if there's any left."
"No," Renata said.
"I haven't asked you anything," I said.
"I know where it's going," she said. "No."
That's the third time Renata's said no to me, if you count the time she said it twice. But this time she said it before I'd even asked. When a woman's answering your question before you ask it, that means she's been thinking about the question. I don't have a lot of education, but I know that.
I took my shower. I took my time, too, so she'd have a chance to miss me. When I came out, she wasn't missing me at all. She was across the room with Phil, talking about first aid.
They talked for twenty minutes. Splints, bandages, and the right way to stop a nosebleed if the nose is a goblin's. Phil had his journal out, and Renata was wrapping a strip of cloth around his arm and showing him how tight.
"Dale, come look," Phil said. "It's a pressure dressing."
"No thanks," I said. "I've seen one." I hadn't. But you can't let them know they're getting to you.
I sat on the bench and watched. I knew exactly what she was doing. She was trying to make me jealous. It's an old trick, and I'm not proud of how well it worked.
Then Renata took her shower. She was in there a very long time. When she came out, she smelled like eleven different soaps. I'd left the bucket in there, and she'd used every bar.
I'm counting it as a gift exchange.
The tunnel ended in a wall. Most tunnels in the dungeon don't do that, so I took it personally.
Phil had gone ahead to scout the other way. I turned around, and Hollis Brandt was standing in the only way out. He had his spear and his clipboard and his two quiet guys from the expo, and one of the quiet guys was eating an apple.
"Dale," Hollis said. "I'm level nine now, in case you were wondering." I hadn't been.
So I did the only smart thing. I fell down dead, right into a pile of goblin loot in the corner, old vests and broken knives and one boot. I shut my eyes. I let my tongue hang out a little, for realism. I'd seen a lot of things die on this floor, and I'd been taking notes.
"Dale," Hollis said again.
I didn't answer. Dead men don't answer. That's the main thing about them.
"That's fine," Hollis said. "I've got all day, Dale. I brought lunch."
Then I heard him sit down on a rock. I heard paper, and then I heard what was definitely a sandwich being unwrapped, and then chewing. It was a long sandwich. It went on for about ten minutes, and I'm almost positive it had pickles.
My nose itched the whole time. There was a goblin vest on my face, and it smelled like the goblin was still in it. Something was crawling slowly up my leg. I didn't move. I'm a professional.
"Good sandwich," Hollis said, to one of the quiet guys. "You want the crust?" The quiet guy didn't want the crust. Neither did I, but nobody asked me, because I was dead.
Finally Hollis stood up. I heard the clipboard and a pen, and then I felt something light land on my chest. Footsteps went away down the tunnel, getting quieter.
I waited a long time to be safe. Then I waited a little longer, because Phil says I always get up too early, and he's usually behind a rock when he says it.
It was a note. It said, "Four thousand dollars and four cents. Half a coconut. Less eleven cents. See you soon, Dale." He'd underlined the word soon, twice.
I read it three times. He could've woken me up. He could've poked me with the spear. Instead he ate his lunch quietly and let me rest. You don't do that for a man you don't respect.
The thing crawling up my leg was a beetle. It had made it all the way to my knee.
I let it stay. It had worked hard.
The doors were twice as tall as a door needs to be, with skulls carved around the frame. I took that as a welcome. Nobody carves skulls for a place they don't care about.
Inside, the bones on the floor had been swept into tidy piles. At the far end, something huge was asleep. It was about the size of a garbage truck.
A message popped up. It said this was a boss room, and good luck. I told Phil we'd gotten there first, so it was ours. That's how parking works.
"Dale," Phil whispered, "I'm level ten. You're level six." He was already backing toward a stack of crates.
The thing opened one eye, yellow and the size of a hubcap, and looked right at my robe. I decided we could let somebody else have the spot.
There was a big wooden cabinet against the wall, so I got in it and pulled the door shut. It smelled like old soup. Phil hid behind the crates, and I couldn't see him at all. That's how well I'd trained him.
The cabinet had a keyhole down low. If I lay on my side with my cheek flat on the bottom, I could see out of it, at exactly one square foot of floor. It was one tile, with a crack in it.
Then the main doors banged open, and a tired man's voice said, "Oh, jeez." A second voice, very pleased with itself, said something about making an entrance. I knew it was Carl and Donut. I'd know them anywhere, especially from inside a cabinet.
Here's the whole fight, as I saw it.
First, a foot. It stepped onto my tile and stopped. Above the foot was a bare, hairy leg with no pants on it, and that's how I knew it was Carl. Most people are recognized by their face. With Carl it's the knees.
Then the foot left very fast, and something roared so loud the cabinet hummed. Something heavy hit the wall next to me, and plaster came down on my tile.
I did the commentary for my viewers, in a whisper. "The foot is gone," I said. "But it'll be back. That's the kind of foot it is."
"Dale," Phil whispered from the crates, "who are you talking to?"
"I'm working, Phil," I said.
Then a tail went across my tile, big and fluffy, taking its time. Then the tile went bright, then dark, then bright again, about nine times. Every time it went bright, I heard Donut say something, and it sounded like she was thanking her fans.
Then the foot came back. It kicked something just off my tile, very hard, over and over. Phil says I counted out loud. I don't remember that, but I remember the numbers.
"Fifteen," I whispered. "Sixteen. The foot isn't tired. The foot has never been tired."
Then something enormous fell over, and the whole floor jumped. The cabinet rocked, tipped, and fell flat on its face, with me inside it, on my face.
Now the keyhole showed me the floor up close. It was the same view, just darker.
I'd hit my head, bent a thumb backward, and gotten soup smell all through the robe. Then I heard a box land, and Donut said, "Finally," and Carl let out a long sigh. I pushed out the back of the cabinet and crawled into the light.
It was over. The boss was a big heap in the middle of the room. Carl was sitting on the steps with his elbows on his knees, and Donut was on his shoulder, cleaning a paw.
It was the greatest fight I've ever seen. All twelve inches of it.
The boss had turned into a pile, and the pile was mostly loot. That's the best kind of pile.
The AI made a big announcement for Carl and Donut, with trumpets and colored lights, and a gold box the size of a refrigerator came down from the ceiling. It said Boss Box on the side. Donut said it was smaller than she'd been promised.
Then a message popped up for me. It said, You have received one Bronze Box. You were present. Present is a strong word, but we're using it.
I knew right away this was my share. They don't give you a box for being in the room unless the room needed you.
It was a small box. I opened it, and inside was half a coconut. It was half of a real one, cut clean across, with the white part still in it. I held it up to the torchlight, and I'll admit my eyes got wet.
They'd watched Exile Isle. Somewhere out there, some alien sat on his couch last spring and watched all of Season Thirty-One. He saw me, and he saw the coconut. Everybody remembers the coconut. He'd been saving it.
"Phil," I said, "they know me out there. They know about the coconut."
"It might just be what was in the box," Phil said.
"Phil," I said, "nothing's ever just what was in the box."
I put the coconut in my inventory. It was the first thing in there I'd ever been proud of, not counting the jar, which I'd given to Hollis. Then I walked over to Carl.
He was still sitting on the steps, looking at the floor. Donut was going through her messages and reading the good ones out loud to him, and he was nodding at them without listening.
"Carl," I said. "I just want you to know. I softened it up for you."
Carl looked at me. Then he looked over at the cabinet, lying on its face. Then he looked at my robe, for a long time, the way you look at something you're trying to remember the word for.
"Sure, Bathrobe," Carl said.
"Carl," Donut said, "the room service man is back. Ask him about the towels."
I barely heard her. I was too busy hearing Carl. He'd called me something. Not Dale, but Dale's just my name. Bathrobe is what I am.
I walked back to Phil very slowly, so it would last. "Are you all right?" Phil said. I told him I'd never been better, and for once he could tell it was true.
It was the happiest moment of my life. I've had a lot of them, but this one had a coconut.
For one whole day, my name was Bathrobe.
I told Phil first, while he was packing up the healing potions. "From now on you can call me Bathrobe," I said. "Carl does."
"Carl said it once," Phil said.
"That's how it starts," I said. "Somebody famous says it once, and then everybody's saying it, and then it's on a shirt."
"I'm going to keep calling you Dale," Phil said.
"I understand," I said. I'd heard him say it so many times that I wanted to see how it felt. It felt pretty good, actually. I can see why he does it so much.
Then I tried to change my display name in the menu. It said the name was locked, the same as before. I tried Bathrobe, and Mister Bathrobe, and just Robe. I tried it in the middle of a sneeze, to sneak it by. It was still locked.
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Nicknamed. Somebody famous gave you a name. It was the name of your clothes. Reward: none.
I was moved. The AI had put it in writing that somebody famous named me, and when it's in writing, that's legally binding, probably.
At the next safe room I told the shopkeeper, a little gray creature behind a counter. I bought a candle from him and said, "Thanks, Bathrobe," to myself, out loud, so he'd hear how it sounded. He gave me my change and went in the back for a while. I told two crawlers we passed in a tunnel. "Hi, I'm Bathrobe," I said. They said, "Okay," and then they walked a lot faster, probably to tell people.
I even tried it on the loot. I hit a rat with the ice bucket until it turned into a little pile, and the menu asked if I wanted to pick it up. "Bathrobe accepts," I said. The menu picked it up for Dale Tummins anyway.
Nobody called me Bathrobe that day. Not Phil, not the shopkeeper, and not the menu, which had every chance. Carl didn't either, but Carl wasn't there. I'm sure he was saying it somewhere.
That night, Phil said, "Goodnight, Dale." I let him.
There's a timer in the corner of the menu. I'd been ignoring it, the way you ignore a smoke alarm in somebody else's apartment.
Phil hadn't been ignoring it. He'd mapped the whole route to the stairs in his journal, with arrows and little drawings of every room. One of the drawings was me, next to a trap, holding the ice bucket, with an arrow pointing at me that said, No.
"We have about a day," Phil said. "We should go now."
I didn't want to go. Floor one was where I'd made my name, and both of my names, if you count Bathrobe. You don't walk out on your audience because a clock tells you to.
"We should stay and build the brand," I said. "Fight some goblins. Wave a lot."
That's when I came up with my new nickname, the People's Crawler. A crawler of the people. Right down here with the people, using their showers, eating their snacks, the way the people would want.
So Phil read me the rule about the timer, out of his journal. He reads me rules a lot. I think it calms him down. When the timer runs out, the floor collapses, and anybody still on it is gone. That's all the rule says. It doesn't say where.
"Is there a grace period?" I said.
"No," Phil said.
"What if you're in line for the shower?"
"Gone," Phil said. He didn't even need the journal for that one.
"What if you're almost at the stairs? Like, you can see them?"
"Still gone," Phil said. He said it a little louder, so I'd stop.
"What if you're really popular?"
Phil looked at the journal for a long time, turning a page back and forth. "It doesn't say anything about popular," he said.
I thought about the People's Crawler. A man of the people goes where the people go, and the people were all heading for the stairs as fast as they could, carrying everything they owned.
"Phil," I said, "I think the people want me on floor two."
"Great," Phil said. He was already walking, so I followed him. Not because of the timer. Because of the people.
Also, I didn't want to be gone.
The stairwell down to floor two had a door on it. It was heavy and gray, with a bar across the middle, like the door to a high school gym.
Phil said we should go right through. I said a door like that needs somebody to hold it, or what's it for?
So I held it. I stood with my back against it and my slipper on the bottom so it wouldn't swing shut. A man came through with a sack, and a woman came through with a lamp, and neither of them said thanks. That was fine. I wasn't holding it for them.
Then I heard a voice down the hall, high and sure of itself. "Carl, if this staircase doesn't have a railing, I'm writing a letter."
It was them. Carl was walking toward me with his jacket on and no pants, the way he does, and Donut was riding on his shoulder. Carl looked tired. He always looks tired. I think it's from carrying so much of the show.
I stood up very straight and held the door wider. I held it so wide I had to lean. Carl came through and looked at me for about half a second. "Thanks," Carl said.
Donut didn't say anything. She didn't even look at me. She kept her chin up and her eyes on the stairs. With royalty, that's the best you can hope for. When they talk to you, it's usually about a stain.
Then they went down the stairs, and I watched them until they went around the first turn.
"Come on, Dale," Phil said. He was tying his shoe.
I kept holding the door a while longer, in case they came back for something. A crawler with a frying pan came through and said, "Thanks." I said, "Not for you."
About fifteen minutes later, Phil and I went down too. That's how Carl and I went down to floor two together. Him first and me after, fifteen minutes behind, which on a staircase is basically holding hands.
"Carl and I went down together," I told Phil, on the second landing.
Phil didn't say anything. He was watching his feet, because Donut was right. There wasn't a railing.
We took the stairs.
The stairs down were long. There were a lot of them, and every single one went down, which I felt was a missed opportunity.
Halfway down, I checked my viewers. I check them about every ten minutes, the way you'd check on a pie, and I stopped right there on the step.
It said one. Phil walked into the back of me, and I didn't even notice, because I was looking at that number. One viewer. I tapped on it, and the menu gave me a name. Zibb.
I didn't know who Zibb was. But I knew this much. Out of all those millions of people watching the dungeon, out there in space, Zibb had picked me. Not Carl, and not the cat. Me, in the robe, on the stairs, with one slipper. That's not a viewer. That's a superfan.
"Zibb," I said, out loud, to the wall. "If you can hear me, buddy, thank you. You're the real thing. Everybody else left, but you stayed."
"It might be a glitch," Phil said.
"Phil," I said, "don't talk like that in front of Zibb."
Then a message came in. It said, From Zibb. Please don't get any better. It would ruin everything.
I read it out loud twice, so Phil could hear it, and so Zibb could hear me reading it. "He likes me just the way I am," I said.
Phil opened his mouth to say something, and then he closed it again. That's how I knew he was moved, too.
I waved at the wall where I figured the camera was. Then I waved at the other wall, in case it wasn't, and then at the ceiling, because you never know with space. Then we kept going down, and I walked a little taller the whole way.
Zibb would've wanted that.
Floor two is a lot like floor one, except everything on it wants you dead a little more. Here's what you need to know, if you ever go.
It's bigger. The tunnels are wider and the rooms are taller, and some of the rooms have other rooms inside them. Phil says that's normal. I say if a room needs a room, it should get its own.
The monsters are meaner. On floor one, a goblin would stab you. On floor two, a goblin stabs you, and then he looks down at your shoes to see if they'll fit.
There are more traps. Some are on the floor, and some are on the walls. One was on a door handle, and I won't be talking about that.
You can craft now. If you put two things together in your menu, sometimes you get a third thing. Phil was very excited about this, and I had to explain to him that's just a sandwich.
"It's not a sandwich, Dale," Phil said.
"Not if you do it wrong," I said.
The safe rooms are nicer. One had a little fountain in the corner, and I drank out of it. Phil said it was a birdbath. I haven't seen any birds, so I think I'm fine.
The light's worse. Everything's a little brown. Phil says it's the torches, but I think somebody picked it out on purpose. Brown hides stains, and you don't pick brown for a place unless you're expecting a lot of company.
On our first morning, a little box fell out of the air and bonked me on the head. It had a tag on it that said, From Zibb. My first gift from a fan.
I opened it right there in the tunnel. Inside was a single paper napkin, folded once. It had been used, and you could tell where. There was a note tucked into it, in tiny letters. It said, For your face.
"Phil," I said, "look at this. He's thinking about my face."
"It's used," Phil said.
"That means he held it," I said. "That's the same thing as signing it."
So I wiped my face with it. I took my time, and I got the forehead and behind the ears, which nobody ever thinks about. Then I held it up to the ceiling.
"Thanks, Zibb," I said. "My face is clean now, and it's because of you."
Phil walked on ahead, a little faster than usual. I think he was jealous. Nobody's ever sent Phil a napkin.
I folded it up and put it in my robe pocket, on the side with my heart. It's still a little damp. That's how you know it's real.
Phil took to crafting right away, because it's mostly reading, and Phil will read anything.
On the first day he made bandages out of an old shirt. Then he made a better strap for his shield, out of the old strap and a goblin belt. Then he made a sling, and he hit a rat with a rock from forty feet away. The rat fell over and turned into a little pile of coins.
"It's all in the menu," Phil said. "You put things together and think hard about what you want."
I knew what I wanted. I wanted a second bathrobe. Not to wear, because I already have a bathrobe. I wanted a backup, in case something happened to this one. A brand needs a backup. Carl probably has a whole closet full of no pants.
So I collected goblin vests. Every goblin wears one, and when the goblin's gone, the vest stays behind. I had eleven of them by lunch, and they smelled like the goblins were still around somewhere.
"Dale," Phil said, from across the room, "those are wool."
"They're bathrobe," I said. "They just don't know it yet."
I put all eleven into the menu and thought hard about a bathrobe. I thought about how soft it is, and the belt, and the little hotel pocket on the front. The menu thought about it too, for quite a while. Then it made something.
It called it a Wool Problem. I took it out of my inventory to look at it. It was all eleven vests stuck together in one big ball about the size of a dog, with a single sleeve coming out of the top.
Three rooms away, Phil sneezed. Then he sneezed again, and he kept going. "Dale," he called, "did you just make something out of wool?"
"No," I said. "I made a bathrobe."
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Maker. You crafted your first item. It's a problem. The menu says so. Reward: one Bronze Adventurer Box.
I was pretty proud. Phil had made bandages all morning, and nobody gave him an achievement for that. You don't get achievements for bandages. You get them for taking risks.
I tried wearing the Wool Problem over the robe for a little while. It was warm, and it was itchy, and it made Phil's eyes swell shut from three rooms away.
"Please," Phil said, through the wall.
So I put it back in my inventory. You don't throw out your first one.
Fenwick was in the floor-two training room, at the same desk, with the same stamp. I asked him if he'd taken the stairs down like everybody else. He said they moved the desk, and he came with the desk.
He looked damper than before, and older, which I didn't think was possible. When we walked in, he didn't look up. "One day closer, crawler," Fenwick said.
"To what?" I said.
"Retirement," he said. "Tomorrow I'll have one day left. Then they take the stamp."
I congratulated him and asked if they'd give him a watch. He said they'd give him a chair. Then, after a while, they'd take the chair back.
I'd come to ask him about viewers. Mine were down to one, and I wanted to grow the base. But Fenwick started talking before I could ask. That's the thing about guides. They guide you whether you want it or not.
"Crawler," he said, "you want to know who makes it down here?"
"The people on the leaderboard," I said.
"No," Fenwick said. "The ones who help other crawlers. They're the ones who make it."
Phil wrote that down in his journal. He underlined it, and then he drew a little star next to it, which he only does for things that are on the test.
I thought about it. I wanted to be fair, because he's old and tired and all he's got is that desk. "Does it count," I said, "if nobody's watching?"
Fenwick looked at me for a long time with his old yellow eyes. I could hear the ceiling drip.
"Especially then," Fenwick said.
I nodded slowly, so he'd know I'd heard him. Then I gave him my honest opinion, as a consultant, free of charge. "Fenwick," I said, "that's a bad business model."
He didn't argue with me. He just stamped something. I don't know what he stamps. He stamps something every time I finish talking, so it might be me. Phil asked him one more question, about what's good for bee stings, and Fenwick told him, and Phil wrote that down too.
On the way out, I felt bad for him. A man works his whole life, and he gets a chair for a while.
At least I'd given him some business advice.
My ice bucket died a few days into floor two. It was eleven inches tall going in and about a quarter of an inch coming out.
It started with a tile. "Don't step on that one, Dale," Phil said. "It's a different color."
"That's how they show you which one's special," I said, and I stepped right on it.
The tile clicked. Up at the end of the hallway a little door opened, and a barrel rolled out onto a ramp and started down toward us. I don't know who keeps a barrel on a ramp, but it's somebody who's expecting company.
"Barrel, Dale," Phil said. I threw the ice bucket at it, because that's what I've always done with problems, and it's got a pretty good record if you don't count the times it came back.
The bucket bounced off the barrel and hit a goblin who'd been standing in a little alcove the whole time, waiting for us. They do that on floor two. It's a kind of customer service.
"Goblin, Dale," Phil said. The goblin was holding a lit torch, and when the bucket hit him, he dropped it on the barrel. I felt bad for him. You try to be a good host, and somebody throws a bucket at you.
The barrel turned out to be full of something that doesn't get along with torches. "Down, Dale," Phil said, and he said it with some feeling.
The barrel went up, and the goblin went up with it and came back down as a pile of loot. Then the ceiling came down, because ceilings don't get along with barrels either. It's all one big system down there.
Phil yanked me backward by my bathrobe belt. The ceiling landed right where I'd been standing, which was also right where my ice bucket was.
When the dust settled, I was fine, mostly. I'd lost both eyebrows and a little of the hair in front, and my left ear rang for an hour. The hem of my robe was on fire, so I sat in a puddle until it wasn't. The slipper was fine. The slipper's always fine, and I'm starting to resent it.
Phil dug the bucket out with his fire poker. It was flat the way a letter is flat, and if I'd had a stamp, I could've mailed it.
That bucket had been with me since the hotel. It came along to carry muffins, and it ended up killing goblins, half a rat, and once, by accident, a lamp. It was my weapon, my helmet, my drum and my pillow on the bad nights, and it never once complained about the career change. I held it a long time. Then I tried to put a little ice in it, out of respect, but it wouldn't take any.
We buried it under some rubble, and Phil asked if I wanted to say a few words. "It was a good bucket," I said. "The best one I ever had."
"It's the only one you ever had," Phil said.
"That's what made it the best," I said.
Then I went through the goblin's loot. It seemed only fair.
He brought the torch.
The goblin who killed my bucket left me a Bronze box. Goblins can't say they're sorry, so they leave you things, and I think that's sweet.
Inside was a ladle. A message popped up. It said, Bronze Ladle of Moderate Stirring. Suitable for soups, stews and light combat. Not recommended for soup that fights back.
I liked the word moderate. A moderate weapon knows its limits, which is more than you can say for a barrel.
"It's a spoon, Dale," Phil said.
"It's a ladle," I said. "A spoon's for one person. A ladle serves the whole table."
I gave it a few practice stirs in the air, and it stirred moderately. Then I hit a rat with it. The rat looked confused, and then annoyed, and then I hit it eleven more times and it fell over and became loot.
That night the AI made its announcement about how many crawlers were left. A goblin was screaming at Phil during the middle part, so I only caught the end, and it sounded like three hundred and eleven. Phil wrote down a much bigger number with a lot of zeros on it. I told him the zeros were probably the goblin.
So I did the math. Most crawlers travel in parties of four or five, so three hundred and eleven crawlers is about seventy parties. Every party has a leader, and everybody knows the leader's the only real crawler in it. That's seventy crawlers.
Then, to be fair, I took out anybody without a kitchen weapon, and then anybody who wasn't wearing a robe. That left Carl, who doesn't wear pants, which is close, and me. Technically that's top two, but I said top ten, to stay humble.
I turned to the wall where I figured the camera was. "Zibb," I said, "you picked a winner. Top ten. You got in on the ground floor."
"We're on the second floor," Phil said.
"Then he got in on the ground floor and followed me all the way down," I said. "That's loyalty."
Zibb didn't say anything. He was speechless.
The first rumor I heard on floor two was that a man with no pants was blowing things up. I said it sounded like a rumor about me, with the details wrong.
Then Phil and I came around a corner, and the whole hallway was full of smoke. It smelled like burnt hair and fireworks. Some of the burnt hair was mine, from the barrel, but most of it wasn't.
Somewhere up ahead there was a boom. It was the biggest boom I'd ever heard, and I once sat on a bag of chips in church. My robe blew wide open, and Phil looked away fast. He's a good friend that way, and he's had a lot of practice.
"Stay back," Phil said.
"Phil," I said, "that's history."
I crept forward into the smoke and got down low, where the air was better. From down there I saw a pair of legs walking away, bare from the boxer shorts down. Up at about shoulder height there was a big fluffy tail, swishing. I know that swish. I do it with my whole body when I get the last muffin.
"Carl," a voice said from up in the smoke, "did you see how high that went? The viewers saw. I could feel them seeing."
"Yeah," said the legs. "Come on, Donut."
Then they were gone. I never saw what blew up, but I saw the legs, and I saw the tail, and I smelled the hair, and I put it all together. Carl's a bomb man.
I decided right there that I'm a bomb man too. Me and Carl have a lot in common. We both dress for comfort, and we both have a cat. Well, he has one, but she's sent me for a pillow.
The only problem was I didn't know how bombs work, so I asked Phil, because Phil knows a little chemistry. "I teach biology," Phil said.
"Biology's just chemistry that's alive," I said. "That makes it angrier, and that's what we want."
"I'm not teaching you to make a bomb, Dale," Phil said.
"Not a big one," I said. "A medium one." Phil said no. I asked what if I only used it on goblins, and he said no. I asked what if I only used it on goblins that were already mostly dead, and he said no to that too.
"What if it only made a loud noise," I said, "and they died of surprise?"
Phil thought about that one for a while. "No," he said.
Then he wrote something in his journal and tilted it so I couldn't see. It was probably a recipe. Phil gets very private about recipes, and he won't even tell me what's in his chili, and I've eaten it out of his fridge six times.
That night I lay in my bunk and practiced saying boom. I've got a really good boom, and I can do it low, so it rumbles.
I just need something to put it in.
The man from Vexmore Brands was about a foot tall and made of light, which I respect in a businessman.
He appeared over the shop counter in a safe room while I was eating a sandwich. That's when I'm at my most approachable, so somebody'd done their homework.
"Dale Tummins," he said. "As I live and breathe."
"Do aliens breathe?" I said.
"As I live," he said.
He told me his name, and it had a lot of sounds in it, so I called him Ted. He let me. That's the kind of company Vexmore is.
Ted said Vexmore made a drink called Torment. "It's very popular," he said. "Everyone has it eventually." I said I'd never heard of it. "You will," Ted said, and he smiled even bigger. He had a lot of teeth for a foot-tall man.
He said Vexmore had been watching me. He said the camera loves a man in a robe, and that I had something you can't teach. "You're a natural, Dale," he said. Nobody'd ever called me a natural before. Mostly people say I'm a lot.
Then a contract scrolled up in the air in front of me, eleven pages long. Phil leaned over and started reading it, and I told him that was rude. You don't read a man's contract right in front of him. You wait until he's signed it, and then you read it to him, if he asks.
"Dale," Phil said, "page four."
"I'm not on page four, Phil," I said. "I'm on the part where you sign."
I signed in the air with my finger, and Ted said I had a beautiful signature. I'd never heard that either. Mostly people say it doesn't match.
"Welcome to the family," Ted said, and he blinked out. I asked Phil what I got. Phil read the whole contract, all eleven pages, twice, which took him forty minutes. Then he closed it and didn't say anything for a long time.
"Well?" I said. "Is it good?"
Phil looked at me, and then he looked at the back of my bathrobe for a while, like he was measuring it. Then he made us both a cup of tea. He only does that at funerals.
I've never felt so sponsored.
Hollis Brandt made himself a crossbow, and he carved what it was for on the side. It says, Four thousand dollars and half a coco. He ran out of room.
He found us in a goblin kitchen, a big room with a pot of soup in the middle. He's level twelve now. He stood in the doorway and aimed the crossbow at me, and I put up my hands. "Hollis," I said, "let's talk about this like two grown men."
He shot the ladle right out of my hand from forty feet. It spun across the room and landed in the soup, and then it sort of stirred it, moderately. I've never been prouder of a utensil.
"Run," Phil said, so we ran.
On the way, Phil drank a healing potion, because a bolt had nicked his ear and he likes to stay ahead of things. Phil reads every label, but this one had the label on the bottom, and you don't see the bottom of a bottle until it's too late. It said, Restores health. May contain traces of bee.
Phil swelled up as he ran, first one ear, then the other ear, then everything in between. Fenwick had told him exactly what to do about bees, and Phil had written it down. It was in the journal, in his pack, on his back, which is the one place you can't read.
By the next room his hands were mittens, and he was still running faster than me. Hollis caught up anyway. He doesn't run. He just keeps walking, and you keep having to stop.
"I can pay you," I said. I held out a floor-two gold coin that I'd found in a boot.
Hollis took out his clipboard. "Floor two rates," he said. "That's four cents."
"It was worth more upstairs," I said.
"You moved down a floor," Hollis said. "Everything's worth less down here."
He wrote it down: four thousand dollars and four cents, and half a coconut, minus fifteen cents. Then he walked back to the kitchen, fished my ladle out of the soup and handed it to me. He said he didn't want me having an excuse.
After he left I did the math. At four cents a coin, I'm only a hundred thousand coins away from being a free man. "Phil," I said, "how many coins have you got?"
Phil looked at me with his big round face. "I understand," he said.
That's Phil for yes.
I've figured out floors. Each one is just the one before it, but downstairs.
I explained it to Renata's party. They'd stopped in a side room to eat, and I sat down with them, because a discovery like that shouldn't have to wait for dessert.
"Floor one was up there," I said, and I pointed at the ceiling. "Floor two's down here. You see where I'm going?"
"Floor three," one of the medics said.
"Down," I said. "Nobody's ever said that out loud before."
"It's on the stairs," Renata said. "There are signs." I told her signs are for people who need signs.
I kept going. I explained that every floor has a floor, and the floor of this floor is the ceiling of the next one. The tall medic put down his food, because he'd lost his appetite. That's what a big idea does to some people.
Then I said that, if you really think about it, we're not going down at all. Everything else is going up. Renata said nothing was going up. "Then why do my ears keep popping?" I said. Nobody had an answer for that.
A man who figures out something like that needs a name to go with it, so I told them they could call me Dale, Breaker of Floors. "You haven't broken any floors," the tall medic said.
"Breaker, like breakthrough," I said. "I broke through the whole idea of floors."
"You fell into two trap rooms," Phil said. I told him that's called research.
Then Renata reached into her pack and held out a sandwich. She didn't say a word. She just held it out and looked at me until I took it.
I knew what that meant. A woman doesn't hand you a sandwich in front of her whole party unless she wants them all to see it. We ate together, sort of. She watched me eat, which is even more personal, and nobody said anything for the rest of the meal. That's how you know it's going well.
That was our first date. She paid.
Renata asked Phil to join her party. She asked him right in front of me, which I thought showed real courage.
"We could use somebody who reads the rules," she said. "And the map. And knows what a rash is."
"I know what a rash is," I said.
"You have one," Renata said.
Phil looked at me, and then at Renata and her two medics, and then at the floor, which is what he does when he's torn. He's torn a lot around me. I knew what I had to do, so I stood up and gave a speech.
"Phil," I said, "go. Go with them. Don't think about me. Don't think about how I always know where the snacks are, or how I make every room a party, even rooms that already have one. Don't think about the time I carried you out of that bog."
"You didn't carry me out of a bog," Phil said.
"Then don't think about it," I said. "That should be easy."
I told him he'd be fine without me for a while. Then one night he'd hear a sandwich being unwrapped in the dark, and he'd think of me, and he'd turn to say something. I wouldn't be there, and he'd have to say it to a medic.
I sat down. One of the medics was crying a little. I think it was the sandwich part. The other medic quietly put his sandwich away, out of respect.
Phil took a long breath. "I'm staying with Dale," he said.
"That's very selfless of you," I said. "I'll allow it."
Renata looked at the ceiling for a while. Then she said Dale could come too. "If he holds the light," she said.
So now we're a party. There's Renata, who has the axe and does the fighting, and her two medics, who do the healing. There's Phil, who does the map, the rules, the crafting and most of the rest of the fighting. And there's me, holding the torch.
Holding the light's the most important job in a party. Everybody has to look where you point it, and everybody has to follow you, or they'll walk into a wall. If you think about it, that's a captain.
I pointed the torch at myself, mostly, so the viewers could see the captain. "Dale," Renata said, "the floor."
I pointed it at the floor for a while. I'm a generous captain.
My sponsorship came in a crate the size of a door, so right away I knew I'd been undercharging.
It was a sign. It said Torment, in letters as tall as a goblin, and it glowed a bright fizzy green. There were four bolts in the crate, and I asked Phil where they went. Before he could answer, the sign climbed up my back by itself and bolted itself to my bathrobe.
It's very professional. I didn't have to lift a finger, and I couldn't have, really, because it happened pretty fast.
Then it played the jingle. It goes, "Torment. Now with more." There's a little tune with it, sort of a bugle, and then the sound of a can opening, a really big can.
"More what?" one of the medics said.
"It doesn't say," I said. "That's confidence."
The jingle plays every ninety seconds. Phil knows because he timed it while he was trying to sleep. I told him a jingle has to repeat, or it's just a song, and nobody pays you for a song.
A message popped up. It said, New achievement! Sold Out. A beverage company purchased you for one case of its product, dented. You're now worth slightly less than the case.
"One case," I said. "That's twenty-four drinks. Nobody's ever valued me at twenty-four of anything."
"It says you're worth less than the case," Phil said.
"Slightly," I said. "We're talking about a can."
Renata turned her back to me. I think the sign was a lot to take in all at once. Every time the jingle played, she closed her eyes for a while. You don't do that unless you're savoring something.
The medics asked if they could sleep in the next room. I said sure, but they'd still see the glow under the door, because it's a quality sign.
I tried to take off the robe so I could see the sign from the front, but it wouldn't come off, and the belt wouldn't even untie. Most sponsors would let you walk away. Vexmore won't hear of it. That's loyalty.
I hummed along with the jingle all night. Somebody has to.
Zibb sent me a trophy. It's two inches tall and gold-colored, and it says Most Robe.
There was a note with it. It said, You earned it. Nobody else even wanted it. I had to sit down. Nobody else even came close.
You don't win Most Robe and just stick it in your inventory. You give a speech. I found a nice long corridor with a good echo, and I stood in the middle and held the trophy up.
"I want to thank Zibb," I said. "I want to thank my mother, who taught me to wear a robe. I want to thank the hotel, who gave me this robe, in a way."
A goblin came around the corner, and then three more. They stopped and listened, and one of them took off his little hat.
"I want to thank Phil," I said, "for everything he's done that I've also done." The goblins nodded. Somebody behind them was sharpening something, very quietly, so as not to interrupt.
"I want to thank my slipper," I said, "and my other slipper, wherever it ended up. And my sponsor, Torment, now with more." Right then the sign played the jingle. The goblins all looked at each other. I think they were moved.
"Finally," I said, "I want to thank the fans. The fan. You know who."
I bowed. The goblins waited until I came back up, and then they attacked.
I'll admit I went long. I lost a sleeve and some skin off one elbow, and a goblin bit the trophy before Phil and Renata got there and the goblins turned into loot.
"Who were you talking to?" Phil said.
"Everybody," I said. "You were in it."
The trophy's fine. It's got a little dent in it now, from the tooth. That makes it more personal.
I've been planning my revenge on Hollis Brandt for a while. It has five steps, which is how you know it's a plan and not just a feeling.
Step one, I'd lure Hollis into a trap room. I know how to find trap rooms, because I've been in most of them.
Step two, I'd lock him in with the slowest mob on the floor. There's a big gray slug down here that moves about a foot an hour. It can't really hurt you. It just gets on you, and then you're a man with a slug on him.
It'd take that slug two days to cross the room, and Hollis would have to watch it coming the whole time. Every hour he'd look up, and it'd be a little closer, and he'd think about what he'd done. Mainly, lending me the jet ski.
Step three, while Hollis was busy with the slug, I'd go through his pack.
Step four, I'd find his soap. Hollis has good soap. I could smell it on him in the hotel lobby in Seattle, all the way across the room, while I was running away. It's eucalyptus, and he keeps it in a little wooden dish.
Step five, I'd use it. Just on my hands at first, and then, if I felt like it, my whole face.
I told Phil the plan, and he said it had a lot of steps. "Five," I said. "One per finger. That way I can count it out while I'm doing it."
Step one didn't work, because Hollis won't go in a trap room. He reads the walls first, like Phil. Step two didn't work, because the slug wouldn't follow me. I waved a mushroom at it for an hour, and it moved four inches toward the mushroom and fell asleep. Step three didn't work, because the pack was on Hollis.
So I skipped to step four. That night we got to a safe room, and I went to take a shower. There are two stalls in that bathroom, with a little shelf between them, and on the shelf was a little wooden dish. Eucalyptus.
In the next stall, somebody was humming. It was Hollis.
I used his soap. I used it on my hands, then my face, and then, since I was in there anyway, the rest of me.
"Dale," Hollis said, over the wall. "Rinse the dish when you're done."
"Sure," I said. I didn't.
When I came out, I told Phil it went perfectly. "That's not how I remember it," Phil said. He'd been sitting right outside the stalls the whole time, waiting for one.
I didn't argue. I smelled too good to argue.
Revenge has a smell. It's eucalyptus.
I was in the bathroom when Carl did the big thing. I missed it by one door.
When I came out, the whole safe room was crowded around the little screen on the wall, and the replay had just ended. "What happened?" I said.
A man with a beard turned around. Half his beard was singed, and he said it was from standing too close to the screen. "He blew up a building," the man said.
"There aren't any buildings down here," I said.
"There was one," the man said. "Then there wasn't."
A woman next to him shook her head. "It wasn't him," she said. "It was the cat. Fire came out of the cat." I asked her out of which part. "All of it," she said.
An older guy in a raincoat said they were both wrong. He said it was a boat, and a lot of fire, and Carl standing on the very top with no pants on, waving. "There's no water down here," the man with the beard said.
"There was," the older guy said. "Then there wasn't."
They kept arguing, so I asked the shopkeeper to play it again. He said it doesn't work that way. So I put all three of them together in my head, and I got it.
Carl built a building on a boat. Then the cat set the whole thing on fire, with all of her, and Carl stood on top and waved. And he did it in a bathrobe.
"He wasn't in a bathrobe," the woman said.
"Not on the outside," I said. "But you could tell."
Later, Phil asked me what I'd say when people asked where I was when Carl did the big thing. "I'll say I was there," I said.
"You were in the bathroom, Dale," Phil said.
"Then I'll say I was nearby," I said. Phil said that was fair.
It's a small safe room.
It turns out monsters can count to ninety.
We were halfway down a long corridor when the sign played the jingle. "Torment. Now with more." Then came the bugle, and the big can. A rat came around the far corner and looked at me, and I waved. I figured he was thirsty.
Ninety seconds later it played again, and there were four rats. Ninety seconds after that, it was rats and goblins, and then beetles, and then something with a lot of legs that walked on the ceiling. Then something came that was mostly mouth. It didn't attack. It just came over and listened.
"Dale," Renata said. "Turn it off."
"It doesn't turn off," I said. "It's a sponsorship."
"Then take off the robe," Phil said. I tried, but the belt wouldn't untie. A message popped up. It said, Removing sponsored apparel is a breach of contract. Please continue to enjoy Torment.
"I'm enjoying it," I told the message. "That was never the problem."
Then they came from both ends at once. Renata took the front end with her fire axe, and Phil took the back end with his fire poker and his shield. The medics stood in the middle passing out potions and yelling "Duck" at different times, which was confusing. I stood in the middle too, glowing.
I had an idea. If you can't turn off a light, you put something over it. So I grabbed the nearest goblin and backed up against him until the sign was behind him. He let me, which is the friendliest a goblin's ever been to me.
The light came out all around his edges, and he glowed. Every monster in the corridor stopped fighting to look at the glowing goblin. Then the jingle played, and it came out of his middle.
The goblin screamed and ran off into the crowd, still glowing a little, and the whole crowd piled on him. I think they thought he was the drink. "Dale," Phil said, "stop helping."
So I just held up the torch and stood there. Holding the light was my one job, and for once I was doing it without even trying. I was doing it from both sides.
It went on a long time. Renata's axe went up and down, and Phil's poker went in and out. Every ninety seconds I'd say "Torment, now with more" a little before the sign did, so the monsters would know it was coming. Phil asked me to stop that too.
I got bitten twice, once by a rat and once by something I never saw. A beetle walked off with the hem of my robe, and the sign didn't even flicker. The mouth thing stayed at the back the whole time, listening. I think it was a critic.
When it was over, the corridor was loot from one end to the other. Renata sat down on a pile of it, and Phil's shield had a dent in it the shape of a mouth. The medics were out of potions and most of their patience. "Never again," Renata said.
I checked my viewers. It was still one, but that one had seen everything. That's a hundred percent of my audience on the edge of their seat.
"Everybody," I said, "that was a hit." Renata threw a goblin boot at me.
Fans do that.
For four minutes on floor two I had no viewers at all. I was in the bathroom.
I found out afterward. There's a little chart of your viewers in the menu, and mine had a dip in it. It went from one down to zero, stayed flat for four minutes, and came back up to one.
"The cameras don't go in the bathroom," Phil said. "It's in the rules, on page two." I'd never read page two. I'd been doing some of my best material in there.
So for four minutes nobody in the whole universe was watching me. Not the aliens, not the AI, not Zibb. It was just me and the sink.
Then I came out, and Zibb came back. He'd waited, and he didn't have to. There are three hundred and eleven crawlers he could be watching instead, and some of them blow things up.
I cried a little, and Phil handed me a bandage, because it's what he had.
Then a message came in from Zibb. It said, Best four minutes yet.
I read it out loud to the sink. He understood. A man needs his privacy, and Zibb gave me mine. He went away so I could be alone, and then he came back so I wouldn't be. That's not a fan. That's a friend.
"Are you crying again?" Phil said.
"It's the sign," I said. It's on my back, but it's very bright.
Floor two has a lake in it, underground, in the dark, and nobody mentions it. I figured it was a perk for the crawlers who'd made it this far, like the pool at a nice motel.
Phil's map said the lake was the only thing between us and the far side of the floor. It was black and flat and very still, and there was a little sign on a post at the edge that said, Please don't feed the lake.
"What does a lake eat?" I said.
"Let's not find out," Renata said.
Phil paced the shore, chewing his pencil. Everybody was being very careful, which is fine if you've got all day, but the timer said we didn't.
"I'll wade it," I said.
"Dale," Phil said, "we don't know how deep it is."
"I do," I said. "I've got more lake experience than anybody down here." That's true. I've been on Lake Wendle with a jet ski, and I've been under Lake Wendle with the same jet ski, so I've seen a lake from both sides.
I tightened the bathrobe belt and stepped in. The water was cold, and my slipper filled up right away, which made it heavier, which I decided was good for traction. Three steps out the water was at my knees, and six steps out it was at my belt. I turned around and waved at everybody, so they'd know I had it handled.
"Lakes are deeper than they look," I told them, and I said it proudly. Most people learn that once in their lives. I've learned it twice now, and both times I said it out loud first.
Then the bottom wasn't there anymore.
Under the water everything was black except me. The Torment sign on my back lit up a big green circle of lake bottom, with some rocks, an old boot and a few little white fish, who swam over to read it. Then the jingle went off, underwater. Torment. Now with more. The fish left. Phil saw the glow from shore. Renata hooked my belt with her axe, everybody grabbed everybody, and they pulled until I came up out of the lake, singing, more or less.
I'd swallowed a lot of lake, I'd left some skin on a rock, and both of my ears were full. But the slipper stayed on the whole time. It knew what was at stake.
"That sign just saved your life," Renata said, wringing out my sleeve.
"It's a sponsorship," I said. "It's in the contract." I've never read the contract, but I said it with confidence.
Then I looked across the water. On the far shore, under a little lantern, Hollis Brandt was sitting on a rock. He was completely dry, and he was eating a sandwich.
"How'd he get over there?" I said.
Phil pointed down the shore. About fifty feet away there was a bridge, with railings, and a sign on it that said Bridge.
"Well," I said, "they really should've put that on the map."
"It's on the map, Dale," Phil said.
Hollis raised his sandwich at me from across the lake. It might have been a toast, or it might have been a reminder about the four thousand dollars.
He took a big, dry bite.
We took the bridge. I wanted to swim it again and do it right this time, but Phil said please, and by the time we got across, Hollis was gone. All he'd left was crumbs, in a neat little pile, which I took as a message.
Renata sat me down on a rock and patched me up: my knee, my elbow, and a part of my ankle I didn't know could bleed. She's gentle with everybody, but she was gentle with me longer, because I had more holes.
"Renata," I said, while she was wrapping the elbow, "when we get out of here, maybe you and I could get dinner somewhere."
"No," she said, and she tied off the bandage. "But that's sweet, Dale. Hold still."
That was four. The first time she said no it was plain, and the second time it was firm, and the third time she said it before I'd even asked. This time she said sweet. If you put all of that on a chart, the line's going up.
"That's real progress," I told her.
"It's a bandage," Renata said.
She gave me a potion for the swelling. It tasted like a penny, so I asked if she had one that tasted like a better coin, and she said this was the coin we had. Then she went over to look at Phil's hand, which he'd scraped pulling me out of the lake. He said something, and she laughed, and then he laughed. Then she said something back, and they both laughed for a long time. One of the medics started laughing too, and he hadn't even heard it.
"Look at them," I told the other medic. "They're laughing about me."
"Are they?" he said.
"Who else would it be about?" I said. "I'm the one who almost drowned. I'm the story."
He thought about that for a while, and then he handed me some more bandage, which I took as a yes. Later I asked Phil what had been so funny.
"Just a thing about frogs," Phil said, and he started laughing all over again.
So it was about me. I told Phil a story about a frog once, at a barbecue, and it was a long one, and I was the hero of it. People don't forget a story like that.
I've still got it, even wet.
My first bomb was a sock. Carl had a head start on me, and all I had was a sock.
It was the single sock from my first loot box. I'd been saving it for something important, and I just hadn't known it'd be explosives.
Phil wouldn't teach me how to make a bomb, and he'd made that clear three different times. But one night he explained it to Renata, as a list of things you should never do at the crafting table, while I lay three feet away pretending to be asleep. I'm very good at that. I've done it at four weddings.
"You never put beetle paste near lamp oil," Phil told her. "And you never, ever pack it tight and tie it off."
I missed the never. I got everything else, though, and you don't need every word to get the spirit of a thing.
So the next day I packed the sock tight with beetle paste and lamp oil and tied it off, and for a fuse I pulled a thread out of the bathrobe. Then I took it to an empty corridor, because a bomb man needs his space, and because Phil had asked me to, several times, while backing away.
I lit the thread and threw the sock as hard as I could. It went about nine feet. I got down behind a barrel, covered my ears and held my breath, which is how I time things down here. I held it twice. Nothing happened.
I walked over and picked the sock up. I shook it, and I shouted into it a little. It was warm, but it was just a sock.
"Dud," I told my viewer.
There was a square hole in the corridor floor, with a shaft going straight down into the dark, and next to it a sign that said, Not a trash can. That was fine with me. The sock wasn't trash. It was a disappointment, which is different. I dropped it down the shaft and walked away without even listening, that's how upset I was.
About a minute later, way down under my slipper, something went boom. A little dust came down from the ceiling. I figured it was Carl, since everything that goes boom on this floor is Carl.
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Return to Sender. Something you threw away in a sulk landed exactly where it was needed. Two crawlers will never know. Apparently, neither will you. Reward: one Bronze Adventurer Box.
I didn't follow all of it. Two crawlers who'd never know had to mean Phil and Renata, since I hadn't told them about the sock, and I wasn't going to. A bomb man doesn't talk about his duds. The box had a single match in it. Now they send me a match.
That night the screen in the safe room was showing replays. It was Carl, walking down a corridor. Then there was a boom, somewhere off to the side, and dust came down on him, and Carl stopped and looked up at the ceiling, very surprised. Donut, on his shoulder, looked surprised too, and then pleased, like she'd ordered it.
At the very edge of the picture, a hole in the wall was smoking. A lot of legs were sticking out of it, all of them pointing up, next to a nice pile of loot.
Everybody in the safe room cheered, and a guy by the shower said, "He did it again."
"He didn't do anything," I said. "He was walking."
Nobody listened. My bomb was a dud, and his go off when he isn't even there.
Some guys get all the booms.
Since hardly anybody was watching me anymore, I decided to become the backup Carl. Every show needs one. If the star gets a cold, somebody has to go out there and kick things.
So I studied what makes Carl Carl. He kicks things, and I'd tried that on floor one, and my toes still remember it. He makes bombs, and I'd tried that too, and the sock let me down. That left the pants.
I announced it at breakfast in the safe room. "From now on I'm not wearing pants," I said. "Like Carl."
The medics looked at each other. Renata kept eating. Phil put his spoon down, very slowly, the way you'd set down something that might go off.
I walked around like that all afternoon. I fought a rat and stood in a doorway for a while with my hands on my hips, looking off into the distance. Nobody could tell the difference. That's the trouble with a bathrobe. It covers up everything, including your best work. I told the medics they could call me Carl Two from now on.
"Like a sequel?" one of them said.
"Exactly," I said. "Sequels make more money." He went right back to calling me Dale, but I could tell he was thinking about it.
That night Phil came over and sat down next to me. He looked tired from keeping everybody alive all day. "Dale," he said, "would you please just put your pants back on?"
"I'm not wearing any," I said. "That's the whole point, Phil. I'm Carl Two."
"I know," Phil said. "Please put them back on."
So I went to put them back on, and then I stopped and thought about it. I'd gone down to the hotel lobby at midnight to take some muffins, in a bathrobe and slippers, and nobody brings pants to steal muffins. I hadn't had pants since Seattle.
I'd been Carl Two the whole time. I'd just been doing it quietly, which is harder, and nobody gives you a box for that. And I was out in that parking lot before Carl ever ran by. I saw him. So if you really think about it, Carl's the one who copied me.
"Phil," I said, "Carl is Dale Two."
"Okay," Phil said. "Goodnight, Dale."
Carl can have it. I'm not using it.
I'm pretty sure the stairs on floor two can move. Every time Phil checked the map they were the same distance away, and every time, the timer was smaller.
"They're backing off," I said. "They know we're coming."
"Dale, we haven't moved," Phil said. "We've been in this safe room for three hours."
"That's exactly what I'd say," I said, "if I was the stairs."
Phil had found them, though, and I'd like it noted that I was in the room when he did. They were on the far side of a part of the map he'd colored in black with his pencil. Then he'd written no on it and underlined it twice, which for Phil is shouting.
"What's in the black part?" I said.
"Nobody knows," Phil said. "Nobody who's come out of it wants to talk about it."
"So it's exclusive," I said, and I felt a lot better about it right away.
The timer said nine hours. Phil said that sounded like a lot and wasn't. I said nine hours is a whole workday, and I've never in my life needed a whole workday for anything.
Over at the shopkeeper's counter, a man buying rope was telling the shopkeeper the news. Carl and the cat were already heading for the stairs. Somebody had seen them on a replay, walking fast, with the cat pointing the way. I went over to make sure I'd heard right. "Carl's heading down?" I said. "Right now? Without us?"
The man looked at my bathrobe, and then at the sign on my back, which picked that moment to play the jingle. "Were you supposed to go with him?" he said.
"I held the door for him," I said. "On floor one. Him and the cat both."
"Okay," the man said. He took his rope and left in a hurry. I think he was jealous. I sat back down. I was hurt. You don't hold a door for a man and then have him go on without you the next time. That's not how doors work. Doors go both ways, which is why they've got two sides.
"I don't think they know we're coming, Dale," Phil said.
"That's exactly the problem," I said.
I thought about sending Carl a message, but I don't know how you do that down here. So I just said it out loud, up toward the ceiling, where the cameras probably are. "I'd have held it for you," I said.
Then I ate the rest of Phil's soup. He'd stopped eating it to look at the map, and I was upset.
Grief makes you hungry.
Fenwick was packing up. Everything he owned fit in one box, and most of the box was stamp.
The floor-two training room was quiet, and his desk was empty except for the box, a damp cup and a flat gray rock he said he liked to lie on. He was moving very slowly. He'd been moving slowly since floor one, but now it looked like he meant it.
"Last day, crawler," Fenwick said.
"Congratulations," I said. "Where are you going?"
"A pond," Fenwick said. "A warm rock by a cold pond, on a world with nobody on it."
"Will you still watch the show?" I said.
"No," Fenwick said. I respected that. A man at the top of his field doesn't need to keep an eye on the competition.
Phil had his journal out already. He's written down everything Fenwick's said since the very first day, and it's got its own section now. It's the only part of the journal that isn't about me.
Fenwick looked at me with both of his eyes, which he doesn't usually spend on me. "One more thing, crawler," he said. "Then I'm done giving advice for good."
"Shoot," I said.
"Nobody's watching, crawler," Fenwick said. "Do it anyway."
I waited for the rest of it. That was the rest of it. Phil wrote it down and underlined it. I nodded, so Fenwick would know I was thinking about it, and I was. Mainly I was thinking that he was wrong. Zibb was watching. Fenwick just doesn't keep up with the numbers.
Then he reached into the box, under the stamp, and took out a dagger. It was a real one, with a good handle and a sharp edge, and nothing about it was a ladle. "For you," Fenwick said.
Nobody's ever given me a weapon on purpose before, so I was very moved. "Thank you, Fenwick," I said. "Does it come with a stand?"
Fenwick closed his eyes for so long that I thought he'd retired early. Then he picked up his stamp one last time and stamped the back of my hand. It said, Seen. I figured it worked like a club stamp, so they'd let me back in later.
He picked up his box and his rock and walked to the door, and then he turned around. "Goodbye, crawler," he said to me. "Goodbye, Phil."
He'd learned Phil's name. I wasn't hurt. Phil's the kind of guy you have to remind people about, and Fenwick was just being thorough on his way out.
I'm going to get that dagger a stand.
The black part of Phil's map turned out to be a cave. It was very dark and very quiet, and it was full of guests.
They were tall and thin, with big flat ears and no eyes that I could find, though I didn't look hard. They didn't see you, they heard you. If you breathed loud they turned your way, and if you stepped on a pebble they came over to see about it.
So the medics wrapped my Torment sign in two blankets and a goblin vest, to keep the glow in and the jingle down. Phil sneezed at the vest, very quietly, into his own armpit. It's the bravest thing I've ever seen him do.
"If anybody makes a sound," Renata whispered, "we're done."
"Got it," I whispered back, and I gave her a thumbs-up, which made my robe rustle. Everybody glared at me in the dark. I couldn't see it, but I could feel it.
We got about halfway across. Then one of the medics turned his ankle on a rock and said a word I won't repeat, and every ear in that cave turned toward us at once. They came out of the dark from three sides with their arms out. I'll say this for them, they were very welcoming.
We backed into a little hollow in the rock. Renata stood in front with the axe, and Phil stood next to her with his shield over the medic with the ankle. The stairs were on the far side of the cave, past all of them. I was in the back, which is my position, feeling around for something to fight with, and what I found was the little dial on my bathrobe belt.
The sponsorship came with a brightness setting. The Vexmore rep had said I'd never need it. It went from Refreshing, to Very Refreshing, to a top setting called Torment.
I'd been planning to run anyway, I'll be honest about that. But I ran out the back of the hollow, away from the stairs and away from everybody, because I wasn't going to get caught standing next to slow people. And I turned the dial all the way up, because if I was going to be chased, I wanted it on camera.
"Dale," Phil said, "what are you doing?"
"Leaving," I said.
The blankets smoked a little and fell off. The sign lit up the whole cave, green and fizzy, and then the jingle played at the Torment setting, loud enough to shake the dust off the ceiling. Torment. Now with more.
Every one of them turned around at once and came after me.
So I ran. I ran through a puddle and a narrow spot and a low part where the ceiling hit my head twice. I lost a piece of the robe on a rock, and a piece of me on the same rock. Behind me I could hear all of them, and none of them were anywhere near the party anymore.
Then a little box popped into my hands. Fan gifts come whenever they want, even during a chase.
I opened it on the run. It was from Zibb, and inside was a coupon that said, Good for one free hug. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said it had expired last Tuesday. The note said, Run faster.
That's good advice. Zibb's always been a coach at heart.
I put the coupon in my robe pocket. The jingle came around again, and I sang along, so they'd know which way I went.
I kept running.
They cornered me at a dead end. There were a lot of them and one of me, and the sign on my back had started to flicker. It does that when the battery's low, or when I sit on it.
I put my back against the wall and held up Fenwick's dagger. I don't know what I was going to do with it. Mainly I held it up so they could see how nice it was.
Then, from somewhere back in the dark, I heard a clang and a thump. Then another clang and another thump, coming my way, very regular. Phil's always been a punctual man. He came out of the dark with the fire poker in one hand and the shield in the other, and he went through those things one at a time, in order, like he was grading papers. Clang, thump. Each one fell over and turned into a little pile of loot.
Around his neck was an amulet, glowing a soft pink. He'd traded for it at the last safe room, for his good pencils and two healing potions, and it was for allergies. He hadn't told me, because he says I make shopkeepers nervous, which is only sometimes on purpose.
For the first time in the dungeon, Phil Brumley wasn't sneezing. It turns out that's all that was ever holding him back.
"Are you okay?" Phil said when he got to me.
"I had them right where I wanted them," I said.
"You were cornered, Dale," Phil said.
"In a corner," I said. "Which is where I wanted them."
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Rear Guard. You led the hunters away and your party walked out alive. On purpose, mostly. Reward: one Silver Adventurer Box.
I read it twice. Mostly. They couldn't even give me the whole thing. And Rear Guard is a joke about my behind. I've been on camera in a bathrobe for two floors, and I know a behind joke when I see one.
"I think that one's real," Phil said, after I read it to him.
"They're all real, Phil," I said. "That's what makes them hurt."
Phil looked like he wanted to say something else. He didn't. He gave me a hand up instead, and he held on a little longer than you need to.
On the way back, I explained to him that all of this was coaching. I've been yelling directions at Phil since floor one. Most of them were wrong, but a coach isn't there to be right. He's there to yell.
"Thanks, Dale," Phil said. He meant it, too. You can always tell with Phil.
That's coaching.
The last time the AI counted the crawlers, it singled me out. It made the announcement while we were still at the edge of the cave, picking up loot.
It said, "Attention, crawlers. There are two hundred and," and then my jingle went off at full volume, because I hadn't turned the dial back down yet. Torment. Now with more. When it finished, the AI was saying, try to keep it that way.
So I missed the middle, but I'd caught the end, and the end's the part that counts. The AI had waited until right after my big run through the cave, and then it told me to keep it up. You don't time a thing like that by accident.
"Phil," I said, "it's talking about me."
"It said how many of us are left," Phil said. He'd written the whole number down in the journal. He looked at it for a while, and then he closed the journal and didn't say anything else.
I gave it a respectful minute. "Right," I said. "And then it said me."
Then somebody came walking out of the dark behind us, with a crossbow on his back and a clipboard under his arm. It was Hollis.
He was scratched up and dusty. He'd been in the cave too, he said, on the far side, pinned behind a rock for an hour. Then a big green light went by, singing, and everything that'd been hunting him got up and followed it.
"So I followed it too," Hollis said. "Out."
"That was me," I said. "I was the light."
"I know it was you," Hollis said. "Nobody else would wear that." He stood there a second, working on something. Hollis isn't a man who says thank you. I've known him for years, and the closest I ever heard him come was when I gave him back his rake.
"I appreciate it, Dale," he said finally. "In my way."
"You're welcome," I said. I was touched. It's not every day a man you owe money to admits you're good for something.
"So," Hollis said, and he clicked his pen. "About the four thousand dollars."
We ran for the stairs with ninety seconds on the timer. I know it was ninety seconds because the jingle went off when we started, and I spent the whole run hoping it wouldn't go off again.
Renata ran in front with the axe, and the medics ran behind her, one of them hopping. Phil ran next to me with the shield held over both of us. Hollis ran wherever he wanted.
The stairwell was at the end of a long hall. Its door was open, and somebody was standing in it, holding it. It was Carl, in his jacket and, of course, no pants. Donut was sitting on his shoulder, looking down the hall at all of us like we were late for her appointment.
They'd waited. They were holding the door for stragglers. I'd never thought of myself as a straggler before, but I didn't mind, since it's nice to be part of a group.
Renata went through first, and Carl nodded at her. The medics went through, hopping. Hollis went through without even looking at Carl, which I thought was rude, considering. Then it was me. I stopped in the doorway, face to face with Carl, and my sign lit him up green.
"Oh, no," Donut said. "It's the singing one. Carl, make it stop."
"That's my sponsor," I told her. "It plays every ninety seconds."
"I know exactly how often it plays," Donut said. "Believe me, I know."
"Come on, Bathrobe," Carl said.
He remembered me. He's the one who came up with it in the first place, so it's not like he had to study, but still, that was twice now. Twice is a nickname, and you can't take a nickname back.
I wanted to say something big, something they'd play on the little screens later. So I looked Carl right in the eye, and I said, "You're welcome."
Carl looked at me. He looked very tired. "For what?" he said.
I didn't know. It's just a thing you say to famous people, and it covers a lot.
"Go, man," Carl said, and I went.
On the stairs going down, I told Phil all about it. "Carl held the door for me," I said. "He waited for me, specifically. He wasn't going to leave without me."
Phil was quiet for a few steps. He still had cave dust in his hair, and the amulet glowed pink on his chest. "That's not how I remember it," he said.
"How do you remember it?" I said.
"He waited for everybody," Phil said. "And everybody was there because of you."
"Right," I said. "So everybody was waiting for me."
Phil thought about that for a while. Then he smiled, which is rare for him on stairs.
"Sure, Dale," he said. "That's close enough."
The stairs down to floor three are long, long enough to settle your affairs on, so I settled with Hollis.
He was a few steps ahead of me, writing on his clipboard. I tapped him on the shoulder, and when he turned around, I reached into my robe and took out the half coconut. It was the one the AI gave me on floor one for being present, and I'd carried it ever since, through goblins and a bomb and a lake.
"Here," I said. "That's half a coconut. We're square on the coconut."
Hollis looked at it for a long time. He turned it over, and he knocked on it. "Is this the same half?" he said.
"It's a different half," I said. "But it's the same size. I checked."
He took it. Then he did the math on his clipboard, out loud, the way he always does. "Four thousand dollars and four cents," Hollis said. "Less eleven cents for the jar. Less four cents, floor two rates. Less half a coconut." He looked up. "Call it four thousand even. I'm rounding."
"Up?" I said.
"Up," Hollis said.
Then he reached into his own pack, took something out and handed it to me. It was a hotel slipper. It was my slipper, the one I'd lost in a gutter in Seattle the night the world ended, while he was chasing me. It was gray now, and stiff, and it crunched a little when I squeezed it.
"You had this the whole time?" I said.
"Collateral," Hollis said.
"You carried my slipper through two whole floors?"
"I carry everything you owe me," Hollis said. "I'm thorough."
I put it on right there. It was crunchy and cold, and it fit perfectly. I stood on the stairs in two slippers for the first time since Seattle, and my feet felt even. I hadn't known how much I'd been leaning. So now I owe Hollis Brandt four thousand dollars, and that's all. No coconut, no jar, no cents. Just money, which is practically nothing.
I took the rest of the stairs a free man.
Floor three starts with a doormat. It says Welcome on it, and under that, in smaller letters, it says, Probably.
We all stood on it together at the bottom of the stairs: Renata and her medics, Phil and me, and Hollis, a little off to one side, eating the coconut. I felt that was disrespectful to the payment, but it was his coconut now.
Then a message popped up. It said, New achievement! Still Here. You reached the third floor in a bathrobe, two slippers and a soft drink advertisement. Our producers have asked us to stop acting surprised. Reward: one Bronze Adventurer Box.
Producers. They'd noticed me. When producers start asking for things, that means they're talking about a spinoff, and I'm prepared to listen.
Then I checked my viewers. Twelve. "Twelve," I told Phil. "That's a movement."
"It's twelve, Dale," Phil said.
"Twelve's a jury," I said. "Twelve's a dozen. That's how they sell eggs, Phil, and everybody needs eggs."
Then a little box popped into my hands, and it was from Zibb. Inside was a napkin, folded into a neat square. The note said, For your face. It's a clean one. Don't read into it.
Zibb had never sent me a clean one before, so I read into it a lot. I wiped my face with it and thanked Zibb out loud, up toward the ceiling. Then I took out the coupon for one free hug, the expired one, and I gave it to Phil.
"Dale, this expired last Tuesday," Phil said.
"It's the thought," I said.
Phil looked at the coupon for a long time. Then he hugged me anyway. Phil reads the fine print on everything except hugs.
I've been thinking about my name, too. I've tried a lot of them down here. The Survivor, The Bucket, the Robe Warrior, Bathrobe, the People's Crawler, Breaker of Floors and Carl Two. Some of them were very good. But on the way down the stairs I decided I'll just go by Dale. For now. It's already on the menu, and most people can spell it.
Phil got out his journal and read the floor-three rules out loud, and I explained each one back to him. Then I asked if there was a dress code. Phil wrote that down. This time he didn't even cross it out.
We make a great team.