It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who this was. Other than Brandon and crew, we’d only come across one other group of crawlers. I’d been thinking maybe it was Rory and Lorelai, the goblin shamankas. I didn’t know if bringing mobs out of the dungeon was a thing. But I remembered that Zhang and Li Jun had waved at them, and I doubted they’d have reacted like that toward a pair of scary-looking goblins.
“Hi, Frank Q. Hi, Maggie My,” I said. “I see you didn’t find the present I left for you. That’s too bad.”
The Maestro smiled huge and for a terrifying moment, I thought I had guessed incorrectly. Could it possibly be Beatrice? No, I decided. No fucking way.
“Watch this, piglets,” he said. “Let’s see if they’re right.”
The video started and I relaxed. It was a recap of Frank and Maggie’s journey so far. I watched as the two player killers stumbled into the dungeon. But, curiously, they had someone else with them. A teenaged girl. It showed them coming into a tutorial guild. We watched as their guide—one of those floating brain Mind Horrors—sat the three of them down and told them the only way to survive was to kill other crawlers. The guide had a deep, rumbly voice, unlike anything I’d heard before. It was terrifying. The teenager wept as the guide explained what had to be done. Maggie clutched onto the girl, hugging her tightly.
The scene switched to the girl on the ground, injured and crying. We hadn’t seen what had happened. It looked as if she’d maybe been hit with a glob of Bad Llama lava. Frank was also injured, convulsing nearby as blood pooled around them. The woman, Maggie, sobbed as she went to her knees in front of the girl.
“Mom,” the girl said. “It hurts.”
“I know baby,” Maggie said. She reached down, and to my utter astonishment, she wrapped her hands around the girl’s throat. She choked her own daughter until she died. When it was done, Maggie leaned against the dungeon wall and wailed.
“What the hell?” I asked, astounded. I turned to the empty chairs. “You didn’t have to do that. She wasn’t dead. She would’ve recovered.”
The recap continued. We were being shown these scenes out of order. This was now something from before the daughter’s death. We watched Frank and Maggie and the daughter come across a much larger group. This group included Rebecca W and several other men. Frank and Maggie introduced themselves as a married couple, and the teenager was their daughter, Yvette. They waited until the others’ backs were turned, and Frank and Maggie ambushed them. They pulled their guns and shot them all. Yvette cried for them to stop. Rebecca and another man fled, and Frank chased them. It showed the man running directly into some plant mob thing I’d never seen before, and of Frank finally tracking Rebecca down, cornering her in the quadrant with the scatterer bugs. The screen split, showing Yvette screaming while Maggie tried to calm her. One of the other men they’d shot wasn’t dead. Maggie put a gun in Yvette’s hand, told her to shoot the man, to get the experience. The girl refused.
As I expected, Frank’s entire backstory was complete, made-up bullshit. I still didn’t know if they were cops or not. I suspected they were. Either way, Rebecca W hadn’t been some sort human trafficker. She’d been someone like me. Afraid, and at the end, alone. She’d been betrayed and hunted down by a fellow human. I thought of the woman’s naked, stripped-bare body. I shook my head in disgust.
The two had received multiple loot boxes from being player killers, including a ring that gave Maggie an area-of-effect stealth ability and a potion that imbued Frank with the ability to track down nearby crawlers.
I noted that Maggie’s stealth ability worked like my Protective Shell. It cast in a static, semi-circle area. It didn’t move with them. That was good to know.
I watched as they hunted several other crawlers, most of them people wandering about on their own. Most of them appeared to have been homeless, some elderly. All of them were afraid. All of them had been so happy to see someone else before they were murdered. Yvette was in some of these scenes. She wasn’t in others. The girl never participated in the killings.
“The best part is coming up,” the Maestro announced.
The video, finally, showed a much abridged version of Donut and me coming across Frank Q in the saferoom and of them attacking us, of them getting frozen. It showed me putting the dynamite in the rat corpse.
But then, I saw something unexpected. My heart sank the moment I realized what was happening.
“Mom?” Yvette asked, coming out of the bathroom. The girl stopped in horror upon seeing both of her parents frozen in the safe room.
Oh. Oh no, I thought. She’d been there. Yvette had been there the whole time. She’d been hiding with her mother under the stealth field.
I see you didn’t find the present I left for you. Now I knew why the Maestro had smiled so big when I said that.
I held my breath as the two murderers and their daughter approached the rat corpse. Maggie yelled at Frank not to loot it. He did it anyway. If I remembered correctly, we’d left five items in its inventory: a hunk of rat steak, a skin, a lit smoke bomb, a lit stick of dynamite, and an unlit, unstable stick. Frank only pulled out one item. The lit dynamite stick. He dropped it in surprise, and all three turned to run. A moment passed, and the dynamite went off. Shrapnel blasted the three crawlers. Yvette went down, and so did Frank. A hunk of dislodged rock sheared the man’s hand right off.
A llama hadn’t given those horrible injuries to the teenaged girl.
I had.
The scene ended, the lights switched on, and Maggie and Frank emerged to our right.
Donut hissed. The crowd’s response was mixed. Half cheers, half insults and screams, as if they weren’t sure whose side they were supposed to be on. I spent the moment observing the two crawlers. Frank was missing his right hand. But that wasn’t all that had changed about him. The man had a hollowed-out, 1,000-yard stare. He looked as if he’d aged ten years in just a few days. Do I look like that? His missing hand wasn’t a rounded, healed stump like one would expect. It was a straight cut, like he was a mannequin whose hand had been removed.
The woman, Maggie, glared directly at me.
I returned her stare. “You didn’t have to kill her,” I said when the audience finally silenced. “Why did you do that? To get the experience? She would’ve healed. Your own daughter? Jesus fuck, lady.”
“You don’t know,” she said to me, spitting the words. “You don’t know anything. You didn’t get the whole story.”
“She wasn’t dead yet,” I repeated. “She would’ve healed.”
“Fuck you,” Maggie said. “You don’t know what we’ve had to do to survive.”
“Survive? Your daughter is dead. But it’s okay, because you got credit for the kill. I’m sure she’d be so fucking proud,” I said.
Maggie leaped from her chair, pulling a black dagger that glowed with a purple halo. She lunged at me.
I didn’t flinch. Her jab passed harmlessly through my throat. The dagger dropped away as Maggie cried out in pain, clutching her hand. She’d likely just stabbed the invisible wall of their production trailer.
“Children, children,” the Maestro said, plainly enjoying this. He was back on familiar ground. “Clearly you guys have a beef with one another.”
Frank whispered something to Maggie, who returned to her chair. He tried to put an arm on her shoulder. She pushed him away.
“As far as I’m concerned, any business I’ve had with these two has already been transacted,” I said. I turned toward Frank and met the man’s eyes. The man had changed significantly since the last time we’d seen each other. He looked away and down. “I’m sorry about what happened to your kid. But fuck you. Fuck both of you. She deserved better. We all would’ve been stronger together. Your game guide is a piece of shit.”