“I still don’t know what’s happening,” I said, frustration rising further.
Mordecai shook his head. “You humans are all the same. This is the seventh or eighth human-seeded world, and it’s always the same. You always want to know why. Why can’t you just accept your circumstances and move on? My people, the skyfowls, we generally last much longer than you humans. You know why? Because we roll with it.”
I didn’t say anything for several moments. There was a lot to parse there. “Human-seeded world?” Did that mean that conspiracy-spouting asshole on TV with the crazy hair was correct? That humans weren’t unique, but a crop, left to grow unattended until, until… this?
Mordecai saw my look of bewilderment and sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll give you the quick version,” he said. He pulled a seat and sat down. He gestured to another chair situated in the center of the round carpet. “You might as well get comfortable.”
4
“There are six basic starter species the Syndicate uses to seed worlds. Humans are one of them. They find a compatible world, sprinkle the humans on there, wait a couple thousand years, and then reveal themselves to the largest settlement. They usually do this as soon as civilization starts to take hold, but long before any sort of industrial revolution. As long as there’s a working government, this counts as ‘First Contact.’ In a legal sense, I mean, which gives them leave to wait a couple thousand additional years, come back, and strip the planet dry.”
“How?” I asked. “It all happened in a second!”
Mordecai shrugged. “Technology beyond your understanding seems like magic. So as far as you’re concerned, in this place, it is magic. It’s like that Wizard of Oz movie, but you’ll never get to peek behind the curtain.”
“You’ve seen Wizard of Oz?”
“Guildmasters prepare for years for each new dungeon world. Kid, I have been preparing for this longer than you have been alive. The advance team arrived in your 1930s, I believe. Whenever that book came out, The Hobbit. I left the last system and entered the prep phase in your year 1964. I know this world and your customs just as well as you do. I even once got to shapeshift into a human and go out into the world. I went to a Blockbuster Video and stole a bunch of James Bond tapes. I was so happy once you guys started digitizing everything.”
“How long have you been a guildmaster?”
Mordecai shook his head. “You don’t even want to know. So anyway, your planet defaulted on claiming Earth as a sovereign entity. You had 50 local years since first contact, and first contact was several thousand years ago. Whenever those pyramid things were built. The Borant Corporation has a huge backlog of worlds to mine, and your time is now.”
My head swam. “So, they’re taking all of our minerals?”
Mordecai nodded. “Sort of. Borant deals in rare elements and the like. What they end up mining will fit on a single transport. I don’t know too much about that part of the process. The elements involved are unimportant. It’s a big universe out there, and there are plenty of places to mine. That’s not why they’re really here. While Borant does make a profit on the mining, the real money is in the game. The dungeon.”
“How?”
“Are you kidding? The Syndicate consists of over three billion independent star systems. Every season, a new Dungeon Crawler World debuts across the net. Quintillions of citizens of the Syndicate become obsessed with the Crawl.”
“Wait, so this is like a TV show? Like Survivor?”
“Oh, I loved that show. And as far as you’re concerned, yes. It’s a show like Survivor. But it’s more a Running Man situation than a Survivor one.”
I leaned back in the chair. I’m on an alien television show. Holy shit.
Bea had always wanted to be on television. She’d tried out for countless reality shows. Me? I’d rather have a hot poker stuck through my eye. I briefly wondered where she was, and if she was alive. Probably not, I decided. It’d been 5 AM in the Bahamas when it had happened, which meant she’d probably been asleep in her hotel. Probably in bed with that asshole. And if by some miracle she had survived, there’s no way she’d have gone into one of those tunnels.
“So are there people watching right now?” I asked, looking around.
Mordecai put his hands together. “I will get to that in a moment. It doesn’t look like anyone else is going to be joining us any time soon, so let’s get the tutorial started.”
Mordecai’s right hand glowed for a moment, and I felt that haptic buzz in my brain. Across the room, Donut hissed and batted at the air.
You have been granted access to the Crawler Menu.
My world blinked, and several items appeared in my vision. A long green bar—a health bar, I realized—appeared in the top right. It pushed the timer down a notch. That blinking folder remained in my top left. A small minimap appeared in the bottom right.
“You just received a notification,” Mordecai said. “That’s called a crawler notification. There are a few different kinds, but that type will only be seen by you. There are also system messages, which everyone sees no matter what floor they’re on. Those may be in different voices. There are also floor-specific notifications, etcetera.”
“I have a blinking box in my top left,” I said.
“Those are game and status change notifications. Probably from your fight outside a few minutes back,” Mordecai said. “Don’t click it yet. We’ll get there. First, I want you to focus on the map on the bottom right. Look right at it, and make sure you’re thinking about looking at it.”
I did as he asked, and the map got bigger, increasing to fill my entire vision. It was a simple blue and gray map showing the hallways and a few random doorways. Most of the area around us wasn’t filled in. It only showed the area we’d walked, pushing out about twenty meters in every direction. A green dot sat in the middle, right in the guild. Two additional dots appeared, a blue one and a white one. I focused on the blue dot, and a note appeared above it:
Crawler Princess Donut.
The white dot read:
Guildmaster Mordecai.
The whole room glowed yellow, and when I focused on it, it read:
Tutorial Guild.
A trio of X’s appeared outside in the hallway. I mentally clicked on one.
Corpse – Level 2 Goblin.
I mentally clicked away, and the whole map shrank back to normal.
“Good, good,” Mordecai said. “So, you’re the green dot, the blue dots will be other crawlers, white dots will be NPCs such as myself, and mobs will be red. There are a few other kinds, but you’ll figure those out along the way. By the way, no other crawlers or mobs can see your menus, but while you’re inside this guild, I can see what’s on your screen. You are already adept at opening and closing, which is good. Now try focusing on the map again. With your mind, pinch it smaller. And then move it across the screen. That way you can customize your HUD.”
It went on like this for a while, him explaining how to open and close menus within my display. I could just think about it, and a whole menu system would pop up, giving me access to several folders. Once I got used to the weirdness of it being in my head, the system was quite intuitive.
The first menu was player stats. Like I mentioned earlier, I’d played a handful of computer and tabletop RPGs over the years, so this section wasn’t too surprising. My stats were: