The lobby of the dungeon was much as it was during his first visit. For some reason, it seemed a little less busy, with shorter lines, but the lines for signup weren’t Kaldalis’s concern. There was a bored-looking Vathon standing by the door at the far wall of the lobby, and Kaldalis assumed that was either the guide or one of his assigned party members.

“Early afternoon run?” Kaldalis asked.

“Yeah,” they said, stifling a yawn. They were young, perhaps late teens, though Kaldalis had to admit he didn’t know how Vathon maturity worked. The kid might be Kaldalis’s age and a late bloomer. Or maybe they were just unusually short. “I’m healing it. You?”

“I’m the tank,” Kaldalis said, thumping a fist against his chest armor. “Visiting Baimer only briefly, so I thought I’d see what the dungeon was like.”

“My pop said this is what adventurers do,” the kid said with a shrug, “and because I’m going to be an adventurer, I guess this is what I do.”

“Fresh meat, huh?” Kaldalis asked with a smirk. “Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you. Impress me and maybe I’ll cut loose and show you how we do it where I’m from.”

“Whatever,” they said with a dismissive wave. They seemed disinterested in further conversation.

Kaldalis was slightly concerned by the idea of having this kid be their healer, but he just had to remind himself that he wanted to see how hard he could push his new tanking ability, Shrug It Off. If this dungeon was really a starter-level affair, the shield was going to be numerically larger as his whole hit point pool when he’d run Sunken Ruins, the first dungeon near Cotanaku. He might be able to compensate for his healer being a checked-out noob.

About ten minutes later, their DPS arrived. They were a suyon man and a bhogad woman, and appeared to be familiar with each other. They seemed a chatty pair, talking about some party they’d been to the previous night, but they were obviously disinterested in making conversation with Kaldalis and the healer.

The assigned time grew close, and one more person joined their group. Kaldalis assumed it was the dungeon guide. Unlike the other members of his dungeon queue group, the Talsar woman was obviously wearing a costume of a uniform. It looked like a cross between an old timey British explorer and a modern whitewater rafter. They were wearing a pith helmet and knee-high protective leather boots, with an overalls-style blue wetsuit and a bright orange life-preserver vest. It was an unusual look, and Kaldalis had no idea what they were going for.

“Looks like all of us are here!” she announced cheerfully before gesturing towards the door. “I’m Iarsa, and I’ll be your dungeon guide for today on our exciting trip through the Raging River Fissure! Please remember to stay close and listen carefully. Please, please, please, don’t make me yell. I’ll be keeping my volume right about here the whole trip because I’m gonna be guiding folks through this dungeon three more times today and I have to save my voice.”

She chuckled at that, but Kaldalis didn’t completely get the joke. Everything she said sounded like a rehearsed script. There was probably a scripted pause for laughter there, inserted by someone who had once heard of humor, but never experienced it themselves.

“Just to confirm all parties are present and accounted for,” she continued with a big grin, pulling out a clipboard, “I’m gonna do a quick roll call. When I say your name give me a big ol’ Baimer howdy, and we’ll get underway.” She briefly glanced at the clipboard. “Our stalwart bodyguard, Kaldalis?”

“How-howdy?” Kaldalis ventured. He wasn’t completely comfortable with the outburst, but he found himself feeling the need to match her energy. Kaldalis had never worked in a customer-facing role like retail or food service, but he had immeasurable respect and sympathy for those stuck in that kind of job. He felt morally compelled to try and make her job easier, if he could.

“Great! Great attitude!” She gave him a beaming grin, obviously pleased with his response. “Our cool and collected administer, Jerporbernit?”

The Vathon kid gave a halfhearted wave and a grunt.

“Alright then,” Iarsa said with audible disappointment. “And the first of our badass sluggers, Myayuan?”

“Yo,” the Bhogad woman said with a smile and a wave.

“Good, good,” Iarsa said, checking the clipboard a final time. “And last but not least, the real power behind the crew, Voron?”

“Howdy!” the Suyon belted out, immediately dissolving in laughter. The Bhogad joined in, after giving him a playful punch in the arm.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Iarsa said with a big grin. “Let’s keep that going as we get underway. Please keep to the path as we go, and keep all your effects well in hand as we go. This train goes one way, and we will not be backtracking to fetch anything you might have forgotten. And please watch your step. We have safety measures in place to stop you from being swept away to you death by falling in the water, but I’m told they are not pleasant to experience.”

Iarsa led them through the door behind her and into the dungeon. Kaldalis got the little pop-up notification for entering the dungeon.

Raging River Fissure

World first completion by Gaou, Blanka, Ramseywis, and Darion

Record Clear Time is 14 minutes, 35 seconds by Lief, Blanka, Darion, and Percival

Kaldalis wanted to curse in awe of the record clear time. He couldn’t imagine sprinting through either of the dungeons he’d been in so far in under fifteen minutes, even if he could freely oneshot every boss in the place. It was even more impressive that half of the world-first party was in the record clear time. That either meant that they had set the record very early after the dungeon was discovered, or that they were centuries old, setting the record after the city had built up around it.

Either that, or they were the dev team’s character names and they had hard coded the clear time as a reference to something.

“As you’ve probably guessed,” Iarsa said as they descended into what appeared to be natural caverns beneath the city, “the raging river the dungeon name refers to is the underground part of the Rill River, which vanishes into a crevasse almost two hundred miles away from Baimer before it reaches the ocean from underground right here.”

Kaldalis felt his heart drop as the lecture began. As they descended into the caverns, Iarsa pointed out rock formations and explained the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite (a stalactite has to grip tight to the ceiling, and you might step on a stalagmite).

He suddenly felt like he wasn’t actually in a dungeon. It was more like a walking tour.

Everything she said felt rehearsed and scheduled.

She started talking about the river and its unique mineral content on a specific mark, starting to speak as they reached a chamber where the rushing sound of running water was audible, and then finishing to go on to talk about the foundation of Baimer when they turned a corner and the sound faded.

A part of him wanted to be interested in the history here. It was videogame lore, after all, and it was kind of interesting that the city had supposedly been built up around the dungeon because it represented a source of fresh water on the coast without needing distillation to remove salt and other impurities. The way she said it, though, made it sound like widely-accepted historical bullshit and not absolute fact. Kaldalis was pretty sure that dungeons spawned near camps as a part of the events that would lead them to upgrade into a town. To his mind, it was more likely that the location had been chosen before the dungeon’s discovery, and the fresh water was a happy accident, instead of the other way around.

Then again, that was making some wild assumptions. Monsoon’s devs had just planted this city here as-is right? They’d inserted this dungeon into a finished city, and then written this NPC’s script as a lore dump for new players, hadn’t they? It seemed silly to even think that NPCs had been following Monsoon’s rules for centuries and built things naturally. If Monsoon had done it that way, it would have been a major selling point in the marketing material.

Then again, maybe it was. Kaldalis had gone into the game before any marketing material had gone public.

“Of course,” Iarsa continued, as they worked their way down a narrow passage, “the river is not without dangers, even here in the heart of Baimer.”

The rush of water grew louder as Iarsa led them into a large cavern. The stone floor vanished off to the right, where a fast-moving river raged. As they entered, Kaldalis’s familiar darkvision globe expanded to reveal more of the room. It was still a natural cavern, with uneven stone and stalactites and stalagmites occasionally meeting in the middle to form columns, but it felt like a curated battle arena, with a wide open space to fight in the middle.

Patrolling that middle area were the first enemies Kaldalis had seen. He had started to fear that this was literally just a walking tour, and that there would be no actual fighting. Never in his life had he been happier to see ravenous slavering beasts.

They had vaguely canine features, with four legs, long snouts, and large bushy tails. There were only three of them here, and they looked slightly unhealthy, as if malnourished. Despite their scrawny appearance, they were a deep blue color and seemed to have a vague glow about them. Their fur turned black at the tips of each tuft, giving them an unnatural look, as if they had a black outline around them. From their open jaws, fluid dribbled to the cavern floor. It appeared to just be water, without the thickness of saliva.

A part of Kaldalis wanted to examine them from a distance before engaging. This was a strange place, and he still had no idea what to expect from the monsters here. But a much larger part of him - the part that was sick and tired of Baimer’s shit - was desperate for literally any adventure whatsoever.

He gave a whoop of excitement and charged, spear at the ready.