She waved her hand. “That’s not something you need to worry yourselves over. Concentrate on the crawl.”
Donut jumped down from the couch and ran to the far wall. She stopped about halfway across the room, her face smushing against an invisible barrier. It appeared the studio went deeper than it really did. She put her feet up on the invisible wall, making it look as if she was standing on two feet. “Carl, look,” she said. “This room is quite odd.”
“Remember what Lexis said?” I called out to her. “We’re not really in the studio. That’s the far end of the boat. Be careful.”
I turned back to Odette. “Whatever you guys did to her is wearing off,” I said.
The woman nodded. She didn’t even deny it. She was also watching the cat pounce around the end of the room. “In many ways, she’s still a child. It’s part of the reason why so many are enchanted with her. It works well in the dungeon. But for interviews, sometimes they need a little nudge.”
I bit my lip. I didn’t know if I should be angry or not. “What did you do?”
She shrugged. “It’s nothing insidious. It was in her cat treats. It’s temporary. It increased her wisdom and a few confidence stats by a point and a half. Not much. It makes for a better interview. It’s no different than drinking a glass of strong wine.”
“I thought wisdom wasn’t a stat anymore,” I said.
“Oh, honey. Everything is a stat. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not really there. But you’re more right than you realize. None of these top-tier stats you see are real. Not truly. A higher intelligence doesn’t mean you’re smarter. It means you have more mana points. It means you can remember things better. It’s really a mish-mash of a hundred other stats all combined.”
Donut came back, her tail swishing. “This room is much smaller than it looks.”
“So how about you, Odette? What are your motivations?” I asked as I stood from the couch. It was time to go. “For helping us, I mean. You said not to trust anyone until you know what their motivations are.”
The older woman smiled. “My audience loves you. The longer you stay alive, the more money I make. And there is nothing I love in this universe more than money. Now get back in there and try not to die.”
30
Floor Two
Views: 0
Followers: 0
Favorites: 0
“There’s nobody on my list,” Donut said. “I don’t have any followers yet.”
We’d been on the second floor for about five seconds. Thankfully, Brandon and his crew hadn’t come down yet. We still had two hours until the collapse, and I suspected they were waiting to see if Chris could convince the thirty folks holed up in that Waffle House to come down. I wouldn’t expect to see the first ones emerge for another hour.
“I don’t think it gets turned on until after the recap episode,” I said. “And Mordecai said it updates slow anyway.” Tonight’s episode coincided with the closing of the first floor. I was hoping we could find a safe room before then.
The episode was usually a little more than an hour long, and after that, Odette’s show would air. And if that show was as popular as they’d implied, the views would start rolling in. I knew, deep down, that this was probably a good thing. The more fans, the better chances we had. But I still had a terrible, ominous feeling that all this attention was a mistake. There was something to be said about being anonymous. Quietly efficient. That wasn’t going to happen, not here, not when I had Donut with me.
Looking about, this second floor was set up similarly to the first, but instead of emerging at the end of a main hallway, I could see that we were in the middle of a quadrant. The floors here were white. The lichen on the wall had an orangish tint to it. The walls, instead of stone, were made of cinderblock. I punched the wall with my gauntlet to see if it would break. A large crack appeared, but it wouldn't break further, like it was magically protected. I punched another nearby block, and the same thing happened. It cracked easily, but it didn't break more than that.
“Well this is boring. How are we supposed to set the intergalactic internet on fire when the second floor is the same as the first floor?” Donut asked.
“Mordecai had said that would be the case. It’s not until the third or fourth floor where things start to get weird.”
“Hopefully the monsters will be more exciting,” Donut said.
“They’ll be similar. Just a little harder.”
“Look, look,” Donut said. “When you zoom out the map, top right corner. Northeast.”
I did, and immediately saw what she was looking at. The icon sat in the midst of the fog, but there it was. An overwhelming sense of relief washed over me. I didn’t see any safe rooms or tutorial guilds yet, but at least we had this.
Stairwell to Floor Three.
“Let’s work our way toward there and see about clearing that quadrant out,” I said. “Keep an eye open for safe rooms.”
I saw the X on the map the moment we turned the corner. My heart leaped, afraid that this was going to be the corpse of Agatha. But it was a smaller X. One of a mob.
I hovered over the spot, and it read Corpse – Level 2 Brindle Grub.
“Level two. That’s good. I wonder if Agatha killed it?” I said. We wouldn’t be able to tell until we were closer. A few more steps, and a pair of red dots appeared in the same hallway, between us and the body. They seemed to also be moving toward the corpse.
“Okay, be careful,” I whispered. I peeked around the corner. There the mobs were, a pair of fuzzy, cat-sized monsters with no legs. Bugs with similar black and brown coloring to Donut. These were large, fat worms. They didn’t appear to be moving too quickly, also level two. They were the same type of creature as the corpse.
Brindle Grub. Level 2.
Have you ever found a dead, bloated, and decomposing body? Have ya poked it with a stick just to see what would wiggle out? Perhaps rubbed it with your bare foot? You know you’ve wanted to. Well, wonder more. Here on the second floor, rats are yesterday’s news. Brindle Grubs are now all the rage, and janitor duty falls unto them. The more monsters you kill in an area, the more the grubs eat. The more the grubs eat, the bigger they get. Once you start finding them in the pupa stage, you best move on. Grubs are easy to kill. Their older siblings are not.
“You take the left one. I’ll get the second,” I said as Donut jumped to my shoulder.
We strode around the corner. Donut blasted the first one with a full-power Magic Missile, and the thing exploded, leaving nothing but a white mess of goo. They had the same sort of squishy innards as the scatterer bugs from the first floor.
“Get ready with a healing scroll in case their blood is acid or something,” I said.
I formed a fist, rushing up. The second grub was making a pitiful squeaking noise, trying to get away at a turtle’s pace. I smashed down with my gauntlet. It was like punching pudding. A toddler could kill these things.
The bug goo didn’t appear to be toxic. The bugs didn’t offer any discernible experience, either. These seemed to be much less dangerous than the rats. I wondered what sort of monster they turned into.
We moved to examine the smushed remains of the third corpse. It was as I suspected.
Lootable Corpse. Brindle Grub. Level 2. Killed by Crawler Agatha.
Vial of Brindle Grub Hemolymph. (Alchemy Material.)
It looked as if she’d run over the thing with her shopping cart. It took about ten minutes before a corpse became lootable by other crawlers, and that was the only indication of how long ago this had been. Her head start was several hours by now thanks to our interlude on the surface. I took the vial.