“Jesus,” I muttered.
“I can’t watch this. I hate this show,” Katia said, getting up. She produced a towel from I-don’t-know-where and moved around the common area, cleaning up the remaining blood splatters from where Mongo hadn’t licked it clean. “We need a maid in here.”
The recap showed something unexpected. A group found a new stairwell, one that wasn’t listed on that early map. It didn’t say where they were, but this was clearly a different area we hadn’t seen. It was a dark, dripping cave, and it was only lit by the Torch spell of one of the crawlers. There was only a single stairwell here. It was clearly a level stairwell, but it was different than usual. It went both up and down, and I wasn’t sure why. Only the part of the stairs below the ground glowed, but it still reached upward, corkscrewing into the air and disappearing into the dark. It was only on screen for a moment, so I didn’t have enough time to investigate what that meant.
“I think I know where that is,” I said, suddenly realizing what we were looking at. “That’s where we teleported the mimic away. That’s station 433. I bet there’s a stairwell there. Just like with Grimaldi. If a city boss is sitting on a stairwell, it’s invisible on the map until he’s gone.”
“What?” Donut said, suddenly incredulous. “Are you saying we could’ve just gone back down to that place and used those stairs?”
“That’s what I’m guessing,” I said. “But I’m not certain. This is a good thing. It means there’s a way to get home for anybody still trapped on that side of the tracks.”
“I guess they won’t be needing the 150,000 gold’s worth of hats just sitting on the ground up there, either,” Donut grumbled.
“They still gotta find that station,” Katia said over her shoulder. I did a double take. She’d grown thin and tall and was scrubbing one of the walls ten feet off the ground. “There are five more mimics up there. How did this blood even get up here?”
“Shush!” Donut waved her paw. “Stop talking. We’re on!”
“Oh fuck,” I said, seeing the scene laid out. They showed me standing over Growler Gary, the cowering gnoll. They’d altered the lights and colors of the scene to make the room dark, showing it from a low angle with me looming over the creature. Mongo materialized, coming into focus like a monster emerging from the fog, biting his hands off. Gary whimpered. The whimpering sounds were added in. Gary was always dead by the time we removed his hands. The scene switched to me wishing for duct tape while I attached one of the poor guy’s hands to the keypad. It showed us doing it over and over again. It never even explained why we were collecting the hands.
It didn’t show the rescue. Instead it moved on to Lucia Mar beating a mantaur to death by smashing him against a train over and over. It appeared she was set up in one of the trainyards, but I couldn’t tell which one. Something had changed with one of her two rottweilers. It was huge now, twice as big as the other.
“What is this?” Donut said. “They cut out the best part! They didn’t show everybody saying thank you to me. They usually get it wrong, but this is over the top. This is outrageous!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “People are watching it happen live. More every day. They know what really happened. It’s the same with the other crawlers. By now everybody knows all of this stuff is pure propaganda.”
“Do you think that means this Lucia kid isn’t as crazy as she looks?” Katia asked, coming to stand beside me.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I remembered what Lucia had done to the Desperado Club. And to Odette’s assistant. Odette had called her a psychopath. And Lucia had talked some serious shit about Donut on that one show. So there was probably some truth to it. But it had to be exaggerated. It had to be.
“You did a good job,” I said, looking about. “The room is very sparkly.” I remembered what Katia had said about her mother being a clean freak, and how she’d rebelled against it. Apparently not so much. Then again, it was predominantly blood stains she was cleaning up. That’s not something most people wanted splattered around their living area.
“It was mostly Mongo,” Katia said, patting the dinosaur on the head.
Hello Crawlers,
This will be your second-to-last message before the floor collapses, and I just wanted to say how proud we are of human tenacity. Quite frankly, we expected the number of deaths to be much higher on this floor. It’s making us rethink how easy the next floor was going to be. Hah.
Odds are good you might have your hands full this time tomorrow, so we’re sticking all the important information into this message. The next floor will see the crawlers scattered throughout, further apart than usual. Parties will still travel together, but only parties that are formed before this message started. We love how you plucky humans are starting to all band together to defeat the big, bad monsters, and it’s great, it really is, but we wish to focus more on individual stories the next floor. Feel free to chat to your friends, but if they aren’t in a party with you right now, it’s best to get your goodbyes out of the way. There will still be Desperado Club and Club Vanquisher entrances throughout the level, so don’t worry about that. But if you haven’t trained yourself up, you might regret it.
And speaking of chat, we’ve added a new and exciting feature to this season. For a small fee, all viewers may now subscribe to your private messages between other crawlers. Isn’t that great? Sign-ups started yesterday, and we are very pleased with how many have already joined up. The system goes live the moment this message ends.
We have also patched a few persistent bugs with the inventory system. Effective immediately, you may no longer store liquids in your inventory unless they are in a container.
That’s it for now. See you guys tomorrow. Now let’s get out there and kill, kill, kill!
“Where is he? Where did that fuck face go?” a familiar voice yelled. It was Mordecai, skidding to a stop in the room. His toad eyes grew wide. Apparently, for him, no time had passed. He’d just blinked. “Oh. Oh shit. Oh fuck,” he said, eyes flashing as he read a page of notifications. “By his left tit. Seven days?”
“Hello, Mordecai,” I said.
The toad man just stared at us. His eyes immediately moved to the golden skull over Katia’s head and then to the skull over Donut’s. He straightened as Mongo squawked and jumped in circles all around him. “I see I missed a few things.”
“A few things, yes,” I said. “We need to…”
I didn’t finish.
Katia exploded.
At least that’s what I thought had happened at first. Blood erupted out of her. Gallons and gallons of it, flying in every direction. It just kept coming and coming, an impossible amount. We all cried in surprise. I was blasted in the face, getting bukkaked by the fetid, stinking liquid. I fell over trying to get away, gasping and choking. Donut squealed and leaped across the room. Mordecai also flew backward, stumbling over the couch, his frog legs sticking straight up into the air.
And still, the red spray didn’t let up. It hit the ceiling and all the far walls, like it was being sprayed from a multi-directional pressure washer.
Mongo shrieked in joy, spinning about like a child in the rain. It kept coming for twenty full seconds before trickling to a stop. Katia just stood there in the middle of the room, eyes huge. Once it stopped, the room was filled with the sound of my coughing and Mordecai’s croaking and the tap-tap-splash-tap of Mongo dancing in circles like he was playing in a wading pool.
It took me a moment to understand what the fuck had just happened. Katia had stored all of the blood when she’d been attached to the front of the train. She’d had to put it directly into her inventory to keep her scoop clean.