DAY 54 13:15

We set off early in the afternoon, when it was still bright enough that I had to carry Shrya out and put her in the cart under the tarp. I was starting to feel like the parent of a homicidal pre-teen. To get to the dungeon we had to go back down the hill.

To pass the time, and cover for my nerves, I was babbling to Abe about whatever came to mind. He was looking increasingly confused.

“Ross ate the other Friends?” Abe was squinting at me.

“No. But it would have been a lot funnier if he did. Anyways, the entrance should be right around the next hill. Let me take the lead in there, there might be traps.”

We parked the cart and then I spent a few minutes carefully searching the door. There were no buttons or switches or traps I could find. It was a solid stone slab of a door set in a large stone frame.

I twitched when a prompt appeared

[Enter Dungeon? Y/N] I poked yes and the door popped open.

“Huh. That’s inviting. Hello?” I called, hoping I wouldn’t get swarmed by fire bees when I stepped inside, which prompted another message.

[A Goblin’s Party has entered the Dungeon]

There was no response, so I pushed the door open and inspected the hall, which was fairly bare with a thick layer of dust. A few old marks in the dust divided it into strata of old and very old. A rug covered most of the hall, so I carefully used an arrow to lift the corner. A trap door was revealed, and after pointing that out I eased around it along the wall. We now had three doors to choose from. My nose didn’t give any hints. It just smelled musty in here, with too many unfamiliar smells to make sense of it. Shrya pointed left, which was as good a choice as any. I checked the door, finding a sigil engraved on the handle. My enchanting knowledge still wasn’t very good, but I didn’t imagine it would be a pleasant trap. Instead I slid my knife into the lip of the hinge pin and popped them out, then leaned the whole door against the wall.

The doorway opened into an alchemy lab. A proper lab. Not just a small tabletop kit like mine, these were full size devices, and it would fill kegs with each batch of potions rather than bottles. A flame was lit under one of the calcinators, emerging from a small metal disk set with a small Core glowing red. This room had barely any dust in it, just in the corners and parts of the tables. Something shuffled on the far side of the room, hidden by several book cases.

“Hello?” I called hesitantly.

A growl answered me, and a massive hound rounded the shelf. There was something unusual about it, and I suspected corruption, but it was different. Less vile, more purposeful. Budding horns protruded from its head and down its spine, and its saliva sizzled when it dripped onto the stone floor. I motioned for Abe and Shrya to stay still.

“Whoa, easy there, buddy.”

The hound advanced, growling louder, baring teeth.

“Okay, let’s go back out to the hall.” I started inching backwards, the hound following. Slowly I reached for the door without looking so that the beast couldn’t follow us into the hall, realizing my mistake as I touched the handle. Electricity surged into me, and all my muscles froze. My hand was clamped onto the handle, and searing pain shot through me. Arcs shot off towards the walls, and the hound charged. Abe met it, and the two crashed into the wall. My hand was still clamped on the handle, the shock paralyzing me, cooking me from the inside out.

Shrya kicked me in the back of the knee and I flopped onto the ground, finally losing contact with the spell. The hound snapped at Abe, but he somehow got around its jaws to grab it around the neck. I was still shaking uncontrollably and unable to do anything but watch, but Shrya launched a dart into its side. In a few heartbeats sickly green-black veins spread across its body, and it thrashed wildly, breaking out of Abe’s grip.

I flopped over onto my side when I regained some movement. Shrya had her spear out, poison glistening on the tip, warding the beast off with fast and light jabs as it shook itself and stumbled. Abe’s spear caught it in the neck, and then Shrya’s went into its flank.

I had barely made it back to my feet when the hound flopped over, dead. My whole body hurt. I felt like a microwaved hotdog that had started to split open. More than that, I had a really bad feeling about having just broken into Teefies home and killed her dog. Panicking, I scrambled over to the dog to see if it might somehow be alive. It was not, a rapidly spreading pool of blood was soaking into the floor from the neck wound, and the flesh on its flank was visibly decaying from the poson.

In other parts of the dungeon howls and barks echoed, and then a deep grinding of stone on stone. I stumbled out into the hall as a thundering slam shook the ground, an entire section of the ceiling had lowered and blocked the exit behind us. We were trapped.

A sudden high pitched *ding* sent me leaping to the floor, but it wasn’t another trap, it was a message

[A Goblin’s party has defeated Alchemic Guard Dog]

“Hello? Teefies? I really need to talk to you. Sorry about the dog. We didn’t want it to go this way.” I looked around, hoping to see some sign that we were being watched, or an exit. Nothing stood out. I didn’t even have any proof that Teefies was here at all. Or online, if that theory proved to be accurate. Had I inadvertently done an overnight raid on her base while she was logged out? Why would it be rigged up to trap us in here?

I didn’t want to have to delve further, potentially doing more harm, but it wasn’t like we could sit in the hall and wait for her to come back, if she ever did.

“Shit. Okay, lets keep going, see if there’s another exit. Try not to kill anything else if we don’t have to. I still want to try to talk to her if I can.”

We pressed on, going through the alchemy lab to another door. This one was just held shut with a basic bar on the other side, no ward. I jimmied my knife into the crack and lifted the bar up, then eased the door open and peered into a storage room with many shelves of boxes. I gave a wave, and Shrya scurried in and up to the ceiling. This room had two other doors. Continuing the theme of left, I went straight through, hoping to stay on the exterior to find a side exit.

While there was quite a bit of dust, there were also signs of recent habitation in the last few days. The scent was odd. Not quite human, but not the same as Nathan had been either, similar to the hound which seemed to have been altered somehow. Had Teefies somehow managed to change her species, or was she just some species I hadn’t encountered yet?

Eventually we found ourselves deep in the dungeon, after having been confronted with two more hounds that we couldn’t bypass without killing. This appeared to be a control room of sorts, and where the scent trails began and ended.

The center of the room had a large clear crystal pillar bigger than me with some sort of dark red blob in the center. It slowly pulsed with energy, and was named [Lesser Core (Dungeon)] I hadn’t considered that places would have a core the way creatures did.

Other strange devices filled the room, such as a large mirror frame on a stand that absorbed all light, showing only infinite darkness. A basin of water that swirled endlessly. A comfortably padded chair. A cartoonish stuffed dog.

I really didn’t know what to do now. We hadn’t found a back door yet, this was the end of the trail. I sat down on the floor to think, having seen too many movies to sit in the chair.

“Where now?” Abe asked, tapping a claw on the crystal core and then backing off when I shot him a glare.

“I don’t know. I was hoping she would be here, but from the looks of it, she might not come back for days. I don’t want to just leave, but I also don’t want to ruin any chance of talking by destroying more of the place. Maybe I should leave a note?”

I was digging some things out of my pack when a shift in the air caught my attention. A figure appeared, popping into existence with a shimmer. She was short for an adult human, wearing dark purple silk clothes of an exotic and loose style, unkempt silver hair, and small curved horns sprouting from her brow. Discoloured blackish veins were visible under her otherwise pale skin.

“Who the fuck is ‘A Goblin’? Defense report.” She turned towards the chair and froze as she saw us, her mouth opened in shock to show dainty fangs. Her eyes were literally glowing red.

A staff of twisted bone whipped out thin air as she gestured, and a wave of force crushed us into the ground. I activated [Beastial Rage] by reflex to no effect, as did Abe, and Shrya used [Veil] and faded but wasn’t able to escape either. Every single part of my body felt crushed.

Teefies gestured, and our buffs vanished, I groaned and shuddered as my mana was abruptly vented out of my body, surrounding me in a green aura. The staff pulsed again, drawing the vented mana towards it through the air to collect into a blue sphere in front of her. It was uncomfortably violating. She gestured again, hands shimmering with unknown power, looking even more confused. Several novas of energy burst and washed over the room, giving sensations of intense itching, momentary numbness, and a short jolt that made us all twitch.

“Who the hell left their followers in my house?”

“Excuse me.” I groaned, barely able to move. “I need to talk to you.”

She ignored me, walking over to the core and touching it for a moment, then over to the mirror which burst into colour and motion, showing a recording of our progress through the dungeon.

“You killed my dogs!”

“I’m sorry about the dogs. I tried to leave. The front door trapped us in here.”

“Fucking glitched shit, there’s no players in here. Is someone hacking?” She muttered to herself as she watched the mirror and then glanced at us. I tried to catch her eye, but she walked past me back to the core. “Nobody could name themselves ‘A Goblin’ anyways. Not a new quest either. Bullshit glitch.”

“Holy shit, lady, I really need to talk to you!”

She looked at me, really looked at me for the first time.

“What?”

“My name’s Karl, I need to know if you did this to me.”

“Yeah, that’s my spell.”

“You turned me into a goblin?”

“What? No? I paralyzed you. What do you mean turned you into a goblin?”

“Something transformed me into a goblin, and I thought it might be you because there was a Codex you made in the cave nearby. I have it in my pack.”

She glanced at my pack, making a twisting gesture that sent all the contents spilling out and grabbing the codex out of the air as it appeared.

“Huh. It is mine. I forgot where this was.” She squatted down in front of me, lifting my head with one hand to look at my face. “How are you doing that? You’re not a player.” She squished my cheeks between both hands.

“Stop that! Just tell me, what year is it? In the real world?”

“What year?”

“Is it still 2027?”

“It’s 2046, man…” She looked around, examining Shrya and Abe and apparently not finding anything curious about them. “Is this some kind of prank? If you’re streaming a hack you’re going to get destroyed by Legal.”

“I’m serious. My name is Karl Mazankowski. I’m not a goblin, I’m Canadian, and I think I’m dead.”

She paused, going through several expressions before settling on

“What the fuck?”

“This isn’t a joke, or a prank. I need your help. Something happened to me. Maybe it had something to do with Doctor Kizani’s study on brain interfaces, he tested us a bunch of times from 2019 to 2023. Then something happened to me in 2027. A stroke or something, and I woke up in here.”

“Kizani’s the head of VI development...” She stood up abruptly and stepped back, alarmed, gesturing for the menu. “Contact game moderator.”

“Wait. Whatever happened to me, I’m trapped. They’ll delete me. I’m a real person! I don’t want to die again!”

Indecision warred with confusion on Teefie’s face. Then she waved a hand through something I presumed was a window only she could see.

“What do you expect me to do about it?”

“I can give you all my info, search it. Either it’ll be proof that I’m telling the truth, or it’ll all be fake and I’m just a malfunctioning character in a game. I just need someone who…”I glanced at Shrya and Abe guiltily, “Someone real. You can look me up, Mazankowski.”

"You, I mean Karl Mazankowski, died nineteen years ago. Really died, his brain was donated and used to develop VI coding and interfacing."

"They took my brain? Shit. That release form was serious. But...ugh, they figured out digital consciousness and they’re using it for a game? It would change the whole world. How did they do it?”

“It’s...science? Shit, I don’t know, I just play the game.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. That’s impossible.”

"There was almost a world war over it, in 2035, when the research went mainstream. Like those two,” She pointed at Abe and Shrya, “If you say something they don't understand and it just slides right off. They don't remember anything outside the game because they're just personalities. They aren’t alive, they don’t change unless programmed."

I had my doubts about that last point, both Shrya and Abe had changed a lot, they could learn and had their own personalities, but after I turned off most of the Binding Commands on them. I couldn’t tell her that though, not right now. Shrya started to say something and I desperately waggled my eyebrows at her, hoping she’d get the hint.

"So, you believe me?"

"I believe that you believe it. This is all public record. There's an international charity with the name, and we learned about it in school. Someone could have programmed it all and hacked the game, if they didn't care about going to jail."

"Shit, fine. I'll give you my passwords, if my accounts even exist any more. Check my email and social media. Just please look into it and help me.”