Every level after a boss was a town, one that gave you a chance to escape the dungeon if you so chose--with bosses every five levels (starting at 4), that meant you got a lot of chances to run away. I could have cleared the dungeon a second time, and at my pace, I might have made it all without sleeping, but I had a single reason not to--I had work in the morning. Leaving would mean starting over, but that was no serious problem, as I'd demonstrated.

I wasn't even at the level cap yet--fighting the Devil three times had given me another four levels, plus one up to that point, for a total level of 26, still within the zero-to-thirty range. Because I had a self-made class, those levels gave me extra generic points to spend, and no automatic effects. I was saving up, though--major class features were expensive, since they were basically wishes, and I would just as soon have those sooner rather than later, even if that left me with fewer attribute boosts.

I didn't trust attributes much anyway. A lot of the things the dungeon did to you felt weird in a way that was hard to describe. I discovered the first time through that it wasn't my imagination; I never asked anyone else if they knew about it (though I did kind of bring it up offhand to Harry, and he didn't even blink at it) but a particular skill I got felt slimy, and only got less slimy when I fed experience to it, rather than using that to level up. Nothing in my class told me it was wrong, except that feeling... but there was a mechanic to very expensively mitigate the problem. So... it was real, and probably really bad.

And attribute points felt slimy to me. I'd bought them a couple times in early level ups, but... ugh.

Having entered level twenty five, I found myself as always in a small, self-contained NPC village--run by the dungeon, virtually immune to diver asshattery, but limited in a number of ways. They had a lot of options for healing, some cheap ways to repair equipment (imperfectly; dungeoneers of equivalent level, with the right skills, were better) and some other conveniences, like the Inn, the Tavern, the Marketplace, the Baths, the Communications Center, the Jail, the Meditation Room, the Chapel, and the Disco.

This town was a bunch of huts on stilts over a choppy sea, surrounded in all directions by water. I passed the buildings one at a time on my way to the Marketplace, but as always in every town I'd ever been in, the Disco, despite the bright lights, pounding bass, and rolling fog, was empty save for the NPC discjockey perpetually nodding to the beat, his hands crossed over his chest. Someday I hoped to wander into a town and see someone actually dancing in one, but... yeah, probably not.

The marketplace was a simple trade exchange, semi-anonymous, and I dropped most of my loot into the sell bin without much thought. I didn't immediately try to sell my new Devil's Skulls, though--that deserved a bit more consideration, and I didn't honestly know how they'd be received, whether anyone else understood them or not.

Still, the income was nothing to sneeze at. Solo drops were always rare; getting them for only the first half of the dungeon meant none of them were too rare, but four of them netted me a few thousand. I also had a bunch of monster corpses, all Perfect, which sold for a bit of cash since they could be skinned or otherwise refined, and tasted better when eaten, but as I was rushing and had no need to grind, there weren't that many. In all, an evening in the dungeon netted me maybe $6000.

I checked the marketplace for skill books, but found none worth mentioning. It was always worth checking; some people put things up here if they were in the middle of a longer dive and needed the cash for other transactions. And there were some, just generally uninteresting ones; there was a book labeled "Skeleton surgery" which was apparently specifically about healing bones, but only when they are exposed (which was a nasty thought), and another called "Dynamosynthesis", apparently about using advanced fabrication spells specifically to create electrical generators.

Dungeon loot was weird.

That done, I checked first at the Chapel. They didn't usually handle item transactions, but I thought it was worth a shot to see if they knew anything about the Devil's Skull. That whole "Traded for redemption" thing in the description certainly sounded godly, right? But no, the NPCs didn't seem to understand at all.

After that I dropped in on the Comm Center, which was an in-dungeon hub for a lot of things, mostly message boards and point-to-point chatter. You could purchase a pass that would give you a portable version, but it only lasted so long, and, well, I didn't have a lot of use for it. There was, however, a brand new element to the interface, one I'd heard of but never seen. For me, the button was labeled "Soulforged". Presumably, it had been missing when I was the only Soulforged in existence.

I checked it and there were a bunch of messages. The message titles often began with "FUUUUUUUUU" and when they did, I could rarely see the end of the word.

"What the everloving fuck is up with this class," said the oldest. "Why did I pick this oh god I have no idea what's going on."

"Please if someone is there answer my questions I am losing it here," was a more recent one.

The most recent ones were actually a listing of him answering his own questions, in order. Those were still months ago, so I felt bad, but there was nothing I could do to help the guy while in prison. The menu option wasn't even there until then, so I couldn't exactly leave hints.

I posted a message stating I was the originator of the class, and sorry I was out of touch, which should be enough for anyone with the class to send me a message, but I didn't send him a follow-up since he seemed to have gotten the hang of things. You could get items or class features that let you check your direct messages from anywhere, but at the very least, you would be informed that you had direct messages waiting in your interface. After having grown up in a cellphone-dominated world, having magic go back to a pager system seemed pretty stupid to me, but with of all the features that being a Dungeoneer did provide, I couldn't really complain.

I checked the Disco one last time on the way out, pretty much exclusively as a private joke. It was empty.

The town escape hatch, like all of them, was a hula hoop floating edge-down a few feet above the floor, which was empty when nobody was around. As I approached, it started to turn and lower, and sparks appeared at the center, sparks that expanded into an opaque plane inside the hoop, but which never exactly turned into a portal. Instead, touching the plane would zap me back to the entrance; I'd never used it, since the way you exited after completing a dungeon was just to jump down a hole in the floor, as you always did when you went one more floor downwards. There was no mystery that you were done, of course; the last town in the dungeon was a massive, eternal party, and the exit was ringed with the word "CONGRATULATIONS" that flickered between any languages you knew.

Every NPC in the end town spent their entire lives dancing, even as they went about their normal lives. It was kind of a trip. The only exception was the DJ in the Disco, who just stood there, nodding to the beat. Or maybe that was him dancing; it was hard to tell. Watching the Smith hammer metal while dancing was a fun way to pass a couple hours, though. He was damned good at it.

Touching the portal brought me back to a military-controlled compound centered on the dungeon entrance. I followed the arrows painted on the floor and made my way to the debriefing, where my inventory was assessed for tax purposes and a priestess (who like all priestesses, was adorable; this one had a cute button nose and freckles, and her divinely-provided silk clothes had lots of little hearts on them. I guess it's a class feature?) with resting bitch face stoically nodded when I answered a few questions to confirm I was neither a blooded diver nor lying about my assets. My ID was recorded, and then I was free to go.

So I piled back into my late-model Toyota Camry with a sigh and headed home.

The next day was the usual routine, which was really weird. After having killed and looted for hours, going back to demonstrating skills to suburbanites and standing there while they mostly got them wrong seemed... a lot like emotional whiplash. The skeeves were a slightly different experience on my end, because having recently killed monsters, I got a much stronger impulse to sever parts of their body as I watched them side-eyeing people in my classes, but I kept it in check. From what I'd heard, killing a Dungeoneer in the real world still left their corpse as an item, so they could be brought back... but--go figure!--it was still a crime.

After that I got dinner at Subway and trolled eBay on my phone for a message-transceiver item. They were relatively high level loot, but easy to grind, so there were lots of them, and I snagged one for about $500, to be delivered in about a week. I wouldn't find one in the dungeon I'd been in, so until I was willing and able to go into a fifty-to-one-hundred dungeon, with or without friends, I wouldn't get one myself.

I had a fleeting thought, not for the first time, that I should try absorbing my phone, but I really got the impression that it wouldn't work right afterwards. And what was the benefit of having a special version compared to it just being in my inventory? Plus... they always came out transparent, and that was bad for an item with a screen. It was just an itch to do something more interesting than standing around.

So on the topic of finding more interesting things to do... I went looking for a nightclub with the kind of electronica I was into, but as had been true before I went to jail, that kind of thing was pretty rare in Texas. There was one place with a crowd I wasn't into--at least not before--but I was restless enough that I found my way there just for spite.

And... it was a nightclub.

I didn't want to dance, certainly not right away--if I were that outgoing I wouldn't have ended up a solo diver--but I got something decent at the bar and found my way to an open booth. It wasn't late enough to be packed, so I just sat and watched, and wondered what life was for other people. The music wasn't bad... but I wondered if this would become the kind of place I'd regret entering. I didn't like people intruding, and this was the kind of place where... well, some people took you being here as permission.

I was a little confused to find that, as the night progressed, more and more people with numbers over their head started showing up. Surely this wasn't a particular place for dungeoneers, was it? Or were dungeoneers just more likely to prefer this over more southern style clubs? I kept my opinions to myself and watched for a bit. They were, as expected, just normal people; they drank, they talked, they danced, they had cliques, they had (sometimes very obvious) preferences for their dance partners, whether among friends or anonymously... and... that was it. They were people.

I got up, got another drink from the bar, and instead of returning to my booth (it had been taken anyway, but I knew it would) found a quiet spot and activated my Stealth skill. It wasn't a great-guns difference, not without equipment boosting it, but I would be harder to spot, less likely to be interfered with, while letting me soak in the crowd.

I guess I just needed to be surrounded by people. I wanted more; there were lots of people around who caught my eye, but most of them had something about them that turned me off, even with a little alcohol making it less obvious. It was always something subtle, or something I couldn't quite put my finger on, not something obvious like "oh gross she's fat" or something. Mostly, people like that just didn't catch my eye, more than that they did and then I disliked them. No, it was something in the face, usually. Something that seemed like a bad sign, of what I wasn't sure. It didn't matter a whole lot, though.

I spent a couple hours being alone in a much more pleasantly crowded room than usual before going home. I decided I would go back every now and then, unless something else happened. Maybe someday I'd even dance.