At that moment, Nick would have sold his left nut to be fighting something else. Maybe the right one, too, if the price was right. The other day, he had heard a customer talking about a dungeon where the monsters psychically mined images of your worst childhood enemies from your brain, then transformed into them to try to intimidate you. It was supposed to be scary, they said, but in effect it was just a two floor romp through beating the shit out of all your schoolyard bullies.
The grand finale, the guy had said, was him drop-kicking the hell out of the psychic image of his own absentee father. Nick could almost see the catharsis steaming off the guy before he bought half the booze in the store, guided his good-looking girlfriend back to his expensive-looking spaceship, and rocketed back out into the stars.
He didn’t say any of this directly to Nick, of course. People like him barely saw guys in paper hats behind counters, especially when they smelled like a combination of off-brand liquid soap and the remnants of explodings monster it had almost but not quite entirely cleaned off.
Another monster was exploding in his face now. That was what you got when you stabbed a floating green bubble with teeth with a sword, it turned out.
“Work as management in a rewarding retail environment, they said.”
Nick swung his sword and chopped another bubble in half, once again trying to find a magic angle that would kill them without dousing him in ichor. He failed.
“Perks include rapid advancement in a quick-moving management-track position, an exciting work environment facilitating the travel of a high-end clientele at the edge of the known universe, and unlimited access to an on-site training dungeon, they wrote.”
Nick should have known. If there was one thing he should have learned by now, it was that anybody who would hire him to do anything that sounded fun was up to no good. Spitting out a bit of monster juice that had happened to land in his mouth, he called up the info for the monsters for the thousandth time, reading it as if it might have changed some time in the last few hours.
It had not.
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Stink Wraith
Born of weak ambient energy and the hastily dumped by-products of a starliner engine, Stink Wraiths are one step away from not being considered a dungeon monster at all. Their two pathetic forms of defense consist of a weak, almost insignificant ability to bite opponents and exploding into foul-smelling liquid when killed.
At most, these monsters represent an annoying early-floor threat in a dungeon, something to avoid or mow through on the way to the boss.
Accumulation Rewards: 1
Loot drops: None
Mastery Reward: None
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No matter what the system said, there was no boss these things were getting in the way of. There weren’t even more floors. This dungeon was so underpowered it was teetering on the edge of not existing at all. The stink wraiths he fought simply materialized through the walls of a cave no bigger than a storage shed, floated slowly towards him in the air, and tried their hardest to bite him before he sliced them in half and claimed a single pathetic point of accumulation for his trouble.
With nobody around to hear him and nothing better to do, Nick continued whining.
“Nick will take that job, of course. He won’t ask a lot of questions. He never does. Once he figures out he’s been scammed, he won’t even quit. Good old Nick. Life’s biggest sucker. Just dangle that carrot in front of him, and he’ll run right into the stick every time.”
After another half hour of killing, the last wraith of the day floated through the wall barely formed, failed to keep aloft in the air, and smashed itself on the floor before Nick could even get to it. The dungeon was spent. It had never been good for more than a couple dozen a day, and today it wasn’t even up to that low standard.
Still, the job ad hadn’t technically been lying. His dungeon access was unlimited. The dungeon itself wasn’t, but his employer didn’t consider that to be their problem.
“Ten points. Almost there.”
Nick swung his sword, sending fluorescent green juice flying through the cave as he stabbed it down into the dirt, left it stuck there, and brought up his status screen. Most days, he was lying when he said he was almost there. Today it was almost true.
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Level 4 Swordsman
Accumulation: 3992/4000
HP 300/300
MP: 0/0
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Strike: 20
Block: 15
Dodge: 10
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Skills:Short Swords (Level 3)
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Once again, Nick bemoaned not spending a single point of his stats on the ability to get out of the way of the sludge the exploding monsters put out. In his tutorial run, it hadn’t seemed important. The levels were coming quickly, at that point. The universe was his oyster. He might have been yanked out of his own universe without warning, but he had what looked like a classic hero class and it was progressing just fine.
When he completed the tutorial and was warped to the refugee center for those yanked from their home universes, the first worker there had been so shocked to see Nick''s class and level that he could hardly look him in the eye. Good classes were almost always out of the ordinary. Simple classes were almost always bad. They did grunt work.
There were exceptions, but Swordsman wasn’t one of them. Especially not when the average level off-universe travellers got to in their tutorials was over ten, and Nick had barely gained three. His situation was so bad that people thought he was joking when he told them about it, and avoided him like the plague once they found out he wasn’t.
Nothing had been what he expected past that point, but after months and months of grinding he was almost there.
“It’s going to happen tomorrow, Nick. You can do this. One more day, Nick. You’ll make it.”
He had a sinking suspicion he had been going a bit crazy, lately, but that hadn’t stopped him from talking to himself. It wasn’t like there was anybody else to talk to, around here.
He slapped his face to help the words sink in, and immediately regretted stirring up the remnant monster-goo on his skin. Pulling his bottom-tier Learner’s Sword out of the dirt, he stumbled towards a lukewarm shower in the literal shed that served as his living space. If he hurried, he could even get in a quick nap before it was time to open the store.
<hr>
Ding-dong!
The door to the Astramart swung open with the usual chime, letting in the usual breeze of slightly-warmer air from outside the shop. Everything in the shop and the breathable air outside of it were all sealed under the same force-field, so it would have been much cheaper to simply keep both spaces at the same temperature.
Astramart, Nick''s handbook said, was better than that. There were four entire pages on the importance of those two temperatures, of the customer’s expectation that entering the interior of the store felt like entering an entirely different kind of area than the outside dome-protected area. Customers could refuel spaceships anywhere. They could buy snacks a dozen places, or rely on their ship’s food constructors. They came to Astramart, the handbook said, because it represented a higher level of service.
“No, man. You don’t get it.” Nick couldn’t tell if the two kids entering the store were assholes, if he just envied the mountain of credits worth of gear they were wrapped up in, or both. “Broken dungeons. That’s what’s up.”
“Broken dungeons are broken, right? You can’t level in them.”
“You want to level?” The first kid waved his arm and opened up a green rift in the fabric of space, then started shoveling bags of snacks into it. Nick watched the store’s auto-merchant function count up the purchase. It was working just fine. “I’ll take you somewhere to level after. I know good places. Broken dungeons aren’t about leveling, man. They are an experience thing.”
If the temperature differential between the outside and interior air was ever to equalize, Nick had ten pages of employee handbook on how to handle that emergency, all of which boiled down to something like wait around until the automated repair function fixes it. If that failed, he was to move on to wait around even longer until a repair ship arrives, then stay out of the way while they fix both the temperature and the automated repair function.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“I don’t understand.” The second guy picked a hundred-can cube of beverages out of the freezer and hefted it into his friend’s storage one-handed like it weighed as much as a tennis ball. His stats were apparently somewhere past the level five threshold. “I don’t get it.”
“I know you don’t. You can’t. I’m telling you, you go into a broken dungeon, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s just broken. Worthless. But if it’s broken just right, you see some shit. Real shit. Colors and shit.”
Nick''s translator was actually pretty good, one of the few real perks of working at an Astramart Spacestop location. His appraisal skill told him it worked by digging into his brain, finding the closest cultural equivalent to whatever he was hearing that his experiences could provide, and then translated whatever alien language he would have otherwise heard into that dialect.
The translator was almost always reliable, and it had pegged these two guys as bros. Perhaps the broiest brosephs to ever bro, in his store, paying for things with the fruits of classes and levels their fathers had bought for them. Or, hell, maybe just their father’s money outright.
Astramart was a convenience store, but it also was a convenience store on the edge of everything. Shipping costs added up. Maintaining a clean, bright building millions of miles out in the boonies cost something, too. The purchases they were making today were worth more than Nick''s salary in a year. To these guys, it was chump change. If dad’s bank account was the reason why, he wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.
Nick stood behind the counter with a blank smile on his face. He was another one of the reasons Astramart cost so much, even if he was probably the cheapest thing in the store. In the event that bro one or bro two needed him, he had a total of forty-seven pages of employee guidebook on hand to tell him exactly how to meet their needs to the Astramart standard of service.
That had never once happened. In his long, lonely service to Astramart, nobody had ever once actually spoken to him. These were people of means and distinction. They had no reason to. Since he had climbed onboard the first of many budget transports that took him from the off-universe refugee center to the store, he had a lot of time to think about that. In the end, the conclusion he came to was as simple as it was depressing.
He was here specifically to be ignored, a kind of low-class window dressing that reassured the customers they had made the right choice for their preserved convenience store purchases. For the next sixteen hours, he’d stand behind the counter, strictly prohibited from accessing any universal network entertainment while customers were in the store. They’d walk past him without a single sign of recognition. That was the deal. It was as constant as the artificial gravity holding him to his asteroid home.
“I don’t want the deluxe soap. I want the ultra-deluxe. I have sensitive skin, I always have…”
That was a big, unarmored reptilian man. One the system chose to portray as a whining british aristocrat in tone.
“If we get some booze here, we can skip out once we''ve made an appearance. You know that Thelsa will give a dozen speeches, once she’s going. We can hit up the slipstream to the sea of stars and do our drinking there with whoever else has the sense to sneak out.”
A couple of well-dressed young women, each wearing a suite of self-defense mechanisms containing jewelry that could either purchase or destroy Nick a hundred times over. The translator played them fairly flat, a couple of average post-university women of means whose assessment of their own value hinged on a low appraisal of someone else’s.
They milled in and out, spending fortunes and hardly registering the expense, and each carrying a small, depressing fragment of a story with them.
“Well of course father thinks so. He’s a fool.”
“Well, damn. My wildcatting days are done, or else I’d love to join you. How big did you say the deposit was? Well, I suppose I could…”
“Oh, he certainly doesn’t know. I have my fun where he can’t see. Even if he found out, what could he do? He couldn’t replace me unless he was willing to settle for gutter trash, and his parents would cut him off at the first hint of that.”
“I”m sorry. Son? You there? I’m just looking for Whaltey Sausage Meal. You’ve heard of it?”
That last one threw Nick off. It sounded like it was addressed to him. That happened every now and again. It always turned out to be something else. Even so, it almost always managed to break him out of his deep, almost meditative zoned-out state. Sometimes it would take him hours to get back in. It was annoying, but it was part of the job.
When his eyes came back into focus and landed on an older, rougher-looking mustached man in black and red clothing, he realized this time was different. The man was standing right at the counter, looking Nick straight in his glassy eyes.
“I could go get a medkit if something’s wrong, son. Are you on something, or hurt?”
Allowing a customer to help him in any way would violate at least six pages of customer service protocol that Nick could remember off the top of his head. Luckily, the absolute impossibility of the offer shocked him the rest of the way out of his stupor and woke him up enough to finally respond.
“Oh, no, that won’t be necessary, sir.” Nick smiled big and fake, as the handbook demanded. “I was just a little distracted.”
“That’s one way to say it.” The man smiled in a tilted-mouth, wry sort of way. “Another way to say it was you were zoned out so hard your soul was about to leak out of your nose.”
The translator was having trouble with the man at first. It did that, sometimes, when someone was hard to read or when a language was particularly obscure. It got it after a moment, transitioning from a flat, almost robotic voice all the way to portraying the man as an old wise ranch hand type. The kind of guy who would lean on a fencepost watching the sunset, then offer you homespun wisdom about the important things in life.
“I… yes.”
Nick decided to trust this guy was different enough that actually talking to him wouldn’t be a disaster. He let the huge, fake smile down. “You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to get the hang of that. I’d never get through my days if I was fully awake for them.”
“Ha!”
The man slapped the counter, hard. Whatever alloy the tabletop was made out of held up, but Nick could tell the same slap would have turned him into jelly.
“I guess so. Anyway, do you have any? I’ve been looking all over. No luck yet.”
“Any… what? I’m sorry. Whatever you asked for, you asked for it while I was still not quite here.”
“Whaltey Sausage Meal.”
“That’s… food?”
“Almost, son. Almost.” The man held his hands apart about six inches. “Comes in a foil bag about this big. Smells like processed rat and sulphur when you open it up. I’ve been to ten stores and haven’t found it yet. It used to be all over.”
“I’ll check.”
Nick had never actually had to check anything in the system, and it took him a second to figure out how to get the mental link to the store’s inventory running. A query for Whaltey brought up three different sizes of the same unhealthy looking bagged slop, all of which were out of stock.
“I’m sorry. It looks like we don’t have it. We do have… Tail-Slap Meatslop. Which looks almost as bad, if that helps.”
“No, no. It’s alright, son. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it. I don’t want to get used to some new kind of crime-in-a-bag. It was the old kind I wanted.”
“Nostalgia?”
“Something like that,” The man pursed his lips wistfully, “but if you don’t have it, you don’t have it.”
Quick as lightning, the man’s hand dropped to his hip, then came up with a coin. He flipped it through the air to Nick, who was so out of practice dealing with actual people that it clattered on the table. He winced at the noise and reached to pick it up, then reached out to hand it back.
“No need for currency, sir. Any purchases you make are automatically deducted.”
“No, son. That’s a tip. For your help.”
“A tip?” Nick looked at the coin in his hand in shock. “Sir, this is a hundred credits. It’s more than I make in a week.”
“Really? Son, you need a different line of work.” The man tapped the table. “Anyhow, have a good day there. And thank you for taking the time to check for me.”
It was the thank you that did it. Somewhere deep in Nick''s soul, it opened up a long-closed closet of memories of real, significant human interaction. He suddenly remembered what it was like to have peers. Or even to have friends. He could barely, just barely, remember what it was like to be a person instead of expensive window dressing in a convenience store.
People did not act like Nick was acting. Not happy people, at least. He made a split-second decision to be different.
“Sir?” Nick called. He half-expected the man not to stop. He did, though, and turned to face the counter again. “I think I might have a possibility for you, if you are interested.”
“A possibility?”
“A way to get the product you want. I figure if you’ve checked so many stores, it might be discontinued. But we have a sort of… I don’t know what you’d call it. A storage-hole, out back. Carved into the asteroid. When products are discontinued, the store usually chucks them back there. No guarantees, but…”
“Say no more, son. It sounds like a good bet. Can you take me there?”
“I would, but the store would notice. I’m on shift for the next eight hours. I have to keep this job, or they kick me out of the dome.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad. Somewhere else, you could find a better job, maybe.”
“No, you don’t get it. They don’t ship me off to some other place. They just kick me out of the dome.” It wasn’t an exaggeration. It had been a banner day for Nick when he had found that little tidbit in his employment contract. “Just pfft, and then the vacuum of space.”
“Ah. I see. I think I can help with that.”
Nick watched with interest as the man pulled a small communicator-like device out of his pocket and punched a few buttons. There was no guessing the exact purpose of the device. Every class had its own gadgets and gizmos, as well as access to a thousand class-generic utilities that could be purchased by anyone who could afford them.
This particular one took in the man’s input, sat quietly in his hand for a moment, then pinged.
“There. That should do it. Store, shut down to outside traffic.” With no ado, the dome outside turned opaque as the various maintenance drones that maintained the store all lurched to life at once. “Okay, let’s go.”
Nick liked the man, but didn’t want to fall into a trap just because he hadn’t checked all the boxes he should.
“What did you just do? Did you hack the store?”
“Son, do I look like I know how to hack a store? I bought the place.”
“Wait.” Nick put his hand to his head. “What? The whole store?”
“The whole asteroid. But only for the next four hours, so let’s get moving.”
Nick watched as the man walked towards the front of the store and the double sliding automatic doors that would lead him outside.
“Kid, I might be your boss, but I’m not gonna order you to do anything. You coming?”
Nick snapped his mouth shut, then used every bit of the meager enhancements he got from his class to vault over the counter in chase.