The Gate of the Feral Gods

by Matt Dinniman

  Clay pulled it from my hand and squinted, examining it. He immediately popped it into his mouth and lit it.

  “Good shit. Welcome to Hump Town. Stay out of city hall. Dromedarians only. Other than that, have fun. If you’re into weird shit, Weird Shit Alley is up against the far wall on the northeast side of town. Otherwise, the regular girls are mostly on Hump Street. I recommend Jazmin Delight over at the Wiggle Room.”

  “Wait,” Katia said. “So the town is called Hump Town because…”

  “Yeah, we’re a brothel town. What did you think? Now get out of here. And again, stay out of city hall.”

  New Quest. “Stay out of city hall.”

  Find out what’s in city hall. It just might be important.

  Reward: You will receive a Silver Quest Box.

  “Well that’s, I don’t know. A little obvious,” I muttered as the camel wandered away, smoking his blitz stick. He stopped and talked to another camel, pointing at us. They both laughed.

  “Do you think the prostitutes are more camels?” Donut asked. “Because that’s just weird.”

  “Not as weird as an entire, prostitution-based economy when there’s only two towns. It’s like the Iron Tangle all over again. It doesn’t make any sense.” Clay proudly showed his blitz stick to another camel, who also laughed. I was starting to realize what had just happened. We’d gotten scammed. I grunted. You asshole. Well-played.

  “Let’s find Mordecai.”

  The town’s streets were laid out like a set of nested semi-circles, like a rainbow. The residences dotted the outer ring, just inside the wall, interspersed with barracks-like buildings. The second ring consisted of shops and a handful of training guilds with the large City Hall building in the center. It was the largest building in town, rising up to the top of the fabric awnings, which all ran from the top of the building to both the town wall and the tomb wall behind it, like an umbrella. Each individual awning piece was triangular, like a jib on a sailboat, but much, much bigger.

  The town was larger than I expected. Larger than the medium skyfowl town I “owned” from the third floor. The inns and Desperado Club were all on the third ring, the aptly labeled “Hump Street.”

  As we made our way, the wind abruptly stopped. And just like that, dirty light streamed in from the spaces between the fabric awnings. Shouts rose around town, and suddenly camels were everywhere. A group appeared, pulling ladders and climbing the walls, unhooking the fabric. We had to step out of the way as a group of tall camels strode by on steampunk-like, metal and spring stilts. We watched as they rolled the fabric up. In minutes, the massive sails were pulled up and placed atop the city hall. I caught the shimmer of enchantment in the fabric. A group of camels expertly twisted the sails atop of the tower. The blue and white stripes formed a pattern, making something between a minaret, the onion towers atop Saint Basil’s cathedral, and soft serve ice cream. Only it was all made of fabric. Fabric they could quickly unfurl and re-deploy the moment another storm arrived.

  “That’s pretty nifty,” I said, amazed at how quickly they’d taken it all down.

  “Amazing,” Katia agreed.

  I stared up into the sky, agape. On the third floor there’d been a fake ceiling with an illusory sky. There’d really been ceiling up there, one I could easily hit with my slingshot.

  Now, I could see the distant shimmer of what appeared to be a forcefield, but it was high, high in the air. Airplane height. I turned in a circle. The city ended at a massive wall that had to be over a hundred feet tall. Before, I had thought we were in a giant bowl. I realized now that I was correct. A bowl that sat atop a tomb. What had the description called it? The Necropolis of Anser.

  “Carl, this doesn’t feel very dungeon-like to me,” Donut said, looking up at the sky.

  I laughed. “You said you didn’t like tunnels. There’s a top. It’s just really, really high up there. Remember what it said when we first came in? It called this place bubble number 543.”

  Katia was also turning in circles, looking into the air. “We’re under a dome,” she agreed. “Look at the way the light shines. It’s gotta be four or five kilometers to the top.”

  Something flew by high above. It was a giant bird of some sort. It dove out of view past the edge of the bowl.

  “If we’re in the air quadrant, and the subterranean quadrant is under our feet, where are the land and sea quadrants?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But if we’re in a bowl. Maybe it’s like an island, and there’s water outside the bowl.”

  “You’re close,” a new, almost-familiar voice said. I turned to look at the skyfowl. The large eagle approached us from one of the deeper streets.

  “Mordecai,” I said, looking at the light brown and beige eagle. “Is that you? Like the real you?”

  He grunted. “Are you taking the scenic route? By the gods, I had to come looking for you. This isn’t what I really looked like. They made me a rock edge skyfowl. I was a centurion. Darker feathers. Larger wingspan. Bigger talons. Much more handsome.”

  Mongo rushed up and sniffed at the manager, and upon realizing who it was, started bouncing up and down.

  “You eagle guys all look the same to me,” I said. We, again, had to move out of the way as a group of dromedarians marched past. There were seven of them, and the system listed them as Level 48 Waster Patrol. They were decked out in dark robes. They carried spears and more of the bazookas over their shoulders. These guys walked with purpose and headed straight for the exit.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Mordecai continued. “It’s amazing. It’s the first time I’ve been in a body similar to my real form in a very long time. But they fucked me.” Mordecai spread out his wings. “I’m in the body of a goddamn cleric. That means I’m clipped. I can fly, but only short distances. Imagine if you suddenly woke up in the body of a eunuch and were then thrown into a supermodel orgy.” He looked up into the sky and sighed heavily. “At least I’m still a skyfowl. And anything is better than the damn toad.”

  Skyfowl didn’t have arms. Just feet and wings, like regular eagles. “Can you still, you know, do potion stuff in that body?”

  He looked at me as if I just asked to see nudes of his mom.

  “Better than ever,” he said. “Anyway, Katia, you were close. We are in a dome. Like a snowglobe. They’re calling them bubbles. The Necropolis of Anser is a very high tower, and we are on top of it.” He pointed up. “That bubble is bigger than it looks from here. The ground and the sea are far below us. You came in a few minutes late, so you missed the first announcement, but there’s going to be another announcement explaining the floor’s rules in a couple of minutes. Let’s get into a saferoom and get some food and listen to what they gotta say.”

  We walked toward Mordecai’s chosen inn, a bar called The Toe. I walked ahead with Mordecai, while Katia, Mongo, and Donut held back, oohing and ahhing at all the sights. The town was an odd mix of stereotypical, movie-style, middle-eastern village mixed in with the Burning Man Festival. The adobe buildings were oftentimes augmented with rusty, metallic exoskeletons. I couldn’t tell if it was armor, something functional, or just art. One residence had a steampunk-ish telescope on top, pointing up. Another held a weather station that glowed with enchantment. A battery-powered engine chugged outside of another building. A pair of young camels zipped by on a tracked cart, like a mini tractor, dragging a rickety wagon stacked impossibly high with branches. They laughed as they bounced. The whole town smelled of smoke and oil and dirt.

  Every NPC I’d seen so far was a camel, but that changed once we hit Hump Street. A pair of women standing outside one bar spied us, and they both changed shape, one into a human woman, the other into a skyfowl.

  “Are those changelings or doppelgangers?” I asked. The tag over them said they were what they portrayed.

  “Changelings, like me,” Mordecai said sourly. “Don’t trust them. If you’re feeling like you need to, you know, stick with the Desperado Club.”
<
br />   The cookbook had something similar to say about changelings. It’d called them thieving, backstabbing whores, or something of the like.

  I observed a pair of crawlers gawking at us. Both were level-22 humans. I waved, and they backed away into a different bar, as if they were afraid of me.

  “Fifteen days, huh?” I said, changing the subject.

  “I was expecting 12,” Mordecai said. “The fact they gave us three more than expected is not necessarily a good thing. I already know how the floor works, and we’re already screwed. So with the extra three days, I suspect we might be in for a nasty surprise.”

  “Why are we screwed?” I asked.

  “You’re stuck in a quadrant with maybe three dozen other crawlers. That’s it. Every one I’ve seen so far other than you guys is so underpowered, it’s a miracle they’ve made it this far. And what’s worse, you gotta use them to help you storm the gnome castle to get to the stairwell.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We need to reset our buffs, get some sleep, open up all our boxes, and then see if we can find the place.”

  “Find it?” Mordecai asked. He pointed up. I looked, following his wing. High, high above, brushing the ceiling of the dome and far to the side was a tiny, little speck. “There’s your castle.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  The Toe was a simple, inn-style tavern with a Dromedarian proprietor. The place smelled like a petting zoo. This inn only employed a single prostitute, a woman changeling named Juice Box, who sat pouting in the corner after we all rejected her. In addition to the woman, the Toe also offered alcohol, food, and a few rooms.

  The incoming message was not a regular announcement as we still had ten more hours until the recap episode. The bar had the traditional three screens, but the middle screen with the top-10 was empty. A countdown appeared, indicating it would populate in ten hours after the recap. Apparently that was a normal thing.

  We ordered drinks and food and sat at the table, waiting for the message. It came quickly.

  Hello, Crawlers. Welcome to the fifth floor! We are so very excited for you to enjoy this new and exciting level! We have just over 178,000 of you joining us. The last floor was somewhat of a mystery, and finding out how it worked was part of the fun. This floor is a little different. The layout is not so much a secret, and the rules are pretty simple. We want you guys to have a great time with this one.

  There are over 4,000 castles on this floor. Every castle contains a single stairwell. No two castles are the same.

  Think of a sheet of bubble wrap. Every bubble is its own self-contained world. Each individual world has four zones or “quadrants.”

  There are a total of 1,172 bubbles. All of you are inside of a bubble, equally and randomly distributed the best we could. That comes to a little more than 150 crawlers per bubble. Like with the castles, every bubble is different.

  Each bubble is split into four quadrants. Land, Sea, Air, and Subterranean. Each quadrant has a single castle within. Your mission is to find the castle, raid it, and take the throne room. Once the throne room is occupied or the quadrant’s boss is killed, the castle is considered conquered. The stairwell is also located in the throne room, so no need to be scrambling around, worried about not being able to find it. Easy, right? Take the castle, take the stairwell.

  “That sounds simple enough,” I said. But it wasn’t simple. If we couldn’t fly, how the hell could we get up there? It’s not like we could build a cannon to toss us. We were going to have to build a balloon. Or an airplane. Or find a way to shoot it down. Something.

  But, there is a small hitch. In order for your stairwell to actually open up and be passable, all four castles in your bubble must first be taken. That’s right, the Land, Sea, Air, and Subterranean castles must all fall in order for you to proceed to the sixth floor.

  Mordecai groaned.

  “Goddamnit,” I said. I exchanged a look with Katia, who looked ill. Even Donut seemed taken aback.

  Luckily for you, once you have taken your own castle, you may traverse outside of your quadrant to lend a hand to your fellow bubble buddies. Once all four castles are taken, the bubble is popped, and you may proceed outside of the bubble area if you wish. You may not enter other bubbles until they are also popped.

  Good luck, folks. Some of these castles are much easier to crack than others. Also, the second round of sponsorship bidding is underway. We’ll have another message in a few hours after the regular recap episode. Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!

  We sat in silence for several moments. Mordecai’s feathers around his neck ruffled and unruffled. He turned to look at us.

  “I’m going to assume right now that out of the 150 or so crawlers in this bubble, every single one of them is an incompetent idiot. That means you have less than four days to take each castle. So get that food in your mouths, open all the boxes you’ve accumulated, get your asses to bed, and then get back out there. We got a lot of work to do.”

  2

  The first thing Donut did was bounce over to the mailbox and grab her spellbook-of-the-floor club prize as we headed toward our personal space.

  “Maybe it’ll be a flying spell,” Katia muttered.

  “We won’t be so lucky,” I said.

  We did, however, have three very rich sponsors amongst us, and we were about to receive three more. I hated, absolutely hated, having to depend on them for help, but I was at a loss as to what we were going to do.

  “What’s the point of being able to leave the bubble if we can’t get into the other bubbles?” Katia asked.

  “Right now we need to focus on that flying castle,” I said.

  Imani: Hey, Carl. What’s a backstay?

  Carl: In sailing terms? It’s the rigging that runs from the mast to the back of the boat. There are different kinds.

  Elle: There are 20 of us, and not a one of these old farts has ever sailed a boat. Can you believe that? I told them not to put me into Meadow Lark. I would’ve been better off in one of the more expensive old folks homes surrounded by rich old codgers who grew up on boats, but no. The system is giving us a sailing tutorial, but it doesn’t tell us where the things are. How are we supposed to pull the boom vang when we don’t know what it is? This thing is more complicated than those trains.

  Imani: We need to figure this out quickly. There are rocks everywhere. What’s a spinnaker? Wait. We don’t need that part yet.

  Carl: Jesus, you guys need to be careful. Sailing a boat isn’t something you can figure out on the fly. It takes months.

  Imani: We would have an NPC helping us if Elle hadn’t iced him.

  Elle: He was being suspicious. We’re on our way back to the island. If we crash, we crash. There are boats everywhere. We have our pick.

  Imani: Not all of us can float, Elle.

  Carl: Weren’t you on the island already? You know what, never mind. Just be careful.

  Donut gasped. “Carl, Carl, I got a good one this time!” She glowed as she read the book.

  I took a deep breath. “Donut. We talk about the spellbooks before we read them. Remember?”

  “Unwad your panties, Carl.”

  Katia laughed. “You got that from Elle.”

  “I know, right? She’s been teaching me sayings from the olden times.”

  “That’s not very princess-like,” I grumbled.

  “Oh, Carl. Just chillax.”

  “That is a good spell,” Mordecai said. “It’s another utility spell, like Hole.”

  “What is it?”

  “Astral Paw,” Mordecai said. “Not as good as Astral Hand because there’s no thumb to manipulate and hold things. But there’s more force to it, especially at higher levels, and it can be used as a weapon. She can grow claws on it at level five. At level 10, she can make the paw a lot bigger. At level 15, her skills and abilities will translate directly to the paw. That’s a big deal since her regular swipe is pretty strong. There’s a similar spell we might want to get for you. Astral Fist. Anyway, she ca
n manipulate items at a distance as if she was physically touching them. Distance grows with level-up. At level one, it’s about 10 meters.”

  I laughed. “Hey, Donut. If we were back home, you’d finally be able to knock that vase off the high shelf.”

  “That thing was a menace, Carl. It was haunted.”

  We’d had a high shelf covered with knickknacks and some heirloom vase thing over the television in our apartment. She’d tried several times to jump up there, but never got close. Sometimes she’d sit on my lap while I was playing a game, and she’d stare up at it and start meowing.

  We returned to our personal space. Almost two days later, and the cleaner bot had not yet finished cleaning all the blood. It was almost done. It was on the couch, sucking away at the back of the cushions when we entered.

  “That thing needs a raise,” I said.

  The bot beeped in agreement.

  “Open your boxes and then assign your stat points,” Mordecai said.

  I sat in the kitchen chair and pulled up the achievements I’d missed. I had several, including a few really good ones. I did not get any sort of credit for killing the mimic, though I hadn’t been expecting it. Most of the achievements revolved around dealing with Grull and tossing the Nightmare through the portal to blow the soul crystals.

  New Achievement! Let There Be Chaos.

  You have successfully summoned a god into the dungeon. That’s a great way to get more friends. Everybody loves it when someone brings immortal death machines to the party.

  Reward: It might’ve been a bad idea, but it’s sure going to be entertaining.

  New Achievement! Divine Epiphany.

  You have seen a deity. Don’t get too excited. It doesn’t mean you’re a prophet or anything like that. This is a pretty common achievement that all crawlers eventually receive if they survive long enough, so you aren’t really that special. Finding a god is easy. What you don’t want is for that god to find you.