Chapter Twelve - My Oldest Friend

I stood outside Dungeon Home with trepidation in my heart. I’d prepared as best I could, but I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. Would the others attack me? If I died, I would respawn in Variak now so… I should be okay. I should be safe even from death.

I had three homepoints set. Variak, Bluebell Bridge, and the Shady Woods Copse. Tread the Sky let players teleport freely between their three home points but everywhere else had to be explored by foot. Or horseback. Or, some mythic level players apparently had flying mounts.

In my case, I could float anywhere.

I could take the form of a Jellyfae once again, but Francis had emphasized that I was not a mob. The game still regarded me as a player and monsters would still attack me based on their instinct. As such, I floated near the top of the cave’s entrance. If there was any place I knew by heart it was Dungeon Home and, barring one heck of a thrown club, none of them could hurt me if I hovered out of reach.

‘Ghoul probably could, but I should be safe from even Momma Bossbear,’ I thought.

I had gotten some leather armor with the money I’d been making as a builder. Pants, gloves, some armor. I didn’t know if I could ever replace the leather tunic that was a symbol of my friendship with Bugbear but everything else was fair game.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t really a way to increase my level without hurting my kin. Completing quests worked, but I hadn’t been very interested in doing that, and almost all of the quests for adventure classes involved killing monsters anyway, which I was still unwilling to do. Luckily, my armor remained the same even when transformed into my Jellyfae form so I kept the added protection of my new armor. I was the sturdiest Jellyfae that ever floated!

It was time to see my old friend. I didn’t hold any illusions that I could free him. In the end, I’d had to break the entire world so that Francis would fix me into something that could leave the Dungeon. Bugbear didn’t have that advantage. I didn’t think he had words like I did either. But he knew me. He’d known me. The question remained, would he remember me? Would he remember saving me, all those cycles ago?

I hoped so.

I ventured in slowly, making sure to stay near the top of the ceiling where the bugbears couldn’t reach me. I quickly made it to the first clearing, and turned around to view the Great-Open.

A large hole in the ground leading out into a sunny light sky. It wasn’t long ago at all that that hole had been the center of my entire world. It looked so small now, after all the sights I’d seen.

Sure enough, a bugbear walked around the corner. Busterbear, walking his usual route. The mob that had almost killed me when I’d first become a player. The one Bugbear had fought to let me go free.

It didn’t take long for him to be alerted to my presence, and I could see in a clinical detached way how his instinct made him flip from a calm guardian to a maddened attack bear. He rushed towards me, frothing inside his huge mouth and swung a sword up towards me.

He was too short to reach me though, and in moments the adrenaline in my heart calmed as the creature continued futility swinging his sword. It was only then that I noticed something was wrong.

His name had been changed. He looked like Busterbear. His fur had the same patterns and his eyes were the same color. This was Busterbear. But now he was just labeled “Bugbear.” My names were gone.

A cold pit began to form in my jelly-guts.

Francis had said they’d shut down Tread the Sky for a week to clean up the problems I’d caused. What if the problems he’d been talking about meant creatures like Busterbear? Torchlight and Skelledog? What if… what if he’d…?

No longer willing to take my time, I flew down the corridors retreading old paths long known to me. Bugbear! Bugbear had to be alright!

I passed bugbear after bugbear, and found that none of them had retained their names. Skeleton looked normal, but Skelledog’s name had been changed to Bone Hound. Panic rising, I slid passed Ghoul on the fourth floor before sneaking back up the stairs into the corridor where I spent almost all of my life.

I found it empty.

“Bugbear!” I exclaimed. “Bugbear! Are… are you here!? Bugbear!”

I zoomed down the halls, irritated by the flaring red torches indicating my own presence in the Dungeon. Bugbear instinct had always led him on a large route but it took me no time at all to traverse the entire thing, flying through the halls as only I could. Every second spent unable to find him added to my desperation.

Bugbear was gone.

I shook with anger and fear, terrified that I wouldn’t find him anywhere in the dungeon and even more afraid that I would. Which would be worse? To not find him at all, or to find him and discover that the personality that he had been developing, the life inside him that fought against the instinct, had been snuffed out like the others?

Why would he have been spared? Why would Francis have preserved him while reverting the others to their generic NPC forms? He wouldn’t. Bugbear must be gone, but I refused to believe it.

“Bugbear!” I screamed frantically searching hallways I’d already entered. “Bugbear!?”

By now I had a small hoard of nameless bugbears following me below. They would follow me to anywhere in the dungeon once they’d spotted me, but as long as I could fly near the top of the dungeon none of them could harm me.

I slid down the torchlit corridors, hiding within flames until the bugbears lost track of me and left me alone, returning to their endless patrol.

It was amazing how quickly I had forgotten the rules of this place. I had to wait for Skeleton to open a door because I didn’t want to risk returning to my human form and endangering myself, but I found myself struggling to remember exactly when he would open the door. Was it near the end of the cycle? The beginning?

The details were escaping me and I felt afraid of that. I had loved this place, once. Now, after only a short time away I was forgetting what it meant to live here. What it meant to be a monster.

Dammit. I continued deeper into the dungeon checking room after room for any place Bugbear might’ve gone. Finally I found the bossroom, where Momma Bossbear sat in perpetual vigil, awaiting adventurers to kill… or be killed by. I didn’t dare enter, but I did open the door. She stood now, enraged but not attacking. I knew from experience that she wouldn’t until I stepped into the chamber.

This was the last room in Dungeon Home, but Bugbear was nowhere to be found. No Bugbear, but no mindless version of him either.

Could I have missed him in my mad rush through the halls? No. I’d counted them multiple times. They were all there, even if they had been renamed. Buggy. Bearington. Overbear. Butterbear. Busterbear. Bugrimace. That was all seven excluding Bugbear. He was simply gone.

I floated towards the exit of Dungeon Home in a daze, unaffected by seeing Momma Bossbear or the others again. The yaps and barks of the creatures below sickened me. My bugbears had been quiet stalwart soldiers awaiting an enemy that never came.

They weren’t mine anymore. They’d attacked me. Tried to kill me. As temporary as I now knew death was, I just… felt hardly anything for them. Breaking connections. The loss of a one-sided friendship. I wanted to start crying right there, but Bugbear was still out there somewhere. Maybe he’d escaped. Maybe he’d–!

I blinked, stopping right before the exit to the dungeon to stare at a strange mural I hadn’t noticed before. The wall leading out of the cave was missing one of the torches that lit all of Dungeon Home.

I flew over to it, but found myself frustrated because I couldn’t descend to touch the wall or look at it without falling prey to the yipping bugbears howling for my jelly innards.

Scratched into the walls – no! Burned into the walls as if with a lit torch, was a small ball with strange lines floating down from it.

A mural that looked like me!

Beside it was an image of what could courteously be called a body with legs walking towards the…

The Great-Open.

Bugbear had left Dungeon Home. I started to cry right there in the dungeon, heedless of the yipping monsters below me. Bugbear had done what I could not. He was free.