He looked like he was going to object, and insist on me ditching it now. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, but Katia interrupted. She had the map out, spread onto the counter.
“What was it?” she asked. “You said you knew how to get to the lower train stations. We figured it out, but there’s a bunch of different ways, and I want to know what you saw.”
Mordecai looked down at the large paper, worn and blood splattered and filled with many more marks than when he’d started working on it over a week earlier. He blinked a few times, staring at the mess of circles. I still couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could make sense of this confusing bullshit. I had the sense whoever designed this let it get away from them. I hoped the same asshole wasn’t in charge of the next floor, too.
“You see this?” he said, pointing to the circle that was the Nightmare’s loop. “And this, and this?” He indicated several other named lines. He grabbed the pen off the table and drew a symbol in the corner. It was a group of overlapping circles, similar to the Olympics logo, though the rings were all a different size. “It’s the logo for the Syndicate, at least from the top down.” He pointed to the second circle of the logo, then tapped the Nightmare line again. “See here, it matches up perfectly. The named trains make a specific pattern. That means there is a train that has to loop to the front. Probably at this station here. Yes, look, you discovered it already. The Escape Velocity line. Yeah, that makes sense. Escape Velocity is the name of the ship that discovered the worm hole to the first system where a Gleener scientific crew investigating a Primal ship graveyard came across the Vog Generation Ship. A few hundred cycles later, the Syndicate was formed. So it’s obvious once you know what you’re looking for.”
“What?” I said. “How in the hell were we supposed to spot that? How would we even know what the Syndicate logo looks like?”
“Isn’t it etched on the doors to the next floor down?”
“No,” I said. “It’s a massive kua-tin.”
“Huh,” Mordecai said. “When I did it, it was the Syndicate logo. Odd.”
“You said this is from the top down?” Katia asked. “What does it look like from the side?”
He drew again, but this time it looked like a lopsided mattress spring. The circles were actually all connected together. “Honestly, I don’t understand how these wormholes work, and that’s what the logo is based on. It’s not usually portrayed in 2D, but in a twisting, 3D shape. Sometimes they show the rings fly together, but when it rotates, it’s one piece. It’s like one of those optical illusion things.”
Katia snatched the pen from him and started re-drawing the logo from several different angles.
“Anyway,” Mordecai said, “that’s how I knew. The abyss here represents the center of the galaxy. You really filled this in well, Katia. The tracks probably represent the worm paths.” Mordecai leaned in. “Yes, I see it now. The whole thing is a simplified map of the galaxy, and the trainlines are the original worm paths.” He paused, reading some more. “Does that say station mimic?” He laughed. “They really went all out. There’s a story about the early days of the Syndicate where the H’lene system set up six waystations near the center. They were traps. The H’lene were robbing and eating all the travelers and then stealing their tech. The H’lene don’t exist anymore, and they weren’t really mimics, but they’re oftentimes represented as them. They got wiped out by the Valtay and the orcs.”
“Jesus,” I said, looking it over.
“What about all these Krakaren bosses and the ghouls?” Katia asked, looking up from her sketches. I had no idea what she was doing, but she was now drawing lines from the logo to different parts of the map.
Mordecai returned his gaze to the map, frowning. “Oh, wow. I see it now. The Krakaren is a real creature. It is a collective mind, and it is spreading throughout the universe. Its proliferation causes a lot of anxiety. A better translation of its name is the Apothecary because of its ability to synthesize elements. When they call it the Krakaren, it’s them deliberately bending the translation into a negative. What we have here in the dungeon is a caricature.”
He pointed to one of the stations where Katia had written, “Drug dealer.”
“They have the Krakaren making the drugs and the Pooka are the ones handing it out. I think the Pooka are supposed to represent the Plenty. They are a caprid race. They look like goats.”
We hadn’t seen or fought the Pooka, but I remembered that Elle and Imani had. They were the ones who gave the addictive “vitamin shot” to the mobs. Elle had described them as goblin things that turned into giant goats when you fought them.
Mordecai continued. “The Plenty invented the modern tunneling system. It’s only been around for a few hundred seasons, but it allows near-universal, real-time communications. The technology is proprietary, and nobody knows how it works. There’s a ridiculous conspiracy theory that they use Krakaren technology, and it’s all a ploy to get everyone into the Krakaren collective. Previously, everything had to be filtered through the wormholes. Borant had a stake in the communications relays that are now obsolete. It’s a long story. I barely understand it all. Before, even in my season, the crawl would get just as many views as it does now, but most everyone in the universe would receive it on delay. Maybe an hour. Maybe a year, depending on where you lived. Only the center system would get it live. It’s only a recent thing that the outer systems are able to follow and favorite crawlers in real time. The breakthrough changed everything. The Plenty are responsible for so much prosperity, but some, like the Bloom of the kua-tin, think of it as some insidious plot. They’re like a telegram company protesting the invention of the telephone. Or a typewriter company protesting the invention of the word processor.”
“Wait,” I said. “So when they have the Krakaren manufacturing drugs and giving it to the pooka to distribute to everyone else, what they are really doing is making some sort of bullshit metaphor? To make a political point?”
“That’s what it looks like. This whole floor is a racist political cartoon, telling the universe how shifty the Krakaren and the Plenty are. Borant has been very vocal about this for a while now. They say the Plenty are selling everybody this technology just so everybody will become addicted to it. But one day they will take it all away, and that will, somehow, allow their overlord, the Krakaren, to I don’t know, absorb the entire universe. It’s a bit ironic if you ask me, considering how Borant are actually using the tunneling technology to spew their hate everywhere.”
All of this was interesting, but I didn’t really give a shit who was racist against who when all of them were stepping all over us. As far as I was concerned, they could all go fuck themselves. But the story itself was important to know.
“But anyway,” Mordecai said. “Now that we know how to get to the front, we just need to wait out the timer and hop down the stairs. Oh, and then give me your table upgrade coupons so I can boost up my alchemy table before we go down a floor.”
I exchanged a look with Katia. We’d both already spent the upgrade coupons. “Okay, I said. We’ll give you a quick recap. But you gotta promise not to smack us again.”
“Wait until you hear about how we stuck Katia to the front of a train and then killed Hekla,” Donut added.
We took our naps and reset our buffs. By the time we were ready to emerge out into the world again, we had one day and 10 hours left. Mordecai had been busy while we slept. He’d rearranged the crafting room. He’d installed that repair bench I’d found and bought three more benches. Two with our coupons and then one with gold. He bought a second alchemy table, which he said was necessary because he could specialize one of them. He bought a metalworking table, which he said he’d explain the purpose of later, and he bought something called a Bolt-Thrower’s Workshop, which would eventually allow for the mass production of explosive and other magical crossbow bolts.