Mordecai: I am going to sit here and twiddle my thumbs for three days. You guys won’t notice a time difference. I’ll see you on the other side. Also, I just peeked out the door. The NPCs are all safe, all that I can see. Nobody is on the street except the guards, who reactivated with that second burst. They all only have a single life point. It’s too bad you’re not here, otherwise I’d have you kill as many as you can. It wouldn’t be as much experience when you’re just finishing them off, but it would still be quite a bit.
I glanced over at Katia, who stood at the entrance to the stairwell, waiting for us.
Carclass="underline" Are there any guards still in the warehouse?
Mordecai: I don’t know. Probably a few. They’re still moving out to their regular positions. I’m not going over there to look. Now get your asses into that stairwell.
Carclass="underline" Okay. Oh, and Mordecai?
Mordecai: What?
Carclass="underline" Congratulations.
He didn’t answer. Donut looked up at me, eyes wide. “That’s right,” she said. “He’s free now, isn’t he? We make it to the fourth floor, and he gets to go home once the dungeon is over.”
“That’s right,” I said. I thought of Remex, who was also about to finish his “duty.” I wondered how long he’d been stuck here. I remembered what Donut had said when she learned what he really was. Carl, I don’t want to become an NPC.
And she’d said something else, too. It was heartbreaking, when you thought about it. I know she’s dead.
I thought of everyone we’d met on this floor, of the crawlers and NPCs we’d come across. We’d been on the floor less than a week, but it felt like a millennium. I thought of Signet the half-naiad. Of Quint the possum-faced pharmacist. Pustule the hobgoblin explosives dealer. I thought of poor GumGum the orc. Of Miss Quill. Of little Ricky Joe, the one-armed, child dwarf. I wondered if his mom ever had her baby.
The three of us turned toward the stairwell. Donut pulled Mongo out of his cage, and the dinosaur grunted with annoyance for being stuck so long.
We proceeded down the stairs. I knew from the last time, the floor ended the moment we pulled on the handle. The door at the bottom of the stairs was the same as always, with the oversized kua-tin carving, making them look bigger and more menacing than they really were.
You’re not going to break me. Fuck you all.
I examined its properties.
Entrance to the fourth floor.
This is where the real fun begins.
Mind the gap.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
We had 100 seconds left.
“Katia,” I said. “Pull out that detonator I gave you earlier. It has a ten second delay. Wait until the timer is at about 15 seconds and push it. Then we’ll go in before it goes off.”
“Why?” she asked, pulling the pencil-like detonator out. The thing had a range of ten kilometers, so we were more than close enough. “Won’t that make the bomb go off faster?”
“Yes, but only by a couple seconds. If people aren’t safe by now, they’re already dead. I doubt it’s going to work, since the detonators are magical. They probably got ruined in that first burst. But if it does, I set the dynamite. I let Donut smush a few of the detonator blobs onto the wall. If we get any experience for it, we’ll all share in the spoils.”
She shrugged. Just as the timer hit twenty seconds, she pressed the button.
We turned to open the door.
“Hey, Carl,” said Donut, just as we started to dissolve away. “You probably should have put your pants back on when we still could get into our inventory, don’t you think? Aren’t we going straight to Odette’s show?” She cackled with laughter.
I looked down at the cat, horrified.
“Goddamnit, Donut,” I said.
Epilogue
“It looks like we now have definitive proof that sex tape with the late Maestro was indeed a snick,” Odette mused. The audience roared. Donut was on her back, howling with laughter as my cheeks burned.
I never considered myself a shy person. I’d been wandering the dungeon wearing nothing but boxers for weeks now. But the sight of myself up on the screen, running full tilt through the Over City with nothing but a one-armed leather jacket and my nuts dangling free filled me with a strange, almost primal sense of vulnerability. I don’t know how nudists ever got used to it.
The interview was going well. So far, we’d received nothing but softball questions. I knew that’d soon change. It was still early.
All four of us—Me, Donut, Mongo, and Katia—had gone through the door and immediately appeared in the green room. There was a slight, odd pop in my brain, similar to the one I’d experienced the very first time I entered the dungeon, but that was it. There was no other sense that two and a half days had passed.
“Whoa,” Katia said, spinning in circles at the sight of the green room. She stopped, putting her hands out to steady herself. “Are we on a boat?”
I didn’t answer her. I only stared. She had changed to a stunning, short-haired woman. Black-haired, probably in her mid-thirties, pale with light, wide-set eyes that sat at an odd angle on her face.
“Katia,” Donut said, “You’re getting really good at the sculpting thing. Plus I like you better with black hair. It gives you more poise.”
She reached up and touched her features, then relaxed. “This is the real me, Donut.”
As Donut explained to her where we were, I proceeded to the bathroom to build myself a loincloth made of toilet paper. My hands shook as I wrapped the paper around my legs.
Holy shit, I thought. Our last few hours on the third floor had gone by quickly and unexpectedly. And now that I had a moment to breathe, my heart couldn’t stop pounding. I found myself sitting on the bathroom floor, my hand to my chest. How is this real? How is this my life?
I knew this respite would be short-lived. After we were done here, we’d move onto the fourth floor, and it would start all over again.
“Carl, hurry up, I gotta wee!” Donut said, barging into the bathroom. She stopped short. Her tail drooped at the sight of me there on the floor. A look of concern flashed across her cat face. She didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “You better get back out there. Katia and Mongo are eating all the human snacks. Lexis is in there. She said Katia is going to be on the show, too, but only at the end of the interview. She said it’s a fourth-floor special, and we’re going live just before the floor opens up.”
“Come here, Donut,” I said.
She immediately jumped onto my lap, butting her head against my chest. “Carl, are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. I gave her head a quick pat. It was strange without her tiara. “What about you? We thought we were going to die, and then we weren’t, and it’s been non-stop since.”
“You need to sleep,” she said, also deflecting the question. “Let’s do the interview and find a saferoom and rest. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, sitting up. I put my arms out, revealing my toilet paper loincloth. “So? What do you think?”
“Are you asking me to lie, Carl?”
“Yes, I am,”
Thirty minutes later, I sat on the couch in my ridiculous makeshift loincloth as we watched our last moments on the third floor play out on the screen.
Odette leaned back. “Before I show you what happened next, I want to bring out the newest member of the Royal Court of Princess Donut. Everyone say hello to Katia. And welcome back to the show, Mongo!”
Katia sat next to me on the couch while Mongo padded out and squawked at the virtual crowd, who screamed enthusiastically at the velociraptor. He curled up on the floor in front of Donut. Despite being in his box most of the night, even he seemed exhausted.