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Dungeon Non-Functional!
Through direct damage to the dungeon itself or due to a problem with the environment it inhabits, this dungeon no longer functions properly. While even the smallest and weakest of dungeons will correct this type of problem over time, the natural process of healing might take longer in a low-quality or energy-starved environment.
Estimated Repair Time: 11 Days
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Nick spent some time looking at the message, reading it and rereading it. Then he screamed, filling the unpopulated dome with echoing sounds of suffering.
“How does it break?”
Nick kicked rocks all the way back to the main building.
“Sputtering? Sure. Creaking while it generates monsters? Of course. But breaking? Breaking?!”
He shifted quickly from anger to denial. It wasn’t, he told himself, that big of a deal. It was just one more week. Plus some days, sure, maybe closer to two weeks. He’d waited much longer than that to get to this point. He would, he told himself, be able to zone out again. He’d close off his mind to the passage of time, and it would whip by.
As soon as he got back on his shift, he couldn’t hide how big of a lie that was. Every moment was suddenly experienced in real-time again, every second vibrantly its own and existing for its own painful eternity. Every customer’s stupid rich-kid voice grated on his nerves. Every menial task was now its own sisyphian boulder-pushing event, dull and endless in and of itself.
Halfway through the eleven-day period, he threw his sword on the roof of the store. He could send a robot to get it later, but the process would be a pain. There was no use keeping a big knife around himself in a depression if he didn’t even have a use for it. He almost hated the robots themselves as they whizzed around taking care of almost every task that could have broken up the monotony of the waiting.
He checked the dungeon every day after his shift, hoping something might change and hurry the process of recovery. He knew it wouldn’t and it never did, but he did at least end up knowing about the passage of every single second, and every moment that remained until he could finally move on.
Finally, after what felt like decades of waiting, he was in his final shift before the dungeon would reboot. After a few more entitled customers ignoring every aspect of his being filtered through the store, he would finally be able to move on from his bad class to a still-bad but slightly better one, throw his hat into the job recruiting pool, and hope for an opportunity to do literally anything else.
Then it happened. As what would probably be the final customer of his shift left the store and blasted away to adventures he could only dream of having, the dome went opaque.
“The hell?”
Nick ran out of the store and verified that there was absolutely nothing of interest for him to see in the landing area. No ships were present that could have caused this. There was no apparent damage to the buildings or the asteroid that the robots needed to take a break to repair.
“Why now?”
The answer came in the form of a small blur of motion as a suitcase-sized metal box flew into the dome. Nothing could do that without clearance from the dome itself, so the connection between the box and whatever was happening was undeniable. Nick stood still as the box took a lap around the dome, leeched off its own velocity into the synthetic atmosphere, then settled just in front of him, hanging in the air in a way that defied every speck of the asteroid’s fake gravity. The box creaked and hissed as a small portion of the metal top slid back into the lid itself, exposing what Nick recognized as a holocrystal.
“Hi, kid.”
The black-clad mystery man’s face projected up from the crystal, lifelike outside of some pixilization and distortion that marred the image here and there.
“Are you surprised?”
“Of course. What’s going on?”
“If you just replied, I can’t hear you. Where I’m at, one-way messages are about all I can manage.”
The man coughed, a truly unhealthy-sounding hacking that immediately shifted Nick from annoyed interest to worry.
“First, I want to apologize for breaking your dungeon. I can’t imagine how pissed off you must have been about that.”
“Asshole!”
Nick yelled, knowing the hologram couldn’t hear him.
“I knew it. I knew it wasn’t a coincidence.”
“No, it didn’t just break on its own. In my defense, it was the only way I could have possibly got you to wait before you locked yourself into that path. You weren’t gonna listen to some old man you didn’t know.”
The man coughed again, wiping his mouth with a hand that came away with a small streak of red.
“But I figured that if there was one thing this universe screwed you out of, it was choices. Where I was headed when I left you, it seemed like there was a good chance I might be able to give you one, for once.”
Just then, there was no universe to Nick. As soon as the man mentioned a real, actual choice, his focus locked in like the bolts on a safe.
“So you know, when an old man like me starts chasing the past like you saw me do, it’s usually because he doesn’t see that much future ahead of him. That’s the kind of thing you have to pay attention to when you are in my line of business.”
The man’s words started to slur a bit. His eyes, which were sharp and focused at the beginning of the message, seemed to be losing their piercing qualities.
“Shit. I thought I’d have more time.”
The old man’s hand moved forward unsteadily to hit a few keys that Nick could hear but couldn’t see, then came back.
“Point is, that crystal in front of you is more than a message. It’s a choice. It’s not a safe choice, or an easy one. I made the same one a long time ago.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The old man coughed again. It didn’t sound better, despite being much weaker now.
“Don’t feel obligated. If you can’t tell, I probably won’t be swinging back your way after this. I just…”
The man seemed to forget where he was for a moment, staring blankly ahead of himself for a few beats before pulling things back together for one last sentence.
“You gave me company when I needed it, back there. I just wanted to thank you by giving you another path to follow. After reading this, you should have about another two minutes to make your choice before the dome goes clear again. It’s your game, whether you call or fold. Good luck either way, kid.”
The message cut off. Nick stood there staring down at the crystal, which didn’t give any obvious signs of activity. Slowly, his curiosity pulled his hand forward until his fingers barely brushed the hard surface of the jewel. It react instantly
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The Outlaw Brody McCann is offering you succession rights to his path.
Do you accept this offer?
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Nothing in any of the books Nick had read mentioned anything like this. Whatever was happening here was either a secret, or rare enough they didn’t consider it interesting.
“Not a lot of information to go on with, Brody. How dangerous and hard are we talking?”
The crystal sat there, silent. The system, however, chose that moment to make things more complex.
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Dungeon Repair Complete
You recently visited a dungeon in disrepair. It is now functional again, and, barring further interference, will behave as usual on your next visit.
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Just like the man had said, there were two choices laid out in front of him. Nick glanced behind him at the cavity in the rock of the asteroid that held its dungeon. He could run over there, kill a few wraiths in half, level, and transition to his new class evolution within the next five minutes. Or he could try to get this crystal to work, abandon all that, and move forward in a different direction that he had no information on.
The thing holding him back the most was the sheer amount of time he had sunk into waiting for his swordsman evolution. He was surprised just how much value the waiting seemed to have added to it. On some level, he knew it wasn’t much. On every other level, it was the focus of his entire life for the last several months. It was hard to think of giving it up.
Somehow, it even mattered that the crystal in front of him wasn’t a pretty color. It wasn’t obsidian black or crimson red. It was just a dull brown thing, a boring color that didn’t give off much of a feeling of adventure.
On the other hand, he could remember what it was like to be around that man, who he was only starting to think of as Brody. He had been a little goofy, and willing to eat things that weren’t exactly food. From what little he had told Nick of his past, he hadn’t had an easy go of things, at least at first. Nick knew absolutely nothing about what his class was or how it worked.
If there was one thing for sure, though, he hadn’t been boring. To Nick, that was enough to overrule any other considerations. He reached out and touched the crystal, focusing his desire to take what Brody had given him and make it his own. Opening his very soul to it.
Nothing happened.
“Oh, yeah. The system interface. Right.”
Opening back up the window, Nick indicated the Y portion of the Y/N choice, and immediately collapsed to the ground. When Nick had first started leveling his class, the feeling of growing stronger had been addictive and exciting. It was the feeling of liquid power being injected directly into every inch of his muscle and bone. This was the same process in reverse, only worse. It was like a wolf was latched onto his soul, shaking. The power he had gained was ripped off like scabs from a wound and he writhed screaming on the ground.
In a blink, the pain stopped, gone like it had never been there at all. In its place was sweet, addictive information.
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Level 1 Starlight Mercenary
Accumulation: 0/500
HP 50/50
MP: 10/10
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Proficiencies:
Gunslinger (Level 0)
Knife-fighter (Level 0)
Tinker (Level 0)
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Skill: 10
Toughness: 10
Quick: 10
Psyche: 10
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Traits:
| Stranger | Bound Captain |
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“Shit."
Nick grimaced at his status screen.
“Level one, again.”
The screen was similar in some ways to what he had before. Every class started with fifty health points, unless they had some skill that pushed the number higher. He had stats. He saw things listed that at least looked like skills, even if the switch to proficiencies was not lost on him. The biggest superficial change was the ten points of honest-to-god magic power gracing his resources. That almost justified the switch, but only almost. He would have had magic power as a magic swordsman, too.
The traits were a mystery, though he knew some classes could pick up qualities that didn’t qualify as skills but still provided benefits. That was where his understanding ran out. Everything else was a mystery that would require a deeper look, but status screens were built to accommodate that kind of zoomed-in examination. Focusing on the class name, Nick brought up every detail the system would give him.
The attempt came with another wince-inducing wave of pain as the system protested what should have been a routine action.
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Warning! Class host incompatibilities detected. Resolving…
Incompatibility resolution successful. The previous errors detected are attributable to the class host’s origins in a non-integrated universe. A lack of cultural context regarding Actolia and the feats of historic Actolians of note has been mitigated by adjusting the aesthetics and superficial touchpoint references of the class to fit the most similar cultural archetype from the class host’s home world.
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That was nonsense, as near as Nick could tell. He stared at the message for a bit without making any sense of it at all. Shaking his head, he moved back to the class description screen, hoping what he read there would help him decode the system-provided nonsense.
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Starlight Mercenary (Ancient Actolia Heritage class, Heritable)
The stars, they say, stretch on forever. Each holds entire worlds captive, full of people and places. Each is waiting for you to explore it, filled to the brim with both opportunity and danger. Each features a potentially infinite list of problems to be solved, and promises riches to those with what it takes to solve them.
As the Starlight Mercenary, you are as well equipped to resolve these issues as anyone in the greater universe. Whether assigned to you by individuals or the system itself, some tasks and jobs will present themselves to you as bounties, specialized class missions that carry system awards above and beyond any negotiated pay.
Starlight Mercenary is a pathed class, one that progresses not only in terms of levels. As you mold yourself to fit your newfound title and contemplate the concepts related to it, you will find strength that both amplifies and surpasses that granted to you by stats.
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That was all the system had to say, but it was a lot. Class descriptions were starter knowledge, at best. The fact that he got three full paragraphs was a far better sign than the bare Uses swords in combat and may progress to more advanced classes description Swordsman had come with.