by G. D. Penman
Whatever Strata did to his body while he was sleeping had left him ravenous. He didn’t look at the time, because that was just asking for trouble. Instead, he went digging through the bags he’d brought home in search of something resembling food.
Protein bars were in order, even if they looked much the same going into his body as coming out. They tasted like nothing, but he shoveled them into his mouth anyway. He needed his energy if they were going to get to the next deep tonight.
There was a gamble involved in pressing on so quickly, but the Night Ravager had proved to him right from the start that it was a fair gamble. They’d face monsters beyond their level, yes, but if they beat them, they’d fly up through the levels so much faster. Besides, he’d never been one to shy away from a challenge.
He couldn’t work out if he had brain damage, or if the reality that Strata portrayed was just so much brighter than his real life that it made food seem tasteless.
It was another one of those subjects that it didn’t help to dwell on. Much like potential ambushing crabs waiting for Lindsay, or the doubts Jezebel had seeded in his brain.
There was only one way to stop worrying about how Strata did all the things that it did, and that was to find out how it did them. If he could get an understanding of the mechanics of the game on that fundamental level, he would finally have solid foundations on which to lay his guesswork and supposition.
While he chewed his vile meal like a cow chewed cud, he slipped the charger into his phone and resumed his search for Edwin Klimpt.
A quick search produced no results, which Martin was fairly certain was impossible, or at least incredibly unlikely. The name was a little bit unusual, but surely there was an Edwin Klimpt somewhere in the world.
It wasn’t like you could move through life without leaving a digital trail. If you’d ever had a home, a job or even an argument online, some of your details were out there.
Two options presented themselves. Klimpt was definitely a real person, to register a patent, you needed biometric identification, so either this genius was some sort of luddite hermit – despite designing one of the most sophisticated pieces of gaming technology on the planet – or his details were being deliberately hidden. Suppressed, somehow.
Martin flipped back to the tab with the patent. There had to be some information on there, beyond the name of the person who filed. Personal details were absent from the form, hidden away behind personal privacy protections that were probably pretty reasonable, but frustrating in this moment.
All he knew for certain was that the patent had been filed somewhere in America, and even that was only because of the American spelling of words on the document. Everything else had been anonymized.
He closed the tab and went back to his search, feeding in other phrases from the patent application. Technical terms that meant nothing to him, but that might trigger some algorithm to show him some academic paper. A paper with the name Edwin Klimpt at the top. Nothing.
With a beleaguered sigh, and an eye still on the clock, Martin typed in the details to pull up the patent again, but he couldn’t find it. He grumbled through some menus to open up his browser history, but while there were literally hundreds of patents there, the last one was not for the NIH.
He backtracked, but it was useless. None of the last ten were for the NIH either. Something weird was going on. He typed Edwin Klimpt into the patent search and it produced nothing.
He stared at the empty expanse of white screen. It was interrupted a moment later by a message from Lindsay.
Heading back in.
There was nothing there. His one lead had run dry. He should never have closed the tab – the moment that he’d suspected something was weird about the search results, he should have dumped everything to the phone memory.
Once there, it would have taken seriously illegal action instead of simple algorithm tampering to take his hard-earned scraps of knowledge back from him.
The patent was a dead end. Edwin Klimpt didn’t exist. He was a dead end too.
If he wasn’t so broke, Martin might have flung the phone across the room. Instead, he pulled up the auction sites again and started trawling through them for any hints about the gate to Deep Four. The opening to Deep Three had been shaped by the events of Deep Two; it only stood to reason that the next one would be altered by their entrance too.
Very briefly, and with no small degree of guilt, he wondered what his companions’ new gear would have been worth at the going market rate. Julia’s staff had to be worth something. Lindsay’s cloak would have worked for any class, so he could see that selling well too.
If he had been a different person, less set on progress, he supposed he could have hoarded an item from each victory to sell along. Made enough cash to eat real food instead of whatever was currently sitting like a lead weight in his stomach.
He set that thought aside; there was no point dwelling on the minor miseries of this world when there was a whole other one to jump back into. The break was almost over, and he was eager to get back in and check on Speckles before they moved on.
This time, logging in didn’t feel like falling. More like slipping into something more comfortable.
Skaife’s little ratty hands were starting to feel more familiar than his own. The tail, which had lashed about on its own initially, now seemed to be almost entirely under his control, like another limb. That should have seemed strange. All of this should have.
This was not his body, yet he inhabited it without even the slightest hint of dysphoria. Even the bristles of fur at the periphery of his vision didn’t turn his stomach the way he might have expected.
It wasn’t like he was being changed. More like he’d been a rat on the inside for his whole life and it was only now escaping.
Speckles had waited dutifully, while the snake posse and the other lingering crusaders seemed to have vanished off into the tunnels.
“Me no like falling water. Feel like my head is drum.”
Martin ruffled the frog’s head, and instantly regretted it. He wiped the slime on his thigh-fur.
“I’m not a big fan of it myself.” he said. “But it was necessary to keep you safe.”
“Me like safe. Safe good.” Speckles bobbed along. “You keep me safe?”
“I’ll do my best.” Martin tried for a comforting smile but landed firmly in grimace territory.
He’d had big ideas about a native monster guide, but very few plans as to how to keep that guide safe once the real fighting started. He hoped Speckles wasn’t going to become a sad green stain on the floor of the dungeon, but hope was about the only thing that he had to offer to prevent it.
Speckles’ huge eyes seemed to take up all of Martin’s vision as he leaned in closer.
“Me think your best be good enough. Me think your best is a lot.”
With that strange vote of confidence lodged, Martin got down to business.
“Could you guide us to the Deep Gate?”
It was hard to pinpoint what exactly in Speckles’ demeanor made him seem uncomfortable when he seemed to be on the verge of wriggling out of his slimy skin at any given moment anyway. Nonetheless, he looked uncomfortable.
“Me could. Yes. If nothing moved.”
Martin let out a sigh. He had his suspicions about how regularly the dungeon was re-structured, and here came the confirmation.
“Me came up, many long time ago with other Anurvan. Me think things moved since then.”
This was why nobody else was trying to use an NPC guide, and why there were no maps of Strata being shared around online. The dungeon was being reshaped every day by the Masters, tweaked and improved or just rejigged entirely to prevent anyone from learning the way through.
Of course it was. There was no design so perfect that people couldn’t think of a way around it, so they just kept on changing the damn design.
He gave Speckles a pat on the back. “Okay. That’s all right. We’ll find it the old-fashioned way.”
Jericho and Julia logged back into the game, arriving in a flash and a giggle. The two of them were definitely in contact outside of the game. They’d spent a week adventuring together to reach the previous deep, without him or Lindsay in tow to act as chaperones.
Martin tried to think back through all of their interactions in Dracolich, to see if this little relationship of theirs had taken root back then, or if it was a new development.
Here in Strata, with such a small group, the fact that they might act as a voting bloc was concerning to say the least. He didn’t want to raise it with Lindsay, because she would inevitably just delight in making things awkward for everyone and wouldn’t see any harm in it either. If anything, she would give Martin more trouble than Julia and Jericho combined.
He put on his best impression of a socially well-adjusted friend. “Welcome back, you two.”
Julia gave him a little wave, but Jericho looked suspicious.
You two.
Great start. Good job, Martin.
“So, I’m thinking we start out searching the deliberately constructed tunnels on the far side. There seems to be a half-dozen of them to choose from. That way, we shouldn’t have to deal with too much organic honeycombing or tangled tunnels.”
Jericho blinked at him. “I see pretty Roman architecture, you see premonitions of future. Strange brain you have in that little rat head. Very strange.”
Julia whacked him ineffectually. “That sounds like a wonderful plan. Thank you.”
As one, the guild crests on their chests lit up. Lindsay’s voice seemed to echo from all around them.
“Good morning, campers. Sorry I had to split on you!”
Martin groaned and touched his crest. “A whole half hour time out, and that was the best joke you could come up with?”
He could almost hear her eyebrows waggling. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m not half the girl I used to be.”
Why had he spent a single moment worrying about her? Nobody bounced back like Lindsay.
Jericho interrupted before another flurry of bisection jokes could start up. “Where are you?”
“Deep One, just heading out of Beachhead.” Her beak clattered between each word. She must have been running. “Should I get anything from the shops?”
“Maybe some healing potions?” Julia replied, grinning.
Who knew they had missed their noble leader so much?
“Lindsay, we’re going to start scouting for the next gate,” Martin said. “I’ve got an ability to open one up every three days or so, and I think it makes sense to—”
She cut him off with what seemed like a forced laugh.
“Yep. Good plan. Do it. I’ll be down as quick as I can. I figure that with my Hollow Bones racial, Acrobatics passive and Raptor Strike, those stairs are going to be a breeze. It’s like they designed this deep just for me to show off.”
Martin wasn’t mistaken; it was a forced laugh. She was shaken. Anyone would be after an experience like that. But that made him wonder just how much of her brazen act was a mask over some deeper hurt. Lindsay had always seemed impervious, unflappable in the face of any challenge, and now he found himself questioning how well he knew her at all.
With Jericho taking point, they headed off into the furthest right of the tunnels. Everywhere Martin looked there were signs of the adventurers that had passed through before. The white stonework was scarred by mis-swung blades, and some enterprising crusaders had used the pale expanse as a message board to leave notes to their allies and enemies.
For the most part the graffiti was just a simple statement of existence. “We were here.” Scratched and inked into the very stone of the dungeon, demanding acknowledgement and attention.
Martin considered taking the fragments of his first dagger and sinking the Iron Riot sigil into that same stone, making his own statement of existence.
But then, the spiteful Master would probably just come along and wipe it clean. No. He didn’t need to leave a scribble, as if Strata was some truck-stop bathroom. His name was going to be set in stone as the rat who beat this dungeon. He was going to be a legend here, just as he’d been in Dracolich.
There were some shattered husks of crab people scattered around the place; looted, dead mobs called Militant Lithodes. They were smaller and more humanoid than the monstrous creature up in the waterfall but still substantial enough that Martin wondered how their armor had been so easily cracked.
As it turned out, Martin’s worries were entirely unfounded. There wasn’t a living specimen to be found anywhere they went.
The tunnel branched and split only twice, leading to dead ends and shell heaps on both occasions, but whatever treasure or experience there was to be gained here had been consumed by the locust hordes of players who’d already been through.
There was no sign of a Deep Gate; not even a hint of it, nor any sign of a monster substantial enough to hold the key.
Once back at the main chamber, the guild began to get restless.
“I thought you were meant to be clever, man,” Jericho rumbled. “You said you knew which way to go. What is the point of you?”
Martin bit back the first few replies that came to mind, finally spitting out, “I need more information before I can make an educated guess.”
“How much more?” Jericho pressed him. “How many empty tunnels do we walk up and down?”
Martin stopped, the embers of fury in his gut sparking to life. “You want to see behind the curtain? You want to know what I’m thinking? Is that what you want?”
Julia took a hold of his arm, but Jericho didn’t stop. He glowered down at Martin with contempt written all over his canine features. “You think you are smarter than everyone. Go on. Prove it.”
Martin held up his paw and started to count off points on his claws. “The pool in the central chamber would be the obvious place for the gate. Central, dramatic. But the last gate was under the water and I can’t see them repeating the same trick twice. Which makes me think that the pool is going to be some sort of trap.”
Jericho grunted in reluctant agreement. Martin was on a roll now.
“There is a narrative convention of hiding good things like treasure behind waterfalls, but the designers of Strata are aware of that. They would invert the expectation and put something bad behind the waterfall.”
He pointed at the endless downpour of water.
“The area surrounding the plunge pool is huge. It’s the perfect place for a pitched battle with some giant monster. Add in the fact that most people wouldn’t trigger the crab attack further up the stairs and you have the perfect recipe for a surprising giant boss monster hidden behind the waterfall. So, we avoid that.”
Now even Julia looked impressed.
“The only logical place to put the gate is further down one of these tunnels, so that people couldn’t just roll right through into the next deep immediately upon arrival.”
He pointed at himself.
“I haven’t seen any other exorcists, but the devs still have to take the abilities my class can unlock into account in their design, and the usual levelling curve that would deliver me here with Rite of Passage ready to use. Obvious boss monsters, hidden gates. That is the only design strategy that makes sense, at least for the next few deeps, before they can start to subvert expectations again by changing it up.”
He stepped up to Jericho and folded all his counted claws into a fist.
“Any questions?”
Jericho was grinning. “Weird brain is doing a great job, but I still think we check behind the waterfall.”
Julia let out a relieved little laugh and Martin felt the tension leaking out of him. It was easy to forget that Jericho was his friend, especially when he insisted on being antagonistic all the time, but that was just the way he communicated. Martin had a habit of shutting down, turning inward. Sometimes he needed a Jericho or a Lindsay to force him out of his shell.
“You know it’s a trap, right?”
Jericho squatted down until they were face to face. “You know they hide good treasure behind traps for people who can beat traps, yes?”
Martin was forced to concede that point. “We need treasure less than we need progress.”
Speckles was hopping up and down beside them. “You no want fight big monster. Me no want fight big monster!”
“Big monster, eh?” Jericho chuckled. He brought his forehead forward to bump against Martin’s, much more gently than anyone could have expected. “Come on now,” he murmured. “Treasure is progress. Have you seen any useless items down here?”
Martin knew he’d lost the argument, especially with Julia’s close… relationship with Jericho. Still, he could win on the details.
“We should wait for Lindsay before we trigger whatever is waiting behind that waterfall,” he said.
But Jericho had already set off for the central chamber. He called back over his shoulder, “I am thinking we surprise her with prizes after. We make her happy. You want her to be happy, yes?”
Julia was trying not to smirk. “She would be very pleased,” she said.
Martin grumbled under his breath, but his choices were to follow them or stand around like a petulant child. This wasn’t the time or the place.
Jericho strode up to the center of the waterfall, clapping his huge hands together and readying the little censer-weapon that he’d got from the last boss.
Julia was already preparing spells, blinking over and over to take in her full ability list and work out her timing. Martin would have to corner her for the details of exactly how hierophant magic worked and how that new staff interacted with it, because each time she cast something a new blossom opened up on the living wood.
A quick glance confirmed that they still had the chamber to themselves. Martin drew his sword, but there wasn’t much else he could do to get ready. For his part, Speckles had found a sheared-off column and was cowering behind it like any sensible creature would when confronted with this level of idiocy.
Jericho charged right into the water with a roar, apparently trusting in Martin’s prediction that he wasn’t running into solid stone. He vanished completely behind the wall of water. The moments ticked by, each one of them with the weight of an hour.
